Why Asia’s Sinking Consumer Confidence is the World’s Problem

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0:33Talk of a Washington takeover of Spirit Airlines hits Republican opposition. Plus, authorities charge a member of U.S. Special Forces with using classified intel to bet on Nicolas Maduro's ouster. Because it kept him out of the Hall of Fame because he bet on his own team. Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good. But he bet on his own team. I'll look into it. And global consumers beware. We'll look at why the effects of Asia's diesel and fertilizer shortages won't stay there. It's Friday, April 24th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

1:16U.S. authorities have charged an American soldier who took part in the operation to capture Nicolas Maduro with using classified information to earn more than$400 ,000 on Polymarket. The Justice Department says the master sergeant, who'd signed an NDA, took part in the execution and planning of Operation Absolute Resolve, and after making several well-timed bets, then tried to cover his tracks by sending most of his gains to a foreign cryptocurrency account and asking Polymarket to delete his account. Journal Finance editor Alex Frankos says the charges mark a shift in how the government views insider information being used on prediction markets.

1:54What's really significant with the Venezuela case is that it's a Department of Justice case against him. The government is basically saying, look, we're not going to be totally laissez-faire about this. We really don't want people exploiting these markets to advantage based especially on government, let alone military inside information. And there's been a lot of question as to whether the Trump administration would go and enforce these things because there's basic questions with prediction markets. They're so new. They're so novel. Are these even securities? Are these even regulated instruments that fall under existing laws?

2:30or are they something new and novel that needs new laws written about them or not? The case comes a day after Polymarket competitor Kalshi announced that it had fined and suspended three congressional candidates for betting on their own races. Polymarket said that it has policies designed to combat insider trading, but Alex says that both incidents come at a vital moment for the increasingly popular prediction markets. They want informed information to feed through into the market to tell the market, hey, this thing is likely to happen or not happen. But one of the real tensions among users is like, there appear to be this pattern of these cases where someone makes a really well-timed bet, makes a lot of money.

3:11And for the people who don't have inside information, they feel like they're at a disadvantage. But some people say that's the point of these markets is you want insiders to come in and move the price because that tells you the likelihood of something happening. And we should note that Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. President Trump has said that a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon will be extended by three weeks. In a post on social media, Trump said the U.S. will work with Lebanon to help it protect itself from Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

3:45Israel and Hezbollah continued to exchange fire in southern Lebanon and northern Israel in the hours before the announcement of the ceasefire extension. Iran has pushed for an agreement to force Israel to end strikes in Lebanon as a precondition of its own ceasefire deal with the U.S. A potential federal bailout of Spirit Airlines is hitting turbulence in Washington, even as President Trump talks up the prospect of buying the carrier to try and turn a profit on a future sale. Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are speaking out against the government taking a stake in the airline, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has noted that past federal bailouts, including of banks in 2008, were politically unpopular.

4:30A key group of Spirit bondholders yesterday also came out against the bailout plan, concerned that it could leave them with a small minority stake in the airline. An analyst at J.P. Morgan warned that a government rescue could spur other carriers to seek government help. We report that senior officials are considering a loan to Spirit of as much as$500 million in exchange for warrants that could give Washington a significant stake in the airline. Shares of Intel have surged more than 20 % off hours after the chipmaker beat earnings estimates and reported strong demand from data centers for its CPUs, the old-school engines of computers it's long specialized in.

5:09It's one of several tailwinds for Intel, which is enjoying a revival across its manufacturing segment, especially for advanced packaging products that help servers to integrate chips into single systems. Here was CFO David Zinsler. What we were able to do in the first quarter was go through finished goods inventory and find opportunities to sell product we didn't think we would be able to move. It was either despeced product or it was legacy product we had shelved and then worked with customers and found opportunities for them to leverage that technology in their system. So that helped out a lot.

5:47Also helping, the 10 percent stake the Trump administration took in Intel last year and signing on as a strategic partner to Tesla and SpaceX's TerraFab project, which includes plans for a chip fabrication plant in Texas. And Nike has become the latest company to announce that it's cutting staff during an earnings season punctuated by layoffs, saying it will reduce its workforce by 2 percent or some 1 ,400 rolls. The cuts primarily affect Nike's technology department as the company struggles with sluggish demand and a 20 % projected sales drop in China. Coming up, we'll look at why the energy price squeeze currently hurting consumers across Asia will be felt around the world for months to come.

6:30That story and more after the break.

