Closing summary
Wall Street stocks are higher, with the S&P 500 crossing through the 7,000 mark for the first time.
Over here, the FTSE 100 index has slipped 0.35% to 10,172 while the French and Spanish stock markets have tumbled more than 1%.
The US dollar has stabilised somewhat, but is hovering at a four-year low against a basket of major currencies.
Yesterday Donald Trump brushed off concerns over the currency’s fall, sending investors fleeing to traditional havens including gold and the Swiss franc.
Spot gold broke through $5,300 an ounce at one stage, and is now 1.7% higher at $5,275 an ounce.
Our other main stories:
Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care! – JK
Wall Street index S&P 500 rises above 7,000 for the first time
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index has gone through the 7,000 mark for the first time, driven by optimism around artificial intelligence and expectations of strong results from big technology companies.
The index is now up 29 points just below the 7,000 level. The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 150 points, or 0.6%, to 23,967 at the open.
It took about three years for the S&P 500 to rise to 5,000 points from 4,000, but only about nine months to jump from 5,000 to 6,000, in November 2024.
Technology stocks account for nearly half of the S&P 500.
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, Microsoft and Tesla are due to report earnings later today.
The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at it the end of its two-day meeting, at 7pm GMT.
Updated
Luca Bindelli, head of investment strategy, and Kiran Kowshik, currency strategist at the Swiss private bank Lombard Odier, have looked at the recent dollar weakness.
Purported coordinated intervention signals from the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan to counter previous excessive Japanese yen weakness have reinforced market perceptions that US authorities may be increasingly willing to tolerate a softer dollar.
Against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, US trade policy, and the upcoming Federal Reserve chair nomination, where concerns about institutional independence linger, dollar downside risks have risen alongside a pick-up in currency volatility. The dollar’s decline broadened and accelerated after President Trump stated he was comfortable with the currency’s year‑to‑date softness. These developments also fuelled fears of monetary debasement, helping explain the concurrent rise in gold prices. Thus far, the impact on US bond markets has been limited, while equities have continued to hold their ground, with the earnings season remaining the dominant market driver.
A weaker US dollar generally reflects improved global liquidity conditions and tends to support broader risk markets, particularly emerging markets. While we do not view a disorderly dollar move as our base case given the still‑elevated US real interest rate premium relative to G10 currency peers and the country’s strong earnings‑growth leadership within developed markets, a sharper downside scenario would likely see gold continue to outperform, even potentially accelerate despite its already-stretched momentum. We maintain our overweight stance in emerging market assets and gold.
Marston’s shares plunged 16%, even though the British pub chain reported strong festive sales.
Investors were spooked by flat like-for-like sales over the 17 weeks to 24 January and questioned whether the company can sustain momentum. The share price is now down 12%.
The owner of more than 1,300 pubs across Britain said like-for-like sales rose 4% over the festive period between 21 December and 3 January.
The lacklustre performance beyond the holiday season raises concerns about underlying consumer demand, as the hospitality sector is facing rising costs.
JPMorgan analysts noted that the flat sales lagged those of its closest rival, Mitchells & Butlers, which reported 4.5% like-for-like sales growth in the first quarter.
Last week, JD Wetherspoon warned 2026 profit could fall as it grapples with mounting costs from energy bills, repairs, and property taxes.
Marston’s has kept a tight lid on costs and upgraded its sites to attract more punters, and is confident it will meet full-year underlying pretax profit forecasts of £78.7.
It hopes events including the 2026 FIFA World Cup will bring more people into its pubs.
Yesterday, the government announced a support package for pubs and live music venues in England, providing some relief from the property tax rises announced in the November budget, which left the hospitality industry reeling and hit pubs particularly hard.
The GMB union has responded to the latest wave of job cuts at the US retail technology giant Amazon, which will also affect the UK, although we don’t know how many.
Rachel Fagan, GMB Organiser, said:
Amazon is showing itself for what it is; a company that cannot be trusted to do the right thing by working people in the UK.
Bosses are overseeing thousands of job losses which will cause huge damage in towns and cities across the country.
Now is the time for decision makers to recognise Amazon as a company fixated on eye-watering profits at the expense of workers and local people.
SpaceX mulls $1.5tn IPO timed to ‘align with Musk’s birthday and the planets’
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is considering a flotation valuing the rocket company at $1.5tn (£1.1tn) that will reportedly be timed for early summer to coincide with a planetary alignment and the multibillionaire’s birthday.
