Stock market news today August 13

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The worst-case scenario for a global trade war could wipe
out the stock market’s most important driver

As a global trade war gathers
steam, banks across Wall
Street are starting to prepare for the worst.

This comes after President Donald Trump announced a start date
for a second tranche of
tariffs on Chinese goods, worth
roughly $16 billion.
A Goldman Sachs economist,
Alec Phillips,
now thinks there’s a 70% probability that Trump will proceed with
most of the tariffs he has threatened on an additional $200
billion in Chinese goods.

Goldman believes a further escalation of the trade conflict could
result in a 25% tariff levied
against all imports
from China. And Goldman says that major downside scenario
wouldn’t be pretty.

European markets drop as Turkey’s lira crisis spreads
around the world

European markets started
the week deep in negative territory before recovering a
little over the course of Monday as the crisis over
the Turkish lira drags on
investor sentiment around the world.

Asian markets fell sharply overnight. Those
falls then spread into Europe, with major European share indexes
losing as much as 1% in early morning trading.

Spain and Italy were the biggest losers, down about 1% each.
Elsewhere, markets were seeing losses of about 0.5% to 0.8% as
investors digested last week’s 25% fall in the
lira.

Elon Musk reveals what he meant by his ‘funding secured’
tweet 

Elon Musk is defending his “funding secured” tweet.

In a company
statement on Monday, Musk said Saudi
Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had brought up taking Tesla
private multiple times for almost two years. The Saudi fund
recently bought a 5% stake in Tesla. Musk said he met with
the fund’s managing director on July
31 and left that meeting confident that a
deal to take Tesla private would close.

Chat app Symphony’s battle to break into a $28 billion
Wall Street market 

Major Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have
invested almost $300 million in Symphony, a startup building
encrypted, cloud-based communication tools. Google is also an
investor.

The banks want to build a platform they can all communicate on to
help them cut down on expensive Bloomberg terminals.

Almost four years into the project, Symphony has over 300,000
users.

But there are questions around usage, partnerships, and whether
it’s really having an effect on Bloomberg.

BI’s story, based on conversations with 35 sources, looks at how
Wall Street’s audacious bet has gone so far and the challenges
the startup still faces.

In markets news