The Rundown - Powell Hints at Rate Cut, Meta Signs $10B Cloud Deal with Google

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Stock market update for August 22, 2025. This video is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the host and guest, not Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. Mentions of assets are not recommendations. Investing involves risk, including loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. For full disclosures, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Public.com/disclosures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Friday, August 22nd. In today's episode, we'll tell you what Jerome Powell said on his speech at Jackson Hole. We'll also dive into Nvidia's latest headache in China. Then we'll tell you why Cracker Barrel stock is in freefall. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out the latest streaming service raising their prices. We got a great show. for you today. Let's go. The market sell-off continued on Thursday with the S&P and NASDAQ both dropping around 0.4%. The NASDAQ is now on a five-day losing streak, but it looks like the losing streak is probably

coming to an end today because as I record this, Jerome Powell is giving his speech in Jackson Hole, and he dropped a strong hint that the Fed plans to cut rates at the next meeting. Jerome Powell said that the baseline outlook and the shifting balance of risk may warn adjusting our policy stance. That's a pretty clear wink the Fed is ready to cut rates. And as soon as he said that, the market just shot up. Now, he's still talking as I recorded this, so I don't know all the stuff that he's going to cover. But the other notable thing that he mentioned was the importance of the Fed's independence.

Jerome Powell has faced a ton of pressure from President Trump who has threatened to fire him multiple times. And the president's not just stopping at Jerome Powell. The DOJ has now launched an investigation into Fed Governor Lee. Lisa Cook with Trump saying that he'll fire her if she doesn't resign. So there's still a lot of drama between the Fed and the White House, but for investors right now, it seems like rate cuts are coming at the September meeting. And that optimism has the markets surging this morning.

If this sustains, there's a chance the stock market finishes the week at record highs. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Meta. Meta is signing a massive cloud deal with Google worth over. $10 billion over six years, making it the largest cloud deal in Google's history. Now, the timing of this deal was interesting because there were multiple reports this week that Meta was freezing hiring for their AI team. Meta now seems to be turning their attention to get as much AI computing power as they

can. Meta has already said they're planning to spend billions of dollars in building their own AI data centers. They also have cloud deals with Microsoft and Amazon, and now this deal with Google. This deal gives meta access to Google's servers, storage, and even Nvidia chips inside Google's data centers. So it's pretty clear that meta is now focusing on getting as much computing power as they can for their AI ambitions. And for Google, this is a huge win for them. Their cloud business has been stuck in third place behind Amazon and Microsoft, so landing a big

client like meta is huge. It's also kind of wild how in big tech, these companies are competing against one another, but also paying each other billions of dollars. Like Google and meta are the two biggest digital advertising companies in the world. They also compete for people's attention, Meta has Instagram while Google has YouTube. But now Meta just became Google's biggest cloud customer, giving them billions of dollars in revenue. And I think when the dust settles, Google might end up being the biggest winner of the AI boom, not just because of their AI models, but because of their AI infrastructure. Now, sticking with the AI theme, let's talk about NVIDIA, because they are dealing with some more drama out of China. Just weeks after President

Trump gave NVIDIA the green light to sell their H20 AI chips to China, the China, the China, the Chinese The Chinese government is now telling Chinese tech companies to stop buying the NVIDIA's chips because of a potential backdoor in these chips that could be used to spy on Chinese tech companies. Now, CEO Jensen Huang is actually in Taiwan right now and he's trying to ease the tension. In fact, he's meeting with Chinese officials to convince him that there is no backdoor in these chips. Jensen was talking to some reporters as well and he sounded kind of exhausted saying that there is no backdoor and there never has been. He followed that up by saying that he was surprised by China's concerns all of a sudden since they were eager, to buy these chips earlier in the year when they were banned by the U.S. government.

You know, when the H20 ban was reversed a couple weeks ago, Chinese tech firms placed orders for 700,000 of these chips. As a result, NVIDIA ramped up production to meet the demand. But now that the Chinese government is blocking the sale of these chips, Nvidia is telling their suppliers to stop making them. Invidia is in a tough spot here. They're getting squeezed from both sides here. The U.S. government keeps changing policies in what NVIDIA is allowed to sell to China, and now the Chinese government is changing their policies and what's allowed to be sold

in their country. And all of this is going to probably have some meaningful impact on Nvidia's business. In fact, China used to make up more than 25% of Nvidia's revenues. Now it's closer to 13% and falling. Jensen clearly doesn't want to lose the Chinese market to local Chinese chipmakers like Huawei. In fact, Jensen said he's already talking to the US government about designing a successor to the H20 chip for the Chinese market. But I mean, with all this drama, I don't know if it's ever going to hit the market. We might learn more about the situation over in China, NVIDIA is reporting earnings next week on Wednesday. So we'll get a peek at the numbers and the impact that this is having on their business.

