Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
IBM shares are in freefall today, down twenty-five percent after the company admitted it faltered as enterprise clients redirected spending toward AI infrastructure — servers, storage, the hardware layer — leaving IBM's legacy business exposed. It is a brutal single-session loss and a warning shot for any firm caught on the wrong side of the AI spending wave.
That pain stands in sharp contrast to what Wall Street's biggest banks are reporting this week. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Bank of America are all posting record trading revenues, fueled by the AI frenzy and the long-awaited SpaceX IPO. Equity desks haven't seen volume like this in years, and the numbers are showing it.
Turning to the macro picture, newly confirmed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh made his first appearance before Congress, striking a hawkish tone — declaring the Fed has zero tolerance for persistently elevated inflation and vowing to make high prices, in his words, a thing of the past. Notably, he offered no forward guidance on rate moves, leaving markets to read between the lines on timing.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
