Markets Rebound from China Tariff Threats, OpenAI’s Broadcom Deal & JPM’s America-First Plan

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Welcome to Professor Markets.

I'm Ed Elson.

It is October 14th.

Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

The major indices rallied following Friday's sell-off.

More on that in a moment.

The S ⁇ P had its best day since May.

The dollar climbed.

And finally, gold hit a new high and silver reached its first record since 1980.

Okay, what else is happening?

Late last week, President Trump rattled markets by saying he was considering a, quote, massive increase in tariffs on Chinese goods.

The S ⁇ P fell more than 2% for the first time in six months, and the Nasdaq saw its steepest drop since April.

Then over the weekend, Trump softened his tone, saying, quote, the USA wants to help China, not hurt it.

And by Monday, Scott Besant said that tensions had, quote, substantially de-escalated, which sent the S ⁇ P rebounding.

Okay, so.

Lots of tariff confusion once again from the president.

They were on, they were off, markets were down, then they were up.

Let's just look at what actually happened here.

Let's go through the timeline.

So on Thursday, China announces these new restrictions on their rare earth metals, which are, of course, one of their biggest levers of influence against the U.S.

We've seen this play out before.

China expanded its list of restricted exports.

They added five more metals to the seven that they had curbed in April.

And this time they said we're also going to target the equipment that is used to refine those metals so in response president trump announces this plan of imposing 100 tariffs on all chinese imports on top of the existing tariffs and that was going to start on november 1st or even sooner he also said he was going to move exports of quote any and all critical software and then he threatened to cancel a meeting with president xi over what he called china's aggressive behavior so quite negative headlines there then china hits back and beijing rolls out these new countermeasures against US-linked ships.

They also launched this antitrust probe into Qualcomm and they warn that if Washington doesn't back off, they will take, quote, resolute measures to defend their interests.

So markets sell off almost instantly.

As I mentioned, stocks had their worst day since April.

Chipmakers took the biggest hit.

Nvidia down 5%.

AMD down 8%.

The dollar weakened.

Meanwhile, crypto saw its largest liquidation event ever.

And then on Sunday, the taco moment occurs and Trump softens his stance and he says that the US actually wants to quote help China, not hurt it.

And that was the moment at which investors exhaled.

And by Monday morning, stocks were opening higher.

The Dow climbed 1%.

The S P rose 1.5%.

The NASDAQ rebounded 2%.

We saw a rally in crypto again, too.

The dollar rose.

So again, we saw the tariffs go on.

And then we see the tarco reaction once again.

So here to help us make sense of all of this and the market's reaction to all of this, we are speaking with Luke Kawa.

He is the market's editor at Sherwood News.

Luke, thank you for joining us on Prof G Markets.

Oh, my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

So we saw the worst day for the stock market since April on Friday.

Trump announces these tariffs that we think are going to happen.

And then he sort of softens that position.

We see this rebound on Monday.

Just tell us, what do you make of what happened in the markets over the past couple of days?

Did anything catch your attention?

Did anything surprise you?

I mean, what's really caught my attention is even zooming out a little bit.

I think in the past week and change, we've had the two biggest fears for the stock market this year resurface in miniature form and both have been completely dismissed.

So the first would have been last week when we had the information report come out about Oracle having pretty crummy profit margins on its NVIDIA GPU rental business.

That was shrugged off, I think, for kind of good reasons, just the idea, you know, early in your ramp, you might not be that profitable.

And, you know, of course, you get another open AI deal announcement in the interim that kind of solves all wounds.

And then at the same time, you have another tariff announcement.

But as far as we know, tariff announcements are not tariff realities.

They aren't always.

There's taco, there's Trump Always Chickens Out.

There's also Tarte.

Trump always raises tariffs.

And the truth kind of lies somewhere in between with a third four-letter acronym, F-A-F-O.

I'll leave that to be Googled.

And so far, we are effing around.

And we have not really found out that things have deteriorated to the point where they're really hitting the earnings expectations of the largest publicly traded companies.

