- The decline on Wall Street is clearly accelerating. The Nasdaq is already down more than 2%, and S&P 500 futures are hitting new session lows.
- Amid escalating tensions in the Middle East and renewed inflation fears, oil prices are rising by more than 3.5%, gold is giving up its gains and falling by 2.8%, and market sentiment remains defensive. Silver is performing very poorly today, currently down by more than 5%.
- The US dollar and the Japanese yen are performing best on the Forex market. Meanwhile, the currencies of the Antipodes—the AUD and the NZD—are under the most downward pressure.
- Several factors are contributing to the gloomy mood: Microsoft has announced a hiring freeze in its cloud computing and sales divisions, raising questions about the health of the entire tech sector and, above all, the hype surrounding AI.
- Meanwhile, geopolitics is once again making its presence felt—as reported by Reuters, following the death of Ali Khamenei on February 28, Iran’s conservative political wing, centered mainly around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is increasingly calling for the development of nuclear weapons.
- During a cabinet meeting, Trump significantly ramped up his rhetoric against Tehran. “Iran is begging for a deal—not me,” the president declared, adding that Tehran should have sealed the deal four weeks ago. Furthermore, Trump openly admitted that he doesn’t know if he’s even ready to negotiate with Iran at this point.
- Meta Platforms shares plunged by more than 6.4% today, wiping nearly $70 billion off the company’s market value in a single trading session.
- Today’s sell-off coincided with the announcement of two landmark jury verdicts, which together have defined a new dimension of legal risk for the entire social media industry. This legal pressure is accompanied by an unprecedented capital expenditure program.
- Google unveiled the TurboQuant algorithm, which compresses the cache of language models down to just 3 bits, reducing KV-cache memory usage by up to six times and achieving up to an 8-fold speedup on H100 chips without any loss of accuracy. The market immediately priced in a potential decline in demand for memory chips: SanDisk fell about 4% at the open, Micron and Western Digital each fell about 2%, and Seagate fell about 2%.
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