Baltic
Dry Index. 2205 -89 Brent Crude 61.12
Spot
Gold 4330 U S 2
Year Yield 3.52 unch.
US
Federal Debt. 38.402 trillion
US
GDP 30.637 trillion
“George
goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they
wake him up and put him outside at two.”
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat.
What goes up and all
that. Did/is reality returning in the AI bubble?
An interesting
trading week lies ahead.
S&P
500 retreats from record Friday, closes down for week as investors rush out of
AI trade
Updated
Fri, Dec 12 2025 4:20 PM EST
U.S.
equities pulled back on Friday as investors continued to exit technology stocks
and move into value areas of the market.
The S&P 500 fell 1.07% to end
the day at 6,827.41, and the Nasdaq
Composite declined 1.69% to 23,195.17. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished
down 245.96 points, or 0.51%, to settle at 48,458.05 after scoring a new
intraday all-time high earlier in the session. The Russell 2000 index slid 1.51%
to 2,551.46 but had also hit a fresh all-time high during the trading day.
The
broad market index and tech-heavy Nasdaq were bogged down by a more than 11%
drop in Broadcom, which
some analysts think is because of margin
compression worries. That’s even after the company beat
fourth-quarter expectations and gave a strong forecast for the current
quarter, saying artificial intelligence chip sales look to double.
As
the AI trade faced more pressure, with names like AMD, Palantir Technologies and Micron seeing some losses
alongside Broadcom, stocks in other areas of the market such as financials,
health care and industrials received a bit of a boost. In those sectors, Visa and Mastercard as well as UnitedHealth Group and GE Aerospace were winners.
“Today
is a value-outperforms-growth day,” said Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at
Argent Capital Management. “Investors are definitely skittish as it relates to
AI — not outright pessimistic, but just kind of, I think, cautious and nervous
and hesitant.”
Friday’s
action marked another day of the rotation trade, as investors on Thursday
poured into cyclical stocks that are considered more sensitive to the economy
while taking profits in growth-oriented names tied to the AI trade. The move
comes after the Federal Reserve on Wednesday cut interest rates for the third
time this year.
A
rise in shares of Visa and UnitedHealth, along with others such as Nike, propelled the Dow to close at
a record in the prior session. The S&P 500 notched a new closing high as
well, while the Nasdaq ended the day lower as high-flying tech stocks such as Alphabet and Nvidia dropped.
“The
same things don’t outperform in markets month after month after month for
forever, so this is normal,” Ellerbroek also said. “It’s to be expected, but it
is unwarranted.”
With
the day’s losses, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq scored a losing week, with the
former down 0.6% and the latter losing 1.6%. The 30-stock Dow posted gains,
however, up 1.1% on the week. Small-capitalization companies have outperformed
their larger counterparts, meanwhile, with the Russell 2000 up 1.2% this week
after notching fresh all-time and closing highs on Thursday.
Stock
market news for Dec. 12, 2025
Broadcom
tumbles 11% despite blockbuster earnings as ‘AI angst’ weighs on Oracle, Nvidia
Published
Fri, Dec 12 2025 12:52 PM EST Updated Fri, Dec 12 2025 5:02 PM EST
Broadcom’s quarterly results
and guidance sailed
past Wall Street estimates. It didn’t matter.
The
chipmaker’s shares plummeted 11% on Friday, their worst day since January, as
investors ran for the exits on the artificial intelligence trade. Oracle dropped 4.5% a day
after plunging 10% following its earnings
report.
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, the two
leading makers of graphics processing units for AI workloads, slid about 3% and
5%, respectively.
AI
has been the driver for the stock market and the broader economy this year, so
any negative sentiment has potentially far-reaching consequences. The Nasdaq on
Friday fell about 1.69%, and the S&P 500 declined by 1%.
The
companies getting hit the hardest are the ones most closely tied to AI
infrastructure, which has been booming as hyperscalers build out their data
centers to try and meet what they describe as insatiable demand for
compute-intensive AI services. Broadcom makes custom chips for many of the the
largest tech companies, and saw its market cap about double each of the past
two years before rallying again in 2025.
“This
stock is up 75-80% year to date. You’re seeing a little bit of a pullback,”
Vijay Rakesh, an analyst at Mizuho, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on
Friday. “We would be buyers on this pullback.”
Mizuho
raised its price target on the stock to $450 from $435. It closed on Friday
just below $360.
“This
is still where the growth is,” Rakesh said. “They are still the big supplier
to Google on their
entire hardware stack, to Meta,
to Anthropic and even OpenAI coming down the road.”
Broadcom
reported revenue growth of 28% during the quarter, largely due to a 74%
increase in AI chip sales, to a total of $18.02 billion, topping the $17.49
billion average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per
share of $1.95 adjusted topped the $1.86 average estimate.
