I'm not sure that's a good idea but I haven't had much luck with companies run by attorneys either. With the lawyers they either remain in the "Thou shalt not" groove of the wise counselor or they go a bit nuts because they think they're no longer an officer of the court.
With the analysts you, somewhat surprisingly, run into the same problems you do with economists: "Sure, it works in practice but will it work in theory." And the "On the other hand..." stuff. Don't even get me started on Elliot Wave practitioners with their alternative wave counts introducing a third and a a fourth hand.
Anyhoo, the equity analysts are going to need to do something after AI takes their jobs so maybe give them a shot at the C-suite. But watch those hands.
From Financial News London, May 25:
It might seem an unlikely move, but capital markets experience is increasingly valuable in the C-suite
Standard Chartered had some compelling reasons to promote Manus Costello -
As
a former equity analyst who covered the bank for many years, Costello
is very familiar with the bank’s strengths and weaknesses, and those of
its rivals. He knows its investors well, understands what they are
looking for and speaks their language.
Since
joining Standard Chartered as head of investor relations two years ago,
Costello has built a good rapport with chief executive Bill Winters,
who says he has made a “significant contribution to the group’s
strategic positioning and engagement of stakeholders”.
While
very familiar with the business he also brings an outsider perspective
that many management experts would say is an ideal combination.
Yet
this raises a question: if it is such an obvious move why don’t more
analysts become senior executives in the sectors they have covered?
In
financial services, the numbers are strikingly small. One of the few
prominent examples is Sallie Krawcheck, who made her name as an
independent-minded analyst of Wall Street banks at Sanford Bernstein. In
2002, she was hired by Citigroup to rebuild trust in its research and
wealth management business after accusations of conflicts of interest.
Two years later she was appointed Citi’s chief financial officer.
In
the UK, Luke Ellis, former chief executive of hedge fund manager Man
Group, previously worked for JPMorgan, though in equity derivatives
rather than research.
Another former
analyst who is now a chief executive is Anthony Noto. A one-time
Goldman Sachs internet analyst, Noto was appointed head of financial
technology firm SoFi in 2018. But Noto shifted into banking at Goldman
before going into the industry, which makes him a slightly different
case.
There are plenty of bankers who move into the industry they covered. Current examples include Jonathan Sorrell, the former Goldman banker who now heads wealth management group Rathbones....
It looks like the drought intensities decreased a bit while the areas affected remained about the same.*
From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, June 4:
This Week's Drought Summary The mid-level height anomaly pattern during the week exhibited an omega-block type pattern, with mean troughing over Alaska and both the West and East, with the western trough cutting off over California, and strong ridging between the troughs across the central contiguous US. This pattern promoted below-normal temperatures across the Southwest for much of the period, with colder air pushing eastward towards the end of the week followed by warming temperatures. Across the East, cooler air overspread New England and the mid-Atlantic, keeping evapotranspiration rates a bit lower than normal. In contrast, much above-normal temperatures were observed throughout the week across the northern Plains and upper-Midwest, though colder weather and storminess overspread the northern Rockies and adjacent High Plains at the end of the week.
An active pattern was noted across
the Plains, South, and Southeast as a mean frontal boundary provided a
focus for stormy weather. These rains, in conjunction with a wetter
pattern overall during May, prompted widespread additional drought
relief for the South and Southeast regions, as well as portions of the
High Plains. In contrast, hot, dry weather across the northern Plains
and upper-Midwest caused expansion of drought and abnormal dryness, with
widespread degradation occurring in western portions of the Midwest
region. Towards the end of the week, a storm system brought heavy
precipitation to western and central Montana, bringing some drought
relief following a period of hot, windy weather. Across the Northeast,
additional rainfall benefitted portions of New England, while drier
weather overspread the mid-Atlantic and southern New England following a
wet week previously.....
*****
....Looking Ahead
At the start
of the next 7 days, drier conditions are favored across much of the
East, with daily temperatures quickly warming to above-normal. A storm
system now over the Plains will progress slowly eastward, bringing a
potential for much needed rainfall across the upper Midwest and Great
Lakes region. Current QPF forecasts from the Weather Prediction Center
show amounts potentially exceeding 1.5 inches across much of Iowa and
far southwestern Wisconsin, but lighter amounts elsewhere will likely be
insufficient to overcome the high demands coming from much above-normal
temperatures and summer agriculture, especially across Illinois,
Indiana, and northern Minnesota. A gradual return to a summer convective
regime is favored across the Southeast during the week, but
accumulations are forecast to be less than what fell over the past few
weeks, especially across northern Florida and east of the Appalachians.
Seabreeze-driven convection is favored to remain active across South
Florida. Mostly dry conditions are favored across the West, with a storm
system bringing some precipitation to the Pacific Northwest. Meager
precipitation is forecast for the Northeast region, raising concerns for
a return of short term drought impacts....
“I could end the deficit in five minutes,” he said. “You just pass a law
that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than three percent of
GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
Yeah, yeah, now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right?”
—Warren E. Buffett, retired insurance salesman, Omaha Nebraska
To Boldly Go: The Case for Space Datacenters Space DC Total Cost of Ownership Explained. Unpacking constraints from Terrestrial DCs and Chip Production. Space-Earth Parity in the late 2030s, Space DCs could start to be viable even sooner.
Everyone has been talking about datacenters in space. Interviews
given by Elon Musk in the past few months have spent lots of time on
orbital compute:
“Five years from now, my prediction is
we will launch and be operating every year more AI in space than the
cumulative total on Earth... I would expect to be at least, sort of five
years from now, a few hundred gigawatts per year of AI in space and
rising.” - Elon Musk on Dwarkesh Podcast, February 2026
Furthering
space-based compute was also one of the stated motivations behind the
merger of xAI into SpaceX (as a ‘reorganization of entities under common
control’), and is a key part of SpaceX’s plans to go public, as stated
in their S-1 filing on 20 May 2026.
