- Trump's tariffs create uncertainty for importers and trade partners
- AI disruption fears impact investor sentiment
- Nvidia's earnings report anticipated as potential market mover
NEW YORK, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Global shares rose on Tuesday after losing ground in the prior session amid renewed focus on the economic impact of artificial intelligence and with markets still grappling with the implications of U.S. President Donald Trump's tariff policies.
San Francisco-based startup Anthropic unveiled 10 new ways for business customers to use its AI plugins, including in investment banking, human resources and engineering, just weeks after other releases sparked a feverish selloff in software and services stocks.
Uncertainty from Trump tariffs persisted in markets after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled his emergency tariffs were unlawful on Friday. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection imposed a new tariff from Tuesday of 10% on all goods not covered by exemptions, the rate first announced by Trump on Friday rather than the 15% he promised a day later.
Wall Street stocks were higher after losing ground in early trade. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.83%, the S&P 500 rose 0.60%, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.91%.
The uncertainty and back-and-forth from tariffs is starting to take a back seat and the market is trying to understand the implications of AI for company earnings, said Ken Mahoney, president and chief executive at Mahoney Asset Management in New Jersey.
"We've already established that we're going to lose jobs with AI and AI may in fact do things better and more efficiently than some of the older software programs out there but then you start calculating that if these companies are going to let a lot of people go because of AI that means fewer licenses from the likes of Microsoft," Mahoney said.
"We went through all these areas and all that negativity and it's nice to see it bouncing back to about half of where we were yesterday," he said.
European stocks rose 0.35%. Britain's FTSE edged higher by 0.09%.
MSCI's All-World index was up 0.34% after dropping 0.62%.
Shares of International Business Machines plunged by more than 13% - their biggest one-day fall since late 2000 - after Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize a programming language run on the company's systems. IBM stock recovered and was last up 4.7%.
The sheer scale of corporate borrowing and spending on AI has been enough to make many nervous, not least because of the outsized market weight of companies at the heart of the boom. AI chipmaker Nvidia, which reports earnings after the bell on Wednesday, accounts for around 8% of the entire S&P 500. Nvidia was up 0.5%.
"The biggest concern is margins. And margins, seemingly with new and cheaper technology, is something that's really bothersome to markets," Mahoney said.
The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes rose 0.4 basis points to 4.031%. The 2-year note yield, which typically moves in step with interest rate expectations for the Federal Reserve, rose 2.1 basis points to 3.461%.
In currencies, the yen weakened following a report that said Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi had conveyed her reservations about further interest rate hikes to Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda. The Japanese yen weakened 0.72% against the greenback to 155.75 per dollar.
The dollar weakened 0.15% against the Swiss franc at 0.7737. The euro was flat at $1.178625 against the dollar.
Sterling strengthened 0.23% to $1.352.
Brent crude traded down 0.62% at $71.03 per barrel, while tensions continued to simmer between the U.S. and Iran. Safe-haven gold dropped 1.56% at $5,150 an ounce.
Reporting by Chibuike Oguh in New York; Additional reporting by Gregor Stuart Hunter in Singapore; Editing by Nick Zieminski
Source: Reuters