That's the headline at Reuters.
At Silicon Republic:
Thomson Reuters cuts 500 jobs as AI adoption deepens
And back to Reuters via The Edge, Malaysia:
Thomson Reuters to sell 51% stake in global print business to KKR for US$500 million
As far as I know the Thomson family is still doing alright, headed up by David, 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet and his wealthier cousin, Sherry Brydson, the richest woman in Canada.
From MarketWatch, July 14:
Tech bellwether releases preliminary results a week before earnings were expected, showing revenue and profit misses
Shares of IBM took a deep dive in early Tuesday trading toward their worst day in decades, after the technology giant surprised investors by releasing second-quarter results a week ahead of schedule, showing both profit and revenue missing analysts’ consensus expectations.
The problem was the launch of the z17 mainframe program, which the company expected to be wrapping up during the second quarter.
“What played out was worse than our expectations, driven by a shortfall in our Z performance and the associated software stack, primarily in transaction processing,” CEO Arvind Krishna said in a statement.
The stock tumbled 19.1% in premarket trading. That puts it on track for its biggest one-day selloff since the record 23.7% drop on Oct. 19, 1987, a date known as Wall Street’s “Black Monday.”
He said that in the last few weeks of June clients shifted capital expenditures toward memory purchases, storage and servers ahead of expected price increases, which impacted client buying patterns.
While some supply-chain-related impact to IBM’s prior expectations were foreseen, “we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization,” Krishna said....
....MUCH MORE
I'm not sure anyone still considers IBM a tech bellwether anymore. Truth be told I had to double-check that they were still a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (they are)
The company may have enough quantum computing stuff to make it worth sniffing around but the bellwether days are long past.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 14:
CONSUMER PRICE INDEX - JUNE 2026
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 0.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in June after rising 0.5 percent in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This decline in the all items index was the largest 1-month decrease since April 2020 when it fell 0.8 percent. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.5 percent before seasonal adjustment.
The index for energy fell 5.7 percent in June after rising 3.9 percent in May, 3.8 percent in April, and 10.9 percent in March. The energy index was the largest contributor to the monthly all items decrease, more than offsetting increases in other indexes including those for shelter and food. The index for food increased 0.2 percent over the month, as did the index for food at home and the index for food away from home.
The index for all items less food and energy was unchanged in June. Indexes that decreased over the month include motor vehicle insurance, communication, apparel, medical care, and used cars and trucks. Conversely, the indexes for recreation, household furnishings and operations, and personal care were among the major indexes that increased in June.
The all items index rose 3.5 percent for the 12 months ending June after rising 4.2 percent for the 12 months ending May. The all items less food and energy index rose 2.6 percent over the year, following a 2.9-percent increase over the 12 months ending May. The energy index increased 15.7 percent for the 12 months ending June. The food index increased 3.0 percent over the last year....
....MUCH MORE, including narrative discussion and the always interesting Table 2.
From Marc to Market:
The US dollar is consolidating yesterday’s gains today. An off-ramp to the Middle East conflict seems increasingly elusive. After surging more than 9% yesterday, the front month WTI and Brent oil futures contracts are up 3.6%-4.6% today. There are three developments in the US that will be closely monitored today. First, the June CPI is due. It looks to have moderated a little, but given Governor Waller’s comment yesterday, a sticky core rate could boost the perceived chances of a hike later this month. Second, Chair Warsh testifies before the House Financial Services Committee (10:00 AM ET). Third, the US earnings season gets underway with several large bank reporting today.
Japanese government bonds have rallied today despite continued rally in oil prices and a soft yen. Last week, Finance Minister Katayama suggested that Japanese pension funds boost their domestic allocation. Today, she advocated adding government bonds to the individual tax-free investment vehicles. Meanwhile, the dollar is holding above JPY162.00. Lastly, China reported a larger than expected, $125.6 bln June trade surplus, which will likely increase the tension with the US and Europe....
....MUCH MORE
From CNBC, July 14:
This is CNBC’s live coverage of bank earnings reports for JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are reporting earnings before the markets open Tuesday.
Investors expected that the five big banks would see strong revenue from trading equities and fixed income during the second quarter.
The SpaceX IPO drove surging fees for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, while commercial lending is showing signs of a turnaround and consumer credit is expected to remain resilient.
What you need to know:
Earlier from CNBC:
From CNBC, July 13:
- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are set to report earnings early Tuesday, followed by Morgan Stanley on Wednesday
- Investment banking revenue could jump 26% and trading revenue could rise 14% from a year ago, according to KBW’s Chris McGratty.
- The SpaceX IPO drove surging fees for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, including debt-raising work and “soft dollars” from hedge funds on the oversubscribed deal.
- Commercial lending is showing signs of a turnaround as banks compete with private credit lenders for AI-fueled corporate spending.
Expectations are high that when banks start posting second-quarter results Tuesday, led by JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, revenue from trading equities and fixed income will approach, or even exceed, the records set earlier this year.
That’s a key part of what veteran analyst Mike Mayo of Wells Fargo calls the “sweet spot” in the financial sector right now. Both of banking’s profit engines — Wall Street and Main Street — are in growth mode at the same time.
The largest U.S. banks are raking in rising fees from helping corporations tap the markets, punctuated by last month’s giant SpaceX IPO, while risk-taking traders are also thriving as geopolitical unrest including the Iran war stokes volatility across asset classes.
“You saw the largest IPO in history, a pace of mergers that’s on track to be a record year, and a broadening out of trading to include equity and fixed income across myriad geographies,” Mayo told CNBC.
The quarter’s big bank earnings come at an unusually favorable moment for the industry. After years of navigating higher interest rates and inflation-fueled recession fears, lenders are benefiting from a rare combination of booming Wall Street activity, resilient consumer credit and a long-awaited pickup in business lending.
“There’s not much more you can ask for,” Mayo said....