“Our
goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each
year. If operated continuously, the generation resources used to support
100 gigawatts of compute could generate approximately one-fifth of the
annual power production in the United States, which was 4.4 thousand
terawatt hours in 2025… We expect space‑based compute to massively
increase AI compute scale, while also improving token economics.” - SpaceX, S-1 Filing, May 2026
As
expected, many part-time prognosticators in the Substack-verse have
emerged from the woodwork to weigh in on the concept. Some articles
bring up insightful points, but there are more than a few that are built
upon ideas that fly in the face of science.
A few casual arguments made in favor of space datacenters include the following:
Space can provide free solar energy 24 hours a day
Cooling is “free”. Some erroneously point to space being cold as a key positive
Communications latency in space is low as you’re just sending light through a vacuum
There is no need for permitting in space… so far…
Many
of these points sound like they hold merit on the surface, but a deeper
analysis of each apparent advantage reveals a far more complex story.
While
we think that it is possible that space datacenters could scale one
day, deploying orbital compute using today’s technology currently costs
several times more than deploying terrestrial compute. Achieving
Space-Earth cost parity will require significant engineering work,
material science breakthroughs and cost scaling progresses and will
still take years to achieve. There are also important reliability and
servicing obstacles to overcome - for instance - how GPU servers will
recover from faults that require human intervention, effectively
shielding accelerators from radiation, among many others.
When we deploy compute in space, it won’t be because of the four superficial reasons we have cherry-picked above. Rather, Space-based
datacenters make sense in the world where AI demand well exceeds all of
the four layers of terrestrial datacenter supply that we will introduce
below. For Space datacenters to step up to this call -
it is a necessary condition that major space datacenter cost items like
radiators, solar arrays and launch costs decline considerably, and that a
number of key operational obstacles are overcome.
Users of our AI Space Datacenter TCO Modelcan
see a first-principles, system-level framework for evaluating orbital
compute economics, engineering constraints, and supply-demand dynamics
across both terrestrial and space-based infrastructure.
The four layers of incremental power supply for terrestrial datacenters include:
Grid-connected supply,
Converted bitcoin miners and powered land,
Behind the meter generation, and finally,
Industrial capacity and manpower to build further power infrastructure.
A
necessary condition for AI related IT equipment demand to reach levels
exceeding terrestrial datacenter supply is for there to be enough chip
fabrication capacity to fulfill this demand in the first place, before
we even discuss datacenters! We wrote about this in great detail in our
recent article on the Great AI Silicon Shortage,
where we concluded that the industry has moved from a power-constrained
to an accelerator-constrained regime. Available datacenter capacity and
power now exceed AI compute demand, but TSMC’s N3 wafer capacity and
HBM supply cannot keep pace with the pace of accelerator deployments.
This means that today, and for the next few years, chip manufacturing
will be the global constraint before we even worry about supply for
these four layers.
The chip constraint forms a separate
fifth layer of supply - Semiconductor Production, and it is a
“universal” constraint on all chip deployment, whether deployed on Earth
or in Space. Users of our AI Space Datacenter TCO Model
can see how this constraint applies well into the future, and under what
scenarios regarding chip manufacturing capacity addition that
Semiconductor Production may not be the constraint.
Elon Musk is clearly well aware of this constraint, and it is the impetus behind his Terafab Initiative. The AI Space Datacenter TCO Model also includes knobs and sliders for users to tune to test out various Terafab scenarios.
Framing the Space Datacenter Debate Our various industry models such as the Accelerator Model, the Foundry Industry Model and WFE Models illustrate the aforementioned chip tightness. Meanwhile our AI Datacenter Model forecasts accelerating incremental datacenter additions in 2027 and 2028. Thus, datacenter capacity addition will run ahead of chip constraints in the next few years until fab capacity additions accelerate to catch up. Our suite of industry models will only forecast such wafer fab and datacenter capacity additions once such plans are confirmed.
However, the world in which AI demand is so
overwhelming as to exceed the already formidable datacenter capacity
additions is a world with no time for half measures. As such, our AI
Space Datacenter TCO Model base case departs from our industry models to
reflect this world, assuming accelerating incremental datacenter
capacity additions and a meaningful step up in the pace of chip fab
capacity addition. It is a world where all the stops are pulled out and
many obstacles from gas turbine availability to EUV tool production
constraints are overcome because clear long-term AI end use ROI
justifies enough capital investment to overcome them.
The below
chart illustrates what this world could look like - with incremental
datacenter capacity additions eventually in the hundreds of GW annually,
though adding chip capacity will still be more difficult than adding
datacenter capacity....
Israel and Lebanon raises hopes of a breakthrough in US-Iran talks where a low intensity conflict has been waged under the flag of a ceasefire. The Israel-Lebanon deal reportedly does not include Hezbollah, underscoring the fragility and limits of the ceasefire claims. July WTI is near the middle of the $94-$96 range. The market seems cautious.
The US dollar is mostly softer, with the Canadian dollar the weakest among the G10 currencies. The swaps market has a BOJ hike nearly fully discounted for later this month and the greenback continues to hover near but below JPY160. Japan’s finance minister continued to press with recent rhetoric that it stands ready to act. Poor earnings from Broadcom late yesterday weighed on the chip sector in Asia and has dragged the Nasdaq futures down over 1%. The market-sensitive US May jobs data are due tomorrow but the bar to a change in Fed policy this month, as Warsh chairs his first meeting is very high....
Global smartphone shipments are now forecast to fall 13.9% YoY in 2026, dropping to 1.08 billion units, the lowest annual volume since 2013, and a steeper contraction than our February forecast of 12.4%.
A memory supply crisis, driven by capacity reallocation toward AI-focused HBM and server DRAM, is the primary driver of the downturn, with LPDDR4/5 prices expected to treble in Q2 2026 relative to Q4 2025, per Counterpoint’s Memory Service.
Lower-end OEMs and Emerging Markets face the sharpest pressure, with LPDDR4 memory supply tracking to a decline of over 40% in 2026; the sub-$150 segment faces an effective permanent removal in some markets.
Apple and Samsung are the most insulated OEMs, while Huawei is the only Chinese brand expected to grow shipments in 2026.
