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 14 seconds.

Yesterday, a mysterious AI company scooped up millions, NFT babas awoke from their slumber, and Prada purchases power through. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• The smoke is still rising from SVB’s explosion. And where you see smoke, you can bet your life that there’s fire nearby. Goldman is predicting that the Fed will be pausing rate hikes entirely because they don’t want to stress the financial system too much.

• Turkish stock markets have had their best year yet. Locals are seeking shelter from 80% inflation, which made the index pop over 2x in 2022. Hungry for returns.

• Ever since the SVB nonsense started, stocks globally have shed almost $500bn in value. Pretty useless number, but an interesting one. 💀

Story Roundup

1 - Anthropic lifted $300mn more. 🤖

Forget SVB - it looks like the big bucks are pouring back in to tech startups.

A mysterious AI company called Anthropic is raising $300 million.

At a mammoth $4.1 billion valuation.

This is probably the first time anyone is hearing of them. Anthropic was formed in 2021 when a group of researchers left OpenAI after getting into a fight about the company's direction.

They vowed to do it bigger and better - so they handed their resignations in and got to work.

Till date, they've built an AI model called Claude, which is like GPT but more bonkers. Which, by the way, might be one reason why Google invested $300mn in them last month.

But the main reason Google has splashed millions is because Anthropic will be providing Google with computing resources.

You know who made that exact cash-for-computing deal?

Microsoft with OpenAI.

And look where OpenAI is sitting right now.

Sign of the times. 🤔

2 - OpenSea thinks that NFTs are back in fashion. 😂

Okay, maybe we forgot about SVB a little too quickly.

OpenSea reckons that that NFTs are on a rollercoaster ride to the top.

Lots of eyebrows were raised over their financial health given (ahem ahem) recent events, which is why their CEO was forced to give some statements on how life is going.

He reinforced that the company has a healthy runway, partly because of the stacks of cash they hustled from investors over 2021.

Monthly volumes at OpenSea are down over 95% in the last year. ($4.9bn in Jan -> $253mn in Nov)

Crypto execs are convinced that it's just a general market slowdown and that we are at the start.

But hey, these are the same guys that thought “metaverse real estate” was a good thing. 🤷🏻

3 - Rich shoppers began skimping on luxury. 👜

Bernard Arnault owns LVMH - the parent company of LV, Dior, Tiffany, Fendi, and Bulgari, to name a few.

There is a reason why Bernard Arnault is the richest guy in the world.

And it’s because he doesn’t sell luxury. He sells scarcity.

Sales of his products skyrocketed last year.

This might be odd to a lot of people, because big-ticket purchases like that Prada bag or those Gucci shoes usually slow down in high interest rate, recession-marred environments.

But it looks like millennials are keeping the party going.

Morgan Stanley has done the math, and nearly half of all US adults aged 18-29 are spending less on rents, and using those savings to buy stuff like handbags and wallets.

Plus, access to free-flowing, zero-interest rate credit in the form of Buy now, Pay later is spurring a lot of this boom.

Credit card debt is at an all-time high too.

Splashing cash. 🙈

4 - SVB in Britain got sold for a pound. 💸

If I knew that I could get a bank and a Snickers bar for the same 5 AED, you already know which one I’m picking.

Really makes me regret my purchases at the grocery store yesterday.

All jokes aside, HSBC just scooped up the British arm of SVB for 1 pound.

This means that the UK government won’t have to “step in” and protect depositors.

SVB UK had about $7 billion of deposits when the Bank of England said that it might be at risk of failing - which is crazy when you consider that they had $12bn of deposits last Thursday.

All SVB UK customers have access to their money as usual.

Shareholders definitely lose here, employees also lose (depending on how senior they are 😉) and life continues as normal.

God bless banking. 🤦🏻

5 - Oil majors rake in BIG bucks. 🛢️

Businesses that sell dead dinosaurs are in for the payday of a lifetime.

ExxonMobil and Chevron are expected to rake in over $100bn in profit over 2022, which represents a tax bonanza for governments.

If you thought that wasn’t enough, wait till you see Saudi.

Saudi Aramco made an eye-popping $161 billion last year.

Joe Biden called them "profiteers of war" and Exxon recently sued Europe over an increase in windfall taxes.

It's a stunning reversal in fortunes, when just 2 (very) short years back we saw oil companies struggle with a corona-induced slowdown in demand.

Greta Thunberg is just speechless. 😶

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 ⚡