Fed Rates, Crypto, and Apple's Foldable iPhones

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning, 9-11 weekend with us, John Tarrant. How are the markets doing? Indeed, it was a very movable Friday, wasn’t it? And remember, the stock exchange was closed for four days after 9-11. When they reopened it, they sank, God bless America, and the Dow plunged by about 7%, over 600 points. But that was 7% back in 2001. Well,

0:23 as for the last week, well, two things dominated. We had inflation at the end of the week and the big Apple event. So inflation was PPI on Thursday and CPI on Friday. They both came in line with expectations from Wall Street, but it was because of energy. And that means that Wall Street is now factoring in a 70%,

0:39 70% chance of a rate hike when the Fed makes its meeting later this week. And the increase is likely to be 25 basis points. Now, let me explain. If inflation had gone up because of, say, furniture or airline tickets, probably the pressure wouldn’t exist. But because it’s energy, there is real pressure on the Fed to do something to

0:56 calm inflation. And that means increasing rates on Wednesday, most likely. We will see. The other big story of last week, of course, was the surprise and shine event of Apple, the Worldwide Development Conference in Cupertino, the first one for John Ternus, the new CEO. He introduced new iPhones, AirPods, chips, and, of course, most importantly, the foldable iPhone, the Duo, which

1:16 sells for $ 2, 000, which I think is a big investment. That’s the basic model, remember. That’s a lot of money for a phone, but there we are. Samsung and others already have foldable phones. The success of this is going to hinge– on the hinge. If the hinge is no good, they won’t be able to sell it. Also, how quickly

1:34 will there be a crease in the screen? That’s another thing. And have they compromised at all on the software in order to get the smaller phone, which is much smaller than the traditional candy bar iPhone? So we will see.

1:44 They obviously think they can take market share away from Samsung, the Korean company, but it’s going to take some time. Cryptocurrency story of the week was NASDAQ investing $ 100 million in the Digital trading platform known as Kraken, which has been around since 2011. It’s a pretty big company, that one.

2:01 The parent company is called Bayward. And in the week ahead, the big story will be the Fed meeting in Washington Tuesday and Wednesday. The decision, of course, at 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. And pressure is building for a rate hike.

2:12 We’ll see. John. Thank you so much for the update. We’ll talk again soon. Yeah. Thanks, John. Thank you. See you next weekend.