Markets

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns; shares close 4.3% lower

• Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's chief on Thursday after revelations of two extramarital affairs, one with a suspected Chinese spy, the WSJ reports. Longtime lieutenant Colette Kress leads in the interim, with no clear succession plan.
• The shares closed 4.3% lower, and at one point Nvidia's value was more than $2 trillion below its October high. Firms backed by Nvidia money, such as CoreWeave, fell; rivals Broadcom and AMD rose.
• A Semafor column by Liz Hoffman argues Huang was AI's buyer of last resort: Nvidia guarantees more than $100 billion of data-centre leases. Without that 'Nvidia put', she expects AI debt and equity to cost more.

Watch next: Nvidia's quarterly results next week. The WSJ notes investors see little change in chip demand, and rivals and cloud buyers rose on the day. If orders hold, a smaller backstop may simply mean healthier, less circular AI financing.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal and Semafor. Read the full story ↗

US existing home sales hit lowest since 2010 as mortgage rates bite

• US sales of previously owned homes fell 5.5% in October from September, the slowest pace since August 2010, the National Association of Realtors said. The annual rate of 3.75mn sales also missed forecasts, the FT reports.
• Higher energy prices from the Iran war have lifted inflation and Treasury yields, pushing mortgage rates as high as 7.5% in early October, a three-year high. Unsold homes now take the longest to sell in more than a decade.
• The Fed raised rates in September and traders expect more. Jefferies expects October's rate jump to weigh on sales in November and December.

Watch next: The Fed's meeting next month, where traders expect a quarter-point rise. Slower sales are not falling prices, and owners on cheap mortgages can wait. If inflation cools and yields ease, could pent-up demand return fast?

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

India grows 6.5% a year as hotels fill and foreign money returns

• Noah Smith (Noahpinion) argues India is quietly doing great: growth near 6.5% a year, faster than China since the pandemic, extreme poverty largely gone, public investment about four times pre-pandemic levels and exports widening.
• An ET Prime analysis finds the same strength in hotels. After the US-Iran war raised fuel prices and cut flights, Indian guests kept filling rooms and paid higher rates, from budget brands to palace suites.
• Investors are noticing. Foreign funds have bought nearly $6bn of Indian shares in November, the most since September 2024 after two years of selling, Reuters reports, as some look for an alternative to AI-heavy markets.

Other side: One quarter, a BRICS summit in Delhi and upbeat earnings calls are thin proof, and foreign money that arrives in a month can leave as fast. Smith himself warns that private investment and FDI still lag, and state-led spending lifts growth only for a while.

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Summary based on Noahpinion, The Economic Times and Reuters. Read the full story ↗

Nvidia's CEO probe shows how much markets lean on one man

• Nvidia shares slid after reports that a woman suspected of being a Chinese intelligence asset had grown close to CEO Jensen Huang, who has acknowledged an affair. An independent board committee is investigating; China calls the spy claim unsubstantiated.
• Bloomberg explains the market stakes: every big decision runs through Huang, no successor is designated, and Nvidia's weight in the S&P 500, about 8% for much of two years, has slipped below Apple's.
• Wired says the AI industry is reeling too. Nvidia controls about 90% of chips for training frontier models, so Huang decides who gets them, and it has invested in customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Other side: The board reportedly wants to keep Huang, and Nvidia's lead rests on years of investment and yearly chip launches, not one man's diary. A dip driven by scandal rather than sales may not last; rivals, China and doubts over AI spending are the bigger tests.

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Summary based on Bloomberg and Wired. Read the full story ↗

The end of cheap money is squeezing America's weakest borrowers

• An FT Big Read says the era of ultra-low borrowing costs is over for US companies: the Fed raised rates in September, markets price in more hikes, and the 10-year Treasury yield topped 5%, its highest since 2007.
• Strong investment-grade firms can absorb it. The pain falls on junk-rated borrowers, above all CCC names, whose bonds now yield almost 18%, and on companies with floating-rate private-credit loans that reprice every quarter.
• Many firms refinanced early to push out due dates, but past quick-fix debt deals often ended in a second default within three years.

