|
|  |  | Friday, December 12, 2025 | |  | | Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images | Good morning, Quartz readers! It’s Shannon Carroll with the Daily Brief. Today, crypto is catching a cold, Oracle is cranking up AI on credit, Disney is handing its characters to OpenAI’s Sora, and Meta is ripening a model it may finally charge real money for. | | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | The job market might be even worse than people
think. Jerome Powell said the government may be overstating monthly payrolls by about 60,000 jobs, which puts extra weight on next week’s delayed revisions. | AI’s power crunch is rewriting business plans. Boom is turning jet engine tech into 1.21 gigawatts of promised power, betting that AI
infrastructure demand can help fund its turbine factory and commercial supersonic flight. | The House of Mouse picked its AI
castle. The company is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and letting Sora users play with more than 200 of its characters, while ordering Google to keep its hands off that same IP. | Trump just put a price tag on U.S. residency. His Gold Card program sells a fast track to U.S. status for a $1 million “contribution,”
plus a $5 million tier that dangles generous tax treatment and plenty of constitutional questions. | | | SPONSORED |  | Why Wait Years for Returns?
Private Credit Can Pay Monthly. | High yield used to mean locking up your money for years. With Percent,
accredited investors can access private credit deals that pay monthly - with average durations under 10 months and potential yields up to 20%.
In volatile markets, control matters. Percent empowers accredited investors to take the reins, allowing you to browse curated offerings and choose deals that match your yield goals, time horizon, and risk appetite. Take charge of your portfolio’s risk-return
profile.
Quartz readers who sign up can get up to a $500 bonus on their first investment. | | Alternative investments are speculative and possess a high level of risk. No assurance can be given that investors will receive a return of their capital. Those investors who cannot afford to lose their entire investment should not invest. Investments in private placements are highly illiquid and those investors who cannot hold an investment for an indefinite term should not invest. Private credit investments may be complex investments and they are subject to default risk. | |
| | COLD HARD CRYPTO | Crypto’s hot streak just hit black ice. Bitcoin has slid about 25% from its early October peak to around $92,000, Ethereum is down by almost one-third, and more than $1 trillion has vanished from crypto’s market cap as traders whisper about “crypto winter.” This is a textbook bear market — a drop of at least 20%
— but the industry’s nightmare scenario is a deeper freeze, the kind CNBC says typically arrives only after Bitcoin has fallen 70%–80% from its all-time high. For now, the question is whether we’re looking at a nasty cold snap or the opening scene of a longer hibernation.
The chill set in fast. After a record-setting run fueled by President Donald Trump’s promise to make America the “crypto capital of the world,” Bitcoin hit an all-time high in early October, then ran headfirst into
geopolitics when Trump threatened fresh tariffs on Chinese imports and traders dumped riskier bets such as crypto for record-high amounts of gold and silver. The sell-off slammed heavily leveraged crypto players, triggering collateral seizures and a record $19 billion in liquidations for roughly 1.6 million traders. That shock landed just as hype around the GENIUS Act was fading and investors were fretting about tariffs, interest rates, and an AI bubble, even as Bitcoin sat mid-cycle after its 2024 halving — a point where 20%–30% pullbacks have
historically been painful but not fatal. This time, though, Bitcoin closed below its 50-week moving average, a line that past downturns have crossed on their way into longer bear markets.
The other big change is who is actually holding the bag. Crypto has gone mainstream, with traditional retail and institutional investors piling in and tethering Bitcoin more tightly to the Nasdaq 100 and the fate of frothy tech names. That correlation has more than doubled this year, and one
strategist argues that “one key prerequisite for any crypto to go up” is a rising stock market — which he doesn’t expect next year — and says Bitcoin looks closer to $50,000 than the $250,000 some boosters once promised. The JPMorgan camp disagrees, pointing to institutional capital and real-world stablecoin use as ballast, and insisting they “struggle to see these recent market pullbacks as emblematic of broader structural degradation” and “continue to be positive on the space.” Between those poles, investors are left to decide whether this is
just normal weather — or the start of a real winter. Quartz’s Niamh Rowe has more on which coins actually look built to survive a real deep
freeze. | | | RECOMMENDED READING | The
future of tech, decoded.
Semafor Technology unpacks the ideas, innovations, and power shifts redefining the global tech landscape. From AI and machine learning to the startups and policies shaping
the industry, each briefing delivers clarity and depth on the tech transforming our world
|
| | | GRID AND BEAR IT | Oracle wants to be the landlord of the AI age, the one keeping its friends plugged into a permanent GPU glow. On paper, it’s getting there: Cloud revenue is growing in the mid-30% range, infrastructure is up about 68%,
and remaining performance obligations — the IOU stack meant to justify the entire AI supercycle — rocketed 438% year over year to $523 billion in the quarter. That’s the kind of backlog people had in mind when they swore AI would pay for itself. The problem is that Wall Street just looked at the wiring and decided this power plant runs on borrowed voltage. Oracle’s stock fell as much as 16% after its fiscal Q2 2026 report, wiping out around $70 billion in market value, as investors saw a funding story they weren’t thrilled to
underwrite.
The cash flow statement is doing most of the screaming. Oracle burned roughly $10 billion of free cash over the quarter while boosting full-year capital spending, racing to build data centers so that the company’s half-trillion-dollar backlog has somewhere to live. To bridge the gap between today’s GPU arms race and tomorrow’s subscription checks, the company has leaned hard on its balance sheet, pushing its debt-to-equity ratio into utility territory. Larry Ellison
pitched Oracle as “chip neutral” and flexible on CPUs and GPUs, which makes for a nice story, but the numbers show that one-time asset sales and a ballooning debt stack are flattering the story just as the core business is spending heavily to keep the AI lights on.
Now, credit analysts are suddenly co-authors on the AI script. Moody’s has already cut Oracle’s outlook, warning that debt will climb faster than EBITDA and that free cash flow could stay negative “for an extended period,”
while others now peg its debt-to-equity ratio around 450%–500%. Oracle is supposed to be the clean test case — with a fast-growing cloud, marquee AI partners, and more than $300 billion of committed compute spending from OpenAI over five years starting in 2027 — yet it just showed how an AI “winner” can still look like an over-levered project-finance vehicle. That makes this quarter feel like a dress rehearsal for an “AI bubble, bond-market first” scenario, where everyone else either copies the leverage or scales back their AI dreams. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on how Oracle’s AI power plant is running on borrowed voltage. | | | SPONSORED | | Why Wait Years for Returns?
Private Credit Can Pay Monthly. | High yield used to mean locking up your money for years. With Percent,
accredited investors can access private credit deals that pay monthly - with average durations under 10 months and potential yields up to 20%.
In volatile markets, control matters. Percent empowers accredited investors to take the reins, allowing you to browse curated offerings and choose deals that match your yield goals, time horizon, and risk appetite. Take charge of your portfolio’s risk-return
profile.
Quartz readers who sign up can get up to a $500 bonus on their first investment. | | Alternative investments are speculative and possess a high level of risk. No assurance can be given that investors will receive a return of their capital. Those investors who cannot afford to lose their entire investment should not invest. Investments in private placements are highly illiquid and those investors who cannot hold an investment for an indefinite term should not invest. Private credit investments may be complex investments and they are subject to default risk. | |
| | MORE FROM QUARTZ |
|
|
|
