π¨ EVERYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG FOR MARKETS WENT WRONG TODAY.
S&P 500 down -1.65%, wiping out $1.14 trillion.
Nasdaq down -2.60%, wiping out $1.11 trillion.
Gold down -3.38%, wiping out $1 trillion.
Silver down -6.9%, wiping out $280 billion.
Bitcoin down -6.31%, wiping out $80 billion.
In total $2.5 TRILLION wiped out in a single session. These were not isolated moves. Everything started breaking at the same time.
It started with the jobs report this morning.
The US economy added 172,000 jobs in May. Wall Street expected 88,000. That is almost double.
On any normal day, strong jobs is good news. But inflation is already at 3.8% and oil is sitting at $90. A labor market this strong tells the Fed it cannot cut interest rates and may actually need to raise them.
The probability of a rate hike this year went from 40% to 57% in a single day. That spooked every investor holding tech and growth stocks because higher rates mean those stocks are worth less today.
Then the AI trade started cracking.
Yesterday Broadcom reported record earnings: revenue up 48%, AI chip sales up 143% and the stock still crashed 12.6%. The reason was simple.
Broadcom did not raise its AI revenue targets for the year. Investors had expected it to. That single miss made people ask a question they had been avoiding for months: are we paying too much for AI stocks?
That question got louder today when a research firm called SemiAnalysis revealed that Nvidia's next-generation AI chips will need significantly less memory than everyone assumed, roughly half of what the market was pricing in.
Memory chips are what companies like SK Hynix and Samsung make. SK Hynix fell nearly 10% today. Samsung fell over 6%.
South Korea's entire stock market crashed 5.5% in a single session. Japan's semiconductor stocks did the same.
And then Anthropic added fuel to the fire by publishing a report warning that AI is getting close to the point where it can improve itself without human help and calling for a global pause in AI development.
Coming on the same day as the memory demand news and Broadcom's miss, it fed a single growing fear across the market: what if the AI boom is moving faster than the business models can keep up with?
Underneath all of this, there is a liquidity problem nobody is talking about.
SpaceX goes public next week at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Anthropic just filed to go public. OpenAI is next.
These three companies together are worth $4 to $5 trillion. Fund managers need cash to buy into these listings.
But cash levels are already at their lowest since early 2024. The only way to raise cash is to sell what they already own. That selling is happening right now.
The new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will also hold his very first policy meeting in 11 days. He was appointed by Trump with the expectation of cutting rates.
He is now walking into a situation where inflation is high, oil is high, and the job market is running hot. Investors do not know what he will do.
When nobody knows what the most powerful central banker in the world will decide in less than two weeks, the safest move is to reduce risk today.
Everything that could go wrong, went wrong at the same time. A hot jobs report, a collapsing ceasefire, a crack in the AI trade, a trillion dollar liquidity drain, and a Fed meeting with no clear outcome.
asked Codex to build me a clone of Oracle
it spun up 15,000 agents
14,998 lawyers, 1 overworked senior engineer, and 1 CEO who immediately moved to Hawaii
the legal agents all entered litigation with every company on the planet claiming copyright infringement over "Java" since every company had coffee at their office
they sent me a $1.4 quadrillion invoice for billable hours
the entire GDP of the world is only like $100 trillion so i'm a little nervous
overworked engineer agent has the cloud business at $100k ARR at least
BREAKING: Belgium is moving to nationalize its nuclear fleet. The gov signed a Letter of Intent with French operator, Engie, for a full takeover of all reactors and liabilities. Dismantling of shuttered reactors has been HALTED.
Milestone in Humanoid Robotics: A Thousand Humanoid Sorters Entering Logistics Centers
Beijing-based RobotEra is deploying its L7 humanoid robot across more than 10 logistics centers operated by China Post, SF Express Group, and other major players.
In several of these centers, the embodied AI robots have already reached over 85% of human-level efficiency while operating stably 24/7.
The company is set to begin batch deliveries of robots at the thousand-unit scale in Q2 this year.
RobotEra recently raised $200 million in funding. By combining external capital with self-generated revenue, it is accelerating the real-world deployment of humanoid robots.
I wonder what UPS would think if they saw this solution? Rumors have been circulating recently that they intend to deploy Figure's humanoid robots in their logistics centers.