Other side: Huge AI capital spending is holding up the US economy, and many investors think a full default wave needs a recession. Until one arrives, the damage may stay with borrowers that were fragile anyway.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

Oil slips below $100 as midterms raise hopes the Iran war fades

• A Times of India column, reposted on Tessellatum, argues the US midterm result raised the odds that the Iran war fades. Brent is back below $100 a barrel from $117 two weeks earlier, though global inventories are still over half a billion barrels below pre-war levels.
• India's energy shock tops 2% of GDP, yet its growth upgrades have been the strongest among big economies. Windfall taxes on fuel exports, disinvestment and strong GST collections should keep fiscal slippage small.
• The June-quarter current account deficit was $4.2bn, as services and remittances offset a wider goods gap. The author blames rupee pressure on over-hedged imports.

Other side: Inventories need over a year to rebuild after the war ends, freight and diesel margins stay far above pre-war levels, and a war that fades is not one that ends. Only June-quarter payments data is complete.

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Summary based on The Times of India. Read the full story ↗

IEA: India's renewables pass 300 GW, set to reach 530 GW by 2030

• India's renewable capacity passed 300 GW in the fourth quarter of 2026, almost four times its level a decade ago, the IEA says. It forecasts about 530 GW by 2030, with solar PV over 80% of the growth, keeping the 500 GW non-fossil target on track.
• Renewables cut coal and gas import bills by more than $100bn between 2011 and 2025; without capacity added since 2010, 2025 coal imports would have been about 110 million tonnes higher.
• Renewables should supply 35% of power by 2030, up from a quarter.

Other side: Variable renewables rise to about 26% of supply, and the IEA says grids, storage and DISCOM finances must keep pace. Gas import dependence still climbs to around 71% by 2030.

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Summary based on IEA. Read the full story ↗

China's bad consumer debt market booms as up to 100 million struggle

• Bloomberg Businessweek estimates, from Gavekal Dragonomics research, that as many as 100 million Chinese consumers are struggling with personal debt. Official data show far less stress, as extensions, refinancing and family help hide it, and China has no national personal bankruptcy system.
• Since 2021, when banks were allowed to sell bad consumer loans in bulk, the market has swelled to about 454 billion yuan by end-2025. Private funds buy at deep discounts and hire young collectors to chase repayment.
• New rules ban threats and call barrages, slowing recoveries, and collectors describe burnout.

Other side: Official delinquency is low, and selling bad loans off bank books is how a system cleans up. The 100 million is an estimate, not a count; a bankruptcy law could turn a slow squeeze into a managed reset.

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Summary based on Bloomberg. Read the full story ↗

Big Tech bets on owning the whole AI stack, from chips to robots

• An FT column argues the AI race is now a contest of vertical integration: Alphabet calls itself full stack, SpaceX runs data centres and is building a chip plant, Amazon is pursuing its own frontier model and Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face.
• The least integrated look most exposed: labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and neoclouds like CoreWeave, must accept bigger rivals' terms. Anthropic, seeking a $1.5tn IPO valuation and a raise of up to $100bn, wants to own more data centres too.
• Yet history cuts both ways: integrated giants often dominate a technology's dawn and later lose to open rivals, as IBM did in PCs, and their size draws regulators.

Other side: Going vertical also means giants that once kept to their own lanes now compete head-on in the costliest race yet. Specialists that partner well may move faster, as open PCs did against IBM.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

Citadel and Cboe-backed group sues to stop Kalshi's single-stock perps

• Kalshi won US regulatory approval last week to offer perpetual futures on single stocks such as McDonald's, SpaceX and Meta. These contracts never expire, trade around the clock and allow leverage. An industry group backed by Citadel Securities and Cboe promptly sued the CFTC.
• The group argues the contracts are security-based swaps that belong under the SEC, which would limit them to institutions. Judge Valerie Caproni set a fast briefing schedule and said the challenge looks likely to succeed.
• Kalshi calls the suit an attempt to block competition and says the launch is its most successful ever. The CFTC says incumbents are fighting its pro-innovation agenda, and NYSE owner ICE plans perps of its own.

