Apple. Josh lipton has the story in san francisco. Well, it is a big new title for Jeff Williams. He is now going to be apples chief operating officer. He is also in charge of apple wash. Some might think theres a Succession Plan in place since this was tim cooks old job. Apple now grooming Jeff Williams as the next ceo. Sources of the company telling me this is not the intention of this promotion. This is simply a recognition, they say, of jeffs contributions. Tim cook, by the way, in a statement saying williams is hands down the best Operations Executive he has worked with. Other big changes to mention here, phil schillor will remain apples head of marketing, but he picks p a new responsibility as well. He is now going to lead the companys app store. That, of course, has become a significant business for apple helping to fuel the companys record 5 billion in Services Revenue last quarter. Natural question then is what that means for eddie cue, apples media head. The company telling me he will remain in charge of apples content. That means apple music, apple pay, and apple tv. One final note here, johnny will join apples executive team as vps. He may not be a household name, but is he the man in charge of hardware. Thats batteries, displays, chip sets. Opening the apple product, and you are looking at johnnys hand where i work. John, back to you. All right. Thank you, swrosh. A few interesting things i think in this announcement. One hiroki asai is retiring from apple. He had been in charge of a lot of the advertising and marketing communication. He is a young guy. I dont think he is quite 50 yet, so one of the things that apple is fighting here is its own success. I mean, once these folks near the top at the top of apple get these millions upon millions of dollars, they dont have to work anymore, so you want to keep them happy. You saw the issue with bob mansfield. He was running chips at one point. He decided to move on and do other things. Apple kept him around for a while. Its interesting. I asked apple does Phil Schiller keep his perview over beats electronics. Theyre not exactly pumping out new headphones all the time. Turns out he just gets the app store. Not books or other evening wroe system things. I dont have the answer yet for whether swref williams is getting paid more as part of this. His Job Responsibilities actually dont seem to be changing. This is a title change. I believe tim cook fwot paid more when he was coo, so you would expect that Jeff Williams will also. I believe he was probably compensated fairly well in his previous role, but it does beg the point, john, keep them happy, keep them interested, henry, and build an executive bench, as apple says. This is not a clear line of succession. There are many executives that could take this role, but its a conversation were now having about the u. S. Economys largest company. The companys comments to josh are confusing. Coo is de facto the number two at the company. In a normal structure, everybody will report in to him. He has now been taken out a very focused operational role to presumably having everybody coming into him, unless they have some strange structure where actually a lot of folks report to tim and jeff only has control over operations. As a vote of confidence, this is clearly the number two. You wouldnt do this if that werent your johnny didnt report to tim even when steve jobs was in charge and tim had that title. There have always been some kind of steve jobs, thats a difference. Steve jobs broke the structure. When steve got sick, tim was in a position. He was named interim ceo of the company when steve was out, he was coo before that. This is something that obviously, jeff is number two. We assume behind the scenes theyre looking at where the company is going to be three or five years down the line. Is this a nod to having to grow other Revenue Streams like. Its time to anoint somebody. There are lots of Different Things going on in the company. He may be spread thin himself. Swref has really singled himself out with the apple watch, but more importantly just in the logistics of producing 75 million iphone orders. Everybody was blown away by that. Stroo were going to talk to a shareholder later on. The shares on this announcement today are down slightly, but, of course, the overall market is taking a little bit of a breather after a rally yesterday following that historic rate hike that has yields off the zero bounce for the first time in seven years. Senior economics correspondent Steve Liesman is back from washington, and he joins us now from new york. Steve, the day after, whats your read on this . Markets are puzzling today over the critical question. Whats the fed looking for in order to hike next . In her answer to my question, yellen explained some of the reasoning behind yesterdays historic hike . We recognized that policy is accommodative, and if we do not begin to slightly reduce the amount of accommodation it would overshoot our employment and inflation objectives. Pointing out the policy acts with long layings, and they want to remove but not they dont want to remove it. They want to reduce the amount of ago addition in the economy. Yellen also said rate hikes are not going to be mechanical. She said that means they wont be every meeting or even every other meeting. Best guess is to think about a funds rate that ends the year somewhere between the current Market Forecast of 1 and the median forecast from the fed itself of 1. 