The Iran conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz add a geopolitical dimension to the downturn, though macroeconomic headwinds are expected to be materially less severe than the post-Ukraine inflationary shock.
Seoul, Beijing, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Fort Collins, Hong Kong, London, New Delhi, Taipei, Tokyo – June 1, 2026
The global smartphone market has entered its deepest period of contraction on record, according to Counterpoint Research's latest Smartphone Market Outlook Tracker, with full-year 2026 shipments now forecast to decline 13.9% YoY to 1.08 billion units, a downward revision from the 12.4% decline projected in February. The trigger is a worsening memory supply crisis that has accelerated sharply in recent weeks, compounded by the outbreak of the Iran conflict.
Global Smartphone Forecast, May 2026 Edition
Source: Counterpoint Research Smartphone Market Monitor and Market Outlook, May 2026 Update
Memory crisis deepens the 2026–2027 downturn
The Q1 2026 smartphone market retreated 3.1% YoY, marking the first decline after nine consecutive quarters of growth. The performance was nonetheless better than expected, as OEMs moved to front-load shipments and clear pre-shock inventory ahead of expected price increases. However, the deterioration since has been sharp. Counterpoint Research's Memory Service indicates that mobile LPDDR4/5 prices in Q2 2026 are on track to treble relative to Q4 2025 levels, with the squeeze expected to persist through H2 2027 given the capital intensity and lead times inherent to semiconductor manufacturing.
The damage is falling disproportionately on lower-end devices. LPDDR4 supply is expected to decline more than 40% in 2026 as fabs reallocate capacity toward AI-driven HBM and server DRAM, making it increasingly uneconomical to supply entry-level products. Globally, smartphone wholesale prices rose 14% in Q1, and the pace will sustain as pre-shock inventory is exhausted. Certain sub-$150 price tiers face effective permanent ejection from the market.
Principal Analyst Yang Wang commented, “The memory crisis is the most disruptive supply-side event the smartphone industry has ever faced. Unlike demand-driven slowdowns, such as seen during COVID and 2022-23, the current contraction will not respond to pricing, channel and product planning adjustments. OEMs in the low- and mid-tier are caught between unabsorbable cost increases and consumers with hard affordability ceilings. The narrative around the smartphone market is no longer how to grow shipments or market share, but whether to remain in the market at all.”
Premium resilience, OEM divergence, and the road to recovery
So the question becomes: Will the increase in average selling price brought about by the shift to more expensive phones be large enough to offset the decline in unit volume?
Dent is a type of field corn. A long way for a not-very-good play on words
First up, from Xinhua via People's Daily, June 4:
Chinese scientists develop high protein maize in animal feed quest
Chinese scientists have identified two key genes for high protein
content in maize and have managed to develop high protein varieties,
offering a promising solution to China's animal feed protein shortage.
Maize is China's largest grain in terms of production volume,
however, its protein content is generally low, only about 8 percent,
leading to a heavy dependence on imported soybean meal as a protein
source for livestock, according to Wu Yongrui, deputy director of the
Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences (CEMPS) of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences (CAS).
In 2025, China's soybean imports exceeded 100 million tonnes. Raising
maize protein content by just one percentage point would be equivalent
to the protein contained in approximately 8 million tonnes of imported
soybeans, Wu said.
Therefore, developing high protein maize to replace imported soybean
meal in feed is a promising tactic in seeking to address the country's
feed protein shortfall. Yet, for a long time, breeding efforts had
lacked access to superior high protein genes, Wu noted.
Research has found that wild maize contains protein levels as high as
30 percent, but after over 9,000 years of domestication and modern
breeding, most of these genes have been "lost" in contemporary varieties
due to the absence of targeted selection for protein content, Wu
explained.
In 2022, a research team led by Wu identified the first high protein
gene, THP9-T, from wild maize, achieving a preliminary boost in protein
content for major domestic maize cultivars. However, further
breakthroughs in maize protein content remained a significant challenge.
Through persistent efforts, the team successfully identified a second
high protein gene, THP3-T. Multi-year, multi-location field trials
demonstrated that this gene can increase kernel protein content from 10
percent to over 13 percent in inbred lines without compromising yield,
while also enhancing whole-plant protein content and enabling the maize
to grow well and remain protein-rich with less fertilizer, Wu said.
Further research revealed that combining THP3-T and THP9-T produces
an unprecedented synergistic effect, raising kernel protein content in
inbred lines from 10 percent to 15 percent -- far exceeding the impact
of either gene alone.
"The research not only discovered the 'key puzzle piece' for high
protein maize breeding but also offers new possibilities for quality
improvement and precise genetic enhancement of modern maize," Wu said.
The team has employed marker-assisted breeding technology to
precisely improve over 80 parental lines of major maize cultivars in
China, raising their protein content to more than 14 percent.
The team also successfully increased the kernel protein content of
Zhengdan958, China's most widely cultivated maize hybrid, from 8.5
percent to over 12 percent.
Wu said that China produces approximately 300 million tonnes of maize
annually. If the protein content of maize used for feed nationwide were
raised by four percentage points to more than 12 percent, the total
added protein would be equivalent to over 30 million tonnes of imported
soybeans, which is roughly 30 percent of current soybean imports....
The
discovery of oil in Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1908 marked a
significant turning point in the region's economic and political
landscape. The process began when Moẓaffar od-Dīn Shāh, the Qājār
Dynasty's ruler, sold exploration rights to William Knox D'Arcy, a
wealthy Englishman. Despite initial challenges, including harsh weather
and a lack of skilled labor, D'Arcy's venture bore fruit when oil was
struck at Masjed Soleymān, leading to the establishment of the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909. This discovery attracted British
government interest, especially as the internal combustion engine gained
importance, further integrating Persian oil into global markets.
The
geopolitical implications of this find were profound, as both Russia
and Britain sought to protect their interests in Persia during World War
I. Subsequent developments included efforts by local leaders, such as
Reza Khan, to negotiate better terms for oil profits, reflecting a
growing nationalistic sentiment. This historical moment laid the
foundation for Iran’s complex relationship with foreign powers,
particularly regarding oil control, which continued to evolve through
the 20th century, culminating in significant political upheaval,
including the 1979 revolution. The discovery of oil thus not only
transformed Persia's economy but also its political dynamics and
international relations.
