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New studies in South Africa and the U.K. last week suggested omicron has a reduced risk of hospitalization and severe illness.
In the U.K. over the weekend, infections were still topping 100,000, while France has also reported cases above that figure for the first time.

LONDON — European markets were slightly higher in a holiday-thinned trading session on Monday with many markets still closed due to the Christmas festivities.

The German Dax and France’s CAC 40 both rose 0.2% by the early afternoon, while Spain’s Ibex index was up 0.6%.

Market players have been juggling concerns over coronavirus restrictions and tighter central bank policy with signs that the heavily mutated omicron strain of the virus is milder than earlier variants like delta.
New studies in South Africa and the U.K. last week suggested omicron has a reduced risk of hospitalization and severe illness. In the U.K. at the end of last week, infections were still topping 100,000, while France has also reported cases above that figure for the first time.
In Asia, shares were mixed in Monday trade, with multiple major markets in the region closed for holidays.
U.S. markets are back open on Monday after the Christmas holiday, but both the U.K. and Ireland are closed on Monday and Tuesday.
In individual stocks news, shares of Storskogen were up 4% with news that the Swedish firm had acquired the automation company LNS.

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U.S. stock index futures indicated a higher start Monday as markets reopen after the Christmas holiday and investors assess the spread of the omicron Covid-19 variant.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose by about 62 points. S&P 500 futures added 0.3% and Nasdaq 100 futures ticked up 0.4%.

Airline stocks fell after a holiday weekend that saw thousands of flights canceled due to Covid-related issues. The rampant spread of the omicron variant led to a staffing shortage at a time when airlines were looking to ramp up their schedules to meet high travel demand.
United Airlines fell 2.3% in premarket trading, while American Airlines dipped 2.1% and Delta Air Lines was off 1.7%.
Cruise line shares also retreated in early morning trading after Covid outbreaks on ships. Carnival slid nearly 3%, Royal Caribbean lost 2.5% and Norwegian Cruise Line slid 2.3%.
Shares of GoDaddy jumped roughly 4% in the premarket after the Wall Street Journal reported activist investor Starboard Value LP took a 6.5% stake in the domain registrar.
Investors are looking for a Santa Claus rally to close out a year in which the S&P 500 has gained a whopping 25.8%. The benchmark index historically gains during the Santa Claus rally period — the final five trading days of the current year and the first two of the new year.

On Thursday, with markets closed Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 196.67 points, or 0.55%, to 35,950.56. The S&P 500 rose 0.62% to 4,725.79 and closed at a record. The 500-stock average sits less than 0.4% from its intraday record high. The Nasdaq Composite gained 0.85% to 15,653.37.
Helping boost sentiment were new studies suggesting that omicron has a lower risk of hospitalization than other Covid variants.
U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that cases of Covid-19 are likely going to keep surging as the omicron variant rapidly spreads across the globe. 
“Every day it goes up and up. The last weekly average was about 150,000 and it likely will go much higher,” Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The U.S. has reported more than 52 million total cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. Driving the surge is the omicron variant, which took over as the dominant strain earlier this month.
A slew of economic data on Thursday last week showed a stable economy with improving labor and spending trends, but inflation at high levels. The Federal Reserve’s closely watched core personal consumption expenditures price index rose 0.6% in November from the month prior. Core PCE rose 4.7% year-over-year in November, higher than the 4.5% rate expected.
On the data front Monday, the Dallas Fed manufacturing index is due out at 10:30 a.m. ET.

Stock picks and investing trends from CNBC Pro:

—CNBC’s Jessica Bursztynsky and Maggie Fitzgerald contributed to this article.

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Check out the companies making headlines before the bell:
Airline stocks – The major carriers saw their shares fall in the premarket after a surge in weekend cancellations due to staffing issues. United Airlines (UAL) slid 1.8%, American Airlines (AAL) fell 1.4%, Delta Air Lines (DAL) was down 1% and Southwest (LUV) declined 1.5%.

Cruise line stocks – Stocks of major cruise lines declined in premarket trading following three Covid-19 outbreaks in the past week on ships operated by Carnival (CCL) and Royal Caribbean (RCL). Carnival slid 2.2% in the premarket, while Royal Caribbean lost 1.9% and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings (NCLH) slid 1.6%.
GoDaddy (GDDY) – GoDaddy jumped 3.9% in premarket action after the Wall Street Journal reported that activist investor Starboard Value had taken a 6.5% stake in the internet domain name registration company.
Apple (AAPL) – Apple was cited by the top competition regulator in the Netherlands, which said the company broke competition laws, and ordered changes to Apple’s App Store payment policies. Apple said it would appeal the ruling.
Cigna (CI) – The insurer will reaffirm its 2021 and 2022 earnings guidance at its upcoming investor meetings, according to an SEC filing. Cigna expected 2021 adjusted earnings of at least $20.35 per share and sees projected growth of at least 10% for 2022.
Moderna (MRNA) – The drugmaker is fighting a shareholder proposal that the company open up its vaccine technology to poorer countries, according to a report in the Financial Times. The proposal calls on Moderna to explain why its prices are so high in light of the amount of government financial support it has received. Moderna fell 2% in the premarket.

