Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 51 seconds.

Yesterday, WhatsApp got Brazil’s businesses roaring, Blackstone set up a mammoth fund, and EY decided to patch stuff up. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Asian stocks popped for a bit then gave up all of those gains as investors wait with bated breath for the US inflation report.

• This is an interesting one - Goldman is moving hard into Japan with transaction banking. They wanna get a hand on all sorts of cash flow. 💀

• Oil prices consolidated and calmed down a little. Just hovering around $80-83 a barrel.

Story Roundup

1 - WhatsApp gives their cash cow a go in Brazil. 💸

One of the biggest, best, and most untapped opportunities of this decade is business payment via chat 

And Meta is turning up the e-commerce heat on everyone else.

Starting tomorrow, Brazilian WhatsApp users can now officially pay companies through their chats.

Brazil is being used as a test bed for Meta, since Zuckerberg and co desperately need to diversify away from advertising.

This is a massive opportunity, and emerging markets are the right place to start.

Countries like Brazil, India, Pakistan, and the Phillippines are dominated by mom-and-pop stores.

These guys don’t want or need to set up an online shopping website.

So imagine how seamless it becomes if everyone starts paying with WhatsApp.

Because who doesn’t have it downloaded? 🤷🏻

2 - Blackstone scoops up billions. 🔥

If you thought that the world was ending and money was tight for everyone, think again.

Blackstone just raised their biggest fund ever - weighing in at a staggering $30.4 billion.

 They’re gonna be using these big bucks to attack opportunistic deals - think rental housing, data centers, and hospitality.

The real estate market has seen a vicious pullback (for anyone who isn’t in Dubai) over the last year, and where there is a pullback, there is opportunity.

Blackstone wants to grab onto undervalued deals with both hands, and never look back. Sounds like child’s play in theory, but is a super tricky ballgame in real life.

Sign of the times? 🤔

3 - EY scraps their break-up plan. 🤷🏻

When EY announced that they were gonna split their business up, the entire accounting industry got ready for it’s biggest shake-up in 2 decades.

But yesterday, the guys at the top decided that they weren’t gonna go ahead with the breakup.

The US HQ’ed EY partners said that they weren’t keep on it anymore, which meant that everyone else followed in suit.

Plus they’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars and engaged thousands of employees with the shuffle.

EY wanted to split the business up because of conflict-of-interest rules, which mean that they cannot sell services to any of their audit clients.

Both sides of the company are chilling with an arranged marriage for now. ❤️

4 - Financial infra startup gets a $270mn boost. ⚡

Nature is healing.

Those multi-million dollar rounds that we saw in 2021 are slowly coming back in style.

A little-known fintech startup that’s building modern infrastructure for markets just raised $270mn at a $2 billion valuation.

The company is called Clear Street, and they want their motto is simple. Out with the old, in with the new.

They want to replace outdated financial infrastructure, and there are a fair few reasons why.

America’s stock markets move trillions of dollars daily but still rely on mainframe technology from the 1980s. Old tech like this gives us a lot of mind-numbing manual processes to do and any errors are super costly.

Who knows, maybe we’ll get to lose money trade 24×7. 🤷🏻

5 - Norway gets ready to go on strike. 😡

Look at what’s happening in “developed” countries.

A Norwegian Union with 23,000 members has warned the public of strikes starting Sunday if any salary hikes aren’t handed out.

They want to bump the pay of ~185k workers by a fair few percent, because Norwegian inflation is sitting at a 30-year high with no signs of slowing down.

Pricey. 🤦🏻

Hope you enjoyed this issue of Market Munch. If you’ve got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email and I'll get a ping in my inbox. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