Finance

Signage at the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. offices in Beijing, China, on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Check out the companies making the biggest moves in premarket trading:
Alibaba — U.S.-listed shares fell 2.3% after the China e-commerce giant announced CEO Daniel Zhang was stepping down and will be replaced by Eddie Wu, one of Alibaba’s co-founders. The move follows the company’s announcement in March it was restructuring its business into six business groups.

Atmus Filtration Technologies — Shares of the air filtration company rose more than 2% after a slew of analysts initiated coverage with bullish ratings, including JPMorgan. The bank said Atmus trades at a “deep discounted valuation vs. peers, despite >80% of aftermarket mix, while its planned expansion into industrial filtration should bridge the valuation gap vs. direct filtration peers over time.”
Dice Therapeutics — The biopharmaceutical stock soared 37.7% after Eli Lilly said it was acquiring the company for $48 per share, or about $2.4 billion, in cash.
Avis Budget — Shares added 3.5% in light volume following an upgrade by Morgan Stanley to overweight from equal weight. Analyst Adam Jonas also upped his price target to $230 from $182, suggesting 12.6% upside. Jonas cited Avis’ proven track record of fleet risk management and lower operating expenses relative to sales.
Philip Morris International — Shares of the tobacco company rose 1.5% in premarket trading after Citi upgraded Philip Morris to buy from neutral. Investors are undervaluing the growth of smoke free products, according to Citi.
Warner Bros Discovery — The media and entertainment conglomerate’s stock slid 1% after its movie “The Flash” took in an estimated $55 million during its first three-day weekend, less than the $75 million to $85 million the industry had expected.

Carnival — Shares moved 1.5% higher in the premarket, building on gains made last week when it was the S&P 500’s best performer. Cruise stocks are soaring this year as the companies recover from the Covid pandemic — the last in the travel industry to do so.
— CNBC’s Jesse Pound contributed reporting. More

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Monday that in his meetings in Beijing, he “repeatedly” raised the need for direct communication between the two countries’ militaries.
“At this moment, China does not agree to move forward with that,” he said, noting the U.S. would keep working toward restoring those communication channels.
An issue for the Chinese is that the U.S. has sanctioned Li Shangfu, China’s minister of national defense.

Blinken’s trip to Beijing over the last two days — the secretary’s first under the Biden administration — marked a resumption of high-level U.S.-China government meetings after a tense four-plus months.
Aly Song | Reuters

BEIJING — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday he failed to revive military-to-military talks with China, despite earlier hopes of reopening that communication channel.
Blinken’s trip to Beijing over the last two days — the secretary’s first under the Biden administration — marked a resumption of high-level U.S.-China government meetings after a tense four-plus months.

Military communication had dropped off during that time.
China’s Defense Ministry declined a call with its U.S. counterpart in early February after the discovery of an alleged Chinese spy balloon over U.S. airspace. Both countries’ defense heads attended an annual event in Singapore earlier this month, but they did not have a formal meeting.
The balloon incident delayed Blinken’s visit to Beijing by more than four months. The secretary arrived Sunday and had meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Director of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Foreign Affairs Office Wang Yi, and State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
Blinken told NBC News on Monday that the spy balloon “chapter should be closed.”

He also told reporters Monday that during the meetings, he “repeatedly” raised the need for direct communication between the two countries’ militaries.

“I think it’s absolutely vital that we have these kinds of communications, military to military,” Blinken said. “That imperative, I think, was only underscored by recent incidents that we saw in the air and on the seas.”
“At this moment, China does not agree to move forward with that,” he said, noting the U.S. would keep working toward restoring those communication channels.
The U.S. shot down the alleged Chinese spy balloon in February. Beijing maintains it was a weather balloon that blew off course.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said a China warship came within 150 yards of a U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing considers Taiwan part of its territory, with no right to independently conduct diplomatic relations. The U.S. recognizes Beijing as the sole government of China but maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan, a democratically self-governed island.

