Raphael Stevens

People wear protective masks in front of Uber Technologies Inc. headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, June 9, 2021.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Take a look at some of the biggest movers in the premarket.
Uber (UBER) — Uber shares rose 5.7% in the premarket after the ride sharing company revised its financial outlook higher for the third period. The company now expects to report between $22.8 billion and $23.2 billion in gross bookings for the third quarter, according to an SEC filing. It previously forecast $22 billion to $24 billion on its second-quarter earnings call.

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) — Johnson & Johnson shares gained 0.8% in early morning trading after the pharmaceutical company said its Covid-19 booster shot is 94% effective when administered two months after the first dose in the U.S. The company said the booster increases antibody levels four to six times higher than just one shot
Apple (AAPL) — Shares of Apple ticked up 0.9% in the premarket after a Wall Street Journal report that the technology company is working on iPhone features to help identify depression and cognitive decline. The features would use sensor data to help detect these health issues, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Chevron (CVX), Exxon Mobil (XOM) — Oil stocks rebounded in the premarket as crude prices rose. Chevron and Exxon Mobil each gained more than 1% in the premarket. The stocks were hit during Monday’s sell-off as concerns about global economic growth sent oil lower.
Enphase Energy (ENPH) — Enphase Energy shares rose 1.8% in early morning trading after KeyBanc initiated coverage of the stock with an overweight rating. The firm said the solar energy play had a solid base business and growing opportunities.
Vail Resorts (MTN) — Vail Resorts shares added 1.7% in the premarket after KeyBanc upgraded the stock to overweight from sector weight. KeyBanc said Vail Resorts should benefit from strong demand for winter vacations.

Big Lots (BIG) — Shares of Big Lots fell 1.3% in early morning trading after Piper Sandler downgraded the retailer to neutral from overweight. The firm said the end of fiscal stimulus will hurt Big Lots.

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The start-up is set to announce Tuesday that it secured a U.S. broker-dealer license, enabling it to compete with the likes of Robinhood and Square in the red-hot world of retail trading, according to CEO and founder Nik Storonsky.
The service will be available in a few months and will eventually allow for fractional share purchases and investing spare change from card transactions.
Like peers including Robinhood, Revolut will earn payment for order flow revenue in the U.S., according to a spokeswoman.
Revolut will eventually aim for a public listing in the U.K., U.S. or perhaps a dual listing, said Storonsky.

Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky speaks onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, California.
Kimberly White | Getty Images

Revolut, the global fintech player valued at $33 billion, will soon offer commission-free stock trading to U.S. customers for the first time, CNBC has learned.
The start-up is set to announce Tuesday that it secured a U.S. broker-dealer license, enabling it to compete with the likes of Robinhood and Square in the red-hot world of retail trading, according to CEO and founder Nik Storonsky.

Revolut has grown to become one of the dominant European consumer fintech firms since its 2015 founding by continually piling on new features. The app started out as a way for people to avoid currency conversation fees while traveling, but quickly added banking, trading and crypto features among dozens of products. It now has more than 16 million customers.
That approach helped it garner a massive $33 billion valuation in July from investors including Softbank and Tiger Global, firms that see London-based Revolut as a contender to create the first global financial super-app. But to get there, it needs to crack the U.S. market, where competitors from Robinhood to Chime have already staked out corners of the fintech ecosystem.
“We are building a single app where people can manage all aspects of their finances, from banking and foreign exchange, to cryptocurrency and stock trading,” Storonsky said. “We’re eager to break down common barriers to entry around stock trading such as account minimums and complex interfaces.”
Revolut launched in the U.S. last year just as the pandemic began, and has since added high interest savings, small business banking, U.S.-Mexico remittances and cryptocurrency trading.

Revolut’s trading feature lets users buy or sell popular U.S. stocks including Apple, Tesla and Beyond Meat.

Retail stock trading may give it the broadest appeal yet, however: More than 20 million new investors have entered the fray since last year, according to JMP Securities. Amid the trading boom, which has benefited disruptors and legacy players alike, others are looking to jump in: PayPal is working on its own stock-trading platform, CNBC reported last month.