....MUCH MORE
A couple previous Bastille Day posts:
June 14 2020 [commenting on July 14, 2019's disaster]
We'll return to our usual graphic and contemplate whether to memory-hole last year's embarrassment.*
The Rue Montorgueil, like its twin painting The Rue Saint-Denis (Rouen, musée des Beaux-arts), is often thought to depict a 14 July celebration. In fact it was painted on 30 June 1878 for a festival declared that year by the government celebrating "peace and work". This was one of the events organised for the third Universal Exhibition in Paris a few weeks after it opened, and intended to be a symbol of France’s recovery after the defeat of 1870. As well as demonstrating nationalist enthusiasm, the celebrations of 30 June 1878 were also an opportunity to strengthen the position of the Republican regime, still fragile only a few months after the major confrontations of 1876-1877 between its supporters and the conservatives. It was only two years later, in 1880, that 14 July was designated the French National Day.....
Non! We knew it wasn't 14 July, it's that we messed up the darn paintings.
Easier to go with the little girl and her tri-color.
back in a month.
Umlauts. Fräncë needs umlauts if they truly intend to inspire dread wherever they turn their Gallic gaze.*
From DefenseNews, Bastille Day, 2025:
France will accelerate a hike in defense spending to reach €64 billion (US$75 billion) in 2027, three years earlier than planned, President Emmanuel Macron told troops and military brass ahead of Bastille Day celebrations on July 14.
In the face of the greatest threat to freedom since 1945, France needs to step up, the president said in his traditional speech at the Armed Forces Ministry in Paris the evening before the national holiday. Macron said Europe must be ready to face a permanent Russian threat on its borders, from the Caucasus to the Arctic....
...MUCH MORE
*From January 2014's "After Car Attacked By Paris Taxi Drivers, Uber to Toughen Image With Umlauts ":
In a move designed to make Uber seem more "bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy-metal manner," the Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures and Bezos Expeditions-backed company officially changed it's name to Über on Monday.
"Much like Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, Über is not to be messed with," said founder Gärrëtt Cämp, né Camp...
"Ödërnt, düm mëtüänt" (Let them hate so long as they fear)
From EuroNews, July 14:
China’s exports accelerated in June, jumping 27% from a year earlier thanks partly to the boom in artificial intelligence, the customs agency said on Tuesday.
The increase in exports in June was much better than economists had expected. Exports rose 19.4% year-on-year in May.
Imports in June surged 36%, better than May’s 27.4% year-on-year growth, with analysts attributing the expansion in part due to the Iran war driving up import costs.
China recorded a trade surplus of $125.6 billion in June, widening from $105.4 billion in the previous month.
“Trade values took another big leg up in June,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China Economics at Capital Economics, wrote in a note Tuesday. “This predominantly reflects the recent surge in semiconductor prices on the back of the AI boom. But even putting that aside, foreign demand for Chinese goods remains robust.”
China's exports of vehicles, especially EVs, and other tech-related products have boomed as rapid adoption of AI increases the need for semiconductors and other electronic equipment.
The strength in export manufacturing has helped to offset prolonged weakness in domestic spending and investment due to a prolonged downturn in the property industry....
....MUCH MORE
From House of Saud, July 12:
...ABU DHABI — The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Iran on July 12 for “renewed hostile missile and drone attacks” targeting five named regional states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Oman — while the UAE’s own air defense systems simultaneously engaged Iranian missiles and drones approaching Emirati airspace, according to the UAE Ministry of Defence. The statement, which arrived hours after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck Duqm Port in Oman and one day after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held bilateral talks with his Omani counterpart in Muscat, represents Abu Dhabi’s most comprehensive multi-country condemnation of Iranian military action since the Gulf war’s escalation.
The condemnation effectively collapses the bilateral channel that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and Abu Dhabi’s deputy ruler, had maintained with IRGC officials through at least June 2026, when Abu Dhabi reportedly facilitated the release of more than $3 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for a halt to attacks. Iran struck the UAE in May 2026 with missiles and drones, Abu Dhabi called it a “dangerous escalation” and a “terrorist attack,” and the bilateral channel survived that episode — Tahnoon’s team continued engagement with IRGC interlocutors. What the May strikes failed to accomplish, the July 12 combination of five-country condemnation and the Duqm attack appears to have finished....
....MUCH MORE
Currently at House of Saud, July 13:
From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:
The re-intensification of the Middle East war initially roiled the markets but as the session progressed, oil has pulled back and equities have stabilized. August WTI briefly traded above $75 and is now around $73.50, which is still nearly 3% higher. Most of the large Asia Pacific equity markets were under pressure but Europe is little changed and US index futures are mixed.
The US dollar is mixed. The Japanese government reportedly will not formally overhaul the allocation of the government’s pension funds, despite what it may have appeared like before the weekend, and the yen and JGBs are softer today. Since last week’s hawkish hold by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Kiwi has been the strongest in the G10 and remains so today. Undaunted by the heightened volatility and the risk of further disruption of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, the PBOC set the dollar’s reference rate at a new three-year low....
....MUCH MORE
From Benzinga, July 10:
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Apex Symposium, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin warned that losing access to Taiwanese semiconductor chips would cause the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) to decline by 8% within six months, triggering a modern “Great Depression” because Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (NYSE:TSM) microchips are embedded in “every high-end product” manufactured today.
Griffin emphasized that a military escalation or blockade around Taiwan creates a dangerous “bad equilibrium” with absolutely no winners. Because Taiwan Semiconductor completely dominates the global supply chain for advanced silicon, a sudden disruption would paralyze core American industrial and technology sectors almost overnight.
“Boeing stops making planes in six months,” Griffin stated, illustrating the scale of the systemic vulnerability. “Most new cars stop being manufactured in six months. Consumer electronics stop being made in six months. Everything freezes.”....
