The combination of America's 'weak employment + AI panic' has triggered a renewed decline in global risk assets, with funds quickly shifting to U.S. Treasury bonds for safety. All three major U.S. stock indices fell over 1%, with small-cap stocks faring even worse; the sell-off in software stocks continues to spread to the semiconductor and AI supply chains, with software stock ETFs dropping about 5%. Oracle, Microsoft, and others suffered heavy losses, and after Amazon's earnings report raised concerns over capital expenditure/profit, the stock plunged over 10% in after-hours trading.
Macro data clearly indicates a cool-down: December's JOLTS job openings fell to a more than five-year low, and January's Challenger job cuts reached the highest level for the same period since 2009, reinforcing expectations of an economic slowdown and suppressing risk appetite. Correspondingly, U.S. Treasuries rebounded strongly, with both the 2-year and 10-year yields significantly declining to near one-month lows.
In terms of exchange rates and central bank actions: Safe-haven demand has slightly strengthened the U.S. dollar; the European Central Bank remains on hold amidst a stronger euro and tariff uncertainties; although the Bank of England kept interest rates unchanged, a 5:4 vote signaled strong indications for a rate cut, leading to a sharp decline in the pound.
Commodities and cryptocurrencies are synchronously 'deleveraging'. Gold fell about 4%, and silver plunged nearly 20%, approaching $70; Bitcoin plummeted about 12% in a single day, dropping below $63,000, while Ethereum fell below $1,900, resulting in large-scale liquidations, indicating that high-volatility assets are the first to bear the brunt of liquidity contraction. Oil prices weakened against the backdrop of confirmed U.S.-Iran negotiations on Friday (down about 2%), with geopolitical premiums retracting.
AI competition is accelerating but also 'hurting old valuations': Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, and OpenAI launched GPT-5.3-Codex/enterprise agent platform Frontier, triggering a repricing of financial information and traditional software sectors, as the market begins to more seriously assess the profit risks of 'AI replacing some software and information services'; at the same time, NVIDIA delayed new gaming chips due to shortages of memory chips, illustrating that AI's crowding-out effects on the supply chain are still ongoing.
