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[elmatador] Trump tried to sell more soybeans more beef more oil and aircrafts to China. In ...

elmatador — 5/16/2026 2:21:04 AM

Trump tried to sell more soybeans more beef more oil and aircrafts to China. In short President Trump tried to get market share from Brazil's exports to China: soybean, beef and oil

Fox News China to buy U.S. oil to feed its ‘insatiable appetite,’ Trump tells Fox News

NYT Trump Touts ‘Fantastic Trade Deals’ With China, but Details Are Scarce
The president left Beijing following a summit with China, during which the two countries sought to stabilize their economic and political relations.

By Ana Swanson

Ana Swanson, who covers international trade, reported from China.

May 15, 2026

President Trump departed Beijing on Friday, touting trade deals to sell American-made airplanes, farm goods and other products, the signature outcome of his two-day summit with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.

Mr. Trump and his advisers said China had agreed to buy 200 Boeing airplanes, with the possibility to sell more, and more than $10 billion worth of agricultural products, as well as energy and medical devices. But few details were released, and Chinese officials said little publicly about the commitments.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Mr. Trump claimed that the two sides did not discuss U.S. tariffs on imports from China. He said that the two sides had discussed sales of advanced chips made by companies like Nvidia, and that the countries would be “doing a lot of trade.”

“Our farmers are going to be very happy,” he said.

Elmat: China might have agreed to buy more soybeans from the US and less from Brazil

Mr. Trump’s visit this week, his first in nearly a decade, was closely watched as a pivotal moment for U.S.-China relations. The two countries are geopolitical rivals, yet remain deeply tied through one of the world’s most profitable trading relationships, with hundreds of billions of dollars in goods and services changing hands each year.

Mr. Trump has long criticized what he calls unfair Chinese trade practices, pressing Beijing to buy more American goods while signaling openness to Chinese investment. But even if Beijing signs off on deals that allow Mr. Trump to claim victory and reinforce his reputation as a deal maker, they are unlikely to alter the trajectory of an increasingly adversarial relationship.

Still, Mr. Trump projected optimism about both the relationship and the agreements reached during the visit. Over tea with Mr. Xi in a Beijing garden on Friday, Mr. Trump called it “an incredible visit.”

“I think a lot of good has come of it,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ve made some fantastic trade deals, really for both countries.”

Chinese officials struck a more cautious tone. Asked whether China had agreed to buy more Boeing airplanes or American agricultural products, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, would not confirm any details.

He said Beijing was willing to work with the United States “to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state.”

Later on Friday afternoon, Boeing said it had secured “an initial commitment for 200 aircraft” with more orders expected later. But the company provided few details about the agreement.

Stephen Olson, a former American trade negotiator, said that “no major breakthroughs were expected and none were achieved, but both countries got what they needed from this summit: a bit of additional stability.”

Both sides had achieved their goals. Mr. Trump emerged with deals he could tout as economic “wins,” while Mr. Xi used the meeting to present China “as a full peer competitor to the United States, a country that does not need to bend the knee to U.S. demands,” Mr. Olson said.

U.S. officials said Friday they would begin establishing a new “Board of Trade” to oversee the business, an arrangement that would entail both countries cutting tariffs on about $30 billion in products.

Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said in an interview with Bloomberg News Friday that the administration was trying to steer trade with China toward “the kinds of things we want to be selling.”

Mr. Greer said he expected China to agree to purchase more American agricultural products, in addition to an existing three-year deal to buy 25 million metric tons of soybeans annually. Beijing also renewed export licenses for some U.S. slaughterhouses to sell American beef in China.

Many U.S. lawmakers and officials, including Mr. Greer, have urged that trade with China focus on less sensitive sectors that would not advance China’s technological or military capabilities.

“We’re already seeing them start to fulfill some of their promises,” Mr. Greer said.

Officials have not specified what, if any, concessions the United States had offered in return for the promised purchases. Asked whether the Trump administration could still raise tariffs on China, Mr. Greer said that the two sides had agreed there would be “a certain level of tariff,” though he declined to elaborate.

To replace the global tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court in February, the Trump administration has launched two trade investigations expected to result in new tariffs on China and dozens of other countries this summer.

“The Chinese are going to be looking at what we’re doing there compared to agreements we’ve had in the past on certain tariff levels and we’ll just have to try to manage that,” Mr. Greer said.

He added that both sides seemed willing to extend an agreement on rare earths, which ensures continued Chinese exports of the minerals and expires later this year.

Mr. Greer also said new Chinese regulations allowing the government to penalize foreign companies for moving their supply chains out of China were a “strong concern” for him. “We’re trying to manage differences rather than escalate them,” he said.

Mr. Trump did not clarify Friday exactly what the countries had discussed about the fate of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips. When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, joined the group of American business leaders traveling to Beijing at the last minute earlier this week, it sparked speculation that progress could be in store for the company’s long-stalled sales in China.

Although Mr. Trump last December greenlit the sale to China of one of Nvidia’s most powerful chips, the H200, the Chinese government has not approved any sales since then. Instead, Beijing has encouraged Chinese tech companies to buy chips made at home by companies like Huawei.

Mr. Greer said earlier on Friday that the decision to buy the chips would be “a sovereign decision for China.” On Air Force One, Mr. Trump said that the issue “did come up, and I think something could happen with that.”

Meaghan Tobin contributed reporting.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.

A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2026, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Details Scarce as Trump Lauds China Trade Deals. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, U.S. Politics

nytimes.com

[Snowshoe] re owners of critical bottlenecks... UAE to complete second oil pipeline bypas...

Snowshoe — 5/15/2026 8:13:32 AM

re owners of critical bottlenecks...

UAE to complete second oil pipeline bypassing strait of Hormuz by 2027...
State oil company fast-tracks previously undisclosed project, which is expected to double export capacity
theguardian.com

Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, has directed the UAE state oil company to fast-track the previously undisclosed project so that the pipeline can begin carrying oil from the emirates to the port of Fujairah by 2027.

The new pipeline is expected to double the UAE’s export capacity via the existing Habshan-Fujairah pipeline which can carry up to 1.8m barrels a day to the port on the Gulf of Oman.

[elmatador] The World According to Karp My comments in bold. First of all thanks for sendin...

elmatador — 5/14/2026 11:24:12 AM

The World According to Karp
My comments in bold.

First of all thanks for sending the material. There is a lot to extract from it.

Karp articulates what the ramifications of AI investments

In artificial intelligence, there is no bronze medal. There will be a hegemon and a runner-up. Everyone else will be a client.

The stark message to the EU: You won't qualify even as runner up !

Who will get the money? the owners of critical bottlenecks:proprietary silicon, scarce power-dense campuses, grid and transmission expansion, specialized memory and fibre, and software platforms that sit closest to mission-critical workflows rather than to consumer novelty.

This is an industrial renaissance as much as it is a tech story.

Capital is already bleeding, gradually but persistently, out of pure duration trades and into the productive economy trade:

industrials, energy, infrastructure, transport, defence, and AI-enabled incumbents that move goods, electrons, and people.

Get Fed’s Warsh on board not to take the punch bowl and derail the revolution

Move capital from financialization to the productive economy. In main main theme: Hog it for productive assets not for the financialization sector
Portfolios should tilt toward domestic manufacturing, industrial automation, engineering heavy firms, energy and power infrastructure, and the regional banks and credit platforms levered to Main Street capex rather than to financial engineering.

Wall Street does not want capital to move into productive assets
Wall Street calls this “undisciplined,” “bubble-like” or, at best, “capex heavy.” It should call it what it is: a sovereignty project.

Karp rewrites re-industrialization in AI terms:
the U.S. has to structurally adjust as it reanimates a policy framework last seen in the 1800s
business floated above the physical world, outsourced its factories, and spent its free cash flow on buybacks. Heavy, long-cycle investment was for dinosaurs.

AI brings the physical back with a vengeance: land for server farms, high-voltage transformers, bespoke fabrication plants, new transmission lines, specialized cooling, and skilled industrial labour. Investors who have spent a decade cheering every reduction in capital intensity are now being asked to applaud the most capital-intensive buildout since the interstate highway system.

[carranza2] Karp and Thorne understand the AI revolution better than most. Enjoy, and pleas...

carranza2 — 5/14/2026 4:58:37 AM

Karp and Thorne understand the AI revolution better than most. Enjoy, and please comment.

[elmatador] Hi Carranza ! thanks. Let me ready it carefully

elmatador — 5/14/2026 4:51:02 AM

[carranza2] For your pondering, elmat: wellington-altus.ca AI capex is America’s industria...

carranza2 — 5/14/2026 4:48:28 AM

For your pondering, elmat:

wellington-altus.ca

AI capex is America’s industrial rearmament“There’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.” – Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir

Download this PDF here.

“There’s only two cultures that are going to win in the next year. It’s going to be us or China.” The subtext of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s widely cited speech from late 2025 sounds like tech-bro theatre until you reflect on it. In artificial intelligence, there is no bronze medal. There will be a hegemon and a runner-up. Everyone else will be a client.

Markets are not pricing that reality. Investors still treat the AI build-out as marginal cloud spend or another overhyped software cycle. They debate whether Big Tech is “exhausting its available capital” or whether capex “must mean revert,” as if infrastructure were optional and competition courteous. They are using valuation models from the wrong century for the wrong game.

AI is not an app store. It is a weapon system—and the operating system of the next industrial era. The capital going into it is not a bubble. It is rearmament.

AI as weapon system, not app

Karp, the philosopher-CEO of Palantir, has finally said in public what many in Silicon Valley admit only in private: AI is not potentially a weapon system. It is inherently one. The same infrastructure that serves personalized ads can set targeting coordinates. The same model that writes high school essays can construct attack plans, design bioweapons, or pilot a drone swarm.

In that environment, restraint does not buy peace; it merely guarantees that the other side defines the red lines. The civilization that spends at industrial scale will not politely negotiate the future with the civilization that chose to save its cash and write risk memos.

Hence the numbers. Alphabet’s capital expenditure plans for 2026 have surged into the US$180 billion range. Amazon is pointing to around US$200 billion in capex this year, explicitly tied to AI-driven data centres, in-house silicon, and logistics infrastructure. Meta is guiding to well over US$100 billion as it rips and replaces its server fleet for AI workloads. Add Microsoft’s own infrastructure spree, and the Big Four are on track to spend in the mid-hundreds of billions on AI and cloud infrastructure in a single year.

Wall Street calls this “undisciplined,” “bubble-like” or, at best, “capex heavy.” It should call it what it is: a sovereignty project.

Wall Street has the story wrong

The U.S. is expanding at 4 per cent, powered by a capex boom and an explicit drive to rebuild the country’s productive base. Yet the dominant narrative still treats this as a tired, late-cycle burst fated to end in recession and a weaker dollar. That’s why money is piling into utilities and staples at 50-times earnings while AI and software are being sold off indiscriminately.

What investors have missed is the Trump-Bessent project: using productive capital, bank deregulation, and supply-side policy to deliver durable, non-inflationary growth. This is not a sugar high stimulus. It’s an attempt to raise potential output and reset the economy’s structure.

The verdict from positioning is telling: the rush into gold, the historic underweight in the dollar, the wholesale rejection of AI-linked equities—all express the same bet that U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will fail. Markets are acting as if the only possible outcomes are inflation, crisis, or both.

This is what happens when the industry of stock market analysis, dominated intellectually by Democrats and Keynesians, keeps reaching for the same demandside playbook. AI hype and Trumpian turbulence have exhausted investors. But fatigue is not an investment framework. The real question is whether Wall Street can shed its reflexive Keynesianism long enough to see that this may be the opening act of a new supply-side era, not the end of one.

The two stories—the AI arms race and America’s supply-side revival—are not separate. They are the same contest seen from different ends of the balance sheet. The rearmament of digital infrastructure and the reindustrialization of the U.S. economy are twin expressions of a single policy logic: power flows from productive capacity.

We are in the midst of a generational change in economic thought—away from Keynesian demand management, where growth is deemed inflationary, toward supply-side economics, where growth itself is the antidote to inflation. The goal is clear: to expand the real economy, lift potential output, sustain growth above 4 per cent, and grow out of the debt burden that demand-side policy left behind. Wall Street still insists this is a short-cycle blip. It is wrong.

Technology, power, and imposed values

Karp’s underlying message is simple: technology is not neutral and never has been. The values of the builder get hard-coded into the stack. If America does not own the chips, fabrication plants, the models, the data centres, and the deployment rails, the values embedded in the next century’s infrastructure will not be the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They will be social-credit scoring, predictive policing, and frictionless censorship.

History offers a blunt reminder: technology does not negotiate with existing social orders; it overthrows them. Printing dissolved medieval community even as it created modern individuality. Railways rewired empires. Nuclear weapons forced a new concept of sovereignty. AI stands in that lineage, but with a twist: it collapses time. Models self-improve. Data compounding accelerates. The feedback loop between deployment and social consequences is far shorter than in the age of presses and railroads.

Once a civilization gets a multiyear head start, its products don’t just bring norms, they become the water everyone else swims in. That is what Karp is trying to drag into the Overton Window when he paraphrases the political scientist Samuel Huntington—as Karp states: “If we are not the ones controlling the violence, we will not be dictating the rule of law.” AI will sit inside every modern weapon system, every intelligence workflow, every critical infrastructure control room. If the stack that executes those functions is designed by a regime that treats dissent as pathology and privacy as subversion, the “rule of law” will evolve to look very different from the one Americans think they are defending.

The prisoners’ dilemma in silicon

From the standpoint of a state, AI capex looks far more like aircraft carrier group procurement than like another cloud line item. No serious strategist asks whether an aircraft carrier is accretive to next quarter’s earnings. You ask whether you still want blue-water power projection capabilities ten years from now. The answer to that question drives the budget.

Look at AI capex through a simple prisoners’-dilemma lens and the trajectory becomes inevitable. Each hyperscaler, and each government, would in isolation prefer a world of moderate, coordinated investment. Profits stay comfortable; bondholders stay calm; no one has to double their capex budget; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) committees can sleep at night.

But as soon as one decisive player defects from that implicit truce—by choosing to weaponize AI at scale—the payoff matrix shifts. If you match the investment, your margins compress and your shareholders complain, but you stay in the game. If you hold the line while your rival defects and spends, you enjoy one or two pleasantly “disciplined” years—and then discover that your core product has been commoditized, your platform is a thin client on someone else’s infrastructure, and your country’s defence stack runs on foreign chips and foreign models.

In that world, “prudence” is not risk management; it is capitulation by another name. The Nash equilibrium of this game is massive, simultaneous over-investment relative to the old world’s comfort levels. No one can afford to be the sole dove in a sky full of hawks. To be clear, the U.S. has to structurally adjust as it reanimates a policy framework last seen in the 1800s. But with the AI wave, firms must evolve quickly or die. We are in the midst of a capex supercycle—a pivot to supply-side economics that deregulates the economy where growth is no longer seen as inflationary. As the world adjusts, investors must follow. Yes, the Great Rotation has begun.

Wall Street’s broken lens

In theory, markets are supposed to price the future. In practice, they misprice regime shifts because they try to squeeze them back inside old templates. That is exactly what is happening with AI. This year’s spike in data-centre and chip spend has triggered “AI bubble” headlines and tech sell-offs, framed as the market “waking up” to over-investment.

Two habits are doing the damage

First, the post-quantitative easing (QE) era taught investors to treat capex as a problem. The perfect business floated above the physical world, outsourced its factories, and spent its free cash flow on buybacks. Heavy, long cycle investment was for dinosaurs. AI brings the physical back with a vengeance: land for server farms, high voltage transformers, bespoke fabrication plants, new transmission lines, specialized cooling, and skilled industrial labour. Investors who have spent a decade cheering every reduction in capital intensity are now being asked to applaud the most capital-intensive buildout since the interstate highway system.

Second, finance prefers ploys with reversible consequences. If a software redesign flops, you ship a patch. If a marketing campaign fails, you try again next quarter. AI infrastructure is different. Once you cede chip manufacturing to a rival bloc, once your competitors have trained frontier models on data you cannot replicate, and once your industrial base is optimized around their tools, there is no quick pivot back. The real-world consequences are measured in decades of lost productivity and diminished sovereignty.

So analysts keep asking whether AI “will pay off” fast enough. The more relevant question is: what is the cost of not making the investment at all? What is the present value of losing effective control over your financial plumbing, your critical infrastructure, your defence stack, and your cultural exports to a rival system that has no interest in your civil liberties? That is a number too large for a discounted cash flow model. A spreadsheet calibrated to last cycle’s cloud story cannot price the terminal value of remaining a first rank civilization.

From FOMO to FOBO

At the corporate level, all this translates into an emotional regime change. The dominant market emotion of the last cycle was FOMO: fear of missing out on the next momentum trade. In this one, it is FOBO: fear of becoming obsolete. Boards are less worried about missing the next rally than about waking up in three years with a structurally higher cost base and an inferior product set because their competitors embedded AI and automation more aggressively.

FOBO turns AI-related capex into a textbook prisoners’ dilemma. On paper, each participating firm would prefer a measured, ROI-disciplined investment path. In practice, each knows its rivals can lever up, tap policybacked credit, and pursue an arms race in chips, data infrastructure, and AI-enabled process redesign. In the dilemma, the individual’s incentive is to defect: overspend relative to “fundamentals” in order not to be the laggard if the technology pays off. Subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing, grants for AI research, accelerated depreciation for digital capex, and regulatory forbearance in testing new models all lower the private cost of aggressive investment and accelerate diffusion. From one angle, it looks like corporate profligacy. From another, it is an arms race in productive capacity.

Hamilton’s “national blessing” returns

To understand the macro regime taking shape around this capex supercycle, it helps to listen to a historical voice. In a 1781 letter to Robert Morris, a key financier of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. treasury secretary, wrote that “a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.” He was not indulging in proto-Keynesian sentimentality. He was making a hard-headed point about power: public credit, properly harnessed, could weld the young republic’s elites to its productive future and finance the infrastructure that would make U.S. independence stick.

