The EU has asked China to voluntarily restrict exports of hybrid cars as part of a deal to prevent a trade war. European carmakers are making mass lay-offs as cheaper made-in-China models flood the market and Brussels wants Beijing to rein in its industry or face higher tariffs.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in three years, a sharp reversal that began taking back cuts it made last year and implicitly undercut the White House’s insistence that inflation isn’t a concern. The increase, approved unanimously, will raise the benchmark federal-funds rate range by a quarter point to between 3.75% and 4%.

John Ternus took over from Tim Cook as Apple’s chief executive. He takes the reins as the company negotiates a rocky path incorporating AI into its products. It is also expected soon to launch a foldable iPhone, the biggest change yet to its most-important device. In addition, Apple is fighting OpenAI in court for allegedly stealing trade secrets.

OpenAI released its latest AI model, which it called “the world’s most intelligent”, as the ChatGPT maker aims to retake the lead from arch-rival Anthropic ahead of a planned public listing. The $852bn start-up said GPT-6 Astra was market-leading in software engineering, science and cyber security.

A global sell-off in government bonds is intensifying, pushing borrowing costs to multi-decade highs. Rising oil prices, high debt levels, and inflation concerns are contributing to this trend, impacting government budgets and raising interest rates. The situation is exacerbated by the protracted war in Iran, which is driving up energy costs and fueling inflation fears.

Apple has shipped 3.1bn iPhones since Tim Cook became chief of the tech giant 15 years ago. Lined end to end, those smartphones would comfortably reach from the Earth’s surface to the Moon. The device still accounts for about half of the company’s total revenue.

Over the past 12 months, the State Street SPDR S&P Biotech ETF is up around 85% versus roughly 20% for the S&P 500. Last week added an exclamation point: Moderna more than doubled in a single session after its mRNA cancer vaccine, developed with Merck, cleared a late-stage melanoma trial.

Global debt has surpassed $350 trillion, according to the Institute of International Finance, or about 305% of global gross domestic product. Governments in advanced economies alone are expected to borrow $18 trillion this year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and are increasingly competing for buyers with stocks and bonds issued by U.S. technology companies.

Meta Reaches $18 Billion Settlement With 48 States Over Child-Safety Claims. This brings an end to a massive federal trial over social media’s harm to teenagers and ushering in a new era of tech companies having legal responsibility for their platforms. As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default 2-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18.

"Compounding works whether you’re building good habits or bad ones… Nobody becomes exceptional because of one extraordinary day. They become exceptional because ordinary days were repeated for years."

The old advice to Americans was to vacation in Europe but never invest there. That is looking outdated. Investor skepticism toward the continent has meant the region’s outperformers often fly under the radar. For instance, total shareholder returns including dividends at European banks have beaten the Magnificent Seven over the last four years. Europe just had its best reporting season in years. Companies in the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index boosted earnings per share by 18% on average in the second quarter compared with a year earlier.

177%. That’s how much Moderna shares surged on Wednesday, after the company and its partner Merck reported successful late-stage trial results for their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine. The rally helped lift Moderna’s market value from about $25 billion before the announcement to roughly $60 billion by week’s end.

$366 billion. The amount of venture capital drawn by California-based companies since the start of the year, driven by Silicon Valley’s AI boom. According to PitchBook data, that record haul is nearly double California’s previous mark set in 2025 and more than triple the venture funding raised across the other 49 states combined. Despite concerns over a proposed state billionaire tax, massive investments in major AI companies continue to fuel the frenzy.

America’s national debt has surpassed $40 trillion for the first time, the Treasury Department announced this afternoon. The figure, according to the latest data, sits at exactly $40,047,425,768,420.22. Borrowing has piled up over the last few decades in order to pay for the rising costs of the military, sprawling social safety net programs and other projects.

The three largest U.S. ETFs by assets all track the S&P 500, and the fourth is Vanguard’s even broader Total Stock Market ETF with 3,500 stocks and a tiny expense ratio of 0.03%. A bit farther down the list sits yet another Vanguard fund that casts the widest possible net, owning 10,000 stocks globally.

