In this pre-holiday edition of the Business News Podcast, we walk straight into one of the most volatile weeks of the year and unpack why markets suddenly feel so fragile, even as major indexes bounce. The headline story: the once-unshakable AI trade is starting to fracture. Alphabet’s surge on the back of its new Gemini 3 model and custom TPUs is forcing investors to rethink NVIDIA’s dominance and, more importantly, to distinguish between who wins at training AI and who wins at running it at scale. The result is a shift from “buy everything with AI in the label” to a far more selective, nerve-wracking game of picking a few true winners.

From there, the episode dives into the bigger AI and geopolitics picture. You’ll hear how U.S. export controls on high-end chips to China, and NVIDIA’s attempts to keep a foothold in that market, are colliding with national security concerns and accelerating a split between Western and Chinese AI ecosystems. At the same time, Amazon Web Services is cementing its role as the government’s supercomputing backbone with a $50 billion commitment to build ultra-secure, AI-driven cloud infrastructure for defense, intelligence, cybersecurity, and even drug discovery. The hosts spell out what 1.3 gigawatts of capacity actually means, and how it could compress decisions that used to take weeks into mere hours.

The macro section zooms out to the Federal Reserve and the economy’s 2026 outlook. After comments from New York Fed officials, markets are suddenly pricing in a December rate cut and a glide path toward roughly 3% interest rates by next Christmas—a potentially huge shift for housing, borrowing costs, and risk assets. We connect those expectations to the search for the next Fed chair, an aggressively optimistic Treasury forecast that insists recession risk is low in 2026, and the quieter but powerful force of trillion-dollar deficits acting like a constant, backdoor form of stimulus. All of this helps explain why stocks can stay supported even as everyday Americans feel squeezed.

That disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street is a running theme. The hosts explore the “joyless tech revolution” around AI, where retirement accounts may benefit from soaring tech valuations while younger workers feel threatened by automation and locked out of career mobility. In corporate news, the episode breaks down Novo Nordisk’s painful Alzheimer’s trial failure and the leadership shake-ups behind its GLP-1 weight-loss boom, Kohl’s high-stakes turnaround and new CEO, Gap’s push toward a leaner, more profitable omnichannel footprint, and the strange limbo of autonomous trucking—where Level 4 driverless technology is real, but outdated safety rules and fuzzy liability keep full adoption stuck in neutral.

The crypto and fintech segment tackles why digital assets are suffering even as equities rally. Bitcoin is in the middle of a brutal drawdown, ETFs are seeing heavy outflows, and even long-term holders are capitulating. The hosts explain why a small, “hawkish” rate cut isn’t enough to revive crypto in the short term, why Bitcoin is currently behaving like an ultra-high-beta tech trade, and yet why many institutional strategists still see a long-term case tied to demographics, inflation, and generational adoption. In sharp contrast, neobank Revolut is thriving, securing a soaring private valuation, surging revenues, and deeper regulatory approval inside the EU as it positions itself as a compliant bridge between traditional banking and digital assets.

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