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U.S. Indices lower as AT&T confirms $43 billion merger
Indices in the United States were lower to start the trading week despite the news that AT&T and Discovery had agreed to a merger.
AT&T announced that it will be merging Warner Media with Discovery in a deal said to be worth $43 billion.
The deal comes 3-years after telecom giant AT&T acquired Time Warner and comes in a bid to compete with streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+.
Discovery stock were up as much as 9% earlier in today’s session. It then traded down 4.53%, whilst AT&T was trading 0.57% lower at the time of writing.
All major U.S. indices were lower as of writing.
Elon tweets send Bitcoin lower
Elon Musk was once again making cryptocurrency related headlines, with his tweets over the weekend “blamed” for sending Bitcoin lower.
Bitcoin prices fell to its lowest level since February. As the Tesla founder tweeted, “indeed”, in response to claims by a Twitter user that. “Bitcoiners are going to slap themselves next quarter when they find out Tesla dumped the rest of their #Bitcoin holdings”.
BTCUSD fell to an intraday low of $42,092, after trading as high as $57,953 only on Friday.
This is the third time in the last week Musk has made headlines for influencing crypto prices, after contributing to recent rallies in Dogecoin.
As of writing, BTCUSD was trading around the $42,300 level. Musk has since tweeted that, “To clarify speculation, Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin”.
FTSE 100 falls despite UK lockdown easing
The FTSE 100 in the UK finished today’s session in the red, despite the government pushing forward with further easing of lockdown restrictions.
May 17th marked the first day that people in the United Kingdom from different households are able to gather indoors for social events.
Visits to galleries, cinemas as well as indoor dining are now allowed, whilst international travel for countries on the UK’s “green list” is also now possible.
Despite this, the London based FTSE 100 fell by 0.15% as some concerns over India’s COVID-19 variant unsettled markets.
As of writing close to 68% of Adults in the UK have received their first shot of the COVID vaccine.
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