Other side: Supporters such as DRW's Don Wilson see perps as a cheaper hedge that avoids rolling expiring contracts, and incumbents defending options and order-flow income are hardly neutral. Still, leveraged 24-hour bets on single stocks for everyday investors are exactly what securities law was built to police.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story ↗

Jeff Yass: There is no such thing as a stock-market bubble, even in AI

• Susquehanna co-founder Jeff Yass argues a high price is not a delusion but the market's best guess: every possible future weighted by its odds, set by people risking their own money.
• His 1999 example: a stock with a 15% shot at a tenfold payoff is a sensible buy even if it ends at zero. The bet was fair; the likelier outcome simply arrived. Even Amazon looked like a bubble after its crash.
• His dare to AI bubble callers: buy put options. If you won't, don't call the market irrational when it falls.

Other side: Odds can only be checked after the fact, so 'it was priced in' is hard to disprove. Herding, leverage and fund managers paid to chase rallies can push prices past any sober estimate, and a trading-firm founder is not a neutral judge of markets.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story ↗

Wall Street banks pile into dim-sum bonds, building a global yuan

• Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee notes that the world's biggest banks have sold nearly triple last year's total of offshore yuan (dim-sum) bonds in Hong Kong so far this year, led by Citigroup, Barclays and BNP Paribas.
• The draw is no longer currency arbitrage but China's vast pool of savers, short of returns at home, who can buy offshore through Southbound Bond Connect while staying in yuan.
• Beijing wants deep yuan markets to blunt Western sanctions. The irony, he says: as Washington frets, US megabanks help build them.

Other side: The yuan is still a sliver of global reserves, and capital controls set the ceiling: the 2016 liquidity squeeze showed Beijing can drain offshore yuan when it chooses. Banks borrowing cheap yuan may be opportunism, not a vote of confidence.

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Summary based on Mint. Read the full story ↗

Stocks beat home prices in every US state over 40 years, after tax, a WSJ study finds

• George Mason's Derek Horstmeyer modelled a 1985 buyer of a $100,000 home deciding whether to spend extra cash on a bigger house or the S&P 500, with 20% down, a floating-rate mortgage, and taxes and sale costs counted to end-2025.
• Stocks won everywhere: 7.57% a year after tax, against 6.22% for the best metro, Seattle, and 5.90% for the best state, Idaho. Illinois came last at 2.36%.
• Homes were far steadier, swinging about 9% a year against 16.5% for stocks, and the study leaves out buying to rent.

Other side: A home gives shelter, stability and forced saving, and the bigger house saves rent the model does not count. Stocks' far wider swings also test nerves; many investors sell at the bottom, which a house rarely tempts them to do.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story ↗

Yields on CCC junk bonds hit 18%, up from 12.5% in January

• ET Prime reports that the average yield on US bonds rated CCC and below, tracked by ICE BofA indices on the St Louis Fed's site, touched 18.17% on October 23, a three-year high and above the April 2025 tariff scare. It began 2026 near 12.5%.
• The pain sits on the bottom rung: BB-rated firms pay about two points over Treasuries, near January's level, while the 10-year Treasury yield rose from about 4.2% to 5.1%.
• It also flags owners moving prized assets, such as brands, into units beyond old lenders' reach, as J.Crew did in 2016-17, a question raised again at Aston Martin in July.

Other side: Trouble confined to the weakest credits is normal when rates rise. BB spreads near January's level suggest no broad credit crunch, and companies never stopped issuing junk bonds.