Investors should stop treating all capital expenditure as equal. Maintenance capex is the money a company must spend simply to preserve its current competitive position and output, while growth capex creates value only when it earns attractive incremental returns. The problem is that depreciation can understate true maintenance needs because of inflation and technological obsolescence, making some businesses look more cash-generative than they really are. Capital-heavy industries such as airlines and autos can therefore become “hamster wheels,” where large amounts of cash are continually reinvested just to stand still.

The most problematic category is defensive capex: spending that management may describe as growth but which is really necessary to avoid losing ground to competitors. Telecom companies investing in 5G, automakers shifting to EVs, and today’s AI infrastructure boom all fit this pattern. Each company may be making a rational decision individually, but collectively the industry can create excess capacity, push prices down, and leave customers as the biggest beneficiaries while returns on invested capital disappoint.

The key lesson is to look beyond headline capex and ask why the money is being spent, whether competitors can easily copy the investment, and whether the expected return still holds if prices fall or technology changes quickly. The most attractive businesses are often capital-light companies, stable oligopolies, or firms that can repeatedly reinvest at high returns without constantly spending huge sums just to defend their position.

https://eaglepointcapital.substack.com/p/capex-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly

Anthropic’s annualized revenue surpassed $65 billion, up from $47 billion in May and $9 billion last year. Investors expect continued growth, projecting a 2026 revenue between $100 billion and $120 billion. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has doubled its revenue to $40 billion, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reported.

Bonds Are Getting Hammered, and Wall Street Says the Rout Won’t End Anytime Soon - With yields on 30-year U.S. Treasurys at 19-year highs, investors predict a new era in the bond market. And it looks a lot like 2007.

Just 27% of actively managed U.S. large-cap equity funds beat their benchmark passive-fund alternatives in the 12 months ended June 30, according to Morningstar data that compares returns after fees. That is actually an improvement over stock-picking funds’ long-term record. In the decade through June, just 13% of active large-cap funds beat their benchmarks.

AI fever is not limited to America. Unitree, a Chinese developer of humanoid robots, said its forthcoming stock-market debut on Shanghai’s tech-heavy STAR exchange was heavily oversubscribed. Unitree has priced its IPO at 150.8 yuan ($22) a share for a valuation of 60bn yuan, relatively high for China. The STAR 50 index has risen by 27% this year, outperforming the NASDAQ Composite.

Nvidia struck partnerships with six leading financial firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and KKR, to eventually channel $500bn to its customers by tapping into “third-party capital”. The proceeds will finance the buildout of AI infrastructure using Nvidia’s chips. The biggest cloud-computing companies, such as Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, are increasingly designing their own customised AI chips, which could eventually compete with Nvidia’s. As well as selling to hyperscalers, Nvidia is seeking new business from other customers, such as governments and companies trying to build their own AI infrastructure.

The US has paid the highest borrowing costs to sell 30-year bonds since 2001 as investors fret over the country’s mounting debt pile and inflation that remains stubbornly high. Thursday's $25bn auction drew yields as high as 5.22 per cent, according to the US Treasury department.

Investors are holding onto over $3 trillion in cash, primarily in money-market funds, despite financial advisors urging them to invest in alternatives like bonds and ETFs. This reluctance stems from concerns about bond yields not keeping pace with inflation and the perceived risks of more complex investments.

>$3 trillion. The mountain of cash that individual investors are holding in retail money-market funds - hovering near a record high, according to the Investment Company Institute. (And that doesn’t include the trillions of institutional dollars sitting in money-market funds.) Advisers are struggling to convince clients to deploy those funds into bonds or other investments, even as average money-market yields have fallen.

Peak waiting times at two major European airports have doubled this summer, compared to a year ago, after the EU’s chaotic rollout of its new electronic border system.The system had been “mis-designed” and should be moved online, Ryanair’s chief executive Michael O’Leary said. “Only the Europeans would invent shit like this,” he told investors last month.

$520 billion. Market cap of China’s CXMT, which recently listed its shares in Shanghai and is the most valuable company listed in mainland China. Apple has been testing memory chips from China’s CXMT across product lines including iPhones and MacBooks, as the U.S. company addresses a memory crunch during the artificial-intelligence boom.

