10 things you need to know in markets August 14

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Good morning! Here’s what you need to know in markets on Tuesday.

1. Global markets got an update on China’s economy today via a
triple-shot of key data releases: retail sales, industrial
production and fixed asset investment. And the
results whiffed across the board, as all three data prints missed
expectations in July. According to China’s National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS), annual retail sales growth rose by 8.8% — down
from 9% in the previous month and missing expectations of a 9.1%
rise.

2. Asia share markets tried to regain their footing on Tuesday as
tremors from the collapse of the Turkish lira ebbed a little and
Wall Street proved resilient to the
shockwaves. Japan’s Nikkei appreciated more
than 2.1% on the day, while Australia’s ASX gained close to 0.8%.
Chinese markets lost ground on the day after weaker than expected
economic data.

3. Credit Suisse is splitting its international wealth-management
unit into seven regions from four, in an ongoing push by Chief
Executive Officer Tidjane Thiam to regionalize the bank,
Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing people briefed on the
matter. The seven regions are Latin America, Brazil,
Western Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and
Central and Eastern Europe, the report said.

4.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said US sanctions on
his country are a “stab in the back.” The US 
imposed sanctions on Turkey this month after it refused to
release a US pastor, leading Turkey’s currency to
plummet. 

5. Elon Musk said via Twitter Monday evening that he was
working Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisors on a
proposal to take Tesla private. Musk also said
that he was working with the law firms Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen
& Katz and Munger and Tolles & Olson as legal advisors.
Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

6. Separately, the rapper Azealia
Banks claimed that she spent the weekend at
Musk’s house, setting social media ablaze. Banks
told Business Insider she saw the Tesla CEO
at home “scrounging for investors” after tweeting
last week about plans to take Tesla private.

7. Activist investor Carl Icahn has reversed his position on US
health insurer Cigna’s purchase of pharmaceutical subscription
company Express Scripts. Last week, Icahn urged
Cigna shareholders to vote against the $US52 billion dollar deal,
and outlined plans to solicit proxy votes to build up enough to
block the transaction. However, on Monday Icahn told
CNBC he would no longer oppose the deal.

8. A bunch of millennials who use hot startups to manage their
investments are getting whacked by Turkey’s currency
crisis. One of the most prominent victims of the
crisis was the Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets exchange-traded
fund (VWO), a basket of stocks located in China, South Africa,
and other developing countries. With $90 billion in net assets,
it’s a bedrock emerging-market ETF. Its top investors
include Betterment and Wealthfront, two of the most popular
robo-advisors that help people get involved in the markets at a
low cost. 

9. WPP is set to move out of its central London headquarters
after 30 years, in another break with the past following the
departure in April of founder and CEO Martin Sorrell from the
world’s largest advertising company. A person
familiar with the situation said the company would stop leasing
the small mews property which, despite its location in Farm
Street in the upscale district of Mayfair, is one of the more
low-key headquarters for a FTSE 100 company.

10. Mark Cuban is taking his Twitter profits and
running. The investor and TV personality told
CNBC on Monday that he has exited his stake in the
social-media company because he “wanted to accumulate as
much cash as possible.”