| The Biden administration considers cutting off Huawei from all of its American suppliers, Gautam Adani $2.5 billion share sale is fully subscribed and UBS underperforms its Wall Street rivals The Biden administration is considering cutting off Huawei from all of its American suppliers, including Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., as the US government intensifies a crackdown on the Chinese technology sector. Sales from US firms to Huawei have been limited for four years, since former President Donald Trump added the Shenzhen, China-based company to the so-called US "entity list" out of national security concerns. The record $2.5 billion share sale by Gautam Adani's flagship company was fully subscribed on the final day, offering Asia's richest man a reprieve after his empire was rocked by allegations of fraud by short seller Hindenburg Research. Investors had placed orders for about 100% of the total shares on sale in the follow-on offering by Adani Enterprises Ltd. shortly before the close of the equity market in Mumbai on Tuesday. While the company's shares were up, they continued to trade in the market for less than Adani is charging in the offering. The stakes are high for Adani, who has already suffered one of the world's biggest-ever declines in personal wealth and fallen off the list of the world's top ten richest people. UBS's investment bank underperformed its Wall Street rivals in the fourth quarter as revenue slumped at the equities division, about twice the size of the debt and forex business. Chief Executive Officer Ralph Hamers said last year was marked by a challenging macroeconomic environment, including persistent inflation and rapid central bank tightening. Like its Wall Street peers, UBS is also wrestling to keep a lid on costs, with the cost to income ratio increasing by about 24 percentage points at the investment bank. US equity futures and European stocks fell ahead of this week's Federal Reserve and European Central Bank meetings amid mixed economic data and earnings. S&P 500 contracts dropped 0.4% as of 5:15 a.m. New York time after the Nasdaq 100 posted its worst day since Dec. 22 on Monday. Miners, financial services and energy led European stock declines. Treasury yields dipped and the dollar gained. Oil fell further after touching a three-week low on Monday. Traders are waiting for more clues on Chinese demand, the Fed decision and the latest guidance from OPEC+. To catch up on the trading day in the UK and Europe, check out today's edition of Markets Today. The US is due to report house price and consumer confidence data today, before the focus switches to tomorrow's Fed decision. Meanwhile Spotify, Snap, McDonald's and GM are among the companies reporting earnings. Will tech companies rally or slump this year? Is ChatGPT a threat to your job or an investment opportunity? The MLIV Pulse survey focuses on the Artificial Intelligence and the tech sector. Click here to share your views. Here's what caught our eye over the past 24 hours: The defining policy choice during the Great Financial Crisis was to bail out the banks. It was a very top-down way to rescue the economy. The money went to these big institutions, and relatively little was spent on direct transfers to the unemployed or people getting evicted from their homes. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we flipped the script. The spending was more bottoms up. The defining policy choice this time around was the $600 checks to the unemployed. Meanwhile, the bailouts didn't go to banks or large corporations, but rather to small businesses through the Payroll Protection Program. It may be worth keeping this reversal in mind as you think about the different headlines we're seeing these days. There's a lot incredulity that growth can remain robust, even as all these big firms like Microsoft and Alphabet undergo layoffs. These are, after all, some high paying jobs that are going away, and the fear is that the effects of these cuts will ripple outwards as these individuals slash their spending. On the other hand, Chipotle says it's adding 15,000 jobs across North America. It currently has 100,000 US workers, so this really moves the needle. Obviously these jobs are nowhere near as high-paying as jobs at Big FANG. But then again, lower paid jobs have a relatively high multiplier effect, given the higher marginal propensity to consume at the low end. A dollar of income by a Chipotle worker is more likely to be spent than a dollar of income for someone working at Alphabet. What's more, it seems safe to say that the macro conditions forcing Chipotle to hire more workers are also being felt by numerous other restaurants and smaller businesses throughout the economy, whose hiring decisions don't make news. Going back to the 2010s for a second. That whole decade was kind of defined by that top-down, trickle-down approach. Fiscal expansion was largely absent. Monetary stimulus was helpful, but to some extent it worked through the asset price channel, which was not particularly robust or powerful. The big secular winners of the decade were these handful of big tech companies that made an absolute fortune, but which employed a relatively small number of workers. If the 2020s are going to be the opposite, with spending trickling upward and outward from the lower quintiles of the income spectrum, then those Chipotle hires may offer more signal about the broader economy than the layoffs within the upper echelons of the workforce. On a related note, two weeks ago there was suddenly a lot of "soft landing" optimism. And there still is. But also there are some fresh concerns that inflation might not come down in as smooth of a line as the market is hoping for right now, which I wrote about yesterday. | 
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