6:36Time is your most important asset and AI is transforming the speed of business. Your innovation and how you protect it depends on the technology you choose to trust. AI is changing the world. We're securing it. CrowdStrike. We stop breaches. It's starting to feel like a lifetime ago, but 2026 was supposed to be a good year for consumers, relatively speaking. Affordability and housing concerns were definitely still on people's minds, though the mood was looking up among consumers and inflation was south of 3%. Well, that's not how things have turned out. The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment reading is due out later this morning and could confirm earlier signals that April witnessed the index's lowest month on record.

7:23A preliminary EU consumer confidence reading this week flashed its lowest level since 2022, and the situation is even worse in Asia, where HSBC's Fred Newman has been tracking a rapid deterioration in sentiment. And Fred, just starting globally, have I adequately summed up the moment? Set the stage for us. That's right. We started off the year with really optimism. Financial markets were up. Inflation was easing. Consumers were looking a little bit more confident. But with the energy shock that developed since late February, early March, you've seen this turn in confidence. And that's very evident in some of the measures you also mentioned across the U.S., Europe, and Asia as well.

8:05and consumers are worried about cost of living issues, how to pay for higher energy bills. And that's going to potentially bite into their appetite for buying durable goods, for example, for purchasing everyday items. Yeah, take us into some of the examples you're seeing of this across Asia. I mean, pretty much every conversation we've been having about the Iran war lately ends with a phrase like, and this trend is worse than Asia. And it sounds like that is the case. Well, Asia is particularly exposed to this energy shock. It's the region that gets most of its energy from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

8:38About 60 % on average of Asian oil imports come through the Strait of Hormuz. And so there is obviously great concern among consumers that gas prices will go up. It's not just gas and petrol. It's also fertilizer prices, for example. And so you're seeing now the consumer confidence reading starting to plummet. In Japan, for example, we've seen a big, big decline. the biggest drop since really the start of COVID. So that's how worried consumers have become. Even if prices have not yet risen at the pump because of subsidies, they're already fretting, essentially, what's going to happen to prices down the road.

9:18And that's the thing, right, Fred? Consumer inflation expectations are kind of almost as damaging to spending as actual inflation readings, which, of course, come out on a bit of a lag. That's right, because it's all about confidence, right? So if you expect prices to go up down the road and your paycheck is not going to increase, you're going to become more cautious in terms of spending decisions. The most impacted economies like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, those are economies where obviously people have lower incomes and immediately the rise in gasoline, for example, and diesel impacts your spending decisions.

9:50Now, why this also matters for the broader region is that many economies, like Thailand, for example, are major exporters of agricultural goods, of rice, for example. And as they have lack of diesel, lack of fertilizer, not only prices going up in Thailand, but also food prices across the region are likely to go up. And so that immediately then hits spending and cost of living in other economies, including the richer ones that import rice from Thailand. Fred, I don't know how these agricultural economies are structured, but is it the case that if a farmer has a bad harvest this year because they couldn't get fertilizer into the ground, we'll see tail effects next year when that same farmer doesn't have the money to, let's say, make a purchase of fertilizer, even if it's available in spring 2027?

10:35That's right. But we even worry about the summer harvest season, the fall harvest season, right? So some of the stuff that's being planted now will be harvested later in the year. And that's already where you see lack of fertilizer. So the crop yields might go down. But also then there's a question of diesel. We have a diesel shortage across Asia. A lot of the agricultural machinery runs on diesel. You need to transport the agricultural goods to market. That's more expensive. So it's the entire supply chain. And so if you have rising food prices in places like India, for example, this will be felt across the world, including in the U.S., by higher food costs.

11:12And that's going to be felt later this year and potentially well into 2027. Fred Newman is HSBC's chief Asia economist. Fred, a pleasure. Thanks for being with us on What's News. Thank you very much.

11:28And finally, this week, the Wall Street Journal has been looking at the cost of divorce. And if you're thinking that divorce can be messy or financially onerous, lend a thought to the 20 million American couples living together without the legal bonds of marriage. One family lawyer told the Journal's Ashley Ebling that resolutions for unmarried couples often hinge on a court's interpretation of case law, an area she described as the Wild West. Ashley says resolutions essentially depend on what state you're in and if common law marriage is recognized. There was a Yale professor who did a study showing that almost half of people believe that you should be sharing your assets if you split after cohabiting.

12:08But then obviously half don't. So there's like this big mismatch and the law doesn't spell out what should be split and what shouldn't. So in a lot of cases, if a party goes to court to try to get something, they might end up with nothing. But again, it depends on the state law. And then conversely, in another state, you might go to court and the person might be surprised how much they have to give up to the partner. And Ashley says that's why some unmarried couples have started turning to cohabitation agreements, which are like the prenups that some married couples use. To read more from our series on the cost of divorce, we've left a link in our show notes.

12:46And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sandra Killhoff. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend. And thanks for listening.

13:10This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at schwab.com slash Washington Wise.