Zero Rss

Trump Refiles Lawsuit Over Wall Street Journal Article Linking Him To Epstein Letter

Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump has refiled his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, over an article that alleged he signed a birthday letter sent to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s legal team submitted the revised complaint exactly on the May 27 deadline set by U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles. In April, Gayles dismissed the original lawsuit, ruling that Trump had failed to show that The Wall Street Journal acted with “actual malice,” the legal standard required in defamation cases involving public figures.

The updated complaint, which is seven pages longer than the original filing, again argues that Trump suffered significant financial and reputational damage from what his attorneys describe as a “false, defamatory, and malicious” article.

Trump has repeatedly denied authoring the 2003 letter.

In the new filing, Trump’s attorneys argue that only two surviving individuals could confirm whether the letter existed. According to the complaint, Trump “vehemently denied” writing it, while Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly told federal officials she had no knowledge of the document.

The complaint further accuses reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, along with Dow Jones and News Corp., of either knowingly publishing false information or intentionally avoiding evidence that contradicted the story.

The original Wall Street Journal report said that Trump denied both writing the letter and drawing the image.

However, Trump’s legal team states “the Defendants falsely, maliciously, and defamatorily state as fact that regardless of how the alleged letter was prepared, it nonetheless contains President Trump’s authentic signature.”

Responding to requests for comment, publisher Dow Jones declined to discuss the refiled lawsuit but reiterated a previous statement issued in July 2025.

“We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit,” a company spokesperson said.

In dismissing the original case, Gayles explained that proving actual malice requires evidence that a publisher knowingly reported false information or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. He wrote that Trump’s earlier complaint “comes nowhere close to this standard.”

Gayles also noted that The Wall Street Journal sought comment from Trump, the Justice Department, and the FBI before publication. Trump denied writing the letter, the Justice Department did not respond, and the FBI declined to comment.

The judge further stated that claims the newspaper ignored contradictory evidence were weakened by the article itself, which included Trump’s denial. Allegations of ill intent alone, he wrote, were insufficient to establish actual malice without supporting factual evidence.

Attorneys representing the newspaper have argued that the article’s claims are true and therefore not defamatory. However, Gayles declined to decide those factual disputes at this stage of the proceedings. He said questions regarding whether Trump authored the letter or maintained a personal relationship with Epstein remain unresolved.

To proceed with the lawsuit, Gayles wrote, Trump must provide clear evidence that The Wall Street Journal knowingly published false information or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.

The judge characterized the original complaint as relying on “formulaic” accusations that failed to meet the high legal threshold required for public figures pursuing defamation claims.

Following the dismissal, Trump addressed the case on Truth Social, saying his legal team would submit a revised complaint before the court’s deadline.

“It is not a termination, it is a suggested re-filing,” Trump wrote.

Trump originally filed the lawsuit in July 2025 after The Wall Street Journal published an article about the sexually suggestive letter allegedly bearing his signature in a birthday album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 15:40

"Closing The Nuclear Fuel Cycle" - Newcleo's $780M War Chest And Oklo Partnership Fuel $2.4B SPAC Debut

It's open season in the nuclear industry for going public, and this week's episode features newcleo, a European lead-cooled reactor developer. 

The Paris-based developer of lead-cooled fast reactors (LFRs) and closed-cycle MOX fuel announced it will merge with NewHold Investment Corp III (ticker NHIC) in a deal valuing the company at roughly $2.4 billion. 

A $220 million oversubscribed PIPE at $10 per share plus up to $209 million from the SPAC trust should deliver as much as $429 million in gross proceeds before redemptions and fees. The combined entity expects to list on Nasdaq under ticker NWCL in the second half of 2026.

Hopefully their transition to public markets doesn't follow the same path as microreactor developer Hadron Energy…

Founded by Stefano Buono (the man who took Advanced Accelerator Applications public on Nasdaq in 2015 and sold it to Novartis for $3.9 billion in 2018), Newcleo has already raised approximately $780 million privately across Europe. It generated roughly $80 million in revenue last year from its vertically integrated supply-chain subsidiaries while building a 900-plus employee team across seven countries and 16 offices. 

The technology: Newcleo’s 200 MW (electric) reactor uses liquid lead coolant. The company highlights that lead is cheap, high-boiling, and chemically inert with water and air. The lead is paired with proprietary MOX fuel (a mixture of uranium and plutonium) fabricated from reprocessed nuclear waste.

Their target for commercial fuel manufacturing is 2031, and they hold a pipeline of 9.2 GW of advanced commercial opportunities, including a state-backed Slovak project for up to four 200 MWe units.

As we recently covered, Oklo was selected by the Department of Energy for advanced negotiations under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program; one of five firms tapped to convert up to 20 metric tons of Cold War-era weapons plutonium into usable reactor fuel. Newcleo is Oklo’s fuel-cycle partner on the deal, supplying European MOX expertise and potential project capital.

The two companies already signed a strategic partnership last October that contemplates up to $2 billion in Newcleo-affiliated investment into U.S. advanced fuel fabrication infrastructure, alongside Sweden’s Blykalla.
 

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 15:25

Bitcoin ETFs Bleed $2.8B In Record 9-Day Outflow Streak

Authored by Helen Partz via CoinTelegraph.com,

US-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) posted their longest outflow streak since launch, extending withdrawals as institutional demand for Bitcoin exposure weakened.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded another $223 million in net outflows on Thursday, marking the record nine-day outflow streak since the funds launched in 2024, according to data from Farside Investors.

The latest streak surpassed the previous record eight-session outflow run recorded in February 2025, though its roughly $2.84 billion in cumulative withdrawals remains below the $3.2 billion lost during the earlier selloff.

US spot Bitcoin ETF outflows in May 2026 versus February 2025. Source: SoSoValue

Visualizing further shows BTC ETFs have seen outflows for 13 of the last 15 days...

The outflows suggest institutional demand for Bitcoin exposure is weakening through the ETF channel, and come as major corporate holders such as Strategy face renewed pressure even as some new altcoin products like Hyperliquid (HYPE) ETFs continue attracting investor interest.

BlackRock’s IBIT leads the outflows at $2 billion

Signs of institutional selling have also emerged beneath the surface.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest US spot Bitcoin ETF by assets, accounted for a massive share of losses during the nine-session outflow streak, recording its largest single-day outflow since launch earlier this week, driven largely by a sizeable dark pool transaction.

The fund recorded roughly $2.04 billion in cumulative outflows between May 15 and Thursday. As Cointelegraph reported, a $527.8 million withdrawal on May 27 marked IBIT’s second-largest daily outflow on record, narrowly below the $528.3 million record posted on Jan. 30, 2025.

BTC holdings for all US spot Bitcoin ETFs as of market close on Wednesday. Source: Wallet Pilot

While the precise motivation behind the trade is unknown, CoinDesk notes that the scale of the redemption suggests some investors may be reallocating capital away from bitcoin exposure and toward sectors that have recently generated stronger returns.

Despite the selling pressure, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF remains the dominant US spot Bitcoin fund by assets under management. IBIT held roughly 792,000 BTC as of market close on Wednesday, representing about 62% of all US spot Bitcoin ETF holdings, according to Wallet Pilot data.

US spot Ether ETFs have also faced persistent selling pressure, logging 13 consecutive days of outflows between May 11 and Thursday, with cumulative losses of roughly $694 million.

HYPE ETFs buck the broader slowdown

While spot Bitcoin ETFs face sustained selling pressure, newly launched HYPE ETFs have continued attracting fresh capital from investors.

The products recorded steady inflows between May 12 and Thursday, with cumulative net inflows rising above $100 million, according to SoSoValue.

Daily flows in US-listed spot HYPE ETFs. Source: SoSoValue

Other altcoin funds such as spot XRP ETFs also recorded steady gains over the period, totaling roughly $120 million in net additions between May 4 and Thursday.

The divergence underscores a shift in crypto fund flows, with investors pulling back from Bitcoin and Ether ETFs while newer products tied to tokens such as Hyperliquid’s HYPE continue to attract inflows.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 15:00

The Two Ugly Paths Now Facing The US Economy

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

I was watching Andrew Ross Sorkin on 60 Minutes last Sunday. Sorkin was on the show to promote his new book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation.

When Leslie Stahl asked him during his interview whether we would have another crash, Sorkin answered: “The answer is, we will have a crash. I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this, we will have the crash.”

At one point he says “We are either living through some kind of remarkable boom, [or we’re reliving] 1929.”

I thought to myself: hell, I can do better than that, and I didn’t even write a book about 1929. Because at this point, the real question is not whether we are headed toward some sort of financial reckoning…the question is what form that reckoning takes.

And after looking at the current economic landscape, I increasingly believe there are only two realistic outcomes over the next several years: a soft default through inflation or a hard default through financial crisis. The former seems more likely than the latter, and can be confusing to people because nominal prices staying steady or rising while inflation runs out of control won’t look like a “crash” that most of 60 Minutes’ viewers will expect. It’ll be a crash upward.

To understand why, let’s start with where we are right now and summarize a lot of what I’ve written about over the past month or two. There’s four key things I’m watching:

1. inflation

2. market valuation

3. the consumer

4. the bond market

These four things have worked together to produce a combination that I believe is close to locking up the economy and taking away any response options from the Central Bank that won’t have immediate and ugly consequences.

