Cisco's weak revenue forecast is driving down its stock

• Becky Peterson
 

• 19h
• 2,079

Cisco CEO Chuck RobbinsCisco Live/Business Insider

CSCO Cisco Systems

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Cisco topped Wall Street's revenue target in its fiscal Q4, but gave a lackluster business forecast for the current quarter.

Cisco's stock declined roughly 2% in after hours trading on Wednesday following the announcement.

Here's are Cisco's results:

• Revenue (GAAP) — $12.1 billion, down 4% from $12.64 billion in Q4 2016.  This is compared to analyst estimates of $12.07 billion. Cisco projected similar estimates. 
• Earnings per share (adjusted) — $0.61, on the nose of analyst estimates and a penny above's Cisco's own forecast. 
• Net income (GAAP) — $2.4 billion, down 14% from 2016.
• Projected revenues (GAAP) for Q1 2018 are below analyst expectations. Cisco projects revenues to decline 1% to 3%, which would put it around $11.8 billion. Analysts had projected revenues to stay around $12.6 billion next quarter. 
• Projected earnings per share (adjusted) meet analyst expectations. Cisco expects earnings per share of $0.59 to $0.61 next quarter; analysts had projected earnings per share of $0.60. 
• Full year revenues (GAAP) were down 2% for fiscal year 2017, with total revenues of $48 billion.
• Full year earnings per share (adjusted) for the year were $2.39.

Get the latest Cisco stock price here.

SEE ALSO: Amazon calls a $350,000 truce on the cloud wars and joins a Google-born cloud project

Amazon can borrow money more cheaply than Russia, Mexico and China

• Joe Ciolli
 

• 19h
• 3,972

Jeff Bezos is thrilled at the bargain that Amazon just got on its $16 billion bond offering. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Amazon got a pretty sweet deal on its recent $16 billion debt financing.

The deal was so good, in fact, that a chunk of it ended up being better than what the governments of Russia, Mexico, Greece, Chile and China could've gotten, according to a report from Quartz's John Detrixhe.

The offering priced on Tuesday amid strong demand from investors, the Wall Street Journal reported . The company sold a $3.5 billion tranche of 10-year bonds at a 0.9-percentage-point yield-premium to Treasurys, below guidance set by underwriters, according to the WSJ.

Given the 10-year Treasury is currently trading at around 2.27%, that makes for a yield on Amazon's debt of around 3.2%. Detrixhe pointed out that while that's still more expensive than what borrowing costs in Germany, the US and Canada, it puts some other world powers to shame.

Consider, for example, that the 10-year bond for Russia yields 7.8%, while their Mexican counterparts return roughly 6.8% and similar-maturity Chinese government securities yield 3.6%.

Amazon can borrow more cheaply than China, Mexico and Russia, among other major nations.Business Insider / Andy Kiersz, data from Bloomberg

Amazon is planning to use the $16 billion it raised in the debt market to fund its recently announced $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods.

The tech giant isn't the only high-flying company translating investor goodwill into favorable borrowing terms. Tesla, which has a junk rating and quickly burns through cash, easily priced a $1.8 billion bond offering on Friday.

The deal ended up getting done at a record-low coupon for a bond of such maturity and low quality, according to a Bloomberg News report. What's more, the originally sought $1.5 billion was bumped up to $1.8 billion because of outsize demand.

So if you're an innovative, fast-growing corporate juggernaut, it looks like a good time to tap debt markets. And even if you don't get the type of bargain enjoyed by Amazon,  you'll probably get a better deal than Russia.

Get the latest Tesla stock price here.

SEE ALSO: The way Tesla and Amazon are raising billions shows why traders shouldn't be scared of big stock drops

The US filed a $400 billion Libor claim on behalf of 39 banks rescued during the financial crisis

• Camilla Hodgson
 

• 7h
• 1,177

Former Barclays employee Jonathan Mathew. REUTERS/Toby Melville

LONDON – The US government filed what could be the biggest court case yet connected to the Libor rigging scandal against some of the UK's biggest banks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's High Court claim alleges banks including Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland kept Libor rates artificially low, a practice known as "lowballing," which contributed to the failure of a number of American banks during the financial crisis.

