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Fear over credit quality in U.S. regional banks rippled through markets on Friday, dragging global financial stocks lower and reviving memories of the crisis of confidence that shook sentiment just over two years ago. The selloff hit Wall Street, with main equities indexes seeing a mixed open, as investors stayed on edge with banking sector worries adding to anxiety already heightened by escalating U.S.-China trade tensions and renewed worries about the global economic outlook. The banking sector’s exposure to two recent U.S. auto bankruptcies has rekindled concerns about lending standards more than two years after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, when high interest rates drove paper losses on its bonds and sparked a global bank stocks rout. Investors are now trying to assess whether recent issues in U.S. credit markets will have a similar effect, as an overnight selloff on Wall Street rippled across Asia and Europe and shone a spotlight on the recent AI-led surge in broader stock markets that some fear could have created a bubble. Some analysts said, at this stage, the concerns around U.S. regional banks appeared idiosyncratic rather than a sign of something more systemic. “Pockets of the U.S. banking sector including regional banks have given the market cause for concern,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell. “This includes Zions flagging an unexpected loss on two loans and Western Alliance alleging a borrower had committed fraud.” Markets whipsaw Some of the largest U.S. banks fell in Friday trading, closing a week marked by broadly strong earnings on a dour note. The KBW Banks Index, which tracks large-cap banks, fell 0.4%. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Friday that banks have ample reserves and that he was optimistic that credit markets could stay ahead of the curve. He added in an interview with Fox Business Network that Trump administration officials led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve’s Michelle Bowman are “cleaning things up right now” without providing further details. “What we see in the banks selling off overnight in the U.S., Asia wakes up to it, Europe wakes up to it, and so it spreads,” said TD Securities head of global macro strategy James Rossiter. European banks fell almost 3%, with Deutsche Bank and Barclays sliding around 6%, and Societe Generale down 4.6%, after financial firms in Asia, especially Japanese banks and insurers sank. In early U.S. trading, the SPDR S&P regional banking ETF was up 0.4%, a day after the benchmark tumbled 6%, its steepest one-day selloff in six months. Strong earnings from Truist Financial, Regions Financial, and Fifth Third bolstered investor sentiment, sending most U.S. regional banks higher in morning trading. Zions Bancorp, at the heart of the investor scrutiny, recovered some lost ground, after closing down 13%. Western Alliance was up 2.6% after losing roughly 11% on Thursday. “Despite growing hopes of further rate cuts this year, attention is turning to the underlying health of the economy, as emerging credit losses amongst Americas regional banks raised further questions about lending practices,” said Derren Nathan, head of equity research, Hargreaves Lansdown. The U.S. KBW Regional Banking Index closed down 6.3% on Thursday. The latest selloff came after Zions said it would take a $50 million loss on two commercial and industrial loans from its California unit, while Western Alliance disclosed it had initiated a lawsuit alleging fraud by Cantor Group V, LLC. Attorneys for Cantor denied the allegations. Credit impairments in private debt have been rising and default rates have hit 5.5%, said Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay Asset Management, citing the latest available data for the second quarter. Despite tenuous gains in U.S. bank stocks, the gloom spread across other pockets of the U.S. financial sector, weighing on mortgage lenders, buy-now-pay-later firms, and brokerages. Analysts say that any cracks in credit on Wall Street are likely to spill over into other areas of the financial sector. Robinhood and Interactive Brokers fell 1.5% and 2%, respectively. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier this week about credit markets: “When you see one cockroach, there are probably more, and so everyone should be forewarned.” Broader market impact “The market is clearly priced for perfection,” said Bo Pei, analyst at US Tiger Securities. “This leaves sentiment vulnerable, so even isolated negative headlines can trigger outsized reactions like what we saw yesterday.” European bank shares are up some 40% year-to-date. Gold meanwhile hit a fresh record high. U.S. banks borrowed nearly $15 billion from the Federal Reserve’s Standing Repo Facility (SRF) on Wednesday and Thursday, suggesting tightness in meeting funding obligations with large net Treasuries settlement due this week. That was the largest borrowing over a two-day period since the Covid-19 pandemic. On Friday morning, however, banks did not tap the repo facility, although they get another chance to do so in the afternoon. The SRF acts as a liquidity backstop for potential funding shortfalls. Introduced in July 2021 in response to the pandemic, the Fed’s facility provides twice-daily overnight cash loans in exchange for eligible collateral such as U.S. Treasuries. “The market has been concerned on a bubble brewing on private credit for the past few months,” said Alan Devlin, Global Financials Research Analyst, Impax Asset Management. “The market is basically shooting first, asking questions later.” Ankur Banerjee, Alun John, and Manya Saini; Additional reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, Kevin Buckland, Stella Qiu, Dhara Ranasinghe, Jose Joel, Pritam Biswas and Medha Singh, Reuters
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Thanksgiving is now less than six weeks away, which means many families are making plans for travel and meal prep. But the cost of inflation will also be weighing heavily on their minds, especially for those who have large Turkey Day gatherings to feed. However, the world of grocery shopping is highly competitive, and one chain, Aldi, is aiming to outdo the competition in enticing cost-conscious consumers to shop at its stores. The national grocery store chain has announced that it will put a full Thanksgiving meal, which feeds 10, on your table for just $40. Heres what you need to know as the turkey dinner wars kick off for 2025. Aldi announces a Thanksgiving meal for 10 for just $40 Every national and regional chain that sells groceries will be vying for Americans dollars over the next six weeks as they begin shopping for their Thanksgiving meals. Today, Aldi has announced that it intends to give cash-conscious consumers the ability to get a full turkey spread for 10 people for just $40. As Aldi notes, at an average cost of just $4 per person, the deal, per household guest, costs less than a pumpkin spice latte. The deal also happens to be $7 cheaper than the $47 Thanksgiving dinner for 10 that Aldi offered last year. It should be noted that the $40 price isnt for a package of set food items. Instead, Aldi calculated the price by adding up the cost of 21 individual products and ingredients that are needed for making a Thanksgiving meal of nine dishes. Those dishes include: a 14-pound turkey rolls cranberry sauce mac and cheese stuffing mashed potatoes with gravy sweet potato casserole green bean casserole pumpkin pie In a potential dig at competitors like Costco, Aldi notes that no coupons or memberships are needed to buy the individual items that go into making the $40 meal for 10. The grocery store chain is also providing a downloadable list of those items here. The average cost of a Thanksgiving dinner has hovered around $60 for years The cost of Thanksgiving dinner can vary widely based on numerous factors, including the dishes you plan to prepare, the number of guests youll be feeding, and where in the country you are located. However, 2024 data from the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) found that the average cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10 people has hovered around $60 for years. The AFBF found that the average Thanksgiving meal for 10 cost $58.08 in 2024. That was down 5% from the $61.17 average meal cost in 2023. In 2022, the average cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10 hit a record high of $64.05, according to the AFBF. Of course, Aldi wont be the only one vying for your Thanksgiving dinner dollars. Last year, the chain was in a heated competition with other major U.S. grocery stores, including Walmart and Target. As reported by CBS Mornings last November, while Aldi was offering a 2024 Thanksgiving meal for 10 for $47, Target was offering a Thanksgiving meal for eight for $40, and Walmart was offering a meal for eight for $54. You can expect both of those major chainsand many othersto be similarly competitive this year. This year, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 27.