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Summary based on The Economic Times. Read the full story ↗

Martin Wolf: AI buildout at 3.6% of US GDP raises the risk of a bust

• Martin Wolf draws on a new Brookings paper by Columbia's Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, which projects US spending on the AI buildout at 3.6% of GDP a year to 2032, a bigger sector boom than the railways of the late 1800s.
• Big Tech's spending is now outrunning its cash flow, he notes, so data-centre developers, infrastructure funds and private credit are filling the gap, much of it through loans outsiders can barely see.
• His bigger worry is stocks: US valuations sit where they have historically come before crashes, and the longer the boom and the financial engineering run, the harder the landing.

Other side: Booms that end in busts often leave useful infrastructure behind, and if AI profits arrive fast enough today's spending will look prudent. Wolf himself grants AI may still prove transformative.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

AI's borrowing bill is rising as bond buyers demand more

• The FT's editorial board notes that Alphabet, Meta and Oracle went back to bond markets this week but had to pay clearly more than a few months ago; Oracle's new bonds carry coupons above 8.5%.
• Insuring against default is dearer too: protection on Meta's debt now costs about 1.2% a year, which the board likens to junk-rated South Africa.
• Its view: the AI boom may not end with a stock crash but with a slow squeeze in credit. Oracle has even pledged to cap the new money it raises from markets until 2030.

Other side: These firms still hold strong ratings and cash-rich core businesses, and they are still raising huge sums. Repricing risk is credit markets working, not breaking.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

The new Fragile Five are rich nations, a Mint column argues

• Narayan Ramachandran takes the 2013 label once pinned on Turkey, Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia and hands it to France, Italy, the UK, Germany and the US: fragile now in social, not currency, terms.
• Higher rates swell debt costs while inflation and an oil shock squeeze budgets. France's student protests have grown into a cost-of-living revolt against a fiscal deficit above 5% of GDP, and Italy has seen looting and fuel blockades.
• He rates Germany the least at risk of the five.

Other side: Floating reserve currencies and deep bond markets give these nations room the old Fragile Five never had. Street protests are not defaults, and the label may stretch the comparison.

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Summary based on Mint. Read the full story ↗

Is 'Made in China' heading for its 'Made in Japan' moment?

• Bloomberg Opinion's Howard Chua-Eoan, in Mint, recalls when 'Made in Japan' was a joke for flimsy toys, until firms like Nippon Kogaku (now Nikon) and Totsuko (now Sony) made it a badge of quality.
• He sees China at a similar turn: Shenzhen lens maker Viltrox is joining the elite, and Europeans buy Chinese EVs that an HSBC report judged simply better.
• Yet many Chinese brands play down their roots, from Miniso's Uniqlo-like logo to Temu's offshore legal home. He expects that to fade as confidence grows.

Other side: Japan rose in an era of open markets; China faces tariffs, quotas and security worries. Keeping a low profile may be smart strategy, not shyness.

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Summary based on Mint. Read the full story ↗

Bank Hapoalim says free shares made new investors, backing Musk

• In the WSJ, Bank Hapoalim's spokesperson praises Elon Musk's plan to give one SpaceX share to every American child next year.
• Israel's largest retail bank offered customers two of its shares or a cash grant in 2025. In the first round, about 240,000 people who had never held securities with it became shareholders, and it added a free investing-basics platform.
• Her case: owning even one share makes people curious about prices, dividends and earnings, and the first step is the hardest.

Other side: The author speaks for the bank that ran the scheme, and a gift share doubles as marketing. Musk's plan is still a promise, and real financial literacy takes more than one stock.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story ↗

Why AI is not yet showing up in productivity data

• Zerodha Varsity revisits Robert Solow's 1987 quip that computers were visible everywhere except the productivity statistics; US trend labour productivity growth had slid from 3.8% in 1948 to 1.2%.
• History shows a lag: factories gained from electricity only after redesigning around individual motors, lifting manufacturing productivity 5.3% a year in the 1920s. Computers paid off in the late 1990s.
• AI forecasts diverge: Daron Acemoglu sees under 1% over a decade, assuming about 5% of tasks shift to AI; Goldman Sachs sees about 1.5 points a year, assuming about 25%.