....MORE
Going back to some posts from 2019/2020:
"China deploys Sun Tzu to win the chip war"
Taiwan's TSMC To Build A $12 Billion Chip Fab in Arizona
***
Although the article focuses on the Huawei angle there is a lot more going on here.
January 16
As Concern Grows Over China’s Invasion Threat To Taiwan the U.S. Military Wants TSMC To Move Some Chip Capacity
And some thought I'd gone mad talking of chips and China and the island formerly known as Formosa (at least to the Portuguese).
p.s. can I start attending the Thursday soirées again? Please....
A couple posts from last summer. Frirst up, the intro to July 3's "China to Narrow Chip Gap With Taiwan Invasion"
Did I say invade? I meant trade.Chips: How China Is Still Paying the Price For Squandering Its Chance To Build a Home-grown Semiconductor Industry
I must have been thinking of China's Defense Minister last month saying "China must be and will be reunited".
With the Taiwanese elections coming up it's probably as good a time as any for Beijing to make some sort of move. Probably not invasion though. China will want to test its military somewhere, our guess is Vietnam, before tackling Taiwan. So probably some sort of fifth column action, cyber, electrical grid etc. And the people to do it are already on the island, I mean if the Chinese could get one of their spies into Dianne Feinstein's office while she was Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (2009 - 2015), the guy was her San Francisco office manager, not, as reported, the chauffeur, if they could do that there is no doubt they have assets in Teipei.
So where was I?
Chips. For all their technological wizardry the Chinese are still having trouble making chips. Some of our links on that after the jump....
April 2023 - Taiwan Quietly Urges U.S. To Chill On The "Invasion Risk To World Chip Supply" Chatter (TSM)
And last week:
As
Chips are just war by other means.
Good timing on getting the ADRs floated on Friday.
From The Korea Economic Daily via Bloomingbit, July 13:
South Korea’s Kospi slumped nearly 9% on July 13, dropping back into the 6,000 range. Concerns that the semiconductor cycle has peaked combined with escalating US-Iran tensions to trigger a Black Monday-style selloff. SK Hynix, which recently listed American depositary receipts on the Nasdaq, plunged more than 15%.
The Kospi closed down 8.95% at 6,806.93. It was the first finish below 7,000 since May 4, when the index ended at 6,936.99. The benchmark hovered around 7,500 early in the session, but losses deepened from about 9:30 a.m. It fell below 7,000 at 12:04 p.m. and by 1:28 p.m. the decline had widened into the 8% range, triggering a circuit breaker that halted all trading for 20 minutes. The marketwide trading curb, introduced after the financial crisis, has been activated 13 times in total, seven of them this year.
A rout in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two stocks that had led gains on the main board, spread across the broader market. Samsung Electronics sank 10.70% to 254,500 won, while SK Hynix tumbled 15.37% to 1.845 million won. That was SK Hynix’s biggest one-day drop on record, surpassing its 14.93% decline during the 2008 financial crisis. SK Hynix listed its ADRs on Nasdaq on July 10, and the securities jumped 12.76% on their debut. Its Seoul-listed shares, however, slumped sharply...
....MORE
From CNBC, July 13:
- TSMC reported a 6.2% month-on-month and 68% year-on-year jump in June revenue.
- The company reported a first-half revenue of NT$ 2404.48 billion for 2026, marking a 35.6% increase compared to the same period last year.
- The Taiwanese chip giant’s stock rose 1%.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported a 67.9% year-on-year rise in its June sales on Monday, ahead of its second-quarter earnings release later this week.
For the first half of 2026, TSMC’s total revenue reached 2.4 trillion new Taiwan dollars ($74.99 billion), representing a 35.6% increase compared to the same period in 2025. TSMC reported June revenue of NT$ 442.68 billion — a 6.2% increase from the previous month.
The Taiwanese chip giant’s shares rose 1% Monday.
TSMC’s numbers are “quite robust,” said Sravan Kundojjala, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, noting that the chipmaker’s second-quarter revenue exceeded its high-end guidance of $40.2 billion. The result came whereas historically June revenue has declined month-over-month over the past four years, he added.
“The demand supply situation in AI is still quite tight and TSMC is sold out on N3, which is targeted by all leading AI GPU and CPUs this year,” he added.
The world’s largest contract chipmaker manufactures semiconductors for a wide range of applications, spanning from smartphones to high-performance AI computing systems, with key clients including U.S. technology leaders such as AI darling Nvidia, Apple and Advanced Micro Devices....
....MORE
And from the company:
TSMC June 2026 Revenue Report
....MORE
With Russian shipping and refining capacity getting whacked we're seeing crack spreads greater than the price of crude itself.
Important - Diesel in the US.
— Vandana Hari (@VandanaHari_SG) July 13, 2026
The attention always focuses on gasoline pump prices.
Pricier diesel has a more silent but debilitating, wider impact on inflation and the economy. https://t.co/LBfd4qyNb3
From The Economist, July 2:
We used artificial intelligence to test the accuracy of our forecasts
The tone of pronouncements made in the leader pages of The Economist has been likened to the “voice of God”. The comparison is not meant flatteringly. But it raises a fair question. A deity would be omniscient. How accurate, by comparison, are our predictions? Rigorous fact-checking usually saves us from embarrassing errors about the present. The future is trickier.
