CNBC Business News Update - Market Open: Stocks Lower, Global Trade War Fears, Tariffs On Aluminum & Steel Imports Begin 2/11/25

Episode Date: February 11, 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 by CNBC's Jessica Ettinger.

I'm Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Stocks in the red this morning on fears of a global trade war. The Dow is down 82 points now, led lower by shares of Disney, which are down about three quarters of a percent. The S&P 500 index down 14, the NASDAQ down 62 points, and Vidi is in the green by one-tenth of one percent. Look, there's a lot of news coming out, and we think the growth to the policies initially are sort of growth negative, which is, you know, immigration sort of enforcement and of course the tariffs. So we're just digesting that. Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson on CNBC. President Trump signed an order imposing 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. These steel and aluminum tariffs are out. And guess what? All the steel makers are up. This is great news for them. They welcome this sort of thing because they have to compete.

And just for some facts here, steel and aluminum, we do import a lot of. We're net importer. We are net importer of both of them. It hurts Canada the most. By the way, we're not going to build a single new aluminum smelting plant. So in other words, this is an industry where there's kind of global overcapacity and the tariffs are about kind of protecting and subsidizing your domestic producers. CNBC's Mike Santoli with Sarah Eisen. North of the border, Canadian restaurants now advertising they're not using American cheese. The U.S. move on tariffs could trigger a major trade war as the European Union now eyes countermeasures to back up Canada against the U.S. Five former U.S. Treasury secretaries have published a bipartisan opinion piece in the New York Times saying the U.S. democracy is under siege. Robert

Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Jacob Lew, and Janet Yellen say the Treasury is in danger of irreparable harm. As an unelected partisan, billionaire Elon Musk takes control of the Treasury with numerous conflicts of interest. Meantime, Musk wants to buy OpenAI. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Musk's bid aims to slow down a competitor. It's a $97.4 billion bid. Musk also has an AI product under development called XAI. Facebook parent Meta starting its effort to fire 4,000 employees today, about 5% of its workforce. As the company moves toward using AI, it's the latest in a number of announced cuts, nearly 2,000 people being cut at workday,

nearly 1,000 at Salesforce. Theme park guests reportedly stranded on rides at Disney's Magic Kingdom theme park in Orlando last night during a power outage. Coca-Cola and AutoNation shares popping higher on better than expected quarterly results. Cosmetic and beauty company Cody shares were down on disappointing numbers. Measles is back in Texas with at least 15 cases reported in a West Texas county with a high rate of vaccine exemptions. The cases are mostly school age kids. The measles outbreak in Texas, hopefully they will get control of. This is an outbreak in an isolated community that had particularly low vaccination rates because of religious exemptions that that community secured. Texas overall has high vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella,

probably about 94 percent, still well above the national average. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb on CNBC. Fed Chair Jay Powell test-f fine to Congress today and tomorrow. It's the semi-annual update. And the Super Bowl set an all-time ratings record for the second year in a row. Fox says an average of 126 million people watched across all platforms, according to early figures from Nielsen. Jessica Ettinger, CNBC.

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