Big Tech sell-off wipes out Wall Street’s October gains. Microsoft’s shares sank 6.1 per cent, their biggest one-day drop, while Meta slid 4.1 per cent. Apple’s stock fell 1.9 per cent in after-hours trading yesterday after the company announced modest growth in iPhone sales. Amazon was a bright spot, rising 6 per cent on the strength of its cloud computing unit, pushing its market valuation past $2tn.
Japanese voters delivered a harsh rebuke to the ruling coalition led by the Liberal Democratic party, stripping it of its parliamentary majority for the first time in 15 years. The yen fell almost 1 per cent against the dollar on speculation that political paralysis would delay further interest rate rises in Japan. Equities, however, rose with the Nikkei 225 index closing up 1.8 per cent, driven partly by expectations that the yen would continue to weaken.
Spain is set to surpass the US to become the world’s fastest-growing major advanced economy this year, expanding at more than three times the pace of the Eurozone as a whole. Economists surveyed in a poll expect GDP data this week to show the country’s economy is on course to expand by 2.7 per cent this year.
US Inflation is basically back to normal. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge increased 2.1 percent in September compared with a year earlier, according to a report released today. That’s nearly back to the 2-percent level that policymakers aim for, though core inflation — without volatile food and fuel costs — remained at 2.7 percent.
Alphabet’s profit jumped 34 per cent in the third quarter as the parent company of search giant Google reported strong growth in its cloud business amid robust demand for computing and data services used to train and run generative artificial intelligence models.
Samsung Electronics is struggling to hold on to its crown as the world’s top-selling smartphone maker. The Korean tech giant was the only one of the top five global smartphone makers to experience falling shipments in the third quarter of this year, losing market share to longtime US rival Apple and Chinese contenders offering slick new foldable devices.
Investors’ “fear of missing out” on gold’s rally has sparked record demand for the precious metal, even as high prices push central banks to scale back their purchases. The value of global demand passed $100bn for the first time in the third quarter of this year, according to industry body the World Gold Council.
The European Union has raised tariffs on China-made electric vehicles to as high as 45.3% starting Wednesday, after a detailed anti-subsidy investigation that has been criticized by Beijing as well as the broader automaking industry. The tariffs will likely intensify the trade war between the EU and China, although negotiations are expected to continue to reach an amicable solution.
U.S. economy grew at 2.8% rate in third quarter. In a key economic report released just days before the presidential election, growth was again driven by robust consumer spending.
Microsoft reported double-digit gains in quarterly revenue and profit driven by strong demand for cloud computing, but its shares slipped after it warned that growth was cooling and artificial intelligence-related spending would continue to rise.
OpenAI has rolled out its online search tool in ChatGPT as competition grows among Big Tech rivals developing AI-driven results to queries. The San Francisco-based company has integrated the ability to search the web into its flagship chatbot, which will be released gradually in the coming weeks, starting with some paid users on Thursday. The move is a direct challenge to Google, the market leader in online search. Google this week announced that it would expand its AI Overviews feature in its search engine, which provides summaries of results using its Gemini AI model.
Just 5 per cent of directors within the S&P 500 companies are under the age of 50.