The world’s richest person is targeting a symbolic date of mid-June for the initial public offering, according to the Financial Times. This would be around the same time as Jupiter and Venus appear in close proximity to each other and shortly before Musk turns 55 on 28 June.
The FT also reported that SpaceX is seeking to raise $50bn – valuing the rocket company at $1.5tn – compared with previous reports that it was looking for $25bn at an $800bn valuation. Last week, it was reported that the rocket company was considering Bank of America, JP MorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for leading roles in the share sale.
Musk, whose $680bn fortune would be turbo-boosted by a SpaceX flotation, said last year the company’s annual revenue would be $15.5bn, with $1.1bn of that coming from contracts with Nasa. The billionaire owns about 42% of SpaceX, as well as nearly 17% of the electric carmaker Tesla, where he is chief executive. He also owns more than three-quarters of the social media platform X.
ONS moves to supermarket checkout scanner data, which means inflation is slightly lower
The way UK inflation is calculated will now include collecting price data from supermarket checkout scanners, the Office for National Statistics said, after years of delays. This means that the inflation rate will be slightly lower when applied to past data.
In a bid to modernise how consumer prices are measured, the ONS said that from March, the prices shoppers pay at supermarket checkouts or online will be incorporated into its inflation data.
Until now, the ONS has measured inflation by sending out price checkers at the same time every month to shops around the UK to record the prices of specific items. Prices were also collected from websites, telephone calls, catalogues and brochures.
The switch to taking data straight from supermarket tills comes five years after the ONS first announced plans to do so, due to the unexpected size and complexity of the switch.
The ONS said the process has involved
replacing 25,000 monthly price points… with 300m price points derived from sales of over a billion units of products per month taken directly from checkouts.
The statistics body said the data will also enable it to better capture the impact of a wider range of promotions, such as store discount cards, on average price inflation. This is because it will be the price charged at the till, not the price shown on the shelf, that will feed into the inflation statistics.
If the new supermarket scanner data had been used between January 2019 and June 2025, it would have lowered the average inflation rate by 0.03 percentage points, and led to a 0.1 percentage point difference in the published rate in 39 out of 66 months, the ONS said.
It said it would also collect an additional day of prices for hotel stays in its inflation data each month to iron out the volatility that can come during a major event such as a big sports match or music concert.
Amazon tells staff it plans 16,000 job cuts after email leak
Amazon has now officially told staff it plans to cut around 16,000 jobs globally as part of efforts to streamline its operations, after it sent an email to its employees in error.
It is the latest major round of job cuts at the retail technology giant, coming only three months after it axed 14,000 jobs.
It is understood the bulk of jobs impacted by the latest cuts will be in the US but there will also be some job losses in the UK. The company did not disclose how many UK workers will be affected.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, told staff in a blog post:
As I shared in October, we’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy.
Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.
US dollar sinks to its lowest level in four years; Swiss franc at decade high
Here’s our full story on the dollar:
The US dollar has fallen to its lowest level in four years after Donald Trump brushed off concerns over the currency’s fall, sending investors fleeing to traditional havens including gold and the Swiss franc.
The dollar dropped by 1.3% against a basket of currencies after the president’s comments on Tuesday, marking its fourth day of declines, then slipped by a further 0.2% on Wednesday morning.
“No, I think it’s great,” Trump said of the weaker dollar, during a visit to Iowa to promote his record on the economy. Asked whether he was concerned about the currency’s slide, he told reporters: “I think the value of the dollar – look at the business we’re doing. The dollar’s doing great.”
The greenback has tumbled by 10% over the past year, while Tuesday’s fall was the largest one-day drop since last April, when Trump announced his sweeping tariff plans, marking a global market sell-off.
The dollar has now touched its lowest level since February 2022, after unpredictable US policymaking, including Trump’s recent threats to take over Greenland and impose further tariffs on European allies, unleashed fresh geopolitical shocks.
“A weaker dollar is a two-sided coin,” said Steve Sosnick, a market strategist at Interactive Brokers, adding that it was good for multinational companies.
If you have operations around the world and foreign currency revenue that will have a conversion advantage when you turn it into US dollars, that will be good. On the other, it makes imported goods more expensive and there might be some inflationary impact from that.
The dollar’s slide has also propelled some rival global currencies to multi-year highs.
The Swiss franc has soared to its highest level against the dollar in more than a decade, as traders have sought out a store of wealth traditionally viewed as a haven insulated from global volatility. The franc has already climbed 3% against the dollar so far this year, after a 14% rise in 2025.
