Markets Tread Water Ahead of the Fed Amid UN Week and Xi’s State Visit

0:00 Speaker 1 Well, Sunday morning. Well, we had UN week. We had a lot of turmoil, ups and downs. And John Tarrant, give us a report of where the markets were and where they’re going to be.

0:12 Speaker 2 Good morning to you, John. Good Sunday morning. You should understand that the markets are reacting to every little bit of news at the moment. We’re kind of treading water waiting for that next Federal Reserve interest rate decision. So any bit of news that comes in, they react instantaneously.

0:26 You know, Iran, rates, inflation, anything else you can think of. The Fed next week, by the way, on the 27th and 28th of October. So this past week has been dominated really by politics. A big one, of course, was UNGA, the UN General Assembly in New York. President Trump speaking last Tuesday, talking about annihilating Iran, saying he wants to

0:46 get a deal with Tehran, saying he thinks there will be one after the November midterm elections here. And of course, famously, he renamed AI last week, SI, not artificial intelligence, which he doesn’t like, but super intelligence. And a lot of people think that’s a pretty good idea. So we’ll see whether it catches on.

1:02 Speaker 1 Well, it comes along with my... commentary that I made this week that it was super Google instead of intelligence. It’s not intelligent. It’s just it’s doing Google in a better way.

1:16 Speaker 2 Well, I heard you say that. I heard that commentary that you made on the radio stations that we own, and it’s a very good point. In other words, it’s just an enhanced version of Google, and it comes down at the end of the day to the personality of the person that actually programs the AI bot. That’s what

1:34 you said, right?

1:35 Speaker 1 And the boss of the people that employs the personalities.

1:40 Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, the other big political story, of course, was President Xi and his wife, Peng Liyun, who’s a very well-known folk singer, by the way, in China, coming to Washington, D.C. Now, President Trump was keen to greet them, so keen, in fact, he went to the very steps, right at the bottom, just as they came off the aircraft at Joint Base Andrews.

1:56 A huge honor for President Xi. There was that lavish state dinner on Thursday evening with all those big tech-name bosses there as well. Few deliverables, you know, diplomats call for deliverables, things that you can actually point to. Well, there were a few of those, not really very many. But, you know, they had a good time together. They got

2:14 to know each other. There was a lot of pageantry, a lot of ceremony, which is what you expect with these kind of state visits. And there’s talk that President Xi may be back soon or that President Trump might meet him in Asia quite soon. Talking of Asia, the big crypto story of the week is there’s a huge

2:29 crypto conference coming up in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Next week, it’ll be about crypto policy and the place of cryptocurrency in the APAC region, the Asia-Pacific region. And for us this coming week, John, well, it’s all about jobs.

2:42 So we’ll get the JOLTS report, the private job, the weekly report job. We’ll get the big September government jobs report, the one that really moves markets on next Friday, the 2nd of October. Of course, that will be watched very closely by the Fed as they prepare to meet at the end of the month. John.

2:58 Speaker 1 John Tarrick, thank you so much for bringing us up to date, and I look forward to spending more time together. Yep.

3:05 Speaker 2 Thank you so much, John. Thank you very much.