So where do you think things go from here?

As you say, we had Tarte and then we had Taco and we've seen that movie before.

The markets rallied.

What are the markets telling us are going to happen here?

I mean, first they were very scared about this.

Now apparently investors are not so scared about this.

Has there been any actual progress in terms of China relieving those restrictions on those rare earths?

Have they come to some sort of agreement?

Is there a reason to believe that, yes, we are in for taco?

What happens going forward here?

So I would say there's been nothing concrete beyond the true social posts, which weren't concrete to begin with when they were negative, and they are not concrete now when they're also offering a more optimistic tone.

What I would say in terms of market reaction, like a lot of times, I love when things move on reasons.

I love when things have a very easy story where you can say this is what's happening and why.

But I also believe markets are just a collection of individuals making buying and selling decisions.

I think it's very, very noteworthy that the momentum ETF, which is, you know, holds the stocks that have done the best effectively, it did better, i.e., went down by less on Friday and outperformed again on Monday.

I think that's a sign that people are really eager to keep bidding up the things that have been doing well.

I would also point to effectively every speculative pocket of the market, except for one stock, kind of got hit pretty badly on Friday.

A lot of those have more than bounced back.

For instance, Goldman Sachs has an index of non-profitable tech companies that has completely erased its losses.

It's actually up 1.2% since Thursday's close.

We have

applied materials, which I think would be one of the stocks that would be most negatively impacted by this.

A couple of weeks ago, they announced that because of expanded export restrictions, they were going to lose out on 600 million in revenues next year.

China's their biggest market.

You see, you know, China, U.S.

tensions heating up again.

This company is also now down like half a percent over the past two sessions.

So it's not really something that's that negative fundamentally.

It's not being treated as such.

It was treated maybe as a reason to take some profits in some high flyers, created much more negative ripple effects in the crypto space.

I would say those have been really quite interesting.

But by and large, what I see is people were very keen to react to this.

This tells me that people are a lot more fully invested than they were in May, June, July, when it was the most hated rally grinding back to all-time highs.

And then that fervor to get back into speculative pockets of the market tells me that, hey, the stock market is the place where we go to bet on the long-term earnings potential of companies, some of which have no earnings to speak of right now.

And we do it overwhelmingly using short-term call options.

Call options on Friday hit a record even as the market was going down.

There was a lot of activity again today, and a lot of that is focused in speculative names in quantum computing, Oclo, a $25 billion now pre-revenue company that is now worth more than First Solar.

So I think the appetite to buy is still very much alive and well, and it takes more than a true social post, whether good or bad, to make that go away.

So much in there.

I do want to get your reactions to what happened with crypto.

As you say, very interesting.

We saw one of the largest crypto sell-offs ever.

I think the largest, correct me if I'm wrong, $19 billion in market value.

erased practically overnight because of tariff news, because of America's relationship with China, which to me seems very surprising.

I don't fully see the connection there.

Why did we see this sell-off?

What was so concerning to crypto investors following this tariff news?

For me, it's less of how the potential relationship with China changed, and it's more about how our relationship with leverage has changed in the U.S.

and well beyond the U.S.

in the crypto space.

So what happened was a very, very, let's call it curiously, timed trade was put on about half an hour before Trump's post at shortly before five on Friday.

So at about 4.20, a large position was put on on an exchange, a short position of over 1 billion that used over 10% leverage, which you can gain by using perpetual futures, which are a lot like futures contracts, except they have the ability to add a lot more leverage.

And also a lot of the exchanges that predominantly carry this trading are outside of the U.S.

It's seeped into the U.S.

more and more over the past, let's call it three months.

Interest has picked up, but that big bet was put on.

And when a big leverage bet is put on, when it has a catalyst, when a lot of trading is done using these perpetual futures, I believe 70% of crypto volume this year has been through perpetual futures.

That means a 2% move for you at

20 times leverage, if you're using that.

Well,

that's more than you got pretty much.

That's pretty much wiping out positions.

