Mass UK Strikes, Adani Chaos Hits India: The Political Week in Photos

from Bloomberg https://ift.tt/FhQ340a

Adani's crisis is casting a cloud over India — and it could benefit China, which is just reopening after 3 years of COVID isolation

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

• A crisis at the Adani Group is clouding over India just as China reopens.
• A US short seller report alleging market manipulation and fraud at the Adani Group has caused a market rout.
• This is raising concerns about corporate governance in India and could benefit China.

Until recently, India was having a moment — its stock market was posting solid gains and potential investors were looking at the country as the new factory of the world to replace China.

But a major scandal engulfing Gautam Adani, the founder and chairman of one of the country's largest business empires, is clouding over India Inc right now.

The industrial tycoon's crisis started after US short seller Hindenburg Research released a scathing report last Tuesday alleging "brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme" at the Adani Group. The Adani Group has been defending itself vigorously, but Hindenburg has also doubled down on its initial report.

Still, the development has rattled investor confidence, causing a market rout with listed companies under the Adani Group losing over $100 billion in market value so far this year. The selloff has also spilled over into the broader India markets and is prompting concerns about corporate governance and debt in the country.

"The Adani case is a worrying sign for the sustainability of many Indian conglomerates which have followed in Adani's footsteps funding rapid expansions in infrastructure through large amounts of debt," Steno Research, a Denmark-based research house, wrote in a Friday report published on the Smartkarma research platform.

It doesn't help that the drama surrounding the Adani Group comes at an inopportune time — that is, just as China is reopening its borders and looking to bolster its economy after three years of pandemic-induced isolation.

China's border closures had helped India, with this shift contributing to optimism in Indian equities — which were Asia's top performers in 2022. India's benchmark Sensex and Nifty 50 indices have surpassed their 2019 levels and more than doubled from their 2020 lows during in the pandemic. In comparison, any gains on Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index and the Shanghai Composite have been relatively limited, and both measures tanked about 15% in 2022.

But, the Hang Seng and Shanghai Composite have recovered somewhat this year after China emerged from on-off pandemic lockdowns. And they could benefit further from Adani's troubles.

"Allegations of fraud at one of India's most valuable conglomerates, the Adani Group, have hastened the decline we expected in Indian equities as foreign investors rebalance their portfolios on China's reopening," Shumita Deveshwar, the chief economist for India at macroeconomic consultancy TS Lombard, wrote in a Monday note seen by Insider.

The Hang Seng Index and the Shanghai Composite are trading lower at noon Friday, but are up over 7% and 4% respectively this year so far. In comparison, India's benchmark Sensex and Nifty 50 indices are flat in early trade on Friday, but are down 1.5% and 3% respectively this year so far.

Investors are bound to intensify their scrutiny of Indian stocks, TS Lombard's Deveshwar added in her Monday note, but the country's corporate governance metrics rank better than most emerging markets including Saudi Arabia, China, and Brazil, according to a November 2022 report from the consultancy.

Read the original article on Business Insider

from Business Insider https://ift.tt/OoBSRDi

Hunter Biden demands criminal probe into Trump allies with access to his laptop and retractions from Fox News: reports

Hunter Biden, right, the son of President Joe Biden, greets Labor Secretary Marty Walsh during a ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 recipients at the White House on July 7, 2022.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

• Hunter Biden's lawyers sent letters singling out Trump allies and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
• Among the recipients are the Justice Department and Deleware attorney general, WaPo reported.
• Attorneys are also seeking a retraction of "defamatory" statements from Fox News and Tucker Carlson.

Hunter Biden's lawyers are targeting Donald Trump's allies and Fox News in perhaps their most notable parry against the spate of attacks from conservatives who have fixated on the contents of Biden's laptop over the past few years.

Letters from Biden's lawyers show the beleaguered president's son is seeking criminal probes into people who may have had access to his computer data, including Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Two letters from Abbe Lowell, one of Biden's lawyers, were sent on Wednesday to the Justice Department and the Delaware attorney general, The Washington Post reported.

The letter to the Justice Department asked for an investigation into "individuals for whom there is considerable reason to believe violated various federal laws in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden's personal computer data," according to an NBC News report.

The Delaware attorney general was also tapped because Biden's lawyers believe the individuals may have violated state laws by accessing the computer, which was reportedly left at a repair shop in Wilmington.

According to The Post, key individuals singled out in the series of letters include John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Wilmington repair shop; Giuliani, who admitted to sending a copy of the computer hard drive to The New York Post; Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello; and Stephen Bannon, who had access to the laptop contents.

"This marks a new approach by Hunter Biden and his team," a person familiar with Biden's strategy told The Post. "He is not going to sit quietly by as questionable characters continue to violate his rights and media organizations peddling in lies try to defame him."

Also targeted by Biden's lawyers is Fox News and its host Tucker Carlson. Bryan M. Sullivan, another member of Biden's litigation team, accused the outlet and host of defamation and demanded the retraction of a story related to Biden's financial transactions, The Post reported.

"We demand that you immediately retract these statements by spending a significant of amount of air-time on such retraction," Sullivan wrote in the letters, according to The Post.