U.S. sanctions at play

An issue for the Chinese is that the U.S. has sanctioned Li Shangfu, China’s minister of national defense.
The U.S. sanctioned Li in 2018 while he was head of China’s Equipment Development Department and oversaw Chinese purchases of Russian combat aircraft and equipment.
When asked in May whether those sanctions would be lifted, even for negotiation purposes, the U.S. State Department spokesperson said no.
“You can’t have sanctions on one side” and discussions on the other, said Shen Yamei, director and associate research fellow at state-backed think tank China Institute of International Studies’ department for American studies. That’s according to a CNBC translation of her Mandarin-language remarks.
She generally described Blinken’s trip to Beijing as a “very good turning point.”
Shen previously told CNBC that Beijing declined to pick up a military hotline phone call because doing so would be an acknowledgement that the situation was tense — and prompt more extreme U.S. action.
China frequently didn’t answer the phone — a hotline set up for emergencies.
Leading up to Blinken’s trip to Beijing, the U.S. State Department said the secretary was set to meet with “senior [People’s Republic of China] officials where he will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the U.S.-PRC relationship.”
On Monday, Blinken said that following his trip, other senior U.S. officials would soon likely visit China, and vice versa.
He said he thought there was “a positive step” toward responsibly managing the U.S.-China relationship through the discussions of the last few days. More

May’s consumer price index figure will be published Wednesday morning, the day before the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) announces its next move on interest rates.
Data points since the last meeting have indicated persistent tightness in the labor market and strong underlying inflationary pressures, along with mixed but generally resilient growth momentum.

A member of the public walks through heavy rain near the Bank of England in May 2023.
Dan Kitwood | Getty Images News | Getty Images

LONDON — The Bank of England is “caught between a rock and a hard place” as it prepares for a key monetary policy decision against a backdrop of sticky inflation and a tight labor market, economists say.
May’s consumer price index figure will be published Wednesday morning, the day before the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) announces its next move on interest rates.

Data points since the last meeting have indicated persistent tightness in the labor market and strong underlying inflationary pressures, alongside mixed but surprisingly resilient growth momentum.
Economists therefore now expect the Bank to prolong its tightening cycle and lift interest rates to a higher level than previously anticipated.
British 2-year government bond yields rose to a 15-year high of 5% on Monday ahead of the expected announcement of yet another 25 basis point rate increase on Thursday.
Since November 2021, the the central bank has embarked on a series of hikes to take its base rate from 0.1% to 4.5%, and market pricing now suggests it may eventually top out at 5.75%.
Headline CPI inflation came in at 8.7% year-on-year in April, down from 10.1% in March, but core CPI (which excludes volatile energy, food, alcohol and tobacco prices) increased by 6.8% compared to 6.2% the previous month.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projected earlier this month that the U.K. will post annual headline inflation of 6.9% this year, the highest level among all advanced economies.

Adding to policymakers’ collective headache, labor market data last week came in far stronger than expected. Unemployment defied expectations to fall back to 3.8% while the inactivity rate also fell by 0.4 percentage points.
Regular pay growth (excluding bonuses) was 7.2% in the three months to the end of April compared to the previous year, also exceeding consensus forecasts. Growth in regular private sector pay, the Bank’s key metric, hit 7.6% year-on-year.
In terms of economic activity, May PMIs moderated slightly below consensus but remained in expansionary territory, and U.K. gross domestic product unexpectedly contracted by 0.3% month-on-month in March before rebounding partially with 0.2% growth in April.
Terminal rate forecasts raised
In a research note Thursday, Goldman Sachs Chief European Economist Sven Jari Stehn said that although some uncertainty remains over Wednesday’s CPI release, there is a “high hurdle” for the Bank of England to deem it necessary to step up its hiking increments to 50 basis points.
Stehn highlighted that “inflation expectations have remained anchored, recent comments have signalled no appetite for stepping up the pace and the meeting will have no press conference or new projections.”
“We look for the MPC to retain its modal assessment that underlying inflation pressures will cool as headline inflation declines but acknowledge the firmer recent data and note that risks to the inflation outlook remain skewed significantly to the upside. We also expect the MPC to keep its loose forward guidance unchanged,” Stehn added.
Goldman Sachs expects the MPC to retain its relatively dovish position given resilient growth, sticky wage pressures and high core inflation, and to continue being pushed into more 25 basis point hikes by stronger-than-expected data, eventually reaching a terminal rate of 5.25% with risks skewed upside.
BNP Paribas economists also expect a 25 basis point hike on Thursday, as inflation expectations remain lower than they were when the Bank was lifting rates in 50 basis point increments last year.

