Recode Daily: Brace yourself for another stock market plunge

Both the Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500-stock indexes dropped by about 4 percent yesterday, deepening losses from the previous week and erasing gains for the year. While the market slump was happening, Jerome H. Powell was sworn in as the 16th chairman of the Federal Reserve; the Fed has gradually been increasing interest rates to control inflation — and markets are beginning to notice. Right after the drop, a tweet, purportedly from Donald Trump, about the “Dow Joans” and presidential liability for a market crash, went viral; Snopes swiftly shot it down. Markets in Asia and Europe fell Tuesday, and Dow futures are down as well, pointing to another selloff today. And if you were hoping bitcoin and other crypto currencies would be a good hedge against conventional investments, don’t look at this chart. [Matt Phillips / The New York Times]

Another big week of earnings reports starts today after the bell with Disney and Snap — here’s what to watch for when Snap presents its Q4 results after three disappointing earnings calls in a row. On Wednesday, we’ll be hearing from IAC and 21st Century Fox; Viacom and News Corp present their numbers on Thursday. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Uber and Waymo are finally having their day in court over self-driving trade secrets. Opening arguments began in front of a jury yesterday. First-day takeaway: Waymo needs to prove that Uber not only stole trade secrets, but that it is using them in its current self-driving technology. “It’s unconscionable that there are this many lawyers in the room,” said presiding Judge William Alsup in San Francisco’s District Court for the Northern District of California. “Nine lawyers per side is a world record, for my courtroom anyway.” Stay up to date with Recode’s detailed trial coverage with this continually updated storystream. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

It seems like each week brings new investments from SoftBank’s $98 billion tech-focused Vision Fund — most recently, Masayoshi Son’s company put $300 million into an on-demand dog-walking service called Wag, and SoftBank became Uber’s largest shareholder with its $9.3 billion investment. We’re keeping a running tally, in chart form, of where SoftBank puts its money. [Rani Molla / Recode]

Newsweek fired its top editors and at least one reporter, presumably because of reporting they were doing about the magazine’s owners. [Hadas Gold / CNN]

Top stories from Recode

Venture capital firm Lightspeed wants its portfolio companies to sign a letter committing to diversity.

The investing muscle behind HQ Trivia and other companies doesn’t have a perfect record on diversity issues itself — does its new policy have enough teeth?

Walmart has acquired a virtual reality startup as part of its tech makeover.

Spatialand joins Walmart’s tech incubator, Store No. 8.

This is cool

Let’s try this again: Five years after the flop of Google Glass, Intel is readying smart glasses called Vaunt that project a display on the user’s retina — and more importantly, they look normal.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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