CNBC Business News Update - Market Midday: Stocks Lower, Confluent Shares Soar on IBM Deal, Paramount Skydance Not Giving Up On WBD

Episode Date: December 8, 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Jill Schneider, CNBC. Stocks are in the red in midday trading. Investors are awaiting the Federal Reserve's last meeting of the year. The Dow is down 210 points, the S&P 500, lower by 26, the NASDAQ, down by 50. Paramount Skydance is launching a hostile bid to buy Warner Brothers Discovery after it lost out to Netflix in a months-long bidding war for the legacy assets. Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison spoke exclusively. exclusively with CNBC, saying his company just wants to finish what it started. This deal, if it is allowed to move forward, will actually be the death of the theatrical movie business in Hollywood.

We're sitting here today trying to save it. Paramount will go straight to WBD shareholders with an all-cash-30-per-share offer. That's the same bid that WBD rejected last week. Shares of confluence soaring nearly 30 percent after IBM said it would buy the company in an $11 billion deal. IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, telling CNBC the move will allow his company to develop its AI strategy better and faster. Nobody can live with a month-old data or even week-old data, and Confluent has the most capable technology to unlock the real-time value of data across all the myriad of applications, clouds, and other APIs that they all deal with. So that's kind of why Confluent and why now. Confluent is an open source enterprise data streaming platform.

The deal is expected to close by the middle of 2026. If you feel like you're spending more time than ever sitting in traffic, you may be right. A new study from Transportation Analytics Company, InRix, found the typical U.S. driver lost 49 hours to traffic congestion this year, up 11% from last year. That's more than an average full work week. Jill Schneider, CNBC. The Consumer News and Business Channel, CNBC, We're happy we have your attention, and we promise to work hard to keep it.