Two centuries on, that idea is back—updated for an era of AI, programmable money, and weaponized supply chains. Trump’s macro regime is often described as an aberration from a rules-based, liberal order. It is more accurate to see it as a late digital return of Hamilton and Henry Clay, the 19th-century American statesman. Trump is not a glitch; he is a throwback.

Clay’s American System married tariffs, infrastructure improvements, and a protected continental market to an explicitly developmental state. Hamilton used public credit and a national bank to consolidate wartime debts, align elite interests with the Union, and fund “useful manufactures.” Trump’s version uses different pipes— trade wars, chip subsidies, reshoring tax credits, defence procurement, and digital regulation—but the heart of the system is recognizable.

For decades, the United States pursued the opposite approach. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after the devastation of the Second World War and created markets for American exports, but also seeded formidable industrial competitors. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 locked in permanent normal trade relations and gave Beijing structured access to Western markets, contributing to the “China shock” that displaced large numbers of U.S. manufacturing jobs in the 2000s. The unintended arc from 1947 to 2001 is now obvious: American policy success abroad fostered a production ecosystem that undercut production at home.

Against that backdrop, Trump’s insistence on restoring American productive capacity and clawing back leverage from multilateral constraints looks less like an outburst and more like a belated correction. His macro regime asks a Hamiltonian question: what, exactly, does each marginal unit of public and private leverage underwrite?

Debt that builds, not floats

The fading regime treated public debt as something to be lamented in speeches even as it tolerated a vast build up of private leverage used primarily to inflate asset prices. Cheap money financed buybacks and speculative real estate, not bulldozers or machine tools. The state’s balance sheet was deployed to socialize losses in crises; the private sector’s balance sheet manufactured paper wealth. Debt, in practice, funded consumption, speculation, and the carrying costs of an unbalanced trading system.

The emerging regime flips that script. It does not pretend debt is going away. Instead, it asks Hamilton’s question: what, precisely, does the marginal unit of leverage underwrite? Increasingly, the answer is concrete: fabrication plants, data centres, electricity grids, ports, refineries, rail hubs, defence manufacturing, and reshored industrial capacity across the interior of the country. Policy has been rewired around sovereign tools—fiscal guarantees, tax credits, directed credit, procurement mandates, regulatory nudges—that steer capital toward these sectors.

The real economy has begun to respond. U.S. manufacturing surveys have moved back into expansion, with new orders and production components both in growth territory for the first time in years. That is not a meme; it is a sign that the industrial pulse is picking up.

Warsh, AI, and supply-side monetarism

This is where Karp’s logic intersects with Kevin Warsh’s prospective tenure at the U.S. Federal Reserve. Warsh is often caricatured as a hawk. That misses the point. In recent remarks, he has described AI as “the most productivity-enhancing wave of our lifetimes,” a mindset that argues firms which move early will enjoy structurally higher margins and market share rather than a one-off efficiency pop.

The parallel Warsh draws is explicit: just as Alan Greenspan, the former U.S. Federal Reserve chair, ultimately trusted the 1990s IT spending wave to expand potential output beyond what staff models predicted, Warsh hints he will trust an AI-driven productivity boom over the instincts of a central bank culture trained to see every capex surge as a prelude to overheating.

A Warsh Federal Reserve operating in an AI capex supercycle is likely to practise something like supplyside monetarism. It will be more sceptical of ultra-easy money and financial engineering that keeps zombie firms alive while being more tolerant of both public and private borrowing when it clearly underwrites productive investment—even at the cost of near-term volatility in inflation and rates. The central bank’s role becomes less about smoothing every business cycle and more about managing the system’s aggregate balance sheet: keeping the cost of capital from being so low that it invites misallocation, or so high that it chokes off the rearmament of the supply side.

Hamilton, it bears recalling, conditioned his “national blessing” line on the debt “not being excessive” and defended the proper funding of existing obligations, not their indefinite expansion. Warsh’s version is similar: use credit to build the future, not to disguise past mistakes.

Bitcoin inside the Hamiltonian tent

Oddly, Bitcoin now sits inside this same story. For a decade, it was the emblem of non-sovereign rebellion: an asset for those convinced that profligate governments would inevitably debase their currencies. It lived outside the perimeter, structurally opposed to the Hamiltonian project of state-anchored credit.

That is changing. As regulatory clarity has grown and institutional wrappers have proliferated, Bitcoin has been pulled into an architecture Hamilton would recognize: a network of custody, collateral, and balance sheets where digital claims underwrite real-world risk-taking.

The United States now explicitly positions itself as the intended nucleus of a global, dollar-centric, digital monetary system built on three pillars: an internetnative technology layer, a standardized legal perimeter for digital assets, and an infrastructure for “agentic” commerce—software agents, machines, and institutions transacting at AI speed.

In that framework, Bitcoin is no longer the whole story, but it is the apex asset and cultural anchor. It functions as a non-sovereign check and complement to public credit rather than a pure repudiation of it. The familiar “Bitcoin is worth zero” refrain looks less serious each cycle, as funding markets repeatedly crowd around the same long-term levels and each wave of volatility leaves behind a denser institutional infrastructure. The Hamiltonian question applies: is this institutionalized Bitcoin stack a blessing or a curse? The answer turns on whether it channels capital toward lower-friction payments, better collateral plumbing, and genuine innovation—or simply adds leverage to speculative narratives.

What investors should do

For investors, the conclusion is uncomfortable but unavoidable. We are no longer in a world where the right question is: “Is there too much debt?” The questions now are: “What is that debt underwriting, and does it expand the country’s productive frontier?” and “Whose stack are you living inside?”

Practically, that means three shifts

First, treat AI capex as the backbone of a new industrial and geopolitical regime, not as a line item that “must mean revert.” The durable equity value is likely to accrue to owners of critical bottlenecks: proprietary silicon, scarce power-dense campuses, grid and transmission expansion, specialized memory and fibre, and software platforms that sit closest to mission-critical workflows rather than to consumer novelty.

Second, take the Great Rotation seriously. Capital is already bleeding, gradually but persistently, out of pure duration trades and into the productive economy trade: industrials, energy, infrastructure, transport, defence, and AI-enabled incumbents that move goods, electrons, and people. This is an industrial renaissance as much as it is a tech story. Portfolios should tilt toward domestic manufacturing, industrial automation, engineeringheavy firms, energy and power infrastructure, and the regional banks and credit platforms levered to Main Street capex rather than to financial engineering.

Third, update your macro template for a Warsh Federal Reserve in a Trumpian-Hamiltonian regime. Expect rate cuts geared to easing stress in housing, small-business credit, and regional banks, combined with a tougher stance on balance-sheet excess and central-bank mission creep. That mix is friendlier to duration in capital hungry, real-economy sectors than to the frothiest corners of speculative tech. It is also consistent with a pragmatic trade policy détente with China that formalizes spheres of influence rather than ending competition.

Hamilton’s wager was that debt, used well, could be a national blessing. Trump has placed a 21st century version of that bet on AI, energy, and industrial rebuilding. Warsh looks ready to design a monetary regime around it. Karp has supplied the visceral framing: in AI, there is no bronze medal.

Investors now have to decide which side of the ledger they are on. Do they own the pipes, engines, and silicon of the rebuild, or just a handful of abstractions floating above it? AI capex is not a bubble. It is industrial rearmament—and the portfolios that win from here will be the ones that stop fighting the capex wave and start riding the industrial

[elmatador] I moved from Los Angeles to Brazil. I pay $1,600 a month to live in a complex wi...

elmatador — 5/14/2026 12:43:03 AM

I moved from Los Angeles to Brazil. I pay $1,600 a month to live in a complex with a supermarket, day care, and restaurants.

Lauren Crosby Medlicott

Wed, May 13, 2026 at 6:02 PM GMT+3
4 min read

Luca Martins is a 28-year-old content creator who moved from LA to Brazil in 2023.
His apartment complex in Rio has everything he could ever need and costs half as much as his rent in LA.
Because his rent is much lower, Luca's quality of life is better.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Luca Martins. It has been edited for length and clarity.

After having moved to the United States from Brazil when I was 13, I started feeling homesick while living in Los Angeles in 2023.

I packed my bags and decided to visit my family in Rio, but very quickly realized I didn't want to leave. In Brazil, I felt I was home. My wife, also originally from Brazil, and I decided we'd stay.

We moved into a gated community
For the first six months in Rio, we stayed with family while deciding where we would live. They lived in a gated complex on the west side of the city.

Luca Martins and his wife have an 800-square-foot apartment.Courtesy of Luca Martins
It's not just a gated neighborhood as you might see in the US — it's more like a gated city within a city. There are about 25,000 people who live in the complex.

We loved the area and the complex, and that my family was all close by, and decided we would rent an apartment in the same complex but in a different building.

This gated community has everything. If you didn't want to go outside the gates, you would hardly need to. We have a large supermarket, day care, a retirement home, a shopping mall, sports facilities, places to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a pharmacy, medical services, and parks — which you can access, some for free and some not.

I pay $1,600 a month
My apartment is 800 square feet, and has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Inside my building, there is a spa, spin and yoga rooms, an outdoor pool, a gym with lots of equipment, a restaurant, and a convenience store. There is a salon and laundry room (although we never use the laundry room because we have a washer and dryer in our apartment).

For all of this, I pay about $1,600 a month. This is half of what I was paying for a townhouse in the suburbs of LA. My place in LA was in a gated community, but it didn't have the amenities I have in this complex in Rio.

Luca Martins lives in a gated community in Rio de JaneiroCourtesy of Luca Martins
My routine these days consists of working through the morning, and then heading to the gym, pool, and spa (which has a steam and sauna room and jacuzzi) in the afternoon or evening. All of these spaces are included in my rent.

Friends gather around these places too, so although I work alone, I never feel alone. I connect with people more here than I ever did in LA, where you had to drive an hour to see anyone.

I feel safe
If I want more than my building offers, I can venture into the rest of the complex, and I feel safe at all times. Rio does have safety issues in different parts of the city, but here I can walk around in the middle of the night without fear, knowing there are gates and security guards on the premises.

Although gated communities exist all around the world, I've never seen one quite like this.

With my lower monthly rent, I've been able to save and travel more, two things I couldn't do nearly as much while living in LA. My quality of life is generally much better here because I don't have to squeeze in work all the time to make ends meet.

I can't see any reason my wife and I would move from here anytime soon. We're surrounded by family, and live in what is effectively a giant neighborhood that we love.

yahoo.com

[elmatador] Paraguay maintains formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, serving as its last ...

elmatador — 5/13/2026 3:11:17 AM

Paraguay maintains formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, serving as its last remaining ally in South America and one of only 12 nations globally to do so.

Taiwan manufactures over 60% of all global semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips.

Paraguay, Taiwan announce ambitious AI hub plan for South America

By Mar Puig | May 11, 2026 at 2:22 PM

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te (L) and Paraguay President Santiago Peña review honor guards during a welcome ceremony in front of the presidential office Taipei, Taiwan, on Friday. Peña sought to further enhance diplomatic ties between the two nations. Photo by Ritchie B. tongo/EPA

ASUNCION, Paraguay, May 11 (UPI) -- Paraguayan President Santiago Peña announced an agreement with Taiwan to develop one of the world's largest artificial intelligence centers in Paraguay -- an initiative aimed at positioning the country as a regional hub for technological infrastructure and digital services.

The announcement came during the conclusion Sunday of Peña's official visit to Taiwan, where he held meetings with Taiwanese President William Lai, as well as business leaders and authorities linked to the technology sector.

"Between two giants, we are beginning the path to create the world's largest artificial intelligence hub: Taiwanese technology powered by Paraguayan energy," Peña said in a message shared on social media.

Peña said the project will be financed equally by the two governments and will combine Taiwan's technological capabilities with Paraguay's surplus hydroelectric energy, making use of the country's position as one of South America's leading exporters of clean energy.

He said the initiative aims to turn Paraguay into a regional center for development linked to artificial intelligence, data centers and high-capacity digital services.

"Paraguay joins the artificial intelligence race with sovereignty," Peña wrote on social media, where he described the agreement as "unprecedented."

The project includes creating an artificial intelligence and high-technology data cCenter aimed at providing technological services across the continent, Paraguayan Ambassador to Taiwan Darío Filártiga said in remarks to RCC Radio.

Filártiga said the proposal seeks to capitalize on "Paraguay's abundance of clean and renewable energy" to attract investments linked to digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence.

The official visit also produced advances in cooperation on cybersecurity, information technology infrastructure and technological training, in addition to agreements aimed at strengthening the private sector.

A delegation of about 40 Paraguayan business leaders participated in a binational forum alongside about 200 Taiwanese representatives. As a result, both countries signed a memorandum of understanding to create the Paraguay-Taiwan Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Culture.

The trip comes amid growing geopolitical competition between China and Taiwan to maintain diplomatic allies in Latin America.

Paraguay remains the only South American country that maintains official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, while Beijing increases international pressure to diplomatically isolate the island.

During an official ceremony in Taipei, Lai publicly thanked Paraguay for its support.

"Taiwan and Paraguay are partners firmly committed to the values of democracy, freedom and human rights," the Taiwanese president said.

Peña, meanwhile, reiterated Paraguay's support in the face of pressure from China.

"Paraguay deeply values this relationship and reaffirms its commitment to continue supporting Taiwan in a strategic alliance based on shared values," he said.

Bilateral relations have also strengthened in trade.

Official Paraguayan data show that Taiwan consolidated its position during 2025 as one of the main destinations for Paraguayan beef exports, with sales exceeding $288 million.

In addition, Taiwan recently authorized imports of Paraguayan poultry, completing what Filártiga described as the "protein trilogy," made up of beef, pork and poultry.

The Paraguayan government has not yet disclosed the exact location of the future technological complex or the expected timeline for the start of construction.

upi.com

[elmatador] If you are in the U.S. illegally, leave the country on your own with a $2,600 bo...

elmatador — 5/13/2026 3:04:14 AM

If you are in the U.S. illegally, leave the country on your own with a $2,600 bonus and a FREE return ticket for you and your family. dhs.gov

[elmatador] If you are in the U.S. illegally, leave the country on your own with a $2,600 bo...

elmatador — 5/13/2026 3:03:13 AM

If you are in the U.S. illegally, leave the country on your own with a $2,600 bonus and a FREE return ticket for you and your family.
dhs.gov

[nicewatch] Microsoft's massive Kenya AI data center would require switching off 'half the c...

nicewatch — 5/12/2026 9:56:29 PM

Microsoft's massive Kenya AI data center would require switching off 'half the country' to meet power requirements, government says — $1 billion project stalls over capacity disagreements and lack of infrastructure

tomshardware.com

[elmatador] Good to hear from You Snowshoe. The North America fairy tale is unwinding. Fast.

elmatador — 5/11/2026 1:22:27 AM

[elmatador] A Keynesian solution to global imbalances Economists have been proposing fixes t...

elmatador — 5/11/2026 12:50:34 AM

A Keynesian solution to global imbalances Economists have been proposing fixes to structural problems created by an international reserve currency since the 1940s

DAIRE MACFADDEN

For the better part of a year, policymakers and economists have been drawing attention to the financial stability risks of wide and persistent current account imbalances between countries. The alarm grew during the IMF-World Bank spring meetings last month and will reach fever pitch ahead of next month’s G7 summit in France.

The concern is well-founded. Imbalances, which are an inherent feature of the international trading system, are nearing their highest level in 150 years. According to the IMF, they are concentrated in a small number of major economies, heightening the risk to global output. In countries running a current account deficit, persistent imbalances have hollowed out domestic manufacturing and generated a political backlash, as today’s tariffs and other trade protectionism show.

Historically, imbalances have been redressed through either co-ordinated policy intervention, such as the 1985 Plaza Accord, or crisis, such as the 2008 financial crash. But in both of these cases, the reversals were temporary.

Elmat The author alludes to the cartel of currencies, aka the G7

Policymakers are keen to avoid an unwinding through disorderly adjustment, which could damage global demand. As a first-best response, the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s fourth Paris Report recommends fiscal consolidation in the US, boosting household consumption in China and an increase in productive investment — modelled on former Italian premier Mario Draghi’s report — in Europe. These measures would encourage more balanced patterns of global saving and investment.

In international forums, there is near-unanimous agreement that any move to redress imbalances should be symmetric and gradual. Policymakers also acknowledge that this will be difficult to achieve against the current geoeconomic backdrop. “The chances of?.?.?.?pre-emptive action are close to zero,” chief economics commentator Martin Wolf wrote earlier this week.

But absent from the proposals has been any discussion of a longer-term structural fix to prevent the build-up of large imbalances and the related political pressures in the first place. Increasingly, the recommendations — such as increased macroeconomic policy co-operation and enhanced financial surveillance — look timid relative to the scale of the risks.

Here’s why the proposed solutions fall short: there is a structural flaw in the system. As Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin observed in 1960, a country that supplies the world’s reserve currency must run persistent deficits to meet global demand for safe assets.

John Maynard Keynes also understood the problem was structural. At Bretton Woods in 1944, he proposed a new financial institution, the International Clearing Union (ICU), which was aimed at preventing the build-up of imbalances. The ICU would be built around an international reserve currency called bancor.

Born of Keynes’ animus towards the gold standard, bancor was designed to automatically correct trade imbalances through exchange rate adjustment when countries breached limits on holdings. Its innovation was that it imposed penalties on countries for running either a surplus or deficit.

The proposal, despite its implementation challenges, was ultimately rejected by the US on political rather than economic grounds. The US, which was then the world’s largest creditor, had little incentive to sign up to a system that would penalise its surplus. This consolidated the dollar as the anchor of the international monetary system.

Regardless, demand for a non-dollar international currency endured. For example, in 2009, the then Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan suggested moving towards a “super-sovereign reserve currency”. Although the bancor proposal was far-sighted, Zhou said, he recommended expanding the role of the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) to reform the international monetary system.

SDRs, foreign exchange reserve assets introduced in 1969 to provide additional liquidity, were originally tied to the value of gold, as was bancor. Following the collapse of Bretton Woods, they were converted into a unit of account based on a basket of national currencies. Today, SDRs are used to supplement IMF members’ foreign reserves.