Inflation remains structurally above the Federal Reserve’s target despite one of the most aggressive rate-hiking cycles in modern history. Even now, inflation is still running around 3.8%, nearly double the Fed’s stated objective. This is no longer a temporary post-pandemic distortion that policymakers can dismiss away with optimistic forecasts and revised models.

Inflation has become embedded across the economy, from housing and insurance to healthcare, wages, food, and government spending itself. The cost structure of modern American life has permanently shifted upward, while policymakers continue pretending that a return to stable 2% inflation is just around the corner. It’s not.

At the same time, financial markets continue to trade at historically stretched valuations. The Shiller P/E ratio sits around 42x versus its mean of 17.3x and market capitalization relative to GDP has surged above 230%, levels associated not with healthy long-term expansion but with periods of deep speculation and excess.

A better way to look at this instead of valuations are high is that the market is extraordinarily vulnerable to falling further in percentage terms. When valuations become detached from underlying economic reality, the downside risk grows larger because there is simply farther to fall once confidence breaks. Expensive markets do not automatically cause crashes, but they create the conditions where even modest disappointments can trigger violent repricing. Especially if the market’s rally has been on poor breadth and the result of speculation on options and the passive bid.

Beneath the surface, delinquency data shows that the consumer is tapped out. Student loan delinquencies have surged back toward record levels as repayments resume into an economy where borrowing costs and living expenses have both exploded higher.

Credit card delinquencies are now sitting at their highest levels since the aftermath of the financial crisis, while auto loan defaults, especially among subprime borrowers, have reached multi-decade highs. Americans are financing $50,000 vehicles with monthly payments exceeding $750 at interest rates that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago.

Consumers have largely maintained spending not because household finances are healthy, but because they have increasingly relied on debt to sustain a standard of living that inflation has steadily eroded.

And the rate at which consumers are saving is dwindling significantly now.

But the most important warning signal in the economy is not the stock market or the consumer. It is the bond market.

Under normal economic conditions, weakening growth and financial stress would push long-term Treasury yields lower as investors seek safety and begin pricing in future Federal Reserve easing. Instead, the opposite is happening. The 10-year Treasury yield remains around 4.5%, while the 30-year Treasury has pushed above 5%. Those are not comforting numbers. They reflect a growing discomfort with the long-term fiscal trajectory of the United States itself.

This is the trap the United States now finds itself in.

And because of these four factors, I believe there are only two paths we can go down. The more likely path I think puts gold eventually on a (rocky and volatile) tracjectory to eventually get to $10,000.

The first, and in my view the more likely outcome, is the soft default. This is the inflationary path where policymakers ultimately choose to save the Treasury market through monetary intervention. They will not describe it as money printing, of course. They will use softer language such as liquidity support, balance sheet management, market stabilization, or yield curve control. But the mechanism is ultimately the same. The Federal Reserve creates money in order to purchase government debt and suppress long-term yields before the Treasury market becomes unstable.

This approach would almost certainly succeed in stabilizing borrowing costs in the short term. But it would come at the expense of the currency itself. That is why I increasingly believe the next major crash could actually be an upward crash. Stocks may continue rising in nominal terms. Gold could surge. Real estate and hard assets may inflate even further. On paper, asset values appear strong and financial markets may even seem resilient. But underneath the surface, the purchasing power of the dollar continues eroding year after year.

That is what a soft default looks like. The government technically honors its obligations, but repays those obligations in increasingly devalued dollars. Savers lose purchasing power. Wage earners fall behind inflation. The middle class gets squeezed as the cost of living rises faster than incomes. Yet politically, inflation remains preferable because it spreads the pain gradually across society instead of concentrating it into one catastrophic event. I’ve even speculated that the Fed could wind up inventing new inflation numbers out of thin air for PR purposes if this happens: The Fed Will Invent New Inflation Numbers Out Of Thin Air

The second possibility is the hard default. This is the more chaotic and openly destructive scenario where policymakers lose control before they can inflate their way out of the problem. A hard default would not necessarily require the United States to formally announce that it is refusing to pay its debts. It could emerge through failed Treasury auctions, a debt ceiling accident, a severe liquidity freeze in the bond market, delayed government obligations, or a broader sovereign confidence crisis that causes investors to rapidly reassess the safety of U.S. debt.

In that environment, Treasury yields could spike violently higher while banks and financial institutions holding large amounts of long-duration government debt come under enormous pressure. Credit markets could freeze. Equity markets would likely experience a rapid downward repricing before policymakers responded with emergency interventions. Government spending cuts and forced austerity measures could suddenly become unavoidable not because Washington chose discipline voluntarily, but because markets imposed discipline externally.

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This is the scenario policymakers fear most because once sovereign confidence begins breaking apart, events move very quickly. Financial history repeatedly shows that debt crises tend to unfold slowly for years and then suddenly all at once. I see this as the less likely scenario, but between the two paths, I’d venture to guess we have 99% of what could possibly take place nailed down and out in the open.

I believe the soft default remains far more likely than the hard default for one simple reason: policymakers will do almost anything to avoid immediate collapse. They will print before they default. They will monetize debt before they accept a disorderly Treasury market. They will sacrifice the purchasing power of the currency before they willingly allow the government’s financing structure to implode.

Sorkin says he knows a crash is coming but does not know what form it will take. I think we can narrow it down much further than that. The next crisis will probably not look like 1929, and it may not even resemble 2008. The more likely scenario is an inflationary sovereign debt crisis disguised for a period of time as economic resilience. It will look like rising nominal asset prices, stubborn inflation, endless liquidity support, and growing pressure on the dollar itself as policymakers attempt to suppress yields and keep the Treasury market functioning.

Because ultimately, once long-term interest rates become politically intolerable, the Federal Reserve will face an impossible choice. It can defend the dollar by allowing yields to rise and risk detonating the debt structure, or it can defend the Treasury market through intervention and risk significantly higher inflation. Under a new Fed chair like Kevin Warsh, the options are still fundamentally the same. Policymakers can change the language, revise inflation metrics, redefine targets, and introduce new programs, but they cannot escape the underlying arithmetic.

History strongly suggests they will choose inflation. Not because it solves the problem, but because it delays the reckoning.

And that is ultimately where I disagree with Sorkin. I do not think the future crash is unknowable. I think the pressure points are already obvious. To me, the only real question is whether the United States defaults honestly through crisis or dishonestly through inflation. I’d bet on the latter, and as an investor it would make me keen to watch gold if it gets smacked lower an an initial shock to markets before the Fed intervenes. Because I could easily see a situation where gold keeps retreating, perhaps to $4,000 or lower, sharply moving lower during the initial shock, maybe to $3500 or lower, before doubling or tripling in the years after a Fed response that I believe could be very inflationary and push gold closer to $10,000 over time.

--

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

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And all positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

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Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 14:20

Was Amazon's Tokenmaxxing Fiasco Behind Claude's $500M Mystery Bill?

Axios reported this week that an unnamed Anthropic enterprise client managed to run up roughly $500 million in Claude charges in a single month after failing to put usage limits on employee licenses.

The company was not named, but we suspect Blue Origin might not be the only thing that blew up for Jeff Bezos this month.

Just as the Axios report landed with the $500M tidbit, Amazon was shutting down an internal AI-usage leaderboard after employees reportedly began “tokenmaxxing” - routing unnecessary work through AI tools to inflate their usage scores. The result was a perfect case study in what happens when corporate America turns AI adoption into a metric, then acts surprised when employees optimize for the metric instead of the work.

Whether or not Amazon was the mystery Claude whale, its internal AI experiment shows exactly how a runaway enterprise AI bill can happen.

The $500M Claude Mystery

The Axios item was brief, but extraordinary:;

An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees. 

So, oops to every CFO who recently approved "AI adoption" as a corporate priority.

In the old software world, when true nerds roamed the land, a bad rollout usually meant paying for licenses employees barely touched. The waste was real, but at least it was mostly static. In the new agentic AI world, a bad rollout - or simply adopting AI for everything - can quickly become devastating: thousands of employees - or autonomous agents operating on their behalf - prompting, testing, summarizing, refactoring, retrying, and spinning up new tasks on usage-based pricing.

That is the heart of the current enterprise AI hangover. Companies spent the past year foisting AI on employees, often without a clean way to separate productivity from dashboard-friendly activity. And now the hangover is here. 

Microsoft has reportedly started canceling most Claude Code licenses and steering developers toward GitHub Copilot CLI. Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI coding-tools budget by April, with COO Andrew Macdonald saying it was “very hard to draw a line” between rising Claude Code usage and useful consumer-facing output. Meta killed an employee-created “Claudeonomics” dashboard after workers competed to rank among the company’s top AI token users.

Amazon’s Tokenmaxxing Fiasco

Amazon’s version of the problem was almost too on-the-nose.

Earlier this month, Financial Times reported that Amazon employees were using MeshClaw, an internal OpenClaw-style AI agent tool, to inflate AI usage metrics. MeshClaw let employees vibecode themselves agents that could interact with workplace systems, including code deployments, email triage, and Slack-style communications.

