Oracle logo is seen in this illustration taken September 9, 2025.
Image: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
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Stocks slide in Asia as metals melt down
Asian shares followed Wall Street futures deep into the red on Monday as chaotic selling in precious metals made for a nervous start to a week that is packed with corporate earnings, central bank meetings and major economic data. Silver lost another 10% at one stage, as Friday's 30% plunge squeezed leveraged positions in what had become a very crowded trade. Dealers said pressure on the UBS SDIC silver futures fund in China added to the rout, with talk of investors having to sell profitable assets to cover margin calls. Adding to the unease was a move by the CME to raise margins on a number of futures contracts, including gold and silver. Oil prices also fell more than 4% as President Donald Trump said over the weekend Iran was "seriously talking" with Washington, perhaps lessening the risk of a U.S. military strike on the country. The jitters saw South Korea's formerly high-flying KOSPI shed 5.5%, the biggest one-day loss since the tariff-induced market mayhem of last April.MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan sank 2.8%, while Chinese blue chips lost 1.0%, with heavy falls in gold indexes.
Google defeats bid for billions of dollars of new penalties
Alphabet's Google persuaded a federal judge in San Francisco on Friday to reject a bid by consumers for more than $2 billion in penalties over the company’s past collection of data from users who had switched off a key privacy setting. Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied the request to order Google to disgorge $2.36 billion in alleged profits and to stop certain ad-related data practices. Google had urged Seeborg not to add the penalty to a jury’s verdict in September that found the company liable for secretly collecting app activity data from millions of users who had disabled a tracking feature. The jury in September awarded about $425 million in damages to the class action plaintiffs — far below the $31 billion they sought — and issued an advisory verdict that disgorgement was unwarranted. David Boies, a lead attorney for the consumers, said they were thankful Seeborg's ruling confirmed the jury's verdict. Google has denied any wrongdoing and said it will appeal the September verdict. Seeborg on Friday rejected Google’s request to decertify the class of 98 million users and 174 million devices.
Oracle says it plans to raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity this year
Oracle expects to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in 2026 to build additional capacity for its cloud infrastructure, the software company said on Sunday. The company, chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison, said it plans to achieve its funding objectives using a combination of debt and equity financing. "Oracle is raising money in order to build additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from our largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, including AMD, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, TikTok, xAI and others", the company said in a statement. Oracle plans to raise around half of the funding through a combination of equity-linked and common equity issuances, including mandatory convertible preferred securities and a new at-the-market equity program of up to $20 billion.
Ferrochrome producers slam interim Eskom tariff relief as ‘insufficient’
The Ferro-Alloys Producers Association (FAPA) has criticised the 87c/kWh interim electricity tariff relief granted to two ferrochrome smelters, saying the measure is both inadequate and exclusionary, and could jeopardise a longer-term pricing solution the industry was expecting by March. The relief, announced as a 12-month intervention, applies to Samancor Chrome and the Glencore-Merafe Chrome Venture. Electricity and Energy Minister Kgosientso Ramokgopa said the recommended tariff is intended to preserve about 12 terawatt-hours of strategic industrial load, while allowing Eskom to recover variable costs and limit the impact on other customers. However, FAPA chairperson Nellis Bester said the move had created uncertainty around a deeper, permanent tariff reduction of 62c/kWh that the industry believed would be implemented from 1 March, based on undertakings made by the minister last year.