Revolut is currently testing its stock trading service, which will allow users to buy ETFs and shares of NYSE and NASDAQ listed companies, according to Ron Oliveira, head of Revolut’s U.S. business. It will be available in a few months and will eventually allow for fractional share purchases and investing spare change from card transactions.
The broker-dealer license took 16 months to acquire through the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Oliveira said. Specifically, Revolut is approved to be an “introducing broker” and will lean on New Jersey-based fintech DriveWealth to clear the trades, just as it does for Revolut’s European trading business, he said.
FINRA “took a deep dive, they asked lots of questions because they wanted to see exactly what the consumer experience was,” Oliveira said. “It took them a period of time to get comfortable, but we’re very happy they got there.”

Payment for order flow

While a Revolut executive said in 2019 that its European operations wouldn’t lean on payment for order flow, an industry practice where market makers pay brokerages for client orders, the U.S. business is shaping up to have a different approach.
Revolut will earn payment for order flow revenue in the U.S., according to a spokeswoman. The tactic is one of the main ways Robinhood earns revenue, and it’s a practice under scrutiny by Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler.
Revolut is also working with regulators on its U.S. bank charter application in California, first reported by CNBC last year, said Oliveira. That process isn’t likely to be completed this year, he said.
The company will eventually aim for a public listing in the U.K., U.S. or perhaps a dual listing, said Storonsky. After raising $800 million in July, Revolut should be done raising money from private investors, he said.
“That will be my hope, because the reality is we are generating free cash flow,” the founder said. “We shouldn’t need any additional capital from external investors.”

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Millions of shoppers now use a buy now, pay later, or BNPL, service to finance their purchases. And the options are more varied than ever.
BNPL plans, also known as point-of-sale loans, let shoppers pay for their items over a period of installments.
BNPL accounted for 2.1% — or about $97 billion — of all global e-commerce transactions in 2020, according to Worldpay.

Klarna logos displayed on a laptop and phone screen.
Jakub Porzycki | NurPhoto via Getty Images

Buy now, pay later is having a moment.
Millions of shoppers now use a buy now, pay later, or BNPL, service to finance their purchases. And the options are more varied than ever — Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay are just a few of the many providers in the space.

Meanwhile, big companies are jumping on the bandwagon, with PayPal launching its own product, Amazon and Apple partnering up with Affirm, and Square agreeing to buy Afterpay in a $29 billion deal.
BNPL companies tout their service as a better alternative to credit cards. But critics are worried many people are spending more than they can afford and that some may not even realize they’re getting into debt.
So what is buy now, pay later? And why is it suddenly booming?

What is BNPL?

BNPL plans, also known as point-of-sale loans, let shoppers pay for their items over a period of instalments.
The concept isn’t new. Instalment plans have been around for years, known as “layaway” in the U.S., or “lay-by” in Australia. These agreements let people spread the cost of items over a certain amount of time.

BNPL is similar in that consumers get the product upfront and pay for it in incremental amounts, often interest-free.
Buyers can opt to use a BNPL service when checking out online with just a few clicks. They typically pay the first instalment then, and get invoiced the remaining sum during a period of three to four months.
BNPL providers often add a checkout button to a retailer’s website and then take a cut from the merchant on each transaction. Experts say retailers are incentivized to agree to this as it often leads to higher average order value and better conversion rates.
Some BNPL firms also generate income from late payment fees and interest on longer-term instalment plans.
The advantage for shoppers is that they can buy a more expensive item than they might normally be able to pay for in one go — say, a $300 jacket — and spread the cost of their purchase over monthly instalments.

Why is it so popular?

One word: coronavirus.
The pandemic resulted in many brick-and-mortar retailers being forced to temporarily shut down and saw consumers spend much more of their time at home.
This accelerated the growth of online shopping. According to a report from Worldpay, the payment processing firm owned by FIS, global e-commerce transactions totaled $4.6 trillion last year, up 19% from 2019.
BNPL accounted for 2.1% — or about $97 billion — of that sum. This figure is expected to double to 4.2% by 2024, according to Worldpay.
While BNPL plans had already been growing in popularity prior to the pandemic, a shift in consumer spending habits and surging e-commerce adoption gave the market a significant lift.
That’s been a boon to a number of companies in the space, with Klarna reaching a $46 billion valuation in a recent private fundraising round, PayPal acquiring Japanese firm Paidy for $2.7 billion and Square snapping up Afterpay.

