Happy Monday, 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.

Over the weekend, financial dystopia got super real, Google tried supercharging the AI race, and Chinese shoppers splurged on luxury. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Oil prices have consolidated near the $85-89 level. Consolidation is a super important stage in the price of any asset, and it looks like life isn’t getting easier at the gas pump anytime soon.

• China’s central bank continued slowly squeezing liquidity into the financial system. Currently sitting at a $25 billion lending facility.

• Asian markets were mixed, European markets were cautious, and American markets stayed flat. Nothing special happened to rock us either way over the weekend. 💀

Story Roundup

1 - IMF gives birth to “Unicoin”. 🪙

A new global currency just launched, but 99% of the world has no idea what this could mean for us.

The IMF is working on something called the Unicoin - an “international” central bank digital currency (CBDC).

This has been designed to work with all existing national currencies and gives the IMF ultimate control over your money.

With a CBDC system, authorities can track what you buy and sell, and control what you spend on - which is super scary once you think about it.

Economy starting to stumble? No problem. Put an expiry date on people’s money so they have to go out and spend.

Someone’s bought too much meat? No problem. Ban them from buying petrol because they’ve used too much carbon this month.

Loaned your friend some money and want to make sure he spends it on “his startup”? No problem. Set what he can spend the money on before you send it to him.

Maybe that last one actually makes sense, but the rest are all part of a power-grab.

The WEF said this, not me - “you will own nothing and be happy”.

It’s gonna be have-nots, and have yachts. 🙈

2 - Google races to scrap a search AI together. 🏃🏻‍♂️

The search wars are heating up.

Samsung might replace Google Chrome with Bing as the default search engine on it’s devices.

Distribution is the most important thing in any software business - and Samsung sells close to 300 million phones every year.

Google makes $3 billion a year from it’s Search advertising, and all of those big bucks are at stake.

But Sundar Pichai isn’t stupid - he’s pushing on with his plans to AI-ify Google.

Cautiously slow. 🦥

3 - Chinese shoppers swipe right on luxury. 💸

Lockdown season meant that Chinese folks came out sitting on a pile of cash.

Multiply a pile of cash by 1.3 billion people, and you have tons of money floating around.

A good chunk of this went toward luxury brands, who’ve had a stellar time during the post-pandemic recovery.

LVMH, Hermes, and Burberry all smashed their earnings results - which shows just how gravity-defying the luxury sector is.

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 hey, we’re all human. This one’s for the Instagram. 🤣

4 - India gets ready to slap the Russian faucet on. 📈

The West has constantly been taking stabs at the East over their purchases of cheap oil from Russia.

But most Eastern economies are using this discounted energy source as a foundation to kick-start their galloping economic growth, and they couldn’t care less.

Countries like India have warned that they’ll restart their purchase of Russian oil if prices keep ticking up.

Changing world order… 💀

5 - Elon takes his big bucks to the AI race. 🚀

Elon baba has set up his own AI business - and this one’s called X.ai.

The company was incorporated last month, with some interesting clues being dropped around.

X is the same name of the company that he created to be the “everything” app.

He’s expressed his “distrust” of OpenAI a fair few times, and it looks like he’s gonna go sparring with ChatGPT.

It’s his world, we’re just living in it. 🤣

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 ⚡