Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon, today is Thursday, March 14th, and I'm your host Kim Khan. Our top story so far.

Former Treasury Secretary Steve Manutian says he is putting together a group of investors to acquire

Tik-Toc. The House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday

that could ban Bight Dance's social media platform across the country.

Minutchen said on CNBC, I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold.

It's a great business and I'm going to put together a group to buy Tik-Tok.

This should be owned by U.S. businesses.

There's no way that China would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China.

Manichin did not disclose who would be part of the group to acquire Tik-talk.

Meanwhile, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a response to Congress today, saying, though the U.S. has never found

any evidence of Tik-Tok posing a threat to U.S. national security, it has never stopped going after

Tik-Tohtok. Such practice of resorting to hegemonic moves when one could not

succeed in fair competition, disrupts the normal operation of businesses, undermines the

confidence of international investors in the investment environment and sabotages the normal

economic and trade order in the world.

This will inevitably come back to backfire on the United States itself.

Looking to the economy, the February producer price index was 0.6% from January, hotter than the 0.3% gain expected.

Final demand goods prices staged their biggest jump since August 2023 at up 1.2%.

Almost 70% of the increase is attributed to the index for final demand energy which

surged 4.4%.

Annually the PPI rose 1.6% compared with the 1.2% consensus and 1% prior.

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