Wall Street crash, 3,200 billion burned with the escape from AI

Wall Street's optimism after the midterm elections crumbles under a violent current of selling on hi-tech stocks. The victory of the Democrats has triggered a flight from stocks linked to artificial intelligence, for which a tightening of the rules is expected, and sank the American stock markets which on a black Thursday burned 3,200 billion dollars of value. The Dow Jones closed down 3.44%, the Nasdaq fell 5.52% while the S&P 50o fell 4.35%.

The negative trend on Wall Street since the opening weighed down the European stock markets. In the Old Continent the worst was Milan which lost one percentage point, followed by that of Amsterdam, which closed with a drop of 0.6%, with Frankfurt which recorded a drop of 0.4%. London was negative by 0.3%, while Paris rose by 0.3% and Madrid by a final 0.8%. Some nervousness also on government bonds: the spread between BTPs and 10-year German Bunds ended at 109.7 basis points compared to 105 at the start, with the yield on the Treasury product rising to 4.33%. The euro, however, was calm, moving to 1.123 against the dollar. All cryptocurrencies were weak, with Bitcoin also falling by 5% to 76 thousand dollars and Ethereum down by six percentage points to 2,260. Gold rose slightly to a daily high of $4,155 per ounce. In the energy sector, after the closure of the European stock exchanges, gas rose by 1.5% to 89.4 euros per megawatt hour, with oil in New York increasing by more than two percentage points, regaining 90 dollars a barrel.

On the US stock market, chip makers Broadcom and Nvidia lost more than 9%, while other stocks, such as the software company Oracle, recorded losses of 7%. Elon Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are still very bad, falling by 10.77% and 9.5% respectively. Thus Piazza Affari blamed the slips of STM and Technoprobe, both down 9%. Fincantieri, Stellantis and Prysmian also did badly, losing four percentage points, with Leonardo down 3.4%. Among the banks, Bper lost 2.7% to 13.2 euros after the third quarter accounts, with Mediobanca down 1.5%. On the other hand, Amplifon (+2.7%) and Tenaris were strong, up 3.6% after accounts above 25 euros.