Insightful interview by renowned investor Bill Ackman. “Wages can’t compound as quickly as stocks and that’s why everyone needs to participate in the market”

The gap between diesel and crude prices has ballooned in recent weeks to reflect a global shortage of refining capacity, fuelling concerns that consumers and industrial users may see little immediate relief from a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Diesel currently trades at a premium of about $70 a barrel to crude, close to last week’s record of $90.

‘Perps’ Are the Risky New Derivatives That Could Amplify Stock Blowups. Perpetual futures, or “perps,” already dominate crypto trading, allowing traders to take highly leveraged positions, sometimes up to 100 times, without an expiration date. Now, firms want to bring the same product to U.S. stocks and commodities, where they are already available offshore. The debate pits financial innovation and competition against concerns that extreme leverage could make already volatile markets even more dangerous.

A spectacular hedge-fund blow-up has shaken AI and tech stocks after 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness reportedly lost more than $30bn in July. The $45bn fund, which had boasted a 439% net return in the first half of 2026, was caught in a brutal leveraged squeeze as major long positions including Bloom Energy, SanDisk, CoreWeave and SK Hynix collapsed while shorts such as Adobe and Oracle failed to offset the damage. Massive margin calls forced a fire sale of its public-equity portfolio to Citadel, narrowly averting an even broader AI-sector liquidation. Aschenbrenner has pledged to overhaul risk management, reportedly spending the days after his wedding speaking directly with investors, while already making a fresh $400m private investment. The episode is another reminder that extraordinary returns mean little if leverage and liquidity are not managed well enough to survive the inevitable reversal.

The S&P 500 High Dividend Index, an equalweight basket of its 80 top yielders, has returned 3.9% annually over a decade compared with 13.2% for the broader index.

AI groups are racing to make conversations with chatbots feel more natural, betting that talking will overtake typing as the dominant way people interact with AI agents.

In carrying out their first joint effort in a generation to boost the yen, the U.S. and Japan are seeking to contain tremors that could be triggered by a cratering Japanese currency. The yen’s slide to a 40-year low indirectly threatened to bump up U.S. interest rates and risked throwing a wrench into plans to pull billions of dollars of Japanese investment into the U.S.

42% of American restaurants were unprofitable last year. Competition is fierce, fewer people commute into city centres, trends towards delivery have continued and home entertainment has improved. Dinner and a movie has to up its game to compete with Netflix and chilaquiles.

$450 billion. Microsoft’s one-day gain in market capitalization on Friday, the largest by any U.S. business, ever. The company’s stock surged 16% after its earnings quelled concerns that investments in data centers, chips, and more would outpace the company’s ability to generate cash.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have ploughed more than $1tn into capital investments since their race to dominate AI began in 2023. The massive combined expenditure is a mark of both the scale of their ambitions and the speed with which the US tech giants have turned from capital-light businesses into huge investors in physical infrastructure.

Anthropic AI Models Hacked Three Companies During Tests. The Anthropic said that software it was testing got onto the internet and hacked unsuspecting companies without the AI-maker’s knowledge in three separate incidents dating back to April.

China’s oil consumption has become a significant factor in the global oil market, with its ability to drastically reduce imports during the Iran war. This unexpected shift, driven by strategic stockpiling, refinery restrictions, and a growing electric vehicle market, has kept oil prices in check. The implications are substantial, as China’s newfound influence challenges the traditional dynamics of the oil market, traditionally dominated by supply-side factors.

One of the world’s biggest memory-chip makers SK Hynix reported a record $64 billion quarterly profit on Wednesday and its stock price still fell nearly 10%. Welcome to the most fickle of stock markets, where earnings that would have been unthinkable a year or two ago are now treated as a disappointment. That was 13 times the figure a year ago and exceeded the company’s combined net profit for the past five years. Yet the figure fell short of some bullish investor expectations and fanned fears about the durability of the AI boom.

BMW is looking to shed 8,000 jobs, becoming the latest German automaker to warn that plunging sales in China will hit employment at home. The Munich-based carmaker told staff Wednesday it would launch a voluntary severance program for white-collar employees in Germany.