You know, there's a lot writing on that earnings report next week. We're going to be watching that one very closely. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day next week to stay in the loop. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Zoom stock is up this morning after the video conference company gave a better than expected outlook for sales growth. and raised their forecast for their fiscal year. Total revenues grew by 5% in Q2, while enterprise sales jumped 7% compared to a year ago.

Zoom said it has nearly 4,300 customers pay more than $100,000 each over the past year. Zoom's even finding some success with their AI product. The company said in their reports that their AI companion tool, which helps with meeting notes, and is offered as a paid add-on, now has millions of monthly active users. Zoom's stock is up about 4% this morning

in reaction to these earnings. Now, sticking with the winners here, Ross's shares are up this morning after the discount retailer beat earnings for the quarter. Ross attributed their earnings beat to lower than expected tariff costs. We've seen that theme a couple times from retailers this week. Now, while Ross did beat on earnings estimates, the retailer did miss slightly on the revenue estimates for Q2. But investors were able to look past that. I think they're more excited about the muted tariff impact, and Ross's shares are up more than 3% this morning in reaction to the earnings. Now on the flip side, shares of Cracker Barrel are getting beat up this week.

They plummeted yesterday after the old country restaurant chain released a new logo, which caused a massive social media firestorm. Cracker Barrel removed the iconic country guy and the barrel from their logo, and their logo is now just the word Cracker Barrel on a yellow backdrop. And to make matters worse, Cracker Barrel is also redesigning their interior and cutting back on the old country store vibes and making the restaurant location. to be more neutral. They're basically converting them to look like a Kava or a Chipotle.

Those changes are believed to appeal to a wider audience, but again, social media did not like these changes. In fact, it's already getting political with conservatives like Donald Trump Jr. calling it a move to destroy American tradition. So this firestorm has been bad for Cracker Barrel. This stock dropped more than 7% yesterday. Now, I think we can all agree that all these modern logo redesigns are so boring.

Like, they all look the same, they have no character. Why did Cracker Barrel have? have to get rid of the country guy in the barrel. You know, that was iconic. You know what? As a tribute to the OG Cracker Barrel logo, we're going to change the logo of the rundown to this. If you're an audio-only listener,

go check out the video version on Spotify or YouTube to see our new logo. We'll also post it on Instagram too, so you can check it out there. Now, obviously, this is not a permanent change for us, but I think more corporations should bring back cool logos, you know? Stop trying to make everything so minimalist and modern.

Let's wrap the show with the fun, Apple TV Plus is raising their monthly subscription to $12.99 a month. That's a $3 hike from the previous plan. It's going to go into effect immediately for new subscribers, and it's going to hit current subscribers in the next billing cycle. I guess we shouldn't be surprised by this. Streaming companies have been raising prices for the last couple years, and it was reported that Apple TV Plus lost about a billion dollars last year.

And Apple TV Plus has become kind of a punchline when it comes to streaming services. They only have about 45 million subscribers, which is orders of magnitude less than Netflix or Disney. But I mean, they have some great content on there. Many people think that they're the new HBO. Now, personally, I haven't watched any of it, but I've heard great things about Severance and some of their other shows. But I think I'm going to have to sign up for Apple TV Plus soon

because I'm a big F1 fan, and Apple has secured the rights for F1 starting next season. That kind of makes sense given the fact that they made the F1 movie, which was really good, by the way. It was a big hit in theaters. So yeah, I guess I'll be paying the $13 a month to Apple to watch fast cars drive around a circuit. Man, it's crazy to think that Apple TV Plus costs five bucks a month when it came out back in 2019.

I mean, does Apple really need the money here from streaming? They should just go back to five bucks a month and eat the loss. Or at least they should offer it for free to anyone that has an Apple product. Like, if you have an iPhone, you should be able to watch Apple TV Plus for free. Come on, Tim Cook, let's make it happen. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. Now, as a reminder, if you miss yesterday's episode, we are expanding the show.

The rundown is now going to come out seven days a week. Saturdays you're going to be getting the deep dive, and then on Sunday we're going to have an interview. Tomorrow's deep dive is going to be about Intel, and then on Sunday we interviewed a big investor of Open Door. It was a very interesting and somewhat heated conversation, so please keep an eye on your podcast feed for that. Check that out when it comes out,

and let me know how my interview skills were. Thank you guys so much for listening and watching. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes, and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow, for the deep dive.