The company had also been pushing aggressive AI adoption internally. According to the FT, more than 80% of Amazon developers were expected to use AI tools weekly, and internal leaderboards tracked AI usage. Employees reportedly responded by routing non-essential tasks through AI agents in order to boost their token counts.

They even had an internal leaderboard - KiroRank - that issued nerd points (or whatever) to employees who tokenmaxxed. Apparently it didn't take long for them to realize this was a huge mistake - nuking KiroRank after it encouraged some workers to perform tasks that did not necessarily solve customer or business problems, but did help them climb the rankings. Amazon senior vice president Dave Treadwell reportedly told staff: “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

Amazon later emphasized that KiroRank was an informal employee-created tracker, not a formal performance system, and said it was never intended to promote AI usage for usage’s sake. The company also said it still tracks AI token usage to measure costs, but does not encourage tokenmaxxing.

Why Amazon Tops The $500M Suspect List

Start with the obvious: Amazon has one of the deepest strategic relationships with Anthropic of any company on earth.

Amazon announced in April that it would invest another $5 billion in Anthropic, with the possibility of up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones, on top of the $8 billion it had already invested. The same announcement said Anthropic had committed to spend more than $100 billion over ten years on AWS technologies.

That makes Amazon more than an ordinary Claude customer. It is an investor, infrastructure provider, distribution partner, and cloud beneficiary of Anthropic’s growth. 

Then there's the scale. Reuters reported in February that Amazon projected roughly $200 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, up sharply from 2025, as Big Tech raced to build out AI infrastructure. That level of spending needs demand signals. Internal AI usage is one of those signals.

Then there is the timing. Amazon’s MeshClaw usage controversy surfaced in May. KiroRank was deprecated in late May. Axios’ unnamed $500 million Claude bill appeared at the same moment the industry was waking up to the cost of tokenmaxxing.

2 weeks to kill the ROI Golden Goose pic.twitter.com/7wuDMpBNvb

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 29, 2026

So, yeah... 

Circle Jerk Intensifies?

The broader issue is not whether Amazon specifically spent $500 million on Claude in one month. The broader issue is that the AI boom is increasingly built on circular flows of money, usage, and valuation.

Hyperscalers invest billions in model companies. Model companies commit to spend billions back on hyperscaler cloud infrastructure. Enterprises push employees to use the tools. Token consumption rises. Rising usage supports higher revenue projections. Higher revenue projections support higher valuations. Higher valuations justify more infrastructure spending.

On paper, it looks like demand. In practice, some of that demand may be employees and agents burning tokens because management told them usage equals progress.

Reuters recently warned that Anthropic’s explosive growth tells only half the story, noting early signs of corporate AI fatigue even as revenue projections and valuation math move higher. The warning is simple: AI demand may be real, but not all usage is economically productive.

Which is a pretty big narrative killer...  If a developer uses Claude Code to ship a meaningful feature faster, that is adoption. If an employee routes fake busywork through an autonomous agent to climb a leaderboard, that is not adoption. It is metered theater.

The problem is that both show up as tokens.

There's an old idea in economics called Goodhart’s Law: when a measurement becomes the target, it stops being a useful measurement.

In plain English, if you tell employees they will be judged by a number, they will make the number go up - whether or not the underlying business gets any better.

That's exactly the danger with enterprise AI adoption. Token usage can be a useful internal signal. It can show whether employees are experimenting with tools, whether teams are adopting new workflows, and where demand is rising. But once token usage becomes a scoreboard, it no longer measures productivity. It measures willingness to burn tokens.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 14:05

Clorox CEO Steps Down For "Health Reasons" After Six-Year Stock Rout

Clorox shares tumbled on Friday after Chair and CEO Linda Rendle said she will step down for "health reasons," prompting the board to begin a search for her replacement.

"Rendle will also serve in an advisory role for a period following the appointment to drive business performance and a smooth leadership transition," Clorox wrote in a press release.

Rendle wrote in a statement, "Serving as CEO of Clorox for the past six years—and being part of this special company for more than two decades—has truly been the privilege of my career."

Under Rendle's six-year tenure, Clorox shares have fallen from grace, down a staggering 57%.

Here's what Wall Street analysts are saying, courtesy of Bloomberg:

TD Cowen (hold, PT $90)

• Analyst Robert Moskow says the announcement reinforces concerns about execution missteps amid CLX's plans to modernize its enterprise resource planning software and launch new products, particularly restaging cat litter."

• "We expect the company to guide below consensus for FY27."

BNP Paribas (neutral, PT $97)

• Analyst Kevin Grundy says CLX's next CEO will inherit a host of challenges, including worsening business performance, volatility in delivery, and subdued category growth.

• "Former and now retired CEO of CHD, Matt Farrell, is very unlikely, but would be a home run for CLX's shareholders"

So, did Rendle actually step down for "health reasons," or was it because investors had lost confidence in the turnaround timeline?

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 13:20

Dollar Dominance Remains Alive And Well

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The dollar is supposed to be dying. We’ve heard that argument for the better part of a decade, and it’s getting louder, not quieter. The narrative goes that BRICS countries are building an alternative, that China is dumping Treasuries, that gold is replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve asset, and that Washington is so desperate to find buyers for the next debt issuance that it’s now offering dollar swap lines to Gulf states as a backdoor liquidity rescue. Make no mistake, the “Persistent Purveyors of Doom” have a story. However, the data doesn’t support any of it.

Dollar dominance isn’t fading. In fact, the events of late April 2026 just delivered the loudest counter-signal in years.

Thesis Vs. Reality

I’ve been arguing for years that the “dollar collapse” thesis confuses inflation with debasement. You can’t be debasing a currency that the rest of the world is fighting harder than ever to acquire. We covered the rebasement argument in our previous piece on the dollar’s plumbing, and in “The Dollar’s Death is Greatly Exaggerated.” The latest data only sharpens the case for dollar dominance.

According to the U.S. Treasury’s most recent Treasury International Capital report, released April 15 with February 2026 data, foreign residents purchased $101 billion of long-term U.S. securities in February alone. Net TIC inflows totaled $184.5 billion for the month. On top of that, foreign holders added $91.6 billion to their Treasury bill holdings. Total foreign ownership of U.S. Treasuries hit a record $9.49 trillion in February, up $198 billion in the month and $587 billion over the trailing 12 months. However, that headline number actually undercounts the reality. It excludes foreign holdings managed through U.S.-domiciled hedge funds and the Cayman Islands basis trade, which the Federal Reserve estimates pulls another $1.5 trillion of de facto foreign demand into the bid stack. Adjusted for that, true foreign-linked exposure runs closer to $11 trillion.

Beyond stock-of-debt figures, the flow data tells the same story. Indirect bidder participation, the auction proxy for foreign demand, has run consistently above 70% of accepted bids on recent benchmark issues. Bid-to-cover ratios on 10-year and 30-year auctions have held above 2.5 across multiple cycles. If the world were truly walking away from the dollar, we’d see weak auctions, tailing yields, and a steepening term premium driven by rejected supply. Instead, we see the opposite. The U.S. just printed roughly two-and-a-half trillion in deficits over the past year, and global investors absorbed every basis point of it.

That doesn’t sound like a fire sale. On the contrary, that looks like the strongest sustained demand for U.S. sovereign debt in history.

Why Central Bank Gold Buying Reinforces Dollar Dominance

Here’s the part of the story the doomers consistently get wrong. The gold bugs have built an entire belief system on a category error. Of course, central banks have been buying gold in size. The World Gold Council’s Q1 2026 Gold Demand Trends report, published April 29, shows central banks bought 244 tonnes of gold net in Q1 2026 alone, up 3 percent year-over-year. That extends 17 consecutive months of net official-sector purchases, even with gold prices peaking above $5,400 an ounce in January.3 Total Q1 physical gold demand reached 474 tonnes, the second-highest quarter on record. Furthermore, the WGC forecasts roughly 850 tonnes of central bank purchases for full-year 2026, on par with 2025 and consistent with the multi-year pace. The trend is real and significant. However, it is not, in any practical sense, an escape from the dollar.

Gold is priced in dollars. The LBMA Gold Price, the global benchmark used to mark central bank holdings, settles in U.S. dollars per ounce. When the People’s Bank of China, the National Bank of Poland, or the Reserve Bank of India accumulates gold, the value of those reserves is reported, audited, and benchmarked in U.S. dollars. Of course, the unit of account doesn’t change just because the asset does. Furthermore, when those same central banks need to deploy gold for liquidity, the counterparty pricing reverts to dollars. That applies whether the deployment is through swaps, repo, or sale. The gold and dollar markets are not parallel systems. They’re the same system, with gold serving as a dollar-priced reserve asset.

That distinction matters because it reframes the entire de-dollarization narrative. A central bank that shifts 5% of reserves from Treasuries into gold has not abandoned the dollar. Instead, it has rebalanced inside the dollar-priced reserve system. The same is true for the Bank for International Settlements gold swaps, the Shanghai Gold Exchange yuan-quoted contract, and even the Russian central bank’s pre-sanction accumulation. Every one of those positions has a dollar-equivalent value because dollars are how the world prices reserve wealth. Even when gold is bought, sold, or pledged, the cross-rate to USD is the reference point. There’s no other deep, liquid pricing rail. In that sense, gold accumulation reinforces dollar dominance rather than threatens it.

