The daily business briefing: October 8, 2018

1. 2 Americans win Nobel economics prize

American researchers William Nordhaus and Paul Romer have won the Nobel Prize for economics for their work examining the interplay of climate change and technological innovation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday. Nordhaus, of Yale University, was the first economist to create a quantitative model that "describes the global interplay between the economy and the climate," showing that "the most efficient remedy for problems caused by greenhouse gases is a global scheme of universally imposed carbon taxes," the academy said. Romer, of New York University's Stern School of Business, helped provide the research that led to the endogenous growth theory, and has shed light on how economic forces steer companies' willingness to produce new ideas and innovations.

CNBC The Associated Press

2. Venom and A Star Is Born combine for record October weekend

The comic-book movie Venom shattered the October box-office record with an $80 million debut weekend, despite bad reviews. Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born was lifted to a $41.3 million haul by Oscar buzz and a wave of positive publicity. The film marks Cooper's directorial debut and Lady Gaga's first leading performance on the big screen. "We knew we had a hit," said Warner Bros. distribution chief Jeffrey Goldstein of A Star Is Born. "We also knew that every time people saw the movie, they felt it, they cried, they loved it. People just like the movie." The two hits contributed to a total of $174.5 million in ticket sales, easily the best October weekend ever.

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The Associated Press

3. Apple to Congress: No sign of China hacking attack

Apple's vice president for information security, George Stathakopoulos, wrote in a letter to Congress on Sunday that the company had found no evidence of a sophisticated attack on its supply chain. The statement to the Senate and House commerce committees came after a Thursday report by Bloomberg BusinessWeek that China had used tiny chips inside servers sold to Apple by Super Micro Computer for spying purposes. "Apple's proprietary security tools are continuously scanning for precisely this kind of outbound traffic, as it indicates the existence of malware or other malicious activity. Nothing was ever found," Stathakopoulos wrote in the letter, obtained by Reuters.

Reuters

4. China moves to offset effects of trade war and slowing consumer spending

China's central bank on Sunday moved to pump $174 billion into the economy. The move is intended to help small and medium-sized businesses that are struggling and having trouble getting loans. The move by the People's Bank of China suggests that the world's No. 2 economy "is really not doing well," Chen Shouhong, the founder of the investment information platform Gelonghui, wrote on the Chinese social media service WeChat. China is facing powerful financial headwinds, including its trade war with the Trump administration, slowing consumer spending and wage growth, slowing infrastructure spending, and rising corporate bond defaults.

The New York Times

5. Stock futures point to lower open on continuing interest-rate concerns

U.S. stock-index futures fell on Monday, pointing to a lower open as rising interest rates continued to weigh on markets despite optimism about coming corporate results. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average were down by 0.4 percent, while those of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 dropped by 0.3 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively. All three of the main U.S. benchmarks are looking at what could be their third straight day of losses. The Nasdaq saw its worst weekly decline since March as Treasury rates surged to their highest level since 2011. Bond prices drop as yields go up. The bond market is closed Monday for Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day.

MarketWatch