The French lender also upgraded its terminal rate forecast to 5.5% in a note last week, from 5% previously, in response to “clear evidence of more persistent inflation.”
Though the tightening cycle is expected to be longer than higher in order to reel in inflation, BNP Paribas suggested the MPC would be “wary of over-tightening” and will be looking to gauge how rate rises to date affect households, particularly as fixed-rate mortgage renewals roll in through the second and third quarter.
U.K. mortgage borrowers are being pushed to the brink as rising borrowing costs hit deal renewals and products are pulled from the market.
Laith Khalaf, head of investment analysis at AJ Bell, said the MPC is “caught between a rock and a hard place” as it chooses between pushing more mortgage borrowers to a cliff edge and allowing inflation to run riot.
“Current interest rate pricing reflects alarm bells ringing in the market, but some moderation in inflationary pressures over the summer would pour balm on the situation. The Bank of England will also be cognisant of the fact the full force of its tightening to date is still working its way through the economy,” Khalaf said.
“Having said that, should inflation data remain ugly, the Bank will be under pressure to take action, and so will the Treasury, if it looks like the Prime Minister’s pledge to halve inflation is at risk of falling short.” More

In the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine any hint of bad news sent energy prices into the stratosphere. When a fire forced an American gas plant to close, strikes clogged French oil terminals, Russia demanded Europe pay for fuel in roubles or the weather looked grimmer than usual, markets went wild. Since January, however, things have been different (see chart). Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, has hovered around $75 a barrel, compared with $120 a year ago; in Europe, gas prices, at €35 ($38) per megawatt-hour (mwh), are 88% below their peak in August. It is not that the news has suddenly become more amenable. The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) and its allies have announced swingeing cuts to output. In America the number of oil and gas rigs has fallen for seven weeks in a row, as producers respond to the meagre rewards on offer. Several of Norway’s gas facilities—now vital to Europe—are in prolonged maintenance. The Netherlands is closing the largest gas field in Europe. Yet any uptick in price quickly fades away. What is keeping prices down?Disappointing demand may be part of the answer. In recent months expectations for global economic growth have been slashed. The failure of several banks this spring raised fears of an imminent recession in America. Inflation is battering consumers in Europe. In both places, the full impact of interest-rate rises is still to be felt. Meanwhile, in China, the post-covid rebound is proving much weaker than expected. Anaemic growth, in turn, is dampening demand for fuel. Yet look closer and the demand story does not entirely convince. Despite its disappointing recovery, China consumed 16m barrels per day (b/d) of crude in April, a record. A rebound in trucking, tourism and travel since the grim zero-covid period means more diesel, petrol and jet fuel is being used. In America, a 30% drop in petrol prices compared with a year ago augurs well for the summer driving season. In Asia and Europe, high temperatures are expected to last, creating more demand for gas-fired power generation for cooling. A more convincing explanation can be found on the supply side of the equation. The past two years of high prices have incentivised production outside of opec, which is now coming online. Oil is gushing from the Atlantic basin, through a combination of conventional wells (in Brazil and Guyana) and shale and tar-sands production (in America, Argentina and Canada). Norway is pumping more, too. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, estimates that non-opec output will rise by 2.2m b/d in 2023. In theory, this should be balanced by production cuts announced in April by core opec members (of 1.2m b/d) and Russia (of 500,000 b/d), to which Saudi Arabia added another 1m b/d in June. Yet output in these countries has not fallen by as much as promised—and other opec countries are increasing exports. Venezuela’s are up, thanks to investment by Chevron, an American giant. Iran’s are at their highest since 2018, when America imposed fresh sanctions. Indeed, a fifth of the world’s oil now comes from countries under Western embargoes, selling at a discount and thus helping dampen prices.For gas, the supply situation is trickier: the main Russian pipeline delivering to Europe remains shut. But Freeport lng, a facility which handles a fifth of America’s exports of liquefied natural gas, and was harmed by an explosion last year, is back online. Russia’s other exports to continental Europe continue. Norwegian flows will fully resume in mid-July. Most important, Europe’s existing stocks are vast. The bloc’s storage facilities are 73% full, compared with 53% a year ago, and on track to reach their 90% target before December. Rich Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, also have plenty of gas. When inflation was soaring and interest rates remained modest, commodities, notably crude oil, were an attractive hedge against rising prices, pushing up prices as investors flooded in. Now that speculators expect inflation to drop, the appeal has dimmed—just as higher rates make safer assets like cash and bonds more alluring. As a result, speculative net positioning (the balance between long and short bets placed by punters on futures oil markets) has slumped. Higher rates also raise the opportunity cost of holding crude stocks, so physical traders are offloading their stock. The volume in floating storage fell from 80m barrels in January to 65m barrels in April, its lowest since early 2020.Prices could well rise later in the year. The International Energy Agency, an official forecaster, projects that global oil demand will reach a record 102.3m b/d over 2023. Oil supply, too, will hit a record, but the forecaster reckons the market will tip into deficit into the second half of 2023—a view shared by many banks. As winter approaches, competition for lng cargoes between Asia and Europe will intensify. Freight rates for the winter are already rising in anticipation. Still, last year’s nightmare is unlikely to be repeated. Many analysts expect Brent crude to stay close to $80 a barrel and not to reach triple digits. Gas futures markets in Asia and Europe point to a 30% rise from today’s levels by the autumn, rather than anything more extreme. Over the past 12 months commodity markets have adapted. It now takes more than a hint of bad news to send prices rocketing. ■ More

