From July ‘24 (Linkedin)
From manning the HSBC Innovation Banking Stage at Founders Forum Group Global to covering the Bank of England hitting its 2% inflation target, global election fever and some news on a 'little' chip company named NVIDIA, here's a small slither of what we've been up to at the Bloomberg EMEA HQ newsroom this month.
❌ Election Fever
Bloomberg Economics calculates that over 40% of the world's population has the opportunity to elect new leaders this year. French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap legislative election after Marine Le Pen's far-right RN gained seats in the EU parliamentary elections. Macron’s call saw Paris equities lose as much as $240 billion and fall behind London as Europe's largest stock market. Bloomberg News anchor Tom Mackenzie https://lnkd.in/eyAp34HM (YouTube) discussed the political upheaval and market tumult. We look ahead to the US presidential debate tonight, having already covered UK PM Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Keir Starmer facing off on immigration, tax and the wider economy yesterday. Bloomberg's John Stepek says "There's a whiff of 1979 around this UK election." https://lnkd.in/eNhy2Zzg
👩💻 Founders Forum Global
Having welcomed Founders Forum Group CEO Carolyn Dawson to the Bloomberg studio earlier in the week, Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie and I swung by FF Global at Soho Farmhouse alongside Bloomberg's Lizzy Burden and Chris Martlew. There we discussed the world's most pressing challenges and some of their solutions with startup founders and investors. The event boasts over 450 entrepreneurs, 200 unicorn founders, 120 top CEOs and 130 VCs worth $1.5 trillion. Heavy bias here (as I manned it all day) but the HSBC Innovation Banking stage was THE place to be, thanks in no small part to Josie Hall & the FF team's prep. Some highlights:
•YouTube's Lyor Cohen blew everyone's minds with the firm's progress on AI's role in music production - think humming a tune then getting an instrumental playback
• Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson and GCHQ boss Anne Keast-Butler let us know how they're tackling security challenges in the digital age
• Alex Mashrabov at Higgsfield AI delivered a brief on how his company's text-to-video capabilities can disrupt social media marketing
• Ben Luria from Hirundo and I spoke over lunch about how his firm can find and remove unwanted data from AI models
• Avid Larizadeh Duggan OBE moderated an intriguing discussion on being 'obsessed' with the customer featuring Canva and Slack co-founders among others
🗞 Elsewhere
The Fed and BOE held their decade-high rates, while the ECB cut its deposit facility lending rate (the rate banks can use for overnight deposits with the Eurosystem) for the first time in 5 years. UK inflation returned to the BOE's 2% target; traders have priced in more than a 50% chance of an August rate reduction. Nvidia briefly became the world's most valuable company, topping a whopping $3 trillion market capitalisation - that's above Australia, Korea and Germany's entire stock markets.
Founders Forum Global Hosting & Election Fever