What are the risks?

One of the main criticisms of BNPL is that it could encourage shoppers to spend more than they can afford. Pay-later plans are particularly popular with millennial and Gen Z shoppers.
Which?, a consumer advocacy group in the U.K., says it conducted an investigation which found that almost a quarter of BNPL users spent more than they initially intended to because the service was available.
There are also fears over how easily people can get into debt, sometimes without even realizing, since there are no hard credit checks involved.
The sector has been compared to controversial payday loans that allow short-term borrowing, often with high interest rates. While BNPL is typically interest-free, some providers charge high late payment fees.
BNPL providers say they have safeguards in place to make sure users don’t overspend. Klarna, for example, sets spending limits on a case-by-case basis.
“For every transaction, we take a new position and look at how consumers are using this product,” Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s CEO, told CNBC.
“If they’re using it in a positive way, we’re able to expand their ability to use it. If not, we’re going to restrict their ability to use it or stop their ability entirely to use it.”
But critics argue BNPL needs regulations to sufficiently protect consumers. The U.K. government is seeking to rein in the industry with a range of proposals including affordability checks on customers. A consultation on the rules is expected to be released in October.
For their part, Klarna and Clearpay — the U.K. arm of Afterpay — say they welcome the move toward regulation.

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U.S. stock futures were higher in overnight trading on Monday following a major sell-off on Wall Street that resulted in the S&P 500’s worst day since May.
Dow Jones futures rose 131 points. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures both traded in positive territory.

The major averages tumbled on Monday due to a confluence of concerns including the imminent Federal Reserve meeting, the lingering delta variant, potential economic disruption in China and the debt ceiling deadline.
However, stocks closed well off their lows of the day.
The S&P 500 slid 1.7% for its worst day since May 12 of this year. At it’s low of the day, the 500-stock average pulled back 5% on an intraday basis from its high. It currently sits 4.1% from its record.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 614 points, or 1.8%, for its biggest one-day drop since July 19. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.2% as growth pockets of the market were some of the hardest hit.

The Federal Reserve begins its two-day policy meeting on Tuesday and investors are looking for more information from Chairman Jerome Powell about the central bank’s plans to taper its bond buying, specifically when that will happen. Powell said last month that he sees the Fed slowing its $120 billion in monthly purchases at some point this year.

The Fed releases its quarterly economic forecasts, the so-called dot plot, along with the statement on interest rates at 2 p.m. ET Wednesday. Powell will have a a press conference after.
“We’re going to have to see proof that the Fed dot plots don’t come out in a way that spooks the market,” said said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at BMO Wealth Management.
Weakness in China’s equity market reverberated into U.S. stocks on Monday. The benchmark Hang Seng index plunged 4% as struggling real estate developer China Evergrande Group teeters on the brink of default.
“We’re going to have to see some proof that the Chinese government is taking steps to manage this,” added Ma.
The Delta variant remains a global health threat as the colder months approach and vaccination hesitancy persists among some Americans.
Stocks linked to global growth led losses on Monday and energy names took a hit thanks to a 2% drop in U.S. oil prices. Banks stops dropped as bond yields fell.
The Cboe Volatility index, Wall Street’s fear gauge, jumped above the 26 level on Monday, the highest since May.
Investors are also concerned about the deadline to raise the debt ceiling and possible tax increases. Congress returned to Washington from recess rushing to pass funding bills to avoid a government shutdown.
September is a historically volatile month for stocks and after the S&P 500’s 16% rally year-to-date, many investors have said the market is due for a pullback. Some strategists called Monday’s sell-off a buying opportunity.
“The market sell-off that escalated overnight we believe is primarily driven by technical selling flows ([commodity trading advisors] and option hedgers) in an environment of poor liquidity, and overreaction of discretionary traders to perceived risks,” Marko Kolanovic, JPMorgan chief global market strategist, said in a note Monday.
While others said volatility is likely to persist until some of the risks are resolved.
“We’re not in the camp that this small pullback represents a special buying opportunity,” said Ma. “There could easily be more volatility depending on what happens with the Fed meeting…similar with the debt ceiling. With the overhang and then negotiations, this is definitely going to be pushed to the wire.”
Cryptocurrencies also pulled back on Monday with bitcoin ending the day about 7% lower. The slide resurfaced the debate about whether bitcoin can or should serve as a safe-haven asset.
FedEx, Adobe, AutoZone and Stich Fix report quarterly earnings on Tuesday.
— with reporting from CNBC’s Hannah Miao.

