Wall Street Today | Netflix Misses Subscriber Estimates, Reveals Password Crackdown to Hit U.S. in Q2

St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard reiterated his call for higher U.S. interest rates to combat inflation, saying he's not worried about a banking crisis and doesn't see a recession taking place anytime soon. Bullard made his remarks in an interview with Reuters. He made similar arguments in speech earlier in April.

The Fed's own forecast suggests the central bank might be done raising interest rates soon, with Wall Street betting on one more increase in May. That would nudge the so-called fed funds rate to a range of 5% to 5.25%.

Bullard wants the Fed to raise rates to a range of 5.5% to 5.75%. He is not a rotating member this year of the Fed's interest-rate setting committee.

The U.S. central bank most likely has one more interest rate rise ahead of it as it continues to work to lower high inflation, Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic said on Tuesday.

"One more move should be enough for us to then take a step back and see how our policy is flowing through the economy, to understand the extent to which inflation is returning back to our target," Bostic said in an interview with CNBC.

"The economy still has a lot of momentum and is performing quite strongly, and inflation remains too high," Bostic said, adding that "by pretty much every measure that you look at, current inflation is more than double what our target is. So there's still more work to be done and I'm ready to do it."

Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said Tuesday that a wholesale central bank digital currency could be promising for future settlement of some financial market transactions and processing international payments.

Still, it's "difficult to imagine a world where the tradeoffs between benefits and unintended consequences could justify a direct access CBDC for uses beyond interbank and wholesale transactions," she said in a prepared speech at Georgetown University, citing financial stability risks and the potential intrusion on users' privacy.

While the U.S. has not yet created a CBDC -- a central bank-issued digital currency representing a nation's fiat currency -- both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve have been assessing the potential risks and benefits since last year. The Fed has previously said it would seek approval from Congress before implementing a CBDC.

Gold futures on Tuesday scored their first gain in three sessions after back-to-back losses saw prices briefly dip below $2,000 an ounce a day earlier, for the first time in a week.

Gold nursed the "deep wounds inflicted by the recent selloff that saw prices fall more than 2% in two days," said Lukman Otunuga, manager, market analysis at FXTM.

Renewed expectations around the Federal Reserve extending its rate hike cycle deeper into 2023 "hammered zero-yielding gold," he said. "This could be another volatile week for the precious metal due to more speeches from Fed officials."

The recent run up in oil prices "due to the OPEC+ [output] cutbacks, and then the bullish IEA report, have left the market seeking direction," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research.

Netflix Inc.'s stock falls Tuesday, after the streaming giant posted weaker subscriber growth and forecast a smaller profit than Wall Street expected. But shares later recovered on company disclosures that its new ad-supported service is a success and its crackdown on shared accounts in the U.S. is coming this quarter.

Revenue improved to $8.16 billion from $7.87 billion a year ago. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected on average net earnings of $2.86 a share on revenue of $8.18 billion.

The tech Giant, which was an early investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The report, citing two people with direct knowledge of the project, states that Microsoft has been developing the chip used for powering the large-language models since as early as 2019.

In addition, the chips, internally code-named Athena, are available to a small amount of Microsoft and OpenAI employees who are testing them.