Just like Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, the retail spend report was too hot for markets to continue the narrative of tons of rate cuts by the Fed this year. In concert, equity futures fell, bond yields rose, and the USD rose against peers. US retail sales rose at the strongest pace in 3 mo for Dec. The prob of easing in Mar fell to 60%, versus 80% last Friday. The VIX is at its highest level since Nov, although still at a very low level in the low/mid-teens.
The FT is reporting that fund managers are investing in riskier assets due to their growing confidence of a soft landing.
Spruce Pt is short MSCI, saying it could drop as much as 65%. MSCI has >270k daily equity, fixed income, and hedge fund indexes and has a market value of almost $43bn. That would be a lot of billions wiped out. They say MSCI is engaging in value-destructive acquisitions and share repurchases.
40 Boeing planes have been checked, which they hope will lead to the un-grounding of the plane soon. The FAA will review the collected data to determine if passengers are safe after the Hollywood movie-scenario of the door missing mid-flight.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang was super clear—don’t expect stimulus to revive growth in the country, which is experiencing the worst deflationary streak since the Asian Financial Crisis. Home prices fell the most last mo since 2015. As you can imagine, his comments are sucking out final hope from investors who dumped more shares.
Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that caused covid in late Dec 2019, at least 2 week before Beijing told everyone else about it. Some guy uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the viral structure to a US gov-run database on Dec 28, 2019. The gov shared details on Jan 11. In any case, it makes me believe that we don’t know the full history here. Seems like we should get a full accounting of the pandemic’s origin.
A judge decided against the JetBlue/Spirit transaction which the former had hoped would pull it from being a second-tier operator with less pricing power and less efficient scale.
It had the biggest rally in 10 mo on Fed cut uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, per Bloomberg.
The Supreme Court refused to hear Apple’s appeal for the App Store antitrust suits, per Bloomberg.