Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 5 minutes and 11 seconds.

Yesterday, Stripe’s aggression faced a reality dose, FBI took down a hacker market, and India said bye-bye to AI regulations. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• If you are a super-rich person looking to buy a home in the Hamptons, now is the time! Hamptons home prices fell for the first time since 2019. Looks like rate hikes are hitting the HNIs too. 😔

• Gold is all set to hit a new record - just passed the $2,000/oz mark and is set to spiral higher.

• Markets remain confused between whether we’ll be plunging into recession or landing safely and securely. Either way, it’s seatbelts on and mouth shut. 🤦🏻

Story Roundup

1 - Stripe slows down a little. 💥

Stripe is one of the world’s most valuable private companies - once peaking at a $92 billion valuation.

They publish an “investor update” yearly - kinda like an annual vibe check on how business is going.

And it turns out that they’ve been surprisingly resilient.

Stripe processed $820 billion in transactions during 2022 - up a full 26% from their 2021 numbers.

They also have over 100 companies that transact $1 billion+ a year and are onboarding over 1,000 new business clients a day.

While all of this sounds super impressive, it’s nothing like the magic dust-fueled business boom of yesteryears.

A 26% increase in transactions is great, but it’s nothing like the 60% boost they had two years back.

If anything, this tells us how much e-commerce and online payments have slumped after being deprived of government-sponsored stimulus checks.

But hey, at least Stripe isn’t suffering from “shiny thing syndrome” anymore. 🤷🏻

2 - FBI seizes a hacker marketplace. 😬

This is the stuff of spy movies - the FBI took down a marketplace for stolen passwords and account details called Genesis.

The attack was code-named ‘Operation Cookie Monster’ and saw over 120 arrests globally.

Genesis Market’s “suppliers” used to rob people of their account details by putting a digital Peeping Tom into their victim’s search session.

And once the poor guy logs into Netflix or Amazon, his details get sent directly to the hacker.

So the end buyer isn’t just purchasing a username and a password that can be changed at any time - they’re essentially buying a lifetime subscription, for pennies on the dollar.

You can check if your email address has been exposed here.

Hacker attack. 🙈

3 - India says no to AI regulation. 🚫

Most of the world is thinking about how AI will become sentient and how Terminator 2025 is gonna be a reality, but India thinks otherwise.

India doesn’t plan to regulate AI as a sector and is not gonna put any throttles on it’s growth.

The IT Ministry thinks that AI is gonna have a “kinetic effect” on entrepreneurship and will help newer and younger business flourish while streamlining older ones.

AI has been the talk of the town in the West, but there hasn’t been a massive surge of popularity in India.

The government wants to get on the gas pedal as fast and as hard as they can, and it looks like this is one way of getting there.

Italy banned GPT and Elon Musk signed a letter asking AI labs to stop - so India is most definitely bucking the trend here.

But as they say, you don’t achieve abnormal success by remaining normal. 😏

4 - Swiss government snatches away senior CS bankers’ 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 for senior bankers will be canceled.

Almost $66mn was to be distributed to ~1,000 bankers, coming out to $66,100 per head.

Protests literally erupted in front of Credit Suisse’s Zurich headquarters over the use of taxpayer money to support the takeover of a bank.

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.

Sign of the times. 🤔

5 - Europe’s central bankers say that they’ll press the brakes on rate hikes. 🤔

A growing chorus of ECB officials are predicting that the era of rate-hikes will be calming down.

They’ve been hiking hard and fast - and it’s been taking a massive toll on Eurozone economies.

One important thing to take note of is that Europe’s member countries are vastly different.

Germany has a very nuanced economy and plays a much different game than a country like Andorra.

That makes it so much harder to apply a “blanket” rate hike to member countries - which also means that some nations get hit harder than others.

Europe thinks that a couple more rate hikes is all it will take, and the job is done after that.

Knife’s edge. 🔪

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 ⚡