Business

In a mostly quiet Wednesday session, Asian stocks rose overnight along with European bourses, which were led higher by miners after Rio Tinto posted higher profits for the first time in three years and a bigger-than-expected dividend, while India’s Sensex extended declines after the central bank unexpectedly left rates unchanged. US futures were little changed as oil continued to fall after API reported a huge inventory build in the last week.

McDonalds replacing minimum-wage workers with "Big Mac ATMs"; Coffee stores replacing low-paid barristas with robots, and now Bank of America opening branches with no workers at all.

According to Reuters, the latest trend when it comes to retail banking is to do what every other industry is doing, and eliminate paid labor entirely. In that vein, Bank of America, has opened three completely automated branches over the past month, "where customers can use ATMs and have video conferences with employees at other branches."

While energy traders remain focused on weekly changes in crude supply and demand, manifesting in shifts in inventory of which today's API  data, which showed the second biggest inventory build in history, was a breathtaking example of how OPEC's "production cut" is clearly not working, a much more troubling datapoint was revealed by the Energy Information Administration last week when it comes to gasoline demand.

Heading into Monday's session, the S&P had gone for 34 consecutive trading sessions in which it hadn't experienced an intraday move greater than 1%: according to the WSJ's Market Data Group, this was the longest such streak going back over two decades, to 1995. And, following the Monday close, the market made history when it ended yet another day by being confined to a 1% trading range. This made it 35 consecutive sessions without an intraday move of 1% or more.

In what will be the biggest victory in the brief history of Ken Moelis' relatively new New York-based independent investment bank, Moelis & Co., moments ago the FT has reported that Moelis has won the advisory mandate for the planned IPO of Saudi Aramco.