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 53 seconds.

Yesterday, Xi Jinping admitted that the COVID situation is stressful, Norway's $1.2 trillion fund thought twice about stocks, and Big Tech's hiring spree became a firing spree. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Fears of a long and deadly recession seem to be easing. Investors think that inflation is well beyond it's peak and that life might start getting chill soon.

• Wall Street think that it's too early to run a victory lap since rate hikes are yet to feed into corporate results.

• Markets remained hella choppy and volatile as traders weighed a host of contrasting economic data. Time will tell where we go. 🤩

Story Roundup

1 - China admits that this COVID thing might be tricky to tackle. 👊🏼

You know stuff is on edge when China's president says so.

Xi Jinping spoke to the entire country yesterday before their lunar new year, and it looks like he's starting to worry.

Infection rates in most big cities are hopping between 70-90 percent and the Chinese holiday season is all set to make this worse.

1.4 billion people are expected to take ~2 billion trips to meet their families - and this is where the problem lies.

A mass-movement event like this means more mingling with COVID. That's a ripe ground for a Wuhan 2.0 to happen.

Sit tight, and strap in. 💉

2 - The world's largest fund thinks that stocks are done. 😬

The world's largest sovereign wealth fund isn't in Dubai, Qatar, or even Saudi.

It's in Norway.

And the head of the $1.2 trillion fund thinks that we're entering a new era of markets.

He thinks that investor stress is not over, especially "with all this COVID crap".

The bottom line from his speech?

We have a long, long period of drab returns lying ahead.

A new cycle of rate hikes "is not that unlikely" and we haven't seen the effects of the "$30tn in wealth destruction last year".

Blindfold on for the next decade. 🙈

3 - Big Tech's hiring spree starts to bite. 🗃️

We had Meta, then Amazon, then Salesforce.

Now, we've got Microsoft.

Bill Gates and co. are gonna chop about 10,000 jobs. That's a mammoth number, and it's about 5% of the company.

Satya Nadella hired 40k workers in 2021, which was double the number in 2022.

He made a bet that customers would continue to spend heavy on tech despite slowly ticking inflation and some creeping economic stresses.

Looks like he got that one wrong. 💀

4 - Oil demand gets set to rocket. 🛢️

Once China gets back to business, oil demand is set to soar.

The International Energy Agency tracks all this stuff, and they think that we might soon start having heart-attacks at the gas pump.

Demand for crude could rise to ~101.7mn BPD with some very, very wild cards dominating outlook.

These two are none other than Russia and China.

China's reopening will send oil markets roaring, but Western sanctions on Russia are gonna force supply a little more.

Get ready to shell out some more for your Premium 95. 😭

5 - Asia's richest guy looks to get a whole lot richer. 💸

Asia's richest dude is on a roller-coaster ride to the top.

Gautam Adani's Adani group went from a no-name company to a household corporation in just 10 short years.

To grow this quick, they borrowed billions and leveraged themselves like crazy.

But it looks like they want to start curbing such reckless exuberance.

Adani will raise $2.5 billion from an FPO (follow-on public offer). That means that more shares are gonna be sold.

All this money is gonna go toward paying off interest on some INSANE amounts of debt, and the rest is gonna be splashed onto some capex for their "traditional" business.

Heavyweight. 💰

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