Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Tuesday, December 22nd.

And this is your FT news briefing.

Global markets lost ground yesterday.

Investors were rattled by a new strain of coronavirus in the UK. We'll

take a look at what kind of impact the new strain will have on the public. Plus, Japanese

Investment Group Soft Bank sheds light on its plans for a blank check company and

Lulu Lemon plans to stretch into overseas markets.

I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day. The S&P 500 managed to end the day slightly down.

The index spent most of Monday in the red following sharp drops in

European markets. Investors there were rattled by fears over a new strain of

coronavirus in parts of Britain. To find out how US markets managed to largely shrug off those jitters, I reached

out to the EFTs U.S. markets reporter, Colby Smith.

So I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that we have a stimulus agreement in motion, which was reached over the weekend. This is something

that investors have been waiting quite a long time for. So this $900 billion agreement

is a huge boost for markets and something that economists have been waiting quite a long while

for just given the slowdown an activity that we have seen in recent weeks.

But the stock market was lower for the day and I think it just speaks a lot to the vast

amount of uncertainty that remains out there about the outlook with the

surge in COVID cases and some of the delays that we've seen on the vaccines

front. So Colby this stimulus package you're talking about,

$900 billion, not small.

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