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NEW YORK (AP) — Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year.

The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion.

The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin. Investors are also looking forward to the expected market debuts of the ticket exchange StubHub and the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, which is majority owned by the Winklevoss twins.

Founded in 2005 as a payments company, Klarna entered the U.S. buy now, pay market in 2015 in partnership with department store operator Macy’s. Since then, Klarna has expanded to hundreds of thousands of merchants and has embedded itself in internet browsers and digital wallets as an alternative to credit cards. The company recently announced a partnership with Wal-Mart.

The company started trading under the symbol “KLAR.” While Klarna was founded in Sweden and is a popular payment service in Europe, company executives said they made the decision to go public in the U.S. as a signal that Klarna’s future growth opportunities lay with the American shopper.

“It’s the largest consumer market in the world, and it’s the biggest credit card market in the world. It’s a tremendous opportunity, from our perspective,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder, in an interview with The Associated Press.

Over the years and in multiple interviews, Siemiatkowski has made it clear that Klarna is looking to steal away customers from the big credit card companies, and sees credit cards as a high-interest, exploitative product that consumers rarely use correctly.

Klarna’s most popular product is what’s known as a “pay-in-4” plan, where a customer can split a purchase into four payments spread over six weeks. The company also offers a longer-term payment plan where it charges interest. The business model has caught on globally, particularly among consumers who are reluctant to use credit cards. The company said 111 million consumers worldwide have used Klarna for a purchase.

Klarna and other buy now, pay later companies have attracted increased public interest in recent years, as the business model has caught on. State and federal regulators, as well as consumer groups, have expressed some degree of worry that consumers may overextend themselves financially on these buy now, pay later loans just as much as they do with credit cards.

Siemiatkowski says the company is actively monitoring how consumers use their products, and the average balance of Klarna user is less than $100. Because the company issues loans that are six weeks or less, Klarna argues it can more easily adjust its underwriting standard depending on economic conditions.

Ahead of going public, Klarna reported in August that it had second-quarter revenues of $823 million and had an adjusted profit of $29 million. The delinquency rate on Klarna’s “pay-in-4” loans is 0.89% and on its longer-term loans for bigger purchases, the delinquency rate is 2.23%. Those figures are below the average 30-day delinquency rates on a credit card.

Klarna will now be the second-largest buy now, pay later company on U.S. public markets, behind Affirm. Shares of Affirm have surged more than 40% so far this year, valuing the company at around $28 billion, helped by a belief among investors that buy now, pay later companies may take away market share from traditional banks and credit cards.

Klarna’s primary underwriters for the IPO were JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is heading for more records on Wednesday following a surprisingly encouraging report on inflation and a stunning forecast for growth from Oracle because of the artificial-intelligence boom.

The S&P 500 rose 0.5% and was on track to set an all-time high for a second straight day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 49 points, or 0.1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.5% higher after both likewise set records the day before.

Stocks have been hitting records in large part because Wall Street is expecting the economy to pull off a delicate balancing act: slowing enough to convince the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, but not so much that it causes a recession, all while inflation remains under control.

Many things must go right for that to happen, and an encouraging signal came from Wednesday’s report showing that inflation at the U.S. wholesale level unexpectedly slowed in August. It’s a relief following months of reports suggesting inflation would be tough to get under the Fed’s target of 2%, with President Donald Trump’s tariffs set to add only upward pressure on prices.

A potentially more important report is coming Thursday that will show how much prices are rising for U.S. households, but Wednesday’s update “essentially rolled out the red carpet for a Fed rate cut next week,” according to Chris Larkin, managing director, trading and investing, at E-Trade from Morgan Stanley.

Traders were already convinced that the Fed will deliver its first cut to interest rates of the year at its next meeting, but they need inflation data in the interim to come up mild enough not to derail those expectations. That’s because cuts to interest rates can push inflation higher, along with giving the economy a kickstart.

“The broader narrative is increasingly anchored on expectations that the Fed will deliver a rate cut at next week’s meeting,” said Ahmad Assiri, research strategist at Pepperstone.

On Wall Street, tech stocks helped lead the way after Oracle said AI-related demand is set to send its revenue soaring. CEO Safra Catz said Oracle signed four multi-billion dollar contracts during its latest quarter, and it expects cloud infrastructure revenue to jump 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year. After that, it expects the unit’s revenue to surge to $144 billion in just four years.

“AI Changes Everything,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said in a statement.