In 1999 we said oil could fall to $5 a barrel, from around $10 at the time. That $10 turned out to be a generational low. Prices rose more than tenfold in the next decade. Then, in 2013, we called a peak in global oil demand. Today it is still stubbornly trundling upwards. This April we said that oil markets were in “La La land” about the war in Iran and predicted a spike in prices. They have since fallen by about a third.Perhaps the black stuff is our bête noire. Yet these howlers, and others, have given rise to the charge that, far from being all-knowing, The Economist is so reliably wrong that the smart move is to bet against it. There is no better time to double down on a stock-market rally than when we start fretting about a bubble. Last year the then chairman of Reform UK, a populist-right party, called The Economist the “ultimate contrarian indicator”, while complaining about our criticism of his party’s fantasyland fiscal numbers. (A few months later, the party reversed course and ditched those policies.)Is the accusation fair? Or can The Economist lay claim to a creditable forecasting record? Predictive perfection is not our goal and we aim mainly to inform and stretch minds. But ideally we would be right more often than wrong. To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders The Economist has published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.We asked it to assess whether each leader had made a falsifiable claim about the future as part of its main thesis. About 1,400 did. We then extracted those predictions, and asked the AI to mark out of ten both how contrarian the leader’s outlook was at the time and how accurate the prediction turned out to be. We ran those queries several times and took an average.Overall, the AI assessor’s conclusions are reassuring, at least for those of us who make a living writing (and occasionally predicting) for The Economist....*****...To evaluate our record in detail, start by casting your mind back to the turn of the millennium, when our leader sample begins. We were preoccupied by transformative technology. Market optimism seemed to be teetering on the delusional. As the dotcom crash took hold, we fretted (accurately) about America’s economic pain spreading to Europe and Asia, and (unnecessarily) about a second dip in growth. But soon we began to fulminate about the next crisis—which started in America’s housing market and culminated in the worldwide financial mayhem of 2007-09....
From Artemis, July 10:
Existing cyber cat bonds structured to withstand Claude Mythos turbulence: Man Group
As Anthropic’s advanced cybersecurity AI model, Claude Mythos, continues to generate significant noise across the cyber sector, investment manager Man Group notes that the per-occurrence structures and high attachment points of existing cyber catastrophe bonds should provide meaningful insulation from future turbulence, for when more advanced AI models eventually become widely available.
In early April, Anthropic announced the successor to its Claude Opus model: Mythos Preview. While a general-purpose language model, Mythos has demonstrated capabilities in computer security, including autonomously discovering and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, as well as reverse-engineering exploits on closed-source software.
“Of concern is not that Mythos is discovering vulnerabilities that could not be discovered by skilled researchers, rather, it allows the search for and application of vulnerabilities to be done at scale, and to potentially put such skills in the hands of less skilled, but malicious actors,” Man Group said.
In response, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing, an initiative bringing together users and authors of some of the most critical software, such as Apple, Google, Linux Foundation, and Cisco, in order to employ Mythos Preview for defensive security.
Man Group noted that Anthropic eventually intends to deploy Mythos-class models with built-in safeguards that detect and block nefarious use. The firm also noted that as part of Anthropic’s evaluation of Mythos, thousands of highly critical vulnerabilities were also identified.
“The concern though is that sooner or later, malicious actors will get their hands on Mythos Preview or a competitor of similar abilities and exploit these vulnerabilities at scale. So, what are the implications for cyber security, cyber insurance, and cyber catastrophe (cat) bonds,” Man Group said.
Adding: “So far, we have observed a benign insurance response, partly, we think, because there haven’t been any severe events yet, but it would be naïve to assume that these capabilities do not elevate the cyber threat level.”
Of the six outstanding 144A cyber catastrophe bond deals, Man Group highlighted that five are per occurrence deals.
“The decision of what constitutes a single occurrence is sometimes delegated to the sponsor rather than effected through a precise legal definition. The latter would be difficult to codify,” the firm said.
Adding: “The cyber linkage of events is potentially more difficult to define, given potentially multiple steps in an attack. In any case, per occurrence deals and high attachment points mean that we need to see a single event causing insured loss which is an order of magnitude greater than what we have seen to date. As an aside, we note that cat bond risk modellers may not necessarily aggregate losses in the same way that the insured does.”
Man Group went on to note that the re/insurance and ILS industry will still need to grapple with two fundamental questions.
“First, if an AI agent simultaneously attacks multiple institutions, insurers must determine if that constitutes a single event. Whether the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center constituted one or two events was heavily litigated, and defining the cyber linkage of events is potentially more difficult. Second, as corporates integrate AI into their processes, the market must consider whether AI outages warrant sub-limits as is already the case for cloud service outages,” the firm explained....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Artemis:
July 2015 - The Next Great Reinsurance Opportunity: Cyber Attacks!
And a whole bunch more between those two bookends. If interested use the 'search blog' box, upper left.
From the Tiled With Pentagons blog, July 2:
(Epistemic status: A hill I'll happily die on, but also will own as the kind of subjective hot take where my own taste is load-bearing for its validity. For everyone with a sweet tooth I've split a bottle of something nice with, and everyone embarrassed of liking fruity drinks.)
How can you tell an eternal aesthetic truth from the vagaries of fashion and signaling? One of them holds up under comparative historical analysis, and the other has a start date. Alcoholic drinks - especially wine - have been getting drier for the last century, and prestige taste has shamed us into calling this progress. It's not: it's fashion masquerading as quality, and the slightest bit of modern archaeology wears that facade away like cheap gold plating from copper. And just as with such faked gold, to be beholden to modern fashions is to spend more money than you should spend on less enjoyment than you might secure.