The euro has also surged to $1.20 against the dollar, setting a new milestone, while the pound hit $1.38 for the first time since October 2021.
Updated
Here are the comments in full from Chuck Robbins, who runs Cisco Systems which produces IT infrastructure enabling use of AI.
He told the BBC the technology will be “bigger than the internet”, but the current market is probably a bubble and some companies “won’t make it,” as reported earlier.
There’s been a lot of discussion about: ‘Is this a bubble?’. And the answer is probably yes, but we had a bubble in 2000 with the internet. And look at where we are today.
So the winners emerge, and there’s carnage along the way, but it is going to be bigger than the internet.
It feels a lot like it (the dotcom crash), but what happens is you’ll have money that will be invested in companies that won’t make it, but the winners will emerge, the applications and use cases will begin to evolve.
Robbins compared AI to iPhones, with the constant development of new applications, saying new uses for the technology will develop over time.
He said it will make “lots of things better”, but also has “potential risks we all have to mitigate”.
British Land to buy Life Science REIT for £150m in lab push
British Land, one of the UK’s biggest property developers which owns the office complex Broadgate in the City of London, has struck a £150m deal to buy Life Science REIT (real estate investment trust).
British Land focuses on building office and shop clusters in London, and is one of the country’s largest owners and operators of out-of-town retail parks. It is also constructing lab buildings, for example in the Knowledge Quarter near King’s Cross station in north London.
The company said it “sees a compelling opportunity to grow its Science & Technology footprint” through the acquisition, adding five well-located assets.
The Life Science REIT portfolio is all located with the “golden triangle” of Cambridge, Oxford and London. It contains two central London buildings within the Knowledge quarter, a modern 24-acre technology park in Oxford, and a 13-acre campus and another building in Cambridge.
British Land acknowledged that demand for lab space was “more muted” in 2025.
It is paying 42.8p for every Life Science REIT share. That firm’s share price jumped by 19% to 42.2p on the news.
The budget hotel chain Travelodge has warned that recent government policies have made trading conditions “more challenging” after the sector missed out on fresh business rates relief.
A day after the Treasury announced additional tax relief for pubs and music venues, the Travelodge boss Jo Boydell said the move was “neglecting the broader hospitality sector”. She added:
Higher rates and a lack of bespoke support, together with wider regulatory cost increases sends the message that the government does not understand the economic value that our sector delivers.
Travelodge said its business rates bill is set to increase from £38m over the past year to £50m in 2026 due to changes taking effect in April, with “further significant rises” in the following years as transitional relief measures are phased out.
Its warning came as the 625-strong hotel business reported a 0.7% increase in revenues to £1.04bn last year.
Coinbase adverts banned in UK for suggesting crypto could ease cost of living crisis
A cryptocurrency company advised by George Osborne has been banned from showing a set of adverts that suggested using its services could be a solution to the cost of living crisis.
Coinbase, which appointed the former Conservative chancellor to chair its global advisory council last year, has been told by the UK’s advertising watchdog that its adverts were “irresponsible” and “trivialised the risks of cryptocurrency”.
The adverts from the US crypto exchange include a sarcastic two-minute video showing people singing “everything is just fine, everything is grand” as their home falls into a state of disrepair and suffers a power cut, while outside Britons cheerfully dance through streets littered with rats and piles of overflowing bin bags.
As the ad progresses, a shopper faces rising prices for fish fingers in a supermarket, white-collar workers lose their jobs, a sewage pipe bursts and rubbish falls from the sky.
The clip ends with large text saying: “If everything’s fine, don’t change anything”, before being replaced with the Coinbase logo. The company, which was founded in 2012, provides a platform for people to buy and sell various cryptocurrencies.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the advertising campaign, which launched in August, implied that using Coinbase could be an alternative to the financial concerns associated with the cost of living, and so trivialised the risks associated with investing in cryptocurrencies.
We considered that using humour to reference serious financial concerns, alongside a cue to ‘change’, risked presenting complex, high-risk financial products as an easy or obvious response to those concerns.
Royal Mail delivered Christmas letters and parcels late to about 16m people
Royal Mail has been criticised for offering an “unacceptable” performance over the crucial Christmas period after it failed to deliver letters and cards on time to about 16 million people, Citizens Advice found.
The consumer watchdog, which carried out research into Christmas deliveries, said that figure was 50% higher than in 2024, and the highest level over the festive period in five years, excluding when Royal Mail was hit by strike action in the run-up to Christmas four years ago.
