ASX set to fall, Nvidia weighs on Wall Street; Trump sends oil higher
By Saghir Hussain ·
Australian shares are poised for a weak open after Wall Street digested the sudden exit of Nvidia chief Jensen Huang without the meltdown many feared, while a Trump-driven oil spike adds fresh cost pressure for households and small firms already stretched thin.
Nvidia’s moment of reckoning
The Santa Clara giant lost its founder and public face on Tuesday after reports surfaced of two personal relationships — one with a direct report, another with an individual alleged by US intelligence to have ties to Chinese state security. Huang’s resignation was immediate. The board named no successor. Shares swung violently in pre-market trade but steadied to a modest decline by the close, a resilience the Sydney Morning Herald attributed to “deep institutional positioning” rather than retail confidence.
Bloomberg reports that before the scandal broke, Huang had been pressing Wall Street banks to expand a credit facility designed to backstop AI infrastructure spending — a programme now in limbo. For the UK and European supply chain, from chip designers in Cambridge to packaging firms in South Wales, the uncertainty delays procurement decisions and freezes hiring plans at the very moment the AI build-out was meant to accelerate.
Trump, oil and the geopolitical overlay
Crude jumped three per cent after Donald Trump, days from retaking the White House, signalled a return to “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iranian exports and pledged to replenish the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve at any price. The move tightens global supply just as OPEC+ wrestles with compliance. For a British haulier in Stoke or a Belfast bakery, that means higher diesel and heating bills within weeks — costs that cannot be passed on when consumers are already cutting back.
The Federal Reserve’s rate path, already complicated by sticky services inflation, now faces a fresh supply-side shock. Markets have pushed back expectations for the next cut to June. Small business lending rates, which track the two-year gilt yield in the UK and the equivalent Treasury in the US, have already ticked up twenty basis points this week.
Workers and small firms carry the risk
The ASX 200 is tipped to open down forty points, led by tech and energy. But the real story is not the index. It is the construction subcontractor in Manchester whose steel order is repriced monthly, the care home operator in Glasgow watching energy bills eat into razor-thin margins, the freelance developer in Cardiff whose US clients have frozen budgets pending Nvidia’s next move.
Big funds hedge. They diversify. They have prime brokerage lines. The corner shop, the local recruiter, the independent garage — they absorb every shock unbuffered.
When the noise fades, the question remains: how many more quarters of volatility can the real economy take before the breakage becomes permanent?