Global Societal Collapse Incoming lol

Markets have halted their slides, cracks are beginning to emerge in the US labor market’s resilience, and a hedge-fund giant warned hyperinflation could lead to “global societal collapse.” It's elections week. Let's dive into the market news we dug up, as well as this week's market outlook.

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Bad News Dumpster Dive

​​The “Friday news dump" is alive and well. In the spirit of highlighting all the efforts of market movers to bury their news, we've decided to excavate them. Here are all the Friday and weekend dumps for your viewing pleasure:

Saturday (all EDT):

6:40 AM: The ECB printed at least $1 trillion to stem Covid (FT).

9:53 AM: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway posted a $2.69 billion third-quarter loss (NY Times).

10:08 AM: Twitter cut more than 950 California employees after Elon Musk took over (CNBC).

12:00 PM: About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October (GlobeSt).

2:09 PM: Insurance broker Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. said it received a subpoena from the Justice Department’s foreign bribery unit, making it the latest casualty in a sprawling investigation into corruption at state-owned companies in Ecuador (WSJ).

3:42 PM: Bed Bath and Beyond’s late CFO Gustavo Arnal, who died by suicide in September, has been dropped from a shareholder lawsuit that had accused him of colluding with activist investor Ryan Cohen to artificially inflate the struggling home-goods retailer’s share price (New York Post).

5:23 PM: Wells Fargo is under pressure from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to pay more than $1 billion to settle a series of investigations into mistreatment of customers, a deal that would shatter the agency’s previous record (Bloomberg).

5:41 PM: The IRS has opened 20 criminal investigations in its crackdown on the evasion of sanctions that the U.S. imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (WSJ).

6:26 PM: Société Générale promoted a veteran banker to be its new group chief risk officer, as the French bank continues to navigate geopolitical uncertainties in Europe and a possible economic slowdown (WSJ).

6:29 PM: U.S. privately asks Ukraine to show it’s open to negotiate with Russia (Washington Post).

Twitter (all EDT):

Tbh we got sick updating the news every time Elon tweeted

Friday, 7:05 AM: Twitter reportedly working on a feature to allow people to post videos & then charge users to view them, with Twitter taking a cut.

Friday, 9:00 AM: Twitter employees log into their emails to see if they’ve been fired. The emails started arriving in employees’ personal inboxes, reading: “Today is your last working day at the company.”

Friday, 10:28 AM: Musk tweets the company has experienced a “massive drop in revenue” due to a flight of advertisers from the network.

Friday, 10:40 AM: Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan accused Twitter in a class-action federal lawsuit of violating federal and California statutes restricting companies from mounting mass layoffs on short notice.

Friday, 12:27 PM: Elon Musk said Twitter could ultimately become the most valuable company in the world during a surprise appearance at the Baron Investment Conference in New York.

• This is the second time in ~2 weeks that Musk has claimed one of his companies could become one of the world's most valuable. During its Q3 earnings call, he said he saw potential for Tesla to far exceed Apple's current market value. And then become worth more than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined.

Friday, 12:30 PM: Musk announces his plans for a so-called super app that would be called X.com. Similar to WeChat, which has a large user base in China, it would allow users to message others and send people money.

Friday, 1:55 PM: Volkswagen announces it has stopped advertising on Twitter.

Friday, 2:30 PM: The same lawyer who threatened lawsuit three hours earlier apologized and claimed she’s “pleased” to learn at least some employees will continue being paid until Jan. 4. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan said Musk “is making an effort to comply” with the law.

Friday, 5:00 PM: Elon Musk fired the entire team that identified that the Twitter algorithm amplifies right-wing voices over others.

Saturday, 12:05 PM: Jack Dorsey, previous cofounder of Twitter, said: “I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.”

Saturday, 2:00 PM: Musk gets owned by Grimes, mother to one of his children, on the platform he owns.

Saturday, 7:15 PM: Twitter’s reputation among consumers and advertisers is at risk from what's unfolding under new owner Elon Musk, some branding executives and other observers say.

Friday (all EDT):

3:02 AM: UK food inflation hits record high of 11.6% as prices of basics from tea bags to sugar soar (The Independent).

6:00 AM: In the week since Adidas terminated its deal with Ye, the sneakers recorded the highest volume of recent transactions on StockX, rising to an average of 6.5% (Bloomberg).

6:04 AM: Netflix officially launches advertisements on its platform (CNN).

7:17 AM: Credit Suisse is planning a fresh round of job cuts at the global wealth management business starting next week (Bloomberg).

8:30 AM: Jobs growth in October topped expectations, with employers adding 261K to payrolls (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

8:30 AM: The US unemployment rate was 3.7% for October, above its estimate of 3.5% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

9:33 AM: Chipotle illegally shut down a Maine restaurant because workers there tried to unionize, according to US labor officials who are seeking to force a reopening (WMTW).

9:50 AM: Apple became worth more than Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta combined. META is now the worst performer in the S&P 500 this year (Yahoo Finance).

12:38 PM: The U.S. sold 15 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to six companies, completing the last batch of the largest-ever release from the stockpile announced by President Joe Biden in March (Reuters).

1:16 PM: Trump to tentatively announce a 2024 Presidential bid on November 14 (Axios).

1:52 PM: Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund is partnering with the biggest assembler of iPhones (Foxconn) to manufacture electric vehicles and attract over $150M foreign direct investment in the country (WSJ).

1:59 PM: Deutsche Bank AG was told by German financial watchdog BaFin that it must fix its controls within given deadlines if it wants to avoid a financial punishment (Bloomberg).

2:00 PM: The average mortgage rates have hit 7.30%, the highest since 2000 (CNBC).

3:44 PM: House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) asks Powell to slow down interest rate rises (WSJ).

4:04 PM: The Fed’s Brainard goes on the record in saying the current macroeconomic environment will increase the likelihood of financial shocks (Fed).

4:06 PM: Google is preparing an app that will use artificial intelligence to let consumers create images by typing a few words (Axios).

7:13 PM: Mortgage purchase applications indexes are 41% lower than one year ago (MarketWatch).

8:30 PM: 63% of Americans support the idea of new stimulus checks to combat inflation (Newsweek).

Bonus: An actual Uber ad that ran Friday before being scraped off the internet.

Market Outlook

News to know for the week ahead

Midterms are this Tuesday. Assuming (and hoping) we’re not your main source of information here, but here are the basics. Forecasters and pollsters anticipate Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona being the decisive states. The economy has consistently been the top issue for voters this year. 79% of registered voters say the economy is “very important” when making their decision about who to vote for in the congressional elections.

October’s CPI estimate is set to be released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday, November 10, before the markets open. Market forecasts anticipate it falling to 7.95% from September’s 8.2% year-over-year result. When you look at the last three months’ month-to-month change in the Unadjusted Index number used to calculate inflation, October’s inflation rate could be set to be significantly lower than expected.

Wall Street is placing its best guesses on the Fed’s final level of rate hikes. This change came shortly after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s declaration that peak interest rates will need to go higher than previously thought. The FOMC in September estimated reaching a target range of 4.5% to 4.75% in 2023. But Powell, citing high inflation and a very tight labor market, told reporters Wednesday that “incoming data since our last meeting suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates will be higher than previously expected.”

Biden’s feud with Big Oil will ratchet up just as the world needs more US oil. Diesel and heating oil inventories in the US Northeast have been getting worryingly low. Officials swung into action, organizing a series of calls between Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and several of the country’s biggest oil refiners to discuss strategies to boost stockpiles. With nationwide average gas prices on the rise again ($3.79/gallon as of 11/3) and midterm elections days away, Biden does not seem to want to back down.

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