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, SoftBank's woes continued to plague them, Adani repaid even MORE debt, and Iran shook hands with Russia. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• JPow warned of even higher rates even if the job market stays strong. That's pretty bad news for markets, since strong job markets are a good sign of inflation being embedded into the economy. Oh man. 🙈

• Junk bonds across the world rallied yesterday after slight bets of a soft-landing coming into the scope. Spreads between treasuries and yields on high-risk companies are at their lowest in almost 10 months.

• The Fed seems to be comforting investors though - with Asian stocks and European markets all rising in hand.

Story Roundup

1 - SoftBank continues to bleed billions. 💸

2021's high-flying tech stock darlings are the laggards of today.

And it's bitten the biggest tech investors of the world

SoftBank was the biggest shark surfing the tech wave, and the tech bubble's undoing has left them high and dry.

There's no end in sight to their misery - they just clocked a $5.5bn loss in Q4 of 2022, which is a staggering 97% drop from 2 years back.

The last two years were bliss for risk assets.

As economies tighten, it's gonna get harder and harder for fledgling companies to grow at the same bolstering paces they were able to.

It's also when the darlings of yesterday become the disappointments of today.

To the moon... and back again. 🤔

2 - Adani gets in a race to repay his debt. 💰

Adani's trying to shore up investor confidence, and he's trying to do it FAST.

His ports company has announced plans to pay off $600 million of debt and cut tons of spending, all within this month.

Adani paid off a $1.1 billion loan yesterday - but that loan was due in about 20 months.

He's trying to tell the world that "you guys think we're cash-strapped? here's $2 billion."

When your shares have fallen 70%, you're obviously going to try put those concerns to rest.

There's a lot of debt-trimming to be done, and this is a healthy start. Adani baba needs to answer some tricky questions.

Time will tell where he goes... 🙈

3 - Iran uses ghosts to buy Russian oil. Not joking. 👻

A ghost fleet is a bunch of illegally contracted oil tankers.

They carry oil for sanction-slapped countries that desperately need cheap fuel, and Iran has hired a few.

Western curbs are proving to be pretty annoying, since any country that doesn't agree with America gets a few sanctions thrown at them.

Russia hired these ghost ships at the start of the war, and it looks like they're delivering oil to Iran's shores.

The premium for illegal Russian oil is about 50% above market rates and sometimes even climbs to 100%. Imagine simply doubling your profit on a barrel of oil.

So it's a no-brainer as to why these ghost ships are sending tankers all over the world.

Slippery stuff. 🛢️

4 - MPs point fingers at British banks. 🫵

British banks are being weird with interest rates.

When rates tick higher, it's usually a party for savers, since they can now earn more money on their deposits.

But some UK MPs have accused Britain's biggest banks of prioritising their profits and not passing on higher rates to savers.

These banks were also accused of "relying on the inertia" of customers and prioritising their profits instead of being generous in hard times.

Rich always get richer... 🤷

5 - Google plans to reveal their own AI. 🧠

Google just revealed plans to launch their own AI, and they want to make up lost ground FAST.

The AI is called "Bard", and it's gonna distill Google's millions of webpages into only the important bits.

When you ask it a question, it's gonna scour the internet for answers and print out what you need in just a few sentences.

Google's also gonna be releasing APIs for this stuff too. And as we saw with Ethereum, the more developers using your stuff, the better.

Tons of startups have already started using GPT for their AI needs - simply because there is no other alternative.

Looks like Google's trying to run harder with this one. 🏃‍♂️

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