Avis Budget (CAR) – The car rental firm’s shares jumped 2.6% in premarket trading, following a 3.2% gain Thursday. Average daily rental rates are at $81 per day, according to travel firm Kayak. That’s up 31% from a year ago.
Didi Global (DIDI) – Didi fell 1.3% in the premarket after the Financial Times reported that the China-based ride-hailing company is blocking employees from selling the shares for an indefinite period. That follows the company’s move to delist in the United States.

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Chinese authorities will allow full foreign ownership of passenger car manufacturing in the country beginning Jan. 1, 2022.
That’s according to a release Monday from the Ministry of Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning agency.

New cars for export wait for shipping at a seaport in Yantai, China on September 7, 2021.
Feature China | Barcroft Media | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese authorities will allow full foreign ownership of passenger car manufacturing in the country beginning Jan. 1, 2022.
That’s according to a release Monday from the Ministry of Commerce and the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planning agency. The document was one of the government’s regular releases on industries barred from foreign investment.

The 2021 version published Monday did not include passenger car manufacturing. The 2020 edition of the list had promised the change would come in 2022.
China has gradually peeled back limits on foreign ownership in the domestic auto industry.
However, Monday’s release still included 31 areas in which foreign investment is banned or restricted, including rare earths, film production and distribution, and tobacco products. In industries such as medical institutions, foreign entities must form joint ventures with local partners, which typically have the majority stake.

Read more about electric vehicles from CNBC Pro

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Regulators in both countries have issued clarifications this month on what’s needed from Chinese companies to go public in the U.S.
Over the weekend, the China Securities Regulatory Commission released proposed rules for domestic companies if they want to list overseas.
“The details of rule enforcement still need further observation, especially the supervisory scope of other related ministry regulators, in addition to the CSRC,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor of law at New York University.

Traders work during the IPO for Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global Inc on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) floor in New York City, U.S., June 30, 2021.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters

BEIJING — Half a year since the rush of Chinese IPOs to the U.S. dried up, many details remain unknown for companies wanting to pursue such international listings.
Since the fallout over Chinese ride-hailing app Didi’s IPO in late June, authorities have increased their scrutiny of Chinese companies raising billions of dollars in U.S. public markets. A 10-year high of 34 China-based companies listed in the U.S. this year, but only three of the IPOs have occurred since July, according to Renaissance Capital.

Regulators in both countries have issued clarifications this month on what’s needed from Chinese companies to go public in the U.S. While it’s a start, many questions about implementation remain.
Over the Christmas holiday weekend on Wall Street, the China Securities Regulatory Commission released proposed rules for domestic companies if they want to list overseas. The public comment period ends Jan. 23.
The CSRC’s proposed rules said an overseas listing could be stopped if authorities deemed it a threat to national security. Domestic companies need to comply with relevant provisions in the areas of foreign investment, cybersecurity and data security, a draft said, without much elaboration.
“The details of rule enforcement still need further observation, especially the supervisory scope of other related ministry regulators, in addition to the CSRC,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor of law at New York University and co-author of the book “The Hunt for Unicorns: How Sovereign Funds Are Reshaping Investment in the Digital Economy.”

No ban on the popular VIE structure

Beijing has said for years that one of its goals is increasing access to and improving its stock market, which is only about 30 years old. Authorities have tried to make it easier for companies to raise money from the domestic stock market by gradually shifting to a registration system, from an approval system.

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The new rules for overseas listings did lay out specific requirements for filing documents, and said the securities commission would respond to filing requests within 20 working days of receiving all materials, according to a draft.
The commission also did not ban the widely used variable interest entity structure, as some had feared. The structure creates a listing through a shell company, often based in the Cayman Islands, preventing investors in the U.S.-listed stock from having majority voting rights.
“If complying with domestic laws and regulations, companies with VIE structure are eligible to list overseas after filing with the CSRC,” the commission said in an English-language statement on its website. It did not specify what those laws and regulations were.
However, the amount of foreign investment allowed in Chinese VIEs will likely be reduced to match that of mainland China’s A shares, said Bruce Pang, head of macro and strategy research at China Renaissance.
He pointed to an online question-and-answer article on new regulations on foreign investment out Monday from China’s Ministry of Commerce and National Development and Reform Commission. The article noted existing restrictions that limit foreign ownership to 30% of a company’s shares, with each foreign investor capped at a 10% stake.
U.S. ownership of Chinese stocks listed in New York is relatively low, according to Morgan Stanley data. Of those eligible for a secondary listing in Hong Kong, the median share of U.S. ownership for the top 50 names is 27%, according to CNBC calculations of the data.
Foreign financial institutions may also face greater requirements to participate in Chinese IPOs.
“The [CSRC’s] proposed rule will also require international banks that underwrite a Chinese firm’s offshore listing to register with the CSRC, which may create new compliance challenges to the foreign underwriters, as they might need to follow Chinese rules once they are registered with [the] CSRC,” said Ma, former managing director and head of North America for China Investment Corporation, a sovereign wealth fund.

