AI nerves, a Musk merger and a poor day in Hong Kong

A nervous day for the AI trade

The Wall Street Journal's live coverage on Thursday 22 October carried a blunt headline. The tech selloff deepened, and a flight into Treasurys drove yields lower.

Meta sat near the middle of it, and the day's coverage did not entirely agree. Euronews reported that Meta shares jumped 5% as AI investments fuelled revenue growth. By the evening the Journal was writing that Meta's hunt for AI capital had struck a raw nerve on Wall Street. The two pieces were published about twelve hours apart. Both accounts can hold at once. The revenue is arriving, and so is the bill. Meta's results thus produced a rally and a rebuke within the same trading day.

Concern about that bill is no longer confined to investors. This is Money reported that the Bank of England chief had sounded the alarm over an AI borrowing binge that could trigger a market crash. The Journal, meanwhile, ran a piece under the headline that politicians are turning against AI, but your pension is riding on it. The two stories approach the same spending from opposite ends: one from the stability of the financial system, the other from the ordinary savers whose retirement money is tied up in it.

The nerves reached the listings calendar. Early on Friday the Journal reported that SK Hynix had pulled the plug on a US flotation of its memory-chip unit, Solidigm, because of market jitters.

Musk, mergers and a crowded London morning

Tesla's quarterly figures arrived with an unusual companion. The Guardian reported that Tesla beat earnings projections after Elon Musk floated a plan to merge it with SpaceX. Euronews put the same results another way: Tesla's profit dropped as it explores a possible merger with Musk's other public company. A fall in profit and a beat against forecasts are not in conflict. They describe the same number against two different yardsticks. Euronews filed its piece several hours after the Guardian's.

The BBC took up the obvious question in its own headline, asking why Musk is plotting a mega-merger of SpaceX and Tesla. It published within a minute of the Guardian's report, around midnight.

Closer to home, Thursday brought a busy run of company news, much of it reported by City A.M. LSEG pushed up its profit forecast and confirmed a $3.5bn swoop on Octus. Sainsbury's shares slid as 'tough' conditions slowed growth; among the London stories it was the one share price reported to have moved lower. Rathbones said its funds had risen as its wealth management arm returned to inflows. Separately, London launched a £70m fund to back startups struggling to raise investment.

Football made the business pages as well. A German energy giant bought a stake in Bayern Munich, Harry Kane's club, in a deal that valued the club at £3.1bn.

Hong Kong, Paris and the price of money

Asia had a poor Thursday. Hong Kong stocks fell the most in seven months, the South China Morning Post reported, as the chance of strong stimulus from Beijing shrank. A companion piece posed a puzzle of its own: China's stabilisation pledge did not lift stocks, so why were investors praising it?

Capital, meanwhile, kept looking past the mainland's borders. Even as Beijing boosts oversight, Chinese investors are continuing their pivot to offshore assets, the paper wrote on Friday. Traffic is running the other way too. Wall Street is piling into Hong Kong's dim sum bonds, according to Bank of America, despite a fading yuan funding edge.

In Europe, the Journal reported that France's debt crisis had deepened as foreign investors looked for the exit.

Rates told different stories in different places. Blackstone's core businesses were hit by rising rates, the Journal said, in a report published the same day that a flight into Treasurys pushed yields lower. Canada unveiled a $6.2bn plan to shield manufacturers as Trump trade tariffs bite. In Britain the household view came from the BBC, which ran a pensioner's words as its headline: 'I can't afford to heat my home on my pension.' The same outlet looked back at the 'trillion pound' oil fund the government believes Britain could have built, while This is Money asked how long it would take a saver to become an Isa millionaire.