gm.
midweek catch-up. five things that moved since monday.
the 5
1. stripe just offered $53 billion to buy paypal.
on wednesday, reuters reported that stripe (teamed up with private equity firm advent international) made a $53 billion offer for paypal. the price is a solid premium over where paypal's stock has been trading, but still well below what paypal was worth at its 2021 peak (it's down roughly 85% from that high).
the storyline: two fintech giants with the same origin (peter thiel co-founded paypal, thiel also backed stripe). paypal has been struggling for years against apple pay, klarna, and shop pay. stripe has become massively bigger during that stretch (last valued around $159 billion). paypal's board is expected to review the offer next week. michael burry, the "big short" investor, is already publicly arguing the offer significantly undervalues paypal.
2. IBM had its biggest stock drop in 115 years.
on tuesday, IBM fell 25% in a single day, wiping out roughly $69 billion in market cap. worst single-day drop in the 115-year history of the company. CEO arvind krishna sent an unscheduled letter warning that Q2 earnings would miss estimates.
the reason: customers are shifting IT budgets toward AI infrastructure (nvidia chips, memory, cloud capacity) and away from IBM's core mainframe and consulting business. classic "old-guard tech getting left behind" story. IBM stock had actually roughly doubled since chatGPT launched, but the last few months have been a rollercoaster.
3. US inflation came in cooler than expected.
on tuesday, the government's june inflation report came in at 3.5%, down from 4.2% in may and lower than economists were expecting. energy prices led the drop. it was the first decline in five months.
why it matters: the fed's next meeting is july 28-29. markets now expect the fed to hold rates steady. new fed chair kevin warsh testified in congress this week and said the fed still has "no tolerance" for high inflation. he also confirmed he meets with treasury secretary bessent "often" between their scheduled meetings.
4. two more AI companies are lining up to go public.
on wednesday, bloomberg reported that anthropic (the AI lab behind claude, and openai's main US competitor) is planning investor meetings for an IPO as soon as october. goldman sachs, morgan stanley, and JPMorgan are running the deal.
separately, deepseek is preparing to list its shares on the shanghai exchange. quick refresher: deepseek is the chinese AI startup that shocked the industry last year by releasing frontier-quality models built for a fraction of the cost. IPO filing could come by year end. taken together with spacex's IPO in june and SK hynix's IPO last friday, the AI IPO wave is now a real market theme.
5. wall street just did its first live blockchain trades.
on wednesday, the DTCC (the company that clears and settles essentially every US stock and bond trade behind the scenes) went live with real, on-chain trading of tokenized stocks, ETFs, and treasuries. backers include blackrock, goldman sachs, JPMorgan, circle, and ondo. full launch is scheduled for october.
what's notable: it's running on the stellar blockchain. stellar has quietly become the go-to chain for wall street institutions doing tokenization pilots (asset managers like franklin templeton and wisdomtree have already run deals on it). years of "wall street will tokenize everything on-chain" talk, and this is the first real production version of it.
see you monday.
not financial advice. aggregated community trends and commentary.