Gold loses safe haven shine

0:00Welcome to Seeking Alphas Wall Street Breakfast, where we cover the top news for investors every morning. We've made it to another Monday, it's the 23rd of March, I'm Julie Morgan. Gold status as a sanctuary asset continues to crumble. As of the time of this recording, Spot Gold is trading around 40 to 50, silver, platinum and palladium are all down at least 4%. Gold was expected to rally amid war and inflation fears, but instead it has dropped sharply, falling about 14% since the start of the Iran conflict. According to the Wall Street Journal's street wise column, the decline has surprised investors who typically view the medal as a safe haven in times of geopolitical stress. Gold ended last year at 43.19 in ounce, and spiked to an all-time high above 55.95 in late January. According to market participants rather than buying the dip, traders are pricing in a

1:01higher for longer rate environment to combat energy-led inflation. Elon Musk has unveiled plans for a new semiconductor venture, is called TerraFab. It'll be built in Austin and operated jointly by SpaceX and Tesla. The project would begin with a smaller, advanced fabrication facility capable of designing and testing a wide range of chips with ambitions to scale into a much larger operation. The proposed fab would produce two main types of chips, lower power processors for vehicles, robot axes and humanoid robots, and higher performance chips designed for space-based computing. The Austin location would sit near Tesla's existing operations and could further position Texas as a growing hub for chip manufacturing. Tesla currently relies on suppliers such as Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing and Samsung. Berkshire Hathaway plans to invest about $1.8 billion in Japanese insurance firm Tokyo

2:04Marine Holdings, further expanding its exposure to Japan. The investment will be made through Berkshire's re-insurance unit, National Indemnity Company, which will initially acquire a roughly 2.5% stake in the insurer. The initial shares will be allocated through the disposition of Treasury's stock held by Tokyo Marine. Any additional acquisitions of Tokyo Marine shares by National Indemnity are expected to be made primarily through open market purchases. The two companies also plan to collaborate on re-insurance as well as potential acquisitions according to a statement released today. The Japanese insurer added that National Indemnity would not acquire more than 9.9% of the company without prior approval from the Tokyo Marine Board. Now for a look at a few other articles that are trending, the first two articles are about Social Security, seeking Alpha is asking its analysts what can Congress do to protect

3:06Social Security benefits, and what happens if the Social Security fund runs dry? And finally, Palantir's AI system, Maven, will reportedly be used as a core U.S. military system. I have one item to tell you about on our Catalyst watch. Climb global solutions will begin trading on a split-adjusted basis following the four-for-one stock split. On Wall Street at this early hour, Dow S&P and NASDAQ features are in the red. Crude Oil is up 0.5% at 98 bucks a barrel. Bitcoin is up 0.5% at 68,000. The FTSE 100 is down 1.9%, and the DEX is also down 1.9%. Synopsis is on our list of the biggest movers of the day pre-market. S&P is up 4% after activist investor Elliott Investment Management disclosed a multi-billion dollar stake and signal plans to push for operational and financial improvements.

4:11And on today's economic calendar at 8.30 a.m. the Chicago Fed National Activity Index and at 10 a.m. construction spending. That's it for today's Wall Street breakfast. Thanks for listening. To take full advantage of Seeking Alpha with coverage on significant stocks and ETFs, become a premium subscriber. Check out SeekingAlpha.com slash subscriptions. I'm your host Julie Morgan. Go out and make it a great day.