Written by Gary
Major averages turn mixed in recent trade (SPY +0.1%). US-China trade talks resume in Beijing as crude oil slumps on stronger dollar.
Here is the current market situation from CNN Money | |
![]() | North and South American markets are mixed today. The IPC is up 0.44% while the S&P 500 gains 0.13%. The Bovespa is off 0.33%. |
What Is Moving the Markets
Here are the headlines moving the markets. | |
![]() | Wall Street treads water, eyes on U.S.-China trade talksWall Street struggled for direction on Monday, with investors taking a pause as the United States and China began their latest trade negotiations and U.S. lawmakers tried to reach a deal on border funding. |
![]() | Altria to tap European bond market to help fund Juul stake buyAltria Group will tap the European investment grade corporate bond market to help finance its $12.8 billion purchase of a stake in e-cigarette maker Juul Labs Inc, the Marlboro maker said in a regulatory filing https://bit.ly/2thLVTO on Monday. |
![]() | CalSTRS backs new activist hedge fund Impactive with $250 millionThe California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), the second largest U.S. pension fund said on Monday it made a $250 million investment with Impactive Capital, a new activist hedge fund that expects to start trading next month. |
![]() | T. Rowe Price nearly halves stake in Tesla to 5.2 percent: filingTesla Inc shareholder T. Rowe Price Group Inc had a 5.2 percent stake in the electric car maker as of end-December, roughly half its earlier stake, a regulatory filing https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/80255/000008025519001855/tsla13gadec18.htm showed on Monday. |
![]() | IKEA accelerates services drive as competition stiffensJessica Reznik likes IKEA’s prices but not do-it-yourself. So when the Swedish furniture giant said a handyman on odd-jobs site TaskRabbit could assemble her new dresser and nightstand in her New York apartment, she jumped at the offer. |
![]() | World stocks edge higher ahead of trade talks, BrexitStock markets globally edged higher on Monday as investors eyed the resumption of trade talks between the United States and China and watched for signs of progress on Brexit. |
![]() | Apple iPhone sales in China fell by a fifth in fourth quarter: IDCApple Inc iPhone sales in China fell 20 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2018, while sales for smartphones made by home-grown rival Huawei soared by 23 percent, data from industry research firm IDC showed on Monday. |
![]() | Qatar revamps investment strategy after Kushner building bailoutWhen news emerged that Qatar may have unwittingly helped bail out a New York skyscraper owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, eyebrows were raised in Doha. |
![]() | Driverless delivery startup Nuro gets $940 million SoftBank investmentAutonomous technology startup Nuro said on Monday it raised $940 million from SoftBank Group Corp, which valued the Silicon Valley-based company at $2.7 billion. |
![]() | Over 1000 ‘Scientists’ Sign “Dissent From Darwinism” StatementAuthored by Brittany Slaughter via TheCollegeFix.com, Earlier this month, a long kept list of Ph.D. scientists who “dissent from Darwinism” reached a milestone – it crossed the threshold of 1,000 signers.
“A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism” is a simple, 32-word statement that reads:
Launched in 2001, the list continues to collect support from scientists from universities across America and globally. Signers have earned their Ph.D.s at institutions that include Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania. Others on the list earned their doctorates at Clemson, UT Austin, Ohio State, UCLA, Duke, Stanford, Emory, UNC Chapel Hill and many others universities. Still other signers are currently employed as professors across the nation. |
![]() | China Rocked By Two Biggest Corporate Defaults YetEver since Beijing allowed Chinese companies (even certain state-owned enterprises) to officially fail for the first time in 2016, and file for bankruptcy to restructure their unsustainable debt loads, it’s been a one-way street of corporate bankruptcies, one which we profiled last June in “Is It Time To Start Worrying About China’s Debt Default Avalanche”, and which culminated with a record number of Chinese onshore bond defaults in 2018, as a liquidity crunch sparked a record 119.6 billion yuan in defaults on local Chinese debt in 2018. And by the early look of things, 2019 won’t be any better after two large Chinese borrowers missed payment deadlines this month according to Bloomberg, setting the scene for even more corporate defaults, and “underscor … |
![]() | The New Green Deal Is Just Old White ElephantsAuthored by Daniel Lacalle, What happens when politicians see that their monster stimuli have not delivered? They bring the next rabbit out of a hat. They need a new name and a new magic solution to make citizens believe in the magic of demand-side policies despite the constant failure of those same plans. Take the Eurozone examples:
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![]() | “Insane” Deutsche Bank Drowning Under Soaring Funding CostsFollowing years of dismal performance, uncovered attempts at market manipulation and fraudulent activities, and painful corporate reorganizations which its latest earnings report showed have “cut deeply into the muscle”, Deutsche Bank is a shadow of its former self, with its stock price trading just shy of all time lows. But an even bigger problem for Germany’s biggest lender is that it is now forced to pay the highest financing rates on the euro debt market for a leading international bank this year according to the FT, and also the highest rates among large banks to raise debt this year according to Bloomberg, in a further sign of the German lender’s uphill struggle to turn its operations around and reduce its funding costs. As the FT first reported, followed promptly by Bloomberg, the bank raised eyebrows last week when it sold a total of 3.6BN in euro-denominated debt, paying 180 bps over the benchmarks for a two-year bond, a steep rate for short-term funding. Deutsche Bank also paid 230 bps over benchmarks for a senior seven-year bond that can absorb losses in a crisis. By comparison, French banking giant BNP Paribas SA last month offered 50 bps less for equally-ranked notes that mature one year later. More embarrassing, Deutsche Bank paid a higher rate than Spanish lender CaixaBank, which recently raised five-year bonds at 225bp. In a latest note to clients, Corinna Dröse, a Frankfurt-based bond analyst at DZ Bank, said: “The high spreads reflect [Deutsche’s] high idiosyncratic risk, which is rooted in the lender’s chronic weakness in earnings.” “Deutsche has to pay significantly higher risk premiums than almost all other large European banks . . . [the] high spreads express severe doubts, mainly triggered by its poor revenue,” said Michael Hünseler, head of credit portfolio manage … |
![]() | As another shutdown looms, here’s some financial advice for federal workersMany banks and credit unions offered no- or low-interest loans during the last shutdown — workers should now pay them off. |
![]() | The Ratings Game: Tesla’s stock jumps 4% on upgrade that foresees a more stable year in 2019Canaccord says Wall Street is not fully appreciating the strong electric vehicle story and believes Tesla is gearing up for a year of growth. |
![]() | Here’s the worst mistake people make that compromises their online securityAlmost everyone online has engaged in this risky behavior. |
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