So, what really happened here is to me a story of how our search for asymmetry it cuts both ways.

For me, in a past life, asymmetry was, hey, I might lose 5% to make 10 to 12%.

The search for asymmetry in modern times is now a lot more like, hey, I'm willing to risk it all for 200 to 300 to 400%.

And you see, that's how you see kind of moves have the ability to snowball a lot more because even as Bitcoin and other cryptos, they became a lot less volatile once institutional adoption came into play.

We'd now effectively, through more financial innovation, through different institutions in some cases, introduce the ingredients for volatility to really return and be injected back into the space because people are selling not because they want to, not because they think there's a reason to, but because they have to because of that leverage.

Yes.

In other words, any drawdown that we would see in the stock market because of anything that happens in the world, i.e., tariffs, if you see, let's call it a three, two, three, 4% drop in the stock market, because of the amount of leverage in the crypto market, you're naturally going to see, you know,

five to 10 times that drawdown.

Essentially, that is what you're describing.

Is that correct?

Loosely, I would just like generically say the potential for cascades, the potential for bigger, more volatile moves because of the leverage, it's much more apparent in crypto than it is in stocks proper.

Yes.

Why is that happening, do you think?

We've talked about perpetual futures on this podcast before.

As you mentioned, the stat that really blew our mind is the fact that these perpetual futures account for nearly 70% of all Bitcoin trading volume.

That was the thing that really got us.

It's not just crypto at large, which we know is already a little bit of a casino.

It's Bitcoin too.

And so as a result, as you point out, we're seeing these massive swings in the price of Bitcoin, which is supposed to be the hedge or the safe haven.

And yet these perpetual futures, 70% of trading volume for Bitcoin in 2025,

these perpetual futures account for that amount of trading volume.

Your reactions to perpetual futures, the rise of perpetual futures, the fact that we are seeing so much more leverage in crypto and in trading at large.

I just saw Coinbase, they just upped their maximum leverage on perp futures to 50 times, which is just, I mean, out of control.

Your reactions to why we're seeing this.

Hey, listen, I would say I'm 35 now.

10 years ago, I was a lot more reckless and risk embracing of a human being.

What we know about Gen Z and the way they trade stocks, it's they like using short-term options.

That is something that looks to me a lot like a parlay bet.

You need something to go right by a certain point of time

and by a certain amount.

So multiple legs to the bet.

Guess what Gen Z also loves betting.

Parlays.

Guess what?

Also,

the youth also love?

Perpetual futures.

To me, the markets right now are really, really defined by this search for asymmetry and the ability to get rich relatively quick using vehicles that were previously in the domain of more, let's call it sophisticated investors.

That to me really is the alpha and the omega of the story.

We are living in a world where you're not, if not encouraged, you're very much allowed to do this through increasingly more mainstream, traditional means on exchanges, at popular brokerages.

And we've effectively socially allowed this type of activity to happen.

So, you know, whether you think it's good, whether you think it's bad, whether you think it's dangerous, this is what people want.

This is what regulators are increasingly willing to allow.

So, this is now the world we live in, and it works really well in a bull market.

And, you know, one thing that's come to my mind is not just my generation, not just millennials, Gen Z has lived in a world where for the S P 500 since 2013, since we were hitting all-time highs, bouncing back from the financial crisis, besides two incidents, we spent a maximum of six months before hitting all-time highs.

So, besides 2015, 2016, when China was really falling apart, there was the oil crash, U.S.

industrial recession, and then generationally high inflation in 2022.

Less than six months it takes to make your money back, to be made hold.

The appetite, the willingness to buy the dip, the willingness to bet on continued upside in a world where there is no persistent bear market, it's a Pavlovian response.

It's something that becomes natural.

And if you become rewarded for doing something over and over, you're going to keep doing more of it.

All right.

Luke Kawa is markets editor at Sherwood News.

Luke, we really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Oh, pleasure being here.

After the break, a new investment strategy from JP Morgan.

