Older Markets stories

Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet all beat Q1 2026 revenue estimates, but combined hyperscaler capex tops $650B, raising urgent questions about AI spending payback.

Amazon beat Q1 estimates with EPS of $2.78 on $181.5B revenue, but free cash flow plunged 95% to $1.2B as AI investments drove capex to $44.2B. AWS revenue surged 28% to $37.59B, while its chips business topped a $20B annual run rate.

Sen. Thom Tillis ends his blockade of Kevin Warsh's Fed chair nomination after the DOJ drops its probe into Jerome Powell, with markets now pricing in at most one rate cut for all of 2026.

The Fed holds rates steady at 3.5%-3.75% in Jerome Powell's final meeting as chair, with inflation at 3.3% due to Iran war oil shock. Markets see no rate cut in 2026.

BlackRock Investment Institute advises moving from bonds to stocks, citing persistent inflation from the Iran war and a 40-basis-point surge in 10-year Treasury yields to 4.39%.

AI-driven earnings growth remains concentrated in tech, yet the Magnificent Seven have fallen 7% YTD despite 18% earnings growth estimates for 2026, highlighting a divergence between market performance and fundamentals.

Goldman beat Q1 EPS by $1.63 and revenue by $570M while the Fed proposed cutting capital requirements 4.8%-7.8% across the bank stack. Two tailwinds collide on the same tape.

The BEA's advance Q1 GDP estimate lands April 30 as Atlanta Fed's nowcast sits at 1.2% and Brent trades above $107, trapping the Fed between a growth scare and oil-driven inflation.

The IMF cut its 2026 global growth forecast to 3.1% and raised inflation to 4.4%, while Wall Street's biggest banks posted record Q1 earnings on a trading boom driven by the same war.

Sarah Breeden's rare BBC warning cites AI valuations near dot-com peak levels, $2.5 trillion in untested private credit, and Middle East risk as three threats converging at the worst possible moment.

The DOJ dropped its criminal probe of Fed Chair Powell on April 24, removing the key Senate obstacle to Kevin Warsh's confirmation and setting up the most consequential Fed handover in two decades.

The DOJ dropped its probe of Jerome Powell on Friday, clearing the Senate path for Kevin Warsh and forcing bond traders to recalibrate every assumption about the rate outlook through 2027.

Fundstrat analysis confirms Trump's posts drive more S&P 500 best-and-worst days than any U.S. president since Reagan, forcing institutions to trade the president, not the economy.

WBD shareholders voted 99% in favor of Paramount Skydance's $110.9 billion takeover, but the stock fell 4.5% the next day as investors tallied a $49 billion debt load and $24 billion in Gulf sovereign funds.

Banks, regulators and traders are no longer treating private credit as an isolated yield story. They are starting to price how stress in a multi-trillion-dollar market would travel through the rest of Wall Street.

JPMorgan’s new 7,600 target turns the AI trade into a hard index number, sharpening the market’s dependence on a narrow group of mega-cap profit engines.

Alphabet's jumbo bond sale, capped by a rare 100-year tranche, shows Wall Street is now financing the AI infrastructure race alongside Big Tech cash flows.

Reuters, citing The Information, reported that SpaceX lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, giving private investors a rare benchmark for pricing one of the market’s most coveted assets.

CoreWeave's IPO became a referendum on whether public investors will fund AI cloud growth when it arrives with heavy debt, extreme capex and a customer list led by Microsoft.

Reuters reported on April 9, citing The Information, that SpaceX lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, giving investors a rare hard figure for a private company long valued on launch dominance and Starlink growth.

CoreWeave's IPO gives public-market investors a direct test of whether AI-computing demand can support high valuations, heavy debt and concentrated customer exposure.

A consortium of 10 European banks is preparing a euro stablecoin, reflecting a strategic push to protect deposits, payments revenue and monetary influence from the rise of dollar tokens.

CoreWeave’s $8.5 billion loan is more than a funding deal: it shows AI infrastructure is starting to be financed like power, telecom and data centers through large-scale debt.

Governor Tiff Macklem says AI is becoming a financial-stability issue as common models, data and vendors raise the risk of faster, more correlated market stress.