Morning Brief: Senate considers scaling back corporate-tax cut
Thursday, November 30, 2017
What to watch today
All eyes will be on the stock market following Wednesday’s wild action that saw tech stocks tank while telecom and financial stocks rallied. According to Bloomberg, the selloff in Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google (GOOGL) — or the so-called “FANG” stocks — amounted to a combined $60 billion in lost market cap. And the billionaire founders of FANG saw $7.6 billion wiped from their fortunes as a result of the drop.
Meanwhile, traders and investors will also be watching bitcoin (BTC-USD), which exploded to an all-time high of over $11,000 before plunging to $8,900 in a matter of hours.
On the economic front, we’ll get updates on jobs, income, and spending, all at 8:30 a.m. ET. Initial weekly jobless claims are estimated to have climbed to 240,000 from 239,000 a week. During the month of October, both personal income and spending are estimated to have climbed by 0.3%.
Top news
Corporate tax rate in flux as Senate votes to open debate: Senate Republicans are considering whether to cut the corporate tax rate less deeply than President Donald Trump has demanded, a move that could make it easier to pass the tax bill they voted to begin debating Wednesday. One of the most significant unresolved issues is whether the corporate tax rate should be set above the 20% threshold Trump has sought and how aggressively the administration would fight an attempt to set it higher. [The Wall Street Journal]
Economist Goodfriend nominated for Fed governor post: President Donald Trump on Wednesday nominated Carnegie Mellon University Professor Marvin Goodfriend to become a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, adding a well-known monetary economist to a central bank losing two of its top economic thinkers. [Bloomberg]
Trump administration does an about-face on SEC judges: The Trump administration switched sides in a clash that could upend the Securities and Exchange Commission’s hearing process, telling the U.S. Supreme Court that agency judges were appointed in violation of the Constitution. In a legal filing Wednesday, the administration said it would no longer defend a federal appeals court decision that upheld the commission’s use of in-house judges. [Bloomberg]
‘Angry Birds’ hatches Angry investors: When Rovio Entertainment Oyj went public in September, investors eager to grab a piece of the producer of “Angry Birds” flocked to the stock. Although the initial public offering gave Rovio a market value of $1.1 billion — half what the company had first aimed for —the stock got a small bounce when a bank backing the IPO started purchasing shares to “stabilize” the price. That effort ended in October, and after Rovio on Nov. 23 disclosed that its marketing costs had soared, the shares dove 22%, spurring many buyers to think they’d gotten a turkey. [Bloomberg]
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