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The gyoza needs to look a little whiter. Its too pink. Nigel Ng is genially micromanaging the look and feel of Fried, an animated series that will premiere on YouTube later this year. His feedback comes during an early planning session at Toonstar, the company producing the show, which is headquartered in a former furniture warehouse in downtown L.A.s arts district. Ng has every right to be fussy about Frieds world. The show represents the cartoon debut of Uncle Roger, the volatile middle-aged Chinese guy he has portrayed in live-action YouTube videos since 2020. They famously depict the character growing agitated as he watches western chefssuch as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, and Nigella Lawsonbotching, by his estimation, the preparation of Asian food. (Especially fried rice.) In his own idiosyncratic way, Uncle Roger is a perfectionist. So is Ng. People follow my YouTube channel because they like Uncle Roger, Ng tells me during a break. They like how he thinks, they like how he talks, and the jokes he makes. People can tell it’s not a decision made by a committee. Its this one person’s sense of humor. Probably not the best sense of humor, but it’s his sense of humor. Doing this animation, I need to bring that ethos into this. Nigel Ng [Photo: Courtesy Asian Nation (@asian_nation) and @dollyave] During the planning meeting, as Ngs critiques of Frieds visuals keep comingspanning subtle details of characters, settings, and other aspects of the productionToonstar staffers swiftly incorporate them into updated artwork. In many ways, its not a radically different process than animation studios employed decades ago. But theres one crucial new element: The closer the show gets to completion, the more AI will perform much of the heavy lifting. Thats the not-so-secret ingredient at Toonstar, which Hollywood veterans John Attanasio and Luisa Huang cofounded in 2017 after working together at Warner Bros. As much a platform as a studio, it built two proprietary pieces of software that it uses in all its productions. One, Ink & Pixel, uses generative AI to produce much of the art thatonce upon a timewould have been handled entirely by humans with pencils and paintbrushes. The other, Spot, uses analytics to help the company figure out how to turn raw ideas into stories that people will actually watch. It sounds cliché, but its part art, part science, says Attanasio, Toonstars CEO. Even Frieds food went through multiple passes of human-rendered art before being generated by Toonstars Ink & Pixel software for the show. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] Now is as good a moment as any to confront an inescapable fact: Many in Hollywood are instinctively repelled by the very notion of mixing the art of entertainment with the science of AI. They regard it as robbing creative people of jobs and the work of its soul. The web is already bulging with AI slop that confirms their worst fears. But Fried, and other Toonstar properties such as StEvEn & Parker, belie AI-assisted medias sketchy reputation. Theyre hardly mass-produced: Frieds first season consists of just 12 eight-minute episodes. Theyre written by creators, not algorithms. Voices are recorded by actors in a studio (with some use of AI-synthesized dialog for purposes such as filling in pickup lines). Perhaps most important, the shows visual identities are their own, not LLM-produced offal. Judging from Frieds preliminary artI havent seen any final footageit will owe its greatest stylistic debt to hand-drawn TV animation of the Saturday morning sort, leavened with a dash of anime. Its undeniably true that tiny Toonstar, which employs just 20 people, is using AI to create more animation faster and with fewer staffers. The company sees its technological bent as reflecting a time-honored tradition for the medium, dating to when Walt Disney himself adopted innovations such as sound and Technicolor. The cartoon business also has a long history of shrinking headcounts to control costs, historically by offshoring much of the production to Asian studios as contract labor. Today, Hollywoods titans are ever-more skittish about gambling on properties that arent already household names. Toonstar argues that its efficiencieswhich include using YouTube as its primary streaming venuepermit it to take greater creative risks. Without the companys ability to do a lot with a little, something like Fried might never have gotten greenlit in the first place. In other words, Toonstars goals do not involve wringing the humanity out of its shows. Fundamentally, storytelling is a team effort, says COO Huang. Its about putting together a band. In this case, its one thats unafraid to use technology as an accelerant. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] YouTubeand beyond Backed by investors such as Founders Fund, Greycroft, and Snap, Toonstar has gone through several iterations of what it means to be a tech-forward cartoon maker. They have included using NFTs to let fans get involved in shaping stories. But its current modus operandi came into focus with StEvEn & Parker, the family-friendly saga of two silly young blond-haired brothers. Derived, like Fried, from the live-action bits of a social-media comedianTexas-based TikTok star Parker Jamesthe show became a bona-fide YouTube hitits in five languages, says Attanasio. Now, with 3.29 million subscribers, its a franchise capable of conquering other media. They include an upcoming smartphone game and, starting next spring, a graphic novel series from Random House. Distributing StEvEn & Parker on YouTube let it reach an audience without Toonstar needing to cut a deal with a megastreamer such as Netflix or HBO Max. Spinning off games and books gave the property a business model bigger than subsisting on YouTube ad revenue, though Attanasio stresses its making good money there. If the company could replicate that formula, it might end up with many multi-platform properties. Thats the blueprint, says Huang. With StEvEn & Parker as precedent, Toonstar grew even keener on identifying creators whose existing ideas held promise as fodder for new shows. Last June, it announced that it was teaming up with WME to find them. The giant talent agency has an incredible roster of digital creators, says Attanasio. They’ve also got an incredible roster of traditional writers and showrunners. And so the combination of that is really supercharging the creative pipeline and projects that are going to be coming. Fried is up first. The idea of cartoonifying Uncle Roger originated at Toonstar, but when WME brought it to Ngs attention, he was instantly amenable. I’ve always wanted to do something in the animation world with Uncle Roger, because I feel the character itself lends itself well to being in cartoon form, he says. So when they reached out, I was like, Oh, perfect. Like Toonstar, he saw potential for his character to become a business empire unto himself: Already, there are Uncle Roger restaurants in Malaysia. Variations on Uncle Roger, who ended up looking like his middle self from this triptych. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] Ng grew up watching cartoons. But he knew enough about animation to realize he didnt know that much about animation. So he studied up on its techniques. I watched a lot of these YouTube explainers, he recalls. I had to read what makes good character design, what makes bad character design. And then there’s that Disney handbook, the 12 rules of animation thing. Fortified with this crash course, he was ready to take an active hand in imagining the show. That was a major undertaking. After all, until now, Uncle Roger has basically been Ng wearing an orange polo shirt, ranting at cooking shows, and using catch phrases such as Haiyaa! and Fuiyoh! (His accent has occasionally led people to accuse Ng, who was born in Kuala Lumpur, of stereotyping, and was the subject of a scholarly paper.) On Fried, Uncle Roger has a rich backstory. Hes a restaurant owner. His ex-wife, Auntie Helenoft-referenced in Ngs comedyis not yet his ex; the show is set before they split. He has an arch-rival, fellow restaurateur Olivier. Theres a cat named Lucky. Eventually, all of these characters and the environments they inhabit will be rendered by AI, with human oversight and polishing. But first they had to be designed. Uncle Rogers restaurant, in preliminary sketch form. [Image: Courtesy of Toonstar] That involved a million little decisions. For instance: Should Uncle Rogers eyes have whites? (Nojust pupils.) Should his trademark polo cover his entire torso, or leave a skosh more of his pants visible? (The longer-shirt version made him look too much like a bell when he walked, says Huang.) How should the food look at Oliviers eatery? (Healthier than it does at Uncle Rogers place.) AI came in handy during these deliberations, because it let Ng and his collaborators quickly look at several options, even in animated form if it helped. At least when I spoke to Ng early in the production process, he claimed not to notice the technology playing much of a role. They either beam up some drawigs to the screen or they print it out for me, he explained. But he did find progress happening far quicker than hed experienced with another Uncle Roger project, a now-shelved live-action sitcom: That got optioned in 2021, and then wed do a draft a year. If Ng doesnt feel like theres a layer of AI between him and his show, thats kind of the point. With any luck, his experience will bolster Toonstars reputation among creators who start out skeptical about the companys process. We’re very artist-first and story-first, says Attanasio. Theres this compounding effect of creators like Nigel that won’t work with other AI tools or studios, but he’ll work with us. Even as Toonstar gets ready to release Fried, Attanasio and Huang say theyre poised to expand furtherand faster than they ever could sans AI. Another dozen shows are in various stages of production, with a couple dozen more in the pipeline. We have folks that we’re working with who are very interested in horror as a category, says Huang. Suspense thrillers are another. There’s young adult, maybe more female-led voices. Also on the horizon: distribution beyond YouTube, which could become another component of the companys multipronged business strategy. Already, three different streamers have inquired about the possibility of a longer-form StEvEn & Parker series. Whatever happens, entertainment is headed for a period of AI disruption, and Toonstar intends to lean into it. Depending on your frame of reference, the company could be the moments Disney, Hanna-Barbera, or Pixar. It will accept any of those comparisons. Yet even at its present scale, it has certain advantages that the iconic cartoon factories of yore couldnt have imagined. Historically, animation has taken a very long time to produce and it’s been very expensive, says Attanasio. Those have been the reasons why there hasn’t been as much produced as we believe there’s a market for. Theres an audience for more. There are more genres you can do. There’s just a lot more to be done.
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