Other side: The J-curve is a hypothesis, not a promise: if the gains never arrive, today's AI spending looks less like early investment and more like overbuilding.

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Summary based on Zerodha Varsity. Read the full story ↗

India's three trade-offs: fuel prices, rates and foreign money

• Deepa Vasudevan writes in Mint that the West Asia war has sharpened three balances for India: cheap fuel versus market prices, savers versus borrowers, and foreign money versus fiscal health.
• Holding pump prices down only delays inflation. With wholesale inflation at 11.4%, either the RBI keeps raising rates or retail fuel prices rise, possibly after Diwali.
• Net capital inflows that averaged $50bn a year until 2023-24 have nearly dried up. Tax breaks for foreign investors might help, but would cost revenue as the deficit risks overshooting.

Other side: These trade-offs can ease on their own: if crude prices fall, fuel, inflation and rate pressures soften together and the hardest choices fade.

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Summary based on Mint. Read the full story ↗

Elliott warns of FOGO as bear-market alarm bells ring

• In an October investor letter seen by the WSJ, Paul Singer's Elliott likens today's debt-fuelled, hype-driven market to the Roaring '20s and says almost every bear-market warning is flashing.
• It lists US deficits, sticky inflation, private credit, AI hype and circular AI deals, plus gambling-like trading, and warns the mood could flip from FOMO to fear of getting obliterated.
• Elliott itself has lagged, gaining under 2% in the first nine months of 2026 against nearly 13% for the S&P 500, and is keeping capital ready for forced sellers.

Other side: Elliott's letters are known for gloom, and frothy markets can run for years; being early on a crash can cost nearly as much as missing it.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story ↗

What caused the Binance hack? Eswar Prasad blames crypto's middlemen

• Cornell economist Eswar Prasad argues the $6.3bn hack of Binance shows how crypto's promise of decentralisation has been undercut by big centralised exchanges.
• The blockchains were not breached, he says; the weak points lie in the ecosystem around them, from exchanges to oracle software, plus human error such as an apparently compromised laptop.
• He warns AI is helping hackers, including from North Korea, find subtle flaws, and urges regulators to stop a loss of trust spilling into mainstream finance.

Other side: Banks get hacked too, and exchanges offer customers the reassurance that losses can be fixed, something a pure self-custody world would not.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

Europe's pension systems strain; UK welfare bill forecast at £431.3bn

• The Wall Street Journal reports that ageing populations and stretched budgets are breaking Europe's old bargain of heavy taxes in return for a comfortable state pension. Anger is sharpest in France, where today's workers fund today's retirees and Finance Minister Roland Lescure says the maths leaves no way around a later retirement age.
• Northern hybrids such as Denmark's, which add invested workplace funds to a state floor, look sturdier but tie retirement age to life expectancy.
• In a Financial Times column, Tej Parikh argues Britain's benefits system works like a ratchet: easy to widen, hard to trim, driven by the state pension and fast-rising disability claims, with the latest Budget offering no curbs.

Other side: Retirees paid in for decades and see these as earned rights, not handouts. Later retirement ages hit manual workers hardest, and part of Britain's disability rise reflects genuinely worse health, so cutting payments without fixing healthcare and jobs may simply move the cost elsewhere.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

Junk debt rout hits CCC borrowers and the funds that bet on them

• The Financial Times reports a long sell-off in the weakest junk debt, as higher rates, fears of AI disruption and costly energy make lenders doubt heavily indebted companies. Yields on Europe's CCC-rated debt have climbed above 21%, with worries over France's finances adding pressure.
• Owners moving assets beyond creditors' reach, as at Aston Martin and Altice International, have set off sudden drops. Credit hedge fund Arini is down 26% this year, and forced selling by distressed-debt funds has deepened the slide.
• In Europe, telecom borrowers such as Virgin Media have been hit hardest.

