Gaza peace talks continue; Macron under pressure

Happy Wednesday and welcome to your morning wrap of the latest business and political headlines from around the world.

First up, peace talks between Israel and Hamas have entered their second day, aligning with the two-year anniversary of the militant group’s surprise attack on Israel which triggered the bloody conflict, Associated Press reports.

A senior Egyptian official involved in the ceasefire talks said Hamas had demanded guarantees that Israel would not return to war after the release of the remaining 48 hostages taken on October 7.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the war will only end when all the hostages have been returned and Hamas has been disarmed.

As The Guardian reported, Israelis across the country have gathered to mark the second anniversary of the attack, in which Hamas-led militants killed about 1200 people and took 251 hostages during its assault on southern Israel.

Unofficial commemorations were held in the small kibbutzim in the southern part of the country, whose members were killed or kidnapped, and a large rally is due to be held in Tel Aviv calling for the release of hostages.

Also, a minute’s silence was held at the site of the Nova music festival, where more than 370 people were killed and dozens taken hostage. The official Israeli ceremony of remembrance will be held on October 16.

October 7 also marks the second anniversary of the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, where, according to local authorities, 67,000 Palestinians have been killed and about 170,000 have been wounded.

To Europe now, where France’s President Emmanuel Macron faces growing pressure to resign or hold a snap parliamentary election to put an end to the political chaos that has forced the resignation of five prime ministers in less than two years, Reuters reported.

Sébastien Lecornu resigned 14 hours after the President unveiled a largely unchanged Cabinet and just 27 days after he assumed the job, although he was asked to hold last-ditch talks with party leaders to try to form a government. 

Macron’s first premier in 2017, Edouard Philippe, said it was time for a new president to break the deadlock, telling a local radio station that he should “be leaving in an orderly manner” to allow a way out of the political crisis.

Gabriel Attal, who briefly served as Prime Minister last year and leads the main pro-Macron party, told French media it was “time to try something else”.

Macron said he would see out his second term, which ends in 2027.

The political crisis is playing out against the backdrop of the country’s deteriorating financial woes, with its debt-to-GDP ratio the third highest in Europe and almost twice the ceiling permitted under EU rules.

Sébastien Lecornu.

To the US now, where Oracle’s shares have fallen 5% after a report from The Information raised questions about the company’s plan to buy billions of Nvidia chips to rent as a cloud provider to clients like OpenAI, CNBC reported.

Oracle had 14% gross margins on US$900m in sales in its Nvidia cloud business in the three months ended August, according to the report, which is significantly lower than Oracle’s overall gross margin of around 70%.

It said the company’s transformation into one of the world’s most important cloud and AI companies might run into profitability challenges because of the cost of Nvidia’s chips and the aggressive pricing on its AI chip rentals.

Oracle said in September that its backlog of cloud contracts had jumped 359% in a year, and it forecast US$144b in cloud infrastructure revenue in 2030, up from just over US$10b in 2025.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Staying with business, the New York Stock Exchange’s owner, Intercontinental Exchange, has taken a US$2b stake in the prediction market Polymarket, Reuters reported.

Polymarket allows people to wager on a range of outcomes across sport, entertainment and politics, including bets on when the US government shutdown will end.

Intercontinental Exchange’s investment values Polymarket at US$8b and marks a vote of confidence for the world’s largest prediction market as it prepares to re-enter the US more than three years after restricting American users.

It secured approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) last month to relaunch in the country, following its US$112m acquisition of a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearing house.

In market news, gold prices hit US$4000 for the first time overnight as investors sought a safe haven from a weak dollar, geopolitical volatility and economic uncertainty, CNBC reported.

Gold has gained more than 50% this year, while the US dollar index fell 10%.

Central banks and retail investors are buying gold at a rapid pace. China and other countries are diversifying away from US Treasuries and into the precious metal after Washington imposed stiff sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Finally this morning, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel H Devoret and John M Martinis for their work on quantum mechanics that is paving the way for a new generation of supercomputers, the BBC reported.

The Nobel committee recognised breakthrough work performed by the three men in a series of experiments in the 1980s on electrical circuits, or as the committee put it: “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

Quantum mechanics refers to what particles like the electron do in the subatomic world.

Professor Clarke and his team looked at how these particles appeared to break rules, like travelling through energy barriers that conventional physics said were impossible – something called “tunnelling.”

Using quantum “tunnelling”, the electron manages to burrow through the energy barrier. Their work demonstrated that tunnelling can be reproduced not only in the quantum world but also in electrical circuits in the real world. This knowledge has been harnessed by scientists in making modern quantum chips.