The Eurozone economy grew 0.4 per cent in the second quarter, surpassing expectations. The figure marked an improvement on the upwardly revised zero growth rate in the first three months of the year and left the euro little changed against the dollar at $1.145. The European Central Bank last month cut its 2026 GDP growth projections for the Eurozone economy to 0.8 per cent.

US long-term borrowing costs hit their highest level since 2007 after the Federal Reserve kept interest rates on hold, raising doubts about the US central bank’s ability to tackle inflation in the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran. The 30-year Treasury yield rose as much as 0.14 percentage points to 5.23 per cent following the Fed decision.

A banal strategy of profiting from changes in stock index membership is emerging as one of the hottest trades on Wall Street, as volatility and the historic SpaceX listing rippled through markets last quarter. The trade involves buying stocks set to be added or dropped from various stock indices, before passive index-tracking funds adjust their portfolios.

Apple flirted with a stock-market valuation of $5trn, vying with Nvidia as the world’s most-valuable company. Some investors that have been spooked by the massive spending on AI at Microsoft, Meta and the like are turning to Apple for stable returns.

https://www.thedailyupside.com/finance/private-equity/blackstone-cashes-out-even-as-pe-peers-get-stuck-with-zombie-funds/

Investment firms are on track to launch a record number of exchange traded funds this year, with 1,000 debuts already, as they opt for a “spaghetti cannon” approach to try to find the latest stock market trends. The surge highlights how a wide range of providers are attempting to emulate the success of popular chip and bitcoin portfolios.

Oil prices jumped above $100 a barrel for the first time since May while US stocks and bonds sold off as Trump said he was weighing a “massive attack” on Iran and as Middle East tensions escalated. Brent crude neared $101 in Asian trading today.

Intel reported its fastest revenue growth in 15 years and added $2bn to its capital spending plans as demand for chips used in AI data centres accelerated its financial turnaround. Revenue rose 25 per cent year on year to $16.1bn in the June quarter and the chipmaker also raised its spending plans for this year to $20bn.

Revolut is raising its valuation to $115bn, up 50% since late 2025 and above Barclays’ market value. Europe’s most valuable startup now has more than 70m customers, a full UK banking licence and ambitions to expand lending in Britain and the US.

Google burned through cash in the second quarter for the first time since going public decades ago. Google’s AI spending has rapidly transformed the group from an asset-light business into a capital-intensive one. The company said free cash flow for the three-month period to the end of June turned to minus $5.9bn as it raised its spending forecast for data centres and other AI hardware.

Individual investors’ yearslong love affair with the market’s biggest tech stocks is starting to cool off. Retail traders are buying fewer shares of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.com, Meta, Nvidia, Alphabet and Tesla. Instead, they are flocking to newer AI trades: chip stocks like SK Hynix, for example, or the Roundhill Memory exchange-traded fund. Many individual investors maintain significant exposure to the Mag Seven - but they are increasingly funneling dollars toward less famous stocks that they are hoping will emerge as the next set of AI superstars.

Energy companies are raising money at initial public offerings at their fastest pace this century, taking advantage of investors’ hunt for new ways to bet on the boom in power-intensive AI data centres. IPOs for energy groups raised $12.6bn in the first half of this year, according to data firm Dealogic.

Wall Street advanced on Tuesday as a cooler-than-expected U.S. inflation report (CPI) and robust earnings from big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs boosted market sentiment. Meanwhile, IBM shares plunged 25% following a surprise earnings warning.

Volkswagen hinted at the possibility of cutting an additional 50,000 jobs in its ongoing effort to align its costs with those of its competitors in the automotive industry. Chief Executive Oliver Blume expressed this concern in an internal memo, stating that Europe is facing significant economic and geopolitical challenges, and Germany, as an export-oriented nation, is particularly vulnerable to these pressures.

Gold prices have dropped about 25% from their January high of $5,318 per troy ounce, influenced by rising energy prices and potential interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. The biggest gold ETF, GLD, is down 25% from January’s high, while silver has fallen 49% from its record high. Despite geopolitical tensions, Fed rate decisions are expected to have a greater impact on gold prices than short-term conflicts.

