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This article first appeared in the Morning Brief. Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. Subscribe
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
Today’s newsletter is by Julie Hyman, anchor and correspondent at Yahoo Finance. Follow Julie on Twitter @juleshyman. Read this and more market news on the go with the Yahoo Finance App.
It feels a little like 2017 in the market right now.
That was the height of the rush for companies to slap “blockchain” on their corporate name, or throw the term around in press releases hyping new products and partnerships.
The trend was perhaps best summed up in this Reuters headline: “Long Island Iced Tea skyrockets after renaming itself Long Blockchain.” (It didn’t work out well.)
This time, it’s artificial intelligence.
Take a tour of the Yahoo Finance trending ticker page right now (one of my faves), and chances are, you’ll find a company with “AI” in the name, or one that has just released a hot new product touting its use of artificial intelligence.
Exhibit A is BigBear.ai (BBAI). The provider of an “end-to-end data analytics platform operationalizing artificial intelligence and machine learning at scale” came public via SPAC in a transaction that closed on Dec. 8, 2021. The shares finished the session that day at $9.25. Today they’re trading around $5.50.
BigBear.ai doesn’t make money (of course). Its main customers are in federal government, including the Department of Defense.
When it announced earnings in November, it reported that revenue had risen 1.2%, and the newly appointed CEO, former IBM executive Mindy Long, focused on cost containment in a statement. At the time, BigBear forecast that 2022 revenue would rise by 3% to 16.8% — a wide range.
Now in
This posting initial appeared in the Early morning Transient. Get the Early morning Brief sent straight to your inbox each Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. Subscribe
Thursday, March 17, 2022
The Federal Reserve last but not least took the plunge and raised charges. As anticipated, Fed Chair Jerome Powell led the Federal Open Industry Committee to elevate its benchmark fascination level focus on by 25 foundation points.
The Fed famously operates according to two mandates (essentially it has three by regulation): value stability and greatest employment. How the Fed achieves these objectives is up to Powell & Co. but if previous is prologue, there could be issues brewing as the Fed amps up its hawkishness.
In the contemporary period, the Fed has made a bewildering array of equipment: fascination-rate focusing on, forward advice, curiosity on surplus reserves, repo amenities, quantitative easing, and quantitative tightening, to name a couple. Not to mention any amount of unexpected emergency services to be conjured up and deployed with the Treasury in troubled moments.
This was not often the situation. When inflation was skyrocketing just over 4 decades in the past, Paul Volcker was elected Fed chairman in 1979 with a mandate to crush superior charges. The buyer selling price index (CPI) reached a significant of 14.8% in 1980, right before his inflation-battling endeavours took result.
Prior to Volcker, the Fed targeted limited-time period fascination costs to manipulate the cash offer to juice or put the brakes on the financial system. With out wading too considerably in the weeds, the Volcker-period Fed focused the real dollars offer. This and other modifications persisted largely into the end of the 1980s — even right after Alan Greenspan grew to become chair in 1987.
But Greenspan pivoted and designed his personal fashion in
This posting initial appeared in the Early morning Temporary. Get the Early morning Short despatched straight to your inbox each individual Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. Subscribe
Thursday, March 3, 2022
Is the U.S. dollar above as a reserve currency?
That is a person of several takeaways from the more and more anfractuous conflict involving Russia and Ukraine. A flurry of significant-handed sanctions has isolated Moscow, and may perhaps yet ricochet throughout the international economy in unanticipated ways (not the the very least of which incorporates inflation spurred by skyrocketing electrical power rates, and fears bordering Russian source).
The debate above the morality (and feasibility) of blockading Russia has amplified yet another discussion that is brewed for many years. Specifically, can the buck maintain its superiority around other currencies as the reserve instrument of preference?
Some believe that the global community’s reaction to Moscow might light the fuse that makes other nations last but not least dump the greenback for superior — as Russia alone has done for many years, considering that its intense habits prompted governments to put the squeeze on its funds. That suggestion was reinforced on Wednesday by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who raised eyebrows by floating that it was doable to have additional than just one reserve forex.
Speaking to Bloomberg News’ Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway this 7 days, investor Zoltan Pozsar warned that Russia’s loss of obtain to its reserves has sent the message that establishments can’t depend on bucks if geopolitical concerns occur, producing the greenback significantly less desirable as a safe and sound haven.
And Dylan Grice, founder of Calderwood Money, warned this week that the sanctions squeeze represented “a turning point in financial background: the finish of [dollar] hegemony the acceleration in the