The swaggering tech giants who’ve made 2024 magnificent for many aren’t letting up as the year begins to wind down. The Nasdaq 100 climbed for the fourth week in a row, powered by both a surge in Broadcom and all across the chip-technology complex. Shares of the company jumped 24% to a record after predicting a boom in demand for its artificial intelligence chips and reaching a $1 trillion market value. Peers such as Marvell Technology, Micron Technology and Nvidia also rose. The tech-heavy stock gauge rose 0.8% to an all-time high for the second time in three days while other major US stock indexes struggled. The S&P 500 slid 0.7% this week while the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.8%. With the potential for so-called Trump shocks on the horizon, for now investors are looking to the Federal Reserve, an expected rate cut and any broader strategy the central bank may have to modulate its bid for a soft landing given the known unknowns that await. —David E. Rovella

What You Need to Know Today

China’s spiral into deflation is proving hard to fix. Prices in the world’s second-biggest economy have fallen for six consecutive quarters, and if they fall for one more, the run would equal a record deflationary streak set in the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Policymakers have pledged to do more to shore up growth and ease price declines, using some of their most direct language in years. Here’s what it means for the rest of the world.

Donald Trump’s crypto project, World Liberty Financial, appears to be buying specialized digital tokens worth millions of dollars as speculation increases that the decentralized finance lending platform is moving closer to becoming operational. His family has been actively promoting the project through social media and public appearances. On the political front, things are getting more turbulent for the Republican as January approaches. Trump this week appeared to turn tail on a series of promises he made to voters, including pledges to lower food and gasoline prices. And with two of his nominees having already withdrawn, he continues to defend his unorthodox cabinet picks, including Pete Hesgeth, a cable television host with a growing amount of baggage, for defense secretary, and Tulsi Gabbard, a former member of Congress who has defended Russia (and visited Syria) in its war on Ukraine, for intelligence director. A new poll shows Americans aren’t too happy with Trump’s selections. Meanwhile, the 78-year-old reiterated a pledge to pardon followers who were convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and has reportedly invited three right-wing foreign leaders to attend his inauguration.

Turkey is asserting itself as the main player in the shaping of Syria’s future, sending a top official to Damascus and restarting diplomatic relations after more than a decade. Israel and the US have been pursuing their own interests alongside Turkey, with the former carrying out a major air offensive on Syrian military assets while continuing to wage war in Gaza, where the Associated Press reported 37 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike yesterday. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Jordan and Turkey on Thursday, as the Biden administration looks to play a role in the country’s future before Trump returns to the White House.

It was the year Mark Zuckerberg turned 6. Not far from the Harvard dorm where he would eventually hatch “thefacebook,” a young stock-picker landed what would become, quite literally, the job of a lifetime. No one could have guessed how the ensuing decades would unfold for market-beating Will Danoff, today one of the most successful mutual fund managers in the history of Fidelity Investments. Since that moment in 1990, Danoff has presided as the sole manager of the Fidelity Contrafund, a $155 billion behemoth that’s now a major investor in Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms and a fixture of many 401(k) plans. In total, he manages about $300 billion of client money.

Elon Musk’s charitable foundation ballooned to $9.5 billion in assets last year while handing out $237 million in gifts, most of which went to other entities he controls. The figures are part of the Musk Foundation’s latest tax filing, obtained by Bloomberg News. The annual snapshot shows the organization got a boost from the millions of Tesla shares it holds and sent $137 million to Musk’s other nonprofit, The Foundation, which he set up to establish a STEM-focused primary and secondary school.

What You’ll Need to Know Tomorrow

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