Global Highlights This Week: The Federal Reserve Leads Interest Rate Meetings of Multiple Central Banks, and the NVIDIA GTC Conference is Heavily Anticipated.

The US stock market continued its downward trend last week, with all three major indexes recording declines. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 3.1% for the week, marking its worst single-week performance since March 2023. Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped by more than 2%, closing lower for the fourth consecutive week.

 

The tariff threats from US President Donald Trump continued to dominate market sentiment, and investors' concerns about the US economy falling into recession intensified. When Trump first won the election, investors once expected that his pro-business policies, including tax cuts and deregulation, could boost economic growth, and largely ignored the harm of his aggressive trade policies. It was only recently that the market realized that Trump was not just using tariffs as a bargaining chip, but was serious about implementing them.

 

Although US stocks rebounded sharply on Friday, this does not mean that the market sentiment has changed. Trump's tariff stick will still suppress the upward momentum of US stocks for a certain period of time.

 

This week ushers in a "Super Central Bank Week", with several central banks set to announce their interest rate decisions. Among them, the Federal Reserve is naturally the most closely watched by the market.

 

The Federal Reserve will announce its interest rate decision and the latest dot plot at 2:00 pm Eastern Time this Wednesday. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will hold a press conference half an hour after the announcement of the decision.

 

The market generally expects that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates unchanged at that time, but investors are concerned about the possibility of rate cuts later this year and hope to find signals of the Fed's readiness to act from the meeting.

 

"The stock market is trying to find any clues about when the Federal Reserve is ready to implement the next interest rate cut," said Dominic Pappalardo, Chief Multi-Asset Strategist at Morningstar Wealth. "I don't think the impact of the headlines from the White House and new policies will stop anytime soon."

 

"The first signal that the stock market hopes the Federal Reserve will send is that its focus starts to shift from fighting inflation to supporting economic growth," Pappalardo said.

 

Over the past month, investors' bets on the number of rate cuts by the Federal Reserve this year have increased. Market pricing shows that investors currently expect the Federal Reserve to carry out three 25-basis-point rate cuts this year.

 

Analysts point out that Powell's speech at the press conference this week is crucial.

 

"Over the past few weeks, the market's expectations of the Federal Reserve have been repriced," said Walter Todd, Chief Investment Officer of Greenwood Capital. "If Powell strongly refutes the market's expectations of rate cuts, it may have an adverse impact on the market."

 

In addition to the Federal Reserve, central banks of countries such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland will also announce their interest rate decisions this week.

 

 

 

NVIDIA usually releases important GPU-related products at the GTC. Market analysis suggests that an upgraded version of the new-generation Blackwell chip may be unveiled at this conference.

 

During the recent earnings call, Jensen Huang confirmed that the upcoming Blackwell B300 series (codenamed Blackwell Ultra) is scheduled for release in the second half of 2025.

 

Another major concern for investors is NVIDIA's next-generation GPU, Rubin, which is expected to be released in 2026. Jensen Huang has said that Rubin will bring "huge, huge, extremely significant performance leaps."

 

In addition to GPUs, NVIDIA may also showcase its latest progress in the field of quantum computing at this conference. The company has arranged a "Quantum Day" event and invited executives from well-known companies in the industry to jointly explore "the path towards practical quantum computing applications."

 

In terms of earnings reports, several Chinese concept stocks will announce their latest financial results this week, including Pinduoduo, Tencent, NIO, and Meituan.