CEO
Hock Tan said Broadcom expects AI chip sales this quarter to double from a year
earlier to $8.2 billion, both from custom AI chips as well as semiconductors
for AI networking.
One
concern among investors is that margins are coming down, at least in the short
term, due to higher up-front costs. CFO Kirsten Spears said on the earnings
call that “gross margins will be lower” for some of Broadcom’s AI chip systems
because the company will have to buy more parts to produce the server racks.
Broadcom
also said it had a $73 billion backlog of AI orders over the next 18 months.
Part of that is from $21 billion of orders from Anthropic, which the company
revealed as a key customer on Thursday.
More
Broadcom
tumbles 11% after earnings as AI trade sells off
UK
on ‘recession watch’ as economy contracts amid Budget chaos
Friday 12 December 2025 7:09 am | Updated: Friday
12 December 2025 9:29 am
The UK economy shrank 0.1 per cent in
October – the second consecutive month of decline – as businesses paused investments amid consistent speculation about upcoming tax hikes in Rachel
Reeves’ second Autumn Budget.
The latest figures published by the Office for
National Statistics (ONS) dealt another blow to the Chancellor’s growth agenda
as new data showed production output shrank 0.5 per cent, whilst construction
contracted 0.3 per cent.
The all-important services sector, which is
estimated to make up over 80 per cent of the economy, did not grow at all.
Economists had pencilled in growth of 0.1 per cent
for the month.
Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at
the ONS, said: “The economy contracted slightly in the
latest three months as production fell again and services growth stalled.”
“Within production there was continued weakness in
car manufacturing, with the industry only making a slight recovery in October
from the substantial fall in output seen in the previous month.”
The economy also contracted by 0.1 in September
after a cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover triggered a collapse in the
manufacturing sector.
Recession
‘now a possibility’
The prospect of the UK economy shrinking over the
last three months of the year is “now a possibility” after today’s grim GDP
figures.
Deutsche Bank believes that Britain’s stuttering services sector – the engine
room of the UK economy – and the slower than expected recovery in auto making
after the JLR cyberattack, makes a quarterly contraction likely.
“For the first time this year, we see some meaningful risk of a marginal
quarterly contraction in real GDP,” said Sanjay Raja, the bank’s chief UK
economist. “If realised this would mark the first quarterly contraction in real
GDP since Q4-23. Indeed, Budget uncertainty combined with weak hiring and
rising unemployment fear will likely see spending and investment more subdued
to end the year.”
More
UK on 'recession watch' as economy contracts amid Budget chaos
‘Fodder for a recession’: Top economist Mark Zandi
warns about so many Americans ‘already living on the financial edge’ in a
K-shaped economy
December 10, 2025
Mark Zandi is worried
that the labor market no longer has a buffer.
So many Americans are
“already living on the financial edge,” the chief economist for Moody’s
Analytics told Fortune. If they start to pull back, that’s “fodder
for a recession.”
The stark assessment
comes as hiring has stalled, unemployment is rising—especially for the most
vulnerable workers—and layoff announcements are piling up. To Zandi, the next
stage is already visible: “If we actually do see layoffs pick up,” he told Fortune, “then
it certainly would be a jobs recession.”
Zandi reached that
assessment before the government released its long-delayed JOLTS report Tuesday, but the official numbers largely
confirm the pullback he has been tracking through private data. Since the
summer, job openings have risen by only a few hundred thousand and remain far
below the highs seen in the frenzy of the pandemic. Layoffs upticked slightly,
while quit rates fell, a sign that workers are increasingly hesitant to leave
their current positions. Hiring, meanwhile, has held at 3.2%, a level
consistent with employers who are not actively slashing staff but are no longer
expanding their workforces either: a “low hire, low fire” market.
If the cooling in the
official data looks slow, the private indicators tell a sharper story. ADP’s
November report found that private employers cut 32,000 jobs, the steepest decline
in more than two years. Nearly all of those losses came from small businesses,
which eliminated 120,000 positions. Larger employers moved in the opposite
direction and kept hiring.
For Zandi, the pattern is
not random. He sees it as the continuation of a break that appeared earlier in
the year, when the administration escalated reciprocal tariffs.
“If you look at when job
growth really came to a standstill, it is back soon after Liberation Day,” he
said.
Because these firms often
lack the financial cushions that larger corporations can draw upon, payroll
becomes the most immediate and often the only mechanism through which they can
respond to rising input costs. The result, Zandi argues, is a labor market in
which the earliest fractures appear among precisely the kinds of employers most
sensitive to policy and price shifts. Those fractures then begin to ripple
outward, first through hiring freezes and only later, if conditions worsen,
through broader layoffs.
