Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Thursday, April 30th. In today's episode, we'll recap Jerome Powell's last meeting as Fed chair. We'll also recap earnings from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why most traders on prediction markets are losing money.
We got a great show for you today. Let's go.
Wednesday was a weird day on Wall Street. The S&P 500 barely budged, dropping less than a tenth of a percent. And the Nasdaq was basically flat too, but did technically finish in the green. Energy was once again the best performing sector because oil prices keep surging.
Brent crude spiked to $126 a barrel overnight, which is a new wartime high before pulling back a bit this morning to around $116.
Chapter 2: What were the key highlights from Jerome Powell's last Fed meeting?
The other big market moving event yesterday was the Fed meeting. It was Jerome Powell's last meeting as Fed chair. And as expected, the Fed held rates steady at 3.5% to 3.75%. But what nobody expected was the level of internal disagreement. There were four members at the Fed that dissented, the most since 1992.
Three regional Fed presidents wanted to drop the language hinting that rate cuts are still on the table. And then on the other side, you have Stephen Moran who dissented because he actually wanted a rate cut. So Kevin Warsh is gonna be inheriting a pretty divided Fed when he takes over as Fed chair on May 15th.
And the other big headline from this meeting was that Jerome Powell announced that he was staying on as Fed governor. See, typically the Fed chair doesn't stay on the Fed board after their term, but Jerome Powell basically said the legal pressure from the Trump administration left him no choice. So he plans to stay on until that is fully resolved. We got a lot of earnings to get through today.
So we'll talk more about Jerome Powell's decision in tomorrow's episode. Let's run through some headlines. And we're talking big tech earnings. Four big tech companies reported earnings last night. Let's start with Google's parent company, Alphabet, because they absolutely crushed it. Alphabet reported $110 billion in revenue for the first quarter, which was up 22% from a year ago.
That's the fastest growth rate for the company in any quarter since 2022. The star of the show was Google Cloud, which brought in $20 billion in revenue, which is up 63% from a year ago. What's wild to me is that Google Cloud grew 48% last quarter. So growth in Google Cloud is accelerating, which is crazy at this scale.
CEO Sundar Pichai said that cloud revenue would have been even higher, but they can't build data centers fast enough to meet the demand. The backlog has nearly doubled to $460 billion, which is basically contracts that have been signed, but they haven't turned into revenue yet.
Google said that enterprise AI adoption became the primary growth driver for cloud with Gemini enterprise paid monthly active users growing 40% quarter over quarter. So yeah, Gemini is quietly crushing it. The other big takeaway from the earnings is that search just keeps growing.
Investors at one point were worried that AI would eat into Google's search business, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Google's search revenue grew 19% to $60 billion last quarter and search queries actually hit an all time high. Now on the spending side, Google raised its 2026 CapEx forecasts They're now expecting to spend up to $190 billion this year on AI infrastructure.
And the CFO said that 2027 will be significantly higher. On top of that, Google said they're going to start selling their custom TPU chips directly to a select group of customers and not just through the cloud. So I got to say, Google seems to be firing on all cylinders right now, which explains why Google stock is up more than 8% this morning and back at all time highs.
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