Here are the most important news items that investors need to start their trading day:
1. Fed ahead
Stock futures are muted headed into a new week as investors await the final Federal Reserve meeting of 2023. The central bank will release its interest rate decision on Wednesday. Last month, the Fed left its benchmark rate unchanged, and Wall Street has been growing increasingly optimistic that it will do the same in December as efforts to bring down inflation without tipping the country into recession appear to be paying off. "Investors should hope that we stay higher, where we are now, for longer, and the Fed could just pause, snooze, for some time," Ken Mahoney, chief executive officer at Mahoney Asset Management, told CNBC. Follow live market updates.
2. Year-end sale
As the holiday shopping season kicks into high gear, an investor group is adding Macy's to its wishlist. Arkhouse Management and Brigade Capital Management have offered to take the department store retailer private at a price of $5.8 billion, sources told CNBC's Gabrielle Fonrouge. That value, at about $21 per share, represents a premium to Macy's Friday close of around $17 a share. Macy's has been struggling to shore up its business in the face of booming e-commerce competition and operational challenges. As of Friday's close, its stock is down more than 15% so far this year.
Elsewhere in M&A: Cigna abandons pursuit of Humana, plans $10 billion share buyback, sources say
3. Dog days of earnings
Earnings season continues to wind down, with just a handful of notable reports this week:
- Monday: Oracle (after the bell)
- Wednesday: Adobe (after the bell)
- Thursday: Costco (after the bell)
- Friday: Darden Restaurants (before the bell)
So far, the season has broadly seen strong earnings but softer sales as consumer demand wanes. That shift led many companies to issue cautious year-end and 2024 guidance.
4. Hybrid work
Old is new again in the automotive industry as carmakers increasingly turn back to hybrid models in the middle of the EV transition. Major automakers like Ford, GM and Stellantis as well as Toyota, Hyundai and Honda are selling more and more hybrid vehicles as a means to meet impending U.S. emissions standards that require an average fuel-efficiency over a company's entire fleet. In light of slower-than-expected sales of all-electric vehicles, hybrids are helping to boost the average. Plus, they can help ease consumers into an electric future, as they typically cost less and can alleviate some common EV concerns like range anxiety.
5. Person-first AI
A team at Google is considering using artificial intelligence to create a mosaic of users' lives, weaving together mobile phone data like photos and online searches, CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports. The project is called "Project Ellmann" — named after biographer Richard David Ellmann — and it's one of the many ways that Google is proposing to create AI-based products. The idea is to feed a user's data into a chatbot and "answer previously impossible questions," according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. The goal of Ellmann, it says, is to be "Your Life Story Teller."
– CNBC's Pia Singh, Gabrielle Fonrouge, Rebecca Picciotto, Robert Hum, Michael Wayland and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
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