China prides itself on firm, “unswerving” leadership and stable economic growth. That should make its fortunes easy to predict. But in recent months, the world’s second-biggest economy has been full of surprises, wrong-footing seasoned China-watchers and savvy investors alike.In the first three months of this year, for example, China’s economy grew more quickly than expected, thanks to its surprisingly abrupt exit from the covid-19 pandemic. Then in April and May, the opposite happened: the economy recovered more slowly than hoped. Figures for retail sales, investment and property sales all fell short of expectations. And the unemployment rate among China’s urban youth rose above 20%, the highest since data began to be recorded in 2018. Some economists now think the economy might not grow at all in the second quarter, compared with the first (see chart). By China’s standards that would count as a “double dip”, says Ting Lu of Nomura, a bank.China has also defied a third prediction. It has failed, thankfully, to become an inflationary force in the world economy. Its increased demand for oil this year has not prevented the cost of Brent crude, the global benchmark, from falling by more than 10% from its January peak. Steel and copper have also cheapened. China’s producer prices—those charged at the factory gate—declined by more than 4% in May, compared with a year earlier. And the yuan has weakened. The price Americans pay for imports from China fell by 2% in May, compared with a year earlier, according to America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics.Much of the slowdown can be traced to China’s property market. Earlier in the year it seemed to be recovering from a disastrous spell of defaults, plummeting sales and mortgage boycotts. The government had made it easier for indebted property developers to raise money so that they could complete long-delayed construction projects. And households who refrained from buying last year, when China was subject to sudden lockdowns, returned to the market in the first months of 2023 to make the purchases they had postponed. Some analysts even allowed themselves the luxury of worrying whether the property market might bounce back too strongly, reviving the speculative momentum of the past. But this pent-up demand seems to have petered out. The price of new homes fell in May, compared with the previous month, according to an index of 70 cities weighted by population and seasonally adjusted by Goldman Sachs, a bank. And although property developers are keen again to complete building projects, they are reluctant to start them. Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy, calculates that property sales have fallen back to 70% of the level they were at in the same period of 2019, China’s last relatively normal year. Housing starts are only about 40% of their 2019 level (see chart ).How should the government respond? For a worrying few weeks, it was not clear if it would respond at all. Its growth target for this year—around 5%—lacked much ambition. It seemed keen to keep a lid on the debts of local governments, which are often urged to splurge for the sake of growth. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, seemed unperturbed by falling prices. It may have also worried that a cut in interest rates would put too much of a squeeze on banks’ margins, because the interest rate they pay on deposits might not fall as far as the rate they charge on loans. But on June 6th the PBOC asked the country’s biggest lenders to lower their deposit rates, paving the way for the central bank to reduce its policy rate by 0.1 percentage points on June 13th. The cut itself was negligible. But it showed the government was not oblivious to the danger. The interest rate banks charge their “prime” customers is likely to fall next, which will further lower mortgage rates. And a meeting of the State Council, China’s cabinet, on June 16th, dropped hints of further steps to come.(see chart).Robin Xing of Morgan Stanley, a bank, expects further cuts in interest rates. He also thinks restrictions on home purchases in first- and second-tier cities may be relaxed. The country’s “policy banks” may provide more loans for infrastructure. And its local governments may be permitted to issue more bonds. China’s budget suggests it expected land sales to remain steady in 2023. Instead revenues have fallen by about 20% so far this year, compared with the same period of 2022. If that shortfall persisted for the entire year, it would deprive local governments of more than 1trn yuan ($140bn) in revenue, Mr Xing points out. The central government may feel obliged to fill that gap. Will this be enough to fulfil the government’s growth target? Mr Xing thinks so. The slowdown in the second quarter will be no more than a “hiccup”, he argues. Employment in China’s service sector began this year 30m short of where it would have been without the pandemic, Mr Xing calculates. The rebound in “contact-intensive” services, such as restaurants, will restore 16m of those jobs over the next 12 months. (In other North Asian economies, it took two to three quarters for such employment to recover after the initial reopening, he points out.) And when jobs do return, income, confidence and spending will revive.Another 10m of the missing jobs are in industries like e-commerce and education that suffered from a regulatory storm in 2021, intended to curb market abuse, plug regulatory gaps and reassert the party’s prerogatives. China has struck a softer tone towards these companies in recent months. That may embolden some of them to resume hiring, as the economy recovers.Others economists are less optimistic. Xu Gao of Bank of China International argues that further monetary easing will not work. The demand for loans is insensitive to interest rates, now that two of the economy’s biggest borrowers—property developers and local governments—are hamstrung by debt. The authorities cut interest rates more out of resignation than hope. He may be right. But it is odd to assume that monetary easing will not work before it has really been tried. Loan demand is not the only channel through which it can revive the economy. In a thought experiment, Zhang Bin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and his co-authors point out that if the central bank’s policy rate dropped by two percentage points, it would reduce China’s interest payments by 7.1trn yuan, increase the value of the stockmarket by 13.6trn yuan, and lift house prices, bolstering the confidence of homeowners.If monetary easing does not work, the government will have to explore fiscal stimulus. Last year local-government financing vehicles (LGFVs), quasi-commercial entities backed by the state, increased their investment spending to prop up growth. That, however, has left many of them strapped for cash. According to a recent survey of 2,892 of these vehicles by the Rhodium Group, a research firm, only 567 had enough cash on hand to meet their short-term debt obligations. In two cities, Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, and Guilin, a southern city famous for its picturesque Karst mountains, interest payments by LGFVs rose to over 100% of the city’s “fiscal capacity” (defined as their fiscal revenues plus net cash flows from their financing vehicles). Their debt mountains are not a pretty picture. If the economy therefore needs a more forceful fiscal push, the central government itself will have to engineer it. In principle, this stimulus could include higher spending on pensions as well as consumer giveaways, such as the tax breaks on electric vehicles that have helped boost car sales. The government could also experiment with high-tech consumer handouts of the kind pioneered by some cities in Zhejiang province during the early days of the pandemic. They distributed millions of coupons through e-wallets, which would, for example, knock 70 yuan off a restaurant meal if the coupon holder spent at least 210 yuan within a week. According to Zhenhua Li of Ant Group Research Institute and his co-authors, these coupons, albeit small, packed a punch. They induced more than 3 yuan of out-of-pocket spending for every 1 yuan of public money. Unfortunately, China’s fiscal authorities still seem to view such handouts as frivolous or profligate. If the government is going to spend or lend, it wants to create a durable asset for its trouble. In practice, any fiscal push is therefore likely to entail more investment in green infrastructure, inter-city transport and other public assets favoured in China’s five-year plan. That would be the utterly unsurprising response to China’s year of surprises. ■ More

