View of the water tower at Paramount Studios on October 30, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Tama Mario | Getty Images
paramount skydance The hostile takeover began on Monday. warner bros discoverycontinued Netflix Last week, it announced that it had reached an agreement to buy out the owners of HBO.
CEO David Ellison told CNBC that the company is “here to finish what we started,” upping the ante with an all-cash offer of $30 per share, compared to Netflix’s $27.75 per share cash and stock offer for WBD’s streaming and studio assets.
Investors were certainly happy, with Paramount stock up 9% and WBD stock up 4.4%.
Another development that traders cheered was US President Donald Trump’s approval. Nvidia The aim is to export the more advanced H200 artificial intelligence chip to “authorized customers” in China and other countries. As long as some of that money is repatriated to the U.S., Nvidia shares rose about 2% in after-hours trading.
But major US indexes fell overnight as investors awaited the Federal Reserve’s last interest rate meeting of the year on Wednesday. The market expects a nearly 90% chance of a quarter-point rate cut, according to the CME FedWatch tool.
Expectations for interest rate cuts pushed up stock prices. “The way the market has moved in the last week or two is really making a 25 basis point rate cut much more likely,” said Stephen Collano, chief investment officer at Integrated Partners.
But that means the potential downside if things don’t go as expected is more severe.
“If they don’t cut rates for some very unthinkable reason, forget it. I think the market is down 2-3%,” Collano added.
In that case, investors will look forward to next year’s Fed meeting and hope for a more satisfying conclusion.
What you need to know today
And finally…
People walk past the New York Stock Exchange on April 4, 2025 in New York City, USA.
Kylie Cooper | Reuters
Private credit is starting to look like a bond market – and that comes with red flags
Private credit, once confined to the niche of lending to mid-market businesses, has expanded across sectors, borrower sizes and collateral types, with large allocators increasingly treating private credit as part of the same opportunity set as high-yield bonds and leveraged loans, experts said.
The convergence of the two markets raises concerns. As more private lenders chase fewer blockbuster deals, experts warn that competition is pushing underwriting standards closer to the lax standards seen in the pre-2020 syndication market.
— Li Yingshan