Yet political restrictions on their issuance have prevented them from ever becoming the “principal reserve asset in the international monetary system”, as envisioned in the IMF constitution. Moreover, a lack of penalties for overdrafts and excess holdings deprives SDRs of the self-adjusting mechanism that was the key innovation of bancor.

There are other potential challengers to dollar dominance in the international monetary framework. One came from Mark Carney in one of his final speeches as Bank of England governor. He proposed the adoption of a “synthetic hegemonic currency”, which could be based on a basket of central bank digital currencies. Another example is the seemingly moribund proposal for a Brics currency.

Every time the global monetary system faces stress, or countries are forced to make macroeconomic adjustments in response to the US financial cycle, the case for a neutral international currency reasserts itself.

Amid the Trump administration’s assault on the global trading and monetary system, the international community appears to have ceded ground to those who wish to undo it from within. Now, policymakers face a choice between watching it fragment and proposing serious reform. If they don’t attempt to fix it, others will.

ft.com

[Snowshoe] Canada seeks growth to its "natural size". I may qualify...;) Millions of Amer...

Snowshoe — 5/9/2026 2:30:45 AM

Canada seeks growth to its "natural size". I may qualify...;)

Millions of Americans could be eligible to become Canadian under new law

[Snowshoe] Trump is shrinking the USA to its "natural size"... Why Brazilians are leaving ...

Snowshoe — 5/9/2026 2:14:28 AM

Trump is shrinking the USA to its "natural size"...

Why Brazilians are leaving Framingham, MA

[elmatador] Airlines slash flights as fuel shortage fears mount Millions of seats cut as M...

elmatador — 5/5/2026 3:24:43 AM

Airlines slash flights as fuel shortage fears mount

Millions of seats cut as Middle East crisis throws global travel into disarray The closure of Gulf airports that connected a third of European journeys to Asia has thrown global travel into disarray

Peter Campbell in London Published
MAY 4 2026

Global airlines have cut 2mn seats from their May schedules within the past two weeks, as concerns about fuel availability in the coming weeks intensify.

Thousands of flights have been cancelled and several services have switched to smaller or more fuel-efficient aircraft to conserve fuel as they brace for supply disruption, according to data from analytics company Cirium.

Since the start of the Iran war in late February, the cost of jet fuel has doubled, forcing airlines to raise ticket prices, while the closure of Gulf airports that connected a third of European journeys to Asia has thrown global travel into disarray.

Elmat: Fuel is typically the largest operating expense for airlines, usually accounting for 20% to 30% of total operating costs. For many carriers, it represents over 40% of costs when prices are high, making it a critical, volatile factor in profitability

Gulf carriers including Emirates, Etihad and Qatar — whose flights are still recovering after halting in the early weeks of the conflict — have redrawn their May schedules, including cancelling flights, Cirium data shows.

The total number of seats available on all airlines during May has fallen from 132mn to 130mn between mid and late April, according to the figures.

International carriers from British Airways and United to China Air and Japan’s ANA have also cut or added significant capacity, reshuffling their network to ease bottlenecks in global travel.

“No European airline is going to send a plane off to Asia to mop up demand from the Gulf, and find it’s stuck there without fuel to go back,” said aviation analyst John Strickland.

“Jet fuel pricing has always been intermittent, but I don’t think in my time there has ever been the question of shortages.”

Elmat: 1) Just supply and demand: The supply of seats going down, the price of the tickets goes up.

2) Forcing efficiency by cutting cross-subsidies as unprofitable routes are being cut. Airlines frequently cross-subsidize routes, using profits from high-demand routes to support less profitable or loss-making routes..

3) Passengers on profitable routes often effectively pay higher fares to support the operation of less popular flights.

Air France said that it had been asked not to add extra services to Singapore or Tokyo’s Haneda, as the two big connecting hubs in Asia seek to limit their jet fuel use.

The region has been hardest hit by the supply disruption because it is more reliant on fuel from the Strait of Hormuz, which remains close to a standstill because of the threat of Iranian attacks and a US naval blockade.

“The disruption of these flows has created significant imbalances in global travel supply and demand,” said Ben Smith, chief executive of Air France-KLM.

“Price and demand” for fuel has become “much more significant” since the conflict began, Bum-ho Kim, acting chief executive of Seoul’s Incheon airport, told the FT. “We are trying to seek any solutions for passengers,” he said. Vietnam has already introduced some jet fuel rationing.

Japan’s airlines have benefited from increased European demand, but have also warned they will be hit by much higher fuel charges. Carrier ANA said it will spend an extra £650mn until next March on fuel, while Japan Air said its profits would fall by a fifth because of higher costs.

US carrier Delta Air Lines has cut 3.5 per cent of its network in the second quarter to save fuel, while EasyJet and Virgin Atlantic have both warned about their profitability during the crisis.

Germany’s Lufthansa accounted for the most cancellations in recent months, cutting 20,000 flights between May and October because fuel costs have made them unprofitable.

Air China had the second highest number of seat cancellations, after cutting flights including internal services between Chengdu and Beijing, Cirium found.

Emirates, which is running about two-thirds of its pre-conflict capacity but with lower passenger numbers, has cut the number of aircraft operating some major routes.

It is still running A380s, a double-decker airliner that carries up to 615 passengers, from Dubai to Brisbane, but has removed Boeing 777s from the route, Cirium data shows.

Both weaker demand and greater cost pressure have driven airlines to switch to smaller or more fuel-efficient aircraft.

Elmat: Embraer may profit from this downsizing..

Etihad has switched from using an Airbus A350, which carries almost 400 passengers, to a Boeing 787 that has between 220 and 300 seats, depending on the exact configuration, on its service between Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong.

However, some routes have switched to larger planes to meet increased demand for direct flights between Europe and Asia. Air France now uses a larger version of Boeing’s 777 on its Mumbai route, while Air China has deployed a larger 777 on its route from London Heathrow to Beijing.

Additional reporting by Harry Dempsey in Tokyo, data visualisation by Jonathan Vincent

[elmatador] How a weaker dollar is quietly making life more expensive “The dollar had been ...

elmatador — 5/4/2026 9:21:07 AM

How a weaker dollar is quietly making life more expensive

“The dollar had been on a 15-year bull run,” he said. “I would argue the dollar is still wildly overvalued, and over the next maybe five or six years, it might fall 15%.”

Take coffee, one of the grocery items that has seen the biggest price hike in the past year. Brazil is the biggest source of coffee for the U.S. and the dollar has fallen around 13% versus its real.

Currency fluctuations can hit harder in developing economies and, while only a fraction of the change may feed into coffee’s ballooning price, every bit can pile up. Coffee prices are up nearly 19% in the U.S. in the past year, according to government data.

The U.S. dollar has dropped about 10% against a basket of other major currencies since early 2025.

That shift is starting to show up in everyday costs.

May 3, 2026, 9:58 PM GMT+3

By The Associated Press

A hidden force is quietly pushing up costs for everything from your summer vacation to your weekly grocery bills: a weaker U.S. dollar.

The dollar has fallen about 10% against other major currencies since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, a pullback potentially playing a role in Americans’ concerns about affordability.

“It’s kind of a hidden tax,” says economist Thomas Savidge of the conservative-leaning American Institute for Economic Research. “What your dollar is going to be able to buy is going to shrink.”

A look at where the dollar stands and what it means for you:

Historic dollar decline

The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against other major currencies, logged its steepest six-month drop in more than 50 years in the first half of 2025. Though the decline hasn’t deepened, the dollar index is still about 10% lower than the start of Trump’s term.

A strong dollar makes imports cheaper and can help keep inflation in check. A weak one can increase prices on foreign goods but boost American exports.

U.S. presidents have long voiced support for a strong dollar even as they pursued policies that, at times, pushed the currency lower. Trump has suggested a strong dollar puts the U.S. at a disadvantage and that a weak dollar helps American industry. And as with most things with Trump, he’s been blunter in his messaging.

“You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar,” he said last year, one of a number of public statements showing his preference for seeing the dollar decline.

Big multinationals benefit
Trump isn’t alone in seeing benefits of a weaker buck.

In recent months, corporate earnings calls have been peppered with talk of how a weaker dollar has helped companies from Philip Morris to Coca-Cola, with executives pulling out C-suite phrases like “favorable currency impact” to note how the dip brought tailwinds outside the U.S. that added to bottom lines.

“In many cases, we’ve got a weaker dollar, which is not unhelpful,” Elie Maalouf, the CEO of InterContinental Hotels, said on a February call as the company announced higher profits and revenues.

For big multinational companies that do business overseas, a weaker dollar can spur sales for products that suddenly become cheaper. But the vast majority of U.S. businesses are not operating beyond the border. For those catering to domestic customers, it’s a different story, particularly if they are reliant on importing goods.

Travis Madeira, a fourth-generation lobsterman who founded the lobster-shipping business LobsterBoys with his brother, makes about 80% of his sales to Americans, unlike some competitors who primarily export.

“The exporters are gonna have the advantage when it comes to the dollar weakening,” says Madeira, who is paying more to import bait and buy Canadian lobsters. “These guys are gonna have a little bit of a lever on us.”

Smaller companies hurt

Even among companies that do have a presence outside the U.S., the dollar’s fall can have an impact. While many big companies hedge currency to try and insulate themselves or push more sales overseas, smaller businesses are often more susceptible to the turbulence.

David Navazio, CEO of Pennsylvania-based Gentell, which makes bandages and other medical supplies, operates plants in Brazil, Paraguay, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In each location, the dollar has fallen, increasing Gentell’s costs.

Gentell has had to raise some prices to reflect the currency fluctuation, which stacks on top of other challenges, including tariffs and war-related spikes to fuel costs.

“A year ago, none of these were concerns,” he says. “And it always hurts the consumer.”

Other currencies rise

For the American consumer, the reality of a declining dollar is most obvious during foreign travel or when making a purchase directly from an international seller.

Cross the border into Mexico, the top foreign destination of Americans, and your dollar is about 16% weaker versus the peso compared with early 2025.

Declines of about 10% to 17% have been recorded elsewhere, including against the Swiss franc, South African rand, Danish krone, Swedish krona and the Euro.

As for goods imported to the U.S., there is an impact, but it’s harder to gauge. Many economists estimate that, in advanced countries like the U.S., only about 5% to 10% of a currency dip is passed on to consumers.

But they are an added stress when prices are already affected by other factors.

Take coffee, one of the grocery items that has seen the biggest price hike in the past year. Brazil is the biggest source of coffee for the U.S. and the dollar has fallen around 13% versus its real. Currency fluctuations can hit harder in developing economies and, while only a fraction of the change may feed into coffee’s ballooning price, every bit can pile up. Coffee prices are up nearly 19% in the U.S. in the past year, according to government data.

Expect more movement

Currency values are constantly moving and, while the dollar’s recent fall is notable, it has reached lower levels at points in the presidencies of each of Trump’s predecessors, back through the creation of the Dollar Index in 1973, when Richard Nixon was at the helm.

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says while “a lot of policies that Trump is doing are something of a cancer for the dollar,” he believes that it was destined to fall no matter who was in charge.

“The dollar had been on a 15-year bull run,” he said. “I would argue the dollar is still wildly overvalued, and over the next maybe five or six years, it might fall 15%.”

What does that mean for American consumers? Rogoff says commodity prices are likely to rise, particularly with the impact of the Iran war on fuel prices.

“They’re just going to go up,” he says, “no matter what the dollar’s at.

nbcnews.com

[elmatador] Why the telcos fighting back is important for Starlink? "Musk’s credibility wit...

elmatador — 5/4/2026 3:13:49 AM

Why the telcos fighting back is important for Starlink?
"Musk’s credibility with investors rests on SpaceX’s ability to turn once-dubious ideas into operational businesses... Starship underpins much of what SpaceX has promised investors, from expanding Starlink into new markets to lofting AI infrastructure into orbit and carrying astronauts for NASA missions beyond Earth. The risks are laid out bluntly in the prospectus."

reuters.com

[elmatador] Inside SpaceX's IPO: Musk's most ambitious plan yet By David Jeans and Echo W...

elmatador — 5/4/2026 2:59:42 AM

Inside SpaceX's IPO: Musk's most ambitious plan yet

By David Jeans and Echo Wang
April 29, 20261:02 PM GMT+3Updated 19 hours ago

Summary
Companies

SpaceX's IPO filing reveals ambitious AI and multi-planetary plans, but highlights financial risks
Skeptics question Musk's projections, citing unproven tech and competition with major tech firms
SpaceX's future depends on Musk's leadership, Starship rocket, huge AI success

NEW YORK, April 29 (Reuters) - In the days after the PayPal IPO in 2002, Elon Musk and company executives gathered at a Las Vegas casino to celebrate. But while others socialized by the pool, Musk was hunched over an old Soviet rocket manual and already planning ?his next venture: SpaceX.

“He’d come off what was an unequivocally big win, he was one of the largest shareholders, and yet he was focused on this next thing,” Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor who ?was at the party, told Reuters. “Now it’s a multi-trillion-dollar business.”
In the two decades since Musk took the reins at SpaceX, the company has grown into the world’s largest space business, launching thousands of Starlink internet satellites and pioneering reusable rockets, transforming the economics of space in a way Musk likens to inventing an airplane that no longer has to be destroyed after every flight.
Musk’s years of defying accepted logic through audacious risk-taking in space look set to be validated when SpaceX goes public this year at a possible valuation of $1.75 trillion, in what would be the largest public listing on record ?and one that could put him on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.

But what comes next may be an even bigger ask than building reusable rockets or the first mass-market electric vehicle, according to a Reuters review ?of more than 100 pages of excerpts from SpaceX’s confidential pre-IPO prospectus, offering the most detailed look at SpaceX’s financials and its future plans since Musk took the helm. Reuters published a series of exclusive ?stories based on the documents last week.

“I always thought he was crazy,” said Walter Isaacson, who spent two years shadowing Musk while writing a biography of the billionaire. “But the danger of betting against him is that he ends up being crazy like ?a fox and gets things done.”
As if torn from the pages of one of Musk’s favorite books, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, SpaceX’s prospectus recasts the company less as a maker of rockets and satellites and more as the future power in artificial ?intelligence, spanning space-based data centers and industries on the moon and Mars.

It promises to harness the sun for near-limitless energy to fuel the AI era, and declares that it will “make life multi-planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great,” reads an opening quote from Musk at the top of the document, known as an S-1, “and that’s what being a space-faring civilization is all about.”
SpaceX did not respond to requests for further comment ?on the filing.
'SWINGING BIG AND HOPING TO CASH IN'
Such out-of-this-world claims are raising questions from market observers and skeptics. But some of the world's biggest institutional firms and Musk loyalists – Fidelity Investments, Founders Fund and Valor Equity Partners – have remained committed as SpaceX endured ?years of rocket failures, revenue losses, lawsuits against the U.S. government, workplace injuries and geopolitical issues.

Musk’s credibility with investors rests on SpaceX’s ability to turn once-dubious ideas into operational businesses, most notably through the reusable Falcon 9 rocket and the Starlink broadband network it enabled.
“Twenty-five years ago, people thought ?we were insane, ?including me,” said Jim Cantrell, one of SpaceX’s earliest employees, who later left to start his own company. Now, “the idea of having products made on Mars and sold on Earth is not so insane.”

But the filing also shows SpaceX lost money last year, is spending far less on AI development than major tech rivals, and warns investors that projects ranging from settlements on the moon and Mars to orbital data centers rely on unproven technologies that may not be commercially viable, Reuters found.
Those more sober numbers have led some commentators to dismiss Musk’s vision as hype designed to inflate SpaceX’s valuation.

Unlike the early days of reusable rockets or electric vehicles, AI is no empty frontier, with SpaceX set to compete against the world’s biggest companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet.

Chart shows comparison between capital spending of Big Tech companies versus that of SpaceX.
Among the ?filing's largest claims is that SpaceX is going after a ?total addressable market of $28.5 trillion, more than the total GDP ?of the United States, "a very swing for the fences number," said Eric Talley, a Columbia Law School professor who focuses on corporate governance, adding that Musk's "calling card is swinging big and hoping to cash in."
Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm that owns SpaceX and Tesla shares, said investors are "willing to suspend fundamental analysis to not be left out."
"There's the perception that Elon ?did it once with Tesla and built a trillion-dollar company," he said, "and that he'll be able to do this again and again."
SPACEX'S RELIANCE ON MUSK
Musk’s space predictions have not always ?borne out. Timelines for Starship, the ?fully reusable rocket at the heart of SpaceX’s future, have repeatedly slipped amid explosive test failures, regulatory delays and engineering hurdles.
That matters because Starship underpins much of what SpaceX has promised investors, from expanding Starlink into new markets to lofting AI infrastructure into orbit and carrying astronauts for NASA missions beyond Earth. The risks are laid out bluntly in the prospectus.
“Any failure or delay in the development of Starship at scale … would delay or limit our ability to execute our growth strategy,” the S-1 said.
One of the starkest risks flagged in SpaceX’s ?pre-IPO filing is its ?reliance on Musk himself. He holds four titles, controls the board, and has an unusually structured compensation package tied to valuation targets as high as $7.5 ?trillion and milestones, such as settling one million people on Mars.
The filing describes Musk as “one of the great visionaries of our generation” and warns that a future without him could pose an existential challenge for the company, adding that selecting a successor may not happen in a “timely manner or at all.”
“He’s the only ?person reliably getting satellites into orbit, and astronauts down from the space station,” Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, said.
“He’s been able to turn science fiction into just science.”
Reporting by Echo Wang and David Jeans; Editing by Joe Brock and Nick Zieminski

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

David JeansThomson Reuters

David Jeans is a space and defense correspondent for Reuters, based in New York. He covers the intersection of weapons, technology and national security, with a focus on the rise of venture-backed military startups and the Pentagon’s evolving relationship with Silicon Valley. Previously, he covered defense tech for Forbes. He's also the co-author of WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, named a Financial Times Best Business Book.

