1) The investment bank Morgan Stanley is buying ETrade Financial Corp. for $13 billion dollars, planning to now manage money for regular people. ETrade will bring five million retail customers worth $360 billion dollars in assets, and an online bank with cheap deposits which Morgan Stanley can funnel into loans. Morgan Stanley had provided financial management to the upper end clients, the million and billionaires.
2) General Electric has avoided a business setback with exports of its jet engines to China. Fears that the Chinese could reverse engineer the new design and bolster its own aircraft manufacturing industry, has drawn threats of barring the LEAP 1C engine export to China. This would have been a major blow to GE’s efforts to recover from its slump, the engine sales being central to recovery efforts. The GE engine is slated for use in China’s C919 narrow body airliner now in development.
3) Clients of Fidelity Investments experienced shock and duress on finding their account balances at $0.00 or worst yet, even unable to find their accounts on the internet. This is a result of Fidelity’s website going down, which the company is working to resolve amongst a blizzard of Tweets from worried clients. Fidelity has 30 million individual investors, some 29.6 million brokerage accounts with a total of $7.8 trillion dollars in total customer assets.
4) Stock market closings for – 20 FEB 20:
Dow 29,219.98 down 128.05
Nasdaq 9,750.96 down 66.22
S&P 500 3,373.23 down 12.92
10 Year Yield: down at 1.52%
Oil: up at $53.73