Arabic version: رفع الفائدة وجدال الذكاء الاصطناعي يهزان وول ستريت

According to Cnbc, investors faced volatility last week as a Federal Reserve rate increase and renewed debate over artificial intelligence safety tested Wall Street. The Dow fell 1.7% for its third consecutive losing week, while the S&P 500 slipped 0.08% and the Nasdaq gained 0.7% as investors returned to AI stocks after an early-week sell-off.

The Fed raised rates by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday, its first increase in three years, taking its benchmark rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%. Chairman Kevin Warsh said inflation was too high and that the move would support a return to the central bank’s 2% inflation target. The 10-year Treasury yield ended the week at 5%, after rising above 5.04% during Tuesday’s oil surge.

Bank stocks were among the biggest decliners. Goldman Sachs lost nearly 8.5% for the week, while Wells Fargo, BNY and Capital One also fell sharply. Oil added to inflation concerns after West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude reached their highest levels since mid-May on Tuesday, driven by supply worries tied to conflict in the Middle East. Boeing, FedEx Freight and FedEx were among stocks pressured by the oil spike.

AI shares initially weakened following a debate sparked by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Sept. 12 essay calling for a slowdown in frontier-model development. Intel and Micron each fell just over 5% on Monday, while GE Vernova and Eaton dropped roughly 9% and 8%, respectively. The group later recovered much of those losses. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks were the week’s strongest performers, rising almost 15% and 10%.

Salesforce also used its Dreamforce conference to argue that AI is an opportunity for enterprise software. The company forecast more than $63 billion in fiscal 2030 revenue, above the $59.2 billion analysts expected, and introduced AIforce and Koa, a reasoning model developed with Nvidia.