Oracle stock soared 34.8% and was potentially heading for its best day since 1992, even though its results for the latest quarter came up just shy of analysts’ expectations.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes chips used in AI, saw its stock that trades in the United States climb 3.1% after it said its revenue jumped nearly 34% in August from a year before.

Nvidia, the chip company whose stock has become the poster child of the AI boom, rose 3.7%. It was one of the strongest single forces lifting the S&P 500, along with Oracle.

On the losing side of Wall Street was Synopsys, which helps customers design and engineer chips. It fell 31.3% after reporting profit for the latest quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations. So did its forecast for profit in the current quarter.

Klarna, the Swedish “buy now, pay later” financial services provider, will trade for the first time as a public company Wednesday after it announced a public offering of its shares at $40 each, about $4 higher than it previously estimated.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe after rising across much of Asia. South Korea’s Kospi rose 1.7%, and Hong Kong Hang Sang climbed 1% for two of the bigger moves.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.05% from 4.08% late Tuesday after the encouraging inflation report on wholesale prices bolstered expectations for coming cuts to interest rates.

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AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday appealed a ruling blocking him from firing Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook as he seeks more control over the traditionally independent board.

The notice of appeal came hours after U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb handed down the ruling. The White House has insisted Trump, a Republican, has the right to fire Cook over over allegations raised by one of his appointees that she committed mortgage fraud related to two properties she bought before she joined the Fed.

The case could soon reach the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority has allowed Trump to fire several board members of other independent agencies but has suggested that power has limitations at the Federal Reserve.

Cook’s lawyers have argued that firing her was unlawful because presidents can only fire Fed governors for cause, which has typically meant poor job performance or misconduct. The judge found the president’s removal power is limited to actions taken during a governor’s time in office.

Cook is accused of saying that both her properties, in Michigan and Georgia, were primary residences, which could have resulted in lower down payments and mortgage rates. Her lawsuit denied the allegations without providing details. Her attorneys said she should have gotten a chance to respond to them before getting fired.

Trump has repeatedly attacked Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting the short-term interest rate the Fed controls more quickly. If Trump can replace Cook, he may be able to gain a 4-3 majority on the Fed’s governing board.

No president has sought to fire a Fed governor before. Economists prefer independent central banks because they can do unpopular things like lifting interest rates to combat inflation more easily than elected officials can.

Cook is set to participate in a Fed meeting next week. The meeting is expected to reduce its key short-term rate by a quarter-point to between 4% and 4.25%.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the Federal Reserve System at https://apnews.com/hub/federal-reserve-system.

NEW YORK (AP) — Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday, according to wealth tracker Bloomberg, as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading.

A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who became the world’s richest for the first time four years ago. Stock in one of Musk’s biggest holdings, Tesla, has been moving in the opposite direction of Oracle’s, dropping 14% so far this year as of Tuesday.

The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle powered by multibillion dollar orders from customers as the artificial-intelligence race heats up.

Another news organization with a long history of tallying the world’s richest, Forbes, still has Musk at the top, at $439 billion. Bloomberg put his net worth at $385 billion. The difference is partly in how the two estimate the value of Musk’s private holdings, which include rocket maker SpaceX and the former Twitter, now called X.

With Ellison’s surging fortune Wednesday, he could fund the lifestyles of 5 million American families for a year, about the entire population of Florida, allowing them to all quit their jobs, assuming the U.S. median household income.

Or Ellison could just tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.

Ellison owns about 40% of Oracle, which means its surging stock added $100 billion to his net worth in little over a half-hour after stock market opened. The company had announced more than $300 billion worth of new contracts when it reported earnings. It said that it now expects revenue from its cloud infrastructure business to jump 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year. then rise to $144 billion in four years after that.

Ellison said about the bold projections, “AI Changes Everything.”

Musk is hoping the same for Tesla and his own net worth, but he’s been struggling to convince investors.

The company had been promising a big turnaround in electric car sales after they fell sharply earlier this year, but the bounce back hasn’t happened. Musk has been downplaying the bad numbers by trying to shift investors’ focus to Tesla’s other business of making robots and advances in the artificial intelligence behind its cars and robotaxis.

While he keeps talking up the Tesla future, though, the bad news keeps coming.

Tesla sales in the European Union plunged 40% earlier this summer, the seventh month in row of drops, as customers balked at buying his cars after he took to X to support extreme right-wing politicians there. The company has been losing market share in the U.S., too, as buyers angry with his embrace of Donald Trump have stayed away from Tesla showrooms.