AI泡沫担忧引发美债避险，法国债券遭抛售与英国信心暴跌

Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. This is the Bloomberg Daybure podcast. Good morning. It's Friday the 23rd of October in London. I'm Caroline Hepka. Coming up today, AI bubble fears spark a rush to US treasuries, but French bonds fail to benefit from any safe haven pilein. Macron prepares to deploy troops and extra police officers to the streets of Paris as the country braces for another weekend of protests.

Plus, do no harm. Britain's chancellor looks to avoid big tax or spending moves as higher borrowing costs squeeze his room for maneuver. Let's start with a roundup of our top stories. A deepening route in AI linked shares is sending investors scrambling for the safety of US government bonds. Treasuries posted their best day in more than two years with the 10-year yield falling back below 5%. That's as US chip shares plunged as much as 7.3% as investors questioned whether massive AI spending will deliver enough returns.

That concerns goes to the heart of the current tech selloff. Can companies actually monetize the huge sums that are being poured into AI? Nancy Tangler of Laugher Tangler Investments says that is now the key question for investors.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't on capex spending. So I think as an investor I have to step back and say what's the reason? Are they making the right decision for the long term? Have they been able to monetize? Will they be able to monetize the spend? And we're seeing a number of the companies that started last quarter being able to monetize uh their their AI spend. That was Nancy Tangler of Lafer Tangler Investments.

The flight to safety is also exposing fresh stress in France where bonds are being sold rather than bought. French 10-year yields now exceed US equivalents for the first time since 2013. And the spread over German debt widened to 178 basis points, its highest since late 2011. Well, France is preparing to put troops on the streets as it braces for another weekend of protests. Soldiers will guard sensitive buildings and on top of a 20% increase in police, specialist forces normally used for missions including counterterrorism will also be available.

President Mron says that only protests organized by labor unions will be authorized this weekend. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guta, says the violence is unacceptable, but legitimate grievances must not be suppressed. Let me be clear, the violence and destruction we have seen on the streets is unacceptable, and those responsible for criminal activities must be held accountable. At the same time, we cannot let intolerable violence obscure the legitimate and very real grievances of the many peaceful protesters.

We must connect the dots and better understand how deeply linked those very real and peacefully expressed grievances are to the wider turmoil in our world.

Antonio Gutierrez there after French supermarket chain Carfor warned earlier this week that the unrest will weigh on its earnings this year highlighting the economic impact of the riots. There is a growing divide over how much further the ECB will raise interest rates as oil remains well above $110 a barrel. The vast majority of economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect a pause next week followed by a single hike in December.

Traders, by contrast, are betting on three more hikes over the next year. The gap reflects disagreement over how far energy costs will go in terms of the increase and how much that will feed through into inflation. While investors remain focused on rising oil prices, economists see little evidence of broader knock-on effects, at least so far. Banks, airlines, and governments across Europe, Asia, and the Americas are pulling down websites to avoid them being hacked.

Artificial intelligence models helped to find vulnerabilities in a commonly used programming language this week called PHP. Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince, says that there are already huge numbers of attempted hacks.

Hackers right now are exploiting this flaw at at just incredible rates. Literally, we're seeing millions of attempted attacks using this flaw now across all of our network, you know, every single minute of every single day. So, so the the flaw is now known and if you are running PHP on your servers, you need to update PHP to the latest version. It's free. You can get it updated immediately. Uh, and that's the only thing that's going to keep you safe.

That was the CEO of Cloudflare, the cyber security firm. He added that he saw AI as the hero of this story for finding the issue. The discovery of critical flaws is set to accelerate as AI models increasingly search software for weaknesses and loopholes. More than 30 government services here in the UK though went offline while PHP security updates were applied. UK consumer confidence has dropped in a Brexitsiz slump as cost of living pressures bite.

GFK's index fell 11 points in one month, erasing all of the improvements since Andy Bernham became prime minister in the summer. The news comes the week before the UK budget as Chancellor John Healey tries to avoid provoking bond markets. The CEO of Gresham House, Tony Dalwood, told Bloomberg Radio he sees the government delivering style over substance.

It appears that they they they pay a lot of lip service to the to the business and and they do to a lot of other stakeholders in the economy. The reality is the structural changes and the and and actually the substance behind the words. Have you could talk about when this government came to power it talked about economic growth being at the core and then we saw uh things like reduction in the VCT tax relief in order for early stage companies.

Tony Al Dalwood there who added that bond yields show markets are nervous about the UK's economic outlook. The chancellor is announcing today the budget will cut red tape for businesses, including simpler corporate reporting and extended import tariff suspensions. President Trump reportedly asked Elon Musk to lift restrictions on the Starink satellite service used by Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal reports Trump expressed frustration that the system speeds were still being capped.

When asked if he had called the SpaceX boss, the president refused to be drawn. I don't want to say but uh I know it was a very interesting situation so I don't want to comment one way or the other but uh

my my relationship with Elon is a very good one. Go ahead.

I'll comment on the way that you called him and after

yeah I don't want to comment on it. You know whether I called or whether somebody else called doesn't make any difference. I guess the bottom line he put it back.

That was President Trump speaking to reporters. Bloomberg understands that Ukrainian troops are still seeing limits on connection speeds through the service, although the service improved slightly in some areas. While President Trump's claim of a very good relationship with Musk follows a fresh injection of donations from the world's richest man, SEC filings show Musk gave an extra $77 million to his political action committee in the first two weeks of October.

That brings his total donations in this election cycle to more than $445 million in an effort to see Republicans elected in November's midterms. Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg TV and radio, contributed about $80 million in September and October to help Democrats in the midterms. Those are some of our top stories for you today. Let's look at the markets. Asian equities staging something of a recovery after the opening losses that we saw.

For example, the costby was down more than 4%. So a really big plunge, but actually now that loss is only about half of 1%. Stock futures then for the NASDAQ in the red along with US stocks of 50 futures. So it still looks quite tentative after the major tech route yesterday. 10ear US Treasury yields fell 17 basis points on Thursday to 4.96%. T