The same World Gold Council survey that gets cited to “prove” a dollar decline shows that 73% of central bank respondents expect a moderately or significantly lower USD share of reserves over the next five years. The doomers stop reading at that headline. The reality is that the IMF’s most recent COFER release, covering Q4 2025, puts the dollar’s share of allocated reserves at 56.77%. That figure is essentially flat versus the prior quarter, with most of the variation explained by exchange-rate effects rather than active selling.

Total foreign exchange reserves stood at $13.14 trillion at year-end 2025. The dollar’s share of reserves has fluctuated between roughly 56% and 72% over the past three decades. At every level, however, it has been a multiple of every other reserve currency combined. The euro sits at 20.25%, and the yen and pound around 5% each, with the yuan, despite all the hype, still under 2%.

Bessent’s Dollar Swaps Extend Dominance

Indeed, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has spent the last several weeks discussing the possibility of extending dollar swap lines to allies in the Persian Gulf and Asia, with the United Arab Emirates as the lead candidate. Predictably, the doomers have framed this as a fire-sale-prevention move, claiming that Washington is offering swaps to keep Gulf sovereigns from dumping Treasuries amid the Iran conflict. However, that reading misses the strategy entirely.

Bessent said it himself in plain language. In his April 22 testimony to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, he stated that swap lines “are to maintain order in the dollar funding markets and to prevent the sale of U.S. assets in a disorderly way.” Two days later, in a coordinated X post, he went further: “Additional swap lines can benefit our nation by reinforcing dollar usage and liquidity internationally,” and “extending permanent swap lines can be a major first step in creating new U.S. dollar funding centers in the Gulf and Asia.” He closed with the line that defines the entire policy framework:

“Dollar dominance and reserve currency status are strengthened by constant long-term initiatives, including countering the growth of problematic, alternative payment systems.”

That’s not the language of a desperate Treasury Secretary trying to plug a leaky bid stack. On the contrary, that’s the language of a policymaker using monetary infrastructure to extend American financial reach. Swap lines are how Washington exports dollar liquidity. The 2008 crisis playbook used them defensively to backstop European and Japanese banks. Bessent is now reaching for the same tool offensively. He’s planting new dollar funding nodes in regions where alternative payment systems, including BRICS clearing rails and yuan-denominated commodity pricing, have been making noise.

Consider the geometry. Permanent swap line access turns a partner country’s central bank into a node of the dollar system. Once that line is in place, local banks have a guaranteed dollar liquidity backstop. As a result, there is no real incentive to develop a non-dollar alternative. The UAE flirted publicly with yuan-denominated oil pricing as recently as last year. A swap line eliminates that option in practice. It makes the dollar backstop too cheap and reliable to abandon. This is the same logic that has kept the existing G7 swap lines (Canada, ECB, Japan, UK, Switzerland) firmly inside the dollar orbit since the financial crisis.

Furthermore, this isn’t theoretical. Bessent has already run this playbook in practice. In September 2025, the Treasury used the Exchange Stabilization Fund to extend a $20 billion swap line to Argentina ahead of Milei’s pivotal October election. The strategic logic was identical. Reinforce dollar liquidity in a partner economy. Prevent disorderly Treasury liquidations during a political stress event. Lock the country into the dollar system at the moment of maximum strategic value. Bessent has publicly stated that the Argentina facility was fully repaid within months, validating the operational template. The UAE proposal extends the same framework to the Gulf, and the broader Asian conversation that Bessent referenced suggests the network is about to expand significantly.

Swap lines are the carrot. Sanctions are the stick. Bessent has been just as direct about the second tool as about the first, and the timing of the messaging is no accident.

Furthermore, in late April, the Treasury unveiled what it’s calling “Economic Fury,” a coordinated campaign to “systematically degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds.” The mechanics are revealing. The U.S. Navy is enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports. Kharg Island oil storage is filling up because Iranian crude has nowhere to go. Tankers facilitating covert trade face direct sanctions exposure. Critically for this discussion, OFAC has already frozen $344 million in cryptocurrency wallets tied to the regime.

That last data point matters more than the doomers will admit. It directly validates the argument we made in our previous piece on digital dollar infrastructure. Stablecoin and crypto rails are not an escape from the dollar system. Instead, they’re an extension of it, with new enforcement capabilities attached. When Treasury can freeze nine-figure crypto positions through compliance pressure on issuers and exchanges, the supposed “uncensorable” alternative to dollar custody turns out to be more censorable, not less.

The reality is that dollar dominance is reinforced by both tools simultaneously. On the carrot side, you have liquidity provision, swap lines, digital dollar adoption, and the deep Treasury bid. On the stick side, you have sanctions reach, OFAC freezes, blacklisting, and naval enforcement of commodity flows. Of course, both capabilities are expanding, not contracting. Foreign reserve managers know this. Furthermore, they are also calculating that being inside the dollar orbit, even with custodial diversification, is far safer than being targeted by it.

The UAE OPEC Exit Validates the Strategy

Then came April 28. The UAE announced it was leaving both OPEC and OPEC+, dealing a heavy blow to the cartel and to its de facto leader, Saudi Arabia. The timing was not coincidental. Just six days earlier, Bessent had publicly endorsed an emergency dollar swap line for Abu Dhabi before the Senate. The UAE central bank governor, Khaled Mohamed Balama, had traveled to Washington during the IMF and World Bank spring meetings to meet with Bessent and Federal Reserve representatives.

Read the sequence carefully. First, Iran’s missile strikes hit Gulf infrastructure, and then the Strait of Hormuz closes. UAE faces a real liquidity stress event. Washington offers an emergency dollar backstop, security guarantees, and the deployment of Israel’s Iron Dome on UAE soil. Days later, the UAE walks out of the petroleum cartel that the doomers have spent years claiming was about to abandon the dollar in favor of a “petroyuan” alternative. Instead, the UAE just publicly chose the dollar bloc over its OPEC peers. The swap line offer didn’t avert a crisis through emergency liquidity. It reorganized a major Gulf state into the U.S. financial orbit at the moment of maximum strategic opportunity.

That is dollar dominance functioning exactly as Bessent described it in his testimony. Carrot first. Then, the strategic realignment is second. The petroyuan narrative just lost its most credible Gulf candidate.

Pushback: But What About De-Dollarization?

The strongest version of the de-dollarization argument runs as follows. After the 2022 sanctions on Russia froze roughly $300 billion in central bank reserves, every other sanction-vulnerable country had to reassess custodial risk. China shifted holdings from direct U.S. custody to Belgium and Luxembourg. BRICS expanded membership. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement, brokered partly by Beijing, signaled a regional pivot. In addition, Russia and China increased bilateral trade settled in yuan and rubles. All of this is true.

However, none of it actually undermines dollar dominance at the system level. Sanction-driven custodial diversification moves Treasuries from the New York Fed to Euroclear. Yet it doesn’t move them out of the Treasury market. China’s reported direct holdings have declined, but its total exposure, including third-country custody, has remained roughly flat. Furthermore, BRICS settlement still reverts to dollars at the cross-border invoicing layer. No participant wants to hold rubles, rupees, or yuan as a long-term store of value. Bilateral yuan settlement, despite the headlines, remains a sliver of total trade flows.

The reality is the doomers are confusing diversification with abandonment. Foreign reserve managers are doing two things at once. First, they’re spreading custodial risk across more jurisdictions. Second, they’re adding gold as a politically neutral hedge. Both moves leave the dollar as the dominant unit of account, the dominant settlement asset, and the dominant store of value. As shown above, the share has barely moved.

Beyond the traditional reserve channel, digital dollar infrastructure is rapidly expanding the dollar’s reach into emerging markets. Demand for dollar-denominated digital tokens has hit all-time highs in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Tether’s Q1 2026 attestation, published May 1, confirmed direct and indirect U.S. Treasury exposure of approximately $141 billion as of March 31, against $191.8 billion in total assets and $183.5 billion in liabilities. The reserve buffer reached a record $8.23 billion, and Q1 net profit hit $1.04 billion. That makes Tether the 17th largest holder of U.S. Treasuries globally.

Furthermore, USDT circulation grew by more than $5 billion during April alone, pushing total supply above $188 billion. In Latin America, dollar-pegged digital tokens accounted for 40% of crypto purchases in 2025, surpassing Bitcoin’s share. The Bitso report on 10 million Latin American users described the trend bluntly as “digital dollarization.” That kind of grassroots demand is dollar dominance in action at the consumer layer.

The GENIUS Act, signed into law last July, created the first federal framework requiring permitted issuers to back tokens with high-quality liquid assets, primarily short-term Treasuries. The April 2026 FinCEN/OFAC proposed rule extends sanctions enforcement directly into the issuer layer. As a result, Washington can freeze, block, or seize dollar-denominated digital tokens through the issuer’s compliance program. That isn’t a workaround away from the dollar system; it’s an extension of it, with new enforcement rails attached.