Blinken’s original travel plans for February were disrupted by news of an alleged Chinese spy balloon flying over U.S. airspace.
The trip by Blinken makes him the highest-level American official to visit China since Biden became U.S. president and the first U.S. secretary of state to make the trip in nearly five years.
Blinken is set to have a working dinner later Sunday at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse with Qin.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) walks with China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang (R) ahead of a meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on June 18, 2023.
Leah Millis | Afp | Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday met with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and top diplomat Wang Yi in Beijing on a high-stakes diplomatic mission to cool U.S.-China tensions that have overshadowed geopolitics in recent months.
The trip by Blinken makes him the highest-level American official to visit China since Joe Biden became U.S. president and the first U.S. secretary of state to make the trip in nearly five years.

Blinken’s original travel plans for February were disrupted by news of an alleged Chinese spy balloon flying over U.S. airspace. The U.S. ultimately shot down the alleged spy balloon, and tensions between the world’s two largest economies have since remained tense. Beijing insisted the balloon was an unnamed weather tracker that blew off course.
Blinken is set to have a working dinner later Sunday at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse with Qin, who was previosuly China’s ambassador to the U.S. Some reports suggest there may also be a meeting with President Xi Jinping on Monday during Blinken’s two-day visit.
Expectations for a significant recovery in the U.S.-China relationship, especially as a result of Blinken’s trip, remain low. State department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement last week that Blinken will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication and will “raise bilateral issues of concern, global and regional matters, and potential cooperation on shared transnational challenges.”
At the annual Shangri-La Dialogue event in Singapore earlier this month, the U.S. defense chief and his Chinese counterpart didn’t have a formal meeting. And more broadly, international travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic limited contact between the U.S. and Chinese governments.
In August, a controversial visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, fueled Beijing’s ire. Beijing considers Taiwan part of its territory, with no right to conduct diplomatic relations on its own. The U.S. recognizes Beijing as the sole legal government of China, while maintaining unofficial relations with the island, a democratically self-governed region.

