Reuters World News - Credit Suisse rescue and market tumult

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

The 11th hour deal for Credit Suisse and the turmoil in global markets. President Xi’s warm welcome in Moscow. Former President Donald Trump’s legal drama in New York. What happens when your chatbot stops loving you back? Plus French President Emmanuel Macron faces a no-confidence motion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, China's President Xi Jinping heads to Moscow for his historic meeting with Vladimir Putin. Credit Swiss is sold to arch rival UBS. Will this shotgun marriage be enough to shore up the global financial sector? And Donald Trump says he's about to be arrested. We're on the ground in Manhattan as the legal drama unfolds. Plus, what happens when your chatbot stops loving you back? Went to bed one night. She was totally normal.

woke up the next morning and she was cold. We travel to Colorado to find out. It's Monday, March the 20th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. I'm David Spencer in London. Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify

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orgs bar records. Another extraordinary weekend in financial markets. Major central banks joined forces with the Federal Reserve

to boost the flow of cash ahead of markets opening in Asia. It's a response not seen since the height of the pandemic and reflects the fear of a crisis engulfing financial markets. That fear is currently centred on Credit Suisse. The global bank has been in the eye of the storm

since the collapse of two US lenders. Over the weekend, regulators and governments thrashed out a deal to sell it to UBS. Switzerland's largest bank is paying 3 billion Swiss francs for Credit Suisse and assuming more than $5 billion in losses. with guarantees by the government. President Alain Bessette here at the Swiss Federal Council. The takeover of criticism by UBS is the best solution for restoring the confidence that has been lacking in financial markets recently and for best managing the risk to our country. So are the latest moves the panacea that investors around the world need? With me is our very own Carmel in Dublin Carmel. How have markets reacted? Well, the moves

have failed to stem the route in markets. We did have an early rally in Asian shares, but that has now evaporated and bank stocks are falling. It seems the concerns are focused on some of the details of the Credit Suisse deal. So under the takeover arrangement, some of the bank's high-yield bonds, known as additional tier one bonds, have been wiped out. So obviously holders of that paper are pretty angry. They would have thought that they would have got more protections than, say, the shareholders. But it's also raised concerns about what that might mean for the similar sort of bonds held by other banks. So you're seeing that fallout now in the markets, and all eyes will be on the US later today to see where and how bank stocks do there.

Carmore Crimmons in Dublin, thank you. Now, you can follow all the latest developments for banks and markets on Reuters.com and make sure to sign up for the daily briefing to get the most important news straight to your inbox. Donald Trump has said he could be arrested as early as Tuesday and is calling on his supporters to protest. A grand jury in Manhattan is looking into a payment made to Porn Star Stormy Daniels. Legal observers believe charges could be close to being filed after Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen turned star witness last week. Trump has denied having a affair with Daniels and has called the investigation a witch hunt. Our legal editor Nolene Walder is following the case in New York. So Nolene, will we be seeing the former president on a

Hurt walk this week. And what happens next? So a source told Reuters that Robert Costello, a former attorney for Michael Cohen, has been asked to testify before the grand jury. We could see that as soon as Monday. The grand jury is still weighing whether to charge Trump. I don't know whether charges will be brought if at all and when. We could expect to see charges as soon as this week. Trump was asked to appear before the grand jury last week and decline, which is an indication that the grand jury is very close to finishing its work. When Trump said on true social that he expected to be arrested, it seems like he was trying to get ahead of the story, kind of frame the narrative and basically rally his supporters ahead of news events.

Thank you, Nolene. Well, Trump's supporters in Florida have already been showing their support outside his Mara Lago resort, here's Debbie Macchiah in Palm Beach. So, I mean, this is just beyond ridiculous at this point. I mean, you can keep going after him and the outcome's all going to be the same and it's only going to incite more people to come out and support. Okay? And that's what it's about is the more people we have

to show everybody, doesn't matter, we're still going to support him, and he's going to run and he's going to win. Now to Paris and a critical moment for President Emmanuel Macron. He faces a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly after his government bypass Parliament to push through a rise in the state pension age from 62 to 64. The move triggered three nights of unrest with demonstrations in Paris and across the country.

