26Feb2019 Market Close: Wall Street Edges Lower After Poor Home Depot Earnings, DOW Closes Down 34 Points, SP 500 Fails To End Above Key 2,800 Level

EBay offers concessions to avert fight with Elliott: sources

EBay Inc has informed Elliott Management Corp it is willing to explore shedding some of its key assets and giving the hedge fund board representation in a bid to avert a proxy contest, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

Tesla’s Musk must address SEC contempt bid as he calls agency ‘broken’

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk to explain by March 11 why he should not be held in contempt for violating his fraud settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

AT&T defeats U.S. in merger fight to buy Time Warner

AT&T Inc scored a key win on Tuesday when a U.S. appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s argument that its $85.4 billion deal to buy media company Time Warner would mean higher consumer prices.

Credit reporting agencies face pressure from skeptical U.S. Congress

The nation’s major credit reporting agencies faced renewed scrutiny from Congress on Tuesday, as lawmakers consider legislation overhauling the industry.

With OPEC likely to ignore Trump, oil prices edge up

Oil futures inched up on Tuesday after news that OPEC would continue production cuts despite comments from U.S. President Donald Trump, who criticized the producer group for rising crude prices a day earlier.

Fed’s Powell says ‘no rush’ to hike rates in ‘solid’ but slowing economy

The Federal Reserve is in “no rush to make a judgment” about further changes to interest rates, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday as he spelled out the central bank’s approach to an economy that is likely slowing.

S&P swivels on mixed data, Fed comments help steady nerves

U.S. equities swerved between positive and negative territory on Tuesday as investors eyed mixed economic data and corporate news while Federal Reserve comments calmed some nerves.

Instant View: Powell – Fed remains patient deciding on further hikes

Rising risks and recent soft data shouldn’t prevent solid growth for the U.S. economy this year, but the Federal Reserve will remain “patient” in deciding on further interest rate hikes, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.

Why some U.S. fund managers like China regardless of trade deal

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to delay raising tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods has helped push global stock markets broadly higher as investors hope for a resolution in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

Stocks Stall At Critical Resistance Again, Yield Curve Hits 12-Mo Steeps

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye…

Chinese markets saw some profit-taking from Monday’s exuberance, but not much…

European traders BTFD at the open but the FTSE remains lower on the week…

US equity cash markets all rebounded at 11ET …

Back To Fun-Durr-Mentals

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

If we look at the list of key macroeconomic data published in recent weeks, we can not use a better definition than “disappointing”.

The slowdown in the eurozone is evident and more pronounced than even the most pessimistic expected. Both industrial production, consumer confidence and indicators such as the trade surplus have deteriorated sharply. But there is growth. Despite the bad data, the Italian recession and the fact that the European Commission has had to revise down by more than 30% its own estimates from a month ago, Europe will likely grow in 2019.

China continues to slow down under the weight of its indebted and inefficient model, but it also grows.

The United States showed poor retail sales data, but both employment and gross capital formation show that the economy continues to expand. The emerging countries have worsened their prospects, but have navigated the monetary imbalances that deactivated the mirage of synchronized growth in …

Rabobank: “Hey Yellen, It Was Trump Who Was Right, And The Fed Was Forced Into A Humiliating U-Turn”

Submitted by Michael Every of RaboBank

As expected, Monday saw US President Trump help to make China great again – or at least the unloved Chinese stock markets. They saw their highest volume since the heady 1929-ish days of 2015 while soaring 5.6% (Shanghai) and 6% (Chinext), taking both into a technical bull market. So much winning! Of course, sentiment was also helped by the official message being sent out that ‘deleveraging has now achieved its goals’, and that the finance sector is very important to the economy. Deleveraging never even started. Sounds to me like the January flood of Chinese borrowing (worth 5% of GDP) might be more than a one off. It also sounds to me like China is going to try to blow another equity bubble to prop up demand. And that reminds me of an early episode of The Simpsons, one where Lisa has a crush on the bully Nelson, goes to his room and sees a poster saying “Nuke The Whales”, asks “You don’t really believe that, do you?”, and gets the response “I dunno. Gotta nuke somethin’.” Perhaps China is getting its trade-war retaliation in in advance? That might still be useful given Trump has said a signing summit for this deal might happen fairly soon or may not happen at all. So much detail!

Indeed, I would argue that “gotta nuke somethin'”, in its gloriously atavistic imbecility, is actually the financial-market zeitgeist of our age. What else have our central-banks been doing for years and years? Certainly not using their considerable ammunition to help in any way if one takes a long-term view. I say that as Rabo are already predicting a US recession in 2020, which will drag many down with it, and as the OECD now warns that swollen corporate debt piles, which central banks have so encouraged, is of ever lower quality and potentially more dangerous than it was back in 2008. 54% of investment grade bonds ar …

Bullard: QE Was Awesome, QT Is A Nothing-Burger

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard was in New York last week, making a presentation to the US Monetary Policy Forum. A well-known dove, speaking to CNBC while attending the conference, as a current voting member of the FOMC Bullard announced his dissenting view to the last “rate hike.” He was not eligible to vote in December, rotating into this situation at the beginning of this year just in time for this new dovish tilt.

I thought at the December meeting, myself I thought it was a step too far. I argued against that move. We did get a bad reaction in financial markets. I think the market started to think we were too hawkish, might cause a recession.

That’s the thing with these doves, they never explain this huge contradiction. Monetary policy is the center of the universe for these people, the central bank could not be more central. To them, it explains everything even though it can’t.

Since rate cuts and QE were so powerful, how in the world can anyone be so dovish after all this time and so much of it? The world wouldn’t seem to need more of it if it worked at all like it has been advertised. Not only that, if it is so effective how can just 250 bps of “rate hikes” (spread out over three years!) be sufficient to bring about very real fears over a recession?

For Bullard, that is the main issue currently; the rate hikes, not QT. Though everyone is talking about balance sheet normalization, for the St. Louis branch this is a minor bit of fine tuning. The subject of his presentation in New York was how QT isn’t really QT.

Weed-killing chemical in Monsanto’s Roundup discovered in popular wines and beers

Vineyards use the herbicide to kill weeds.

Capitol Report: Congresswoman asks Equifax CEO for his personal data as she hammers company’s legal moves

A tense exchange at a Capitol Hill hearing on credit reporting was generating buzz on Tuesday.

The Margin: Watch: Passengers endure ‘near-death experience’ on British Airways flight

British Airways would later say that “at no point was there a risk to safety,” but don’t tell that to Eli Hassett, who was busy calling upon a higher power as his flight swayed violently on its approach to Gibraltar on Monday.