What This Means for Investors

The investment implications cut several ways. First, foreign demand for U.S. Treasuries is structurally strong, which keeps a bid under the long end of the curve even as deficits widen. Indeed, that’s bullish for duration. Second, central bank gold buying creates a price floor under bullion that didn’t exist in prior cycles. Investors should hold some allocation to gold. However, they should hold it for the right reason. It’s a dollar-priced inflation hedge and a political risk diversifier, not a fiat escape hatch. Finally, the digital dollar buildout is creating a new investable vertical. Custody, payments infrastructure, and compliant on-ramp providers (CRCL, COIN, V, MA, JPM, BK) sit at the intersection of fiat and digital dollar plumbing.

The contrarian read is this. If you bought into the dollar collapse narrative over the last five years, you missed gains in U.S. equities. You missed the Treasury bid that compressed yields during recent risk-off episodes. You probably overweighted gold and Bitcoin at peaks. The bottom line is that the trade that has worked across cycles is owning U.S. assets denominated in U.S. dollars. Diversifying across the dollar-priced reserve system has worked. Diversifying against it has not.

What does this mean for portfolio positioning right now? It means duration risk is rewarded by structural foreign demand. Equity risk is supported by the dollar-priced earnings of multinational franchises. Gold belongs in the portfolio at a strategic weight, not a doomsday weight. Furthermore, investors should pay close attention to which firms are positioning for the digital dollar buildout. That’s where the next leg of dollar dominance is happening.

The doomers will keep selling fear. That’s the business model. Make no mistake, real risks exist. Fiscal trajectory, debt servicing costs, sanctions blowback, and CBDC competition are all worth tracking carefully. However, none of those risks add up to the collapse narrative being pitched on social media every other day. The reality on the tape is that foreign Treasury demand is at an all-time high. Central bank gold buying continues to reinforce dollar pricing. Swap lines are being deployed offensively to extend dollar reach. Digital dollar infrastructure is colonizing real-time commerce in emerging markets.

If the dollar were truly dying, none of this would be happening. The fact that all of it is happening simultaneously tells you everything you need to know about where the smart money is positioning. The dollar isn’t dying. It’s evolving. And dollar dominance is going to be the central pricing rail of the global financial system for a long time yet.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 13:00

Antares Signs World’s First Multi-Year Commercial HALEU Supply Deal With Urenco

Antares has secured the first long-term commercial contract for High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) enrichment services from Urenco, a critical milestone for the microreactor sector that has long been starved for reliable Western fuel supply.

The agreement gives Antares access to HALEU produced at Urenco’s new enrichment facility in the United Kingdom, scheduled to come online in 2031. While still years away, the deal marks the first time a Western supplier has committed to multi-year commercial HALEU deliveries outside of government allocations.

The decision by the leading microreactor developer in the US to sign their first long-term contract with an international supplier brings immediate concern to the speed of development in the US for the expansion of enrichment capacity. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent (with billions more pledged) on companies including Centrus and General Matter by the federal government. Yet Antares chose to buy their enrichment services overseas...

“We are pleased to execute with Antares the world’s first multi-year contract for the supply of HALEU, which marks an important milestone in the maturation of this new market,” said Magnus Mori, Urenco’s Head of Advanced Fuels.

Antares CEO Jordan Bramble was equally direct: “Microreactors fueled with HALEU will be more performant and more economical. This partnership ensures that when we scale beyond material allocated by the federal government, we will have commercial supply ready to meet our needs.”

Antares is one of the more advanced microreactor developers, with a sodium heat-pipe design, factory production model, and recent selection for the Department of the Air Force’s Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program. 

The company is on track to take their first reactor critical prior to July 4th. 

HALEU remains the single biggest constraint for the entire advanced reactor wave. While the U.S. has made real regulatory progress and DOE allocations have helped early movers, commercial-scale Western production has been painfully slow. Most developers are still relying on limited government stockpiles or waiting on facilities that won’t be ready until the early 2030s.

This Urenco-Antares deal doesn’t solve the near-term crunch, but it does show that serious commercial players are finally moving beyond announcements and into actual supply agreements.
 

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 12:40

NATO Condemns Russia After Drone Smashes Into Romanian Apartments: 'Grave Escalation'

A Russian overnight attack on Ukraine reportedly involved an errant drone crashing into a 10-story apartment block in neighboring Romania, which is a member of NATO.

"We condemn Russia's recklessness, and NATO will continue to strengthen our defenses against all threats, including drones," a NATO spokesperson said on X, in an initial reaction.

 Romanian Department for Emergency Situations handout, via Reuters

Romanian officials described that during the Russian military's assault on Ukraine, which has basically become nightly at this point, a Russian drone slammed into the residential building in the southeastern city of Galati - resulting in an explosion and a fire that injured two people.

The Romanian Foreign Affairs Ministry condemned the "grave and irresponsible escalation from Russia" while further declaring it has issued formal request for more anti-drone defense measures from NATO.

"Romania has informed allies and NATO's secretary-general about the circumstances and requested measures to accelerate the transfer of anti-drone capabilities to Romania," the ministry said.

While Romania and other countries which border Ukraine have witnessed 'errant' drones and missiles come across the border before, this is the first time Romania in particular has suffered casualties as a result of a projectile hitting a densely populated city or area.

Romania has said that drone fragments have fallen on its territory several of dozens of times - the vast majority or nearly all of these happening without injury or serious incident.

Reuters details that "Romania's emergency response agency said on Friday a fire broke out in a 10th floor apartment after the drone struck the building's roof and exploded." The report indicated that "Two people were receiving medical treatment on site, it said, adding 70 people had evacuated."

The Kremlin has denied that Russian forces were behind the incident, while state media suggested the drone came from Ukrainian forces:

Moscow denied the allegations, arguing that there is no definitive proof that the drones were Russian.

Several suspected Ukrainian drones have veered into the airspace of the Baltic states in recent months. On May 7, a UAV damaged four empty oil storage tanks in eastern Latvia near the Russian border. Moscow has accused the Baltic states of allowing Ukraine to use their airspace to conduct strikes deep inside Russia, which the NATO members have denied.

In prior recent instances of drones entering neighboring airspace, NATO jets were scrambled - and in some cases drones are safely brought down via electronic intercept means.

Video of drone crash. Romania's military said it could not safely intercept over densely populated areas:

BREAKING 🔴

A Russian drone crashed into an apartment building in Galați, Romania, Faytuks Network reports. pic.twitter.com/ouZhWOCuNH

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 28, 2026

But each instance creates new tensions between Russia and NATO, and the typical accusations and threats then fly. The Kremlin has of late been especially alarmed at the Trump administration transferring 5,000 US troops from Germany to Poland, near Russia's doorstep.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 12:00

Ferrari Vs Tesla: $640K Luce EV Loses Key Speed And Range Battles To Model S Plaid

Authored by Aamir Khollam via Interesting Engineering,

Ferrari's upcoming electric grand tourer, the Luce, has already sparked intense debate online. Much of that attention centers on its unconventional styling. Yet beyond the design discussion, the numbers reveal an interesting comparison against one of the EV market's most established performance sedans: the Tesla Model S Plaid.

The matchup is far from equal in price or positioning. Ferrari plans to launch the Luce at roughly $640,000, while Tesla's Model S Plaid starts near $95,000. Ferrari also intends to keep production limited, preserving the exclusivity tied to the brand. Tesla, meanwhile, sells the Plaid in far greater numbers worldwide.

Still, both vehicles target buyers seeking extreme electric performance, making the comparison difficult to ignore.

Performance Numbers Compared

On paper, Ferrari takes a narrow lead in outright power. The Luce produces 1,050 horsepower from four electric motors, while the Model S Plaid delivers 1,020 horsepower through a tri-motor setup.

Ferrari's approach goes beyond raw output. Each wheel receives its own dedicated motor, allowing advanced torque vectoring and sharper handling control. Ferrari engineers claim the setup will preserve the brand's traditional driving feel despite the shift to an electric platform.

crazy.. pic.twitter.com/DTNVAYNPZX

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) May 27, 2026

Tesla counters with proven straight-line performance. The Model S Plaid still launches harder, reaching 60 mph in under two seconds. Ferrari estimates the Luce will hit the same mark in roughly 2.4 seconds. Tesla also claims a higher top speed, touching 200 mph compared to Ferrari's projected 193 mph.

Battery And Charging Edge

Ferrari equips the Luce with a larger 122 kWh battery pack. Tesla's Plaid uses a battery closer to 100 kWh. The Luce also benefits from an 800-volt electrical architecture capable of supporting up to 350 kW DC fast charging.

That charging advantage could reduce downtime during long-distance travel, assuming drivers access compatible high-speed chargers. Tesla's current V3 Supercharger network peaks at around 250 kW.

Despite the smaller battery, Tesla still holds the range advantage. The Model S Plaid carries an estimated range of about 348 miles, while Ferrari targets roughly 280 miles for the Luce. The Ferrari's additional weight likely contributes to the gap. Early figures place the Luce near 4,982 pounds.

Tesla also maintains an advantage in software maturity. The Model S Plaid includes Tesla's Full Self-Driving suite, although the system still requires driver supervision. Ferrari has not introduced a comparable autonomous driving package for the Luce.