“We’re afraid there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for consumers struggling with Royal Mail’s persistent delivery failures,” said Anne Pardoe, the head of policy at Citizens Advice. “When people have no other postal provider to choose from, the sheer volume of delays is simply unacceptable.”
The research, based on a survey of almost 2,100 adults conducted by Yonder, calculated that 5.7 million of the 16 million who experienced delivery delays missed out on receiving important information, such as health appointments, fines, benefit decisions and legal documents.
“The company’s dreadful festive slump is about much more than late Christmas cards,” said Pardoe. “This is a worrying trend, and with cuts to delivery days looming, [postal regulator] Ofcom must start cracking down even harder on missed targets before things go from bad to worse.”
‘My Tesla has become ordinary’: Turkey catches up with EU in electric car sales
When Berke Astarcıoğlu bought a BMW i3 in 2016, he was one of just 44 people in a country of 80 million to buy a battery electric vehicle (BEV) that year. By the time he bought a Tesla in 2023, BEVs were no longer a complete oddity in Turkey, making up 7% of new car sales.
Fast-forward two years and electric cars are selling so fast that Turkey has caught up with the EU in its rate of adoption. Its market is now the fourth largest in Europe, behind Germany, the UK and France.
“A premium product is a thing that makes you happy but that not everyone can have,” said Astarcıoğlu, a mechatronic engineer from Istanbul and the developer of an app to find charging stations. “My Tesla has become an ordinary car over here.”
BEVs made up 16.7% of new car sales in Turkey in 2025, just behind the EU’s 17.4%, registration data published on Tuesday shows. While uptake is lower than in the Netherlands or the Nordics, where BEVs make up 35% to 96% of new cars sold, sales in Turkey have raced ahead of almost every country in southern and eastern Europe.
Its electric vehicle surge is part of a global trend in which emerging markets from Uruguay to Vietnam are spurning fossil fuel-burning cars at surprising speed. The latest data comes as Turkey prepares to host the UN climate summit, and one month after the EU watered down its 2035 ban on new combustion engine cars.
Analysts attribute the boom to a disparity in Turkey’s special consumption tax, which has left electric cars only slightly more expensive than comparable petrol cars. Sales remained high even after the government raised taxes on electric vehicles in August.
“Practically speaking, Turkish people don’t buy electric vehicles because it’s eco-friendly,” said Ufuk Alparslan, an analyst at the climate thinktank Ember, saying that running costs were lower for electric cars. “The motivation is purely economical.”
Amazon reveals fresh round of global job cuts in email sent in error to workers
Amazon has told workers of a fresh round of global job cuts in an email that appears to have been sent in error.
Workers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) received a meeting invitation from a top executive on Tuesday for the following day – subsequently cancelled – that also contained a draft email.
The message erroneously said the affected employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been told they had lost their jobs.
It was signed by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice-president of applied AI solutions at the company’s cloud computing arm AWS, while the layoffs were referred to in the email as “Project Dawn”.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, which was seen by multiple news outlets including Reuters and Bloomberg. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.”
Debenhams lifts forecast and will retain PrettyLittleThing brand
The British retailer Debenhams has lifted its forecast for 2025 profit as all its brands are doing well, including PrettyLittleThing.
The company, which rebranded from Boohoo last March after buying the department store chain Debenhams out of administration five years ago, said trading had been better than expected. This means it now expects adjusted core profit for the 12 months to 28 February to come in at £50m, rather than £45m as previously estimated. It said:
This is a result of the continued momentum in our Debenhams brand, a discernible improvement in the performance of our youth brands and accelerated progress on our transformation plan. All our brands continue to trade profitably.
The online retailer had planned to sell PrettyLittleThing as part of a cost-cutting drive to boost profits and reduce its debt burden, but now plans to retain the brand. It reiterated that it will still go ahead with the sale of non-core assets to “materially” reduce debt.
Given the success we are seeing with PrettyLittleThing’s turnaround, the momentum it is building and the substantial opportunity ahead as a fashion-led marketplace, the brand will be retained.
On the stock markets, European shares are taking a breather and have fallen back after two days of gains.
US stock futures are pointing to a higher open on Wall Street later, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq seen rising 0.8%.
The pan-European Stoxx 600 index is flat ahead of the latest interest rate decision from the US Federal Reserve later today (markets are expecting no change but are waiting for further clues on policy from Fed chair Jerome Powell during the press conference).
A technology stocks index climbed as much as 2.7%, after ASML, the world’s largest supplier of computer chip equipment, reported stronger-than-expected orders for the fourth quarter, highlighting booming AI demand. Its shares rose 7% to hit a record high, and are now trading 5.3% higher.