In 1916, a Swedish schooner named the Jönköping was transporting a cargo of fine spirits to Tsar Nicholas II's court and to the Allied war effort: wine, Cognac, and 3,000 bottles of Champagne. To Nicky's sorrow, she ran afoul of a German U-Boat, which detained her, took her crew prisoner, and scuttled her with a torpedo to prevent the steel she carried from reaching Russia. 80 years later, salvage operations began on the wreck, and 2,000 bottles of fine Champagne had survived to be lifted from the bed of the Baltic Sea. The conditions had been ideal for their preservation: the chill and the dark had prevented spoilage, and 6 atmospheres of water pressure outside had countered an equal 6 atmospheres of carbonation within, preventing leakage. Tasting notes agreed: Goût Américain 1907 was well-balanced and complex, with a "sweet, fruity, fresh" aroma with notes of honey, exotic fruits, apricots, and raisins; "comporting itself as though from the 1970s", it retained much of its carbonation after all those decades, and had a "youthful golden color with slight copper hue". It was, expert tasters agreed, one of the best Champagnes they'd ever had. And one more thing - it was very, very sweet: "sweet, and one of the richest Champagnes [they'd] ever tasted"; almost scandalously so. And it wasn't that the wine had improved all that much or sweetened at all over its near-century at the bottom of the sea. All Champagne has added sugar - called a dose - to balance its acidity and help carbonate the wine, and Goût Américain 1907's was relatively high - at least, for modern times. For its own time, it was pretty unexceptional. That was what excellence tasted like for those who could afford the very best: rich and sweet. Some of the richest people who ever drowned went down with the Titanic, and before their fateful foundering, they would have been toasting with much the same: something rich, complex, scintillating, and, according to a modern oenophile's palate, dessert. (It's a pity that no recoverable bottles of Champagne survived to prove me right.) Bone-dry Brut as a badge of sophistication is a recent invention....
....MUCH MORE
A few stories from Iran International, July 11/12:
The headliner:
Revenge becomes Iran's language of unity after Khamenei’s death | Iran International
Iranian officials are calling for national unity after Ali Khamenei’s death, but the message is increasingly being shaped by demands for revenge, attacks on officials accused of compromise and warnings that internal division serves the enemy....Iran turns Friday prayers into nationwide campaign for revenge | Iran International
Khamenei doubles down on revenge after Trump vows to decimate Iran if targeted | Iran International
Iran’s economic pain deepens as factions trade blame | Iran International
Iran faces region’s harshest mix of wartime contraction and inflation | Iran International
For many Iranians, paychecks now barely cover food | Iran International
And from the Iran International liveblog
An Iranian army spokesperson said the United States must comply with the terms of the memorandum of understanding, adding that US actions to create what he called an "illegal route" in the southern Strait of Hormuz had undermined security.
"We are duty-bound to ensure the region's security and the safe passage of ships," Brigadier General Abolfazl Akraminia said, according to state media.
He added that Iran's armed forces would "firmly defend the rights of the Iranian people in the Strait of Hormuz" and said their target list was "constantly being updated."
From Observer, July 10:
Shawn Edwards has spent decades building the infrastructure of Wall Street. Now he's trying to teach it to think—without letting it lie.
....MUCH MOREBloomberg’s chief technology officer has, by his own admission, a job that is half about building the future and half about stopping the future’s more embarrassing impulses from getting anywhere near production. “Half my job is keeping out nonsense from the company,” Shawn Edwards tells Observer, and he is not entirely joking. The nonsense he’s referring to is the tidal wave of generative-A.I. hype that has swept through every boardroom with a Bloomberg Terminal. His job is finding the narrow cross-section between what his engineers can dream up and what the people who actually trade bonds, screen credit and prep for earnings calls are desperately trying to get done—not what they’re doing today, but what they’re actually trying to achieve. In Edwards’ worldview, that distinction is the organizing principle behind ASKB, the conversational, agentic A.I. system Bloomberg has built directly into the Terminal.
Ask Edwards for a use case, and he describes the old way of doing things. “Before ASKB, a user would have to go to different places in the Bloomberg Terminal to look at company fundamentals, to look at what the street estimates are, to look at various performance measures, company KPIs, and a different place to look at print, peer analysis and alternative data for that quarter’s performance—reading lots of news about the company and invariably reading lots and lots of company documents and sell-side research.” Edwards pauses. “And then they would have to synthesize all this information.”
As of February, Bloomberg users can ask the system (ASKB) to synthesize information. “It knows where to fetch and knows where to find all this information and gives you a quite detailed analysis for you to be prepared.”
The machine does not replace the analyst, and Edwards is careful, almost insistent, on this point. “ASKB doesn’t do the entire job for the analyst, but it does 80 percent of the work of gathering and synthesizing this information. And it frees them up to do the value-added thinking—really deciding where they really dig in.” The workflows differ by desk. For equity analysts, it’s event preparation and thesis monitoring. For credit analysts, it’s liquidity analysis and bond screening. The common thread is a research problem.
Trust Isn’t a Feature...
Via FN London, July 9:
Boosted by legal win for the Trumps, Schwab account went on automated trading spree
In August, a New York appeals court delivered some good news to President Trump—and sent his Charles Schwab account into overdrive.
A panel of judges threw out a roughly $500 million penalty against the Trumps stemming from New York Attorney General Letitia James’s fraud case against the family’s businesses.
The president’s trust had set aside money in a Schwab account to pay the fine, but the ruling freed up that cash for investments, people familiar with the situation said. Within days, the Schwab account was snapping up and selling dozens of stocks as an automated trading strategy put the cash to work.
Trump’s massive increase in stock trading, detailed in recent financial disclosures, has drawn scrutiny from government ethics watchdogs. After reporting dozens or hundreds of trades in filings through the first 15 months of his term, he began disclosing thousands more in recent weeks. His latest report revealed an avalanche of more than 21,000 trades over the course of last year.
Schwab, which has emerged as one of the Trumps’ go-to financial firms, is one of the major money managers at the center of that trading activity. Of the eight investment accounts detailed in Trump’s annual financial report, one managed by Schwab—identified only as “account no. 7”—held the most money, as measured by the minimum values assigned to each holding, and had among the highest volume of trades on or after the August court ruling, according to people familiar with the matter.
_ and JPMorgan Chase are two of the other financial firms handling investment accounts for the first family, some of the people said.
Trump has said his sons are managing all of his investments while he is in office. “My kids run it,” he said on CNBC earlier this month. “I’ve made a tremendous amount of money, more than I would have ever thought I would have made, and I let people invest it I don’t even speak to.”
Much of the president’s wealth is held in a revocable trust. Trump is the sole beneficiary, though Donald Trump Jr. serves as the trustee, with sole voting power.
