Financial Markets and Economy
Fed Pivots Toward December Rate Rise Amid Moderate U.S. Growth (Bloomberg)
Federal Reserve officials pivoted toward a December interest-rate increase, betting that further job gains will lead to higher inflation over time and allow them to close an unprecedented era of near-zero borrowing costs.
Hershey sees squeeze from growing U.S. income gap (Business Insider)
Chocolate maker Hershey Co <HSY.N>, long a staple of middle-class U.S. households, is getting squeezed as consumers either pay up for fancier sweets or seek more savings. The maker of Hershey kisses and Reese’s peanut butter cups reported lower-than-expected U.S. sales on Wednesday and cut its profit forecast for the year, sending shares down 6.5 percent. It has cut such forecasts for five quarters in a row.
Apple’s stock looks way undervalued (Market Watch)
Apple Inc.’s stock surged Wednesday after the technology giant beat profit expectations, but it still looks way undervalued relative to earnings-per-share growth.
Oil Climbs Most in Eight Weeks as Refiners Boost Operating Rate (Bloomberg)
Oil climbed the most in eight weeks in New York as increasing U.S. refinery activity signaled the end of seasonal maintenance and higher crude demand.
Buffalo Wild Wings shares nosedive after sales and earnings whiff (Business Insider)
Buffalo Wild Wings sales and earnings fell short of expectations.
The stock is down 12% in after-hours trading.
Inflation no longer a risk, but central banks keep fighting last war (Market Watch)
Fixated on inflation targeting in a world without inflation, central banks have lost their way. With benchmark interest rates stuck at the dreaded zero bound, monetary policy has been transformed from an agent of price stability into an engine of financial instability. A new approach is desperately needed.
Oil Companies Curtail Spending on Everything–Except Dividends (Bloomberg)
Oil executives are standing by promises to protect dividend payouts from the collapse in crude prices even as they fire workers, cancel drilling projects and sell everything from oil fields to aircraft to conserve cash.
GoPro plummets 17% to an all-time low after weak earnings and ugly guidance (Business Insider)
GoPro shares just crashed to an all-time low.
Gold settles at 1-week high, then falls after Fed news (Market Watch)
Gold futures climbed Wednesday to settle at their highest level in about a week, then turned lower in electronic trading after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged but kept the door open for a rate hike at its next meeting.
Shortly after the price settlement for gold, the Fed’s policy-setting committee said it decided to keep interest rates close to zero, but also indicated in its statement that it would focus on its “next meeting” in mid-December on whether to raise rates.
Snyder's-Lance Investors Balk at Purchase of Diamond Foods (Bloomberg)
Snyder’s-Lance Inc. shareholders aren’t happy about its plan to buy Diamond Foods Inc., part of a growing investor backlash against acquisitions.
After the company announced the $1.27 billion buyout this morning, Snyder’s shares tumbled 7.8 percent to close at $33.25 in New York. The drop represents the worst one-day decline in almost two years, underscoring concerns that the deal will add to Snyder’s debt without giving it a surefire growth engine.
Microsoft tried to buy this hot 2-year-old startup but got turned down (Business Insider)
Microsoft tried to buy Mesosphere, a hot cloud-computing startup, for as much as $150 million, but Mesosphere turned them down, reports The Information.
Rumors of a Microsoft-Mesosphere deal surfaced over the summer when it came out that the tech giant was interested in Mesosphere's technology for managing the growing market for running data centers at super-high efficiency.
Bond Traders Boost Bets on December Fed Interest-Rate Increase (Bloomberg)
It just got a lot tougher for bond traders to rule out a Federal Reserve interest-rate increase in 2015.
French Billionaire Takes 5% Stake in Warburg Pincus (NY Times)
The holding company of the family of the French billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière has acquired a 5 percent passive stake in Warburg Pincus, where Mr. Ladreit de Lacharrière will act as a senior strategic partner, theprivate equity firm said on Wednesday.
Warburg Pincus, with $35 billion of assets under management, is based and New York and run by Charles R. Kaye and Joseph P. Landy as co-chief executives. Timothy F. Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, joined the firm as president last year.
The giants of private equity have been taking a pummelling (Business Insider)
Private equity firms just wrapped up a pretty rough third quarter.
Blackstone, KKR and The Carlyle Group reported disappointing results, each posting losses in their earnings reports.
