Finance

Christopher Waller, governor of the US Federal Reserve, speaks during the C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, US, on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller on Monday voiced support for another interest rate cut at the central bank’s December meeting, saying he’s grown concerned over the labor market and the sharp slowdown in hiring.
In an increasingly divided Fed, Waller’s comments put him squarely in the camp of those looking to ease monetary policy to head off further danger in the jobs picture. Others, including multiple regional presidents, have expressed opposition in recent days to more cuts as they view inflation as a persistent economic threat that could be reignited by additional easing.

“I am not worried about inflation accelerating or inflation expectations rising significantly,” Waller said in prepared remarks delivered to a group of economists in London. “My focus is on the labor market, and after months of weakening, it is unlikely that the September jobs report later this week or any other data in the next few weeks would change my view that another cut is in order.”
The rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee next meets Dec. 9-10. Markets are divided over which way the panel will swing following consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, cuts at meetings in September and October.
Earlier Monday, Vice Chair Philip Jefferson was noncommittal on the upcoming meeting, saying only that the current economic climate calls for policymakers to “proceed slowly” as it contemplates further cuts. Boston Fed President Susan Collins said Wednesday that she sees a “high bar” for more easing.
Waller specified that he favors another quarter-point move. Governor Stephen Miran, who like Waller is an appointee of President Donald Trump, favored half-point moves at the prior two meetings.
While he has spoken out multiple times in recent months in favor cuts, Waller updated his comments to reflect recent developments. Absent government data during the recently ended shutdown, the policymaker cited a variety of other data points showing weak demand in the labor market and pressure on consumers.

At the same time, he said price data has indicated that tariffs will not have a long-lasting impact on inflation. Cutting rates again will be an exercise in “risk management,” a term Chair Jerome Powell also has been using.
“I worry that restrictive monetary policy is weighing on the economy, especially about how it is affecting lower-and middle-income consumers,” Waller said. “A December cut will provide additional insurance against an acceleration in the weakening of the labor market and move policy toward a more neutral setting.”
Waller rejected claims that the Fed has been “flying blind” on policy as the shutdown suspended almost all official government economic data.
“Despite the government shutdown, we have a wealth of private and some public-sector data that provide an imperfect but perfectly actionable picture of the U.S. economy,” he said. More

Berkshire Hathaway owned roughly $4.3 billion worth of Alphabet as of Sept. 30, making it the firm’s 10th largest equity holding, a filing showed.
The Alphabet investment likely came from one of his two lieutenants, Todd Combs or Ted Weschler.
Though its size suggests it likely had the blessing of Buffett, who is stepping down as CEO at the end of this year.

Warren Buffett ahead of the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC

Alphabet shares jumped Monday after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed a new stake in the Google parent, marking one of the conglomerate’s most significant technology bets in years.
Alphabet shares gained 3.1%, bucking the weakness in most technology shares to start the week.

A quarterly 13F filing showed Berkshire owned roughly $4.3 billion worth of Alphabet as of Sept. 30, making it the firm’s 10th largest equity holding. The move surprised many Buffett watchers given the billionaire’s decades-long hesitation toward high-growth tech companies. Buffett has always seen Apple, Berkshire’s largest holding, as a consumer products company.

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The Alphabet investment likely came from one of his two lieutenants, Todd Combs or Ted Weschler, who increasingly influence Berkshire’s $300 billion stock portfolio. Though its size suggests it likely had the blessing of Buffett, who is stepping down as CEO at the end of this year. The pair have been responsible for many of Berkshire’s tech-leaning investments, including a stake in Amazon initiated in 2019. Berkshire still owns $2.2 billion worth of Amazon today.
Alphabet has been one of the stock market’s biggest winners this year, rising 46% as investors reward its accelerating artificial intelligence push and rapidly improving cloud profitability. Revenue growth from Google Cloud, once a margin drag, has turned into a key earnings driver.

Changing of the guard?

Bill Stone, Glenview Trust Company’s chief investment officer, said the Alphabet purchase could reflect a broader approach to technology investments as leadership transitions to the next generation.
“Perhaps the purchase of Alphabet signals a widening of the circle of competence into technology,” Stone said.