The Dutch company’s chief executive Christophe Fouquet said the group expected a “significant increase” in sales of its Extreme Ultraviolet machines this year, after fourth-quarter orders beat analysts’ expectations.
Swedish truckmaker Volvo climbed 2.7% after it posted a smaller-than-anticipated decline in fourth-quarter operating profits.
On the flipside, the luxury group LVMH shares tumbled by 7% after chief executive Bernard Arnault expressed caution about the year ahead.
The FTSE 100 index in London has slipped 16 points, or 0.16%, to 10,191. Germany’s Dax is down 0.13%, France’s CAC has lost 0.9%, Italy’s FTSE MiB slid 0.7% and Spain’s Ibex is trading 0.6% lower.
Updated
Pound rises above $1.38 for first time since 2021; gold breaks through $5,300
The pound has also benefited from the weaker dollar, and rose above $1.38 for the first time since October 2021.
Meanwhile, gold briefly broke through the $5,300 an ounce level, as investors sought out safe-haven investments.
Sterling has climbed nearly 3% in the last four trading days, from around $1.34, reflecting a sharp unwind in dollar positions as investors respond to growing policy risk in the US, said George Vessey, lead currency and macro strategist at the cross-border payments firm Convera.
Several factors are weighing on the US currency simultaneously, but the common thread is erratic US policymaking, which has revived the dollar’s risk premium and pushed investors to rotate out of dollar‑denominated assets or hedge their exposure.
He said for the pound, “the move looks convincingly bullish and could mark the beginning of a shift into a higher trading range, with the psychological $1.40 level now the next upside marker”.
The FX options market reinforces this momentum. Positioning for a stronger pound versus the dollar is now the most bullish over a one‑week horizon since 2019, while longer‑dated risk reversals have surged back to levels last seen during the tariff shock last April.
More broadly, currency volatility has returned with force. The G10 one‑month implied/realised volatility spread is at its widest in over a year, signalling that traders are bracing for more turbulence ahead.
Euro hits $1.20 as sentiment towards dollar sours
As sentiment towards the dollar sours, the euro has hit $1.20 against the greenback, setting a new milestone.
Last week, the euro rose about 2%, its biggest weekly gain since last April, when Donald Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” trade tariffs caused global turmoil.
The dollar has been on the backfoot against a number of major currencies, sinking to a fresh four-year low today.
Trump’s trade and foreign policy and his attacks on the US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, have weakened the dollar. The latest sell-off intensified after he said the dollar’s value was “great” when asked whether the greenback had declined too much.
2025 was the European single currency’s best year since 2017, as it climbed about 13%. However, the path to $1.20 has not been smooth – the euro was near that level in September but then the dollar recovered.
A year ago, the euro was trading close to $1, but has strengthened since then, helped by a European stimulus package led by Germany, the region’s economic powerhouse, and efforts to boost long-term growth and security in the eurozone.
Historically, the $1.20 level sits just above the euro’s average since it was launched in 1999, according to Reuters. But it’s still much lower than the peak of $1.60 it touched in 2008 during the global financial crisis.
EasyJet warned over 'misleading' £5.99 cabin bag fee
EasyJet has been told by the UK’s advertising regulator that its claim that carry-on baggage fees cost “from £5.99” is “misleading”.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said there was “insufficient evidence” that the price was available for large cabin bags “across a range of flight routes and dates”.
It banned the airline from using the phrase in its marketing and asked it to ensure that for “from” prices for large cabin bags, the lowest price is available “across a significant proportion of flights”.
In its defence, the budget airline told the regulator its advertised price was available on a range of routes but prices varied depending availability, demand and operational cost. It added that the actual price for a particular booking was clearly displayed before purchase.
The regulator’s ruling comes after an investigation by consumer group Which? which found the price for adding a large cabin bag exceeded £5.99 on all 520 easyJet flights analysed. The lowest price found was £23.49 while the average was £30.
Large cabin bags are designed to fit in overhead lockers on planes. Most low-cost airlines charge passengers an extra fee for bringing a large cabin bag.
Rory Boland, editor of magazine Which? Travel, said:
It’s frankly astonishing that airlines think they can ignore the rules and mislead customers with unattainable prices, so it’s absolutely right that the ASA has made this ruling against easyJet as a result of our complaint.
Our recent investigation found that there is a culture of airlines using low headline fares - then charging exorbitant prices on top to take a standard cabin bag.