Blackstone reported a loss of $0.40 per share, while KKR reported losses of $0.42 a share, and Carlyle reported a $0.43 loss.
Investors Dislike Energy Stocks Nearly as Much as They Disliked Financial Stocks in 2008 (Bloomberg)
Investor sentiment toward energy stocks is crumbling as oil prices remain at depressed levels.
CITI: We performed a deep dive into breakfast and concluded 2016 is when cereal makes its comeback (Business Insider)
"Cereal [is] poised for a comeback in 2016," declared Citi analyst David Driscoll in a recent note to clients.
PayPal reveals how it will finally cash in on Venmo (Venture Beat)
PayPal is finally breaking Venmo out beyond peer-to-peer payments.
During its Q3 earnings call, the company announced an upcoming service called “Pay with Venmo,” which will allow Venmo users to pay at any PayPal merchant.
Ouattara Says Ivory Coast to Supply 50% Global Cocoa by 2020 (Bloomberg)
President Alassane Ouattara said Ivory Coast aims to produce half of the world’s cocoa by 2020 and that he won’t make the mistake of overwhelming the nation with debt to sustain growth like other nations in Africa.
Brazilians have to pay 414% interest on their credit cards (Business Insider)
The Central Bank of Brazil reported interest rates on credit card debt in the country climbed another 10% in September to a mind-blowing 414% per year, according to Xinhua.
The Sharing Economy Doesn't Need to Be Full of Monopolies (The Atlantic)
The so-called sharing company has made it possible to hail a private taxi via a smartphone and book a room in someone’s private home, and these are the early days: So much more is ready to be turned into a product and sold, via the power of an app.
For partisans of the sharing economy, the result of this privatization will be a dynamic mix of corporate sovereigns, all jostling to better serve the producers and consumers on each side of their platforms.
Politics
Why the Republican debate is critical for Jeb Bush (Market Watch)
To understand why Jeb Bush needs to perform well in Wednesday night’s Republican debate, consider one number: seven.
As in, 7% — the amount of support Bush gets in an average of national polls for the GOP presidential nomination, putting the former Florida governor way back in fourth place behind Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio.
Trump and Company Take the Stage Again (The Atlantic)
The clan of 10 takes the stage again tonight for the third GOP debate, this time in Colorado.
Republican presidential hopefuls will square off in what is expected to be, at the very least, an entertaining debate if it shakes out like the others. CNBC is hosting the debate and perhaps reaping the benefits of doing so, as they’re likely going to garner a large viewership. Fox News and CNN, the last two hosts, boasted strong ratings.
Technology
Mitsubishi Cars Will Know When You’re Distracted (PSFK)
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has developed a new technology for the automotive industry that is able to detect absent-mindedness and other cognitive distractions in drivers.
Once implemented in vehicles in the future, this could greatly improve safe driving behaviors behind the wheel by quickly alerting drivers when they lose concentration on the road. So if their mind starts to drift while on a long journey, the system will immediately provide a warning so they can pull over and take a break.
Yamaha built a motorcycle-driving robot, and it's already challenging a world champion (The Verge)
The Tokyo Motor Show, known for far-out concepts, is underway in Japan. We've already seen some pretty strange designs ourselves, but none of them are anything like what Yamaha just announced: an autonomous, motorcycle-riding humanoid robot called Motobot.
There's little detail beyond an impressive video of Motobot cruising around an abandoned airfield.
Health and Life Sciences
Your brain tissue changes when you learn to navigate (Futurity)
Fifteen years ago, a study showed that the brains of London cab drivers had an enlargement in the hippocampus, a brain area associated with navigation.
But it wasn’t clear if the experience of navigating London’s complex system of streets change their brains, or did only the people with larger hippocampi succeed in becoming cab drivers?
TB 'joins HIV as most deadly infection' (BBC)
Tuberculosis now ranks alongside HIV as the world's most deadly infectious disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.
Each accounted for between 1.1 million and 1.2 million deaths in 2014.
Life on the Home Planet
Huge fire in Brazil's jungle threatens tribes: Greenpeace (Phys)
A huge fire engulfing a swath of Brazilian jungle threatens the existence of remote indigenous tribes and may have been started by illegal loggers invading the territory, Greenpeace said Wednesday.
About 12,000 members of the Guajajara tribe and 80 people from the even more isolated Awa-Guaja live on lands affected by what the environmental group described as "one of the biggest forest fires ever registered within an indigenous territory in Brazil.
