Another rise of close to one percent today with retailers. Banks, insurance companies, and resource companies are all doing quite well. Stocks in New York went up even more, by 1.3 percent, and there were strong gains in Asia.
Today, in fact, ever since the banking crisis in the United States and Switzerland started on March 10 with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Australian shares have done worse than the American and Swiss share markets, which is decidedly unfair since our banks are fine.
Although I did come across this chart today of the amount and percentage of deposits held by the big four Australian banks that are covered by the government’s financial claim scheme, which guarantees deposits up to $250,000.
It’s a total of 1.2 trillion dollars, or just under 50 percent of total deposits. I suppose the half-empty way to look at that is that just over 50 percent of deposits are not guaranteed. Gold dropped back below two thousand dollars an ounce last night, along with silver and iron ore, but the oil price jumped three and a half percent, and the Australian dollar stayed just under 67 U.S. cents.
Google released its own artificial intelligence chat bot today to compete with OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Microsoft’s Bing, and why not Chat GPT has just had the fastest take-up of any new technology in history as measured by how fast it got to 1 million users; it took five days compared with Netflix’s, three and a half years for Airbnb, two and a half years for Twitter, two years for Facebook, 10 months for Spotify, two and a half months for Instagram, and three and a half years for Uber.