Full Article
DATE May 26, 1908
The discovery of oil in Persia by an Englishman who had purchased
oil concession rights gave Great Britain control of Persian oil, making
Persia of tremendous strategic importance during two world wars. The
discovery also initiated the opening of the Middle East to oil
exploration and development, making the region of vital importance to
the world economy. Initial Western control of oil production produced an
anti-imperialist reaction that remained for many decades.
LOCALE Masjed Soleymān, Persia (now Iran)
Key Figures
William Knox D’Arcy (1849-1917), British entrepreneur
Moẓaffar od-Dīn Shāh (1853-1907), Qājār shah, r. 1896-1907
Reza Khan (1878-1944), nationalist and secular reformist shah of Iran, 1925-1941
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980), shah of Iran, 1941-1979
Mohammad Mosaddeq (1880-1967), nationalistic prime minister of Iran, 1951-1953
Sir Percy Sykes (1867-1945), British general in charge of protecting Persian oil fields during World War I
George B. Reynolds (fl. early twentieth century), leader of D’Arcy’s oil drilling team
Summary of Event
During the last half of the nineteenth century, Persia (modern-day
Iran) was of interest to Europeans mainly for its fine carpets and for
whatever monopolies could be gained from monetary gifts to the corrupt
shahs (emperors) of the Qājār Dynasty. By 1900, Russian interests
controlled the five northern Persian provinces, while the British sphere
was in the south and controlled monopolies for commodities such as
tobacco. It was business as usual when Moẓaffar od-Dīn Shāh sold a
concession to a wealthy Englishman, William Knox D’Arcy, who had made
his fortune mining gold in Queensland, Australia. For ten thousand
pounds, D’Arcy purchased the rights to explore, develop, and sell natural gas,
petroleum, and asphalt in all of Persia, except for the five northern
provinces controlled by Russia, for the next sixty years. After two
years, D’Arcy was required to form a company and give the shah twenty
thousand additional pounds and twenty thousand pounds in shares of the
company’s stock. The shah was also to receive 16 percent of any profits
from annual oil revenues.
The natural seepage of oil from the ground in Persia, which had been
used for centuries to caulk boats and bind bricks, attracted European
interest in the 1870’s as technology for oil drilling developed. Baron
Julius de Reuter (founder of Reuters News Agency)
made two unsuccessful efforts to locate oil, and in the early 1890’s a
French geologist surveyed western Persia and published a scientific
paper on the region’s oil-producing potential. These efforts sparked
D’Arcy’s interests and resulted in his 1901 purchase of the shah’s
concession. That year, D’Arcy hired George B. Reynolds, one of the few
Englishmen with experience in oil exploration, and sent him to find oil
fields in western Persia.
From 1901 to 1905, Reynolds drilled for oil without success. Harsh
weather conditions, difficult terrain, and the shortage of skilled labor
slowed progress. Running low on capital, D’Arcy signed an agreement
with the Burmah Oil Company, a British corporation, to gain the funding
necessary to continue exploration. Reynolds began drilling in southern
Iraq, but through 1906 and 1907 he continued to lose money. The venture
was close to collapse when, at 4:00 P.M. on May 26, 1908, oil began to
gush over the top of oil rig number one at Masjed Soleymān, rising to a
height of fifty feet above the rig. Two more wells were sunk, with
equally productive results. The first major oil strike in the Middle
East had been made. Today, a small outdoor museum preserves what is
known as Well Number One, which still retains its original rig, boiler,
and pump.
In 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded. D’Arcy led the
company, and by the time of his death in 1917 he had made a massive
fortune, despite the fact that he never set foot in Persia and operated
only through his agents. The company began construction in October,
1909, and by 1911 the number of employees had risen to twenty-five
hundred. The export of oil began in 1912, and by 1914, thirty oil wells
had been drilled at Masjed Soleymān....
Senior government officials have warned Russian President Vladimir Putin
that spending on the war in Ukraine is on an unaffordable path, the
most serious sign of internal division in Moscow since the full-scale
invasion began.
Officials
in Russia’s Finance Ministry and central bank have advised the Kremlin
that the current level of projected defense expenditure risks the
government’s budget deficit widening dangerously, according to people
familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.
The
officials, who have grown increasingly concerned about the state of
Russia’s economy and state budget in recent months, have proposed new
cuts to defense spending, the people said. It will be difficult to mend
the country’s stretched public finances without finding further
efficiencies, they have advised.
However,
a divide among policymakers has seen senior officials in the Defense
Ministry and some in the Kremlin, who are determined to pursue Putin’s
war aims, insist on protecting military expenditure. Reducing it would
badly damage the economy because so many businesses are reliant on
military-related contracts, they have argued.
Putin
has asked Finance Ministry officials to find spending reductions in
other budget areas before targeting defense, some of the people said.
They were all granted anonymity discussing the concerns, the extent of
which has not been made public.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The
Defense Ministry is not only resisting cuts but is demanding additional
funding, according to two people close to the Russian government.
Military expenditure will have to increase to address a shortfall as
high as three trillion rubles ($36 billion) this year, they said.
The
president has been aware of the budgetary pressures both last year and
this year, so the challenges aren’t a surprise, the people said. The
scale of any spending cuts will depend solely on Putin, as no major
budget decisions are made without his approval and he acts as the
ultimate arbiter, they said, describing that as an iron rule.
When
the 2026 budget was drafted, officials understood that a funding gap of
roughly 1.2 trillion to 1.5 trillion rubles could emerge in the second
half of the year, money that might be needed for the defense sector.
At
the time, there were hopes the war in Ukraine would end following the
summit in Alaska last August between Putin and US President Donald Trump,
which would have made a reduction in defense spending in the second
half of 2026 a logical assumption, according to the people close to the
Russian government....
Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chief executive officer CC Wei
said the company’s global chip supply will fall short of AI-fuelled
demand for years to come, sustaining revenue growth for the firm.