Scrutiny extends to SPACs

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been increasing its efforts in alerting investors to the uncertainties of investing in Chinese companies listed in New York.
Early this month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finalized the rules it needs to implement a law that could force Chinese companies to delist from U.S. stock exchanges. It is unclear when such delistings would begin — Morgan Stanley analysts don’t expect them to occur until at least 2024.
The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance last week also released details on 15 areas in which it “encouraged” China-based listings — existing and future — to increase disclosures. One section read:

State whether you, your subsidiaries, or VIEs are covered by permissions requirements from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) or any other governmental agency that is required to approve the VIE’s operations, and state affirmatively whether you have received all requisite permissions or approvals and whether any permissions or approvals have been denied. 

The SEC statement noted that special purpose acquisition companies with significant ties to China should also disclose relevant risks. SPACs have exploded in popularity in the last two years. They bypass the traditional IPO process by using shell companies created for the sole purpose of acquiring existing private companies.
The CSRC’s draft rules said that companies going to other markets via SPACs should follow the same filing requirements as overseas IPOs.

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THE SPEED of the economic bounce-back from the enormous recession of 2020 has taken many forecasters by surprise. Output across the 38 mostly rich OECD countries combined probably surpassed its pre-crisis level a few months ago. The average unemployment rate across the club, at 5.7%, is in line with the post-war average. Aggregate household income, adjusted for inflation, is above its pre-crisis level. The overall picture has been remarkably benign, even as several variants of the coronavirus emerged during the year. But it hides stark differences beneath. The pandemic has created winners and losers—and the dispersion between them is likely to persist in 2022.In order to assess these differences, The Economist has gathered data on five economic and financial indicators—GDP, household incomes, stockmarket performance, capital spending and government indebtedness—for 23 rich countries. We have ranked each economy according to how well they have performed on each indicator, creating an overall league table (see chart). Some countries remain in the economic pits, while others are faring better than they were before the pandemic on almost every measure. Denmark, Norway and Sweden are all near the top, and the American economy has also performed reasonably well. Many big European countries, however, including Britain, Germany and Italy, have fared worse. Spain has done worst of all.The change in overall output since the end of 2019 offers a snapshot of economic health. Some countries always looked vulnerable to travel bans and a collapse in services spending—in particular those in southern Europe, which are heavily reliant on tourism. Other countries, including Belgium and Britain, suffered high levels of covid-19 infections and deaths, which in turn limited consumer spending.Granular data help fill in the picture. The change in household income gives a sense of how well families have done, as it includes not just earnings from employment but also handouts from governments. Our measure is in real terms, which adjusts for reduced purchasing power as a result of recent surges in inflation.In some countries, especially those where the impact of the virus was relatively slight, labour markets did not suffer too much, allowing people to continue to earn. Japan’s unemployment rate has barely budged since the pandemic began. By contrast, Spain’s rate rose by three percentage points between February and August 2020.Some governments more than made up for people’s lost labour income by sending them vast amounts of money. That was America’s strategy: although unemployment soared as the economy locked down, households received more than $2trn in government transfers this year and last, in the form of topped-up unemployment benefits and stimulus cheques. Canada did something similar. Other countries, however, such as the Baltics, focused their fiscal firepower on protecting firms’ cashflow or expanding health-care capacity. Austria and Spain seemed neither to preserve jobs nor compensate the losers: in both countries real household income is still around 6% below its pre-pandemic level.What about companies? Stockmarket performance hints at their health, as well as a country’s attractiveness to foreign investors. Share prices in Britain are slightly lower today than on the eve of the pandemic—a reflection, perhaps, of Brexit-induced uncertainty. Britain also hosts fewer companies in the higher-growth sectors that have benefited from pandemic-induced technology adoption and from lower interest rates. America, which has more such firms, has seen its stockmarket jump. But it has nothing on the bourses of northern Europe, where prices have soared. Three of the top ten biggest firms by market capitalisation on the Danish market are in health care, decent stocks to hold in a pandemic.Capital spending, our fourth measure, provides a gauge of businesses’ optimism about the future. Some countries are in the middle of a capex boom: in America, for instance, entrepreneurs are spotting opportunities created by the pandemic, and companies are spending big on technologies that make working from home more efficient. In October Goldman Sachs, a bank, forecast that S&P 500 companies would spend 18% more on capex and research and development in 2022 than they did in 2019. Investment in some other places, by contrast, is more sedate. Norway has seen cuts to oil-and-gas capex.Our last indicator is public indebtedness. All else equal, a big rise in government debt is worse than a small one, since it could indicate potentially larger tax rises and spending cuts in the future. Not every country has amassed enormous debts during the pandemic, even if America, Britain, Canada and others certainly have. Swedish public debt has risen by just six percentage points as a share of GDP. This is a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that the country largely avoided strict lockdowns, necessitating less fiscal support.The economic recovery will continue in 2022 (although the spread of the Omicron variant has led forecasters to mark down its expected speed). The overall picture will probably mask wide variation again. The OECD expects some of the worst performers to start catching up: Italy, for instance, is forecast to grow by 4.6% in 2022, above the average pace for the club of 3.9%.But the laggards have a long way to go. By the end of next year, the OECD expects the combined GDP of our three highest-ranked countries to be 5% higher than its pre-pandemic level. Output for the three worst performers, meanwhile, is expected to be just 1% higher than it was before covid-19. The uneven effects of the pandemic, in other words, will endure. More