Exclusivity Versus Accessibility

The massive price difference ultimately shapes the entire comparison. Buyers could purchase several Model S Plaids for the cost of a single Ferrari Luce.

Yet Ferrari is not chasing the same customer base as Tesla. The Luce competes as much with ultra-luxury brands like Rolls-Royce and Bentley as it does with mainstream performance EVs.

The Luce also represents a major milestone for Ferrari's future. Designed with input from Jony Ive and Marc Newson, the EV signals Ferrari's full entry into the electric era.

Even so, the comparison highlights Tesla's lasting influence on the segment. Years after launch, the Model S Plaid remains the benchmark many high-performance EVs still chase.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 11:40

Clinton-Appointed Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump's $1.776 Billion Anti-Weaponization Fund

A federal judge in Virginia has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund," freezing any transfers, claims processing, or disbursements while legal challenges proceed.

JUST IN: Clinton-appointed Judge temporarily BLOCKS the DOJ’s $1.8B “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

— Jack (@jackunheard) May 29, 2026

The brief order from U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia...

...says the Trump administration cannot take any action "pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund."

"...to ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed"

New: A federal judge in Virginia has temporarily barred the Trump administration from acting on claims for payouts from the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” while she weighs a longer-term block; hearing set for 6/12… pic.twitter.com/70NyLtlDIv

— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) May 29, 2026

The fund, operated through the Justice Department, was created as part of a settlement involving President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization.

Sec. Bessent on the Anti-Weaponization Fund: "President Trump is a great American who has endured more than 10 years nonstop harassment and weaponization from federal and state government actors. A bad actor at the IRS leaked more than 400,000 tax returns, including the Trump… pic.twitter.com/GQFasifJcS

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 28, 2026

Under the settlement framework, individuals claiming to have been victims of politically motivated prosecutions or government abuse would be able to seek compensation, including the 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants whom Trump pardoned.

Any American—Democrat, Republican, Independent or apolitical—can file claims with the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which are then reviewed by a committee of five.

The fund was established as a result of the IRS illegally leaking the tax returns of the Trump family and around 100… https://t.co/6QS6Op6Eas

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 20, 2026

Congressional Democrats have been widely opposed to the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund because they say it will serve as a massive "slush fund" for Trump allies.

Brinkema said the order was needed to prevent money from being "irreversibly disbursed" before pending motions are resolved. The fund cannot formally begin distributing money until five commissioners are selected.

She set a hearing for June 12 to hear arguments over whether she should issue a more lasting pause.

Meanwhile, unhinged and left-wing California Gov. Gavin Newsom said his administration will impose 100% tax on any resident receiving these funds. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 11:00

"The Real Part Of This Economy Is Not Doing Well": Ed Dowd Warns 'Just Wait 'Til The AI Bubble Bursts'

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of PhinanceTechnologies.com warned at the beginning of April that the economy was already rolling over. 

He said “Private Credit Problems are Ending the Party.”  Just 10 days ago, BlackRock and other firms with so-called private credit are  locking up investors’ cash because of a wave of redemptions.  Dowd predicted this, and the sagging economy is not going to be getting any better anytime soon. 

If you thought private credit was a drag on the economy, then the Iran war is going to be a boat anchor.  Dowd says:

“The longer this situation persists, the likelihood of oil drifting higher is going to happen.

 We have two scenarios, and one is oil peaks out at $125, and this gets resolved by May.  Inflation would peak around 5%...

We are at the point now, if this does not get resolved soon, oil prices could continue to drift higher...

We have a second scenario where we get $200 to $250 a barrel oil, which was our worst-case scenario. 

If that happens, inflation will peak out at around 11% by our models...”

Martin Armstrong said two weeks ago that gasoline prices could go to $9 a gallon.  Dowd agrees with Armstrong and says you might get $10 a gallon gas in a worst-case scenario.  Dowd adds:

“I see oil going a lot higher, which will cause a tremendous amount of demand destruction and a recession that I think is coming anyway. 

It will be even deeper than we have forecasted. 

It will cause layoffs and economic growth to go into recessionary territory.  The prices of commodities will collapse as deflation sets in.  

The solution to high commodity prices is high commodity prices because it creates demand destruction.”

So, what’s the Fed going to do?  Dowd thinks,

“The Fed could raise rates to combat the headline inflation.  My best guess is they do nothing at the June FOMC meeting. 

They are certainly not going to cut until they see the economic growth slowing...

Depending on this war . . . the real part of this economy, housing, is not doing well and rolling over. 

We are just waiting on the AI bubble to finally burst . . . we are close to that topping out soon.”

Dowd is still bullish on gold and silver long term, but short term, it may get sold off to raise cash like Turkey just did. 

Silver will have stronger headwinds than gold given the deflation that is coming. 

Dowd does not see China’s economic woes getting any better.  Dowd predicted China’s economic problems months ago, and Wall Street is just now catching up on the bad news.  Dowd says,

“China had 8% negative growth in the first quarter.”

Dowd goes into a deep dive on the severe economic problems facing China. 

Dowd points out big problems in housing and says it’s cheaper to rent a house than to own one. 

Dowd also predicts the Fed will be forced to cut interest rates in early 2027 because the deflation will be so severe.

In closing, Dowd says, “This is the normal credit cycle..."

"  The credit cycle is old and aging, and we are seeing the credit cycle get chinks in the armor with the private credit situation, which is effectively frozen.  This was credit growth that happened in 2024 and 2025.”

There is much more in the 44-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog as he goes One-on-One with money manager and investment expert Ed Dowd as he explains why we are seeing big trouble for the US economy.   Dowd predicted this was coming in January with his report called “US Economy Outlook 2026.”

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 10:40

"False": Musk Denies Bloomberg Report About SpaceX IPO Valuation Drop

Summary:

• Musk says the Bloomberg report is "false" 

• SpaceX Reportedly Lowers IPO Valuation Target, as per Bloomberg

Musk Rejects Bloomberg Report 

Yet again, corporate media is pushing fake news against Elon Musk.

This time, Musk called a Bloomberg report that cited unnamed sources and claimed SpaceX had lowered its IPO valuation target "false." 

False

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 29, 2026 SpaceX Reportedly Lowers IPO Valuation Target 

SpaceX is targeting a valuation of at least $1.8 trillion in its upcoming initial public offering, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. This is below an earlier goal of more than $2 trillion.

In practice, the initial IPO valuation target is a marketing range, not a final number. Therefore, any valuation shifts ahead of the trading day would not be unusual. This suggests advisers are calibrating the deal to what investors are willing to absorb, especially given the massive proposed raise of up to $75 billion.

The target is settling lower after consultations with advisers and investors, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn't public.

Details of an IPO, such as size and valuation, are typically adjusted ahead of pricing based on feedback from stakeholders, the people said.

SpaceX is seeking to raise as much as $75 billion, people familiar with the matter have said, which would make it the biggest IPO of all time. -BBG

The May 21 SpaceX S-1 filing revealed that Elon Musk's space company is much more than a reusable-rocket and satellite-internet company. It now encompasses AI services, infrastructure, orbital data centers, and a claimed $28.5 trillion total addressable market.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the IPO is set to price on June 11, with a June 12 debut. The stock is expected to list on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker "SPCX."

Polymarket bets show a 90% chance that SpaceX's market capitalization will be $1.8 trillion on the IPO date.

//--> //--> SpaceX IPO closing market cap above $1.8T?
Yes 90% · No 10%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

There was speculation earlier this week of a SpaceX-Tesla merger in 2027. Wedbush Securities' Dan Ives has those odds at 80%.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 10:07

Kicking The Can On A Ceasefire "Which Does Not Solve Anything"

Bas van Geffen, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank

Both Bloomberg and Axios report that the US and Iran have reached a tentative deal to extend the ceasefire by 60 days as they engage in further negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme. However, Tasnim reported that the text of the memorandum of understanding had not been finalized.

US Vice President Vance said that the two sides are still “going back and forth on a couple of language points,” which reportedly includes the wording on Iran’s nuclear capacity. But the Vice President said that Iran appears to be negotiating in good faith, paving the way for Trump’s approval of the ceasefire extension.

While negotiators are trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of the memorandum, President Trump has reportedly asked for a couple of days to think about the final deal.

Energy prices fell further on the news that a deal could –again– be imminent, after the US administration made similar claims last week. Brent futures are currently down about 10% on the week. That, in turn, is lifting optimism in other markets. Yields dropped, and green figures returned on stock exchanges.

Admittedly, a 60-day extension would lessen some of the near-term tail risks – although both sides have accused each other of violating the current ceasefire. Just the past day, Kuwait intercepted a missile that Iran had fired at a US base, causing the US to respond with new “defensive strikes” on Iran.

More importantly, a ceasefire does not solve anything, unless the US and Iran manage to agree on the key sticking points during that extended ceasefire.

Treasury Secretary Bessent reminded everyone that Trump’s three red lines are unchanged: Hormuz must reopen, Tehran must end its nuclear programme, and Iran must transfer its highly enriched uranium. As we noted earlier this week, a nuclear deal still seems highly unlikely at this juncture.