“All of the president’s assets are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” a White House spokeswoman said in a statement. “There are no conflicts of interest.”
Since the president’s return to the White House in early 2025, the Trumps have turned to automated trading strategies. A Trump Organization spokesman said the family is taking that approach to alleviate concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
One such strategy, direct indexing, involves buying individual securities that track the performance of an index—such as the S&P 500 or the Schwab 1000—while also generating losses that can be used to reduce capital-gains taxes. These automated strategies routinely buy and sell large quantities of stocks over the course of the year to hew to an index, and any influx of cash into the account will very quickly be redeployed....
....MUCH MORE
From DTN Progressive Farmer, July 10:
USDA Lowers New-Crop Corn Ending Stocks, Forecasts Record-Large US Soybean Crop
This article was originally published at 11:02 a.m. CDT on Friday, July 10. It was last updated with additional information at 12:29 a.m. CDT on Friday, July 10.
**
OMAHA (DTN) -- USDA trimmed 170 million bushels (mb) from 2026-27 corn ending stocks, estimating that there will be 1.79 billion bushels (bb) of corn on hand at the end of the marketing year. Corn acreage and yield were left unchanged at 95.3 million acres (ma) and 183 bushels per acre (bpa).
USDA increased soybean production to 4.475 billion bushels, which would be a U.S. production record if it holds. USDA estimates that farmers planted 85.4 ma that will yield an average of 53 bpa.
USDA trimmed 20 mb from wheat ending stocks, lowering its projection for 2026-27 to 722 mb.
USDA released its July Crop Production and World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports on Friday....
....MUCH MORE
Soybeans have given back much of the initial jump, wheat maintains.
From the U.S. Department of Agriculture, July 10:
World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates
WHEAT: The outlook for 2026/27 U.S. wheat this month is for lower supplies, unchanged domestic use and exports, and smaller ending stocks. Supplies are reduced 22 million bushels on lower beginning stocks and production. Production is forecast at 1,536 million bushels, down 7 million from last month. This is the lowest U.S. wheat production since 1970/71. The all wheat yield is 47.9 bushels per acre, up 0.9 bushels from last month. Winter wheat production is lowered 39 million bushels to 990 million, almost entirely due to reductions in Hard Red Winter and Soft Red Winter.
The initial 2026/27 survey-based production forecasts from NASS indicate other spring wheat is less than last year at 475 million bushels on lower harvested area while Durum is also lower at 71 million on reduced harvested area and yields. Projected 2026/27 ending stocks are reduced 22 million bushels to 722 million and are down 22 percent from last year. The projected 2026/27 season- average farm price (SAFP) is unchanged at $6.00 per bushel, compared to last year’s final SAFP of $5.06.
This month’s 2026/27 global wheat outlook is for reduced supplies, higher consumption and trade, and reduced ending stocks. Supplies are projected down 1.0 million tons to 1,099.1 million primarily on reduced beginning stocks for several countries with global output only slightly lower. Production is raised for Russia and Ukraine on continued favorable conditions for their winter wheat crops. Canada’s production is lowered based on Statistics Canada’s Principal Field Crops Area report. Global consumption is raised 1.6 million tons to 826.2 million, mainly on higher food, seed, and industrial use for India, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. World trade is 1.1 million tons higher at 213.1 million on increased exports for Argentina, Russia, and Ukraine more than offsetting reduced exports for Canada. Projected 2026/27 global ending stocks are lowered 2.6 million tons to 272.8 million, primarily on reductions for the United States, India, Argentina, and Canada....
....MUCH MORE
And more to come.
From TradingView, Wheat 24 hours.
In association with Hugo Drax Productions.
From Business Insider, July 8:
Amazon documents reveal a costly new Alexa AI project
Amazon's next Alexa AI upgrade may be able to handle more complex tasks. Getting there is expensive, though.
Internal planning documents reviewed by Business Insider show Amazon is working on a previously unreported Alexa project, codenamed Moonraker, to handle more complex, multistep tasks for users.
Moonraker pushes Alexa into the AI agent race. Alexa+, its AI-powered assistant, already lets users book rides or buy tickets through partners such as Uber and Ticketmaster. Moonraker would take that a step further by completing multiple actions from a single request.
The project also highlights the steep cost of building more capable AI. Internal documents show Moonraker quickly became one of the most expensive parts of Amazon's latest Alexa+ overhaul....
....MUCH MORE
See what happens when Big Retail, founded by a guy with a side-gig rocket company, gets creative control of the Bond franchise?
No word on whether the ethereal spirit of Roger Moore has been attached to the project.
All of which brings to mind the outro from a 2023 post, Renewable Fuel: "Wood Pellet Giant Enviva Discloses a Financial Crisis":
....*Drax is the largest power plant in Britain at just under 4 megawatts capacity and has been converted from coal to biomass-and-coal to biomass base load with natural gas peakers.
*Don't get me started on
Nationality AmericanOccupation Criminal mastermindAffiliation IndependentStatus Deceased; shot by a poison dart and blasted into space by James Bond
From Reuters via Investing.com, July 10:
China announced an immediate temporary export ban on helium on Friday as renewed military conflict in the Middle East raises concerns about new shortages of the gas used in chip manufacturing.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran earlier this year caused helium shortages that disrupted companies worldwide, including Chinese firms where the AI industry depends increasingly on domestic chips for training and running AI models. Helium plays a key role in heat management during semiconductor production....
....MORE
The storm has been downgraded from the earlier Supertyphoon designation but it still packs a rainy, windy punch.
From Insurance Journal, July 10:
Japan on high alert as typhoon Bavi approaches with torrential rain, violent winds
Typhoon Bavi moved towards Japan's Sakishima Islands, disrupting flights and forcing residents to prepare. Taiwan and eastern China also braced for heavy rain, evacuations and wider travel disruption.