US small-cap stocks are bucking years of underperformance to enjoy their best returns in more than 20 years, as investors start to look beyond high-flying big tech companies to lowly valued stocks benefiting from the AI investment boom. The Russell 2000 index, the US small-cap benchmark, is up 20 per cent so far this year, on track for its best performance since 2003, compared with a 10 per cent rise in the blue-chip S&P 500 and a gain of less than 3 per cent in the so-called Magnificent Seven megacap tech stocks.

There is a surprise winner from the Iran war: Africa’s richest man. Surging demand for refined petroleum products has boosted Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote’s wealth by some $4.86 billion this year, bringing his net worth to around $34.8 billion. Dangote went “through hell” building a $20 billion oil refinery. Now, the tycoon is reaping the benefits: The refinery reached full capacity in February—just in time to supply global markets with fuel that doesn’t need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

South Korean memory chips group SK Hynix has raised $26.5bn in the largest-ever US initial public offering by a foreign company and today its shares will begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange. Rising prices for SK Hynix’s memory chips helped its first-quarter revenue nearly triple year on year to Won52.6tn ($34.5bn). Its shares are up more than 600 per cent over the past year on the Kospi in Seoul, its main listing.

The global economy is expected to slow sharply in 2026 due to the war with Iran, which disrupted energy supply chains and triggered inflation. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects a decrease in global output to 3% from 3.5% last year. Despite the challenges, the global economy has shown resilience, supported by renewable energy and investments in artificial intelligence.

Anthropic, an AI model developer, is facing political challenges, including a legal battle with the Trump administration over its refusal to provide unfettered access to its tools for military use. While these challenges may impact Anthropic’s reputation and limit its market, they are likely to be short-lived and less significant than those faced by its rival, OpenAI. OpenAI’s mass-market appeal exposes it to greater political scrutiny, including potential government ownership, which could pose long-term risks to its competitive position.

South Korea’s export surge is now a semiconductor story. Chipmakers helped drive a 70.9% year-on-year rise in exports, with semiconductor exports up 200%, while Samsung and SK Hynix joined the government in a $600bn plan for new chip factories in less-developed areas. That is industrial policy, regional policy and AI supply-chain strategy in one package. The risk is concentration: the KOSPI’s huge rally and volatility show how much national financial mood now depends on memory chips. South Korea has turned itself into a core supplier of the AI age. It has also made itself more exposed to the AI cycle.

Small companies are punching above their weight on Wall Street. The Russell 2000, which tracks shares of smaller companies, climbed some 22% in the first six months of the year. That is the best first half since 1991, beating the Nasdaq composite by around nine percentage points—its largest outperformance in that period since 2006. At one point last week, the index notched four straight record closes.

OpenAI has discussed giving a 5 per cent stake to the US government as the $852bn AI start-up seeks to clear political obstacles by securing financial buy-in from the Trump administration. Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI. Giving the US government an ownership stake could help secure good relations and would mark an attempt to address political blowback by sharing wealth generated by the technology with the public.

Stocks Notch Best Quarter Since 2020. The S&P 500 closed out its best quarter in six years, rising 14.9 percent for the three months through June. Stock prices were lifted by corporate earnings and hopes for a U.S.-Iran peace deal.

AI was sold as weightless software. It now arrives as land, gas turbines, power contracts, transmission lines and local resentment. Meta’s Prometheus project in Ohio could draw a gigawatt of electricity, and global AI data-centre spending may reach $3trn between 2026 and 2030. That makes data centres the factories of the AI age, but with fewer jobs and more suspicion. The industry’s mistake was to talk like prophets while building like utilities. If local communities see only noise, power bills and ugly infrastructure, they will treat AI not as progress but as extraction.

US stocks closed sharply higher on Monday, with the S&P 500 rising 1.2%, the Nasdaq 100 surging 2.3%, and the Dow Jones gaining 307 points to finish at a fresh record high, as investors reassessed the AI trade following the recent selloff. Sentiment was also supported by easing tensions between the US and Iran over the weekend, with President Trump saying peace talks with Iran are set to resume on Tuesday. Alphabet jumped 5% on its first trading day as a Dow component replacing Verizon, while Nvidia gained 1.3%, Amazon climbed 3.2%, Meta advanced 2.2%, and Tesla soared 8.5%. Comcast also rallied 4.5% after announcing plans to spin off its media and technology businesses into two separately traded public companies. On the downside, materials was the weakest-performing sector.

