Investors responded to Big Tech earnings this week with a stark warning: they will forgive record spending that brings solid growth, but punish companies if not, showing how much the stakes have changed since ChatGPT’s launch more than three years ago.
We know that BoA, JPMorgan and Capital have declined Morgan or closed his account since the Capitol riots. He has sued the last two and didn’t invite the CEO of BoA to a Davos party
Or Why the EU is a bunch of surrender monkees that deserve to be humiliated and bullied.
Less than four years ago, Europe’s economy was dealt a harsh blow in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as nations had to rapidly find alternatives to the abundant Russian natural gas they had relied on for decades. That scramble triggered a severe supply shock and a four-fold increase in European gas prices in the first six months of the conflict.
Europe resolved this problem by trading one dependency for another. As Russia’s share of European Union gas imports fell to 12% last year, from 45% before the invasion, Europe rapidly turned to U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG). Imports of U.S. LNG skyrocketed from 18 million metric tons in 2021 to 65 million tons last year, making up 57% of all LNG imported by the EU and Britain in 2025, according to analytics firm Kpler. Today, the U.S. supplies nearly a quarter of the EU’s total gas imports.
In the US, aluminum is a metal used across a wide array of industries from automotive and aerospace to construction and packaging …
American aluminium buyers are now paying an eye-watering 68% premium over the London Metal Exchange (LME) price to get physical metal.
This is of course a direct of result of U.S. President Donald Trump hiking import tariffs from 10% to 25% in March and again to 50% in June.
But the premium for physical delivery in the U.S. Midwest is trading another $560 per metric ton over any implied tariff cost, propelling the “all-in” price of aluminium above $5,000 per ton.
Rising Treasury yields cause a whole different set of issues – further complicating the funding of mounting U.S. debt piles and torching Trump’s big housing “affordability” push ahead of November’s mid-term congressional elections.
The prospect of rising mortgage rates on the back of higher Treasury yields cuts across much of the president’s new-year economic agenda. After Tuesday’s jump, for example, 30-year U.S. Treasury yields are 10 basis points above where they were at Trump’s inauguration last year – despite three Fed rate cuts in the interim.
That comes as U.S. opinion polls show voters think Trump is spending too much time on world affairs and not enough on fixing the economy, let alone risking another import price rise with new tariffs.
“Toying with more tariffs won’t help,” wrote AXA Group chief economist Gilles Moec, adding that the eight European states targeted account for 25% of U.S. imports and a 10% tariff rise would lift the average U.S. tariff rate by 2.5 percentage points.
When I was in Primary school in the early 60s, I learnt that tin was an important metal. It was also an important export of the Malayan Peninsula, along with rubber.
In the mid 1980s, I became an equities broker specializing in M’sia. At that time, tin was irrelevant both as a metal and as an export.
A few years ago no one paid much attention to tin. The market was too small, both in terms of physical volumes and futures activity, to qualify for investment with most fund managers.
That is changing as the world wakes up to tin’s central role in the coming Internet of Things Age. No circuit boards, no internet. And very little else in our hyper-connected world.
It is telling that the head of the world’s most important chipmaker had to talk to his “customers’ customers” to make sure demand for artificial intelligence is, in fact, real. But the $1.4 trillion Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s (2330.TW) , opens new tab chief executive has done just that to justify a huge increase in capital expenditure for the current year. It’s just the type of validation AI bulls have been waiting for.
UBS is fighting the Swiss govt over threat of more stringent capital buffers.
See how big UBS Americas is v UBS Switzerland.
Earlier this year, UBS denied that it wanted to give up its Swiss passport. The Swiss government had many regulatory disagreements with it. They forced a shotgun marriage with Credit Suisse a few years ago, which made it too big to fail. But too big for the Swiss state to rescue it.
And members are all American. And three of them led by people born outside the US. And the US-burn CEO is gay. E Pluribus Unum, Latin for “Out of many, one,” is the motto of the United States,
Btw, Indians rule OK. And being White and straight sucks. LOL.
Thoughts of a Cynical Investor 