Likewise, Iran still believes that it can effectively control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, together with Oman, allowing it to put down toll booths along the strait. Even though this would allow paying ships to cross, that’s not a “reopening” in Trump’s view.

The US imposed sanctions on the Hormuz Strait Shipping Authority, which is supposed to collect the toll. And Bessent warned that “Oman, in particular, should know that the ⁠U.S. Treasury will aggressively target any actors involved –directly or indirectly– in ⁠facilitating tolls for the Strait.” President Trump even threatened to “blow them up” if Oman works with Iran to control shipping through Hormuz.

It still seems unlikely that the key sticking points will be resolved soon. On that basis, we have shifted our baseline for Hormuz to remain closed for up to three more months before we see a crisis resolution. Only if either the US or Iran blinks regarding the nuclear programme, could we see a quicker end to the conflict.

Meanwhile, tensions are rising in other parts of the globe too. Talks between the US and Cuba appear to have stalled, while Cuba and China discussed agricultural cooperation, food shipments, and political support. This increases the risk that the US may resort to military aggression. China, meanwhile, claims that a Dutch frigate entered their waters – which the Netherlands disputed; and a Canadian frigate transited the Taiwan Strait, defying Chinese warnings not to do so.

And, as we’ve noted before, even if the US-Iran conflict is resolved sooner, it would still take a substantial amount of time before energy flows return to some form of normalcy. So, some further inflationary pressure is inevitable.

Policymakers are also starting to realize this. The ECB’s Schnabel noted recently that “even if the war ended today, a lot of damage has already been done to energy infrastructure and global supply chains.” She adds that higher costs will probably trickle through global supply chains and into higher goods prices.

The accounts of the April ECB meeting suggest that Schnabel is not the only policymaker who’s concerned about the size and the persistence of the inflation shock. It therefore looks like a June hike is all but a done deal. According to the minutes, some policymakers said that the decision to hold or hike was already a “close call” for them in April. This group essentially indicated that they would not have opposed a rate hike last month, if this had been proposed as the path forward.

Today’s inflation data are further cementing the case for a rate hike. French HICP inflation rose to 2.8% y/y, while Spanish HICP inflation edged up to 3.6%. Meanwhile, business surveys indicate that companies expect to raise selling prices further – although selling price expectations eased a bit in May, compared to the steep increases in the two months prior.

And, worryingly, consumers’ medium-term inflation expectations have started to pick up alongside the rise in current inflation rates. As Schnabel pointed out, these shifts in consumer expectations could be a first indication that expectations are de-anchoring.

However, we still believe that the current backdrop is less conducive to broader and protracted inflationary pressures than 2021-2022. Yesterday’s business confidence survey indicated that employment expectations continue to score below the long-term average. The labor hoarding index remains above its long-term average, but businesses appear to hoard less labor than before.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 10:00

Russia Warns US Against Sending Thousands More Troops Near Its Borders: Pushing Toward 'Suicidal Conflict'

Russia is deeply alarmed about US plans to deploy thousands of additional troops to NATO's eastern flank member Poland, slamming reports out of Washington as unacceptable and portending an escalation in the Ukraine war.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a press briefing on Thursday that sending additional American soldiers to Poland "would result in escalation of tension across Europe" and that Moscow would be forced to take "retaliatory measures".

Getty Images

Given that some 5,000 troops are being moved there from Germany, she did acknowledge that reducing America's troop presense in Europe would overall be "rational, justified, and long-overdue" step toward stabilizing what she called an "imbalanced" security situation created by NATO and Western policies.

Weeks ago, the White House began threatening a significant and historic force reduction from Germany, following Berlin officials' repeat criticisms of the US-Israeli war against Iran. This was initially presented in media reports as part of a broader drawdown from Europe, but now it appears US forces are just being shifted around, and with 5,000 to be placed closer to Russia.

But these thousands more troops in Poland could induce Russia to respond with "military-technical measures." Zakharova in perhaps the most provocative part of her remarks warned that NATO is pushing the continent toward a "suicidal" conflict.

In total, some 10,000 US service members are stationed in Poland, on a regular rotation, and the new Washington deployment would see thousands more added to this - from among the 80,000 deployed across Europe.

Poland shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad Region, setting off further concerns about targeting and drone activity: 

The deployment of additional US military forces to Poland could lead to a "qualitative escalation" of tensions between Russia and the West and force Moscow to take retaliatory measures, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.

Zakharova also said that the number of drone attacks on Russian territory from the direction of Europe and Northern European states was increasing.

Moscow has expressed concern that Ukrainian drones could be using Baltic or other countries' airspace to launch attacks on targets inside Russia, an assertion rejected by Kyiv and the three Baltic countries.

Warsaw has hit back, with Foreign minister Maciej Wewiór having told the Polish news agency PAP that allied troops in Poland were "a necessary reinforcement of NATO's eastern flank" as a result of Russia's aggression in Ukraine, and given the Kremlin's "escalatory rhetoric" towards the alliance.

Wiki Commons

Wewiór additionally said the "real source of escalation and tensions in Europe" remains Moscow's "unlawful and aggressive military actions" – and not legitimate measures taken by NATO countries to defend their populations and borders.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 09:40

DC Great Again: Historic Columbus Circle Fountain Flows For First Time In Years

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Trump administration continues to deliver tangible results in Washington, D.C.

Columbus Circle at Union Station is now clean, safe, and beautiful again, with its historic fountain restored and water flowing for the first time in years.

The ribbon was officially cut Thursday, and fencing around the circle comes down tomorrow, reopening the space to the public as a polished front door to the capital.

Columbus Circle at Union Station in D.C. is CLEAN & SAFE again!

THANK YOU @POTUS & @SecretaryBurgum! pic.twitter.com/DunGCzcjBg

- Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 28, 2026

The ribbon has been cut. Columbus Circle at Union Station is officially restored. The fencing around the circle will come down tomorrow, making it officially back open to the public. pic.twitter.com/BRqkL55eLJ

- Reagan Reese (@reaganreese_) May 28, 2026

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum celebrated the moment, posting side-by-side images.

Columbus Circle is a historic front door to Washington, D.C. and thanks to @POTUS, today it is once again ready to welcome the public! pic.twitter.com/nXetZR572W

- Secretary Doug Burgum (@SecretaryBurgum) May 28, 2026

Before-and-after footage highlights the stark turnaround. Under the prior administration, the area sat neglected and rundown. Now it gleams with restored brick walkways and a working fountain.

Columbus Circle during Biden vs. Trump.

Decline is a choice. https://t.co/ZzCW4ijWvv pic.twitter.com/yE7iawFlCx

- Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 28, 2026

Weekly reminder: Decline is a choice. pic.twitter.com/LeFsjFqg3R

- The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 28, 2026

DC before vs after Trump's restorations pic.twitter.com/j8CgBWi3Tx

- End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 28, 2026

Donald Trump and Doug Burgum are on a generational run. My gosh. pic.twitter.com/8rIB6qeDdc

- johnny maga (@johnnymaga) May 28, 2026

Never in my 13 years living in DC have I seen this fountain on.

Honestly, I don't think many Washingtonians thought it would ever come back, especially after last year's protests.

It's more beautiful than I expected. pic.twitter.com/V4wmQk23t3 pic.twitter.com/vE31yrRUD5

- Ken Farnaso (@KLF) May 28, 2026

This restoration is part of a broader National Park Service initiative that has already brought more than 20 D.C. fountains back to life using upgraded materials, many looking better than when originally built.

People outside of DC don't realize what a transformation this is. Union Station used to be packed with drugged out zombies shambling around screaming at passersby, and barefoot, piss-soaked homeless people passed out on the floor. Columbus Circle right outside used to be a gross... https://t.co/THnYayRwVb pic.twitter.com/QtDKrsiKoF

- Payton Alexander (@AlexanderPayton) May 28, 2026

The Columbus Circle project, part of a larger $54 million effort targeting seven major fountains, aligns directly with President Trump's executive order to make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful ahead of America's 250th anniversary.

The transformation echoes what Americans saw just weeks ago at Meridian Hill Park, where a long-dry cascading fountain now flows powerfully and families - including blue-haired liberals - have returned to enjoy the clean, safe space.

President Trump is also personally overseeing the overhaul of the granddaddy of them all: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The 2,500-foot-long landmark, plagued by leaks, grime, and decay since its construction in 1922, is being thoroughly cleaned, repaired, and resurfaced.

Trump shared a striking rendering of how the pool will glow in deep American flag blue as work advances.

President Trump just shared this stunning image on Truth Social:

The Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool glowing in deep American flag blue.

Trump is having the Reflecting Pool thoroughly cleaned, repaired, and restored so it will once again be a true thing of beauty - ... pic.twitter.com/5H2hj9Yjwd

- Paul A. Szypula (@Bubblebathgirl) May 28, 2026

The contrast could not be clearer. For years, Democrat-led neglect turned key public spaces into eyesores overrun by encampments, trash, and graffiti. Now, under Trump, beauty, order, and civic pride are returning. Crime is dropping. Encampments are clearing. Families are reclaiming their city.

Decline was a choice. Action, strength, and American pride are the alternative - and the results are already visible on the streets of the nation's capital.