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CHINA’S FINANCIAL authorities are honing a new skill: the “marketised default”—or an orderly market exit and well-managed restructuring for troubled companies. The term has surfaced in government documents and local media as of late as regulators become adept at managing larger, more frequent and highly complex defaults. They have had some successes. Evergrande, a massive Chinese property developer on the brink of collapse, is proving to be anything but.The company, the world’s most indebted property firm with $300bn in liabilities, is expected to default on September 23rd on both yuan- and dollar-denominated interest payments. Far from being a well-managed process, the distress is roiling markets across the globe and dragging other weak developers down with it. Major indices in Europe and America fell on September 20th as Evergrande’s situation appeared to worsen. Yields on the bonds of a number of struggling Chinese developers have soared. Hong Kong-traded shares in one large Shanghai-based group, Sinic Holdings, collapsed by nearly 90% on September 20th on fears that it, too, would fail to repay a bond due in October. R&F Properties, another highly indebted group, has said it will raise up to $2.5bn by borrowing cash from company executives and selling a property project. Several financial institutions with high exposure to the property sector have suffered falls in their market value. The price of iron ore fell below $100 per tonne on September 20th for the first time in a year on fears that Chinese homebuilders will construct fewer properties. The crackdown on developer debt is not an isolated event but one of several campaigns Xi Jinping, China’s president, is using to remould the country. A sweeping clampdown on internet-technology companies has wiped out more than $1trn in shareholder value since early this year. A number of New York-listed Chinese companies have seen their entire business models destroyed. These changes, along with the goal of improving housing affordability and ridding the property market of speculation, have been encapsulated by Mr Xi in the phrase “common prosperity”. “A regime shift is occurring without necessarily the markets fully comprehending the enormous underlying change to the structure of the economy,” said Sean Darby of Jefferies, an investment bank.Analysts and short-sellers have been predicting the death of Evergrande for years. Its chairman, Xu Jiayin, who founded the company in 1996, put up $1bn of his own cash in 2018 to meet a shortfall in demand for an Evergrande bond with a 13% coupon. The company has relied on ever-increasing short-term debts, often at higher and higher costs, to fund a business model that relies on borrowing money to develop properties and selling them years before they are completed to generate cash from buyers’ deposits. When central-government regulators stepped up their campaign against leverage last August, the first major cracks began appearing in its business. Authorities have constricted developers’ capacity to continue accumulating debt, limiting liability-to-asset ratios to less than 70%, net debt-to-equity ratios to less than 100% and mandating levels of cash that are at least equivalent to short-term debt. The policy has changed the nature of the business. Unable to continue perpetually expanding their debts, Evergrande and several other weak companies have slashed home prices and halted projects in order to preserve cash. Evergrande is said to be offloading housing projects in an attempt to generate just enough cash to make payments to suppliers. It is also selling off its land at a 70% discount, says one investor. UBS, a Swiss bank, has identified ten other Chinese property groups with 1.86trn yuan ($290bn) in contracted sales that are in similar risky positions. How far will the turmoil spread? The volatility leading up to the expected default on September 23rd has already given investors a taste of the risks emanating from China’s deleveraging campaign. However, many analysts still believe severe contagion can be ring-fenced to groups with known connections to Evergrande and other weak property developers. Start with banks, the main area of concern on regulators’ minds. China’s banking sector has lent heavily to developers in recent years. A stress test on banks’ exposure to the property sector conducted recently by the central bank concluded that an extreme scenario, in which loans to developers suffered a 