Financial Market News | Saturday Review

This was the week the market stopped selling everything and started being selective.

For three straight weeks, strong earnings got sold. That changed Wednesday night when four of the largest companies in the world reported at once and three of them rose. The fourth fell because it raised spending without saying when the returns would arrive.

By Friday, a new rule had replaced the old one. The market rewards clean results. It punishes open-ended costs.

Here are the six things that actually drove the week.

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The nine-consecutive-beat-and-sell streak ended Wednesday night.

Alphabet (GOOGL) reported 81% profit growth and shares jumped 6%. Amazon (AMZN) posted its fastest cloud growth since 2022 and shares rose 4%. Microsoft (MSFT) beat on revenue and spent less on infrastructure than expected. All three rose. The pattern was officially broken.

Then Meta (META) reported. Revenue grew 33%, the best in five years. But the company raised infrastructure spending by $10 billion in a single quarter and could not say what it would spend in 2027. Shares fell more than 5%.

Apple (AAPL) closed the week Thursday night. iPhone revenue rose 21.7%. Gross margin hit 49.3%, a record. June quarter guidance came in nearly double analyst expectations. Shares rose.

Then Sandisk (SNDK) beat its earnings estimate by 60% and fell 8% anyway. The pattern did not disappear. It migrated.

The Takeaway 

The beat-and-sell era is over for companies with clear AI revenue. It is very much alive for companies whose profits are already in the stock price. That distinction now drives which names get bought and which get sold.

The Fed held rates Wednesday. The vote behind it was not routine.

Three regional presidents voted against keeping the language that signals rate cuts are still coming. A fourth wanted an immediate cut. The committee is fractured in ways it has not been in decades.

Then Powell announced he would stay on the board as governor after his term as chair ends May 15. He said the legal attacks on the Fed left him no choice.

Warsh takes the chair May 15. His predecessor stays in the building. Three colleagues are already on record against the language that makes his rate-cut agenda plausible. He inherits dysfunction before he chairs his first meeting.

The Takeaway 

The rate decision was the least important part of Wednesday's Fed meeting. The fractured vote and Powell's decision to stay are what define Warsh's starting position. His first challenge is institutional, not economic.

Donald Trump has cheated death.

He’s overcome insane and criminal vote rigging.

And survived every indictment and impeachment thrown at him.

But his next move could make him a legend – and perhaps the most popular president in U.S. History.

Former Presidential Advisor, Jim Rickards says, “Trump is on the verge of accomplishing something no President has ever done before."

And if he’s successful, it could kick off one of the greatest wealth booms in history.

We recently sat down with Rickards to capture all the key details on tape.

For the moment, you can watch this interview free of charge – just click here.

Thursday brought the two numbers that define Warsh's starting conditions.

First-quarter GDP grew at 2%, below the 2.2% estimate. Consumer spending rose only 1.6%. Core inflation hit 3.2%, the highest since November 2023. Energy costs jumped 11.6% in a single month.

Growth below target. Inflation above target. Both in the same morning release. The stagflation definition economists had been debating is now in the official data.

The Q1 report captured only one month of elevated gas prices. Q2 captures all three months at $4-plus per gallon. That report arrives in late July.

The Takeaway 

The data Warsh needs to make his first major policy call has not been reported yet. His opening moves will be shaped by numbers he cannot see. That is the corner the economy walked into this week.

Three companies make the memory chips that power AI data centers, smartphones, and medical equipment. All three are sold out. All three just posted record earnings.

Samsung's semiconductor division made 94% of the company's total profit for the quarter. Memory prices nearly doubled in three months. Samsung is on track to be the second most profitable company in the world this year, behind only Nvidia (NVDA). SK Hynix and Micron (MU) are both entering the global top ten. Together, the three are set to earn $350 billion in 2026.

New chip factories will not be ready until late 2027 at the earliest. Customers are getting only 30 to 50 percent of the chips they order.

Meta raised its full-year spending by $10 billion citing memory prices specifically. GE HealthCare (GEHC) cut its profit forecast for the same reason. Apple's Tim Cook warned memory costs will be significantly higher after June.

The Takeaway 

The memory chip shortage is the most important structural constraint in the global economy right now. It has no geographic bypass. Every major spending story this week traced back to the same three companies, and none of them can build fast enough to fix it.

Elon Musk spent three days on the stand this week suing OpenAI for putting profit before its nonprofit mission. Thursday's cross-examination collapsed the moral frame around his case.

Musk admitted that xAI used distillation, training its Grok AI on outputs from OpenAI's models. When asked directly, he said, "Partly."

That word matters because Musk has publicly condemned Chinese companies for doing exactly this to American AI labs. The State Department sent a global cable this week calling it a national security threat. His own company, it turns out, did it to the company he is suing.

He also ranked the world's leading AI companies under oath: Anthropic first, OpenAI second, Google third, xAI a distant fourth with only a few hundred employees.

The Takeaway 

The admission did not end his legal case. It removed the moral high ground his lawyers built it on. The argument that OpenAI betrayed a public trust lands differently when the plaintiff's company had the same instincts.

This week's sharpest connection between two stories that ran separately all month appeared Thursday.

Blue Owl (OWL) has been under significant redemption pressure, with some funds seeing withdrawal requests reach 22 to 41 percent of total assets. To manage that pressure, Blue Owl sold roughly half its SpaceX stake at a $1.25 trillion valuation, generating about 10 times its original investment. Co-CEO Marc Lipschultz said the sale was done explicitly to offset credit losses.

SpaceX is targeting a $1.75 trillion IPO valuation, $500 billion above the price Blue Owl just sold at. Private credit stress and the SpaceX IPO are now the same story.

The Takeaway 

Watch whether other private credit managers with SpaceX exposure make similar moves. If they do, SpaceX equity is functioning as a liquidity buffer across the private credit sector, and that changes how you read institutional demand when the IPO opens.

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This week gave investors a new framework, not just new data.

Clean AI revenue gets rewarded. Open-ended AI spending gets punished. The Fed is more divided than it admitted. Stagflation is no longer a forecast. And the most important constraint in the global economy is three chip factories that cannot build fast enough.

The beat-and-sell pattern did not end. It got precise.

Knowing which side of that line a company sits on is now the most important question heading into May.