- Stocks slide in the last week of September.
- Congress is trying to prevent a government shutdown by Saturday’s deadline.
- Hollywood writers and producers reached a tentative agreement to end a nearly 150-day strike.
Here are the key news investors need to start the trading day:
Congress begins the week without a clear path to passing a spending bill by a Saturday deadline and avoiding a shortfall in federal funding. A prolonged shutdown could lead to furloughed workers, loss of benefits or slower economic growth. The Republican-led House of Representatives left Washington for the weekend after failing to advance a funding plan as Speaker Kevin McCarthy failed to win the support of hardline conservatives who were pushing for drastic spending cuts. “I don’t know what to think,” Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Hollywood writers and producers agreed to a tentative labor agreement that would end a nearly 150-day strike. Details of the deal, which the sides reached after two days of negotiations over the weekend, were not immediately known. Members of the Writers Guild of America must ratify an agreement. The group told members that it envisioned “significant gains and protections for writers across all areas of membership.” Screenwriters are calling for a bigger cut in streaming revenue and protection from the use of artificial intelligence in an evolving industry. The work stoppage, along with the actors’ strike that began in July, has led to delays in television production and film releases at major media companies.
Amazon relies heavily on the development of artificial intelligence. The e-commerce titan will invest $4 billion in AI company Anthropic, which makes chatbots that compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The deal includes a strategic partnership that makes Amazon Web Services Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and delivers new capabilities to AWS customers through Anthropic. The bet allows Amazon to go deeper into AI development as it tries to keep pace with rivals like Microsoft and Alphabet.
Credit card companies’ losses are rising at a rate not seen since the Great Recession, according to Goldman Sachs. According to the bank, current losses of 3.63% are up 1.5 percentage points from the September 2021 low. Goldman expects those losses to continue to rise to nearly 5%. The estimate comes at a time when U.S. credit card debt exceeds $1 trillion.
—CNBC’s Yun Li, Rebecca Picciotto, Sarah Whitten, Arjun Kharpal and Michelle Fox contributed to this report.
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