Well... stocks look to continue their 2024 confusion-filled hangover after payrolls continued to surge causing fears that wagers on Fed rate cuts may have been a bit too aggressive (which may or may not have been mentioned on here a bit ago). Nonfarm payrolls increased 216,000 after downward revisions to the prior two months while the unemployment rate held at 3.7%. The kicker was the average hourly earnings data which rose 0.4% month-on-month. Futures are now pricing about 135 basis points of Fed rate cuts this year-- down from more than 150 basis points earlier this week.
China is launching investigations into liquor products like brandy from the EU, all after a recently opened probe last fall into its electric vehicle subsidies. The investigation targets French cognac and affects producers like Pernod (-4% early today) and Remy Cointreau (-12% early today). France being the main force of Brussels’ probe into Chinese EV’s, there seems to be some retaliation in the trade war.
Ozempic, its sister drug Wegovy, and similar medications known as GLP-1s, are threatening to drain state and local governments’ budgets– bills which may be passed down to US taxpayers. State’s are already taking action with Connecticut and Virginia imposing new hurdles/ tightening criteria for state employees seeking weight-loss treatment. Demand is poised to explode. Publicly, attention is on the well off just wanting to lose a few pounds, but reality is that more than 1 in 10 Americans have type 2 diabetes, and upward of 100 million suffer from obesity (those rates are even higher among the 19% of Americans who rely on Medicaid).
Bloomberg is out with a story noting that Amazon captured nearly 30% of all online orders in the final days of holiday shopping.
Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg helped drive some of that Amazon sales volume as the Meta magnate sold nearly half a billion dollars worth of stock in the final two months of the year, per Bloomberg.
We are still waiting on an upcoming decision by the SEC on whether to approve an exchange-traded fund tied directly to the world’s largest cryptocurrency– causing bitcoin to trade lower. Traders are seemingly antsy and indecisive around any and all headlines.