Longtime lieutenant Greg Abel is set to take the reins for 95-year-old Buffett in January. The Oracle of Omaha will remain chairman of the board.
Despite the stellar rally in 2025, Alphabet’s valuation remains lower than many of its AI-driven megacap peers. The stock trades at 26.9 times next year’s earnings, compared with Microsoft at 31.8, Broadcom at 40.7 and Nvidia at 31.8, according to FactSet.
That relative discount, combined with Alphabet’s massive cash flow and dominant market position, may have made the shares particularly attractive to Buffett’s team.
“We think Berkshire likely finds more comfort investing in GOOG over other tech plays given the high free cash flow potential of its core business coupled with an attractive valuation at about 22x 2027 EPS amid a healthy top-line growth trajectory,” Angelo Zino, Alphabet analyst at CFRA, said in a note to clients.

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Alphabet year to date

Buffett has admitted missing Google was one of his biggest investing mistakes. He had a front-row seat: Geico, Berkshire’s auto insurance unit, was one of Google’s earliest major advertisers. The company paid about $10 every time a user clicked one of its search ads in the early days of online marketing.
“I had seen the product work, and I knew the kind of margins [they had],” Buffett said in 2018. “I didn’t know enough about technology to know whether this really was the one that would stop the competitive race.” More

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed late Friday that it owns a $4.3 billion stake in Google parent Alphabet as of the end of the third quarter.
Alphabet shares rallied on Monday and are now up about 50% this year, driven in part by the artificial intelligence boom.
Berkshire’s rare bet on a big internet company comes a little over two decades after Google’s founders said they were “inspired” by Buffett in the company’s IPO prospectus.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

In Google’s IPO prospectus 21 years ago, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave a flattering nod to Warren Buffett, suggesting in their letter to prospective investors that the billionaire investor was a big influence.
They titled their founders’ letter, “‘An owner’s manual’ for Google’s shareholders,” and indicated that there was a footnote worth reading.

“Much of this was inspired by Warren Buffett’s essays in his annual reports and his ‘An Owner’s Manual’ to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders,” the footnote said.
More than two decades later, Buffett is showing that the admiration goes both ways. Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s holding company, revealed late Friday that it owns a stake in Google parent Alphabet worth roughly $4.3 billion as of the end of the third quarter, making it the firm’s 10th largest equity holding. It marks one of Berkshire’s most significant technology bets in years — Apple’s is the firm’s largest holding — and sent sent Alphabet shares up 3% on Monday.
It’s a rare move by Berkshire, which for decades has hesitated to buy into high-growth tech companies, and represents the first time the firm is known to have a stake in Google. Buffett, 95, is stepping down as CEO at the end of this year, with longtime lieutenant Greg Abel set to take the reins.
In 2017, Buffett said he regretted not buying shares in Google years earlier when Berkshire insurance subsidiary Geico was paying hefty fees for advertising on its network. He also acknowledged missing out on Amazon, which Berkshire eventually purchased in 2019, still owning $2.2 billion worth of the e-commerce shares.

Alphabet shares are up 50% this year, after Monday’s gains, trading just shy of their all-time high reached last week. The company notched its first $100 billion revenue quarter in the third period, fueled by growth in its cloud unit, which houses its artificial intelligence services. The cloud division also has a $155 billion backlog from customers and an updated line of chips that sets it apart from other AI players.

Alphabet’s valuation remains lower than many of its AI-driven megacap peers. The stock trades at about 26 times next year’s earnings, compared with Microsoft at 32, Broadcom at 51 and Nvidia at 42, according to FactSet.
Page and Brin are now ranked seventh and eighth, respectively, on the Forbes billionaires list, just behind Buffett at sixth.
The Google founders cited Buffett multiple times in the company’s IPO prospectus. In one instance, Page and Brin were effectively warning investors that quarterly financials may not always look pretty.
“In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations,” they wrote. “In Warren Buffett’s words, ‘We won’t “smooth” quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you.'”
In explaining the logic behind a dual-class stock structure, which gave the founders outsized voting control, they cited Berkshire as one of the companies to previously and successfully implement it, along with media companies like The New York Times, the Washington Post (the newspaper now owned by Jeff Bezos) and Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones (now owned by News Corp.)
“Media observers have pointed out that dual class ownership has allowed these companies to concentrate on their core, long term interest in serious news coverage, despite fluctuations in quarterly results,” Page and Brin wrote. “Berkshire Hathaway has implemented a dual class structure for similar reasons.”
WATCH: Berkshire discloses new Alphabet state worth $4.3 billion. More

Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of DoubleLine Capital LP, speaks during an interview with CNBC on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., May 7, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Wall Street veteran Jeffrey Gundlach said many assets are extremely overpriced right now, urging investors to keep about 20% of their portfolios in cash to protect against a major downturn.
Speaking on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast released Monday, the DoubleLine Capital CEO warned that the stock market looks dangerously speculative, saying it’s among the least healthy he’s seen in his entire career. The Dartmouth grad, who started his Wall Street career in the mid-1980s at TCW Group, today sees speculative excess in AI-related stocks and data-center investments, cautioning that momentum investing during a boom can end badly.

Gundlach said he is especially worried about the rapid growth of private credit, a $1.7 trillion market that lends directly to companies. He said lenders are making “garbage loans” similar to what happened before the 2008 mortgage crisis, pointing to recent failures like auto lender Tricolor and car parts supplier First Brands Group as early warning signs.
“The next big crisis in the financial markets is going to be private credit,” he said. “It has the same trappings as subprime mortgage repackaging had back in 2006.”
Gundlach also criticized the push to sell private credit funds to retail investors, calling it a “perfect mismatch” where there’s a promise for easy withdrawals despite the fact those assets can’t typically be sold quickly. If investors pull money out, funds may be forced to sell at steep losses, he said.
Despite his warnings, Gundlach admits it’s hard to profit directly from this view. He won’t short junk bonds, for example, because the trade keeps losing money, he said.
He said he still likes gold but has reduced his recommended allocation to 15%. Gundlach had recommended a 25% gold position in mid-September, based on his belief that inflation would stay stubbornly elevated because of the impact of tariffs on import prices. More

A White House memo alleged “Alibaba provides tech support for Chinese military ‘operations’ against targets in the U.S.,” according to a FT report Friday.
“The assertions and innuendoes in the article are completely false,” Alibaba said in a statement to CNBC on the FT report.
Alibaba provides cloud computing services and has developed open-source AI models that are growing in popularity, including in the U.S.

BEIJING — Alibaba is helping the Chinese military to target the U.S., according to a White House memo, the Financial Times reported Friday.
The memo alleged “Alibaba provides tech support for Chinese military ‘operations’ against targets in the U.S.,” according to the FT.

The FT said it could not independently verify the claims, and did not publish a full version of the memo. It was not clear when the memo was released. The White House did not respond to requests for comment, while the FT said it stood by its reporting.
“The assertions and innuendoes in the article are completely false,” Alibaba said in a statement to CNBC on the FT report.
“We question the motivation behind the anonymous leak, which the FT admits that they cannot verify,” Alibaba said. “This malicious PR operation clearly came from a rogue voice looking to undermine President Trump’s recent trade deal with China.”

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in South Korea last month for the first time since Trump began his second term in January. The leaders agreed to a rollback of tariffs and export controls for 12 months, easing bilateral tensions that have escalated this year.
The lack of details in the FT report “does raise the question of whether some of the China hawks in the administration are trying to undercut the President’s deal with Xi Jinping,” Andy Rothman, founder of consulting firm Sinology, said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”

He pointed out that Trump had not said anything about the FT report, while noting that all the major U.S. cloud computing companies have contracts with the U.S. government.

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The U.S. has ramped up efforts over the last few years to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors for training artificial intelligence models.
“The fact that Alibaba’s stock price dropped so rapidly in response [to the FT report] shows how much China’s AI industry is on edge over possible new sanctions,” said Kyle Chan, a Brookings fellow who focuses on China tech.
Alibaba shares had closed 3.78% lower in the U.S. on Friday following the report, but were up more than 1% in Hong Kong on Monday.
Chan pointed out the FT report comes as Alibaba’s open-source Qwen AI model is growing in popularity in Silicon Valley, increasing the threat to the pay-to-use models from U.S. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic — while investors are increasingly worried about a possible AI bubble.
Alibaba is set to release quarterly results on Nov. 25 ahead of the U.S. market open.
—CNBC’s Eamon Javers and Elaine Yu contributed to this report. More

New York Federal Reserve President John Williams met with Wall Street’s dealers last week about a key lending facility, the Financial Times reported, citing three individuals familiar with the matter.
The meeting included representatives from many of the 25 primary dealers from banks that underwrite the government’s debt, according to the report.
Williams sought feedback from these dealers on the use of the Fed’s standing repo facility, a permanent lending tool that acts as a backstop for markets.