4 . Back to you, guys. The guessing game begins yet again, steve. Great reporting on this topic for months and months and more to come. Henry, yesterdays hike was well signalled. Thats why we didnt have volatility in the market. What do you think we should be watching now as we could be waiting multiple meetings before we get the next hike . First of all, lets hope that the fed is right and janet yellen is right and we dont start doing this, the economy is going to get out of control. It would be great if we saw the economy actually really heat up here. It would actually be great if inflation ticked up a little bit because of that. You dont want it wildly out of control, but weve been stuck in this laggard economy for seven years. If things really are starting to get going, thats great. If the fed is in a position where they can keep raising out six months or so, we should be happy. You still come back to that central problem that they are forecasting on their dots, which is what the individual members of the fed believe will be the trajectory of Interest Rates. Theyre still forecasting on their dots full rate rises, and the market believes its going to be two. How do you resolve that . How is that resolved . I think its the same thick the fed is doing. You get new data every day that are going to change that. They take their view. Will it be less hawkish as they go through . She will continue to be flexible is the sense that i get. She communicated this perfectly. Its justifiable given the information we have now. The economy gets stronger. I do think, though, nobody likes bad news. Hate to be the bearer of bad news. Historically rising Interest Rate environments dont tend to be good for size. You can argue about, well you are trying to slow the economy. Its a no brainer. Were trying to slow down the economy. She said it is a myth that expansions die of old age. That is going out on a limb there. That is great. Again, going back to the real economy if we are seeing real pressure on the labor side certainly from a stock perspective, you might say, oh, its bad. Costs are going up. Those costs are wages to people in this economy. Moving to a different type of rate hike. One thats coming to pandora. Its jumping on a favorable ruling on the rates it pays royalties to artists. The royalty board out with the rate of 2016 through 2002, and although they did rise, pandora ceo mcandrews called it a balanced rate. Sound exchange, a nonprofit that helps collect digital royalties calls it deeply disappointing. The stock was up with 20 after hours yesterday after some volatility. Today its up about 12 . John, it raised the rate by about 20 , but its still not as high as the musicians and the Music Industry want it. Youre going to see a shift away from this idea that music is free all the time. If you want to build a business, you want people paying for something. Pandora has put itself in an interesting position now having additional businesses in downloads. They hedge their bets there. I think the next couple of years as far as the structure of how Companies Like pandora go forward is going to be pretty interesting. Its a variable thats been solved for now, but do we do this all over again in 2020 . Pandora has been having this problem for years where theyre always threatened to be killed or wounded by royalty change. You put your finger on it. Thats always an issue. The other issue is listener hours arent growing that much. Financials are good. Theyre growing nicely. The usage is not, and that is ultimately a real problem. You dont see it as a window where they reset the rates, and now there are increases of the Consumer Price index. Theres no cap on the revenue figure. You dont see that as somebody who runs technology companies, okay, weve got five years. Go the bigger pandora gets, the stronger it gets. Ultimately theres huge value to artists being played on pandora. The whole thing on radio, you want your artist played. People get to know the music and go out and buy it. The bigger pandora gets, actually the more leverage they have to say, look, you want to charge so much, then keep your music off pandora. Its terrible for you. Listener hours, i would expect that if they had a product that people were nuts bshgs and it was so viral, you would see a lot more usage grow. Its single digit percentage. We have breaking news on star wars coming from julia borstein. What do we know . Well, were just getting the latest from star wars. The force awakens in 12 International Markets placing number one in each market with an estimated 14. 1 million in overall box office. Im just going to put it in context here. This is the biggest single industry day of all time in norway and weeden. Biggest industry opening day of all time, and several of these markets, including belgium, finland, norway, switzerland, and it was the biggest opening day of all time. It was more than double the opening day of avengers and over double the opening day of Jurassic World. It was the biggest opening of all time, biggest Opening Weekend of all time here in the wraits. Theres going to be a lot of attention on whether or not star wars the force awakens can beat that record set by Jurassic World in june swh every and whether it comes in in the top three of movies for all time. Certainly numbers were going to continue to watch over the course of the day today and tomorrow. John. Crucially do we know anything about the buzz of people coming out of the theater . The reviewers liked it, but do we know if people are they saying theyre going to see it again and tell their friends, et cetera . I havent seen anything out of the theaters that have opened in europe so far, but on rotten tomatoes, the film has a 95 critics score, which is incredibly strong. In terms of the viewer score, people who want to see it, its 99 . We havent started getting those word of mouth reviews from the u. S. Theaters yet. Julia borstein covering star wars. Is this your shocked face . Record opening . Have i tickets. Everything. So excited. For no spoilers, though. No spoilers. I have been avoiding them studiously, but i was so happy to see some people its good. Youre going to enjoy it. That was very good news. Have a great weekend. Great to have you, as always. Henry joining us on squawk alley. More on apples management changes. Well hear from a longtime apple shareholder next. Plus, embattled pharmacy martin arrested this morning. A live report and fbi News Conference in brooklyn coming up. Forget fang stocks. Why 2016 is the year of the mark mahaney has his tech bits for 2016. Youre making me hungry. Then there were