Wall Street Wobbles Amid Tech Troubles and Crypto Chaos

0:00 Speaker 1 With us today is John Terrett. Well, it’s an interesting financial week, and it’s the week before the election. John Terrett, give us an up-to-date.

0:10 Speaker 2 Oh, John, what an extraordinary week this past week has been. We had General Motors pulling out after more than 100 years of the New York Stock Exchange to go to the NASDAQ. We had Anthropic, the AI California-based software maker, home to Claude, that rogue bot. Announcing an IPO, beating their great rivals, OpenAI. Wall Street thinks it could be

0:32 bigger than SpaceX. But here’s the thing. They spent 80 pages of their 300-page prospectus for the NASDAQ talking about the catastrophic and existential threat that their own product, AI, could be on the human existence. Most extraordinary. Of course, we had the Fed on Wednesday seeking more data before they move on interest rates again. We did have two investors.

0:55 And members of the voting panel, it was not unanimous. Somebody from the board and somebody from Cleveland voting in favor of a rate hike. So it wasn’t a unanimous thing. Almost certainly now a rate hike coming in December, everybody says.

1:08 And the earnings, well, what can I say? I mean, Amazon on Thursday, their stock absolutely tanked because of rising costs, the money they’re spending on AI, huge cash burn, weaker sales, a weaker than expected holiday forecast. And Intel down 21% on Thursday night and 30% on Friday, basically because of a PC slump. And their forecast for revenue in the

1:31 fourth quarter was very, very weak. And they’re also talking about supply chain issues as well, which Wall Street never wants to hear. Microsoft turned in strong earnings midweek, but it is the company offering 60,000 staff around the world a buyout. That’s a quarter of their entire staff, including here in America, in the UK, and in India. And,

1:49 of course, Google had that huge amount of money. It was revealed that they’re spending on AI. And for the first time this week, Wall Street questioning whether Google’s search engine can go on being as profitable in the future because of AI. That’s why the stock of Google Alphabet was down. Then on Friday, Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange

2:08 hacked by the North Koreans, we’re told, to the tune of $ 6. 3 billion. They’ve recovered $ 3 billion of it, which they’ve managed to freeze And Binance is such a rich company, has $ 144 billion on its books. It’s going to cover anyone’s losses. And so, too, this week. And, of course, the other thing, on Friday, we have a huge tech

2:24 rout with the NASDAQ down about 4% because of pretty much everything I’ve just mentioned. In the week ahead, earnings come from Apple, Palantir, the cyber security company, AMD, the chip maker. And, of course, we get the non-farms government jobs report on Friday. John, back to you.

2:42 Speaker 1 You’re out of breath. Thank you, John Terrett, and we’ll catch up again soon.

2:47 Speaker 2 See you next Sunday. Thanks, John. Thank you.