JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It was another wild week on Wall Street with a lot of drama in AI and cryptocurrency. The tech-heavy NASDAQ had its worst days since April's tariff turmoil, while the price of bitcoin crashed. But then the Dow hit a record high today, crossing 50,000 for the first time. NPR financial correspondent Maria Aspan joins us to break down the highs and the lows. Hello there.
MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: Hey, there.
SUMMERS: Maria, let's start with the latest panic over AI. Tell us what happened this week.
ASPAN: It was another week on the AI roller coaster. I mean, Juana, as we have been discussing, AI has been powering the stock market, but investors are worried that big tech companies are spending too much on it without seeing enough in the way of results. This week, we saw that as Google and Amazon reported earnings. They're making gobs of money, but they're also spending gobs of money on AI. Amazon, for example, really shocked investors when it said it's going to spend $200 billion this year. Its shares plunged. Yet, at the same time this week, investors in other software companies got worried that AI might actually be too effective already.
SUMMERS: What do you mean by too effective?
ASPAN: So, of course, there are these huge fears that AI is going to eliminate jobs or make some businesses really redundant. It seemed like that came closer to reality for some companies this week. Two of the big AI startups, OpenAI and Anthropic, released new tools that can automate some of the sales and marketing and legal tasks that some big traditional software companies specialize in. We saw companies like Salesforce and Workday see their stocks get hammered this week. So this is all another reminder of how much the AI arms race is powering the stock market, but how much the outcome is still totally up in the air. And that uncertainty played into the other big crash we saw this week in the price of bitcoin, in part because tech stocks and bitcoin tend to trade together.
SUMMERS: You know, I feel like it wasn't all that long ago that we were talking about bitcoin hitting record highs. So what happened?
ASPAN: It was just back in October, and bitcoin hit those highs in part because President Trump and his administration have embraced cryptocurrency, and they've relaxed a lot of the rules around it. That led to a lot of speculation and excitement, but it also created a very frothy and volatile market. And in the last few months, the price of bitcoin has gone plummeting back down. This week, it sank to where it was before Trump won reelection. That said, the silver lining for something that's really volatile is that it can go back up. The price of bitcoin recovered a little bit today. The Dow surged 1,200 points and hit that new milestone. And even before that, there were other bright spots in the market this week.
SUMMERS: All right, tell me what they were.
ASPAN: Well, if you ignore all of the AI noise, companies are reporting pretty strong corporate profits, and there are things going on in the economy and in the stock market other than tech. For example, Walmart - this week, it became worth $1 trillion in market value. Investors really like how it's growing its e-commerce business and, yes, embracing AI, but it's still a big traditional retailer that does a lot of business in physical goods. So despite all the hype and worry over AI, there are other companies and industries still having a really big impact on our economy these days.
SUMMERS: NPR's Maria Aspan, thanks as always.
ASPAN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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