Anthropic’s $350B AI Raise, Trump Shakes Housing Giants, Apple Card’s Exit, and Venezuela’s Market Meltdown Rally

8th January 2025

The AI funding race hit a new extreme as Anthropic lined up a $10 billion raise at a staggering $350 billion valuation, cementing its place among the most valuable private companies in the world. In U.S. politics and markets, Blackstone shares slid after Donald Trump vowed to curb institutional ownership of single-family homes, reigniting the housing affordability debate. On Wall Street, Goldman Sachs’ troubled Apple Card experiment finally reached its end, with JPMorgan stepping in to take over the program. And in Latin America, Venezuela’s stock market erupted surging as much as 50% in a single day after the U.S. raid that removed Nicolás Maduro, signaling how sharply markets can swing on regime-change expectations. All this and more in today’s Read It And Eat!

Major Headlines 

• Anthropic Raising $10 Billion at $350 Billion Value

Anthropic has signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation, CNBC confirmed on Wednesday. Coatue and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC are leading the financing, according to a source familiar who asked not to be named because the discussions are confidential.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO, Dario Amodei. The company is best known for developing a family of large language models called Claude.Amazon has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, and in November, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest up to $5 billion and up to $10 billion, respectively.  

Anthropic is racing to stay ahead of competitors like Google and OpenAI, which has seen its valuation swell to $500 billion. Anthropic released three new models; Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude Opus 4.5 late last year. Wall Street Journal 

• Blackstone stock sinks after Trump plans steps to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes

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Blackstone (BX) stock fell 5.6% on Wednesday after President Trump said in a Truth Social post that he will be "taking steps to ban institutional investors from buying more single-family homes." In his post, Trump said he would be calling on Congress to codify a ban on the practice, writing that "people live in homes, not corporations."

"For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream," Trump said. "That American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans." Blackstone, the asset management giant that manages more than $1 trillion, has spent the past few years building one of the largest rental housing portfolios in the country, buying hundreds of thousands of single-family homes and apartments.

Blackstone told CNBC in August that it owns "less than 1% of the housing available" in each market where the asset manager operates. The company often renovates and then relists properties. Critics of the firm have accused Blackstone of buying up homes en masse in what is already a thinly stretched housing market, reducing availability and pushing prices higher. "Our ownership of U.S. single-family homes represents about 2% of our real estate AUM and 0.5% of the overall firm," Blackstone said to Yahoo Finance.  Yahoo.Finance

• Goldman Sachs’ Apple Card saga is finally coming to an end

  
  

JP Morgan has reached a deal to take over the Apple AAPL  credit-card program from Goldman Sachs, further cementing JP Morgan’s status as a behemoth in the credit-card sector and marking the final chapter of Goldman’s failed experiment in consumer lending. Apple and JPMorgan said they expect a transition of about two years, and that Apple Card users will continue to enjoy perks such as up to 3% cash back on purchases and access to a high-yield savings account. 

Mastercard  will remain the payment network for Apple Card, they said. The Journal story said that the Apple Card, which launched in 2019, featured “a high exposure to subprime borrowers and what has been a higher-than-industry-average delinquency rate, creating the potential for significant losses on the outstanding balances.” Through the partnership, Goldman Sachs was trying to expand more into consumer lending. But the company racked up $7 billion in losses through some of its consumer-loan endeavors since 2020, according to the report.

There were also quirks of the Apple Card program that didn’t quite work out for the Goldman team, according to the Journal’s prior reporting, which said in 2023 that Apple required customers to get their statements at the start of every month, bucking an industry trend in which cardholders don’t all get their bills at the same time. The Apple policy meant support representatives at Goldman had to deal with an influx of customer-service calls all at once. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in 2024 ordered the companies to pay $89 million over what it called “customer-service breakdowns” around transaction disputes. Wall Street Journal

• Venezuela stock market surges 50% in a day

Venezuela's stock market cheered the US raid on the Latin American country over the weekend to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, with the Caracas Stock Exchange recording a massive run-up in the last two days. After surging 16% on Monday, the Caracas Stock Exchange's IBC index jumped another 50% on Tuesday, January 6, taking the two-day rise to 75%. The IBC index rose to a high of 3,910.42 in the last trading session and ended the day at 3,896.77, a jump of 50.01%. 

The index has added almost 162% in a month and a massive 2,979% in a year, far eclipsing the returns given by any major stock markets or commodities. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro remains in a New York jail facing US drug-trafficking and related charges. Meanwhile, opposition leader María Corina Machado has said she plans to return to Venezuela soon to lead the country 

"It is a historical moment for the Venezuelan economy, with a clear regime change taking place. Whenever there is a regime change, it can be positive for capital markets and business entrepreneurs. People also expect more liberalised policies, which is why the index is rallying," explained Kranthi Bathini of Wealthmills Securities. Dasani said that markets are reacting to the perception that a Trump-led transition framework could rapidly unlock three long-blocked channels: sanctions recalibration, oil-sector normalisation, and a credible path to sovereign and PDVSA debt resolution. Economic Times 

Minor Headlines 

• Private markets fundraising hit a record $1.4T last year on credit rush AW

  
  

• Hiring was anemic in November. The 3.2% hiring rate was one of the worst since the Great Recession era." Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• Meta names Microsoft's Mahoney as chief legal officer Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• Berkshire’s Abel to Get 19% Salary Bump in First Year as CEO Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• Rubio Tells Lawmakers Trump Wants to Buy Greenland New York Times 

  
  

• Buy Korea Calls Grow Louder as Stocks Extend Blistering Rally Bloomberg

  
  

• Hong Kong Developers Sell $750 Million of Luxury Homes in Weeks Bloomberg

  
  

• Majority of Fed banks voted against December change to discount rate Reuters