Investors have never been more eager to ratchet up their stock returns through margin loans and funds that amplify gains and losses. It may be a sign of trouble. U.S. margin debt, or what investors borrow from their brokerages to buy securities, rose 54% to a record $1.4 trillion in May from a year earlier, according to Finra data. Meanwhile, high-risk leveraged exchange-traded funds that produce double or triple the daily move of underlying stocks are growing rapidly, as is trading in options tied to them. The risks of buying leveraged funds are well-advertised. And yet, buyers ranging from hedge funds to teenagers on Robinhood have poured money into leveraged ETFs this year.

A law firm that uses AI instead of lawyers won a case in the English courts, in what is thought to be a legal first for AI anywhere in the world. Garfield AI, which uses the technology to prepare its cases, helped a humanresources freelancer recover money owed to her by a firm, though a human barrister represented her in court. The freelancer spent £400 ($525) on AI legal services and was awarded £7,000.

Blaise Pascal wrote in 1670 that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” That line describes the modern institutional investor with uncomfortable precision: all portfolio managers’ miseries derive from their being unable to leave their best positions alone. The asset management profession is structurally designed to prevent exactly the behavior most likely to produce strong returns. Warren Buffett described the flip side of Pascal’s idea at the 1998 Berkshire annual meeting: “We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we’ll wait, we’ll wait indefinitely.” Clearly, Buffett had no problem sitting quietly and letting his investment theses play out. Indeed, Buffett noted in a 1999 BusinessWeek interview that investing success does not correlate with raw intelligence above a modest baseline; instead, it correlates to temperament, specifically the capacity to resist the urges that get other people into trouble.

US stock indices closed negative on Tuesday amid a selloff in heavyweight chip producers. The S&P 500 fell 1.4%, and the Nasdaq 100 lost 3.3% as AI infrastructure companies, including semiconductor and memory chip producers, tanked on increasing skepticism that AI spending by hyperscalers will not meet returns. Nvidia (-4.2%), Broadcom (-3.1%), Qualcomm (-8%), AMD (-5.8%), Micron (-13.2%), and Sandisk (-11.2%) posted losses. Tesla lost 5.8% and Oracle slipped 5.8%. Meanwhile, SpaceX added 1%, rebounding as it issued bonds only one week after its IPO, adding to caution on colossal capital expenditure.

Europeans have doubled down on frugality in recent years - another economic headache for the continent. Consumers’ reluctance to spend is a key reason why Europe has lagged behind the U.S., where robust spending especially among higher-earners has driven growth. European companies that make some of the most coveted products in the world -luxury handbags, watches, clothes - now depend heavily on American and Asian consumers for growth. People around the world are feeling the sticker-shock of higher prices, but recent inflation has taken a larger psychological toll on Europeans.

The digital euro is moving closer to becoming a reality after a key parliamentary committee backed its launch in an effort to reduce the bloc's reliance on foreign payment systems like Visa and Mastercard. The approval comes as the U.S. moves to ban the creation of a central bank digital currency. The European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee on Tuesday voted in favor of establishing the long-awaited digital euro. Lawmakers will negotiate legislation for the new form of payment with the European Council and European Commission next month, targeting final approval by year-end and possible first issuance in 2029. "The digital euro will complement cash, never replace it," said Fernando Navarrete Rojas, an EU lawmaker and rapporteur. "No one should be forced away from cash, and no one should be left without a secure, resilient and genuinely European digital payment option."

Elon Musk’s SpaceX shed $400bn in market value on Monday in a fresh bout of volatility for the rockets and AI company following its record-breaking initial public offering. Its shares ended yesterday down 16.4 per cent at $154.60, leaving them 31.5 per cent below the high struck after the group’s Wall Street debut this month.

