Market Overview
The S&P 500 closed at a record high Monday after Congress approved an infrastructure spending package.
The broad index gained 0.09% to close above 4,700 for the first time at 4,701.70. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 104.27 points, or 0.3%, to close at 36,432.22. The Nasdaq Composite ticked up 0.07% at 15,982.36. All three stock averages posted record closes.
Other important events included that the U.S. House of Representatives passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill,Musk would sell 10% of Tesla stock based on Twitter poll, several Fed officials spoke on Monday and so on.
Tesla shares closed Monday down nearly 5% as Musk will sell 10% of Tesla stock
Tesla shares closed Monday down 4.8% after CEO Elon Musk said he would sell 10% of his holdings in the electric car maker — more than $20 billion worth by most calculations — based on the results of a poll he conducted on Twitter over the weekend.
According to analyst Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities, Musk owns about 23% of Tesla’s stock and has about $10 billion in taxes coming due on stock options that vest next summer.
Much of Musk’s wealth is held in shares of Tesla, which does not pay him a cash salary.
“I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,” Musk tweeted.
The sometimes abrasive and unpredictable Musk, whose net worth is around $300 billion, said he proposed selling the stock as some Democrats have been pushing for billionaires to pay taxes when the price of the stocks they hold goes up, even if they don’t sell any shares. However, the wording on unrealized gains, also called a “billionaires tax,” was removed from President Joe Biden’s budget, which is still being negotiated.
“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” he tweeted Saturday afternoon. “Do you support this?”
Musk said he would abide by the results of the poll, which ended with 58% of more than 3.5 million votes calling for him to sell the stock. He did not say when he would sell the stock.
AMD shares closed up 10% after company won Meta partnership
Advanced Micro Devices on Monday announced new specialized processors for different data-center workloads. It also added Facebook as a customer for its server chips. AMD stock surged higher on the news.
AMD announced that Meta Platforms, the parent company of social network Facebook, is the latest hyperscale cloud company to adopt AMD's Epyc central processing units, or CPUs.
On Monday, AMD launched its AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators, which are optimized for high-performance computing and artificial-intelligence workloads. The company described them as "the first exascale-class GPU accelerators." AMD competes with Nvidia in GPUs.
AMD also previewed the use of 3D chiplet packaging technology in server CPUs. Third-generation AMD Epyc processors with AMD 3D V-Cache will offer a 50% average performance uplift across targeted technical computing workloads. The new chips will launch in the first quarter of 2022.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill
The U.S. House of Representatives late Friday passed a more than $1 trillion infrastructure bill, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden for his signature.
The Senate approved the revamp of transportation, utilities and broadband in August. The legislation’s passage is perhaps the unified Democratic government’s most concrete achievement since it approved a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package in the spring.
The measure passed in a 228-206 vote. Thirteen Republicans supported it, while six Democrats voted against it. Biden could sign the bill within days.
The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would put $550 billion in new money into transportation projects, the utility grid and broadband. The package includes $110 billion for roads, bridges and other major projects, along with $66 billion for passenger and freight rail and $39 billion for public transit.
It would put $65 billion into broadband, a priority for many lawmakers after the coronavirus pandemic highlighted inequities in internet access for households and students across the country. The legislation would also invest $55 billion into water systems, including efforts to replace lead pipes.
Industrials and materials stocks rallied Monday with those names set to benefit from the spending package. The Global X U.S. Infrastructure Development exchange-traded fund rose nearly 1.3% and hit a new all-time high Monday morning.
Mining company Freeport-McMoRan, construction materials stock Vulcan and steel corporation Nucor were among the notable gainers on the S&P 500. Construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar led the Dow’s rally with a 4% gain. Heavy equipment producer Deere saw its shares rise about 1.6%. United Rentals, Martin Marietta and Jacobs Engineering were among other infrastructure-related gainers.
Fed Said U.S. Public Health Among Biggest Near-Term Risks to Financial System
The potential for U.S. public health to worsen as the Covid-19 pandemic continues is one of the greatest near-term risks to the financial system, the Federal Reserve said, while noting that asset prices are susceptible to large declines should investor sentiment shift.
Any deterioration in the public-health situation could slow the recent economic recovery, particularly if widespread business closures returned and supply chains were further disrupted, the Fed said. The number of new Covid-19 cases has fallen in recent months, but a resurgence this summer, tied to the Delta variant, coincided with a slowdown in hiring and economic growth.
Still, other parts of the financial system appear resilient. Banks remain well capitalized, the central bank said, and key measures of vulnerability from business and household debt have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The Fed also warned that structural vulnerabilities persist in some types of money-market mutual funds and other cash-management vehicles, as well as in bond and bank loan mutual funds. The vulnerabilities could amplify shocks to the financial system in times of stress, as they have in prior crises, the central bank said.
Moreover,Fed officials have indicated that they continue to have serious concerns about risks in asset markets. Staff at a July Fed meeting characterized vulnerabilities to the financial system as notable, pointing in part to rapidly increasing house prices that had left valuation measures stretched.
Fed’s Clarida Sees Interest-Rate Liftoff Test Met by End of 2022
Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida said the “necessary conditions” to raise the U.S. central bank’s benchmark lending rate from near zero will probably be in place at the end of next year.
“We are clearly a ways away from considering raising interest rates,” Clarida told a virtual event Monday hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I believe that these three necessary conditions for raising the target range for the federal funds rate will have been met by year-end 2022,” he said, referring to the labor market and inflation tests laid out by the Fed for liftoff.
Clarida said he expected inflation pressures to ease “as the labor market and global supply chains eventually adjust and, importantly, do so without putting persistent upward pressure on price inflation and wage gains adjusted for productivity.” U.S. central bankers in August 2020 adopted a new approach to the central bank’s goals for employment and price stability. The inflation target was redefined as 2% on average, to overcome years of undershooting.
He also pointed out that the risks to inflation are to the upside, and said he would not want to see another year of inflation overshoot along the lines of 2021. Inflation by the Fed’s preferred measure rose 4.4% for the 12 months ending September, and minus food and energy it rose 3.6%.
“Inflation so far this year represents, to me, much more than a ‘moderate’ overshoot of our 2% longer-run inflation objective, and I would not consider a repeat performance next year a policy success,” he said.
Several other Fed officials also spoke on Monday. Highlights from those remarks include:
St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who said he had penciled in two rate increases next year and argued the central bank should be prepared to speed up its pace of tapering asset purchases. “We have done a lot to move the policy in a more hawkish direction. We can do more, but that will be data-dependent. We will have to see how that comes in,” he told Fox Business in an interview.
Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker, in a speech to the Economic Club of New York, said “I don’t expect that the federal funds rate will rise before the tapering is complete, but we are monitoring inflation very closely and are prepared to take action, should circumstances warrant it.”
Chicago Fed President Charles Evans expects elevated inflation to eventually fade, but he says “there are some indications that inflationary pressures may be building more broadly.”
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