Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Friday, November 21st, and this is your FT News Briefing.
The NASDAQ rollercoaster ride is giving everybody motion sickness and the US is finally releasing economic data again, but it's a bit hard to parse.
Plus, a peace treaty from Russia and the U.S. isn't getting much traction in Ukraine.
I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
It seemed like for a little bit that Nvidia's strong earnings had bailed out the tech stock sell-off.
On Wednesday, the American chipmaker reported better-than-expected earnings.
And yesterday morning, the tech-heavy Nasdaq surged nearly 2.5%.
But it all went downhill from there.
The index ended the day pretty much wiping out all its earlier gains, closing down more than 2%.
The S&P 500, which has been mostly propped up by tech stocks, fell a little bit more than 1.5%.
Here to make sense of all this is the FT's markets columnist, Katie Martin.
Hi, Katie.
Hey, hey, hi, Deng.
I'm doing well.
Like I mentioned, risky assets like stocks and crypto have been dipping lately since about October.
But before that, they were going gangbusters.
Can you give us a little context on their performance and what drove that rally?
Yeah, so we obviously had a big shock to markets and stocks fell really hard in April after Donald Trump unveiled these global trade tariffs.
And then pretty much the moment that he said OK, I'm going to backtrack on some of the more extreme elements here.
It's just been one way traffic, this huge recovery that's taken place.
And that's built on a few things.
It's built on this idea that, you know, we're all familiar with this Taco trade, right?
Trump always chickens out.
There's this idea that he will always back away from the more extreme stuff.
There's the fact that earnings have actually been pretty good and the US economy has been much more resilient to the effect of tariffs and to policy uncertainty than people have been expecting.
So there has just been an incredibly impressive rise in US and global stocks ever since April.
And that just kind of ran out of steam a bit in recent weeks.
Yeah, let's talk about that specifically.
As I mentioned, it started around early October.
And there were a few things that I think combined to get investors a little worked up.
What happened?
Well, so, okay, there's an element of cherry picking here.
But you can see reasons for caution or for alarm in lots of different parts of markets at the moment.
You look over at the private credit market. where there've been a few blowups recently.
And that has got people worried about lending standards in private credit, about the prevalence of fraud there.
This is the first brands thing, right?
This is first brands, tricolor.
It's just a little cluster of these things.
And it makes people think, hmm, I remember 2007.
Is this a repeat of that?
And then you just look at the valuation of some of these AI tech stocks and some of the huge deals they're doing with each other.
And it all just adds up to this picture that.
Hang on, is this a bubble and is it going to pop like now?
Now, like I had mentioned NVIDIA, for a moment anyway, swooped in and kind of eased those concerns with its earnings report on Wednesday.
What was it exactly in that report that got everyone, even if briefly, in such a good mood?
It's not just any old chipmaker, right?
This is like the biggest company on the planet.
It absolutely dominates the performance of all the big stocks, indices in the States and globally.
And it's just this prime example of a company that's right in the center of the AI trade.
You know, the thinking for a lot of investors is well, if NVIDIA is okay, then that means the AI trade is okay.
And NVIDIA is super okay.
So it reported a 62 rise in its revenues in the three months that ended in October, which was much more significant than investors have been anticipating.
And its revenue forecasts are still much higher than people have been thinking.
So it's pretty clear that this company is still selling a lot of chips.
And its chief executive, Jensen Wang, said, there's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble.
From our vantage point, we see something very different.
One thing that's really important here to remember is that even if you accept that it's a bubble and there are some excesses going on here, There's no reason to think it has to pop today or tomorrow or next week.
But the fact is, they are still scooping up the money, cranking out the chips.
Everybody's happy.
So this has certainly lightened the mood and helped some of these things to keep running towards the end of the year.
But no one's sounding the all clear just yet.
That's the FT's Katie Martin in London.
Thanks as always, Katie.
Pleasure.
We're getting more clues about the health of the U.S. economy.
After a more than month-long delay due to the government shutdown, the Labor Department released the September jobs report yesterday.
It showed 119,000 jobs were added to the economy, a way higher number than expected.
But the unemployment rate also reached its highest level in four years.
Figures for the previous two months were revised lower by a combined 33,000 jobs.
Analysts say the data will complicate the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision next month.
That's because the jobs report gives a little something to the hawks and a little something to the doves.
And the Fed is already split on whether to cut rates again.
The war in Ukraine is still raging, despite the Trump administration trying to broker a peace deal.
The US and Russia drafted a new peace plan this week without Kiev's involvement.
To give us an update about what's happening on the battlefield and at the negotiating table is chris miller.
He covers ukraine for the ft.
Hi chris, hey mark.
So let's start with an update on the war itself.
Where do things stand on the battlefield?
Well, right now, the russians are still gaining territory, moving forward on the ground, specifically around a couple of hot spots in eastern ukraine.