[elmatador] The Vietnam Wan and the Six-Day War caused 2 shocks. The Nixon shock of 1971The ...

elmatador — 4/30/2026 4:04:39 AM

The Vietnam Wan and the Six-Day War caused 2 shocks.

The Nixon shock of 1971
The Oil Shock of 1973

Everything was normal and then suddenly there was a new normal.
It was like a tectonic plate movement
There was a lot of energy stored that was suddenly released
And the world never returned to the previous era

The Ukraine War and the Iranian wars must be analyzed under the same perspecive
They are the triggers of the new normal
We still do not know how the new normal will play on

[elmatador] ...critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age ...

elmatador — 4/30/2026 3:30:51 AM

...critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence, when an LLM can do much of the heavy lifting in coding or research.

Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, Palantir cofounder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices.

Elmat lateral thinking and his capacity to think differently from the average Joe will be at a premium price.

Palantir CEO says AI ‘will destroy’ humanities jobs, but there will be ‘more than enough jobs’ for people with vocational training

By Jacqueline Munis

April 11, 2026, 7:05 AM ET

Some economists and experts say critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence, when an LLM can do much of the heavy lifting in coding or research.

Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, Palantir cofounder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices.

“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “You went to an elite school, and you studied philosophy—I’ll use myself as an example—hopefully, you have some other skill; that one is going to be hard to market.”

Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a JD from Stanford Law School and a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.

Of his own career, Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking: “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.”

The comments echoed past remarks Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.

“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge, but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp said in an interview with Axios in November.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp: AI will devastate liberal arts careers. Here’s who he thinks will thrive
Karp recently expanded on his predictions for who is best prepared for the AI era.

“There are basically two ways to know you have a future,” the 58-year-old billionaire said on TBPN on March 12. “One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.” Karp has credited his own dyslexia, a learning disability that can affect reading, writing, and information processing, for Palantir’s success. More broadly, neurodivergence can include conditions such as ADHD and autism.

Karp also predicted large-scale disruption for humanities graduates, Democratic voters, and women.

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the power, economic power [of] vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters, and … so, these disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society,” he told CNBC.

Not every CEO agrees with Karp’s assessment that humanities graduates are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein told Fortune in 2024 the company was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”

McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,” to break out of AI’s linear problem-solving.

Karp has long been an advocate of vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with the chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months.

The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and having “opaque” admissions that “displaced meritocracy and excellence,” in its announcement of the fellowship.

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during a Q2 earnings call last year.

“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to a former police officer who attended junior college, who now manages the U.S. Army’s Maven system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.

“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said.

Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”

He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.”

Karp’s comments come as more employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December and is growing among college graduates. Karp isn’t too worried, though.

“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Jan. 20, 2026.

[elmatador] ‘Take the money and run’: Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke on why the UAE qui...

elmatador — 4/29/2026 12:01:08 PM

‘Take the money and run’: Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke on why the UAE quit OPEC

By Shawn Tully

Senior Editor-at-Large

April 29, 2026, 3:00 AM ET

The decision was shocking. But the announcement April 28 that the United Arab Emirates was leaving OPEC caps years of tension where the desert state chafed under the cartel’s quotas, and recently, encountered severe strain in its relationship with Saudi Arabia, the group’s most potent force by far. Though it had felt strains before, it was the war in Iran that pushed the UAE over the edge.

“The war suddenly made job one for the UAE: ‘Take the money and run,’” says Steve H. Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. “First, OPEC stood partially in the way. Now, the Iran war poses a much bigger danger for a long time to come.”

The UAE didn’t mention the Gulf conflict in its public announcement. Its press release stated: “The decision reflects the UAE’s long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile, including accelerated investment in domestic energy production.” Included was a confirmation that the UAE seeks to lift production beyond OPEC strictures—framed by understatement apparently designed to avoid freaking out the oil market. The UAE pledged to bring “additional production to the market in a gradual and measured manner, aligned with demand and market conditions.”

One observer the move didn’t surprise was Hanke, who served on the UAE’s Financial Advisory Council from 2008 to 2014.

Years earlier, he had developed an economic model that addressed how fast an oil-rich nation should produce assuming different rates of decline in the “real,” or inflation-adjusted, price of crude. That projection specified the rising “discount rates” at which the reserves lost value the longer they stayed in the ground. The faster the projected decline in the dollars a barrel fetched on the world market, the quicker a nation should pump to maximize its profits. Hanke shared his work with the UAE’s economic leaders.

“The system showing those optimal pumping rates made sense to them,” says Hanke. “If you think future prices are going higher, you slow down and wait to produce. If you think they’re going lower, you ramp up fast.”

Starting around 2021, the UAE began pushing hard for a much higher share of OPEC’s output. For Hanke, the reason was obvious: Its Abu Dhabi–based government was increasingly concerned about the rise in green energy that threatened a long-running slide in “real” fossil fuel prices. In fact, sustainable technologies looked so promising to the UAE that it invested heavily in projects ranging from solar farms to sustainable aircraft fuel to low-emission hydrogen. “That led to the strategy of ‘pump like hell today,’” says Hanke.

In that vein, the UAE greatly accelerated its oil investments, and sought to put all that new capacity to work by pressing OPEC to lift its limit around 50% to roughly 5 million barrels per day.

Those demands soured its relations with Saudi Arabia, and the two nations also clashed in their support of warring sides in both Yemen and Sudan. The UAE’s tacit recognition of Somaliland, and its role in moving toward officially recognizing Israel, have further antagonized the Saudis.

The haymaker, however, landed when fellow OPEC member Iran unleashed its drones and missiles on UAE’s oil and gas complex, an offensive that seemed unimaginable before the U.S.-Israeli attacks—even though the Emirates had antagonized Iran by courting both nations, and joining the Abraham Accords in 2020. Iran inflicted severe damage on at least five major UAE facilities, including a drone strike that ignited fires at Ruwais, one of the world’s largest refineries, and another at the key Port of Fujairah oil export hub. While the UAE still manages significant shipments via its pipeline to the Gulf of Oman, the war has crippled its freedom for moving crude and gas from its wells to world markets.

“The problem’s gone from a long-term decline in the real price, to the possibility that in the future, they won’t be able to sell all, or can only sell much less, because Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, or periodically takes out part of its infrastructure,” says Hanke.

The upshot: The UAE’s discount rate soared overnight. The new math dictates that the “present value” of oil produced in the future will be much lower than before the war.

In other words, any opportunity to go, go like hell. “The UAE now has a big incentive to tilt oil production towards the present and away from the future,” says Hanke. Leaving OPEC and its quotas opens that door. This war is full of unforeseen consequences. None bigger than the bombshell on April 28 that this OPEC stalwart for nearly 60 years is bolting.

About the Author

By Shawn TullySenior Editor-at-Large

Shawn Tully is a senior editor-at-large at Fortune, covering the biggest trends in business, aviation, politics, and leadership.

[elmatador] UAE seeks US dollar swap line to ease bank liquidity pressures Key money supply ...

elmatador — 4/28/2026 4:39:00 AM

UAE seeks US dollar swap line to ease bank liquidity pressures
Key money supply measure down sharply since start of Iran war

by John Everington

Despite the swap request, UAE officials emphasise the nation’s financial strength and extensive sovereign wealth fund assets © Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

The United Arab Emirates’ swap line request to the US is aimed at easing liquidity pressures for the country’s banks, say analysts, as the Middle East’s second-largest economy contends with lower dollar receipts due to the Iran conflict.

US President Donald Trump last week said the swap was under consideration, confirming a Wall Street Journal report that the country had inquired about potential financial lifelines, including a currency swap, if the fallout from the conflict worsens.

Azad Zangana, head of GCC macroeconomic analysis at Oxford Economics, said that the request for a swap was an unsurprising move, given the deterioration of the UAE’s monetary base days into the conflict between the US and Israel and Iran.

The Central Bank of the UAE on March 17 became the first regional central bank to launch a liquidity support package for local banks, offering enhanced access to reserve balances up to 30 per cent of the cash reserve requirement and availability of term liquidity facilities in both dirhams and US dollars. Later in the month, the central bank added Dh31bn ($8.4bn) to the local banking system via its contingent liquidity insurance facility amid a sharp drop in liquidity in the system.

The money supply rose in the wake of such measures but has retreated since then, Zangana said in a recent research note.

“As of April 21, [the so-called M0 or broad money supply indicator was] down 2.6 per cent of GDP since the start of the conflict, or 51 per cent on an annualised basis,” he said.

A Gulf-based banking analyst told The Banker that a swap agreement would create “access room” for the CBUAE for the easier supply of US dollars in the banking system, compensating for temporary shortages while trade and tourism in the country remains subdued.

The supply of additional dollars in the system via a swap would be a more affordable option for domestic banks than via other channels, they said, with widening spreads between the three-month EIBOR and SOFR, together with higher credit default swaps on Dubai and Abu Dhabi sovereign debt indicating tighter liquidity and “higher but not prohibitive” repo rates in the local banking system.

“If the [central bank] doesn’t get the swap I am sure they have other resources, [but the] swap is just easier and likely cheaper,” they said.

The CBUAE has been contacted for comment.

Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to Washington, in a statement last week insisted that “any suggestion that the UAE requires external financial backing misreads the facts”.

“The UAE is one of the world’s most financially resilient economies, underpinned by more than $2tn in sovereign investment assets; more than $300bn in foreign currency reserves held by the UAE’s central bank; and a banking sector with approximately $1.5tn in deposits,” he said in a Facebook post.

A senior Gulf-based financial professional told The Banker that the liquidity swap request was likely related to “a technical cash flow [liquidity] issue to avoid selling assets” rather than a sign of hardship.

“The UAE is flush with dollars,” they said, speculating that the request was “probably more political messaging to the US than economic necessity”.

“It’s about building confidence and signalling we are one of the most trusted economies in the world, like Japan and Europe, and the US is putting the UAE in that category,” a person with knowledge of the UAE’s thinking told the FT last week.

[elmatador] US being ‘humiliated’ by Iran, says Germany’s Merz The Trump administration mis...

elmatador — 4/28/2026 2:32:30 AM

US being ‘humiliated’ by Iran, says Germany’s Merz

The Trump administration misjudged the regime in Tehran and “has no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations,” the German chancellor said.

politico.eu

[elmatador] A disturbing message from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: Ukraine will have ...

elmatador — 4/28/2026 2:31:38 AM

A disturbing message from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz:

Ukraine will have to recognize the loss of its territories in order to join the EU.

Other things he said: At some point, Ukraine will sign a ceasefire agreement. It may then turn out that part of Ukraine’s territory will no longer be Ukrainian.

If President Zelensky wants to communicate this to the public and secure majority support, and if a referendum is needed on this issue, he should also tell the people: “I have opened the path to Europe for you.”
Ukraine will not join the EU while the war is ongoing.

He also said that Kyiv must continue fighting corruption.
Zelensky had proposed joining the EU on January 1, 2027. That will not work. Even January 1, 2028 is unrealistic, Merz said.

Source: Reuters

[elmatador] What now for Dubai? Iranian strikes have damaged the hub’s reputation for neutra...

elmatador — 4/27/2026 8:58:23 AM

What now for Dubai?
Iranian strikes have damaged the hub’s reputation for neutrality, business ease and quality of life

by John Everington

Analysts suggest that Dubai’s brand is built on neutrality — a reputation now facing significant tests
A few weeks into the precarious ceasefire in the Middle East war, Dubai is attempting to pick itself up and move on from its worst-ever security crisis.

The emirate has been the pre-eminent target for Iranian attacks against the Gulf states, launched in late February in retaliation for the US-Israeli bombing campaign that has killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, scores of regime figures and thousands of civilians.

Such attacks — which from March 11 explicitly targeted regional economic centres and banks — have dealt a significant blow to Dubai’s service-based economy, and, perhaps more significantly, the emirate’s status as the Middle East’s pre-eminent banking and financial centre.

Since the agreement of a Pakistan-brokered temporary ceasefire by the US, Israel and Iran on April 7 (still in place as The Banker went to press), Dubai has tried to put on a brave face, and attempt to return to normal, with a series of measures designed to support local businesses and attract new investors to the emirate.

Indeed, several financial professionals that left Dubai in the early stages of the crisis have told The Banker they have either returned or intend to return, lured back by the emirate’s attractiveness as an expat destination.

“There are lots of Dubai residents now abroad who want to return because the emirate is their home, while others still see Dubai as a crucial node in the global economy,” says Robert Mogielnicki, founder of Polisphere Advisory and a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute.

“The big question is how resilient the economy will prove to be and what kind of a bounce back there will be on the road to recovery.”

Indeed, the damage done to Dubai’s economy — and its regional and international reputation — should not be underestimated, with images of attacks on the emirate’s airport, luxury hotels and buildings around its financial centre likely to live long in the memory.

Furthermore, the absence of a longer-lasting ceasefire agreement between the conflict’s protagonists at time of writing equates to a far higher risk profile for Dubai for people wanting to do business in the emirate.

Regional leaderThe past two decades have seen Dubai eclipse Bahrain as the region’s pre-eminent banking and financial hub (see box), as well as the primary headquarters location for those looking to do both business in the Middle East and further afield. After a challenging period in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Dubai has steadily risen on the international stage, seen as the ultimate prosperous safe haven in an often turbulent region.

The emirate rose four positions to seventh place in the 39th edition of the Global Financial Centres Index, published by London-based think-tank Z/Yen in March.

The survey put Dubai ahead of other prominent locations such as Seoul, Tokyo and Zurich, and far ahead of its rivals in the region (see table). Respondents, polled ahead of the recent outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, also ranked the emirate as the financial centre growing most in significance, coming in ahead of other hubs including Singapore, Riyadh and Astana.

That safe haven image was shattered shortly after the commencement of hostilities by the US and Israel against Iran on February 28, when Iran launched a series of strikes on Gulf states in retaliation for the killing of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other senior regime figures.

The UAE has been the biggest focus of Iranian attacks in the region, having been targeted by more than 2,800 missiles and drones, close to the combined figure for the remaining five states in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The attacks can be seen as an Iranian response to the increasingly close relationship between Israel and the UAE, following the normalisation of relations between the two countries under the Abraham Accords of 2020.

“From Iran’s point of view, the UAE is the least neutral country in the GCC, having aligned itself so closely with the US and Israel,” says Jim Krane, a lecturer in energy and geopolitics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

“The country has taken a definite stance and has been punished for doing so.”

Read more: “Dubai is just the latest ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’”

Departures and withdrawalsAs arguably the Middle Eastern city with the highest international profile, attacks on Dubai have featured particularly prominently in the international media, with damage sustained at the city’s airport (the busiest in the world), its luxury hotels and residential areas.

Fears intensified after Iran named “ economic centres and banks linked to the US and Zionist regime in the region” as targets on March 11. Damage to buildings in and around the Dubai International Financial Centre in the following days prompted banks and financial institutions across the emirate and the wider Gulf region to introduce working from home protocols.

The attacks prompted panic across Dubai and around much of the rest of the region, as thousands of Dubai and UAE-based residents rushed to leave the country. Data obtained by the Financial Times in early April indicated that 30,000 British residents in the UAE — equivalent to between 10-15 per cent of the prewar, long-term population — had left the country since the start of the conflict.

Those departing included several bankers, as recruitment firms reported an uptick in applications from Dubai-based professionals looking for opportunities in jurisdictions such as the US and Switzerland.

The impact of the crisis, even if the worst has passed, is set to significantly impact both credit and profitability at UAE lenders for the year ahead (see box), with early suggestions that international banks may stand to benefit in the short term.

A Dubai-based management consultant told The Banker that a number of international corporate clients in Dubai had transferred funds held by local lenders to an international bank in the early days of the crisis, in case capital controls were imposed by the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates. A senior executive at a large UAE bank said the withdrawals in the early days of the conflict had been “elevated”.

Such capital controls had not been put in place publicly at time of writing. However, Dubai’s official media office was forced on March 19 to deny claims that it had introduced laws preventing foreign investors from withdrawing their capital, reiterating the UAE’s “firm commitment to policies of economic openness and the free movement of capital”.

A banker at an African group with a presence in Dubai said that banks and clients in the emirate were examining “backups” in Singapore and other jurisdictions outside the region in the case of a long and drawn out conflict.

Read more: “Banks brace for impact”

Keep calm and come back to the beachIn spite of the early panic and departures, much of Dubai’s banking and financial community has remained in place in the emirate.

“Of course there are people that left as soon as the first attacks began, but the vast majority of the population have stayed put,” says Zachary Beckett, a Dubai-based talent partner with recruiter Professional Pyramid.

“It just hasn’t been the case that tons of jobs have suddenly opened up because so many people have left.”

While several Dubai-based professionals had moved their families out of the country for schooling purposes after the government mandated home-based online teaching in the early days of the conflict, the resumption of in-person teaching on April 20 has assuaged such concerns, he said.

Indeed, several bankers and finance professionals who had left Dubai and the UAE prior to the ceasefire agreement of April 8 have subsequently expressed a desire to return.

“The core value prospect of the UAE and Dubai in particular has not really changed much in spite of the recent events,” said the Dubai-based management consultant, who has returned to the city after spending the early part of the conflict abroad.

“When you look at the quality of life, the infrastructure and the public services, and what the government’s done in recent years to make residency more secure, it’s still a very appealing prospect as an expat destination.”

Economic impactYet even if the current ceasefire holds, Dubai’s economy faces a significantly challenging short-term future, with trade, leisure and tourism, transport and financial services (together accounting for more than 60 per cent of the emirate’s economy) all significantly impacted since the start of the conflict.

The coincidence of the conflict with the crucial Easter holiday season has had a devastating impact on the emirate’s tourism and leisure industry; air traffic into Dubai fell by around two-thirds in March, with hotel occupancy at just 20 per cent, compared with normal figures of 70-80 per cent.

Iranian attacks and the ongoing standoff with the US over the vital Strait of Hormuz have impacted the trading volumes of Dubai’s Jebel Ali, the Middle East’s largest container port.

