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 55 seconds.

Yesterday, Credit Suisse got put under the microscope, Meta trimmed the herd, and Volkswagen splashed cash on going electric. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Crypto bros finally got a reason to emerge from their hidey-holes. Looks like all that mistrust in the world of banking is pushing some serious bucks into the wacky world of Web3. Seatbelts on. 🙈

• Mood for yesterday was super volatile. The same as every single day this year. Mr Market is giving us quite a bumpy ride.

• Canada stepped up their investment into rare metal mining. They want to be the answer to Europe’s raw material problem, since the West wants to move away from China too.

Story Roundup

1 - Credit Suisse gets in a bind. Again. 🔥

Just when you thought all was well, Credit Suisse managed to make stuff worse.

They’re in some hot water again.

Over the last 5 years, Credit Suisse shares have fallen by 95%.

Their investors might as well have soaked their money in petrol, stuffed it into an oil drum, and lit the sucker up.

Cut to yesterday, and the share price fell by another 10%.

They found some “material weaknesses” in the balance sheet - and these weaknesses could snowball into a bomb that blows the bank up.

Credit Suisse also apologized for “not maintaining an effective risk assessment process”, which is corporate-speak for “we messed up”.

Markets are recession-flavoured, and they think that the chances of Credit Suisse going bankrupt are 1.5 times higher than in 2008.

Tough stuff. 😅

2 - Zuckerberg baba goes around with the axe. 🪓

The metaverse dream is not looking good.

Facebook’s parent company Meta is gonna be snipping 10k jobs and slashing a lot of their vacant roles.

When pestered about the state of things, Mark Zuckerberg said that 2023 is a “year of efficiency”.

Last year was a very humbling wake-up call for all high-flying tech companies.

Meta lost close to $10 billion on their Reality Labs division. Investors have been souring for a long while, because they want to see less experimental bets and more proven ones.

Maybe one day we’ll put on our VR headsets to go to work while AI owns us all, but there is a long way to go until that day.

Until then, I’m staying away from the metaverse.

The reason?

Lack of toilets. 🙏🏻

3 - Volkswagen injects cash into their EV biz. 🔋

Volkswagen is the world’s second largest carmaker, and they’re making a big decision.

They want to switch out their gas-guzzling beasts for electric beauties that glide along the road.

VW will be spending about $180 billion over the next 5 years on their own battery plants and raw material stocks.

But that’s not the interesting part.

The question is over where this money goes.

A lot of these plants will be built in China.

When 99% of the world is fleeing China and buying the first ticket out that they can, VW wants to strengthen their position.

They think that China is where the action will be over the next few decades, and they’re betting heavy on it.

Bolt. ⚡

4 - American inflation confuses the Fed. 🤔

February inflation numbers just came in for America, and things are looking confusing… to say the least.

Prices rose 6% year-on-year, which was a very welcome reduction, but the problem doesn’t lie there.

“Core” inflation - which is normal inflation minus food and energy - rose 0.5%.

A higher cost of living is starting to get really sticky, and central banks don’t like it.

Normal order of business would be to hike rates to take care of this blip in the grocery bill, but last week’s bank explosions were a prime reason behind why we can’t start doing that.

The Fed has some scary decisions to make.

Between a rock and a hard place. 🪨

5 - OpenAI drops GPT-4. 💀

Story is in the headline.

Before your LinkedIn feeds get saturated with "here are 472+ GPT-4 prompts” posts, here is a short and sweet outline behind what it can do, and why this is big news.

GPT-4’s special since it doesn’t rely on only text.

It can take audio, video, AND text as input.

It can also -
- pass the bar exam (the lawyer one) at 95+ percentile
- pass every single GCSE exam
- be more flexible with it’s tone and style.

Oh… and ChatGPT users can get access to it. But only paying ones.

The next few generations will either be the smartest in history, or the dumbest in history.🤷🏻

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 ⚡