The Justice Department and Delaware attorney general's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

from Business Insider https://ift.tt/98cwmpa

Looking for a stock boost? Just say you're using new AI tools like ChatGPT

SOPA Images / Getty Images

• Companies are starting to capitalize on the investor frenzy around artificial intelligence.
• The release of ChatGPT in November has supercharged investor interest in the space, sending some stocks soaring. 
• Even companies with no existing business in AI have seen shares surge on news related to trend. 

---

Investors love a good viral trend to sink their teeth into, and that's on full display right now amid the buyside's frenzy for anything related to artificial intelligence, be it a struggling media company or a tiny software firm.

Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November, investors have been growing more and more interested in the potential for artificial intelligence to reshape whole industries (not to mention draw massive amounts of capital). 

ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot that allows users to have human-like conversations on a myriad of topics. Just two months after its release, users of ChatGPT are using the platform to assist with writing emails, developing code, and answering questions on topics ranging from dating to investing.

As is often the natural course of these trends, ChatGPT and AI have fully captured Wall Street's attention, and companies are starting to cash in. 

C3.ai said in a press release on Tuesday that it would incorporate ChatGPT into its enterprise product offerings. The stock soared 22%, and is up another 9% today. While C3.ai has always been focused on artificial intelligence, the announcement on Tuesday and subsequent pop in the shares showed that investors are hungry for anything new and shiny in this space. 

Buzzfeed is another example. The digital media company known for its viral quizzes and listicles said it would harness ChatGPT to create personalized content for its readers, and like clockwork its stock quadrupled over a two-day period. The stock has since dropped 48% from its recent peak. 

Even some more obscure and only vaguely AI-adjacent names are getting a boost from the hype. On Wednesday, Versus Systems, a small software firm with a roughly $7 million market cap, saw its stock spike 400% on an announcement it's partnering with a company that has some focus on AI, even though Versus itself has no discernible business in the space.  

Just as the 1960s saw a wave of companies scrambling to associate themselves with consumer electronics by adding "tron" the end of their name, the 1990s experienced a wave of .com branding, and the mid 2010s were awash in blockchain businesses (remember Long Island Blockchain?), the world in 2023 is witnessing a new gold rush to the wild west of AI.

The metaverse is another great example of markets jumping the shark on a nascent trend. Last year,  investors scrambled for anything related to Web3, only to have their dreams of virtual economies rudely interrupted by developments in the real economy. Metaverse ambitions mostly flamed out as financial conditions tightened and the sector was rocked by high-profile crypto scandals. 

Now, sparked by the promising (and, to be fair, real) capabilities of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence is the market's shiny new object. 

There's little doubt that artificial intelligence will be a game-changer in the coming years, and there will be plenty of winners in the space, but similar to recent crazes like last year's rush to the metaverse, investors at this point may still want to take the grandiose promises of AI with a large grain of salt. 

Read the original article on Business Insider

from Business Insider https://ift.tt/KxGs64t

Bank of America's Veteran Mining Head Omar Davis to Retire

from Bloomberg https://ift.tt/0OIdTkU

Mark Zuckerberg is among the top gainers in wealth this year as Meta shares surge on the company's cost-cutting spree

Gains in Meta's share prices are boosting Mark Zuckerberg's net worth this year so far.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

• Mark Zuckerberg's net worth is up $11.6 billion this year so far thanks to gains in Meta shares.
• Meta shares are up over 50% this year after surging 20% in after-hours trade on Wednesday.
• Meta shares were boosted by the company's announcement that it will continue to cut costs this year.

Mark Zuckerberg's cost-cutting measures for Meta have borne fruits for investors — and himself — as the company's share price surged 20% after hours on Wednesday.

The after-hours bump adds to Meta stock's winning streak, taking its gains to over 50% this year. This has in turn boosted Zuckerberg's net worth by $11.6 billion this year — taking his fortune to $57.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, where he is in the 21st spot.

The rise in Zuckerberg's fortune is impressive because it put him in the fifth spot in terms of year-to-date gains behind fellow billionaires Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, and Changpeng Zhao, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Even so, this is a far cry from early 2022, when Zuckerberg started the year with a $125 billion fortune.

The massive slump in Zuckerberg's wealth last year mirrored a massive decline in Meta's share price, which lost about two-thirds of its value in 2022 after Facebook reported a fall in its daily active user numbers for the first time ever amid a massive strategic pivot.

In November, Zuckerberg announced mass layoffs that affected about 13% of its workforce and implemented other cost-cutting measures, like closing offices. On Wednesday, Meta said it will continue to tighten its belts in 2023.

"It's been a rapid phase-change, to take a step back and say, 'Ok, we can't treat everything like it's hyper growth,'" Zuckerberg said on a fourth-quarter earnings call with Wall Street analysts on Wednesday, according to a transcript. "We have a lot of things now that a lot of people use and that support a large amount of business and we should operate somewhat differently."

Meta expects capital expenditures to fall by $4 billion this year, the company said in a press release.

Meta shares closed 2.8% higher at $153.12 on Wednesday before strong gains of 20% in after-hours trade.

Read the original article on Business Insider

from Business Insider https://ift.tt/zCmPIkL

Avian Flu Jump a 'Long Way' From a Covid-19-Like Infection in Humans

from Bloomberg https://ift.tt/L8PkUqs