London’s FTSE 100 ended the day up 0.2%, while the French CAC was 0.14% lower.
Markets in Germany, Italy and Switzerland were closed to mark the Christmas holiday.
It comes as market players juggle concerns over coronavirus restrictions and tighter central bank policy with signs that the heavily mutated omicron strain of the virus is milder than earlier variants like delta.

LONDON — European markets ended the day in mixed territory after a thin trading session on Christmas Eve, as traders kept a watchful eye on the latest developments around the omicron Covid variant.

London’s FTSE 100 ended the day up 0.2%, while the French CAC was 0.14% lower. Markets in Germany, Italy and Switzerland were closed to mark the Christmas holiday.

It comes as market players juggle concerns over coronavirus restrictions and tighter central bank policy with signs that the heavily mutated omicron strain of the virus is milder than earlier variants like delta.
New studies in South Africa and the U.K. this week suggest omicron has a reduced risk of hospitalization and severe illness.
According to the South Africa research, which is not peer-reviewed, people infected with omicron are 80% less likely to be admitted to hospital compared with other variants. However, the authors said this may be due in part to higher immunity in the population, while South African health officials cautioned that the data should not be extrapolated to all countries.
A separate study in Scotland, also not peer-reviewed, suggests omicron is two-thirds less likely to result in hospitalization compared with delta. The U.K. Health Security Agency backed up the findings Thursday, saying someone with omicron was 50-70% less likely to be admitted to hospital.
Governments are searching for clues on the severity of the new variant, which is ripping through numerous countries much more rapidly than previous mutations. Authorities are worried the health system could come under huge pressure over the winter period amid what is now the fourth wave of infections.

Traders are also weighing the potential for tighter liquidity in 2022, with the Federal Reserve targeting an aggressive tapering of its huge stimulus program and three rate hikes.
The Bank of England is also taking a hawkish approach, becoming the first major central bank to hike interest rates since the pandemic began, while the European Central Bank is looking more cautious.
In Asia, markets were mixed Friday. Some major markets in the region, including Hong Kong and Singapore, close early for Christmas Eve.
U.S. markets are closed Friday for the Christmas holiday.
In corporate news, HSBC says it has bought the mutual fund arm of Indian firm L&T Finance Holdings for $425 million, in a bid to capitalize on growth in the Indian asset management market. The U.K. lender’s shares rose slightly on the news.

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Nikola shares jumped 18% on Thursday after the electric truck maker completed delivery of its first vehicle.

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The surge in the stock came a day after the company announced on Twitter that its first customer delivery is done, signaling more to come.

Earlier this week, Nikola said it agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission $125 million to settle charges it defrauded investors by misleading them about its products, technical capacity and business prospects.
The SEC said Nikola is responsible for misleading claims made by the company’s founder and former chief executive officer, Trevor Milton. He pleaded not guilty to fraud charges brought by the Justice Department in July.
Nikola went public in June 2020 by merging with a SPAC. The stock hit a record high above $90 a share soon after the IPO but came all the way back down due to the regulatory probe.
A slew of pre-revenue electric vehicle start-ups sought to go public through SPAC deals following Nikola, which garnered regulators’ attention. Nikola was one of at least four EV companies under investigation by federal agencies about potentially misleading investors.
— CNBC’s Tom Franck and Mike Wayland contributed reporting.

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