Francesca Fontana

I'm Francesca Fontana for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them.

Let's get to it.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving last week, for those who observe.

This week, we got our first full trading week of December, starting with a cryptocurrency slump and peppered with earnings reports and other corporate updates throughout, including retailers and consumer companies.

More on which ones were the winners and losers, so to speak, in a minute.

And Friday brought us a nice big M&A surprise.

The winner of the rounds of bidding for Warner Bros.

Discovery was, drumroll please, Netflix.

But before I talk about how shares of all the players reacted, let's see how the indexes fared.

For this week, the first of the month, the Dow ended up 0.5%, the S&P added 0.3%, and the Nasdaq gained 0.9%.

Like I said, we got a bunch of updates from companies revolving around the increasingly cautious American consumer, including supermarkets and the companies behind grocery brands.

Let's start with Procter & Gamble, maker of things like Pampers and Gillette razors.

On Tuesday, the finance chief of P&G gave a warning about its U.S.

business.

The company's sales this quarter are being affected as cautious consumers pull back spending.

The government shutdown and the temporary loss of SNAP food assistance benefits also impacted sales.

That sent P&G shares falling Tuesday.

Ultimately, they dropped 1.1% for the day.

And on a weekly basis, the stock notched a 3.2% loss.

Then on Thursday, supermarket chain Kroger swung to a quarterly loss and said it was working to cut costs as it tries to manage consumer sensitivity to rising prices while also addressing its own rising expenses.