Even with
new manufacturing capacity in the US, TSMC can’t fulfill demand led by
American customers, Wei said at the company’s annual shareholders’
meeting in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on Thursday. He reiterated its forecast for
sales growth of more than 30% for this year.
Taiwan’s
largest company is an essential player in the global AI industry by
making cutting-edge semiconductors for the likes of Nvidia Corp and
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. TSMC has been expanding its footprint beyond
its home island to add capacity, yet even that isn’t enough to satisfy
chip needs as major hyperscalers are set to spend US$725 billion for AI
just this year....
Quantinuum
raised $1.68 billion in its upsized initial public offering late
Wednesday, setting the stage for one of the most anticipated tech
listings of the year.
The
quantum computing company priced its upsized IPO of 28 million shares
at $60 apiece. Underwriters have been granted a 30-day option to sell an
additional 4.2 million shares if demand is higher than expected,
Quantinuum said.
From
SpaceX to Anthropic, the pipeline of blockbuster IPOs is moving fast.
But for quantum enthusiasts, Quantinuum’s forthcoming trading debut is a
chance to back a rising market leader.
The
Honeywell-backed upstart is slated to go public Thursday. Shares will
be listed on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol “QNT.”
Interest
in quantum computing has exploded over the past year. Moving far beyond
theoretical technology, it represents an entirely different way of
processing information. These systems harness quantum mechanics to solve
problems far outside the reach of traditional hardware, promising
exponential speedups on tasks that would take classical supercomputers
millennia to complete.
Quantinuum itself aims to capitalize on this wave of interest. Just on Monday, the company upsized its IPO to
26.5 million shares for $53 to $55 each. At the top end of the range,
Quantinuum would have had a market value of $14.3 billion, making it the
second-largest publicly traded quantum company behind IonQ.
The
IPO caps months of uncertainty for investors looking to Quantinuum as
the next big force in quantum computing. Formed in 2021 through a merger
between Honeywell Quantum Solutions and a U.K.-based start-up,
Quantinuum has built a roster of collaborators across the energy,
aerospace, and finance sectors....
What authority would they be claiming? Not the '33 or '34 Acts so probably some sort of fraud statute. Or maybe Federal Trade Commission false advertising, tee hee.
From Reuters, June 3:
Manhattan's
top federal prosecutor said on Wednesday he and his staff are asking
questions in the private asset marketplace about valuations, as concerns
rise about opacity in those processes in private credit and private equity.
Regarding
"marks and transparency of marks, we can do a better job," U.S.
Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton told the
Bloomberg Global Credit Forum.
Scrutiny
has intensified on the valuations asset managers place on securities
that rarely trade, partly pushed by increasing efforts among investment
firms and some governments to channel more retail investor money into private assets.
Clayton
said that in a market where multiple participants have the same asset
marked at different levels, it was important to ask questions,
"particularly if they're making fees."....
He helped break the Bank of England. Now Trump’s Treasury Secretary is using that experience for the United States — and China should be terrified.
More than a year ago, both before and after
Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, I told you that
China could not win a trade war with the United States. My reasoning was
straightforward: China’s economy is far weaker than its official
numbers pretend, its demographic collapse is leading it off a cliff, and
its only way out — even in the short term — is exports, particularly to
the U.S. market.
Not long after I started sounding that
alarm, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave a long-form interview
explaining Trump’s tariff strategy. Buried inside it was something far
more important.
China, he said, has the most imbalanced economy in modern history.
It is trapped in a deflationary recession — perhaps depression — and
trying to export its way out. Its own people do not trust the yuan. They
want to get their money out. The Chinese Communist Party will not let
them.
That sounds like normal economic commentary. It isn’t. Bessent was describing the anatomy of a currency regime under pressure.
If you understand who Scott Bessent is and what he once did, that should run shivers up your spine.
In
1992, Bessent was a leading member of the team at Soros Fund Management
that “broke the Bank of England.” Britain was trying to defend the
pound inside Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism. The official line was
confidence, stability, managed order, and responsible policy. The SFM
team saw something else: a government defending a position reality no
longer supported.
Soros got the legend. Bessent helped him execute. Trump watched, and learned the lesson.
Speculators
do not destroy sound currencies by magic. They attack when governments
defend lies. They see the contradiction before politicians admit it,
before central bankers explain it away, before the press corps discovers
it three years too late and pretends it was obvious all along. Britain
broke. The pound fell. The Bank of England lost.
Now Bessent is Trump’s Treasury Secretary, and the currency under pressure is not the pound. It is the yuan.
So here is the question the Enemedia will not ask, and probably won’t even think of: is Scott Bessent working to crash China’s currency?
Not by announcing it. Serious men don’t announce the trade before they make it. By doing something much larger: strengthening the dollar,
hardening the American financial system, using tariffs to stop China
from exporting its depression into our markets, and forcing Beijing’s
unsustainable economic model into the open.
Presidents hire people for a reason. Trump did not put Scott Bessent
at Treasury because he needed another Wall Street résumé. Trump hired a
man who had helped break a major currency from the inside, who
understood the role of confidence, leverage, capital flows, interest
rates, debt, and political denial, and who knew that governments do not
lose control of currencies because traders are clever. They lose control
because reality finally catches up with the lie.
Bessent is not incidental to Trump’s China strategy. He is one of its central weapons.
China
is not Britain in 1992. The analogy is not exact, nor does it need to
be. Britain was defending a currency arrangement markets no longer
believed. China is defending something far bigger: the fiction that an
overbuilt, overleveraged, export-addicted dictatorship with too little
domestic consumption and evaporating foreign direct investment can keep
growing forever while its own people are trapped behind financial walls
and its customers are shutting their doors.
That fiction is embodied, crystallized in the yuan.
The yuan is not a normal currency. It is not
the dollar. It’s not even the euro. It is a managed instrument of
Communist Party control. A real reserve currency requires trust. It
requires convertibility. It requires deep and open capital markets. It
requires the rule of law. It requires confidence that the government
will not trap your savings the moment they become politically
inconvenient.
China cannot offer any of those things without ceasing to be Communist China.
