Bad week for Wall Street

A bad week on Wall Street turned dismal Thursday after the relentless surge in Treasury yields sapped demand for risk assets. In the end, US stocks suffered the biggest drop in six months. The S&P 500 plunged 1.6% and the Nasdaq 100 fell almost 2%. The two indexes are on track for the worst quarter in a year. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed toward 4.5%, up more than 30 basis points in just three weeks. Leading the way down for equities were profitless technology companies, a group whose lofty valuations have become harder to justify as investors turn to other asset classes for returns. —David E. Rovella

Chip designer Arm Holdings fell below its initial public offering price just one week after a highly-anticipated debut was seen as a signal that the market was ready to reopen to fresh listings.

A hedge fund manager who made a name for himself shorting fossil fuel stocks says the strategy is no longer viable, as oil’s ascent proves too strong to fight. James Jampel, the founder of Massachusetts-based HITE Hedge Asset Management, said he still believes oil will lose steam in the longer term. But that moment is further away than he once imagined, and shorting fossil fuel producers has become untenable, he said.

Cisco Systems agreed to buy Splunk in a deal valued at about $28 billion, representing its biggest acquisition yet and a massive push into software and artificial intelligence-powered data analysis. Under Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins, Cisco has been trying to lessen its dependence on one-time sales of expensive hardware and shift toward software and services. Splunk is its most expensive foray into that area.

Canada, home to the world’s third-largest crude deposits, is poised to reshuffle global oil flows next year. The nearly completed expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline promises to vault Canada into a new role in global markets by transporting an additional 600,000 barrels a day—on par with the daily output of Azerbaijan—from the country’s vast oil sands to a port on the Pacific Coast.

While Canada’s energy prospects are brightening, its diplomatic affairs are increasingly fraught. The government said it would reduce the number of diplomats in India due to security concerns, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government appeared to suspend visas for Canadians, as a diplomatic fight escalated over the murder of a Sikh activist.

Zurich has become one of Europe’s hottest housing markets, with prices surging past London and Paris. With demand in the Swiss financial hub stoked by hiring from companies including Google, apartments in the central Zurich district are being listed at near record levels of over €18,000 ($19,000) per square meter—more than double the price in London.

Is humanity living through a historic transformation—a paradigm shift in how societies organize themselves, their economics and politics? Or are we traveling through another manifestation of the trials and triumphs of those who came before? On this episode of the Bloomberg Originals series Exponentially, Azeem Azhar and historian Niall Ferguson explore the geopolitics of technological revolutions past and present in an effort to determine how unique this moment truly is.

As the world pivots away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, solar has taken on outsize significance, and America’s failure to keep pace with China has become a growing strategic liability. In the Bloomberg Originals mini-documentary The Hidden Threat to US Energy Security, we explore how the US is trying to make up some lost ground in this critical sector, and how China’s dominance of the industry has given it a leading role in the fight to slow global warming.

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