Happy Friday, Munchers! 🙏

Hope you’re all looking forward to a cracking weekend. Have a lovely one, folks. 🥰

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 59 seconds.

Yesterday, World Bank leadership got a little shuffle, SBF got in more hot water, and Europe’s Central Bank got rickety. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• The latest Fed officials show that most of the lettuces setting our monetary policy want to downshift in rate hikes. Inflation has showed a very welcome reduction which gives us room to go a little less ham on the hikes. Solid.

• Markets remained SUPER choppy and we saw a ton of volatility across almost every asset class. Pray.

• US GDP came in weaker than expected as did quite a few other economic indicators across the world. That’s some super conflicting data. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The world right now is like a poorly cooked microwave meal. Some parts are searing hot and others are ice cold. 🙈

Story Roundup

1 - Indian dude gets ready to run the World Bank. 💸

The age old adage still holds true.

You either die as a founder run business or get taken over by an Indian dude.

Baba Biden has nominated Ajay Banga as the next head of the World Bank - picking a Wall Street veteran raised in India to lead their biggest generational change yet.

World Bank’s focus is shifting from poverty to climate change, and this makes developing nations uneasy.

Our good friend Ajay’s job is to ease this nausea, and hand-hold emerging markets going into the future.

Seems pretty fun!

2 - SBF’s hot water bath ticks beyond 100 Celsius. 🥵

SBF is throwing around some wild allegations, and it doesn't look good.

He's laid blame for FTX's bankruptcy on a "months-long PR campaign by Binance CEO CZ".

As Alameda became illiquid, FTX International went belly up as well.

That's because Alameda had a margin position open on FTX, and a bank run turned that illiquidity into insolvency.

To try fixing this, SBF has said that "nearly all of my assets were and still are utilizable to backstop FTX customers".

What a mess.

3 - ECB gets wary about a rate-induced profit wipeout. 💀💀

For the first time in 15 years, the European Central Bank made no profits.

The ECB usually pays out a ‘dividend’ to Eurozone countries at the end of the year.

Last year though? No dividend.

First reason behind these hefty losses is that the ECB was forced to write down many bond investments, which put them in a pretty shoddy state.

If that wasn’t bad enough, rising rates mean that the interest paid on commercial lenders’ reserves could quickly outpace the interest earned on these bond investments.

Seatbelts on, folks. 🙊

4 - Dubai’s sheikhs bask in property cash. 🏠

Money is in the air, and most of it is taking a one-way trip to Dubai.

The glitz and glam is doing very well at supporting the housing market, with prices and sales ripping almost every week.

Dubai managed the pandemic very well, which left their arms open to -
- Europeans seeking a sunkissed life
- Russians rushing away from the war
- Indians setting up generations
- Chinese fleeing COVID restrictions

All this demand has led to an insane spike in prices, with most villas almost doubling in value over the last 2 years.

Dubai bling. Literally.

5 - Elon baba slaps around the axe at Twitter. 🪓

Two months back, Elon Musk gathered 2/3rds of Twitter’s workforce together to tell them that they were getting the boot.

To the remaining 1/3rd, he promised that nothing else would happen.

Cut to today, and he’s still cutting jobs across sales, engineering, and marketing. That’s virtually the entire company.

Never trust a billionaire. 💀

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 ⚡