Layoffs are coming, Zandi warns
So for Zandi, if ADP
offers a snapshot of the present, the data from Challenger, Gray &
Christmas hints at what may lie
ahead. Employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs this year, a figure
surpassed only during the pandemic shock of 2020 and the depths of the Great
Recession. These announcements are global, and not all will materialize as U.S.
cuts, Zandi advised, yet he considers their scale meaningful because they
reflect decisions made months in advance of actual separations.
“That would suggest that
there are layoffs coming,” he said. “They seemingly have not occurred yet.” The
disconnect between rising layoff announcements and historically low
unemployment-insurance claims feels increasingly “incongruous” to him, and he
suspects one reason may be that early cuts are falling on higher-income workers
who receive severance or wait longer before filing for benefits, obscuring the
first phase of the weakening.
More
Deutsche
Bank and Goldman Sachs expect the dollar
to resume its slide next year. The
greenback has steadied after its steepest first-half drop since the early
1970s, triggered by Trump’s trade war. But strategists predict renewed
weakness as the Fed continues easing while other central banks hold firm or
even move toward tightening. That divergence would prod investors to
sell US debt and redirect funds to markets offering higher yields.
Trump Signals Help for Ukraine - Bloomberg
In other news, are US
official statistics reliable? No, according to Fed Chairman Powell.
Fed
Chair Jerome Powell Says U.S. May Be Drastically Overstating Jobs Numbers
The country could
be losing 20,000 jobs a month, Powell said, a concern that was part of the
decision to cut interest rates
Dec. 10, 2025 7:32 pm ET
Fed
Chair Jerome Powell pointed on Wednesday to a job-market risk that
economists have been worried about for months: Official statistics could be
drastically overstating recent hiring.
Powell
said that Fed staffers believe that federal data could be overestimating job
creation by up to 60,000 jobs a month. Given that figures published so far show
that the economy has added about 40,000 jobs a month since April, the real
number could be something more like a loss of 20,000 jobs a month, Powell said.
“We
think there’s an overstatement in these numbers,” Powell said in a press
conference following the central bank’s two-day policy meeting.
Published
data already show the labor market has slowed significantly this year, down
from rapid hiring after the Covid-19 pandemic. This slower pace means big data
revisions can more easily reveal the economy is shedding jobs, not adding
them.
“It’s
a complicated, unusual, and difficult situation, where the labor market is also
under pressure, where job creation may actually be negative,” Powell
said.
That
concern provided some of the backing for the Fed’s decision to cut interest
rates at a third straight meeting, Powell said, despite a labor market that
still looks healthy on the surface, with unemployment at a relatively modest
4.4% in September and a net gain of 119,000 jobs that month. Next week, the
Labor Department will report fresh jobs numbers for October and November, as
well as possible revisions for previous months.
Powell’s
concern involves a quandary that the Labor Department faces when measuring
hiring: how to judge the number of jobs added or destroyed when new businesses
are created or close down. Those jobs can’t be surveyed directly because it is
difficult for the government to reach out to brand-new companies or companies
no longer in business.
Instead,
Labor’s data arm, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, must use a statistical model
to make a guess. In the past few years, that technique, called the birth-death
model—referring to the births and deaths of businesses—has contributed to
estimates that have overstated
job creation by hundreds of thousands of jobs a year, forcing
significant downward revisions later.
Last
month, the BLS laid out a plan to change how it uses the birth-death model,
which could make the real-time numbers more accurate starting in February. But
for now, Powell suggested, the Fed is concerned that monthly employment stats
have been too good to be true, part of the rationale for continuing to cut
interest rates even though inflation remains above target.
More
Fed Chair Jerome
Powell Says U.S. May Be Drastically Overstating Jobs Numbers - WSJ
Global Inflation/Stagflation/Recession
Watch.
Given
our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians,
inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
AI is skyrocketing the price of RAM. Computers, phones
and tablets could be next
Major memory component producers are shifting focus from
consumer products to AI data centres
Posted:
Dec 11, 2025 9:41 AM EST | Last Updated: December 11
From
computers to cellphones and even certain features in cars, a lot of electronics
rely on random-access memory, or RAM. It’s the fundamental hardware your
computer processor needs to run applications, open files and let you surf the
internet.
But
if you've been in the market recently for RAM, you've probably noticed a major
spike in prices as memory manufacturers pivot more of their production capacity
away from consumer products to supplying AI companies instead, which are
rapidly building out data centres that need massive amounts of memory to
operate.
“Prices
have absolutely skyrocketed since the beginning of November,” Mark Chen, store
manager at Uniway Computers, which sells custom-built PCs with RAM in Calgary,
told CBC News in an email.
Back
in October, Chen said he could find a 32GB DDR5 memory kit for under $130. By
mid-November, the price had more than doubled to around $300.
Now,
Chen says, it’s difficult to find that same memory kit for less than $400.
