CNBC Business News Update - Market Midday: Stocks Higher, Trump Plans Steel Tariffs, Amazon Sentiment Improving 2/10/25

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

From Wall Street to Main Street, the latest on the markets and what it means for your money. Updated regularly on weekdays, featuring CNBC expert analysis and sound from top business newsmakers. Anchored and reported by CNBC's Jill Schneider.

I'm Jill Schneider, CNBC. Green arrows across the board on Wall Street as big tech names lead the way, and it seems traders are shrugging off the latest tariff talk from President Trump. The Dow is up eight points. The S&P 500 is up 27. The Nasdaq is higher by 187. The president says he's planning to unveil a blanket 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, and those stocks are rising in response. Cleveland Cliffs up 14%, U.S. Steel and Alcoa each up about 4%, and Nucor 6% higher. That tariff news comes as Trump's previously announced duties on China take effect, and now China is pushing back with retaliatory tariffs of its own, slapping them on a number of American products. London School of Economics associate professor Qi Yujin says while the initial measures won't have much of an impact on the U.S., she says going forward,

it's important to keep an eye on how willing China is to expand its retaliatory toolbox. I think that China doesn't want to escalate and really engage in a full trade war, but it does want to have a reaction rather than just sit back because it wants to have a strong position when it's actually coming back to the negotiation table. So in fact, it is a strategy. And they're talking about using Tai Chi moves rather than boxing moves, which means a combination of hard and soft moves and then keeping tactics both flexible and pragmatic, in fact. Shares of chip makers moving higher on Wall Street, a sentiment appeared to improve after the late January sell-off in tech stocks, fueled by concerns around the emergence of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. Meanwhile, since ChatGPT has come on the scene, Amazon has been

criticized for being behind in AI. But as DeepSeek shakes up the market, some people are taking a second look at Amazon's strategy. Here's CNBC's Kate Rooney. The sentiment around Amazon's AI playbook is much more positive right now. There had been this feeling on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley that when it came to the AI race, we talked so much about Amazon was caught flat footed. So the negativity has really shifted, at least from what I'm hearing. Amazon is getting a lot more credit for being what one investor described to me as the Switzerland of AI. Mixed quarterly results for McDonald's, the fast food giant's earnings met expectations, but revenue fell short. Sales at U.S. restaurants saw their worst drop since the

pandemic. Shares of McDonald's up about 4 percent. Telehealth provider HIMS and HERS Health aired its first Super Bowl ad last night, but not without controversy. The company promoted its offerings of compounded GLP-1 drugs, basically copycat generic versions, allowed to be manufactured during a shortage. The ad is facing pushback from big pharma and lawmakers who urged the FDA to look into it for claims of false advertising. They say the ad neglected to include warnings or side effects of taking the compounded drugs versus FDA-approved versions of the weight loss drugs. Joel Schneider, CNBC. Get tomorrow's big stock stories delivered to your inbox tonight when you subscribe to Joel Schneider, CNBC.