The middle class will be most impacted by the interest rate increase and price increases, according to Marcello’s recap of th week. Elon Musk ultimately succeeded in acquiring Twitter, and Kanye West has been dropped by numerous firms due to some antisemitic comments.
Elon Musk has finally taken ownership of Twitter with business efficiency, quickly firing top executives as he moves forward to achieve the agenda he has outlined for the influential social media platform. “The bird is freed,” he tweeted after he completed his $44B acquisition Thursday, referencing Twitter’s bird logo in an apparent nod to his desire to see the company have fewer limits on content that can be posted, but the full restructuring of the firm will take time. He has said a downsizing of up -75% of the present headcount will occur.
Russian President Putin said on Thursday that the world faced the most dangerous decade since World War II as Western elites scrambled to prevent the inevitable crumbling of the global dominance of the U.S. & its allies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the depths of the Cold War when the Soviet Union & the U.S. came closest to nuclear war.
The European Central Bank announced a 75-basis-point interest rate hike this week, its 3rd consecutive increase this year, while also scaling back support for European banks. Thursday’s rate hike takes the ECB’s main benchmark from 0.75% to 1.5%, a level not seen since 2009, before the sovereign debt crisis. It comes after the central bank raised rates by +0.50% basis points in July & +0.75% in September.
According to the National Association of Realtors, U.S. pending home sales, a measure of signed contracts on existing homes, dropped a much worse-than-expected -10.2% in September from August. Economists had predicted only a -4% decline. Sales are down -31% year over year. It marks the lowest level on the pending sales index since June 2010, excluding April 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was in its early days.
Shares of U.S. tech giant Apple surged nearly +8% on Friday at $156.00, in the best single day since 2020.
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