This is the place where all of China’s contradictions meet. Beijing needs a weak yuan
because its economy is built around exports. If Chinese goods get too
expensive abroad, factories slow, unemployment rises, debt problems
worsen, and the Party’s claim to competent rule erodes. But Beijing also needs a strong yuan
because the moment ordinary Chinese believe their currency will fall,
they will try to get their savings out even faster than they already do.
That means tighter capital controls, more fear, more distortions, and
still less trust....
The European Parliament will switch to French search engine Qwant from Google it said on Wednesday, underscoring Europe's push to reduce its reliance on U.S. technology in favour of local alternatives.
The
European Commission will later on Wednesday announce measures on
chips, cloud computing services and AI as part of its "Buy and Use
European" drive....
While what has been dubbed China Shock 2.0 as the Chinese model moves into higher value-added goods is important, the most immediate challenge facing investors is the double shock from the US in the form or tariffs and war. And both are impacting the capital markets today. More clashes between the US and Iran have been reported, which are underpinning oil prices and lifting bond yields. At the same time, the US is threatening new tariffs of at least 10% on imports from 60 trading partners over how goods allegedly from forced labor are handled. This levy would ostensibly apply to Canada, Mexico, the EU, Taiwan, and UK, while China, Japan, India, South Korea, Brazil, and Switzerland would face a 12.5% tariff. A public comment and review period is planned to run into early July before implementation.
The US dollar is firmer against most of the G10 currencies. The two exceptions are notable. The Norwegian krone is the strongest and may be helped by the gains in oil prices. The yen is the other exception. While comments by BOJ Governor Ueda saw the swap market lift the chances of a rate hike later this month, officials said little new about the weakness of the yen. The greenback tested JPY160 without moving above it, which is its best level since the late April intervention. It is hovering a little below it ahead of the North American session....
Nvidia's decision to build its new humanoid robot platform around Unitree indicates a major push into robotics, autonomous systems and the future of physical AI.
Artificial intelligence
may be driving Nvidia’s record growth today, but the company
increasingly sees robotics as the next frontier. From humanoid robots
and autonomous machines to self-driving cars and robotic factories,
Nvidia is positioning itself as the technology backbone of what CEO Jensen Huang calls the era of “physical AI.”
Now, Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree has landed one of its most
significant endorsements yet. Nvidia has selected Unitree’s H2 humanoid
robot as the foundation of the first robotics system it is selling to
leading research institutions, including Stanford University and ETH
Zurich.
The new platform combines Unitree’s nearly six-foot-tall H2 humanoid robot with Nvidia’s
Jetson Thor computing system, powered by the company’s latest Blackwell
GPU architecture. Rather than simply supplying chips, Nvidia is now
packaging hardware, software and simulation tools into a complete
robotics development platform for researchers.
For Unitree, the partnership provides access to some of the world’s
most prestigious robotics laboratories. For Nvidia, it is another step
toward a future where robots become a major driver of growth beyond
traditional artificial intelligence applications.
A market Nvidia believes could be enormous Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been increasingly vocal about the potential of robotics. Last year, he told shareholders that robotics, alongside artificial intelligence, represented Nvidia’s largest growth opportunity.
“We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and
robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth
opportunity,” Huang said. He has also outlined a future where robots
become as common as computers and smartphones are today.
“We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots,
hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands
of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang
said.
The company expects rapid expansion in robotics over the next five
years as advances in AI make machines more capable of understanding,
reasoning and interacting with real-world environments....
I assume Mr. Son is aware the term "dot.com" does not have the best connotations.
From CNBC, June 1:
Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son told CNBC that the AI revolution will outpace the dot-com boom in the 2000s.
“This is the biggest revolution of technology and realization that mankind ever experienced,” Son said.
The Japanese investment giant announced on Friday a 75 billion-euro investment to build AI infrastructure in France.
The AI revolution is 50 times bigger than the dot-com revolution in the 2000s, SoftBank
CEO Masayoshi Son told CNBC Monday.
“I think this is like more than 10x, probably 50x bigger than dot-com,” Son told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal in Paris, a day after the company announced that it’s investing 75 billion euros ($87 billion) to build AI infrastructure in France, including 5 GW of AI data center capacity.
The
SoftBank chief said the dot-com crash experienced a painful burst,
which proved to be just a small bump in a much bigger long-term growth
story.
“This is the biggest revolution of technology and
realization that mankind ever experienced, so this is just like the
beginning of the internet,” Son added.
Son referenced the fall of auto and electronics stocks in the 1929 Wall Street crash, saying, “There’s always a correction.”....
Throughout the manic phase of SoftBank and the Vision fund there was almost no mention of the fact that at the start of this century Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the word:"But Son’s fairytale didn’t last long. After the dot-com bubble burst,
his company Softbank’s shares plunged 75 percent in two months and was
93 percent lower by the end of 2000.
The business almost went
bankrupt and Son ended up losing USD 70 billion, the highest ever
recorded financial loss for a person in history."
As a side note: If the British government had not refused to allow Nvidia to purchase Arm Holdings, Mr Son would not have had the opportunity to do so and his claim to fame would have been his position as the largest investor in WeWork.
“I told Adam not to be proud that WeWork was growing organically without
a large sales force or spending big marketing dollars,” Softbank boss
Masayoshi Son told Forbes after Softbank’s first investment in 2017.
“Make it ten times bigger than your original plan. If you think in that
manner, the valuation is cheap.” He added, “It can be worth a few
hundred billion dollars.”
That may be some of the worst career advice ever. But probably not the worst:
an internship at the white house will be amazing on your resume. 😳
— Monica Lewinsky (she/her) (@MonicaLewinsky) July 14, 2019
A federal jury found Andrew Left of Citron Research guilty of securities fraud.
Left, who took the stand in his own defense, could face years in prison.
The Los Angeles trial was closely watched because of potential consequences on Wall Street.
Short-seller Andrew Left was convicted Monday of securities fraud for a lucrative tweet-and-trade operation — a verdict that could have consequences on Wall Street....