A street sign is seen near the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, New York, U.S., August 7, 2025.
Eduardo Munoz | Reuters

New York Federal Reserve President John Williams met with Wall Street’s dealers last week about a key lending facility, the Financial Times reported, citing three individuals familiar with the matter.
The meeting, which took place on the sidelines on Wednesday at the Fed’s annual Treasury market conference, included representatives from many of the 25 primary dealers of banks that underwrite the government’s debt, according to the report. The meeting participants were members of banks’ teams that specialize in fixed income markets, the report said.

CNBC has confirmed the meeting took place.
Williams sought feedback from these dealers on the use of the Fed’s standing repo facility — a permanent lending tool that allows eligible financial institutions to borrow cash from the central bank in return for high-quality collateral such as Treasury bonds. The tool would allow institutions to sell securities to the Fed with an agreement to repurchase them at a later time, essentially acting as a backstop for markets.
“President Williams convened the New York Fed’s primary trading counterparties [primary dealers] to continue engagement on the purpose of the standing repo facility as a tool of monetary policy implementation and to solicit feedback that ensures it remains effective for rate control,” a spokesperson for the New York Fed told the Financial Times, which reported the news on Friday.
The meeting took place amid brewing concerns about stress in parts of the U.S. financial system and signs of tighter market liquidity.
Roberto Perli, who manages the Fed’s System Open Market Account, which is the central bank’s bonds and cash holdings, said Wednesday that firms in need of the central bank’s standing repo facility should “be used whenever it is economically sensible to do so.”

The New York Fed did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
Read the complete Financial Times report here. More

THE JARGON of gold trading echoes that of poker. “Strong hands” are investors loyal to the metal no matter the price. “Weak hands” are flaky punters who fold at the first sign of trouble. Bullish investors win when they convince others of their story for why the price is rising, which boils down to why, this time, strong hands outnumber weak ones. Their bluff is called when the market softens. If the price does not rebound, their story collapses. If it does, it gains credence. More

Industrial and infrastructure stocks may soon share the spotlight with the artificial intelligence trade.
According to ETF Action’s Mike Atkins, there’s a bullish setup taking shape due to both policy and consumer trends. His prediction comes during a volatile month for Big Tech and AI stocks.

“You’re seeing kind of the old-school infrastructure, industrial products that have not done as well over the years,” the firm’s founding partner told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “But there’s a big drive… kind of away from globalization into this reshoring concept, and I think that has legs.”
Global X CEO Ryan O’Connor is also optimistic because the groups support the AI boom. His firm runs the Global X U.S. Infrastructure Development ETF (PAVE), which tracks companies involved in construction and industrial projects.
“Infrastructure is something that’s near and dear to our heart based off of PAVE, which is our largest ETF in the market,” said O’Connor in the same interview. “We think some of these reshoring efforts that you can get through some of these infrastructure places are an interesting one.”
The Global X’s infrastructure exchange-traded fund is up 16% so far this year, while the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), which includes AI bellwethers Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor and Broadcom, is up 42%, as of Friday’s close.
Both ETFs are lower so far this month — but Global X’s infrastructure ETF is performing better. Its top holdings, according to the firm’s website, are Howmet Aerospace, Quanta Services and Parker Hannifin.

Supporting the AI boom
He also sees electrification as a positive driver.
“All of the things that are going to be required for us to continue to support this AI boom, the electrification of the U.S. economy, is certainly one of them,” he said, noting the firm’s U.S. Electrification ETF (ZAP) gives investors exposure to them. The ETF is up almost 24% so far this year.
The Global X U.S. Electrification ETF is also performing a few percentage points better than the VanEck Semiconductor ETF for the month.

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