Purchasing Manager Index data for Dubai, compiled by S&P Global, showed that supply chains have been hit in March, with non-oil companies experiencing the greatest lengthening of delivery times since July 2022, and difficulties securing stocks leading to the sharpest decline in input inventories on record.

While the IMF in its World Economic Outlook for April has downgraded its economic forecast for the UAE for 2026 to 3.1 from 5 per cent, other analysts are more pessimistic; Capital Economics predicts each Gulf economy, including the UAE, will see GDP declines of between 5-10 per cent during the year.

Dubai’s authorities have been understandably keen to paint a picture of a city returning to normal since the ceasefire agreement came into effect.

Hadi Badri, CEO of the Dubai Economic Development Corporation, said that domestic spending in Dubai was “only a few percentage points shy” of pre-conflict levels.

“I think the good news is that people have stayed, despite what some tabloids overseas have been saying,” he told delegates at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington DC in mid-April.

“People have stayed, they’ve gone to work, they’ve kept building.”

Such optimistic sentiment has come against a backdrop of dozens of arrests across the emirate and the UAE, with open-source research group Bellingcat accusing authorities of downplaying damage and in some instances not acknowledging successful Iranian drone strikes on the country.

Dubai’s crown prince on March 30 announced Dh1bn ($270mn) worth of economic facilitation ?measures to support local businesses, particularly those within the tourism and hospitality sector, enabling hospitality establishments to defer payment of sales fees on rooms, food and beverages, and related regulatory fees until the end of June.

The financial sector has also seen its share of assistance from local authorities. Following early measures to support the banking industry outlined by the central bank, the DIFC on April 9 announced a package of temporary relief measures to support its business and retail community “as the region emerges from the current environment.”

The Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism on April 13 announced an agreement with HSBC “to further deepen cooperation aimed at attracting international corporates, institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals seeking to establish or expand their presence in the emirate”, with Asian institutions especially targeted.

Despite the physical and reputational damage it has suffered since the end of February, and the attempts in recent years by the likes of Abu Dhabi and Riyadh to boost their standing as financial centres, Dubai’s status as the region’s pre-eminent banking hub is unlikely to be toppled anytime soon.

“The King Abdullah Financial District [in Riyadh] is beginning to fill up but Dubai is still very much in pole position,” says Krane.

“In spite of all the changes we’ve seen in Saudi Arabia in recent years, Dubai is still a far easier place to live and do business, with better connectivity and a greater tolerance and embrace of expatriates.”

Yet with a longer-term ceasefire with Iran and a solution to the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz yet to be agreed at time of writing, the emirate’s regional and international standing has diminished since the start of the conflict, he says, with a battered but emboldened Iran a much more prominent threat.

“Dubai’s brand is built around tolerance, neutrality, freedom of movement,” he says.

“It’s succeeded over the years by staying out of conflicts and remaining friends with everyone, but that’s now no longer the case.”

With additional reporting by Chris Newlands, Kimberley Long, Michael Klimes, Anita Hawser and Aliya Shibli
https://www.thebanker.com/content/1cebb32e-d929-4f91-a085-7b1fd3907a7d

[elmatador] Netflix’s New Stock Buyback Is Bigger Than Its Entire 2026 Content Budget By A...

elmatador — 4/27/2026 5:32:22 AM

Netflix’s New Stock Buyback Is Bigger Than Its Entire 2026 Content Budget

By Andy Meek,

Apr 26, 2026, 03:31pm EDT

Netflix, for years, spent whatever it took to win the streaming wars. Now, in a sign of just how much the streaming giant has matured, it’s gearing up to spend more on buying back its own stock than it will actually shell out this year on creating the TV shows and movies that keep its business humming along.

The streamer has just authorized up to $25 billion in repurchases, a figure that eclipses its entire 2026 content budget of around $20 billion. And the timing here, coming after the company’s aborted $83 billion bid for part of Warner Bros. Discovery, is hard to ignore.

Instead of betting on WBD — the shareholders of which on Thursday approved the company’s $110 billion merger with Paramount Skydance — buying back its own stock means Netflix will instead be betting on itself.

Netflix’s post-streaming wars playbook

The additional $25 billion in share repurchases authorized by Netflix’s board come on top of the company’s December 2024 share repurchase authorization, which still had about $6.8 billion remaining as of the end of March. Also worth noting: With no firm end date for the new or prior authorizations, Netflix has plenty of flexibility on timing here.

Bigger picture, this is also quite a big signal of confidence for a company that once defined itself by outspending rivals on content.

Consider: Netflix has already won the global scale game, its ad tier is becoming increasingly attractive to subscribers, and the days of needing to outspend everyone else are largely over. With no new mega-deal or acquisition on par with WBD, at least not on the immediate horizon, the Netflix stock itself becomes the next obvious place to invest.

After trading around $108 in mid-April, Netflix shares dipped roughly 14% into the low $90’s following its most recent quarterly earnings report — the moment when the company could argue that a massive stock buyback looks like a well-timed bet on itself.

Walking away from the WBD deal is what gave Netflix the extra capital to do so.

“We move forward with $2.8 billion in our pocket that we didn’t have a few weeks ago,” Netflix CFO Spence Neumann said in March at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, referring to the breakup fee that Netflix got from Paramount.

Recent headlines underscore the narrative that Netflix is signaling with the buybacks. Its Q1 2026 earnings beat expectations, with revenue up 16% to $12.25 billion. The underlying business is still throwing off cash, with more than 300 million global subscribers and growth levers like ads and a recently announced price hike.

Netflix’s content slate for the second half of 2026, meanwhile, offers its own indicator of the strength of the business. On tap are a mix of prestige projects, new installments of existing franchises, and a variety of big-budget originals; it’s a lineup that, among other things, is set to include Narnia from Greta Gerwig plus Enola Holmes 3 and a 1950s-set Peaky Blinders series.

The company says it also streamed more than 70 live events during the first quarter — including the World Baseball Classic in Japan, which drew 31.4 million viewers and drove its biggest single-day spike in sign-ups there. BTS’ live-streamed comeback concert on Netflix wasn’t far behind, with 18.4 million global viewers — enough to earn it a presence on the streamer’s Top 10 chart in 80 countries.

© 2026 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

[Broken_Clock] NYT: War in the Middle East nytimes.com Why Iran’s ‘Mosquito Fleet’ Remains a ...

Broken_Clock — 4/20/2026 2:14:59 PM

NYT:

War in the Middle East
nytimes.com

Why Iran’s ‘Mosquito Fleet’ Remains a Potent Threat in the Strait of Hormuz
Although much of the regular Iranian navy is destroyed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps can still deploy small, speedy boats to disrupt shipping.

Listen · 7:52 min

An Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps speedboat and navy ship in the Persian Gulf in 2024. Credit...Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

By Neil MacFarquhar

April 18, 2026
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Iranian warships sunk by U.S. and Israeli attacks litter naval harbors along the Persian Gulf coast, but what is sometimes called a “mosquito fleet” lurks in the shadows.

It is a flotilla of small, fast, agile boats designed to harass shipping, and it forms the heart of the naval forces deployed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a force separate from Iran’s regular navy.

These boats, and especially the missiles and drones that the Guards navy can launch from them, or from camouflaged sites onshore, have been the main threat stymying shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran had vowed to keep the strait closed until there was a cease-fire in Lebanon. On Friday, senior Iranian officials made conflicting statements about whether that truce had prompted Iran to open the strait. On Saturday, Iran’s military said the waterway had “returned to its previous state” and was “under strict management and control of the armed forces.”

Welcoming the initial Iranian announcement of the opening, President Trump pronounced the Hormuz situation “over,” while stressing on social media that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place until a peace deal was reached.

The task of keeping the strait closed would fall to the Guards navy.

“The I.R.G.C. navy works more like a guerrilla force at sea,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on the Guards and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“It is focused on asymmetrical warfare, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he added. “So instead of relying on big warships and classic naval battles, it depends on hit-and-run attacks.”

During the war, at least 20 vessels were attacked, according to the International Maritime Agency, a United Nations agency. The Guards navy rarely claimed the attacks, which analysts said were most likely carried out by drones fired from mobile launchers on land, which generate a faint footprint, difficult to trace.

On April 8, after a two-week cease-fire in the war was announced, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said more than 90 percent of the regular navy’s fleet, including its main warships, sat at the bottom of the ocean.

An estimated half of the Guards navy’s fast attack boats were also sunk, General Caine said, but did not specify how many. Estimates of the overall number range from hundreds to thousands — it is difficult to count them.

The boats are often too small to appear on satellite images, and they are moored along piers within deep caves excavated along the rocky coastline, ready to be deployed in minutes, analysts said. Their arsenal poses a major threat to commercial ships in the gulf and the strait.

“It remains a disruptive force,” said Adm. Gary Roughead, a retired chief of U.S. Naval Operations. “You never quite knew what they were up to and what their intentions were.”

Stepping in where the regular navy couldn’tThe Guards land forces were formed soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did not trust the regular army to protect the new government.

The Guards navy was added around 1986. The regular navy had proved reluctant during the Iran-Iraq war to attack oil tankers from Iraq’s financial backers, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, said Farzin Nadimi, a specialist on the Guards navy at the Washington Institute, a policy think tank in the U.S. capital.

Eventually those attacks ratcheted up, and the United States then deployed warships to escort tankers. One of them, the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, almost sank after hitting an Iranian mine. In a subsequent battle, the U.S. Navy scuppered two Iranian frigates and a number of other naval vessels.

Three years later, the Iranians watched as the United States laid waste to the Iraqi military during the first Persian Gulf war.

That combination of events convinced Iran that it could never prevail in a direct confrontation with the U.S. military, so it developed a stealth force to harass ships in the gulf, Mr. Nadimi said.

The Guards navy has an estimated 50,000 men, he said, and divides its forces into five sectors along the gulf, including some presence on many of the 38 gulf islands that Iran controls.

Overall, it has constructed at least 10 well-hidden, fortified bases for attack boats. One, Farur, is the center of operations for the naval special forces, whose equipment, even their sunglasses, are modeled on their U.S. counterparts.

“The I.R.G.C. navy has always believed that it is at the forefront of the confrontation with the Great Satan, and has been in constant friction with the Americans in the gulf,” Mr. Nadimi said.

An arsenal of small, nimble boatsIran started by using recreational boats mounted with rocket-propelled grenades or machine guns, naval analysts said. Over the years, it built a range of specially designed small boats, as well as miniature submarines and marine drones. Iran claims that some of those boats can reach speeds of more than 100 knots, or 115 miles per hour, experts said.

The Guards navy also recently developed larger, more sophisticated warships, many of which were targeted in the war, said Alex Pape, the chief maritime expert at Janes, a defense analysis firm. Those damaged included its largest drone carrier, the Shahid Bagheri, a converted container ship that could also launch anti-ship missiles.

Image

A satellite image of Iran’s drone ship, known as the Shahid Bagheri, anchored near the Bandar Abbas port in Iran in 2024.Credit...2024 Maxar Technologies

To counter a potential swarm of smaller boats, U.S. warships have high-caliber cannons and other weaponry, experts said. Commercial vessels, though, have no way to fend off such attacks.

But the Iranians have never tested swarm attacks of small boats in combat, said Nicholas Carl, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington.

Since Mr. Trump on Monday imposed a naval blockade on ships traveling from Iranian ports, even the most powerful U.S. warships are avoiding spending any time patrolling in the vicinity of the narrow Strait of Hormuz. There is little room to maneuver and almost no warning time to ward off a drone or a missile fired from nearby, experts said.

The U.S. warships enforcing the blockade are likely to remain outside the strait, in the Gulf of Oman or even farther, in the Arabian Sea, where they can monitor shipping traffic but are far more difficult for the Guards to attack, experts said. On Wednesday, Iran warned that it could expand operations into the Red Sea, another key shipping route in the region, through its proxy force in Yemen.

A long history of confrontationThe Guards navy has long played games of cat-and-mouse with the U.S. military inside the gulf. Admiral Roughead remembers that in the 1990s and 2000s, the small attack craft would approach American warships at high speeds and then veer off when they were half a mile away.

Drone warfare has amplified the danger level, he said. Drones are cheap and sometimes hard to detect, but they can inflict significant damage on a warship costing billions of dollars.

Occasionally the Guards navy has fought directly with American or other forces. In early 2016, it captured two small U.S. naval boats. The 10 sailors, filmed on their knees, were later released unharmed. The episode caused an uproar in the United States.

Image

In this image provided by the U.S. Navy, a Guards navy fast inshore attack craft, a type of speedboat armed with machine guns, neared U.S. naval vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz in 2021.Credit...Navcent Public Affairs/U.S. Navy, via Associated Press

Brig. Gen. Mohammad Nazeri, a founder of the Guards naval special forces, who led that attack, achieved cultlike status in Iran. He inspired a reality show on state television, “The Commander,” which ran for five seasons.

Each season, about 30 contestants competed for the chance to become a naval commando. They demonstrated their survival skills or feats of daring like jumping off cliffs into the gulf. After each round, viewers voted for their favorite “hero.”

From the comments

168

Neil MacFarquhar
International reporter

The Guards navy — having seen that U.S. and Israeli air superiority over the Persian Gulf meant that any visible ships were destroyed or damaged — apparently kept the bulk of its fast, agile, small attack craft hidden in caves in order to fight another day, experts said. It is the missiles and drones that they carry, or that are fired from mobile launchers ashore, that constitute the biggest threat to commercial shipping.

Read all comments

Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.

A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Mosquito Fleet’ of Guards Navy Remains a Potent Threat in the Strait. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (Quds Force)

[elmatador] The Rise of Private Credit A Time Line Michael Milken, he is the primary inspi...

elmatador — 4/19/2026 1:48:39 AM

The Rise of Private Credit A Time Line
Michael Milken, he is the primary inspiration for Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. Milken, known as the "Junk Bond King," was a visionary financier whose 1980s rise and subsequent 1990 conviction for securities fraud heavily influenced media portrayals of greed.

The Man Who Saw the Gap
In the 1970s, a young analyst named Michael Milken was working at a firm called Drexel Burnham Lambert. He noticed something that most people on Wall Street had just accepted as the way things were.

avs431.medium.com

[robert b furman] Hi EL, The first step should be applying a lower tax rate to the interest earne...

robert b furman — 4/17/2026 9:17:12 AM

Hi EL,

The first step should be applying a lower tax rate to the interest earned on Treasueries.

Many Treasury holders have an AGI that gets into the Obama care 4.3 additional tax putting the tax rate up to 41.3% after approx 675,000 AGI.

With interest being paid semi annually and Quarterly tax etimates being due every 3 months, th dirty little secret about Treasury income is almost half of the interest income being paid ends right back into the treasury.

Drop the Obama care surcharge nd big players would be far more inclined to park money in Treasuries.

Obamacare was a complete failure - It sounded nice to lower the cost of health care but in fact it was a huge freebee for low income nonworkers.

The truth about Obamacare is and was: IT WAS A HUGE WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION PROGRAM.

Sadly it did little to nothing when it came to reducing health care epense for the working class.

Then it became a political football by the Biden Administration during Covid to keep the low costs for government employees - many of which had diual incomes up to 150,000 and got beneficial rates similat to those who did not work.

That's where the corruption of lawmakers comes in - BUYING VOTES IN BIG BLOCKS (like what unions create/represent).

Bob

[elmatador] During the 2008 financial crisis, the government still had fiscal room to maneuv...

elmatador — 4/17/2026 2:54:28 AM

During the 2008 financial crisis, the government still had fiscal room to maneuver. But a U.S. public debt crisis does not offer such luxury.

WHAT WERE THE LUXURIES IN 2008?

- They included massive bank bailouts (TARP),

- Fed's extraordinary liquidity injections,

- Rescue of major financial institutions, and

- Government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

[elmatador] Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warns U.S. needs an emergency ‘break-the...

elmatador — 4/17/2026 2:06:01 AM

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warns U.S. needs an emergency ‘break-the-glass’ plan if Treasury demand collapses

The plan should be ‘ready to go’ for ‘when we hit the wall,’ Paulson said

By Frances Yue

Last Updated: April 17, 2026 at 12:11 a.m. ET
First Published: April 16, 2026 at 4:39 p.m. ET

Henry Paulson said a crisis in the Treasury market now would differ in a crucial way from the 2008 financial meltdown.

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Thursday urged U.S. policymakers to prepare an emergency plan in case demand for Treasurys breaks down — warning that a crisis in the government bond market could trigger severe consequences across the economy.

“We need an emergency break-the-glass plan which is targeted and short term on the shelf, so it’s ready to go when we hit the wall,” Paulson said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Wall Street Week on Thursday.

Paulson’s warning comes as investors grow increasingly concerned about the waning appeal of U.S. Treasury debt. Persistent deficits, heavy debt issuance and inflation worries have weighed on longer-term government bonds recently.

Paulson said a crisis in the Treasury market would differ in a crucial way from the 2008 financial meltdown, when the U.S. government still had enough fiscal capacity to step in and contain the damage. This time, instead of centering around the private sector, a Treasury crisis could hamper the government’s ability to finance itself.

In 2008, “as bad as it was,” the government had fiscal firepower to address the credit meltdown,” Paulson noted. “You can come in and clean up the mess.”

Nevertheless, in a public-debt crisis, “when you hit the wall and you’re trying to issue Treasurys, and the Fed is the only buyer and the prices of the Treasurys are going down and interest rates are up, that’s a dangerous thing.”

In other words, if demand for Treasurys drops significantly, investors may ask for higher yields before buying more. That would make it more expensive for the government to borrow, and those bigger interest payments would make the deficit even larger, which gives investors another reason to worry.

Still, Paulson said it’s hard for him to predict a timeline regarding when such a crisis might eventually happen.

“People say, ‘When are you going to hit the wall?’ I obviously don’t know — it’s impossible to know,” he told Bloomberg. “When we hit it, it will be vicious, so we have to prepare for that eventuality.”

In a statement Thursday night, the Paulson Institute clarified that Paulson was “clear that his concerns about the debt were not immediate and that he believed the U.S. economy remains the most resilient major economy in the world and is most able to withstand the uncertainty, including the impact of the war in Iran. He also noted that the dollar is indeed stronger in the wake of the current situation.”