Forecasting is hard. Accurate forecasting is harder still. But why
forecasting? In support of policymakers dealing with uncertainty,
intelligence analysts perform three principal functions: They form judgments, prepare forecasts, and generate insights.
A key aim of this paper is to show how better alignment between
forecasting methods and structured analytic techniques (SATs) will
enhance analysts’ judgments about the future—thereby improving the
decision-support advantage that policymakers expect from intelligence.
This paper was developed for U.S. government analysts, intelligence
practitioners, and national security managers interested in learning how
forecasting methods can leverage traditional analytic approaches and
enhance tradecraft across the Intelligence Community (IC). The authors
examine how forecasting approaches to probabilistic reasoning,
uncertainty quantification, and structured question design complement
the analytic principles established in IC Directives. Rather than
introducing a new analytic paradigm in this paper, the authors emphasize
interoperability: how forecasting can be integrated within existing IC
analytical frameworks, such as scenario planning, Red team analysis, and
other SATs. That is, the authors frame forecasting as a supporting
discipline that can be integrated to complement and enhance, not
replace, established tradecraft. It is thus positioned as an additive
capability that enhances analytic rigor, strengthens the expression of
uncertainty, and complements existing IC methodologies, such as scenario
planning and related SATs with forecasting applicability....
As noted introducing May 28's "For the Public, Covid Is No Longer a Mystery": Over the next six months there will be a lot of information coming out regarding coronavirus, Covid-19 and the responses thereto. A lot....
From The Telegraph, October 8, 2022:
China ‘began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’ China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say
China began severely restricting the export of personal protective
equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the
world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.
PPE exports to
the US fell by around 50 per cent between August and September of 2019,
in a significant drop which raised alarm bells at key US government
agencies.
China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts said.
The
fall in PPE supplies exiting China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of
PPE, raises new questions about the true timeline of the emergence of
SARS-CoV-2.
An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.
The
anomaly was uncovered by former US government officials including Dr
Tom McGinn, a Senior Health Advisor at the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), and Colonel John Hoffman, a Senior Research Fellow with
the Food Protection and Defence Institute whose career spans decades in
US government and military.
The pair were unconvinced that the
virus had started at the Wuhan Wet Market in December 2019, after and
began looking for an alternative theory.
After scouring a Customs and Border Protection database which tracks
goods entering the US, they noticed China had started hoarding PPE far
earlier than the initial date of the outbreak.
“You can go and
look about three years back [at import data]”, said Colonel Hoffman.
“This is not the normal up and down that occurs”
The pair
presented the information to DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass
Destruction Office, which declined to investigate, saying the drop
reflected normal supply fluctuations.
However
when Col Hoffman contacted one of America’s biggest hospital networks,
HCA Healthcare, the organisation confirmed it was highly unusual.
Surgical gowns on backorder in September 2019
A
representative of HCA, which operates around 200 hospitals and 2,000
clinics, reported surgical gowns and drapes went on backorder in late
September 2019, leaving hospitals scrambling.
“I asked HCA folks if this had happened anytime recently”, Col Hoffman added.
“The answer was no—they could not remember ever seeing so much of this stuff on back order.”
David
Asher, a former State Department official who played a key role in the
pandemic response and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, says
the shortage was also caused by Chinese government efforts to buy up
global PPE stocks in the US, Europe and Australia.
“It was a
persistent uptick [of Chinese purchasing]”, said Dr Asher. “And it was
significant enough that my colleagues at DHS heard about it from
American companies that manufacture PPE, and most importantly from US
hospitals reporting they weren’t able to get the normal supply of masks,
gloves, gowns and goggles”.
China’s campaign to snatch up global PPE stocks and ship them back to China at the start of the pandemic in January and February 2020.
But
earlier purchasing efforts from August and September 2019, call into
question whether the Chinese were aware of an outbreak earlier....
And Marvell was up $14.43 (+7.04%) to $219.43 and another $48.64 (+22.17%) in this morning's pre-market trade after Mr. Huang said MRVL would achieve a trillion-dollar market cap.
Nvidia's CEO says a lot of things.*
From TechFinitive, June 1:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang kicked off Computex 2026
with a sonic boom of a bang this morning by claiming that it is going
to reinvent the PC in exactly the same way that Apple reinvented the
phone.
“Remember, 15, 20 years ago, we used to
have an idea called a phone,” said Huang during the two-hour keynote
speech. “Today, when you think about your phone, the one thing you don’t
do with it is make phone calls. You do just about everything else. So
that phone means something very different to you than a phone of the
past.
“I am certain that what is going to happen
here is that the PC ten years from now, and the PC you think about
today… is going to be completely different,” he said. “Here’s my theory.
[Just as] many houses have home theatres, lawnmowers, dishwashers, I
can totally imagine that someday there’s an AI supercomputer in your
house.”
Naturally, an AI supercomputer that will
be running on Nvidia silicon. It’s no coincidence that Huang also
announced RTX Spark, an AI-focused chip that will run Windows. More of
that later in this article.
Huang’s vision is that rather than our
current idea of a PC that you sit in front of, clicking and typing, in
this future world the PC will be “running all of your agents, it’s
running all of your assistants, and it’s doing all kinds of things for
you all the time”.
But that’s the future, one that sets the
direction of travel for Nvidia and perhaps the entire PC industry.
Against that backdrop, here’s a run-through of five immediate
announcements that we think businesses, enterprises and large
organisations should take note of.
AI supercomputer on every enterprise desk
While Huang’s vision of an AI
supercomputer in every house seems a little distant, it has already
announced an AI supercomputer for every desk in an enterprise. This
echoes Bill Gates’ successful prediction, made in 1993, of a computer in every home.
The enterprise AI supercomputer in
question is the Nvidia DGX Station for Windows. Based on the Nvidia
GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip (Nvidia is not afraid of
superlatives) it can pack up to 748GB of memory and provides up to 20
petaflops of FP4 performance....
The capital markets remain hopefully that the US and Iran will reach an agreement. Oil is a little softer and bond yields are lower. However, in Polymarket, the odds that the Strait of Hormuz is open by the end of the month is at around 22%, down from around 35% last week. The odds it is open by the end of next month is 41%. It briefly was below 40% yesterday for the first time in around three weeks.
