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, Google and China went sparring, the AI arms race heated up, and Elon got boring. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Investors seemed moody yesterday. American markets played tug-of-war with the smart money assessing earnings ahead an all-important interest rate decision on Friday.

• An interesting trend we're seeing is the shift of decently-sized startupts away from equity and toward convertible bonds as the fundraising environment stalls.

• A little bounce is very well in play, with China's reopening and Europe's recession avoidance giving us a little kick. Now just pray that WW3 doesn't start. 😅

Story Roundup

1 - Bard bumps fists with GPT. 🤜🏻🤛🏻

A new challenger has stepped into the ring.

Google’s response to Microsoft’s AI arms race is here - and it’s called Bard.

Bard’s birth comes 4 months later than GPT’s (time really does fly) and it is a much-needed step toward the “future”.

But there is one big problem.

Google is still very much a search company.

They made over 50% of their revenue from Google Search and maintain a stunning 75% profit margin from Search.

If Bard can summarize whatever the user needs in a single sentence, there’s no need to go paging through the depths of Google.

That could deal a big hit to Google’s bottom line.

Knife’s edge? 🔪

2 - Elon Musk heads straight into the Earth. 🌍

Elon Musk is doubling down on his Vegas bet.

And he wants to build the underground arteries of Sin City.

The Boring Company’s had a lackluster past (to say the least) but they wanna do something big with this one.

They’re putting down ~65 miles of tunnel below the casinos of Vegas and spending tons of cash and time building what seems to be a glorified train system.

In their pilot program, a promised speed of 150mph in their pods turned out to top out at around 35mph.

Not the bang and boom we were promised. 💀

3 - Google takes a jab at China. 👊🏻

Pinduoduo is an app that has 900 million users. And there’s a good chance that you haven’t even heard of them.

They are a simple, humble e-commerce app, but they do crazy things at scale. Kinda like the Amazon of China/

Pinduoduo made $35.5 billion last year and officially made a hard launch into the US market.

Anyhow - yesterday, Google decided to ban them from the app store over concerns of “malware”.

Google has told them that their app is malicious and poses a hefty threat to security.

Boxing fight. 🥊

4 - Switzerland says no to Credit Suisse’s bonuses. 💀

Credit Suisse’s bankers aren’t loving life right now.

And Switzerland just gave them one more reason to hate the state of things.

All pending bonuses will be canceled.

Protests literally erupted in front of Credit Suisse’s Zurich headquarters over the use of taxpayer money to support something like this.

People are angry. Politicians are angry. And the bankers, they’re the angriest.

A few have said that UBS might turn up to find that they have bought empty offices, with the way that things are going.

Crazy times we live in. 🏦

5 - Nestle admits that they’re selling garbage. 🍫

Nestle is trying to go for transparency, but it’s kinda like a criminal admitting that he’s a bad guy.

They acknowledged that the nutritional value of 50%+ of their products is close to zero.

Packaged food companies are being put under the microscope more and more for their contributions to a global obesity problem.

And while work goes on to cut down the bad stuff, there is a very clear limit on how far we can go.

A KitKat bar is never gonna be healthy for you. Not in a million years. 😅

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 ⚡