Morgan Stanley email exposes deal secrets

0:00Welcome to Seeking Alphas Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news and analysis. Good afternoon, today is Wednesday, September 23rd, and I'm your host, Kim Khan. Our top story so far, a Morgan Stanley employee accidentally leaked an internal document that had details on more than 100 investment banking deals in Asia and the EMEA region Blueberg reported. The email Miss Fire this week has said it included details on candidates for IPOs, private equity and pension funds, backing companies, and projects put on hold. A blurred copy of the details was posted by an account on Instagram. Thanks to financial institutions, it has accidentally leaked sensitive documents in the past, attracting regulatory fines, reputational damage, and customer trust issues. Among active stocks, Steeple upgraded Microsoft to buy from hold, saying the company is getting back on track, analysts Brad Reback says he expects accelerating revenue growth in Asia, despite capacity constraints, from incremental operational efficiencies, ramping new data

1:01center capacity, and a growing open AI revenue share. General Mills delivered a better-than-fiered Q1 and set 2027 profit guidance slightly above estimates, but profit continues to be undermined by higher input costs and lower volumes. An eye on Q is rallying after researchers demonstrated the development and successful testing of the industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error correction decoder that runs on a single standard off-the-shelf central processing unit. Quantum error correction is essential for building practical fault tolerant quantum computers because physical qubits are inherently sensitive to environmental noise. Finding and fixing those errors in real-time is historically presented a significant challenge. In other news of note, McDonald's will spend as much as $8.5 billion to bring customers back to the Golden Arches by making big investments in menu innovations, modernizing its restaurants, and creating a more welcoming and efficient workforce. The McDonald's next initiative aims to drive operating margin to the low to mid-50% range by 2030 and deliver 250 basis points of restaurant-level efficiency gains.

2:05CEO Chris Kymchinsky said, executing across key components of next will unlock stronger restaurant economics, generate attractive returns to the company, our franchisees, and shareholders, and increase capacity to keep investing in growth. And in the Wall Street Research Corner, Oak Tree Capital's Howard Marx doesn't think much of using Treasury Bond purchases to temporarily lower yields. The US displays a total lack of fiscal discipline Marx wrote, describing the dollar's reserve currency status as a golden credit card that the US has used unwisely. Treasury buybacks would not change the government's overall indebtedness if they were accompanied by greater Treasury bill issuance, he noted. Instead, such transactions could shorten the maturity of government debt and require more frequent refinancing. That's all for today's Wall Street lunch. Look for links for stories in the Schoenert section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at SeekingOffa.com slash WSP. And for a wealth of coverage on stocks and ETFs, go to SeekingOffa.com slash subscriptions.