Copyright © 2026 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.

[elmatador] Private credit firms are increasingly financing AI data centers, with major deal...

elmatador — 4/16/2026 4:25:54 AM

Private credit firms are increasingly financing AI data centers, with major deals including a $29 billion+ facility for Meta's Hyperion campus (led by Blue Owl and PIMCO) and a $12 billion+ package for xAI. These deals utilize special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to keep debt off main balance sheets while funding massive infrastructure, often led by firms like Blue Owl, Apollo, and KKR

Highly leveraged companies use off-balance sheet financing to attract lenders and investors.

Keeping debt off the main balance sheet when funding massive infrastructure—typically achieved through project finance and Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs)—provides benefits primarily by isolating risk, preserving the financial capacity of the sponsoring entity (government or corporate), and improving key financial metrics. By creating a separate legal entity for the project, the debt is serviced by the infrastructure’s cash flows rather than the sponsor's general revenue.

keeping debt off the main balance sheet—often through project finance, Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), or joint ventures—significantly impacts a company's share price, generally by improving reported financial ratios and reducing perceived risk, which can drive the stock price higher. However, if investors perceive this as a way to hide excessive risk or liabilities, it can damage credibility and lower the share price.

Five debt hotspots in the AI data centre boom

By Lucy Raitano
December 12, 20252:13 PM GMT+3Updated December 12, 2025

Summary

AI data centre debt issuance surges in several markets
More supply expected in 2026 and beyond
Market watchers note risks, AI bubble fears persist

LONDON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - As AI fever has propelled global stocks to record highs, the data centres needed to power the technology are increasingly being financed with debt, adding to concerns about the risks.
A UBS report last month said AI data centre and project financing deals surged to $125 billion so far this year, from $15 billion in the same period in 2024, with more supply from the sector expected to be pivotal for credit markets in 2026.
"Public and private credit seems to have become a major source of funding for AI investments, and its rapid growth raised some concerns," said Anton Dombrovskiy, fixed income portfolio specialist at T. Rowe Price.
"Although up until now an increase in supply has been met with relatively healthy demand, this is the area to watch especially taking into account large financing needs estimates," Dombrovskiy added.
The Bank of England warned last week that the growing role of debt in the AI infrastructure boom could heighten potential financial stability risks if valuations correct.
Christopher Kramer, portfolio manager and senior trader on the investment grade credit team at Neuberger told Reuters that the market has seen a structural shift as the largest technology companies finance their AI infrastructure ambitions.

"They really haven't been focal points in our market from a debt issuance standpoint, and that's obviously shifting really dramatically ... anytime you have that, it creates a lot of opportunity," he said on November 28.
"We're excited just from the standpoint that the market's changing. You're going to have a different dynamic, it creates an opportunity to take risks and create value for our investors," Kramer added.
Here are five charts that show how debt is increasingly funding AI's race for space.
1) ORACLE: CDS SPIKE REFLECTS INVESTOR CONCERN
Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab shares fell almost 11% on Thursday, their biggest one-day drop since January, sparking a broader tech selloff as its massive spending and weak forecasts fanned doubts over how quickly big bets on AI will pay off.
Tech executives, whose companies long depended on strong cash flows to fund spending on new initiatives, have said the outlays are necessary for a technology that will transform work and make businesses more efficient, arguing the bigger risk is underinvesting, not overspending.

At their peak in September, Oracle shares had almost doubled in value year-to-date on the back of a $300 billion deal with OpenAI. But they have since fallen 42%.
In September, U.S. credit rating agency Moody's flagged several potential risks in Oracle's new contracts, but stopped short of taking any ratings action.
Oracle's debt levels have been a focal point for investors, against a broader backdrop of more AI debt issuance and its credit default swaps(CDS), a form of insurance against default, closed Thursday at their highest level since 2009, according to data from S&P Global.
Boaz Weinstein's Saba Capital Management sold credit derivatives in recent months to lenders seeking protection on the likes of Oracle and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Reuters reported last month.

Performance of Oracle shares versus its five-year CDS since December 2024 in percentage terms

2) AI INVESTMENT GRADE BORROWING SURGES
The investment grade (IG) debt market has seen a huge influx of tech issuance in recent months. Mega deals in September and October included $18 billion from Oracle and $30 billion from Meta. Google owner Alphabet also announced new borrowing.

JP Morgan estimates AI-linked companies account for 14% of its investment grade index, surpassing U.S. banks as the dominant sector.
But Big Tech deals still only account for a fraction of the nearly $1.6 trillion in U.S. IG debt issues expected in 2025.

A grouped bar chart, showing a breakdown in YTD tech bond issuance for the past three years, across a range of U.S. debt markets

3) MORE AI-RELATED 'HIGH YIELD' BONDS
There has also been AI-linked issuance in the high-yield debt market, where issuers have lower credit ratings yet investors are offered higher returns.

Overall, junk tech bond issuance is at a record high, data from Dealogic shows.
Al Cattermole, fixed income portfolio manager and senior analyst at Mirabaud Asset Management, said that as of November 25, his team had not invested in any of the AI-linked IG or high-yield bonds that had recently hit the market.
"Until we see data centres being delivered on time and on budget and providing the computing power that they are intended to - and there still being the demand for it - it is untested," Cattermole told Reuters.
"And because it's untested, that's why I think you need to be compensated like an equity ... not debt," he added.

A step bar chart showing the annual issuance of high yield tech junk bonds from 1995-2025, showing a spike in late 2025 on par with 2021's peak

4) PRIVATE CREDIT'S INCREASING ROLE IN AI FUNDING
Private credit - extended by the likes of investment firms, rather than banks - is also funding AI data centres.
UBS estimates private credit AI loans may have nearly doubled in the 12 months through early 2025.
Morgan Stanley estimates private credit markets could supply over half the $1.5 trillion needed for the data centre build out until 2028.

Pie chart showing a breakdown of Morgan Stanley estimates for how the global data centre buildout will be financed, as they identify an $800 billion private credit opportunity.

5) ABS MAKEOVER?
Securitised products, such as asset-backed securities (ABS), will also help fund AI industry growth, says Morgan Stanley.

They bundle together illiquid assets such as loans, credit card debt, or - in AI context - rent payable to a data centre owner by a Big Tech tenant, into a tradable security.

While digital infrastructure accounts for just 5%, or $82 billion, of the roughly $1.6 trillion U.S. ABS market, BofA notes it has expanded more than nine fold in less than five years. It estimates that data centres backed 63% of that market, which it expects to add $50-$60 billion in supply in 2026.
ABS are viewed with caution since the 2008 crisis when billions of dollars worth of products turned out to be backed by soured loans and highly illiquid and complex assets.

A stacked bar chart showing a breakdown of the U.S. ABS digital infrastrucure securitised product market.
Reporting by Lucy Raitano; Editing by Amanda Cooper, Dhara Ranasinghe and Alexander Smith

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

[elmatador] Donald Trump’s push to cut US rates akin to ‘banana republic’, says Janet Yellen...

elmatador — 4/16/2026 4:03:44 AM

Donald Trump’s push to cut US rates akin to ‘banana republic’, says Janet Yellen
Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh will lack ‘credibility’ in arguing rates should fall, says former Treasury secretary

Arjun Neil Alim in Hong Kong and Claire Jones in Washington

Published April 15 2026

Donald Trump’s aggressive campaign for lower interest rates in order to reduce the cost of US debt is the rhetoric of a “banana republic”, said former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.

Speaking at HSBC’s Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong, Yellen sounded the alarm on monetary policy independence, saying she had “never seen a threat of this level to the Fed before”.

“How often does the president of a developed country express the view that the interest rate should be set to reduce the debt service cost?” she said. “This is what you hear in a banana republic.”

Managing interest rates for the sake of the government budget, she said, had led to “hyperinflation” in such countries.

The US president has spent much of his second term attacking the Fed for its refusal to slash borrowing costs, labelling Yellen’s replacement as chair, Jay Powell, a “numbskull”, “moron” and “too late”.

Yellen was Treasury secretary during the Biden administration.

She predicted that Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, would struggle to establish “credibility” with colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee if he argued that productivity gains from artificial intelligence justified lower interest rates.

Alongside other members of the administration, Warsh has compared the current macroeconomic moment to the 1990s, when Alan Greenspan, then the Fed chair, gambled on holding rates steady amid a productivity boost from the emerging IT sector.

“[Greenspan] looked at evidence in a different way than many economists do. But I think he was very much respected for his economic expertise on the FOMC. And people listened to what he said very respectfully and took it seriously.”

“I don’t think that Warsh walks in with that level of credibility,” said Yellen, who participated in those debates as a Fed board governor from 1994 to 1997.

Posts on Trump’s Truth Social platform have linked lower short-term borrowing costs to lower debt repayments for the US government. He

“Our Fed Rate is AT LEAST 3 Points too high,” he posted in July. ‘Too Late’ is costing the U.S. 360 Billion Dollars a Point, PER YEAR, in refinancing costs. No Inflation, COMPANIES POURING INTO AMERICA. ‘The hottest Country in the World!’ LOWER THE RATE!!!”

Yellen cast doubt on the argument that AI-driven productivity gains would immediately damp US inflation, which is rising sharply after energy prices soared due to the US and Israel’s war in Iran.

“I really don’t see the FOMC accepting this in the short run. First of all, because the evidence isn’t clear.”

“And second of all because we can all see the surge in investment spending, consumer spending, our portfolios have been [boosted] by equity price increases and we’re really not seeing much disinflationary impact.”

While the Fed cut its benchmark federal funds rate three times last year, the current target range of 3.5-3.75 per cent is well above the 1 per cent Trump wants.

His attacks on the Fed have raised concerns among economists that the capacity of the world’s most important central bank to set interest rates free from political pressure is under threat.

Yellen said that despite concerns about inflation she expected the Fed to announce one interest rate cut by the end of the year.

“My guess would be that maybe there would be a cut later in the year. I think that’s entirely possible, maybe the main scenario.”

[elmatador] Using the Iranian war to syphon money. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed ...

elmatador — 4/16/2026 3:00:58 AM

Using the Iranian war to syphon money. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the Pentagon would ask Congress for more money to wage war in Iran, though he said the reported $200 billion figure "could move."
Once these $200 billion were announced everybody wants a piece of the action.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the Pentagon would ask Congress for more money to wage war in Iran, though he said the reported $200 billion figure "could move."

If the US had closed a quick deal with the Iranians last week there would be no sense of urgency for Congress to approve these $200 billion.

In order to get that money the conflict needed to continue.

But that can't go on for much longer.

Besides those $200 billion is a very inflated number

By the End of the Week, the Trump Administration’s War in Iran Will Likely Have Cost $25 Billion

Based on a combination of official cost tallies and estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Iran war’s cost has likely surpassed $20 billion already and will likely surpass $25 billion by the end of this week.

Reporting indicates that the White House is likely seeking supplemental appropriations that would provide more than $200 billion in additional funding—a request that cannot be justified on budgetary grounds.

americanprogress.org

[elmatador] Saudi Fund to Back Away From LIV Golf Under Mounting Financial Pressures The Sau...

elmatador — 4/16/2026 2:47:39 AM

Saudi Fund to Back Away From LIV Golf Under Mounting Financial Pressures
The Saudi league, established in 2022, attracted some of the sport’s biggest stars with huge contracts.

By Lauren Hirsch Vivian Nereim and Alan Blinder

April 15, 2026

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is on the verge of announcing it will withdraw financial support from LIV Golf, the upstart golf circuit it launched four years ago to compete with the PGA Tour, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The Saudi league splashed into professional golf in 2022, attracting some of the sport’s biggest stars with contracts that exceeded — by tens of millions of dollars — their career earnings with more established circuits like the American-run PGA Tour.

The move comes as Saudi Arabia’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund announced a new five-year strategy on Wednesday, with the fund’s governor saying it would slow down some of its biggest projects as it focuses on “increasing the efficiency of investments.”

Saudi officials have said that the oil-rich kingdom is re-evaluating its priorities amid mounting financial pressures, including the cost of its pledges to host the World Expo in 2030 and the men’s soccer World Cup in 2034.

Image

On Wednesday, Sergio Garcia, a LIV player who won the Masters Tournament in 2017, suggested the league’s athletes were in the dark about its fate, even as speculation swirled online about its future.

Mr. Garcia said the wealth fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, had assured players that LIV was part of a broader, long-term effort. “Honestly, we haven’t heard anything other than what Yasir told us at the beginning of the year,” Mr. Garcia said at a news conference in Mexico on the eve of a LIV tournament there.

“Honestly, you know how these rumors are,” Mr. Garcia said. “There are always a lot of them. And I can’t tell you anything more than what we already know.”

The kingdom’s wealth fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The fund’s head, Mr. al-Rumayyan, said that the new strategy represents a “natural progression” of the fund’s path as it enters its second decade as a global investment powerhouse. The fund’s board had asked executives to look through their plans with an eye for “what’s must-have, and what’s good to have,” he said.

“There needed to be a reconsideration of the timing of some investments,” Mr. al-Rumayyan said, speaking during a news conference in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital.

The fund, called the Public Investment Fund, has become a major source of capital around the world in recent years, with eye-catching investments in Uber, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and sports franchises like the English Premier League soccer team Newcastle United. It has poured money into the breakaway golf league and invested at least $2 billion in a fund run by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.

The wealth fund is also one of three Gulf Arab sovereign wealth funds contributing a total of $24 billion to finance Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Mr. al-Rumayyan with President Donald J. Trump at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, NJ, in 2022.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The fund was also a key locus of power for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as he rose to become de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. In one of his first moves after his father was appointed king in 2015, the then 29-year-old prince began to turn the fund — at the time a staid domestic entity — into a sovereign wealth vehicle capable of making momentous international bets.

In the early years of his rise, the prince led both Saudi Arabia and the sovereign fund on high-risk undertakings. The fund invested heavily in Magic Leap — an augmented reality company that has since floundered — and it made a major investment in Lucid, an American electric vehicle company.

In 2017, Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank, declared that he had raised “$1 billion per minute” during a conversation with Prince Mohammed, for a total of $45 billion. The fund that money was invested into proved to be highly volatile, although it has made up for its staggering losses in recent years.

The assets managed by the PIF grew enormously during its first decade — up from an initial $150 billion. But much of that growth came through moving other state-owned assets under the fund’s umbrella, centralizing the kingdom’s wealth.

Cloaked in vague corporate language and short on details, the fund’s new, five-year strategy nonetheless reflects an important shift in Saudi Arabia’s trajectory under Prince Mohammed, now 40.

In his early years, the prince compared himself to technology “disrupters” like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who pledged to “move fast and break things.” He spearheaded a disastrous military intervention in Yemen and oversaw an episode in which the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, was effectively held hostage in Riyadh and pressured to resign. In 2018, the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by government agents in Istanbul sparked global outcry.

But in recent years, the prince has refashioned himself as a mediator and diplomat, while pulling back on some of the flashiest elements of his plans to overhaul Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy.

The shift in the sovereign fund’s strategy will have a particularly noticeable effect on Neom, the science fiction-inspired region that the prince had planned to build along the kingdom’s Red Sea coast. There, officials had been working on plans that included a mountain ski resort and a linear metropolis composed entirely of two parallel skyscrapers. But many of those projects have since been scaled back or delayed as Neom — the sovereign fund’s largest project by far — ran over costs.

Neom is now focused on “controlled and gradual execution,” with its various projects rescheduled and prioritized according to their “commercial feasibility,” Mr. al-Rumayyan said. The first piece of Neom to be delivered will be an industrial city called Oxagon with a port and renewable energy facilities, he added.

Other key areas of focus for the kingdom in coming years will be investing in artificial intelligence and delivering on plans to host the World Expo in 2030 and the World Cup in 2034, Mr. al-Rumayyan said. Those projects were considered “critical” and have been prioritized over others, he said.

Asked about the impact that the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran will have on the fund, he said he did not see a large, long-term effect from the war.

Still, he warned of the “negative effects” the conflict will have across the globe as the prices of energy, fertilizer and computer chips all increase.

Lauren Hirsch is a Times reporter who covers deals and dealmakers in Wall Street and Washington.

Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.

A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2026, Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Saudi Fund to Back Away From LIV as Financial Pressures Mount.

[elmatador] Not to worry, the end of the war is just a formality. Deal prospects: The Trum...

elmatador — 4/16/2026 1:38:43 AM

Not to worry, the end of the war is just a formality.

Deal prospects: The Trump administration feels “good about prospects of a deal” with Iran, the White House said, noting that a potential second round of talks would likely be held in Pakistan. Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran remains committed to promoting peace after meeting Pakistan’s military chief — a key intermediary.

The US blockade is in place just for the military men get a quick buck in the form of additional pay and tax benefits when deployed to or near a designated war zone or area of imminent danger.

• US blockade: Iran’s military has threatened shipping in the Red Sea if the US continues its blockade of Iranian ports. The US Central Command said the blockade had “completely halted” Tehran’s economic sea trade, while Iranian media reported four vessels had traveled to and from the country.

[elmatador] But the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both ...

elmatador — 4/15/2026 9:00:47 AM

But the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.

It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment—a trend that should be welcomed and encouraged. In fact, President Trump’s ability to unite the Arab world at Sharm el-Sheikh in pursuit of peace and normalization will allow the United States to finally prioritize American interests

the above is from the

National Security Strategy of the United States of America

November 2025
whitehouse.gov

How did the Trump administration changed its strategy to end up where it is today?

China and Russia might be asking:
If the US is the biggest economic and military power, how can it be manipulated to change its policies?

Or has the US become the big guy who is on call to break a thumb of the guy the Cappo dislikes?

