Investors had nowhere to hide on Monday as both the stock market and cryptocurrencies tumbled. The rout followed yet another report of high inflation on Friday that has investors concerned the Federal Reserve will continue its aggressive interest rate hikes, thereby increasing the odds of a U.S. recession. The cryptocurrency market saw its total market cap drop by roughly 12% on Monday to just $980 billion. The sector as a whole has now seen more than $2 trillion in losses since its November… Source link

Snap (SNAP) is getting hammered. Shares of the social media/camera company, which were trading as high as $83.11 in September 2021, have since plunged amid rising inflation, the war in Ukraine, and Apple’s privacy changes. Shares of Snap collapsed a stunning 74.5% year-to-date as of Monday, falling to $12 ahead of the close of markets in New York. Snap suggested the pain could continue, warning in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last month that it will likely fall short of its Q2… Source link

The next time a Google Calendar invitation lands in your inbox, you may notice that it looks a little different. Google announced on Monday that it is making updates to the emails it sends out for calendar events, tweaking them to look more modern and to surface important information quickly. Google says if an organizer updates an event, the new design will also show you the old information. For example, if an event changes from 1PM to 2PM, you’ll see the 1PM start time crossed out… Source link

According to an eye-opening tale in the Washington Post on Saturday, one Google engineer said that after hundreds of interactions with a cutting edge, unreleased AI system called LaMDA, he believed the program had achieved a level of consciousness. In interviews and public statements, many in the AI community pushed back at the engineer’s claims, while some pointed out that his tale highlights how the technology can lead people to assign human attributes to it. But the belief that Google’s AI… Source link

Google is shutting down Talk (also known as GChat) for good — its instant-messaging service you probably haven’t used much since 2007 (via Android Police). Although Google migrated Talk users over to Google Hangouts in 2017 — another one of its now-sidelined messaging platforms — it was still accessible by third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin and Gajim. But Google will cut these last lines of life support on June 16th — three days from now. In a message on Talk’s support… Source link

After a year of back-and-forth, Silicon Valley tech executive Marissa Mayer has finally demolished three townhouses she bought next to her Palo Alto home to install a backyard pool. As first reported by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Mayer was legally able to raze the neighboring homes despite a California state law that required any home demolitions to be replaced with equivalent replacement “housing units.” That law was seemingly the reason Mayer’s request was denied… Source link

Everybody’s frustrated. If somebody could do something about it, it would be done. But oil and gasoline prices are on a tear that for the time being seems unstoppable. U.S. gasoline prices have hit $5 per gallon for the first time ever, and Moody’s Analytics thinks they could hit $5.50 within a couple of weeks. There’s no mystery why. A confluence of forces, led by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has crimped oil supply and bumped up demand. There’s more that could go wrong, adding a… Source link

Phil Mickelson stepped to the microphone at the U.S. Open for the first news conference of the rest of his life looking like a pale shadow of his old self. His eyes were wider, his cheeks flecked with fragments of gray beard. Where once he’d sparred with the media like he was angling for a debate-team prize, now he was parrying barbed questions with dodges, evasions and brief non-answers. He wasn’t nervous — Phil Mickelson doesn’t get nervous — but he clearly wasn’t relishing… Source link

Canadian e-commerce service Shopify (SHOP) was a certified pandemic-era darling, with its stock price soaring as high as $1,690.60 per share in November 2021. But high-flying inflation, a pullback in consumer spending online compared to during the pandemic, and increased competition are punishing the company, sending shares of Shopify plummeting 76% year-to-date to $331.42 at the start of trading Monday. Shopify’s woes aren’t unique. The company is just one of a host of big-name firms… Source link

Is a recession already priced into equity markets? The world-renowned economist Jeremy Siegel says it sure looks like stocks have discounted at least a “mild recession” amid this year’s downturn. On Monday, the S&P 500 officially entered bear market territory, dropping more than 3% to a level more than 20% off its January peak. And as recession predictions continue to flood in from both Wall Street and Main Street, some sectors of the market have fared even worse. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is… Source link