Happy Tuesday, Munchers! 🙏

Hope all is well and that your Monday was... as less of a Monday as possible.

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.

Over the weekend, COVID ran rampant around China, Brazil and Argentina embraced each other, and economists got happier about Europe. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• The "smart money" thinks that we can beat inflation while keeping markets stable.

• Monetary policy is entering a new phase of quantitative tightening. Billions of dollars of liquidity are getting sucked out of the system. There's plenty of theory for this, but not enough experience... 🤔

• The futures markets are betting that the Fed will abandon their ultra-aggressive tightening. Markets believe that they won't "stay the course".

Story Roundup

1 - China's COVID clock ticks faster. ⏱️

Happy Chinese New Year!

Fireworks fill the night skies and cheer fills the hearts of every Chinese household - but all of this mingling gives COVID a lovely breeding ground. 

Government scientists think that 80% of the country is infected.

Not some armchair dude who's spent 15 minutes on Reddit. A legitimate Chinese government scientist. 

Hundreds of millions of folks are travelling in and around the country - which makes outbreaks ripe in rural areas where the virus has barely spread.

Last man standing. 💉

2 - Brazil and Argentina bro-out big time. 🤜🏼🤛🏼

Brazil and Argentina hate each other when it comes to football.

But they have pretty similar economies. 

They're so in-sync, that they want to merge their currencies. If they go ahead with this pretty ambitious plan, they'll make the world's 2nd largest currency bloc. 

The name is gonna be the Sur - which means "South" in Spanish. 

They'll also offer the option to join to other South American economies - which could be BIG. 

Something's-a brewing. 🤔

3 - Economists turn their frown on Europe. 😁

There are only 2 things that are fickle in this world. Fate, and whatever economists say.

Turns out that the "hot water" Europe was in has cooled pretty quick, and analysts are betting on a quick Eurozone turnaround. 

Lower energy prices, blockbuster government support, and a reopening Chinese economy are gonna be kickstarting Europe's economic engine. 

Just weeks ago, the chief of the IMF said that "half of the EU would be in a recession soon". 

Looks like that recession never came. 🤷🏼

4 - GPT passes a Wharton exam. 🤓

What can't AI do?

It can do your homework for you, it can help you write bomb research papers, and it can replace all your friends.

Turns out it can also get into Wharton.

Professor Terwiesch from the Wharton school just authored a reserach paper - "Would ChatGPT get a Wharton MBA?" and the results are pretty off-putting.

The bot got a B on the exam. Not the greatest, but it's still in it's infancy.

It did some amazing work with process analysis questions and hit every single case study question out of the park.

Dumb and dumber. That's what we're all gonna become. 😔

5 - Microsoft splashed billions on GPT. 🖥️

"Multi-year, and multi-billion dollar". 

That's all we know about Microsoft's AI ambitions. 

They just announced a long-term partnership with the OpenAI - the dudes that developed GPT-3. 

Neither side has disclosed the deal value but some earlier rumours placed OpenAI's valuation at $29 billion. 

This deal is great for Microsoft since it makes OpenAI reliant on all their cloud services for research, products, and API services.

AI is the new big thing. I guess. 😔

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