15-percentage-point rise in their non-performing ratios, would eat up 2.1 percentage points of banks’ overall capital-adequacy ratios, reducing the industry average to 12.3%. Such a drop in the banks’ capital buffers, evenly spread across the banking sector, would be a tolerable depletion of protection. But such a crisis would not hit banks even-handedly; weaker banks would see a much larger reduction, note analysts at S&P Global, a ratings agency.Ping An Bank and Minsheng Bank, both hit by sell-offs in recent days, had 10.6% and 10.3% of their total loan books extended to property groups in the first half of the year. Minsheng has tight links to Evergrande. Shengjing Bank, which is majority-owned by Evergrande, is thought to have lent heavily to the property company. A banking crisis is not the base case for many investors watching the situation. But “the situation would change very quickly” if a bank of Minsheng’s scale proved vulnerable, says a China-based executive at an asset manager. Central authorities would probably step in swiftly at the first sign of distress at a major bank, the investor adds.Of more immediate concern are Evergrande’s links to China’s shadow banking system. About 45% of its interest-bearing liabilities in the first half of 2020 were from trusts and other shadow lenders, which are opaque and typically charge higher rates, compared with just 25% for bank loans, according to Gavekal, a research firm.Panic in the offshore bond market is another worry. Chinese developers are the largest issuers of dollar-denominated bonds traded in Hong Kong, and among them Evergrande is the single largest issuer. The company’s bonds have traded at less than 30 cents to the dollar over the past week. Many other developers’ yields have shot up above 30%. Investors are waiting for a signal from Beijing. So far the absence of any strong sign of support has shown that regulators do not want to step in as they did recently with Huarong, a state-owned distressed debt investor that required a full bail-out in August. The treatment of Huarong, which is intricately connected to China’s financial system, suggests that Mr Xi is still intent on avoiding a generalised market meltdown. If Evergrande does default, there is still the possibility that the government may step in to help individuals. The state, which is likely to be worried by protests in recent days by savers who have bought Evergrande’s wealth-management products, is expected to be forced to broker a partial bail-out for assets most connected with social stability.Such a process would be focused on the properties the company has already sold to ordinary people and which are not yet built. Capital Economics, a research firm, estimates there are about 1.4m of those. This could involve a number of companies carving up construction projects across the country and taking over assets in the provinces where they are based. By keeping these projects under development, suppliers and contractors would also in effect be bailed out.One trick in organising such a bail-out will be finding buyers. The crackdown on leverage has left few developers with excess cash to make such purchases. Therefore, says Stephen Jen of Eurizon Capital, an asset manager, local governments may need to step in.Perhaps the biggest contagion risk flaring up in the market is not that posed by Evergrande itself but by Mr Xi’s unyielding crackdown on leverage. In this sense Evergrande is not the root cause of the troubles in China’s property sector, says Logan Wright of Rhodium Group, a research firm. Instead it is a symptom of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reshape the nature of the market. Following the assault on China’s vibrant tech sector Mr Xi has given analysts every reason to believe he intends to see this deleveraging campaign through, says Mr Wright.These implications are bigger than the current market rout. China’s property sector accounts for 20-25% of its economy. An extended campaign against developer debt could significantly lower China’s growth prospects, says Tommy Wu of Oxford Economics, a research firm. But such a strategy could lead to much greater economic and financial turmoil further down the road. Regulators may eventually be forced to bail out the property industry along with the financial one, Mr Wu says. Such a worst-case scenario poses concerns far beyond the fate of Evergrande, and raises questions over where Mr Xi’s relentless and wide-reaching campaigns are leading China. More

