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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadod Mani, and Today is Monday, November 10th. In today's episode, we'll get you ready for this upcoming week, including some positive developments on the government shutdown. We'll also tell you why TSMC sales numbers have some investors concern and the latest ask for help that OpenAI is making to the federal government. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why credit card rewards might be going away pretty soon. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks are coming off a pretty brutal week, with the S&P 500 dropping 1.6% and the Nasdaq dropped more than 3%. In fact, it was the worst week for the Nasdaq since April, when the markets were dealing with the chaos from the Liberation Day tariffs. So yeah, last week was pretty brutal, especially for tech stocks, and there are a few reasons for that. For one, investors are getting nervous about the AI trade. Big tech companies continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building out AI infrastructure without seeing a meaningful return on the investments so far. Now, beyond AI, investors are also watching the labor market. Now, we haven't gotten official government data regarding the labor market because of the shutdown, but private sector reports are pointing to a slowdown in hiring. And speaking of the government shutdown, it's now entering its fourth 40th day, the longest in US history, and that's starting to have a noticeable impact on the economy, especially at airports. The FAA has reduced the number of flights, which is leading to flight delays and cancellations. Now, we covered the wider economic fallout of the government shutdown on Saturday's deep dive episode. So go check that out if you missed it. Now, there is some good news this morning. To start the week, Congress seems to be inching closer to a temporary fix to the shutdown. It seems like the Senate has enough votes to pass a bill that would reopen the government through January. The vote is expected to take place today, so that's good news in the short term, but we might be doing this whole government shutdown dance again in a couple of months. Either way, it's shaping up to be a pretty eventful week. On top of all the drama in D.C. we're also getting earnings from a handful of interesting companies, including Nevius, Circle, Oklo, and Disney. So we're staying on top of all the developing news. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with tsmc. TSMC reported some sales numbers this morning and it's adding even more concerns around the AI trade. TSMC said their revenues in October were up just 17% year over year, which is the slowest growth for the company since February of 2024. For some context, sales in September and August both grew by more than 30%. Now the reason this is notable is because TSMC manufactures, you know, physically makes all the state of the art AI chips for pretty much every AI chip company. Their customers include Nvidia, amd, Apple and more. So the slowing growth has investors wondering if this is another sign of the AI boom potentially cooling off. Now the likely answer to that is probably not because, you know, one month of slowing growth isn't enough to make any conclusions about the AI demand. Plus, TSMC CEO says the company is stretched thin and they're not able to meet all the demand right now. On top of that, the spending from big tech companies isn't stopping anytime soon. Just a couple weeks ago, all the big tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft all said they were on track to spend more than $400 billion on AI infrastructure next year, which is up 21% from 2025. Now it's going to be very interesting to see what Nvidia says in their earnings report. They report earnings next week, on November 19, depending on what they say and what their forecast is for the upcoming quarter. And it can determine what happens to the AI trade for the rest of the year. So we have nine days to prepare for what is probably the most important earnings report of the year, maybe of all time. I feel like we say that about every Nvidia earnings report at this point. Let's stick with the AI theme here and talk about OpenAI. Last week, the company made headlines after their CFO hinted at the possibility of getting help from the federal government with financing their data centers. Now, those comments were walked back after they received a lot of backlash, but the company is actively asking the Trump administration for help in the form of tax credits. In a recently revealed letter, OpenAI wants the Trump administration to expand the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, which is part of the 2022 Chips Act. Now remember, the Chips act was designed to expand manufacturing of chips here in the US Right now, the tax covers semiconductor manufacturing and gives companies a 25 to 35% tax break on those investments. But OpenAI wants to broaden those tax credits to include AI data centers, AI servers and AI grid infrastructure. C CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI isn't looking for government loan guarantees or handouts. They just want a fairer tax credit structure that puts AI on the same footing as chips. Personally, I think this is going to be a tough sell. As I said last week, I don't think many people in politicians are going to sign up for giving subsidies and tax breaks to AI companies that are working on a technology that could one day replace human jobs. You know, I think giving tax breaks to chip companies makes sense to help reignite chip manufacturing here in the US which is a matter of national security at this point. But giving it to AI companies kind of feels wrong here, so we'll see what ends up happening. Let me know in the comments if you guys think that AI companies should be given tax credits just like semiconductor companies. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of Rumble are rallying this morning after the YouTube competitor announced plans to acquire a German AI infrastructure company, Northern Data, and in a $767 million all stock deal. As part of this deal, Rumble will gain access to Northern's data center business, which includes over 40,000 Nvidia GPUs. This seems to be an AI play by Rumble. It gets their foot in the door in the AI infrastructure space. Now an interesting tidbit about this deal. The crypto stablecoin company Tether is a major investor in Northern Data and also rumble, acquiring 48% of the company almost a year ago since so this deal brings together two of Tether's major investments and Tether said they're going to be a major cloud customer of the combined group. Shares of Rumble are up more than 10% this morning in reaction to this merger. Now, investors didn't love every merger this morning because Metcera's stock is tumbling after the pharma company announced a deal to be bought by Pfizer. Medcera has been the target of a bidding war between Pfizer and Novo Nordisk, and after some back and forth, Pfizer won the bid to acquire Metcera for $86.25 per share in a deal that could be worth more than $10 billion if all the performance milestones are hit. See Med Sarah has a weight loss drug pipeline, making it a prime target for an acquisition. Nova Nordisk ultimately decided to back off because of antitrust concerns given their dominance with Ozempic and Wegovy. So this is a big win for Pfizer because it could finally get their foot in the door in the weight loss space which is currently dominated by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, but investors didn't seem to agree. Medcera's stock is down nearly 15% this morning on this news and Pfizer's stock is trading flat. Some analysts believe that the real winner here might be Novo Nordisk, because Pfizer likely overpaid for an unproven weight loss pipeline. So Novo Nordisk might have been playing 40 chess here and just driving up the price, hoping that Pfizer would overpay in desperation. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Visa and MasterCard just agreed to a major settlement that has been ongoing for 20 years and it could have a huge impact on credit card rewards. The settlement is about interchange fees that credit card companies charge merchants and store owners. Every time you pay with a credit card, these fees can be anywhere between 2 and 2.5% and they're used to fund all the sweet points, miles and cash back perks that credit card users have come to love. Now obviously store owners don't like paying these fees and they sued back in 2005 alleging that these fees were anti competitive behavior. Fast forward 20 years and the two credit card giants have reached a settlement with merchants that slightly lowers the interchange fees and also lets merchants reject certain credit cards. That second part right there is the major development and it could have a huge impact on credit card rewards. It now means that stores can choose to accept your basic Visa card, but not the fancy rewards Visa card, since premium cards charge an even higher interchange fee. It seems like a small change on paper, but it could seriously reshape the entire rewards ecosystem, especially if more stores decide to stop accepting these higher fee cards. Imagine if a handful of major retailers like Walmart, Costco and Target stop accepting a Chase Sapphire reserve card. It might not make sense to get a Chase Sapphire reserve anymore, so we'll see what the fallout ends up being. But enjoy those 5x points on dining while you can, because it seems like the golden age of credit card rewards might be coming to an end. Well, all right guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you are listening on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes, and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.