"Each bank defendant had a common financial and profit-based incentive to collude to lowball [US dollar] Libor submissions and in turn to cause USD Libor to be lower than it otherwise would have been," The Times reported the filing as saying.

Libor is the daily measure showing the interest rate at which banks lend to each other. In the rigging scandal, which came to light in 2012, traders from a number of banks artificially manipulated the rate in order to profit more than they should have done.

The claim is on behalf of 39 American banks, rescued by the FDIC during the financial crisis. Pre-crisis, it says, their combined worth had been more than $440 billion, while their combined annual turnover at the end of 2007 had been more than $114 billion.

The filing says nine lenders worked alongside the British Bankers' Association (BBA) to coordinate the "sustained and material suppression" of Libor between August 2007 and at least the end of 2009. Both lenders and the BBA, it says, knowingly did business with rates skewed in their favour.

It cites a BBA memo from April 2008, which stated US dollar Libor was lower than it should have been and suggested lenders "float the dollar rate slightly, gently up," via a "co-ordinated action by a large number of panel banks."

Earlier this week, one of the traders convicted for Libor manipulation in 2016, Jonathan Mathew, appealed to the Criminal Cases Review Commission against his four year sentence.

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Trump tweets that he is scrapping his business councils after the massive exodus of executives

• Bob Bryan
 

• 22h
• 44,687
 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The members of President Donald Trump's main business council agreed to disband the group Wednesday shortly before Trump tweeted he was scrapping the group himself.

In a statement following Trump's tweet announcing the decision, the members of the Strategic and Policy Forum said, "President and we are disbanding the Forum."

Multiple reports indicated, however, that the members of the forum had already decided to disband the group during a phone call before the president's tweet about it.

The members hoped to inform the White House before publicly announcing the decision, according to Bloomberg.

The New York Times' Landon Thomas Jr. reported that nine CEOs on the forum said they would step down if the group were not disbanded.

Trump tweeted on Wednesday afternoon that he was doing away with the Strategic and Policy Forum and a separate manufacturing council.

"Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!" Trump tweeted.

Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier left Trump's manufacturing council on Monday, setting off a wave of departures from that group. Frazier and other business leaders cited Trump's response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, as the impetus for their exits.

The Strategic and Policy Forum featured a diverse group of leaders including JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon. Steve Schwarzman, the CEO of the private-equity giant Blackstone, was the leader of the council.

The group held one White House meeting, on February 3, in which Trump promised "exciting times ahead" and declared that this administration was "coming out with a tax bill soon and a healthcare bill even sooner." Trump also said he wanted to meet with the council on a monthly or quarterly basis going forward, but another meeting never materialized.

The group said in a statement that the question of their participation was becoming a "distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussion."

Here is the full statement:

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. The President's Strategic and Policy Forum was conceived as a bi-partisan group of business leaders called to serve our country by providing independent feedback and perspectives directly to the President on accelerating economic growth and job creation in the United States. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussion on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans. As such, the President and we are disbanding the Forum. Job creation and and supporting an inclusive pro-growth agenda remain vitally important to the progress of our country. As Americans, we are all united in our desire to see our country succeed."

The manufacturing council also met only once, on February 23.

The CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and United Technologies announced they were departing the manufacturing council Wednesday following Trump's tweet, which they did not ackowledge.

Trump, for his part, attacked those executives who left the manufacturing council, calling them "grandstanders" and saying they were "embarrassed" because they manufactured their products outside the US.

Here is a full list of Strategic and Policy Forum members:

• Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone
• Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo
• Doug McMillon, Walmart
• Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase
• Mary Barra, General Motors
• Mark Weinberger, EY
• Larry Fink,BlackRock
• Jack Welch, General Electric
• Paul Atkins, Patomak Global Partners
• Adebayo Ogunlesi, Global Infrastructure Partners
• Toby Cosgrove, Cleveland Clinic
• Rich Lesser, Boston Consulting Group
• Jim McNerney, Boeing
• Kevin Warsh, Hoover
• Daniel Yergin, IHS Markit
• Ginni Rometty, IBM

Three other members of the council departed before this week:

• Bob Iger, Disney
• Travis Kalanick, Uber
• Elon Musk, Tesla

SEE ALSO: Here are all the members of the manufacturing council who already announced their departure

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