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we're back with profit markets jp morgan is embracing the america first playbook the bank plans to invest up to one and a half trillion dollars over 10 years to fund what it calls critical industries that includes everything from national security to rare earth minerals, which are, of course, as we discussed, a major interest of Trump's right now.

Shares of rare earth mineral companies surged after this announcement.

Lithium Americas was up 11%.

MP Materials was up 24%.

And USA rare earth was up 32%.

Now, the big question that everyone is asking, what was the motivation for this more than trillion-dollar initiative?

Was this a legitimate strategic investment or was this another move by an American corporation to curry favor with the president, as we've seen?

Jamie Dimon has come out and he said it is the former.

He said this is not philanthropy.

He said this is 100% commercial.

He also said the bank has not spoken with anyone from the administration about this investment.

At the same time, many people are pointing out the optics here.

And that is this is the same play we've seen from several other companies who have tried to get in good with the president.

We saw Tim Cook, who gave Trump a trophy and then he announced this multi-billion dollar investment in America, or Jensen Huang going to the MAGA fundraiser and then doing the same thing, or Zuckerberg praising Trump, and then he invests too.

We've seen this before.

And so, for Jamie Dimon to come out and do almost the exact same thing and then publicly say, no, no, no, don't worry, this isn't what you think it is.

Well, it begs the question, perhaps it is what we think it is.

Yes, jamie dimon has criticized trump specifically about the tariffs but perhaps this is a way of retracing his steps and perhaps scoring some political points with this administration i don't know i'm not sure we're simply asking the question but perhaps scott galloway has a perspective on this so let's give him a call

Scott, good to see you.

Good to see you, Ed.

I feel as if we haven't seen each other in a while.

Felt like years.

I've missed you.

Go on.

You missed your mentor.

You missed daddy.

Full three days.

You missed daddy.

Yeah, exactly.

That's right.

I did.

So we want to get your reaction to this investment from JP Morgan.

They are announcing this $1.5 trillion initiative to invest in these critical industries.

People are calling it sort of an America-first investment.

It does seem to align with all of Trump's strategic objectives.

There's this emphasis on rare earth minerals and rare earth metals, which, of course, has been a point of contention in these China deals.

And there is this question of whether this is really about investing in America, really about investing in getting a return, or is this more sycophantry, the likes of which we've seen from Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, and maybe Jamie Dimon is doing the same.

Your reactions?

My initial reaction, quite frankly, when I read the release of the first articles on it was that Jamie Dimon is running for president.

It feels to me like very much a, it felt to me like a stump speech.

You know, all this, all this language about we need to come together and America first and bipartisanship and ensuring that America maintains a lead.

And I know a bunch of people, I don't, I've met Jamie.

I don't know him,

but he's got, he's got kind of all of the attributes of someone who should run for president.

And everyone says he doesn't want to.

But I read that thing and I thought,

it sounds like he's running for president.

That was my first inclination.

My second reaction, Ed, is that

these investments, this reads great and I'm hugely in support of it.

But if you look at the really big critical technologies and sectors that required investment for American competitive advantage, They're traditionally shitty investments, and that's why the government does it.

So if you look at the most seminal technologies in history history that have created the most shareholder value for the first 20 or 30 years, they were terrible investments.

So GPS, which gave rise to

the iPhone and an entire, you know, the entire

mobile industry, that was initially a technology developed by the Defense Department such that they could put a Tomahawk missile in Golbrichev's pocket.

And it didn't economically make sense for a long time.

The internet, arguably the technology that's created a massive amount of shareholder value, that was DARPA.

That was a post-communications or a post-apocalypse communications network that ultimately, they couldn't figure out what to do with it.

And academics started using it, but it made no financial sense for a long time.

Vaccines have not been, have not had a great ROI.

So generally speaking,

you know, this sort of America first investing in technologies that are key to American competitiveness, I'm all for it, but typically that's what the government does because in the short run,

those technologies don't show an ROI.

And that's why the government makes them because few other places have the capital and the tax base to make those types of investments.

And then hopefully over time, they leak and they spill into the private sector.