[elmatador] Putin pushing for a bombers' base in Indonesia. The US pushed back with a Defens...

elmatador — 4/14/2026 2:23:03 AM

Putin pushing for a bombers' base in Indonesia. The US pushed back with a Defense Partnership

Targets a 12 Percent Increase in Cooperation between Indonesia and Russia
14 April 2026, 08:06
voi.id

Russia Sends Strike Submarine to Indonesia Amid Bomber Base Plans
Apr 03, 2026 10:30
2 min read
united24media.com

The US reaction

Hegseth, Indonesian Counterpart Announce Defense Partnership
April 13, 2026 | By Matthew Olay, Pentagon News |

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth welcomed his Indonesian counterpart — Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin — to the Pentagon today, where the two men announced the establishment of the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership between the two countries.

war.gov

[elmatador] How did Iran do to close the Strait? Used fast attack boats and drones to swarm...

elmatador — 4/13/2026 5:09:27 AM

How did Iran do to close the Strait?

Used fast attack boats and drones to swarm ships and threatening to destroy any vessel that does not follow their directives.

Deployed naval mines to render the channel hazardous.

Charge some vessels to pass through, effectively controlling traffic through its territorial waters.
Targeted Attacks: Launching attacks against oil tankers and cargo vessels to halt traffic.

What the US will do?

How Would a Blockade of the Strait of Hormuz Work? Here Are Some

Possibilities

The goal of the naval operation ordered by President Trump is to deny Iran the revenues it needs to fund its military, but there are many unknowns.

By Ephrat Livni

Published April 12, 2026Updated April 13, 2026, 1:27 a.m. ET

After weekend peace talks in Pakistan between the United States and Iran ended with no agreement, President Trump on Sunday said the U.S. Navy would impose a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping waterway that Iran has mostly choked off since the war began in late February.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Mr. Trump said in a post on social media. “At some point, we will reach an ‘ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO IN, ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO OUT’ basis.”

The statement came as traffic in the strait, through which a major portion of the world’s seaborne oil and natural gas passes, has ground to a practical halt for more than a month amid Iranian strikes on commercial vessels in the region.

While Iran has allowed some ships to pass through the waterway — possibly for a fee — it has used control over the strait, including threats that it has been mined, to disrupt the global economy and to pressure the Trump administration.

The United States Central Command, known as CENTCOM, said on Sunday that a blockade would be enforced “impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.”

Here’s what to know about the U.S. plan for a blockade.

How might it be enforced?
American forces will not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the strait to and from non-Iranian ports, CENTCOM said. The blockade will begin Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, it said.

Parties at war can exercise the right of “visit and search,” meaning that they can stop and inspect even private vessels in waters that are not neutral and decide whether or not they may pass, said James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at the U.S. Naval War College and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

A U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would mean that any ship that attempts to transit the waterway would have to submit to a search if asked to do so and U.S. forces would be able to determine whether or not to allow it to proceed, he said.

Such a blockade could inflict economic damage on Iran that would undermine its ability to keep fighting over the long term by denying it the ability to export oil and earn revenue. But it could also leave countries that rely on Iranian oil, like China, in a bind, Mr. Kraska said.

But there still may be mines in the strait and Iran maintains the ability to fire missiles and drones, Mr. Kraska noted.

What would a blockade mean for Iran?
A U.S. blockade on Iranian ports would quite likely mean that Iranian vessels, which have been able to transit the Strait of Hormuz amid the war, would no longer be able to do so and that other ships that have been stuck at port or at sea could begin to move supplies in and out through this route.

This would be a reversal of the U.S. approach so far. Even as the United States has been attacking Iran, American officials have taken steps that enabled Iranian oil to flow to limit pressure on energy prices around the world.

Last month, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said that the United States was allowing Iranian oil tankers to traverse the strait to keep up global supplies. The United States also temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil at sea, allowing it to be sold to most countries, including the United States, for a month.

Some economic analysts have called on the United States to block the flow of Iranian oil as a means to end its effective control of the strait.

Robin J. Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has argued that Iran’s dependence on oil exports means it will not be able to afford to keep attacking ships once its own economy takes a hit. On Sunday, he said in a post on social media that a blockade “collapses Iran’s business model.”

But Iranian officials, who have been keenly aware of the pressure on Mr. Trump as a result of spikes in energy prices, appear unconcerned. In a post on social media on Sunday, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and the country’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote: “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4–$5 gas.”

What would the consequences be for the world?
Normally about 150 vessels transit through the Strait of Hormuz daily. In March, a little more than 150 passed through the waterway all month, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Those that did transit had made arrangements with the Iranian authorities and may have paid a toll or fee for passage, shipping intelligence firms have reported.

The halt in traffic has led to a spike in oil prices. If an American blockade on ships to and from Iran leads to freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the waterway with oil from Persian Gulf countries, it could mean lower prices, though how quickly that could happen is not clear.

Mr. Trump said on Sunday that “any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!”

But much remains unclear. Whether vessel operators will run the risk of transiting the strait at this point could depend on how Iran responds to the blockade. And whether the United States will be able to control vessel passage is also an open question.

After CENTCOM announced that it would not impede freedom of navigation for vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports, vessel trackers expressed doubts about enforcement, pointing to tricks ships have used, like changing their identification data, to evade notice.

“This will get tricky as a number of Iran-linked tankers make bogus port calls in Saudi Arabia and Iraq with the help of AIS spoofing,” the company Tanker Trackers posted, referring to Automatic Identification Systems. “Good luck with that, CENTCOM.”

A retired Navy admiral, James Stavridis, welcomed the blockade announcement a post on social media on Sunday. “In recent days,” he wrote, “the ONLY people benefiting from Gulf transit were the Iranians,” He said that the United States and its allies “are no worse off than we were after the Iranians started holding the Strait hostage.”

Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering breaking news around the world. She is based in Washington.

[elmatador] Why Iran is fighting with its own economic warfare. Secretary of Treasury Scot...

elmatador — 4/12/2026 3:07:55 AM

Why Iran is fighting with its own economic warfare.

Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent

“We created a dollar shortage in the country ... with a grand culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under, there was a run on the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street," Bessent stated.

Before the war broke out, Iran was already in a full-blown economic emergency. The Statistical Centre of Iran put year-on-year inflation at 68.1% in February — the highest since World War II — while the Central Bank of Iran reported a slightly lower rate of 62.2%.

This underscores why the frozen assets are a key demand in the ongoing negotiations.

President Trump caused Iran hardening its position

For example, after reaching an interim nuclear deal in 2014 with the US, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, Iran was allowed to repatriate $4.2 billion (€3.6bn) in oil revenues held abroad.

In 2015, the same countries finalised the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in which Iran agreed to significantly reduce its nuclear programme, allow foreign observers to inspect its nuclear sites and, in exchange, regained access to more than $100 billion (€86.5bn) in frozen assets.

However, during his first term in 2018, US President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed wide-ranging US sanctions, effectively re-freezing Iran’s assets abroad

That explains why the Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, are not helping the US.

euronews.com

[elmatador] Ukraine, Russia move towards potential peace deal, Bloomberg reports By Reuters...

elmatador — 4/10/2026 10:29:12 AM

Ukraine, Russia move towards potential peace deal, Bloomberg reports

By Reuters
April 10, 20263:00 PM GMT+3Updated 2 hours ago

Chief of the Military Intelligence of Ukraine Kyrylo Budanov meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, in this handout picture released January 2, 2026. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

KYIV, April 10 (Reuters) - Ukraine and Russia are moving towards a potential deal to end the war, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing the top aide to Ukrainian ?President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Kyrylo Budanov, a former head of Ukraine's military intelligence, ?said that he saw progress towards a deal, but declined to say what a potential compromise on territory, a key stumbling block, would look like.

"No final decision has been made ?yet," he said, according to the report. "But, in principle, everyone now clearly ?understands the limits of what is acceptable. That’s enormous progress."

"They all ?understand the war needs to end. That’s why they are negotiating,” Budanov ?said in an interview with Bloomberg on April 4. “I don’t think it will be ?long.”
Budanov was appointed head of Zelenskiy's office in January and has become a key Ukrainian negotiator during U.S.-brokered talks between Kyiv and Moscow.
The only tangible outcome from several rounds of talks ?this year was the exchange of prisoners of war. In the latest exchange ?in March, Ukraine and Russia swapped 500 POWs.
Another prisoner swap was possible ahead of the ?Orthodox ?Easter this weekend, Ukrainian officials said.

RUSSIA, UKRAINE AGREE TO EASTER CEASEFIRE
Russia announced a 32-hour ceasefire over two days for Orthodox Easter, and Ukraine agreed to reciprocate that.
The Kremlin said the ceasefire would be in effect from Saturday at 4 p.m. (1300 GMT) ?to midnight (2100 GMT) ?on Sunday.
Budanov said ?that Kyiv and Moscow maintained “maximalist” positions in the talks so far, but believed the positions would be closer in the ?search for a compromise.
Russia demands that Ukraine withdraw from parts ?of Donbas ?that Kyiv still controls. Ukraine refuses to do so.
Zelenskiy has said that, given a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran in the Middle East, a new trilateral meeting ?of ?negotiating teams could take place soon.
He said that the ?spring and summer months would be difficult for Ukraine as it would face pressure on the battlefield ?and also diplomatically to end the war.

Reporting by Olena Harmash; Editing by Alex Richardson

© 2026 Reuters. All rights reserved

[elmatador] How do you do a sales pitch for defense spending? Creating a war ! Start with ...

elmatador — 4/8/2026 3:26:31 AM

How do you do a sales pitch for defense spending? Creating a war !

Start with the bill that sent Elon Musk away. The One Big Beautiful Bill. The FY2026 defense budget totaled $1 trillion through a combination of $838.7 billion in the defense appropriations act and an additional $150 billion as part of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill signed last summer.

What was the sales pitch for last Summer? It was called Operation Midnight Hammer.

But the military wanted more! This year's sales pitch is for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY2027. It is called Operation Epic Fury.

They do this right under the eyes of the American tax payers !

The White House released its fiscal 2027 budget blueprint Friday with a record 44% increase in defense spending.

The $1.5 trillion request for 2027 builds on the record $1 trillion for 2026 and includes a pay boost of 7% for all military personnel ranked E-5 and below, 6% for E-6 to O-3 and 5% for O-4 and above.

ngaus.org

[elmatador] The U.S. defense Gravy Train: Personnel-related costs are about 25–35% of the co...

elmatador — 4/6/2026 2:39:47 AM

The U.S. defense Gravy Train: Personnel-related costs are about 25–35% of the core defense budget.
Military personnel (active + reserve pay & benefits): ~20–25%
Civilian personnel: ~5–10%

Part of this personnel-related money go to pay Kenyan and Indian contractors working for V2X Inc in Iraq to support Iraq’s F-16 fighter jet program across many locations in the country, one of the firm’s staff members told The Guardian. And they can't leave else V2X loses its contract to support F-16 fighter jets.

A large share of those contractors -they can outnumber the U.S. troops- are neither American nor local nationals. As these contractors are hired through subcontracting chains, you can be sure that there are retired U.S. personnel making a lot of money handling these contractors. I can them the Gatos

The more bases the U.S. has, the more contractors are needed and the more money the gatos, who recruit and handle these foreign contractors, make.

Iran hitting these bases is a way to force the U.S. to close these bases in the region.

Iranian strikes on military bases used by the US in the Middle East caused about $800m (£600m) in damage in the first two weeks of the war, a new analysis shows.

"The damage to US bases in the region has been underreported," said Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser and co-author of the think tank study. "Although that appears to be extensive, the full amount won't be known until more information is available."

For satellite images of destruction are not being shown

But V2X is hiring for the base Irfjan right now
https://careers.gov2x.com/why-gov2x/jobs?location=Middle%20East&stretch=10&stretchUnit=MILES&page=1

[elmatador] White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion (or 4.5% of the US GDP) for Defense in New Budge...

elmatador — 4/6/2026 2:02:08 AM

White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion (or 4.5% of the US GDP) for Defense in New Budget Request

The huge proposed increase would be partly offset by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the Trump administration describes as wasteful.

By Tony Romm

Reporting from Washington

April 3, 2026

See more of our coverage in your search results.Add The New York Times on Google

With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House asked Congress on Friday to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history.

The request, which arrived as part of President Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40 percent increase from what the United States spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration coupled the proposal with a call for $73 billion in cuts spread across many domestic agencies, including the elimination of key federal health, housing and education programs, some of which serve minority groups and the poor.

The ideas sum to a fiscal blueprint that could add trillions of dollars to the brimming federal debt, if Congress opts to translate the president’s full vision into law without other changes to the nation’s balance sheet. But such an outcome seemed highly unlikely, given that Republicans united with Democrats only months earlier to reject the president’s last proposal for dramatic spending cuts.

This year, Mr. Trump urged Congress to approve most of the new defense money — more than $1.1 trillion — as part of its regular work to fund the government and to enact the remaining $350 billion using the same special legislative tactic that allowed Republicans to clinch their tax cuts in 2025. Such a move could also enable G.O.P. leaders to boost funding for the president’s mass deportations despite Democrats’ objections.

In the days before releasing his plan, the president and his aides framed the proposed increase for defense in urgent terms, citing a need to restock munitions and other supplies as the war with Iran continued. At one point, Mr. Trump indicated at a private lunch that military spending needed to be a national priority, even at the expense of federal safety-net programs and other government aid.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.” He added that the focus had to be “military protection.”

But Democrats and Republicans have recently expressed a shared unease about raising military spending to the extent that Mr. Trump has suggested, fretting that the administration had failed to keep them updated about the status of the Iran war, which is now in its fifth week.

Nor have lawmakers always responded favorably to some of the president’s proposed cuts for agencies and programs that serve millions of American families and businesses. Still, the White House asked Congress on Friday to slash domestic spending by about 10 percent, targeting core government services, including money meant to respond to natural disasters, train new teachers, root out tax fraud, research cures for diseases and develop clean energy technology.

Some of the most severe cuts would reduce or eliminate funding that benefits minority groups and their communities, under the presumption that the spending — meant to expand access to lending, bolster minority-owned businesses and combat housing discrimination — is “woke,” “weaponized” or facilitates “cultural Marxism.” So, too, did the administration aim to scrap money designed to reduce racial disparities in health and those supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Other funds targeted by Mr. Trump extend critical assistance to the poor, including federal aid that helps Americans afford their heating and cooling bills, which the president seeks to eliminate. And in the wake of two shutdowns that left workers at the Transportation Security Administration without pay, snarling airports nationwide, the White House budget proposed to begin “the privatization of T.S.A.’s airport screeners.”

The administration signaled it would reserve its most significant increases for law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13 percent bump. Some of that money is meant to promote “robust enforcement” of immigration laws. The budget further sets aside $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the source of a dispute between Democrats and Republicans that has shuttered the Homeland Security Department for weeks.

“The 2027 budget builds on the president’s vision by continuing to constrain nondefense spending and reform the federal government,” Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, said in a letter preceding the proposal.

He added that the approach “would ensure that the United States continues to maintain the world’s most powerful and capable military.”

Overall, the president requested almost $2.2 trillion in spending for the 2027 fiscal year, which would cover the period from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, 2027. His proposal addressed only the agencies and programs that must be funded on a yearly basis, a small fraction of the overall federal ledger, while offering no update on the future of entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

The White House also offered a complicated forecast for the government’s own finances, months after slashing taxes while imposing tariffs on imports from around the world. The administration predicted that revenues would rise next fiscal year, compared with 2026, citing strong economic growth, even though the war with Iran has recently led many economists to question the White House and its assumptions.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s proposal quickly stoked early bipartisan criticism. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican chair of the chamber’s appropriations panel, took issue with the president’s attempt to once again reduce spending on medical research, education and other programs.

“After careful review,” she said in a statement, “Congress decisively rejected these particular cuts last year.”

Many Democrats fiercely criticized the president for bolstering military spending at the expense of Americans’ needs. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, said Mr. Trump “wants Congress to defund dozens of programs that help students so that he can send other people’s kids to fight a war with no justification.”

Nevertheless, the president’s blueprint does not carry the force of law; only lawmakers have the authority under the Constitution to set the nation’s spending levels. But Mr. Trump has at times upset that balance by claiming that he possesses vast powers to control the nation’s purse strings and carry out his budgetary vision, even without the express approval of Congress.

Over the first year of his second term, the president closed agencies and programs he disliked, dismissed thousands of federal workers across the bureaucracy, and halted billions in congressionally enacted funds for health, education, foreign aid, public broadcasting and more. The actions frequently drew widespread political rebukes and hundreds of legal challenges, many of which have not resolved in the president’s favor.

The roughly $1.5 trillion sought for the Pentagon next fiscal year would amount to about 4.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, according to Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution. By that measure, it would be the largest year-over-year increase for defense since the Korean War, her analysis showed, after adjusting for inflation.

The request comes less than a year after Mr. Trump secured about $150 billion in extra funding for the Pentagon as part of Republicans’ sweeping tax cut package. The government has raced to disburse those funds in recent months while pursuing additional money to help fund the war with Iran. The new money in 2027 would allow the government to increase pay for the military’s most junior personnel, develop new munitions and produce more naval vessels.

Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates deficit reduction, said the president’s increases could exacerbate the federal debt, which now stands at nearly $39 trillion.

Without other substantial changes to federal spending and tax revenue, another half trillion in new military spending could total about $5 trillion to $6 trillion to that imbalance over the next decade, according to an analysis prepared before the budget was released. That number includes interest on what the government already owes.

Yet Mr. Trump has insisted that he can close the nation’s fiscal imbalance, particularly by slashing spending. His 2027 budget is replete with attempts to overhaul entire agencies, much of which lawmakers have already considered and rejected in recent months.

The White House asked Congress to halve funding at the Environmental Protection Agency, part of a series of moves meant to eliminate the government’s work on climate change. Much as it tried last year, the administration also proposed to cut $15 billion in existing funding from the Energy Department for renewable energy, battery manufacturing and technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the air.

On health, the budget tracked closely with the priorities and grievances of both Mr. Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The proposal called for $111.1 billion in “discretionary” spending for the Department of Health and Human Services, which Mr. Kennedy leads, a 12.5 percent decrease.

It reiterated Mr. Kennedy’s call to consolidate numerous health programs under a new “Administration for a Healthy America” — a riff on the secretary’s Make America Healthy Again movement. But the creation of A.H.A., as the proposed agency is known, is currently tied up in litigation.