They're pushing ahead slowly but surely.
They're using also their missiles and drones to attack ukraine's critical infrastructure And, as we're speaking, actually much of the country is without power or on these rolling blackout schedules.
Some are without water, some are without heating.
So the pressure really is mounting on Ukraine.
And you know we're looking at a political situation also in Ukraine.
That could further destabilize things or make it at least very difficult for Zelensky going forward amid a big corruption scandal that's really rocked his office.
And, you know, I mentioned this peace plan.
What do we know about it?
What we know is that this was a apparently really hastily drawn up proposal put forward by Donald Trump's Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff, and an envoy of Vladimir Putin, Kirill Dmitriev.
And it really is very much the Kremlin position and envisages major concessions by Kiev, including the reduction of its military by more than half, the concession of territory in eastern Ukraine that Ukraine currently controls still.
It also calls for Ukraine declaring its neutrality and dropping its bid to join NATO.
And so these are all things that are big, clear red lines for Kyiv, meaning that they would never go along with this.
This is a little bit about what I was going to ask you about next, which is, given that Ukraine is not going to agree to this, why bother drafting it in the first place?
Is it just so that they can have something to bring to the negotiating table?
Well, I think the Trump administration is getting tired of not seeing a deal done.
He said repeatedly that he's tired of the war and that he wants to see the killing stop.
But he's done little actually, besides sanctioning some of Russia's top gas companies to really push the Russians to the negotiating table.
We've seen since the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency that the Russian position hasn't changed.
In fact, it hasn't changed since the beginning of the war.
But where the Trump administration has applied pressure and asked for concessions is on the Ukrainian side, where it believes it has more leverage, given the fact that the United States is the biggest political and military backer of the country.
And we should mention Chris, that Ukrainian officials told the FT the Trump administration is putting a ton of pressure on Kyiv to accept the agreement.
So what happens next?
Do you think we could see any movement in the peace process?
I really don't think so.
There hasn't been any movement really since Donald Trump came to office.
And so what I think is likely to happen is we're going to see the war ramp up and things get more serious on the battlefield and in the air war over the winter.
It'll be a really tough winter for Ukraine.
They'll continue to try to push counter proposals to bring the United States more closely in line with its position and try to apply more pressure on Russia to get it to negotiate in earnest.
But all of this means that I think the war is going to go on for several more months, if not through much of 2026.
That's the FT's chief Ukraine correspondent, Chris Miller.
Thanks, Chris.
Thanks, Mark.
Before we go.
The news flow is so fast and furious these days so we thought we would start a new Friday tradition where we look into our news crystal ball at some of the big stories we're keeping tabs on over the next week.
Victoria Craig, who hosts the Monday edition of the FT News Briefing, is here to peer into that other dimension with me.
Hi, Victoria.
Hey, Mark.
All right, so what's on tap for the week ahead?
Well, plenty of drama at the G20 summit in South Africa, and that's before it even begins.
It's not because of the content what's going to be happening at the summit, but because of the guest list.
And that's because, until Thursday afternoon, President Trump said that the US would not participate in the summit.
He said that America is sitting this one out because— white Afrikaners were being quote slaughtered in South Africa.
That is a false claim that he's made repeatedly since he returned to the White House earlier this year.
If the US doesn't send a delegation, it will be the first time Any G20 member has completely boycotted the event, which has been running for almost three decades now.
And so back to the drama.
There's been a lot of chatter about whether the United States is reconsidering its decision not to attend.
South Africa says that it is.
The Trump administration, though, calls it fake news.
And here's White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt speaking on the issue yesterday.
The representative of the embassy in South Africa is simply there to recognize that the United States will be the host of the G20.
They are receiving that send off at the end of the event.
They are not there to participate in official talks, despite what the South African president is falsely claiming.
So Mark, President Trump has said that he's going to host next year's G20 at one of his golf courses near Miami Florida.
Until then, it's a bit of a mismatch about expectations over the United States' role in this summit in Johannesburg.
So we'll have all the very latest from our correspondents at the summit, which begins on Saturday.
So, you know, stay tuned to this very podcast.
Yeah, we'll keep an eye out for that story and more in Monday's edition of The Briefing.
Have a good weekend, Victoria.
Thanks, Mark.
You too.
You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes.
This has been your daily FT News Briefing.
Check back next week for the latest business news.
The FT News Briefing was produced this week by Julia Webster, Persis Love, Lucy Baldwin, Victoria Craig, Sonia Hudson, Fiona Simon and Misha Frankel Duvall.
I'm your host and editor, Mark Filippino.
Our show is mixed by Alex Higgins, Kent Millitzer, and Kelly Gary.
We had help this week from Peter Barber, Michael Lello, and Gavin Coleman.
Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. and our theme song is by Metaphor Music.