ACROSS THE world, a natural-gas shortage is starting to bite. Prices of power in Germany and France have soared by around 40% in the past two weeks. In many countries, including Britain and Spain, governments are rushing through emergency measures to protect consumers. Factories are being temporarily switched off, from aluminium smelters in Mexico to fertiliser plants in Britain. Markets are frantic. One trader says it is like the global financial crisis for commodities. Even in America, the world’s biggest natural-gas producer, lobby groups are calling on the government to limit exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the price of which has climbed to $25 per million British thermal units (mBTU), up by two-thirds in the past month.In one sense the crisis has fiendishly complex causes, with a mosaic of factors from geopolitics to precautionary hoarding in Asia sending prices higher. Viewed from a different perspective, however, its causes are simple: an energy market with only thin safety buffers has become acutely sensitive to disruptions. And subdued investment in fossil fuels may mean higher volatility is here to stay.The shortfall has taken almost everyone by surprise. In 2019 there was plenty of gas on the international market, thanks to new LNG plants coming online in America. When the covid pandemic struck and lockdown constrained demand, much of the excess gas went into storage in Europe. That came in handy last winter, which was particularly cold in northern Asia and Europe. The freeze pushed up demand for heating. In Asia gas prices quadrupled in three months. Buyers, such as national gas companies, looked to the LNG market to fill out supply. Many Europe-destined cargoes were diverted to Asia. Europe, by contrast, drew down on its reserves. Prices there only inched up.This year odd weather has featured again. A hot summer has added to booming gas demand in Asia. The region accounts for almost three-quarters of global LNG imports, according to AllianceBernstein, a financial firm. China led the way, thanks to its swift economic recovery. In the first half of 2021 its power generation jumped by 16% compared with the previous year. Three-fifths of China’s power is generated by coal; a fifth comes from hydropower. But hydropower generation has been low because of a drought. And coal demand fell partly because of environmentally friendly policies, such as replacing coal-burning boilers with gas ones. Investment in mining coal has also been low. That meant more reliance on natural gas. In the first half of the year, gas generation grew quicker than coal or hydropower. Chinese LNG imports grew by 26% from the previous year. Other countries have seen higher demand too, partly because of the warm summer in Asia. In addition, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have been topping up their storage facilities. Meanwhile, a drought in Latin America, which gets half its power from hydro, has increased the need for gas there. The region’s LNG demand has almost doubled in the past year. Booming demand has been met with lower supply of LNG. A long list of small disruptions has nibbled away at global output. Some of the outages were caused by maintenance work delayed during the covid pandemic. Others, such as a fire at a Norwegian LNG plant, were unplanned. The combined effect of all these disruptions was to cut global LNG supply by roughly 5%, estimates Mike Fulwood of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (Mr Fulwood’s daughter works at The Economist).With LNG being sucked into Asia, less has been left for European buyers. LNG imports into Europe are about 20% lower than they were last year. Gas inventories are about 25% below their long-term average. Gas production has also dropped in Britain and the Netherlands. Analysts had expected Russia’s Gazprom, which supplies a third of Europe’s gas, to make up the difference. But even though it met all of its long-term gas contracts to Europe this year, it has not sold additional gas in the spot market. Some suspect Gazprom wants to speed up the launch of Nord Stream 2, a big gas pipeline.Europe has been hit by peculiar weather in other ways. Across the north-west of the continent the air has been still, reducing wind generation. In Germany, for example, during the first two weeks of September wind-power generation was 50% below its five-year average. Moreover, usually European utilities respond to high gas prices by using more coal. But the price of coal is also at near-record highs on the back of demand for electricity and production bottlenecks. The cost of European carbon permits is at record highs too. These give the holder the right to emit an amount of greenhouse gases. Because burning coal emits more than burning natural gas, expensive carbon permits add even more to the price.America’s gas market has responded to international demand. In the first half of the year America exported about a tenth of its natural-gas production, a 42% increase on the year before, according to the Energy Information Administration, a government statistical agency. But even if America produced more domestically, it would not help to balance the international LNG market. LNG facilities in America are running nearly at full capacity. So are liquefication facilities in other big gas-producing countries, such as Australia and Qatar. Expanding LNG plants is possible (Qatar plans to increase its capacity by 50%) but takes years to do.What could bring the heat out of the market in the short term? One possibility is substitution. That has begun to happen in some places. Europe is burning more coal than this time last year. Some power plants in Pakistan and Bangladesh switched to oil from LNG. Another possibility is an increase in supply from Russia. But it is unclear how much more Russia can produce. A final possibility is warmer weather. But meteorologists are already forecasting a cold winter. Gas prices are unlikely to come down to earth soon. More