Good morning! Here's what you need to know on Wednesday.
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10 things you need to know in markets today
Here's what you need to know on Wednesday.
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1. London-listed drugmaker Shire and Japan's Takeda Pharmaceuticals plan to announce a preliminary deal on Wednesday, after the latter sweetened its $62 billion acquisition offer, Reuters reports. Shire is also expected to agree to an extension of a Wednesday regulatory deadline that would allow Takeda to carry out more due diligence and firm up its bid.
2. Credit Suisse on Wednesday reported 694 million Swiss francs ($707.4 million) in first-quarter net income, its best quarter since Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam launched a three-year restructuring plan for Switzerland's second-biggest bank."With these first-quarter results, we got off to a good start in our third and final year of restructuring, and we are looking ahead to the future with confidence in our new business model and in our execution capabilities," Thiam said in a statement.
3. The US 10-year bond yield finally reached the elusive 3% level on Tuesday morning.The benchmark yield flirted with the level all day Monday, but it was Tuesday's stronger than expected Case-Shiller home prices that pushed it through the mark for the first time since January 2014.
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4. After the closely watched 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 3% for the first time since 2014, US stocks tumbled. Selling in mega-captech stocksalso put pressure onmajor indexes. The Dow Jones industrial average slid more than 2.5%, or 620 points, while the benchmarkS&P 500dropped as much as 2%.
5. Apple will start paying $16 billion in back taxes to Ireland.The company must pay the money as part of a record-breaking back tax judgment from August 2016. Now Ireland will collect the penalty, it said on Tuesday, although there's still a chance Apple could get the money back.
6. Americans have turned on the stock market — for now.People who expect the stock market to fall over the next year now outnumber people who predict the opposite, for the first time since the US elections in November 2016, when the stock market extended what became known as the Trump rally. That's according to the US Conference Board's April survey of consumers
7. Norway has effectively become the world's first cashless society, according to one of the country's most senior economic policymakers.Speaking during the City Week conference at London's Guildhall, Jon Nicolaisen, the deputy governor of Norway's central bank, argued that the level of transactions using cash in the Scandinavian country is now so low that it can be considered cashless.
8. FTSE 100 firm Whitbread said it would spin off its Costa Coffee business, leaving it with its Premier Inn hotels operation, with the split expected to be completed within 24 months.It said Costa Coffee was the clear UK market leader and second largest globally, and had attractive long-term international opportunities.
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9. Japan's SoftBank plans to shift more than $20 billion of its investments in top ride-hailing companies including Uber Technologies, Ola, Grab and Didi Chuxing into its Saudi-backed Vision technology fund, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. The proposed transfer will provide the fast-growing ride-service firms access to the Vision Fund's resources.
10. Bitstamp, the world's oldest surviving bitcoin exchange, is up for sale, according to people familiar with the matter, and a South Korean gaming company is said to be close to finalizing a deal to buy it.Three people with knowledge of the deal told Business Insider that Bitstamp was in the middle of a sales process, and two of those people named Nexon as the likely buyer.
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