Happy Friday, Munchers! 🙏

Hope you have a lovely weekend ahead and enjoy the partying today.

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 53 seconds.

Yesterday, Disney went on a steep cost-cutting drive, Credit Suisse slumped to a hefty loss, and China-America tensions got renewed.

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• US junk bonds have rallied on hopes of a "soft" economic landing. When the prices of bonds go down, their yields go up. And spreads between yields on high risk debt and Treasuries have just got to their lowest in 10 months.

• Global markets remained mixed after both Biden and Powell held speeches. Investors are assessing earnings and thinking about companies' longer-term profits.

• The path toward higher rates seems set in stone, but we might have more rate hikes than are currently priced in. 💀

Story Roundup

1 - Disney starts to fantasize about profits. 🏰

What's bad for most of the sane world is usually great news on Wall Street.

And that's how it's looking at Disney.

They're gonna be chopping 7k jobs and trying to save about $5.5bn in the next two years.

Disney is trying to restore the magic, and movies are dying fast.

So the move is digital.

Streaming seems to be the way to go and a lot of money has been funneled towards stuff that makes their online margins fatter.

Lights, camera, action. 🎥

2 - Credit Suisse slumps to a jumbo loss. 📉

Maybe Credit Suisse should change it's name to Debit Suisse.

Not much seems to be going right for them, and they just reported their biggest loss since the 2008 crisis.

CS shares tumbled a stunning 20 percent, adding to the woes of their 85% drop over the last year.

Customers withdrew almost $130 billion in the last 3 months of 2022 with almost 2/3rds of those withdrawals coming in October. Maybe investors got more spooked than usual.

Numbers like this really lay bare the scale of the CS crisis and tell us quite a bit about what all needs to be done.

Their biggest focus now is gonna be on making sure their slim margins are forced to get fatter, and that they restructure the business to put profits first.

Scary stuff. 😓

3 - America finds out that China was indeed spying on them. 🤔

Turns out that Chinese spy balloon was pretty malicious.

The US said that the balloon had multiple antennas and that other similar balloons had been spread across the globe.

Over 40 countries over 5 continents have been subject to this surveillance - and America is super angry.

Biden wants to go ahead and blacklist Chinese companies that supported the balloon's entry into American airspace and expose other Chinese surveillance activities.

Stalemate... soon to become checkmate? ♟️

4 - German inflation sinks to a fresh low. 🥳

Just a month back, inflation in Germany hit a 70-year high.

Yesterday, the number weighed in at 9.2% - a much, much bigger drop than expected.

German families are rejoicing in the

This news is gonna give the ECB a reason to stop slamming on the brakes, because Germany is not the only European country that's had larger-than-expected drops in inflation.

Berlin introduced price caps on gas for consumers too, so the days of double-digit inflation are well behind us.

Maybe we'll all be okay. 🤷

5 - Toshiba gets a billion-dollar payout from private equity. 💸

Private Equity comes for everyone - and Japan's private equity has some big pockets.

Toshiba is the next $15 billion target for Japan's biggest PE firm.

If this buyout is approved, it's gonna be a good sign-off to an 8-year saga that saw the company go from market leader to literal brink of collapse.

Toshiba was struck by crisis in 2015 when it's US-based nuclear business faced some massive writedowns, and everything has been in jeopardy since.

Support from shareholders will be critical since it is not an ideal time to be selling at a loss.

Hard knock-life.

Hope you enjoyed this issue of the Market Munch. If you've got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

Aryaansh