In
the latest blow to the consumer market, Micron Technology Inc., considered to
be one of the three major RAM manufacturers in the world, announced
last week it
is retiring its consumer-focused brand Crucial — instead turning its focus to
supplying memory and storage to fast-growing AI data centre customers.
Willy
Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, explained
that Micron is reallocating its manufacturing resources to AI companies,
“where, frankly, they can make a lot more profit.”
“I
have never seen a price spike for RAM of this magnitude before,” Chen said. He
said he’s seen similar volatility with graphics cards a couple of years ago due
to the cryptocurrency boom, but never for memory.
AI
boom fuels a global memory shortage
As
the demand for AI soars, companies like Open AI, Meta and Google have been
scrambling to rapidly develop data centres — becoming more lucrative clientele
for chip manufacturers in the process.
AI
data centres use large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, a kind of
high-performing dynamic RAM, or DRAM, necessary to process the high workload of
AI. Whereas an average personal laptop may operate with 16 gigabytes of memory,
an AI memory component will have closer to 200 gigabytes, Shih explained.
Micron
and its two major competitors, Samsung and SK Hynix, are “all racing to fill
this demand for memory” — sending consumer prices soaring, Shih said.
It’s
a logical business move, he added: if a factory has limited capacity for making
chips, it will make the higher value, in-demand units designed for AI tasks.
More
AI is skyrocketing
the price of RAM. Computers, phones and tablets could be next | CBC News
Technology
Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
GIM Secures Initial Lending Facility with NatWest to Accelerate
Global Growth in Graphene, AI, and Robotics
News provided by Graphene Innovations Manchester Ltd. on
Monday 8th Dec 2025
Graphene
Innovations Manchester (GIM), the world leader in
graphene-based technologies enhanced by AI and robotics, today announced that
it has secured its initial lending facility with NatWest Bank. The
agreement marks a significant milestone in GIM’s long-term growth strategy,
supporting the company’s expanding international operations and its newly
awarded contract with a major Middle Eastern partner.
This financing facility provides GIM with the flexibility to advance its global
rollout of technologies that make materials stronger, lighter, and more
efficient - across sectors ranging from aerospace and construction to energy
and data-centre cooling. As part of its business model, GIM develops breakthrough
materials and intelligent manufacturing systems in the United Kingdom and
licenses them to leading industrial partners worldwide for large-scale
commercialisation.
Dr. Vivek Koncherry, Chief Executive Officer of GIM, commented:
“This agreement with NatWest marks another important step in GIM’s journey to
translate world-class research into global industrial impact. It gives us the
financial platform to expand our operations, deliver on major international
contracts, and strengthen our position as a world leader in graphene-based
innovation”.
For NatWest, the partnership aligns with its mission to support innovation and
advanced manufacturing.
Malcolm Buchanan, Chair of the North Regional
Board, NatWest Group, said:
“NatWest is proud to support pioneering companies like GIM that are driving the
next generation of material science and intelligent automation. With the city
region already the UK’s fastest growing economy, this partnership further
underlines Greater Manchester’s strength as a centre of excellence for
innovation and growth.”
The initial facility is intended to form the foundation of a larger, long-term
financing partnership between GIM and NatWest, as GIM continues to expand its
global presence, deepen its research base, and scale its manufacturing
ecosystem from Great Britain to the Middle East and beyond.
About Graphene Innovations Manchester (GIM)
GIM is a world leader in developing and commercialising graphene and other
2D-material technologies, combined with artificial intelligence and robotics.
From stronger, lighter composites and advanced hydrogen storage to
next-generation concrete and thermal management systems, GIM transforms
scientific breakthroughs into real-world solutions. Headquartered in
Manchester, England, GIM licenses its technologies globally to accelerate
industrial performance and sustainability.
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
Exponent
Calculator
Enter
values into any two of the input fields to solve for the third.
This
weekend’s music diversion, Frederick the Great’s sister composes for the
harpsicord. Approx. 13 minutes.
Wilhelmine
von Bayreuth (1709-1758) - Concerto â Cembalo Obligato
Wilhelmine von
Bayreuth (1709-1758) - Concerto â Cembalo Obligato - YouTube
Next,
more forgotten secret British history. Approx. 28 minutes.
The
Accountant Who Cracked Hitler’s Secret Code
The Accountant Who
Cracked Hitler’s Secret Code - YouTube
Finally,
how HMS Victory worked part two. Approx. 29 minutes.
3D
Guide to Britain's Most Famous Warship (2/2)
3D Guide to Britain's MostFamous Warship (2/2)
Next week, Nelson’s great victory at the Nile.
"I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now you
come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a
drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted- put you right in less than no
time."
Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something
brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise
(supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with:
"So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the corner
here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.”
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat.
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