Day: 14 November 2023

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U.S. inflation flat for October from September 2023, core CPI hits two-year low giving a boost to equities

U.S. inflation flat in October - trending down.

U.S. Inflation was flat in October from the previous month, providing a positive sign that high prices are finally easing their tight grip on the U.S. economy. Is this also a green light for the Federal Reserve to stop raising interest rates.

The consumer price index (CPI) was flat in October 2023 from the previous month but up 3.2% from a year ago. Both were below analysts’ estimates, sparking a major stock market rally.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, the core CPI rose 0.2% and 4%, against the forecast of 0.3% and 4.1%. The annual rate was the smallest increase since September 2021.

The flat reading on the headline CPI came as energy prices declined 2.5% for the month, offsetting a 0.3% increase in the food index.

Traders do not anticipate that the Fed will raise interest rates in December 2023, according to data from the CME Group.

Traders do not anticipate that the Fed will raise interest rates in December 2023, according to data from the CME Group.

U.S. Treasury yields fall

U.S. Treasury yields fell on Tuesday 14th November 2023 as key inflation data showed a surprisingly ‘soft’ change in prices last month.

The 10-year Treasury yield fell to about 4.45%. The 2-year Treasury yield fell more to under 4.9%.

Good data

Inflation stabilising, yields falling and equities up – are the stars aligning for a stock market rally leading into Christmas 2023?

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‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts’.

Shakespeare quote

William Shakespeare 1564 – 1616

This is from As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7, where Jaques describes the ages of human life.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts’.

See other quotes

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Nvidia unveils its newest GH200 high-end AI superchip

Art impression of AI chip

Nvidia has recently announced its latest high-end chip, the GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, which is designed for training AI models at giant scale. 

The GH200 is a breakthrough accelerated CPU that combines the NVIDIA Grace™ and Hopper™ architectures using NVIDIA® NVLink®-C2C to deliver a CPU+GPU coherent memory model for AI and HPC applications. The superchip delivers up to 10X higher performance for applications running terabytes of data, enabling scientists and researchers to reach unprecedented solutions for the world’s most complex problems.

The technical bit

The GH200 features 72 cores of Grace CPU outfitted with 480 GB of ECC LPDDR5X memory, as well as the GH100 compute GPU that is paired with 141 GB of HBM3E memory that comes in six 24 GB stacks and uses a 6,144-bit memory interface. 

The GH200 also has a new 900 gigabytes per second (GB/s) coherent interface, which is 7X faster than PCIe Gen5, and supercharges accelerated computing and generative AI with HBM3 and HBM3e GPU memory. The GH200 can run all NVIDIA software stacks and platforms, including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, HPC SDK, and Omniverse™.

Nvidia GH200 superchip for AI
Nvidia unveils its newest GH200 high-end AI Superchip.

The GH200 is available as part of the NVIDIA DGX GH200, a massive memory supercomputer that fully connects 256 GH200 Superchips into a singular GPU. The DGX GH200 offers 144 terabytes (TB) of shared memory with linear scalability for giant AI models. 

The DGX GH200 is a turnkey data centre-class solution that includes integrated software and white-glove services from NVIDIA, from design to deployment, to speed the ROI of AI. 

The DGX GH200 is the only AI supercomputer that offers a massive, shared memory space of 144TB across 256 NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips, providing developers with nearly 500X more memory to build giant models.

Full details available on the Nvidia website.

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UK pay outstrips inflation by highest amount for two years

UK pay up

Pay growth has outstripped inflation by the most since 2021, in a further sign that the pressure on living costs may be starting to ease.

Regular pay rose at an annual rate of 7.7% between July and September 2023, official figures show; higher than average inflation over the same three months.

But job vacancies fell for the 16th month in row, in a worrying sign that the jobs market is weakening. Between August and October 2023, the estimated number of vacancies in the UK fell to 957000, down 58000 – although the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the total remains well above pre-pandemic levels.

Data Source: Office for National Statistics Data

UK pay outstrips inflation by highest amount for two years

The UK’s unemployment rate was largely unchanged between July to September 2023 at 4.2%, according to ONS data.