UNITED STATES
- Futures are down this morning in the US and global stocks are falling as well
- Budget discussions took a sharp turn and it now looks like the government will indeed shutdown tomorrow unless $5bn are allocated to build a border wall
- Data from the Philly Fed shows regional manufacturing activity slowing and "hours worked" reversing course to 2016 levels
- New Orders and Expected Investments are holding steady though
OTHER
- The Bank of England reduced Q4 growth forecasts from 0.3% to 0.2% for the British economy
- UK Retail Sales came in strong (Expected 2.3% | Actual 3.8%)
- A court in Germany is making Apple stop selling certain iPhones after finding that they infringed on Qualcomm patents
- Oil continues to get battered with the price of Brent Crude falling below $55/barrel
- The Malaysian government wants $7.2bn from Goldman Sachs for their involvment in the 1MDB corruption scandal
- Carlos Ghosn was rearrested amid suspicion that he shifted $16 million in personal losses to Nissan
CHINA
- The gap between Chinese stock underperformance and US stocks is narrowing
- US stocks have underperformed Chinese shares since the end of October
- The South China Morning Post is bullish on American stocks
- Charges have been filed by the US against two Chinese citizens for their role in a campaign to steal information from US businesses and the government
\This will be my last time reading the news for you until Dec. 27 - Happy Holidays* 🎅
Submitted December 21, 2018 at 07:31AM by ogordained http://bit.ly/2A9MMcW
