Choppy Markets Await Fed Policy Guidance

Tuesday saw another Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde day on Wall Street, with markets diving to start the day before a late rally that petered out and left the Nasdaq down more than 2% and  the S&P 500 down about half that - NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg

With that jumpiness in mind, all eyes will be on the Fed today as it updates its policy guidance when the Open Market Committee breaks this afternoon - NYTimes and Bloomberg and WSJ and MarketWatch

Either way, best to prepare yourself mentally for more of the same - NYTimes

More tough news for a chip industry that’s already been stressed since Covid hit hard. A Commerce Department survey of more than 150 chip-focused companies found that the U.S. “is facing an ‘alarming’ shortage of semiconductors”—a situation that’s “threatening American factory production and helping to fuel inflation” - NYTimes and WSJ

Intel has scored a big victory at the expense of EU antitrust regulators, with the EU’s General Court striking down “much of a 2009 finding by the [European Commission] that Intel had abused its dominant position by issuing loyalty rebates and payments that restricted rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. from competing” - WSJ and Bloomberg

The IMF is joining the downer chorus in its latest  economic forecast, predicting that slowdowns in the U.S. and China—the world’s “two biggest economies”—will trickle down to the rest of the world and reduce estimated global growth to 4.4% from the “4.9 percent it projected just three months ago” - NYTimes and Marketplace

The Canadian National Railway made major moves on Tuesday that “will allow the railroad operator to avert a proxy fight.” CNR named Tracy Robinson, a “longtime railroad executive,” as its CEO and president and agreed to name a total of three new independent directors (two with “North American railroad experience”) by its annual meeting date - WSJ

Years of sustained blowback from the ad industry and regulators has prompted Google to scrap plans announced two years ago to “block digital tracking cookies from its Chrome web browser” in favor of a new online ad system called Topics, which “would still eliminate cookies , but . . . would inform advertisers of a user’s areas of interest . . . based on the last three weeks of the user’s web browsing history” - NYTimes and WSJ

Zuck’s dreams of a Facebook stablecoin appear to be fading on reports that Meta is shopping its Diem unit’s assets “as a way to return capital to its investor members” - Bloomberg

The FTC has filed a lawsuit to stop Lockheed Martin’s planned acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, a $4.4 billion purchase that the agency argued “would harm rival defense contractors and lead to unacceptable consolidation in markets critical to national security and defense” - WSJ

A reading list for those of us juuuust a little behind the times. Sounds about right these days - TheAtlantic

Stay safe, and get boosted,

MDR

The Robins Kaplan Financial Daily Dose features top stories and latest news headlines in financial markets, banking, securities and technology topics.