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|  |  | Thursday, October 16, 2025 | |  | | Win McNamee/Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon
Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, Beijing is trying to game Wall Street’s reflexes, Oracle is buying leverage, shoppers aren’t buying what they can’t afford, and the Boy Scouts are finding merit in modernity. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | Bank of America is turning chaos into cash. Quarterly profit jumped 23% to $9 billion as wealthy clients borrowed more, trading desks
thrived, and savers earned little beyond the satisfaction of participation. | Holiday spirit is running on fumes. Deloitte found that 57% of shoppers expect the economy to weaken next year and plan to spend 10% less
as tariffs lift prices on everything from furniture to food. | OpenAI has entered its contract era. Multibillion-dollar deals with Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and more are turning the GPT-maker into Silicon
Valley’s most ambitious supply-chain experiment. | Washington’s consumer watchdog is out of leash. Amid the government shutdown, acting CFPB director Russ Vought said he intends to close
the agency within the next three months, a move that could spark a legal battle. | | Sponsored |  | Technical Leader’s
Productivity Playbook | The Technical Leader’s Productivity Playbook reveals how today’s smartest engineering orgs ship faster, focus deeper, and scale sustainably. Backed by proprietary Hubstaff data and field-tested insights, it outlines
six high-leverage strategies: eliminate manual overhead, build passive visibility, experiment without chaos, adopt guardrails for AI, and engineer sustainable velocity. The result? Faster delivery, fewer distractions, and stronger teams, without the burnout tax. If you lead lean engineering teams under pressure to move faster, this playbook is your blueprint for clarity, resilience, and predictable performance. | |
| | GETTING DOW AND DIRTY | The next trade weapon doesn’t fit on a cargo ship; it scrolls across a ticker. Beijing has decided that market psychology may move Washington policy faster than any shipment of goods ever could. Chinese officials reportedly believe Wall Street’s nerves are a pressure point worth pressing, betting that a few bad trading days could jolt the White House toward negotiation.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly moved to puncture that theory, telling CNBC
that the U.S. “won’t negotiate because the stock market is going down.” His reassurance came days after President Donald Trump’s tariff volley sent the Dow to its worst session since April’s “Liberation Day” and just before the president floated a potential embargo on Chinese cooking-oil exports. The White House insists it’s steering the economy, not reacting to it; Beijing is wagering otherwise.
| | POWER MOVE | Oracle finally found something rarer than GPUs: leverage. After years of building its cloud ambitions on Nvidia’s timetable, the company has decided to buy itself some breathing room. Its new partnership with AMD (a 50,000-chip order shipping in 2026) isn’t about swapping suppliers so much as it is about shifting posture. In the GPU economy, where compute dictates ambition, control is measured in optionality, and independence is something you have to purchase. And Oracle just placed a down
payment.
AMD, meanwhile, gets what money can’t usually buy, and that’s credibility. The company has spent years as the second name on everyone’s procurement list, technically capable but never first in line. Now, with Oracle as a marquee customer and OpenAI locked into a multigigawatt supply deal that could hand it nearly a tenth of AMD’s stock, the balance of perception starts to tilt. It’s not parity — Nvidia still controls the software stack, the pace, and the myth — but it’s
progress.
But every “diversification” headline reminds investors who rules the ecosystem: Nvidia. The Oracle–AMD deal can be read as proof that alternatives exist — a signal to shareholders that it won’t be caught waiting while rivals hoard silicon. But what Oracle really bought is insurance against scarcity, against optics, and against being left behind. And in a business where compute power has become the ultimate currency, even a little leverage costs a fortune. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on the quiet economics of optionality. | | Sponsored | | Technical Leader’s
Productivity Playbook | The Technical Leader’s Productivity Playbook reveals how today’s smartest engineering orgs ship faster, focus deeper, and scale sustainably. Backed by proprietary Hubstaff data and field-tested insights, it outlines
six high-leverage strategies: eliminate manual overhead, build passive visibility, experiment without chaos, adopt guardrails for AI, and engineer sustainable velocity. The result? Faster delivery, fewer distractions, and stronger teams, without the burnout tax. If you lead lean engineering teams under pressure to move faster, this playbook is your blueprint for clarity, resilience, and predictable performance. | |
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