A large and powerful typhoon approached a remote chain of islands in Japan's southwest on Friday, prompting authorities to warn of violent winds, torrential rain, landslides and flooding in what could be the region's most destructive storm in years.
Typhoon Bavi is expected to pass very close to Japan's Sakishima Islands, a remote island chain near Taiwan that is part of Okinawa Prefecture, early on Saturday morning, according to meteorological authorities....
....TSMC 2330.TW, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said it would delay the scheduled release of its June sales data from Friday to Monday....
Previously:
July 5 - 180 MPH Super Typhoon Bavi Appears Headed For Northern Taiwan (TSMC)
From Bloomberg, July 9:
China dropped a numerical target for urban job creation over the next five years for the first time in decades, in an apparent nod to rising uncertainty over employment as AI spreads through the economy.
The government will instead keep new urban jobs at a “considerable scale” in 2026-2030, according to a five-year plan released Thursday by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. Annual targets will be set flexibly based on each year’s conditions, it said.
The move marks the first time since at least the 1990s that a headline number for new urban jobs has been left out of the country’s medium-term economic plan. The omission highlights China’s challenge in shielding its vast workforce from AI displacement while chasing technological supremacy against the US and other rivals.
The government will “comprehensively address the impact of changes in the external environment and the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence on employment,” according to the plan. Industrial transformation and demographic shifts also pose “new challenges to economic development and social governance,” it said.
In its annual government work report in March, China targeted more than 12 million new urban jobs for the year alongside an economic growth goal of 4.5% to 5%, its most modest expansion target since 1991.
Read More: China Sets Lowest Growth Target Since 1991 as Old Model Falters
The official measure of new urban jobs doesn’t take into account those who become unemployed, and is therefore different from the net change in employment....
,,,,MUCH MORE
From Yahoo Fiance, July 9:
Wall Street expects hyperscaler companies' free cash flow to boom, starting in 2028.
If that boom doesn't materialize, the consequences could be severe, warned Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Sløk. (Disclosure: Yahoo is a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.)
As hyperscalers have poured money into artificial intelligence, free cash flow at the traditionally cash-heavy Big Tech leaders has plummeted. That trend has pushed the "Magnificent Seven" companies to pivot toward debt issuance to fund hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.
Spending in 2026 by Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) is now expected to cross $700 billion as those companies have gone from being the "source of cash" to the "user of cash," Bank of America's Savita Subramanian and Vivek Arya noted.
The industry is counting on that trend of declining free cash flows to turn around as the AI business case, in theory, starts generating serious cash for companies that have thrown money at the burgeoning technology.
Apollo's Sløk is looking for three potential risks if that doesn't happen.
Wall Street is looking for free cash flow to make a strong recovery in 2028 and beyond. The market could face a cascade of risks if those projections don't pan out, Apollo Global Management's Torsten Sløk wrote.
The first risk is if earnings results disappoint. Should the projected surge of free cash flow be delayed "while committed capex and heavy depreciation hit on schedule," it could squeeze margins, Sløk wrote. Without money coming in the door, the argument goes, massive capital expenditure commitments could become increasingly hard to fund.
To be fair, the hyperscalers are in healthier financial positions than the 1990s tech leaders that blew up in the market collapse through 2000 and 2001, Bank of America recently noted to clients.
But today's Big Tech leaders, BofA analysts said, are now "at least as capital-intensive as oil companies," which traditionally rank among the most capital-intensive businesses in the market. Furthermore, the decoupling of hyperscalers' earnings-per-share growth from free cash flow could mark a potential deterioration in earnings quality, per BofA.
That trend gets at Sløk's next risk to watch. Lesser-than-expected earnings from Big Tech could trigger a Magnificent Seven sell-off that takes the rest of the market — the "S&P 493" — with it, according to Sløk....
....MORE
Here's Apollo, July 9:
A Slower AI Payoff Would Be Everyone's Problem
This point is key (bolding in original):
If Chinese models keep gaining and token prices keep falling, the hyperscaler cash flows expected may prove too optimistic.
If interested see also July 7's ""Frontiers of compute: The technologies to reduce AI inference costs"—McKinsey
The cost of inference has dropped by over 99.5% in the last three or four years while the price to the end user definitely has not fallen by that much and in fact all-in costs have actually risen. That gap is the opportunity China is focused on.
From The Register, July 9:
Downer for doomers as conservative investor plans to lift portfolio exposure by 150 percent, and even more once it adds electrification ventures
Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, one of the world’s largest investment houses, intends to massively increase its investment in AI over the next five years – both for its own use and across its portfolio.
Temasek holds over $400 billion in assets and around six percent of those are currently tied up in AI companies, including OpenAI.
At its annual review meeting yesterday, the fund announced it intends to increase its exposure to AI until it reaches 15 percent in 2031. Temasek said it will target five areas: energy and data centres, semiconductors, cloud services providers, foundation models, and AI applications & software infrastructure.
Temasek also sees rising demand for AI as one reason to grow its investment in infrastructure from one percent of its portfolio to five percent.
“We see compelling opportunities in ageing infrastructure and grid modernisation, renewable and nuclear energy, energy storage, and breakthrough decarbonisation technologies, underpinned by rising electrification demand and AI-driven data centre growth,” the fund said.
The fund is eating its own dog food, too, by “embedding AI into how we invest and operate, augmenting human decision-making, sharpening workflows, and enhancing productivity across the firm.”....
....MUCH MORE, including sidebars and The Register's take on the scars from Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX
From Reuters, July 8/9:
The Democratic Republic of Congo said on Wednesday that suspected Ebola cases had been reported in a new province, highlighting the expansion of the ongoing outbreak as deaths hit 600.
The outbreak, declared on May 15, has so far infected 1,759 people across the eastern provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu, according to the government's latest situation report published Wednesday night.