Other side: Higher-rated junk is holding up, so this may be a clear-out of the weakest names rather than a broad credit crisis. Yields this high could also tempt bargain hunters once rates stop rising.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

OpenAI's discounts lure customers from Anthropic before its IPO

• The Information reports that OpenAI's heavy discounts on its models and its Codex coding tool are pulling some business away from Anthropic. At HR software firm Rippling, Anthropic's share of coding work has dropped to 18% since May, with OpenAI now handling most of it.
• Replit moved most of its AI spending to OpenAI after a discount of more than 30%, a person familiar said, once Anthropic declined to extend its own discount without a bigger commitment.
• Anthropic has largely held firm on pricing and margins, and its new Opus 5.5 model has since retaken the lead on routing service OpenRouter.

Other side: Discounts that deepen losses cannot run forever, and a better model can win customers back fast, as the OpenRouter rebound suggests. A handful of startup anecdotes may also say little about large enterprise contracts.

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Summary based on The Information. Read the full story ↗

Wall Street gets choosier about funding the AI build-out

• Lenders and investors who funded AI with few questions now demand tougher terms. Neoclouds such as CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale have effectively been shut out of the bond market, and one CoreWeave bond now yields above 15%.
• Strong borrowers feel it too: hyperscaler bonds trade at discounts, Broadcom sweetened terms for banks, OpenAI's round has fallen short of its goal, Lambda cut its target valuation and Nscale is pushing back its IPO.
• Worries include local pushback against data centres, AI profits arriving late and investors overloaded on one theme. Nebius is leaning on customer prepayments.

Other side: Money is choosier, not gone: creditworthy firms still closed giant chip financings this week. A pause that weeds out shaky projects could leave the build-out on firmer ground.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal. Read the full story ↗

AI agents get better, but businesses see barely any agent orders

• Wired reports Meta says over 10 million people in the US and Canada have activated its Muse agent, with shopping the top task. Yet most firms on recent earnings calls, from DoorDash to Hilton, saw little agent activity.
• Some are preparing anyway: Chipotle is fixing its site so agents can check out, and Meta plans a fee on agent sales. Amazon softened its stance after blocking Muse; Insurify reversed its block.
• In a separate Wired test of six agents over a day, OpenAI's Dots scored best and Muse came a close second as the easiest to set up. All still made mistakes.

Other side: Low numbers may say more about early days than demand, and one reporter's day of tests is a small sample. Price-comparing agents could also help shoppers more than they hurt sellers.

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Summary based on Wired. Read the full story ↗

Intel's record crash caps a week when the AI trade cracked

• Intel fell 29% on Friday, its worst session ever, after warning that memory-chip prices inflated by the AI boom will keep PC sales weak, the WSJ reports. The Nasdaq composite fell 2.9%, its worst day since June.
• Alphabet had its worst day on record as Google's search-ad growth slowed, partly due to AI mode, while Amazon's free cash flow plunged. With the Fed raising rates in September, heavy AI spending now reads as a burden.
• An FT Unhedged column argues cash flow is what moves these stocks now: Meta, Alphabet and Amazon were punished for spending more than expected, while Microsoft's restraint kept its shares steadier.

Other side: One bad week is not a bust. Some investors expect AI listings and a calmer Middle East to restart the rally, and steep falls in quality names have often proved buying chances.

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Summary based on The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. Read the full story ↗

Apollo lends as OpenAI-backed Thrive buys ADT for $15bn

• Thrive Holdings, spun out of Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital and backed by OpenAI, is buying home-alarm network ADT for $15bn including debt. Apollo, a past owner that made modest returns on it, is financing the deal.
• The FT's Lex column says a new breed of AI-focused owners is promising bold makeovers of old businesses, while firms like Apollo shift from buyouts to corporate lending: steadier interest, less risk and less upside.

Other side: An AI-led makeover of an alarm company is still a theory, and a buyer paying a big premium has less room for error. Lenders also lose if a heavily financed bet goes wrong.

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Summary based on Financial Times. Read the full story ↗