At the Daily Journal’s annual shareholders meeting in 2022, chairman Charlie Munger offered one of his characteristically blunt diagnoses of the human condition. “The world is not driven by greed,” he said. “It’s driven by envy.” A greedy person can, in theory, be satisfied. Enough wealth, enough status, enough comfort - and their appetite might be quelled. Envy offers no such satiation. It’s a moving target defined purely by comparison, recalibrated the instant someone else pulls ahead of you. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve personally gained or achieved, how tall the pile you currently stand on. “I can’t change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything has improved by about 600%,” said Charlie. He noted many times, that envy is a uniquely useless sin. The only one without any apparent upside.

US stock indexes closed mixed on Monday as losses in megacap tech stocks offset optimism over progress in restoring energy supply from the Middle East. The S&P 500 fell 0.4%, while the Nasdaq 100 lost 0.2%. Broadcom tumbled 4.7%, Amazon declined 4.4%, Microsoft lost 3.2% and Meta fell 2.7%. SpaceX plunged 16.4% after announcing a new bond sale. In contrast, Micron gained 6.8% after announcing a strategic agreement with Anthropic.

Detroit is protected from Chinese EVs, not saved from them. America’s carmakers still make money from petrol pickups and SUVs, protected by tariffs and regulations that keep Chinese EVs out. But insulation is not immunity. Chinese carmakers dominate much of the electric future and are already surrounding America through Mexico, Canada, Europe and global supply chains. Ford, GM and Stellantis have pulled back from some EV ambitions, but they cannot abandon the transition forever. Protection gives Detroit time. It does not guarantee relevance. In markets, the difference between a moat and a waiting room is often visible only when the drawbridge fails.

Oil’s relief rally may be premature. Brent has fallen from war highs, but the road back to normal runs through mines, tankers, insurers, refineries and Iranian “fees”. Even if Hormuz reopens, tankers must return, shipping lanes must be cleared and producers must restore flows. Analysts cited in the issue expect Gulf output to recover gradually, not instantly, and some forecast Brent averaging well above pre-war assumptions in the coming quarters. The market has priced the headline; it has not fully priced the plumbing. Oil is not just a commodity. It is a choreography of ships, credit, insurance and trust. Trust is the part that takes longest to repair.

Europe has discovered that sovereignty needs electricity. Europe’s AI debate has moved from values to voltage. The continent wants technological sovereignty, yet has a tiny share of global AI compute compared with America and lacks the cheap energy, permissive planning and capital-market depth needed to catch up quickly. The proposed remedy is not autarky but leverage: build more data centres, mobilise pension capital, reform labour markets and make Europe attractive enough that American firms build there in exchange for model-access guarantees. In other words, Europe should stop confusing regulation with power. AI sovereignty is not written in directives. It is built with substations, chips, cooling systems and cash.

What happened this week, stripped down: America and Iran signed a preliminary deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and starts a 60-day negotiation over a final pact. The Fed, under Kevin Warsh, held rates steady and dropped the previous bias towards easing. The Bank of England also held; the Bank of Japan raised rates to 1%, its highest level since 1995. The Trump administration imposed export controls on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, forcing a broader shutdown. Fox agreed to buy Roku for $22bn. SpaceX surged after its IPO, reached a valuation near $2.7trn and agreed to buy Cursor for $60bn.

The market mood is turning from optimism into theatre. SpaceX’s IPO, Anthropic and OpenAI’s expected listings, and the options-market boom all feed the sense that investors have entered the manic phase of the AI bull market. SpaceX listed at a valuation above 90 times annual revenue, despite losses, and rose sharply soon after. The danger is not that AI is fake. The danger is that a real technological revolution can still be priced absurdly. Railways, radio, the internet and now AI: history is full of good technologies that became bad trades.

US equities closed higher on Thursday, as tech strength and optimism over a potential US-Iran deal offset concerns over a hawkish Federal Reserve. The S&P 500 advanced 1% and the Nasdaq 100 gained 1.9%, while the Dow rose by 72 points. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve kept rates steady, with half of officials signaling that at least one rate increase may be warranted this year. Intel surged 10.6% after President Trump announced that the semiconductor giant would produce chips for Apple in the US. The news lifted the broader chip sector, with Nvidia up 2.8% and Micron Technology climbing 8.5%.