But that case total does not include two cases in Kisangani, the capital of Tshopo province and one of Congo's biggest cities, the situation report said....
....MUCH MORE
From Marc to Market:
With the fog of war still shrouding the near-term outlook, the US dollar is mostly consolidating with a softer bias against the G10 currencies. Outside of the New Zealand dollar that is still basking in yesterday's rate hike, and the Canadian dollar, which is slightly softer, the other G10 currencies are up less than 0.15% ahead of the North American open. August WTI and September Brent are trading within yesterday’s ranges.
The FOMC minutes released yesterday failed to tell the market anything it did not already know. Fed officials are divided, which had already been revealed in the “dot plot” that saw nine of the 18 members indicate that they thought at least one hike this year would be appropriate. The UK’s Labour leadership contest formally begins today, though there seems to be little doubt of the outcome. French politics are also in flux after Le Pen says she will run for president next year. Lastly, undeterred by slightly slower consumer inflation, the PBOC set the dollar’s reference rate at a new three-year low....
....MUCH MORE
This piece looks at the visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum but the thing that always got me thinking was thermal/infrared. As long as you are alive it is hard to avoid giving off a thermal image so most of the approaches involve cloaking of some sort which at the moment is far from elegant.
From The Economist, July 8:
In the Ukraine war, anti-AI tactics are producing bizarre forms of camouflage
IN RECENT MONTHS Russian military lorries in Ukraine have begun sporting a striking new colour scheme of vivid black-and-white stripes. As camouflage goes, it is not much use against human observers. But then, it is not intended to fool biological eyes. Its aim is to frustrate the machine-vision systems that are fitted to the Ukrainian drones that zip around battlefields looking for prey.
The stripes are reminiscent of the “dazzle camouflage” used by the Royal Navy in the first world war. But whereas dazzle camouflage was intended to break up a ship’s silhouette, making it difficult to judge its speed and heading, the new variant aims to fool machines into thinking that a lorry is not, in fact, a lorry at all.
Machine vision is based on pattern-matching. A model is trained by exposing it to images, some of which contain lorries (or tanks, or aircraft) and some of which do not. Over zillions of exposures, the computer deduces rules that allow it to identify the things its trainers want to teach it about. Because zebra-striped trucks are unlikely to appear in the training data, says Todd Humphreys, an engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, an AI that encounters one in the real world may not realise what it is looking at.
Computers often rely on very specific features to recognise an object. That leads to a problem known as “brittleness”, in which small variations can cause bizarre misclassifications. “Adversarial examples” designed to exploit the quirks of computer vision, have been around for years. One, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, featured a plastic turtle. Misled by the pattern on its shell, a computer confidently classified it as a rifle. In another project, researchers produced stickers which, when attached to roads, caused a Tesla’s self-driving software to steer into oncoming traffic.
Dr Humphreys says that efforts to counter machine vision in the Ukraine conflict work on the same principle, obscuring expected features with unexpected ones. Parked Russian aircraft have been seen with rows of old tyres on their wings to confuse image-matching software on drones. Some Russian drones also now have dazzle camouflage of their own, presumably to make it harder for Ukrainian interceptor drones to identify them.
These tactics are likely to become more common. Presently most battlefield drones are still flown by a remote human operator, who is unlikely to be fooled by the markings....
....MORE
Previously:
July 2020 - "How to hide from a drone – the subtle art of 'ghosting' in the age of surveillance"
Hong Kong and Seattle protesters sometimes use umbrellas but that leads us into another story for another day....
And the outro:
Long time readers know most of this stuff, from the drone-hunting birds
of prey to anti-drone-drones with nets to.....well, we've examined a lot of techniques.
If interested see also:
Protest In Hong Kong: The Technology
We've looked at a few of the improvisations of the Hong Kong protesters over the last year. See for example "Hong
Kong: After The Cash Machines Were Emptied There Was a Run On The
Grocery Stores As The Homemade Catapult Was Rolled Out and.." and more....
Another Way To Fool The Facial Recognition Algos
31-year-old Mimi Choi, a makeup artist from Vancouver, spends hours turning her face into mind-boggling optical illusions that look photoshopped at first glance.
A former schoolteacher, Choi got into makeup only three years ago, attending classes at Blanche Macdonald, a local beauty school, to learn the basics of the craft. She’s come a long way since then, though, and today she uses her makeup skills to turn her own face into incredible optical illusions.....
And the outro from a 2024 post:
Things are moving pretty quick. From 2013's "Imagining a Drone-Proof City in the Age of Surveillance" To 2016's "There's A Drone Spying On Your Daughter and Using A Shotgun Is Frowned On In Many Locales......What to Do?":
My interest in anti-drone technology was probably intensified when I saw this guy at Economic Policy Journal back in 2012:
"If you're concerned about it, maybe there's a reason we should be flying over you, right?" said Douglas McDonald, the company's director of special operations and president of a local chapter of the unmanned vehicle trade group....We've probably all known the creepazoid military/law enforcement wannabe. They came out of the woodwork after 9/11 and dealing with them was just yucky. It's been a while for me but just seeing that in print reminded me of how loathsome the type is.
And "Dutch Police Training Eagles to Take Down Drones":
...back to Digg: A Compilation Of Animals Attacking Drones. Although the verticality achieved by the crocodile is impressive, it's probably not practical for police work or home use.
Unless you have a moat.
To 2018's "Disney Rumored To Be Securing The Set Of The Next Star Wars Episode With Anti-Drone Drones"
To 2020's "al-Qaeda's 22 Tips for Avoiding a Drone Attack"
In an October 18 post on breaking up Google I said we'd have an upcoming post on how to hide from drones. And then I promptly forgot....
A couple recent posts that highlight the problem of drones:
And the truly terrifying prospect of "Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn’t Ready"
A wider-angle view from April 2026:
"A Shakeup Is Coming for the Nation-State"
Yes, we've thought about this stuff for quite a while.
