New York Times (July 28)
“Chipmakers are taking a hit” on a number of fronts. “Investors worry that Big Tech’s extravagant artificial intelligence spending isn’t delivering real profits yet.” Moreover, “powerful open-weight models are making A.I. cheaper to run, raising questions about whether companies need to keep buying such expensive tech, including chips.” The chipmakers still have “huge long-term investment build-out commitments from major tech players,” which raises a major question. “Is this just a healthy reset for a hot market, or the start of a bigger slowdown?”
Tags: AI, Big tech, Build-out commitments, Cheaper, Chipmakers, Expensive, Extravagant, Hit, Investment, Investors, Market, Open-weight models, Profits, Reset, Spending, Worry
Bloomberg (January 18)
“The new year was supposed to bring opportunities for beaten-down software stocks. Instead, the group is off to its worst start in years.” Amid fears that AI will undercut the benefits of software, “valuations for software companies keep getting cheaper. The Morgan Stanley basket is priced at 18 times earnings projected over the next 12 months, its cheapest on record, and well below an average of more than 55 times over the past decade.”
Tags: AI, Beaten-down, Benefits, Cheaper, Fears, Morgan Stanley, Opportunities, Software, Software stocks, Undercut, Valuations, Worst start
West Monroe (September 9)
“Legacy banks are at an inflection point.” Today, banks ”are no longer just competing with each other, but rather a sprawling field of fintechs, embedded finance players, and tech firms—all of which are delivering faster, cheaper, and more intuitive financial services. The field is fragmented, but the pattern is clear: customers now expect their bank to act like a digital platform, not just a financial service provider.”
Tags: Cheaper, Competing, Customers, Digital platform, Embedded finance, Faster, Financial services, Fintechs, Fragmented, Inflection point, Intuitive, Legacy banks, Tech firms
Institutional Investor (April 15)
“Whether passively or actively managed, the REIT industry has not been able to avoid sharp slowdowns every decade or so. In the present downturn, publicly traded REITs can be acquired at a substantial discount to their net asset value. That means it has actually become cheaper to buy real estate through a REIT than to purchase the properties directly.” The sector seems primed for consolidation and “the likely dropouts” include “REITs that took on too much debt when commercial real estate roared ahead and got into trouble when the cycle spun downward.”
Tags: Acquired, Cheaper, Commercial real estate, Consolidation, Cycle, Debt, Discount, Downturn, NAV, Passively. Actively managed, Properties, Real estate, REIT industry, Slowdowns
Jalopnik (January 15)
“American automakers have long feared Chinese competition, worrying that cheaper cars built just as well would knock the floor out of a profitable industry. Now, regulators have found a way to protect American brands by outright banning Chinese cars — or automotive hardware or software — used for communications or autonomous driving.”
Tags: Automakers, Autonomous driving, Banning, Brands, Cars, Cheaper, China, Communications, Competition, Hardware, Profitable, Protect, Regulators, Software, U.S.
The Economist (June 4)
“For the past two years Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has pursued a zany policy of trying to bring down inflation by making borrowing cheaper. It is precisely the opposite of what any mainstream economist would advise, and it was never going to work.” His new cabinet “includes Mehmet Simsek, a voice of economic orthodoxy.” The new treasury and finance minister has said “Turkey has no choice left but to return to a rational basis” for policymaking. “Such words will be music to the ears of many foreign investors, who have given up on Turkey over the past couple of years. But they will not count for much unless they are backed up by concrete steps to fix the country’s economy.”
Tags: Borrowing, Cabinet, Cheaper, Economist, Erdogan, Finance Minister, Inflation, Mainstream, Orthodoxy, Policy, Rational, Simsek, Treasury, Turkey
American Banker (December 9)
“Fintechs turned cross-border payments into a hotbed of innovation over the last five years. Now the card networks and banks are responding with disruptions of their own. It’s not just the competitive threat from fintechs developing faster, cheaper and more transparent cross-border payment options. The changing economy is now adding urgency for legacy cross-border providers to modernize their services.”
Tags: Banks, Card networks, Cheaper, Competitive threat, Cross-border, Disruptions, Economy, Faster, Fintechs, Hotbed, Innovation, Legacy, Modernize, Payments, Services, Transparent