Or put another way, you know,

This a little bit feels to me like go woke, go broke.

And that is, if you're focused on American competitiveness, I'm not sure that's the the way to make, get your limiteds or your investors a return.

What are your thoughts?

Where do I have this wrong?

Well, I think that's probably right.

What is interesting, though, is JP Morgan has done this kind of thing in the past.

In 2020, they had this big investment that was designed for racial equity, $30 billion.

In 2021, they had this big $2.5 trillion initiative for climate and sustainability initiatives.

I mean, they have done this before, and it does raise this question of, is this actually a commercial investment where they're interested in making return, or is this a branding event or a press release where they say, you know, we've got, we're going to attach this big dollar number to this press release, and we're going to say this is generally the mission of the company going forward.

And perhaps there's a political element to that too.

I think that's really where I...

I'm starting to land here is this is this is more this is more a branding event than an actual uh funding event.

Yeah, it's sort of a different twist on.

I think Larry Fink

from BlackRock was constantly talking about sustainability and investing in climate change.

Kleiner Perkins made a huge, was very out in front on climate and had a climate fund, and the returns were abysmal.

And it's interesting that you say they've done this before.

So maybe, you know, we look at the returns of those past investments, but at 30 billion, I think the number I saw was this one and a half trillion.

Is that right?

Yes.

So this is, you know, 50x the size.

Look, JV Morgan is worth more.

First off, it's an incredibly well-run institution.

Jamie's a fantastic leader.

He's built a great bench of really thoughtful, smart people.

And JV Morgan is now worth more than the 10 largest European banks combined.

So big, bold bets, that's the kind of thing that a CEO with his kind of gravitas and job security should be doing.

So,

you know, hats off to him, thinking big and bold.

I generally find the types of things that move the needle in terms of geopolitical advantage are money losers in the beginning.

That's why the government does them.

Yes.

And that's not to say you can't unleash the power of the government.

I mean, we're going to need a lot more energy production, as you pointed out or Mia pointed out.

China will add more solar

electricity production in 2025 than we have already existing in the U.S.

I mean, they're just making the kinds of staggering investments that should give them a geopolitical advantage.

Now, the question is, is the private sector making those or is the government making them?

Because the kind of investments you need to establish geopolitical advantage, whether it's soft power,

whether it's a strong military,

better national grid,

you know, no one can make money.

So I like it.

More power to them.

I I hope it works.

It feels to me like wrapping themselves in the flag a little bit.

And I'd be curious to see more details around what this means.

But, you know, good for them.

But my first reaction is it felt a little bit performative and like more of, I think, your assessment right.

Like, how much of this is brand building?

All right.

You heard it here first.

This was Jamie Diamond's presidential bid

in disguise.

Scott, appreciate your time.

That's right, brother.

Open AI and Broadcom just unveiled a multi-billion dollar deal to develop 10 gigawatts worth of custom AI chips over the next four years.

OpenAI plans to design its own GPUs, which will power both its own data centers and those run by its partners.

The chips co-developed with Broadcom are set to roll out in the second half of next year.

Broadcom stock jumps nearly 10%

on this new.

So

10 10 more gigawatts for OpenAI in yet another deal signed by the world's most ambitious AI company.

We covered the math of OpenAI's financial commitments last week when they made this deal with AMD.

But just to remind you of that math, OpenAI execs have estimated that one gigawatt of chips is equal to about $35 billion.

So by that math, by what people believe the price of one gigawatt actually is, that would make this deal worth an approximate $350 billion or a whopping $88 billion per year.

And this is only one deal.

There's also the deals that they have with AMD and Nvidia and Coreweave and Oracle, which total around $880 billion.

So

We went over that math last week.

We're going to add in this new Broadcom deal that we have here.

And OpenAI's compute commitments are now upwards of $1.2 trillion, which is roughly five times what all of big tech plans to spend on CapEx this year.

It's also more than 90 times larger than the $13 billion in revenue that OpenAI is on track to make this year.

So

the numbers are absolutely crazy.