The easyJet cabin bag prices we collected were typically five times as much as the ‘from £5.99’ it claimed. When booking a trip, customers should consider choosing an airline without cabin bag add-ons as it may work out cheaper.
EasyJet said in a statement:
We always aim to provide clear information to our customers on pricing, and the purpose of this page was to display factual information on fees and charges to customers.
We always have some large cabin bags available for the lowest price.
In light of the ASA’s feedback we have made some changes to the page to ensure the information is as clear as possible for consumers.
Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, said it is likely that the dollar will continue to weaken.
There were plenty of major stories and market moves yesterday, but the most significant — and most impactful — was undoubtedly the sharp sell-off in the US dollar. It pushed the US dollar index to a four-year low and continues to drive gold and silver to fresh record highs this morning.
Trade and geopolitical uncertainty, tied to an increasingly unreliable American friend and ally, as well as growing concerns about what will happen to the Federal Reserve’s credibility once Jerome Powell leaves office (it will fly out of the window), continue to weigh on the US dollar. Add to that the latest US consumer survey, which showed a sharp drop in consumer confidence, a marked deterioration in how households view the current situation, a decline in the share of consumers expecting income growth, and a steady rise in those saying jobs are hard to get. You get a pretty murky picture for the greenback and the two-speed US economy.
Still, this will hardly convince the Fed to cut rates today or in the coming months. Powell is likely to avoid political commentary at his post-decision speech today and keep the focus firmly on economic data to justify policy decisions.
That said, we all know the US President is waiting just outside the room — and anything he might say about the Fed’s decision, or about how much he dislikes Powell, would only risk making matters worse for the US dollar, much to the delight of gold and silver longs. But with or without buzzy headlines, the US dollar looks condemned to weaken.
The only real comfort is that US inflation has not surged as a result of tariffs.
Introduction: AI boom will produce winners and 'carnage,' says tech boss; dollar sinks to four-year lows after Trump comments
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.
The artificial intelligence (AI) will create winners but there will be “carnage along the way,” the boss of a US technology company has warned.
Chuck Robbins, who runs Cisco Systems which produces IT infrastructure enabling use of AI, told the BBC the technology will be “bigger than the internet”, but the current market is probably a bubble and some companies “won’t make it”.
Robbins said some jobs will be changed by AI, or even “eliminated”, especially in areas like customer services where companies will need “fewer people”, but urged workers to embrace rather than fear the technology.
This comes after a spate of warnings over job losses as a result of the technology, and fears that the boom is a bubble waiting to burst. JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon has said some of the money invested in AI would “probably be lost”, while Google parent company Alphabet’s chief executive Sundar Pichai said there was some “irrationality” in the AI boom.
The dollar has sunk to four-year lows after Donald Trump brushed off its recent decline, triggering more selling of the US currency ahead of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision later today.
The dollar slumped 1.3% against a basket major currencies yesterday, and has slipped a further 0.2% this morning. It has fallen for four days in a row.
The US president said yesterday the value of the dollar was “great,” when asked whether he thought it had fallen too much. Traders interpreted this as a signal to carry on with dollar selling.
The dollar has been under pressure amid Trump’s erratic trade tariffs and foreign policy and as traders brace for a possible coordinated currency intervention by US and Japanese authorities to stabilise the yen’s decline.
The Japanese currency has been rallying since Monday amid talk of the US and Japan conducting rate checks, seen as a precursor to official intervention.
Kyle Rodda, a senior analyst at Capital.com, told Reuters:
It shows there’s a crisis of confidence in the US dollar. It would appear that while the Trump administration sticks with its erratic trade, foreign and economic policy, this weakness could persist.
Markets are expecting no change to interest rates at the Fed meeting, and Trump is not going to like that, having pushed for lower rates over the past year. Analysts said this could inject more volatility into dollar trading.
The US president could announce his candidate to replace Fed chair Jerome Powell soon after the rate decision. The Trump administration’s criminal investigation of Powell and his ongoing attempt to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook are also in focus.
Gold continues to climb, breaking through $5,200 an ounce to a new record high. The precious metal, seen as a safe haven investment in times of political turmoil, jumped 1.7% to $5,278 an ounce.
Last year, gold recorded a 64% gain, the largest annual increase since 1979.
The Agenda
2.45pm GMT: Bank of Canada interest rate decision (no change expected)
7pm GMT: US Federal Reserve interest rate decision (no change expected)
7.30pm GMT: Fed press conference
Updated
