Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 5 minutes and 12 seconds.

That's less time than it takes for Binance to buy out it's biggest competitor... then say no, Meta to fire about 11k people, and TikTok to warn of billions in lost revenue. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• The crypto industry is contagious with the FTX virus - Bitcoin touched $17k...

• Meta stock jumped about 8% as they planned to lay off 11k employees, cutting costs significantly.

• King Dollar continued it's gains for another straight week. Fed's aggressive approach to tackling inflation provides protein for the Dollar's muscles.

Story Roundup

1 - Binance becomes King of the Hill. 👑

The last 24 hours have been a deadly swarm of chaos for crypto markets.

And no one enjoyed it more than Binance.

Binance's CEO played a strategic game of 4D chess to sink his biggest competitor's ship (FTX), and he did it all overnight.

But after signing papers to buy FTX, he took the mother of all U-turns.

Binance isn't buying FTX. Full stop.

This comes after concerns over their mishandling of customer funds and some digging by financial regulators.

Blood is on the streets in the crypto casino. 🪙

2 - Meta says bye-bye to 11,000 employees. 💀

In their most dramatic culling in history, Meta has downsized their workforce by 11k people.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed employees on Wednesday and informed them of the layoffs - the full letter is in the title.

Revenue growth that pandemic times offered was unsustainable, which meant that Facebook was no longer an efficient business.

Teams all across the company are gonna be hit hard, along with a hiring freeze that will continue into next year.

Tight, tight belts. ❌

3 - TikTok slashes revenue targets by $2 billion. 📉

Ambitious goals and lackluster performance - TikTok is slashing it's targets for revenue by over $2 billion.

As the river of advertising revenue slowly dries up, social media businesses are being battered. This is the first sign that TikTok is not immune to the problems that plague it's counterparts, despite the insane growth they're going through.

They've restructured their US operations to try and cut costs, even delaying their IPO to ensure that a difficult market doesn't beat up their valuation.

Staff have been directly blamed for this slump, from not driving enough sales in advertising to slowing down efforts on the ecommerce end.

Slowdown's coming in hot. 🥵

4 - Germany considers bumping up taxes for the rich folks. 💸

Germany might be considering increasing taxes on it's wealthiest people to fund a $200bn energy package.

There are three things that they've explored - - increasing the top rate of tax- ripping up plans to cut tax rates- introducing a new "solidarity charge" on people that make big bucks.

They're also dumping more cash in subsidies for renewable energy - so that's everything under the sun (EVs, green hydrogen, solar).

When all hell is breaking loose, putting less money in people's pockets doesn't seem like a great thing to do. 😏

5 - Abu Dhabi gets it's first ETF. 🧺

Abu Dhabi has soared this year. There is no doubting that.

Their stock index is on an absolute rocket ship - outpacing all of it's peers across the globe.

And they're getting their first ETF.

Things are looking great for the oil-rich capital of the UAE as they keep on attracting inflows from people outside.

All of this helps push local markets up and makes it stand out as a beacon in a sea of suffering and negative YTD returns.

All aboard. 🚀

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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