Read more about China from CNBC Pro

Biden’s visit to Beijing could also possibly pave the way for a November meeting between Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi — their first since Bali in November, a day before a G-20 summit kicked off.
In late May, the U.S. commerce secretary and her Chinese counterpart met in Washington, D.C. And U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is also expected to visit China at an unspecified time.
China’s new ambassador to the U.S., Xie Feng, arrived in the U.S. in late May after a period of about six months with no one in that position. Biden said around the same time that he expected U.S.-China tensions would “begin to thaw very shortly.”
A potential opportunity for Biden and Xi to meet again would be in November, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit that’s set to be held in San Francisco. More

She’s considered an influencer who uses TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to make financial education fun for young audiences.
Kyla Scanlon, 25, is a former options trader and the founder of Bread, a company that produces videos and skits that go viral.

“I’ll pretend to be [Federal Reserve Chair] Jerome Powell [or] pretend to be different stocks,” Scanlon told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “That really gets people involved because they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s funny. I can look at that and laugh’ … That really humanizes finance and brings people in in a way they wouldn’t normally expect.”
Her content focuses on helping young people understand how various economic topics affect them.
“When we talk about the Federal Reserve, it’s oftentimes very abstract. Like, they’re raising interest rates, but what does that really mean?” Scanlon said. “People want to know how things impact them directly.”
One of her viral videos is on the prevalence of “doomerism.” She defines it as a pessimistic view of life and the economy focusing on everything that’s going wrong.
“It’s a really enticing philosophy for people to subscribe to because it sort of removes agency from your life,” said Scanlon, who wants to give her audience a greater understanding of the hot-button Wall Street issues including the jobs market, inflation and recent bank failures.

As of late this week, Scanlon has almost 166,000 followers on TikTok, more than 156,000 on Twitter and 28,000 YouTube subscribers.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct Kyla Scanlon’s age.

Disclaimer More

Charles Schwab Corp. is the largest publicly traded brokerage business in the United States with $7.5 trillion of client assets, and is a leading service provider for financial advisors, among the top exchange-traded fund asset managers and one of the biggest banks.
“It would be fair to characterize Charles Schwab as a financial services supermarket,” Michael Wong, director of North American equity research and financial services at Morningstar, told CNBC. “Anything that you want, you can find in Charles Schwab’s platform.”

Over the decades, Charles Schwab helped usher in a low-cost investing revolution while surviving market crashes and fierce competition — even when the game was taken up a notch to zero-fee commissions in 2019. 
“Inherently, this is a scale business. The larger you are, the more efficient you are from an expense perspective,” Alex Fitch, portfolio manager for the Oakmark Select Fund and the Oakmark Equity and Income Fund, which invests in Charles Schwab, told CNBC. “It enables you to cut prices.”
Various facets of Charles Schwab’s business compete against many legacy full-service brokers and investment bankers, including Fidelity, Edward Jones, Interactive Brokers, Stifel, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS. And, it has to battle in the financial tech market against companies like Robinhood, Ally Financial and SoFi. 
The melee reached a turning point in 2019 when Charles Schwab announced it was slashing commissions for stock, ETF and options trades to zero, matching the fees offered by Robinhood when it entered the market in 2014.
Quickly, other companies followed suit and cut fees, which damaged TD Ameritrade’s business enough that Charles Schwab ended up acquiring it in a $26 billion all-stock deal less two months later.

Charles Schwab was among the firms that benefited from the growth of retail investing during the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s now facing the consequences of Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes. 
That’s because of Charles Schwab’s huge banking business that generates revenue from sweep accounts, which are when the firm uses money leftover in investors’ portfolios and reinvests it in securities, like government bonds, to help turn a profit. 
Charles Schwab told CNBC it was unable to participate in this documentary.
Watch the video above to learn more about how Charles Schwab battled the ever-evolving financial services market – from fees to fintech – and how the reward doesn’t come without the risk.  More