four. Apple adding a new name as it names swref williams coo. Before we was named to the post, he was effectively many people would say that he was the coo effectively anyway. Certainly he led the launch of the apple watch. Ross gerber is president and coo of gerber kawasaki and an apple shareholder. Ross, have you met this guy . I actually havent met him. A lot of tim cooks style is really behind the scenes low key, and this guy fits right in the mold of tim cook. Zoo think this is about succession, and you think jim williams will take kim cooks job one day . I think its definitely in order. All companies are required to have a strong Succession Plan anyway. I think tim and him have a very unique relationship and personality. I think its a long grooming process. This is not about Succession Planning and probably part of the reason why theyre saying that, theyve got a lot of strong executives who could be ceos or have been ceos and sthe dont want to flim reply that those folks probably are going to be second fiddle. Theres speculation that tim cook is his way out. Tim cook is not on his way out. He has years ahead of him. You have angela arons in there. People were speculate about her being a ceo candidate before she started working there. I dont think we should do athat. The mack app store being one. They have this app store for the mack. That was supposed to echo the success of the iphone. It has not done that arguably. A number of Prominent Developers are saying were going to pull our apps off of the mack app store because its too limiting the way thats implemented. Well have to see if this structure helps them fix that. Each division is acting as its own company. Im very xooetd comfortable with the structure of apple and its management structure. Flo what would you say to those deeply concerned about the rises in the stock . Were almost down 20 . We almost entered bear market territory amid this huge debate as to whether iphone sales will actually fall year on year. I dont know why people have to look at, you know, over the last year its about even. Its up a little bit. Over the last five years its up 145 . Not including dividends. Over two of those years it didnt even go up. Were bullish on apple, but the whole i phones sales things is completely wrong. Its absolutely wrong. Okay . Smartphone sales are going to increase 10 globally next year. Apples hair is continuing to grow in markets like china and india, so at least the iphone sales up anywhere from 10 , which would just keep them equal to the market to as high as 15 next year. I think these analysts are just running their numbers with basic calculations, and theyre not really thinking about markets like india and china. Krip, top picks for 2016 and why he says fang is out and binge wroe is in. Markets lossed in europe in just about seven minutes. The dow is down around 200 points. Lots of action coming up today. All that is next. Ader offices. Ahh. Steve, other than making me move stuff, what are you working on . Let me show you. Okay. Our thinkorswim Trading Platform aggregates all the options data you need in one place that lets you visualize that information for any options series. Okay, cool. Hang on a second. You can even see the anticipated range of a stock expecting earnings. Impressive. Whats up, tim . For all the confidence you need. Td ameritrade. You got this. The major averages here in the u. S. Near the lows of the session. Dow down 177 points or 1 . S p 500 down 1. 25 . Nasdaq down about 1 as well. We did see the philly fed index this morning go negative for the third month in the last four, but it was really the breakdown in the price of oil. Wti down 2 . Below 35 a barrel. Even as brent remains unchanged. For that we bring in simon hobbs to look at the close in europe and in the u. K. , which is approaching in a moments time. Its a much stronger close, as you can see, because europe is catching the tail wind of where heeds session here when we rallied after the fed. Up from the beginning of the session today, and then making gains through. The figures that you just saw from where were trading now here has brought us off the highs. Germany up over 3 . Just coming back town. Its still wit a sizable rally for the record the swrermans survey of sentiment, dipped. Partly because of what is happening in germany. Partly because of the paris tashgs, but it is still very strong heading towards were end. Lets look at where we have the strength in this rally. A lot of the insurers and the Asset Managers have been doing well. As can you see, these guys are still linked to the South African makeup, if you like. Here continuing to rally after you get that third finance minister confirmed. The others are higher. The banks are also higher. Perhaps inevitably. Though many are off her highs. Standard chart did a real outperformer with the az wra focus. Interestingly, a lot of the automotives have done well today on the session as well. Whether thats a bet about the divergence between the fed and the ecb and whether youro might trade. Certainly volkswagen, daimler, and porsche are all in positive territory. Now to the politics of europe. Assembled in brussels for the yearend. Leaders summit. The 28 heads of the european wrun. There you see Prime Minister david cameron, this is where the rubber meets the road for him. With angel wra merkel, they are now going to discuss changing the treaties so the britain stays within the european wrun. He has promised britain that it can have a referendum on leaving that block. He says he wants treat where i change. Not least to be able to ban Migrant Workers from the u. K. For four wreerz. Its a real third rail issue. A top vc on his investments in fin tech and how the feds rate hike will affect his industry. Plus, coming up later today on closing bell, you wont want to miss this. An interview with short seller swrim chanos here on cnbc. Surprise we heard you got a job as a developer its official, i work for ge what . Wow. Yeah okay. Guys, ill be writing a new language for machines so pl