STOCKS SLIDE: Here's what you need to know

Bob Bryan

Ilya Naymushin/Reuters

A participant lands in the water as he fails to cross a pool of water and foam on an inflated item.

Stocks fell across the board in trading on Monday, as political events dominated the day and a slew of merger news crossed the wire.

The S&P and Dow Jones industrial average ended the day solidly in the red, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq was close to unchanged.

We've got all the headlines, but first, the scoreboard:

President Donald Trump is expected to name current Fed governor Jerome Powell the next Federal Reserve chair. The announcement is expected for Thursday, and allows Trump to make his mark on the central bank while also maintaining the Fed's relatively dovish lean under current chair Janet Yellen. Yellen's term expires in February.
Two members of Trump's presidential campaign staff were indicted in connection to the Mueller probe. Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort's former business associate Rick Gates pleaded not guilty on Monday after being indicted by a grand jury in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
Reports surfaced that Sprint and T-Mobile are calling off merger talks. A report from Nikkei said that Softbank, the parent company of Sprint, was planning to end the talks. Both companies saw their stocks fall on the news.
The National Association of Home Builders came out against the GOP tax plan. The NAHB said that the forthcoming bill would curtail incentives in the tax code designed to make homebuying more attractive. The group's CEO, Jerry Howard, told Politico, "All the resources we were going to put into supporting are now going to go into opposing the plan."
Homebuilder Lennar agreed CalAtlantic Group for $9.3 billion. The deal would create America's largest homebuilder by market cap. The implied value of the deal is $51.34 per share, representing a premium of 27 percent to CalAtlantic's Friday close.

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