We've talked about this before, but if you are listening to Sam Altman's aspirations, if you're living in the Sam Altman bubble, well, then this might track.

I mean, he recently told his employees that he intends to to build out 250 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2033, which would cost upward of $10 trillion.

Now, should we take that statement seriously?

Of course not.

It is a made-up number.

He fabricated it.

He pulled it out of thin air and it makes no financial sense whatsoever.

The more important question, however, is whether or not we should take the Broadcom number seriously.

Because while we may not really believe it, the reality is the market does believe it.

Broadcom added roughly $150 billion in market value yesterday, not because their revenues grew, not because they cut costs, but because Sam Altman made a vague promise to the company that realistically he cannot keep.

And yet, Wall Street doesn't care.

Because they're too excited about OpenAI.

They're too excited about data centers.

They are so excited that they are actually struggling to recognize that the probability of any of this even happening is quite low.

And this brings us to a mistake that we made last week, which I would like to highlight.

And that is last week when we were discussing all of these multi-billion dollar OpenAI deals, we mentioned that OpenAI had struck a $10 billion deal with Broadcom.

And the reason we thought that was because back in September, Broadcom announced a $10 billion deal with some unidentified compute partner.

And analysts and journalists looked into into it and they widely reported, we think it is OpenAI.

And once that narrative got out that Broadcom was partnering with OpenAI, the stock, Broadcom stock that is, popped about 20%.

And crucially, Broadcom didn't say anything.

They didn't correct anyone.

They didn't amend any statements.

They simply stayed silent while the stock.

skyrocketed.

And so naturally, we all assumed, yes, the partner is OpenAI.

Well, we learned yesterday.

It turns out that's not actually true.

It turns out they have a different partner.

And that is why we're now seeing this separate $350 billion deal with OpenAI.

And we only learned that yesterday when the Broadcom CEO told us on CNBC, he said OpenAI isn't the partner that we talked about in September.

Now, that mistake doesn't change much overall.

But it does highlight something very important that is happening in AI right now.

And that is a lot of vague statements are being made.

And a lot of investors are interpreting those vague statements.

And then they are filling in the blanks.

And in many cases, they're filling in the blanks and they turn out to be wrong.

And that's what happened here.

They said, oh, we think it's open AI.

Turns out it wasn't even open AI.

And even we, we who are skeptics of this whole situation, even we were fooled.

Now, remember, Broadcom went up 20%

because of a deal that turned out out to be something very different from what people thought it was, which would make you think, okay, it went up 20%.

Probably the stock will correct.

Indeed, we saw no correction.

Why?

Because the clarification of that deal coincided with the announcement of another deal, this OpenAI deal, which made the stock go up even more.

And so what we have here is an endless cycle of these complicated announcements, which amount to, let's be honest, bullshit.

Bullshit when it comes to who's participating in the deals, bullshit when it comes to who are the beneficiaries of the deals, bullshit when it comes to the size of the deals.

The bullshit is everywhere in AI right now.

To be clear, bullshit isn't new.

It's been around since the beginning of time, and it has certainly been around since the beginning of markets.

So we shouldn't be surprised by or afraid of bullshit.

What we should be afraid of, however, is when we all start buying the bullshit at the same time,

that's where we'll run into trouble.

Okay, that's it for today.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller, edited by Joel Paston, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Our associate producer is Alison Weiss, our research team is Dan Jalan, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio.

Our technical director is Drew Burrows.

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I'm Ed Elson.

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I have sat around that table at NATO.

There is an incoming missile attack now.

Could you answer the question?

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All right, remember, the machine knows if you're lying.

First statement: Carvana will give you a real offer on your car all online.

False.

True, actually.

You can sell your car in minutes.

False?

That's gotta be.

True again.

Carvana will pick up your car from your door, or you can drop it off at one of their car vending machines.

Sounds too good to be true, so true.

Finally caught on.

Nice job.

Honesty isn't just their policy, it's their entire model.

Sell your car today, too.

Carvana!

Pickup fees may apply.