Markets & Headlines

Markets & Headlines – 4/16/25

Headlines and Quotations

WSJ

Kristi Noem’s Made-for-TV Approach to Homeland Security

“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”
The government is asking for a comprehensive mask ban as well as changes to governance, leadership and admissions and an end to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs.

The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.

Meta offered $450M to settle an antitrust case, far less than the FTC’s $30B demand, centered on Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon are seeking other ways to send sensitive information to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency due to concerns around an email hack that is still under investigation
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.

The private-markets giant has formed an alliance with Vanguard and Wellington Management, with the goal of offering individuals access to multiasset portfolios, with private and public assets, that have otherwise only been available to institutional investors, the companies said.
The partnership could give Blackstone a path to offer private-markets assets for target-date funds in 401(k)s, which many in the industry have long viewed as a holy grail.

CNBC

On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.
The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in 2024.
Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.
Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.
DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.

The new restrictions — which encompass the medium and heavy rare earth elements samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium — will require Chinese companies to secure special licenses to export the resources.
As China effectively holds a monopoly over the supply of global heavy rare earths processing
Trump has also been seeking a deal with Ukraine, which would give it access to its deposits of rare earth minerals. However, questions remain about the value and accessibility of such deposits.

“I mean, within BP, a company that trades on three times EBITDA, there’s a division that can trade at 10 times EBITDA, right? Amazing. You can make the same point for a lot of the other Big Oils,” Della Vigna said.

Apple’s main India suppliers Foxconn
and Tata shipped nearly $2 billion worth of iPhones to the United States in March, an all-time high, as the U.S. company airlifted devices to bypass President Donald Trump’s impending tariffs, customs data shows.

Investing.com

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) stock rose more than 3% after the lender reported a rise in net interest income in the first quarter, as tariff-driven volatility spurring on record equities trading revenue at its global markets unit.

Yahoo Finance

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