DealBook: Can it go higher?
Good morning. Andrew here. As the world focuses on today's meeting at the White House with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other European leaders, Wall Street is turning its attention to Jackson Hole, Wyo., where central bank officials are headed this week and where Jay Powell of the Fed is expected to speak. Investors will try to read between the lines of whatever he says, with September's rates meeting potentially being his last major decision before President Trump names Powell's successor, effectively creating a shadow Fed chair. We're also focused on the news that the World Economic Forum exonerated Klaus Schwab, the group's founder, after a yearslong drip of anonymous accusations that he and his wife had misused the organization's resources. Schwab stepped down as a result of the accusations, yet the board said that an investigation found "there is no evidence of material wrongdoing." Larry Fink of BlackRock and the Swiss philanthropist André Hoffmann will become interim co-chairs of the organization. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
The bull and bear cases for another market rallyTrade war and geopolitical uncertainty. Rising inflation. Stagflation worries. A hiring slowdown. None of that seems to be spooking investors. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite indexes just posted another set of weekly gains, their fourth each in the past five weeks.
But some analysts are concerned that the recent rally has made stocks unjustifiably expensive. Their warnings come before the annual confab of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., this week, where Jay Powell, the Fed chair, is scheduled to address the state of the economy. It could offer clues on the central bank's next move on interest rates. The bearish case:
The bullish case:
Novo Nordisk shares surge after a regulatory win for Wegovy. The F.D.A. on Friday granted the Danish drug maker accelerated approval for use of its weight-loss drug in addressing a serious liver disease. The decision broadens the uses of GLP-1 treatments, after they shot to popularity to help in the fight against obesity and diabetes. Shares in Novo Nordisk were up over 5.5 percent in European trading today, a boost for the company after a series of costly missteps. Soho House agrees to go private. The private members club operator said today that it would sell itself to a group of investors, including the hotel operator MCR and Apollo Global Management, for $9 a share, valuing it at roughly $2.7 billion, including debt. The deal, if completed, would conclude Soho House's bumpy run as a publicly traded company, which included questions about its growth and pressure from activist investors including Dan Loeb's Third Point. Corporate earnings and the Fed will be a big focus this week. Major retailers — Home Depot tomorrow, Target and Lowe's on Wednesday and Walmart on Thursday — report results that should offer clues on how consumers are weathering President Trump's trade war. Investors and economists will also pore over the minutes from the Fed's most recent rate-setting meeting, set for publication on Wednesday, and what comes out about the economy — beyond bats — from the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium of central bankers, which begins on Thursday in Wyoming. The Alaska effect on tradeThe latest drama in President Trump's effort to bring an end to the war in Ukraine will go down today, when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is set to come to the White House flanked by an array of European leaders. What emerges from that discussion — after Trump's meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Friday — could have big political and economic consequences for major American trading partners. (More on the buzz from international capitals below.) Catch up: Senior Trump administration officials have sought to portray Friday's meeting between Trump and Putin in Anchorage as a win, despite the lack of a deal for a cease-fire. Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for Trump, said on CNN yesterday that Putin was closer to making some concessions including NATO-style security protections for Ukraine. He also said that Trump had abided by Kyiv's plea not to agree to a land swap with Putin, but evaded a question about whether Moscow had demanded the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine in exchange for peace. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned on ABC that both Russia and Ukraine would need to make concessions to end the fighting. "We are not at the precipice of a peace agreement," he said. "But I do think progress was made." What happens to global trade? Remember that Trump justified imposing huge, and potentially hugely damaging, tariffs on India by citing the country's importing of Russian oil. (It's unclear whether Indian companies have stopped buying petroleum from Moscow; talks between New Delhi and Washington appear to be on ice, Reuters reports, as those tariffs are set to go into effect next week.) But during the post-meeting news conference, Trump said that he didn't think he needed similar retaliatory levies on China, which is Moscow's other major crude oil customer, though he said that he might reassess "in two or three weeks." Some Trump allies want the U.S. and others to get tougher on Russia and its clients. "You've got to convince Putin that if this war doesn't end justly and honorably with Ukraine making concessions also," Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News, "we're going to destroy the Russian economy." Graham, who is sponsoring a Senate bill that would allow Trump to impose 500 percent tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil, said that such a threat was what drove Putin to show up in Alaska. But the Trump administration appears reluctant. Rubio told NBC yesterday that while more sanctions were possible, imposing more on Russia would suggest that Trump's peace efforts had failed. "The minute we take those steps, there is no one left in the world to go talk to the Russians and try to get them to the table to reach a peace agreement," Rubio said of the president. Where does that leave things? The price of Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, hovered around $66 today, little changed from where it has traded this summer. "The status quo remains largely intact for now, despite the photo ops and pledges to meet again soon," Helima Croft, the global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, wrote about oil prices. "Wherever they're sent, no one really wants to be there, but it's the high capacity for work and pain. They can chew glass."— Luba Lesiva, a venture capitalist and former head of investor relations at Palantir, on why the data consulting firm's alumni became hot commodities in Silicon Valley. Company alumni — who call themselves things like "Palantir Pals" — chalk up their success to experience embedding in difficult engineering situations. Overseas commentators weigh in: Ukraine deal makingThe Alaska summit between President Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and its cascading effects on global trade and geopolitics have dominated the headlines in capitals around the world. The TL;DR: Russian commentators took a victory lap. India saw its hopes for some kind of tariff relief to emerge from the talks largely dashed. And the mood in Europe has swung from near panic to nervous anticipation about the possibility of President Volodymyr Zelensky getting ambushed at the White House today. Here's what DealBook is seeing: Russia: Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a government-owned newspaper, portrayed Friday's meeting as significant as any U.S.-Russia dialogue since the collapsing Soviet Union agreed to withdraw from East Germany. "It is not about Ukraine itself," Valentina Egorova, a correspondent wrote, but about a larger breakthrough to restore relations with the West. Natalia Poklonskaya, an adviser to the Russia's prosecutor general, offered a bold suggestion, according to Russia's television network RTVI: trilateral U.S.-Russia-Ukraine talks in Crimea, the Russian-annexed territory and site of the 1945 Yalta Conference where Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S. essentially drew up the map for post-World War II Europe. (Yalta has become a kind of geopolitical byword for the big gobbling up the small.) India: The Hindustan Times closely tracked the Alaska talks for hopes that a resolution to the 50 percent U.S. tariffs on the country — half of which are in retaliation for Russian oil imports — would come into force. The fate of the levies is still in limbo. "India has defended its purchases and criticized the U.S. and the E.U. for singling it out at a time when other countries buying Russian energy have not faced U.S. penalties," the paper reminded readers on Friday. The "clear winner" from the talks seems to be Putin, the Indian Express's national business editor Anil Sasi, a national business editor, and Sukalp Sharma, a senior assistant editor, wrote yesterday in The Indian Express. Europe: Some commentators are aghast that Trump may have opened the door to making the region more unsafe. "The idea that Ukraine might be strong-armed into trading away unoccupied territory that is rich in minerals, fortified by defensive positions that would provide an excellent staging post for future Russian invasions, and symbolically central to Kyiv's claim of sovereignty, is precisely the nightmare scenario Europe is determined to prevent," Julien Hoez, a French political analyst, wrote on his Substack today.
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