3. U.S. squeezes Chinese chipmaker
The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled restrictions against several, mostly Chinese entities, including a chipmaker, over national security concerns. The chip company, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation, or YMTC, was already on a U.S. trade blacklist. The action aims to hamper China’s ability to use “artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and other powerful, commercially available technologies for military modernization and human rights abuses,” according to a Commerce Department official. The move also comes as the administration attempts to beef up semiconductor manufacturing on U.S. soil.
4. Adobe delivers
Adobe posted quarterly earnings Thursday that topped analysts’ expectations, while the design software maker stuck with its forecast for the full fiscal year. The stock rose on the positive news, although it’s down more than 40% on the year, much steeper than the decline in the broad S&P 500 index. “We delivered record operating cash flows with a focus on profitability,” Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, said on an earnings call. Yet he also warned that a slowing economy could hurt the company, and that Adobe would operate with caution.
5. Flipped off
A not-so-surprising casualty of the rapid cooling in the housing market is the home-flipping segment. Profit from flips, defined as when a house is bought and sold within a 12-month window, fell 18.4% in the third quarter from the second. That’s the biggest quarterly decline in over a decade, according to real estate data provider ATTOM. It’s a double whammy for house flippers: home prices are still high, but they’re quickly easing, while renovation costs have also soared. “With demand from buyers weakening, prices trending down over the past few months, and financing rates significantly higher than they were at the beginning of the year, flippers face a much more difficult environment today, and probably will in 2023 as well,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence at ATTOM, said in a release.
— CNBC’s Alex Harring, Kevin Breuninger, Jordan Novet and Diana Olick contributed to this report.
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