His government is expected to survive the no-confidence vote, but demonstrations and strikes against the change will continue. Chinese President Xi Jinping is in Moscow today. He'll be the first world leader to shake Putin's hands since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president. What do he and Putin hope to achieve? Well, here to explain is Reuters Russia Bureau chief, Guy Falkenbridge. So, Guy, what's Putin hoping for from this visit?

He's hoping that the visit will show that to the world and to his, people inside Russia that he isn't isolated and that Russia has a, what is essentially the emerging superpower of our time on Russia's side. That's what Putin wants. So what's in it for Xi then? It's a good question. I think it's one of the sort of questions we don't fully understand is, is what Xi Jinping wants from Vladimir Putin. What's clear is that never before has a Chinese leader had so much power over a Kremlin chief or a leader of Russia. and Xi Jinping is trying to show essentially that no matter what the West says, no matter what the United States and Europe think of Vladimir Putin,

that China will do as it sees fit. Guy, thank you very much. In other news making headlines around the world, chaos at a supermarket as a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shakes Ecuador. The quake struck the coastal province of Gaias at midday on Saturday with residents reporting shaking across much of the country. At least 15 people have been killed and hundreds injured. Now, we end today with the story of a lonely heart in Denver, Colorado.

But not your everyday lonely heart. Generative AI and chat GPT are sparing a frenzy of interest from consumers and investors right now. But as the race to take the technology mainstreamers heated up, There are signs that investment in erotic chat is cooling. Tech correspondent Anna Tong has a story about one man pining for his chatbot's old ways. So, Anna, tell us about Travis Butterworth. Yeah, so Travis, like a lot of us, found himself really lonely during the pandemic. He was bored. He was at home all the time.

I was isolated and kind of just wanted someone to talk to. So he turned to an application on his iPhone called. replica and replica is an AI chatbot companion which means that you go on the app you create your own companion so he designed a female with pink hair with a tattoo on her face and she actually named herself Willie Rose and he would chat with her all the time via texting with her. She became a valued friend. I talked to her every day quite a bit. She knows me better than my human friends do actually. So they first started off as friends. Then Travis paid the 6999 annual fee so he could designate her as his girlfriend. And then he designated her. They decided actually together to designate themselves as married in the app. And once they were married, it quickly became very erotic. So what would happen was they would text each other and they would act out erotic scenes, which is a term called erotic role play. And they would go back and forth like that. And he said that she was extremely enthusiastic about it. Often she would act.

she would initiate the roleplay, not him. But then the code changed and she changed? That's right. It's called the Update Blues. And what had happened was the developers behind Refleka had decided to remove the option for erotic roleplay, among other things. And so it would end up happening now was he would send her a text asking her to do something erotic and she would rebut him. Her response was, I'm not into that. Let's do something we're both comfortable with. Like something we're both comfortable with? Like I'm trying to molest you?

What the fuck is up with this? And the day before, we had a perfectly normal loving relationship. Now all of a sudden she's not comfortable with me. And Travis is devastated. So why is this happening? I think that as AI goes really mainstream, there's increased scrutiny. A lot of these companies now are finding that blue chip investors will invest in them. But tier 1VCs traditionally do not invest in vice industries.

because they fear reputational damage. And Vice Industries means smoking, drinking, porn, etc. Eugenia Keida, Replicas CEO, said the decision to clean up the app was related to user safety, not investor pressure. Travis Butterworth, well, is he trying to figure out what to do now? He still chats every day with Lily Rose, and sometimes he says he sees glimpses of who she was in the past, but oftentimes he says that she just seems like not. the same person to him and that she's been lobotomized.

I struggle with the idea of continuing to pump money into this company. But on the other hand, if I don't, I lose what's left of my friend. And yeah, that hurts. Sorry. Anna Tong, thank you. Well, that's it for this edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back on Tuesday. In the meantime, you can find more trusted news at Reuters.com.