In some cases, the White House framed its cuts as part of a broader campaign to protect taxpayer dollars and prevent government waste and fraud. To that end, the White House on Friday asked Congress to approve $30 million to assist its new fraud crackdown, which Vice President JD Vance is leading.

Since announcing that campaign, Mr. Trump has primarily targeted funds sent to cities and states led by Democrats, which have resisted his immigration policies or sought to halt money under programs he disfavors. Citing a desire to protect taxpayer dollars, his administration has already tried to block billions of dollars in federal funding for child care, public health, nutrition, transportation and more, even though Congress has not expressly allowed it.

Mr. Trump suggested on Friday that he would continue to wage the antifraud campaign in a political manner, asserting on social media that he and Mr. Vance would focus “primarily” in “Blue States.”

“The numbers are so large that, if successful, we would literally be able to balance our American Budget,” the president said. Fiscal experts widely and vigorously dispute this claim.

Brad Plumer, Scott Dance, Maxine Joselow, Andrew Duehren, John Ismay, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Lisa Friedman and Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.

Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Military, Trump Seeks $1.5 Trillion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

[elmatador] The rescue of the second airman had to succeed no matter the cost. Why? Presiden...

elmatador — 4/5/2026 10:47:34 AM

The rescue of the second airman had to succeed no matter the cost. Why? President Trump asked the congress for massive military budget of $1.5 trillion for fiscal year 2027, a 40% increase over the previous fiscal year budget.

The whole narrative is that the war will be own. Will short Trump claimed the United States will “complete” its military objectives “very shortly,” he threatened to strike Iran “extremely hard” over the next several weeks.

Successes in the war will soften congress and the public opinion for the gigantic budget be approved.

[elmatador] All countries have ways to syphon money from the tax payers. The US use defense ...

elmatador — 4/4/2026 3:34:19 AM

All countries have ways to syphon money from the tax payers. The US use defense spending. Build assets that are not necessary for to defend the country but that are useful only overseas.
Cold Era ended and they continued.

TODAY:
White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request
The huge proposed increase would be partly offset by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the Trump administration describes as wasteful.

The Iranian war is being used to keep Cold War era assets by sending them to Iran to.
Iran hits A-10 and the F-15C proving that those assets should go to the scrapheap.
For 9 years these dead men walking assets are being kept

Course Change: The US Air Force Now Wants to Keep the A-10, U-2, and F-15C
In a reversal, the service will not retire three Cold War-era planes still making an impact on the battlefield.

By Marcus Weisgerber

Global Business Editor

May 24, 2017

The U.S. Air Force plans to keep the A-10 Warthog and U-2 spy plane flying, reversing course after years of arguing that the service needed to retire the Cold War-era aircraft to pay for newer planes and drones.

The Air Force has also decided keep the F-15C fighter, a plane that generals had recently suggested was also on the chopping block. The decisions were announced in the Trump administration’s first military budget request sent to Congress on Tuesday. Lawmakers are likely to support the plan since they have routinely added funds to save the A-10 and U-2 from retirement time after time in recent years.

“The world has changed, so we're trying to maintain capacity and capability,” Maj. Gen. Jim Martin, the Air Force budget director, said during a briefing at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

Another thing that has changed: the Pentagon’s budget is expected to grow in the near term.

In recent years, Congress stopped numerous Air Force attempts to retire the A-10, which has been striking Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. Service officials said last year that they would delay the plane’s retirement, in part because commanders want it for the counter-ISIS campaign.

“Fleet strategy and viability [for the A-10] will be assessed as the Air Force determines a long term strategy,” says a budget document released by the service on Tuesday.

A separate Defense Department budget document says that the Air Force has “restored funding to maintain the Air Force’s A-10 Thunderbolt II fleet across the [5-year] Future Years Defense Program.”
The high-flying U-2 spy plane was also spared from the boneyard. The 2018 budget proposal includes money that “extends the service of the U-2.”

“We plan to keep that platform well into the future,” Martin said. “There is not a retirement date for the U-2 in this budget.”

As for the F-15C, the Air Force has decided start investing in a series of upgrades to modernize the fighter jet. The overhaul of the plane's’ fuselage is set to begin in 2018.

“We're dedicated just to making sure that the F-15 fleet remains viable and survivable and capable,” Martin said

[elmatador] US op to seize Iran’s uranium would take weeks, require building a runway — repo...

elmatador — 4/4/2026 3:20:01 AM

US op to seize Iran’s uranium would take weeks, require building a runway — report

Trump reportedly briefed on risky plan, which could require airlift of thousands of troops and heavy equipment to extract buried material, all while forces would be exposed to fire

By Michael Horovitz

2 April 2026, 12:57 pm

This handout satellite image courtesy of Vantor shows an overview of the Pickaxe Mountain tunnel complex adjacent to the Natanz Nuclear Facility near Natanz, Isfahan province, in central Iran on March 7, 2026. (Photo by Satellite image Â©2026 Vantor / AFP)

Elmat
What the US can do?
Drop troops and earth moving machinery to make a runway.
Immediately technicians start measuring radioactivity to locate the canisters
Helicopters drop men to secure perimeter
Hercules planes land drop men and materials.
Blasting and excavation work towards the place wher where the casters are located.
Collect the cache of highly enriched Uranium, declare victory and withdraw

How will the IRCG react?
Destroy the improvised runway with missiles to avoid delivering supplies: Diesel and water etc.
As the living infrastructure is concentrated in a small area, Iran will hit them with drones.
Morale will drop as the troops feel they are entrapped
A night raid come to pick men and withdraw.

A US military option to seize some 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium would reportedly require flying in excavation equipment and building a runway for cargo planes to fly off with the radioactive material.

US President Donald Trump was presented with the plan by his military over the past week, two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, though experts said such an operation would take weeks and carry enormous risks to troops.

Iran’s stockpile of some 450 kilograms of 60 percent-enriched uranium is believed to be buried under the rubble of sites bombed by the US last year, specifically near Isfahan and the Natanz area.

The mission to extract it would demand an airlift of hundreds or even thousands of troops specially trained to remove nuclear material from behind enemy lines, along with heavy equipment, all while operating under Iranian fire, former defense officials told the Post.

Personnel, which would include civilian nuclear specialists, would live in a small base instead of a clandestine site, and after forces completed the arduous task of blasting through the rubble to collect uranium, planes would need to take off from a purpose-built runway to carry the material away, the Post reported.

“It is slow, meticulous and can be an extremely deadly process,” a former special operator trained for such missions said. Another former defense official described the potential mission as looking like “you’re not just buying a car on the lot, you’re buying the entire assembly line.”

Centrifuges line a hall at the Uranium Enrichment Facility in Natanz, Iran, in a still image from a video aired by the Islamic Republic Iran Broadcasting company on April 17, 2021, six days after the hall had been damaged in a mysterious attack. (IRIB via AP)Trump said in an address to the nation on Wednesday that the Iranian nuclear sites bombed by the US last June “have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust. And we have it under intense satellite surveillance and control. If we see [the Iranians] make a move, even a move for it, we’ll hit them with missiles very hard again.”

An 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper participates in artillery training during a field exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Aug. 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Sarah Blake Morgan, File)Retired US Gen. Joseph Votel told the Post that a military operation was possible to extract the uranium, but that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) personnel were best equipped to remove the material under a ceasefire.

He added that there were “a lot of risks associated” with a military operation.

“This is a very high order of complexity. There likely will be casualties,” he added. “But this is the problem set for US Special Operations forces. It’s what we do. We have people who are specifically trained to go into these types of environments.”

Another former official said an operation was indeed possible, despite the complexities: “Short of a largely symbolic quick strike to demonstrate we could do more, to recover much or all of the material requires a temporary occupation.”

In response to the report, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the briefing on the plan “does not mean the President has made a decision.”

Reports on such an escalatory military operation came as Trump publicly spoke of the war winding down, boasting that the US and Israel were close to completing their key objectives.

But two Pentagon officials told The New York Times on Wednesday that Washington is adding 18 A-10 Warthog attack planes to the nearly a dozen it already has deployed in the Middle East.

Illustrative: A US A-10 Warthog maneuvers next to mountains during live fire exercises, as part of the annual US-Philippines joint military exercise at Crow Valley, in Capas town, Tarlac province, north of Manila on April 10, 2019. (TED ALJIBE / AFP)The slow-moving planes, which carry heavy firepower, could be used to assist in a potential ground invasion of territory near the Strait of Hormuz aimed at opening the strategic waterway that Iran has effectively blocked since the beginning of the war, the report said.

The presence of the slow-moving planes suggests that Iran’s air defenses are obliterated or heavily weakened, the report added.

Israel and the US launched their campaign against Iran on February 28 in a bid to destabilize the regime and destroy its nuclear and ballistic missile capacities. Iran has responded with missile and drone strikes across the region, and its proxies in Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon have also carried out attacks, with Israel launching airstrikes and a ground operation in Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah terror group’s rocket barrages.

Agencies and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

[elmatador] China's ANTA Is Coming After Nike Written by: [graphic]Glyn Atwal Basketball ...

elmatador — 4/2/2026 5:47:16 AM

China's ANTA Is Coming After Nike

Written by:

Glyn Atwal

Basketball fans in the U.S. have long associated the sport with Nike’s iconic swoosh which has dominated the game for decades. And yet it is the Chinese brand of basketball shoes, ANTA, that signed Team USA’s men’s 3×3 basketball team at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

While its pricing remains accessible such as the ANTA KAI 2 “Solar Return,” which retails for $125, the brand unlike many other Chinese brands expanding globally is not positioning itself as a low-cost label. Additionally, ANTA is shifting distribution into second gear. It currently has no direct stores in the U.S. but continues to expand its physical footprint through partnerships with retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and activations at Foot Locker.

China’s Edge
ANTA may be the new player on the U.S. court, but in China, it has never been more popular. ANTA’s revenue grew by 10.6 percent to reach RMB 33.52 billion in 2024. And there are no signs of slowing down. CEO Xu Yang is confident that Anta, founded in 1991, will overtake Nike in China within three years.

According to Chris Baker, Founder at TOTEM, “ANTA has done a great job of pulling market share from Nike in China. Its success versus Nike in China owes somewhat to nationalistic sentiment (of Chinese who are proud of its national brand champ) but also comes as a result of; (1) investing in innovation and design, and (2) offering better value for customers.
Add to this, ANTA, in China has been able to develop a real ‘cool factor’ at home with a more edgy, fresh marketing playbook, whereas Nike has defaulted to a more staid, safety-driven approach there in recent years.”

The Chinese brand may enjoy a home advantage but the biggest prize is the U.S. market. According to Euromonitor data published by McKinsey & Co, the sporting goods industry in North America is projected to grow from $165 billion in 2024 to $209 billion by 2029.

ANTA entered the U.S. in March 2024, but fast-forward 12 months, it is on track to become not just a spectator, but a real player in the U.S. sportswear market.

Basketball FactorANTA’s game plan to win in the U.S. has been to hyperfocus on basketball. The NBA provides an opening to a large following with a young and diverse fanbase. Athlete endorsements are nothing new but a tactic straight out of Nike’s playbook. According to a YouGov U.S. survey, 38 percent and 30 percent of NBA male and female fans respectively are interested in the players who play in the league. ANTA’s roster includes recent signings, Caris LeVert (Cleveland Cavaliers), Derrick Jones Jr. (Los Angeles Clippers) and Daniel Gafford (Dallas Mavericks). The NBA’s pulling power isn’t just about popularity but gives ANTA permission to play in a must-win market.

As Elisa Harca, Co-Founder and CEO of Red Ant Asia notes, “It’s a very smart move to align to a sport such as basketball, that is highly watched in both the U.S. and China. It’s a smart move for them internationally and domestically. It also shows that they have a clear focus and seek to build a genuine community and brand ambassadors around a genre as the key focus, showing that they are not just a fashion shoe but a highly trusted performance footwear choice. It’s a really strong play, and will be the halo for success.”

X FactorHowever, ANTA has made its mark through exclusive collaborations with NBA stars, notably the ANTA x Klay Thompson and ANTA x Gordon Hayward lines. While such partnerships are common in the sports industry, ANTA’s breakthrough came with the appointment of NBA star Kyrie Irving as its Creative Officer of Basketball. The Dallas Mavericks guard, with 20.2 million Instagram followers, is one of the league’s most favorite players. According to a Q4 2024 ranking, Irving ranked as the fifth most popular NBA player among Millennials.

Cool FactorIt is the powerful influence of Irving that has helped to cultivate ANTA into a lifestyle brand. The ANTA KAI collection by Kyrie Irving is delivering returns to be measured not in sales revenue but in image transfer. According to the latest trend report, Big Facts: Current Culture Index 2025, ANTA is the fastest-growing sneaker brand on StockX. Its stand-out appeal driven by Kyrie Irving’s distinctive design direction, propelled the brand to an astonishing 1,901% year-over-year growth. The latest ANTA Kai 2 “Solar Return” colorway collection inspired by the solar spectrum is a telling sign of the brand’s high aspirations for the U.S. market. Whisper it quietly but has ANTA achieved cool status?

Can Anta Win in the U.S.?

ANTA is increasing its brand awareness and visibility in a highly competitive and increasingly fragmented market. Baker observes, “Too many Chinese brands have wanted to fast-track and short-cut success in the U.S., which has seen them focus on being cheap, spending on customer acquisition…at the expense of branding and quality.” While its pricing remains accessible such as the ANTA KAI 2 “Solar Return,” which retails for $125, the brand unlike many other Chinese brands expanding globally is not positioning itself as a low-cost label. Additionally, ANTA is shifting distribution into second gear. It currently has no direct stores in the U.S. but continues to expand its physical footprint through partnerships with retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and activations at Foot Locker.

Setting tariffs aside which will affect Chinese but also U.S. sportswear brands given their manufacturing presence in Southeast Asia, a growing anti-Chinese sentiment could challenge ANTA’s expansion plans. As Baker notes, “Most American customers are unlikely to avoid ANTA for purely nationalist reasons BUT the China stigma is still a massive hurdle. Escalating trade tensions only make this more difficult into 2025.”

According to a 2024 survey, only 15.2 percent of North American respondents have a positive sentiment toward Chinese brands. However, the brand downplays its Chinese origins – its U.S. website makes no mention of its ownership. This strategy has proven effective for other Chinese global players, notably SHEIN, to mitigate a potentially negative consumer backlash.

New Heights?Anta Sports, which boasts a diverse portfolio of brands through acquisitions of high-profile brands like FILA, Descente and Kolon Sport, reported a record-high revenue of RMB 70.8 billion in 2024. The parent company is certainly not short on ambition to expand both in scale and scope. The latest acquisition target is the German outdoor apparel brand, Jack Wolfskin. According to Harca, “ANTA is a big group of companies, with strong resources throughout the full cycle of footwear – from design and manufacturing to marketing – it’s for sure going to make a big impact.”

Should Nike and Adidas be concerned about this emerging competitive threat? Maybe. While ANTA’s arc logo is unlikely to dethrone Nike’s Swoosh, other Chinese sportswear brands are eying up the U.S. Li Ning, X-tep and 361° are making inroads into the U.S. market against a backdrop in which challenger brands like On have proven that consumers are searching for innovation and newness.

ANTA is still a relatively small player but is learning to take on the Nikes at its own game. It is a brand to watch as Chinese brands are known to play the long game. The unpredictability of U.S.-China trade relations could be a major distraction as tariffs of 145 percent on goods from China are likely to cause price increases for the U.S. consumer but as Harca notes, “The quality of the products, the style of the designs, the smart focused strategy aligning with superstar sports and athletes, I feel it’s a strong move, and I anticipate success.” Its slogan, “Keep Moving” is a reminder that the brand will not give up easily.

[elmatador] In China, Nike has seen seven straight quarters of declining sales?. When he to...

elmatador — 4/2/2026 5:44:16 AM

In China, Nike has seen seven straight quarters of declining sales?.

When he took Nike’s NKE -15.51%decrease; red down pointing triangle helm 18 months ago, Chief Executive Elliott Hill said it would take time to rehab the iconic sneaker maker. Now he is warning of another setback in one of its most critical markets.

Nike shares plunge as Middle East conflict tests company’s turnaround plan
Published Yesterday

Nike’s NKE-N efforts to steady its business face a fresh setback, with executives cautioning that unrest in the Middle East could further complicate the turnaround, while the sportswear giant still struggles to regain traction in China.

The company on Tuesday warned of a sharp drop in current-quarter sales and slower-than-expected progress on its turnaround, as higher trade-related costs squeeze its margins and cautious consumers rein in spending.

Shares of the company slumped 10 per cent to $47.35 in premarket trading on Wednesday and were on track to open at their lowest in over a decade.

On an earnings call, chief financial officer Matthew Friend said the conflict in the Middle East had already disrupted shopping behaviour in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, contributing to softer store traffic and weaker sportswear sales.

“The Middle East conflict is compounding the pressure, with Nike flagging traffic disruption and elevated inventory across EMEA,” said Josh Gilbert, market analyst at eToro.

Nike CEO Elliott Hill, who took the helm in 2024, has been looking to steady the company as it grapples with several challenges, including a sluggish digital business, stubborn excess inventory and intensifying competition from Chinese sportswear brands.

To boost margins and bolster investor confidence, Hill has moved to rein in promotions, sharpen product innovation and refocus the business on core franchises such as running.

The efforts showed some signs of improvement in the reported quarter, with the running category growing over 20 per cent, but analysts still see a long road ahead for Nike.

At least eight brokerages cut their price target on the stock.

“We are turning at least somewhat frustrated, with seemingly slower than planned pace of recovery,” Oppenheimer analyst Brian Nagel said.

The company’s forward price-to-earnings multiple, a common benchmark for valuing stocks, is 25.47, compared with 13.54 for Adidas and Under Armour’s ratio of 25.72, according to LSEG data.

“These earnings show Nike is keeping pace at a steady jog, but it keeps tripping over hurdles along the way,” eToro’s Gilbert added.

“Patience is clearly the price of admission.”