Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, April 30th, and this is your FT News Briefing. Investors don't love Meta's plans for AI, and the special relationship between the US and the UK held up this week. Plus, shouldn't war be good for defense stocks? The adage goes, you buy the tension and you sell the war. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
Meta reported quarterly earnings yesterday, and things looked pretty good on the surface. Revenues jumped 33% in the first quarter year on year. That beat Wall Street expectations.
Chapter 2: What are Meta's plans for AI spending in 2023?
And what's more, Meta expects revenues to rise this quarter. But the tech giant lost the crowd when it started talking about plans for artificial intelligence. Meta said it's going to expand its AI spending spree this quarter. The company raised its expected capital expenditure for this year to be as much as $145 billion. That ceiling is $10 billion higher from what Meta shared last quarter.
Investors weren't too thrilled with this. Meta's share price dropped in after-hours trading. Jay Powell gave his final press conference as chair of the Federal Reserve yesterday, but he's probably not leaving the U.S. Central Bank anytime soon.
I welcomed the announcement last Friday by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia that she had closed the criminal investigation.
He's referring there to U.S. prosecutors dropping a criminal probe against him. It was related to cost overruns in a Fed building project. But over the weekend, U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro said she would not hesitate to restart the investigation.
I've said that I will not leave the board until this investigation is well and truly over with transparency and finality, and I stand by that. After my term as chair ends on May 15, I will continue to serve as a governor for a period of time to be determined.
In the meantime, Powell's successor, Kevin Warsh, cleared yet another hurdle yesterday on the road to taking up the mantle at the Fed. The Senate Banking Committee voted 13-11 to advance its candidacy to a full vote on the Senate floor. Powell's remarks came after the Fed opted to keep interest rates on hold for the third straight meeting.
The committee cited higher inflation, which is due in part to the ongoing effect of U.S. tariffs and rising energy prices from the war in Iran.
In sort of the textbook, you would look through an oil shock because they tend to be short-lived and they tend to revert. But looking through energy really is not in front of us right now. It hasn't even peaked yet. And I think we'd want to see the backside of that and progress on tariffs before we even thought about reducing rates.
Brent crude jumped yesterday to just above $120 a barrel, its highest level since 2022. That came after U.S. President Donald Trump said he did not want to end the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Things between the U.S. and the U.K.? They've been better. King Charles visited Washington this week. He addressed Congress and met with U.S. President Donald Trump.
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Chapter 3: What did Jay Powell announce about his future at the Federal Reserve?
And if Washington were to withdraw, it would take the UK and Europe billions of of pounds and many years to rebuild that kind of capability. So that is one reason that the UK is very keen to keep hugging the US close.
Lucy Fisher is the FT's Whitehall editor. She also hosts the Political Fix podcast. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. Thanks, Lucy.
Thanks, Mark.
The Trump administration really wants to spend more money on the military. It takes money to kill bad guys. So we're going back to Congress and our folks there to ensure that we're properly funded. That's Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking in mid-March. He said the Pentagon wants hundreds of billions of dollars more to fund the U.S. war on Iran.
With all that spending, it seems fair to think investors would want to buy defense stocks. But since the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran at the end of February, investors are actually selling. Shares in U.S. defense giants Northrop Grumman, RTX's Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin are all down double digits in that time. The FT's Christian Davies covers U.S.
industries, including the defense sector. Hey, Christian. Hello. So just how bad has this stock sell-off been?
First look, it seems very counterintuitive that U.S. defense stocks should have fallen in the wake of such a high-profile conflict. But yes, overall, they're down quite substantially. We've seen similar movements in Europe. And so this is really kind of a global sell-off defense stocks, despite this war going on in the Middle East at the moment.
And similar to America, European companies are spending a lot too. So I'm wondering why investors are selling war at a time that they were expected to be buying.
Yes, well, this is often a misconception that investors tend to sell defense stocks at time of peace and buy them at times of war. What they really do is buy at times of tension. So if we expand our time horizon out a bit,
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