The dollar is mostly a little softer but within well-worn ranges. The dollar continues to ease slowly against the Chinese yuan. Against the offshore yuan, a new three-year low was recorded today even as the PBOC set the dollar’s fix slightly higher. Meanwhile, the greenback is trading in a narrow range near yesterday’s high against the Japanese yen (~JPY159.75), which is the highest the it has been since the April 30 intervention....
Mistral’s semiconductor ambitions underscore the company’s bid to control more of its infrastructure as it competes with OpenAI and Anthropic.
The French startup also announced a new data center in France designed specifically for inferencing.
“Europe is lagging behind when it comes to [the] buildout of infrastructure, and so we are investing to close that gap,” CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC.
French startupMistral AI is exploring designing its own chips and may eventually develop them, CEO Arthur Mensch told CNBC.
It
is the first comment made by Mensch about Mistral’s semiconductor
ambitions, underscoring how the company is looking to control more of
its infrastructure as it competes with U.S. heavyweights OpenAI and
Anthropic.
“Of
course, it is interesting,” Mensch said about the prospect of Mistral
developing its own chips, adding that the company is not ruling it out.
Mensch
said that custom chips allow a company to “lower the cost of deploying
tokens to meaningful extents.” Tokens are units of data processed by AI
models.
“Owning the chips may come, I think it should come at some point, but for now we are relying on Nvidia, which is a great partner to us, and we’re testing a few things here and there,” Mensch told CNBC.
Mistral, which is valued at nearly 12 billion euros,
develops AI models but is also investing in building data centers with
Nvidia chips. The Paris-headquartered firm is often seen as Europe’s
answer to OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company is focused on enterprise and counts companies such as chip equipment giant ASML among its top customers.
If Mistral were to develop its own chips, it would follow in the footsteps of the big American hyperscalers such as Amazon and Google, which have designed and deployed their own semiconductors in their data centers.
Custom
chips, also known as an application-specific integrated circuit, are
seen as a way for hyperscalers to have more control over their hardware
and software integrations, potentially offering a differentiated product
from competitors.
Data center expansion Mistral announced on Thursday a new data center in France designed specifically for inferencing, which is the actual process of running AI models....
Down 12.70% since May 1 and even more since the April 23 all-time highs ($1,181.95 intraday, $1,149.53 closing).
However! The fact that I'm posting this likely means the stock is at or very near an intermediate-term bottom, $950.54 down $17.78 (-1.84%) at today's close. ($939.00 intraday low)
That's the way this blogging stuff works and I have no idea why.
First up, from EnergyWatch, May 28:
GE Vernova sees more states putting up barriers to energy projects
”We are seeing more and more states that are clearly putting up barriers,” says the company’s chief executive at a conference.
GE Vernova fell 1.9% on Wednesday at midday in the US after CEO Scott
Strazik expressed caution regarding the outlook for data center and
wind energy projects at a conference organized by investment firm
Bernstein.
Regarding the outlook for data centers, the chief executive stated:
“We are seeing more and more states that are clearly putting up
barriers. And we have customers who are struggling to get their projects
completed,” he said, according to Bloomberg News.
However, the CEO does not foresee canceled orders from customers.
In the wind business, “the pipeline is very significant, but it is
very difficult to convert the wind power pipeline into orders, while
there is also significant economic uncertainty surrounding issues like
tariffs,” says Strazik.
He still expects GE Vernova to deliver 1,500 wind turbines in 2026,
“but I don’t think we can expect to see these orders until there is
clarity on tariffs in the US.”
In the German market, Siemens Energy fell 4.1% on Wednesday, and in Denmark, Vestas plunged 7.4%....
AI Leader GE Vernova: Data-Center Customers 'Are Struggling To Get Projects Across The Line'
AI data centers are indeed receiving community pushback, but GE Vernova (GEV)
sees little risk to its AI-led energy equipment and services backlog,
management said on Wednesday. GE Vernova stock fell modestly but is near
a buy point.
Artificial-intelligence data centers make massive demands for
computing power and suck up vast amounts of energy. GE Vernova's
electrification segment especially targets the energy infrastructure
needs of AI data centers. It is a leader in that market.
Big Tech firms like Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) are behind the AI data-center boom.
AI Data Centers: 'Struggling To Get Projects Across The Line'
At a Bernstein industry conference on Wednesday, Vernova's top executive acknowledged that community opposition to data centers is real, while soothing fears about a risk to growth.
Some customers are "struggling to get projects across the line" as
"more and more states" push back, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik said.
However, he described lease cancellations and project delays as "quite
normal" in the power industry.
Strazik added this type of "typical" pushback is assumed in
realization rates. He explained: "So when (customers) sit down with us
and project the next number of years of growth, they'll often show us
many, many more projects than they are securing equipment for. They know
there is a number of projects that, for one reason or other, either
they will choose not to develop, or externalities beyond their own
control will make it difficult to make happen."
As such, Vernova sees low risk to the backlog. In fact, Strazik
likened the current power cycle to the "1945 after World War II" era.
In both periods, economic growth and the issue of national security or energy independence boosted overall power demand.
For Vernova, realization rates mean the pace at which the order
backlog — a record $163 billion now — turns into realized revenue....
And finally, the judge who told GEV they had to continue working on an offshore wind project, via a preliminary injunction a month ago today reaffirmed the order.
From The New Bedford Light, June 1:
Judge rules again for Vineyard Wind in its dispute with GE Vernova The turbine supplier remains barred from exiting its contract with the wind project.
A judge in Boston has again denied GE Vernova’s request to leave the Vineyard Wind project. He affirmed his April ruling that temporarily bars the turbine supplier from exiting its contract to service and maintain the turbines.
GE Vernova submitted a request for Judge Peter B. Krupp to reconsider his preliminary injunction, arguing that Vineyard Wind achieving commercial operation
and activating its power purchase agreements (thereby locking in a
decadeslong revenue stream) belies the project’s earlier argument that
it was in great financial and operational peril....