As more landmarks come back online, the message is unmistakable: America is being made beautiful again, one restored fountain at a time.

Meanwhile, leftists are losing it over this image of work being done at the White House, along with a temporary structure being built for the forthcoming UFC event as part of the 250th celebrations.

Leftists losing it over this image. Do they walk around cities clutching their pearls when they see buildings being constructed? https://t.co/sTKTh5udzn

- m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) May 28, 2026 Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 09:20

Will Blue Origin's Vaporized Rocket Set Back Amazon Leo's Satellite Rollout

Summary: 

• Amazon Leo needs 24 New Glenn launches to close the gap with SpaceX's Starlink. NASA needs New Glenn for Artemis. Both timelines could've just been derailed simultaneously.

• Blue Origin's New Glenn Rocket Explodes On Florida Launchpad

Will Blue Origin's New Glenn Rocket Mishap Derail Amazon Leo Satellite Launches

Ahead of Thursday night's disastours static-fire test of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos' rocket company was planning to launch 48 Amazon Leo satellites, formerly Project Kuiper. 

Amazon says it has completed 11 missions and launched more than 300 Leo broadband satellites. The next batch of 48 satellites was expected to be launched into LEO in early June, but last night's mishap is likely to have derailed those efforts. 

🚀 Launch Alert | New Glenn's fourth launch will send 48 @AmazonLeo satellites into low Earth orbit as part of their growing broadband constellation. More details to come soon. pic.twitter.com/2jNAucrtPv

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) May 27, 2026

Amazon Leo is a direct competitor to Elon Musk's Starlink internet service, which has more than 10,400 broadband satellites in space and ten million customers worldwide. 

Growth is very fast (Starlink added millions in 2025 alone), with unofficial estimates putting the figure around 11–12 million by early to mid-May 2026.

One X user pointed out how "Blue Origin just vaporized a rocket, a launch pad, and Amazon's entire satellite deployment timeline in nine seconds." 

NG-4 was supposed to fly on June 4, carrying 48 Amazon Leo satellites. That mission was the first of 24 contracted Blue Origin launches Amazon needs to build its Starlink competitor. Amazon has roughly 240 satellites in orbit against an FCC requirement of 1,618 by July 2026. They already filed for a two-year extension because they were falling short. Losing your primary heavy-lift rocket on the pad doesn't help that math.

The pad damage is the part people aren't thinking about. New Glenn carries roughly 2.4 million pounds of propellant. The explosion toppled one of LC-36's lightning protection towers. That launch complex took years to build and billions to outfit. You can manufacture a new rocket in months. You cannot rebuild a launch pad in months.

The cascade gets worse. Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander is supposed to launch on New Glenn this fall for NASA's CLPS program. That mission is the pathfinder for Artemis III, which needs Blue Moon MK2 to fly on New Glenn in mid-2027 to land astronauts at the lunar south pole. Every month LC-36 sits damaged pushes Artemis further into the late 2020s.

Jeff Bezos has two companies betting on the same rocket. Amazon Leo needs 24 New Glenn launches to close the gap with Starlink. NASA needs New Glenn for Artemis. Both timelines just broke simultaneously, and LC-36 is on fire.

Blue Origin just vaporized a rocket, a launch pad, and Amazon's entire satellite deployment timeline in nine seconds.

NG-4 was supposed to fly June 4 carrying 48 Amazon Leo satellites. That mission was the first of 24 contracted Blue Origin launches Amazon needs to build its… https://t.co/Pz2Su6925C

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) May 29, 2026

However, as one X user explained, Bezos now has three options, and all three are, as he put it, "catastrophic": 

• OPTION 1: REBUILD LC-36 FROM SCRATCH

• OPTION 2: BORROW OR BUY LAUNCH CAPACITY FROM A COMPETITOR

• OPTION 3: ABSORB THE DELAY AND KEEP INVESTING

🚨 🚨 BEZOS HAS 3 OPTIONS LEFT AFTER NEW GLENN'S LAUNCHPAD EXPLOSION. ALL 3 ARE CATASTROPHIC.

This is the moment nobody wants to talk about.

After years of development, a $1B+ heavy-lift rocket program, and a final ground test before Amazon's Kuiper satellite mission → Blue… pic.twitter.com/Kdsd1k3vBb

— 🇨🇳 Liu Feng 刘锋 (@LiuInTheShadows) May 29, 2026

Amazon Leo has not yet released an official statement on the impacts of last night's mishap on future satellite launches. 

Sigh, Delta. 

Delta rejected adopting SpaceX's @Starlink on its fleet because it wanted to provide internet connectivity to passengers via the Delta Sync portal, instead of the Starlink-branded portal. Delta has since chosen to partner with Amazon's LEO.

This will result in Delta falling… pic.twitter.com/gTt8JrYx8R

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 13, 2026

Meanwhile, American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and others have announced contracts for Starlink. 

Blue Origin's New Glenn Rocket Explodes On Florida Launchpad

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded in a massive fireball while undergoing a static-fire test on a Florida launchpad Thursday evening, dealing a major setback to the Jeff Bezos-backed firm in its efforts to challenge a dominant SpaceX. 

The firm was preparing the vehicle for its fourth launch, which was slated to deploy a batch of satellites for Amazon.com Inc.’s Leo, a rival satellite network to SpaceX’s Starlink. None of the satellites were on the rocket when it exploded, a spokesperson for Amazon said.

Blue Origin's New Glenn just blew up at LC-36 while attempting to Static Fire ahead of NG-4.https://t.co/tANS0dWyIH pic.twitter.com/PztxFoBqIw

— NSF - NASASpaceflight.com (@NASASpaceflight) May 29, 2026

Blue Origin said the rocket experienced an “anomaly” during the test. All personnel have been accounted for and are safe, the company said. 

We experienced an anomaly during today's hotfire test. All personnel have been accounted for. We will provide updates as we learn more.

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) May 29, 2026

Commenting on the explosion, which raised the valuation of SpaceX by tens of billions as one of its biggest competitors just saw its launch vehicle end up in a massive fireball, Elon said the event was "most unfortunate. Rockets are hard."

Most unfortunate. Rockets are hard.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 29, 2026

New Glenn, which is key to Blue Origin’s plans for space exploration, is years behind schedule and has faced longer-than-expected waiting periods between flights. The explosion is the latest blow to its reputation as a reliable alternative to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

The rocket is set to serve a key role in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to send humans back to the moon. It is also one of an elite group of vehicles that is supposed to deliver the most critical US national security satellites for the Pentagon.

All personnel are accounted for and safe. It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) May 29, 2026

According to Bloomberg, the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, said it is aware of the failure and there was no impact to air traffic. The test was not within the scope of FAA licensed activities, the agency said, referring further questions to the company.

This angle is even crazier https://t.co/bDUuiafnTg pic.twitter.com/LuLG3frNw2

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 29, 2026

Blue Origin recently launched New Glenn on its third flight in April. The rocket successfully took off and the vehicle’s booster landed on a company barge at sea. However, the upper portion of the rocket experienced an issue in space and didn’t achieve enough thrust, failing to put the satellite it was carrying for AST SpaceMobile Inc. into the proper orbit. Ultimately, the satellite fell back to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere.

The FAA had recently approved Blue Origin’s investigative report that analyzed the issue on the third flight, and the company said corrective measures had been implemented.

Insane footage filmed from a nearby restaurant shows tonight’s explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn at Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36 (LC-36). pic.twitter.com/2jahDKHKhq

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) May 29, 2026 Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 09:08

Futures Hit Another Record High After Pricing In Same "Iran Deal" Every Day For The Past Month

US equity futures are higher, continuing their slow motion-gamma squeeze into record territory, as traders waited to see whether America and Iran could finally get the peace deal they have already priced in every single day for the past month. As of 8:00am ET, S&P futures are up 0.1%, and poised to rise for the ninth consecutive week, the best streak since 2023; Nasdaq futs also have modest gains. In the pre-market, Mag 7 are mostly lower with AMZN (-1.0%), TSLA (-0.7%), AAPL (-0.6%) the laggards even as evidence of relentless demand for AI-infrastructure stocks was on display as Dell jumped 37% after the legacy computer maker gave a sales outlook that far surpassed analysts’ estimates, fueled by servers designed to run AI workloads. MSCI All Country World Index on track for a second monthly gain, both European and Asian markets were higher overnight. Bond yields are flat at 4.44% and the USD remains unchanged. WTI crude fell $1.46 to $87.44, while Brent traded around $92; base metals are all higher; gold added 0.7%. Economic data slate includes April advance goods trade balance and retail and wholesale inventories (8:30am) and May MNI Chicago PMI (9:45am, several minutes earlier for subscribers). Fed speaker slate includes Daly (7:45am, 12:40pm), Bowman (9:10am) and Paulson (9:15am)

In premarket trading, Mag 7 stocks are mostly lower (Microsoft +0.8%, Nvidia +0.5%, Tesla -0.4%, Apple -0.5%, Meta -0.5%, Amazon -0.7%, Alphabet -0.8%)

• American Eagle shares (AEO) tumbled 11% after the clothing retailer reported total comparable sales for the first quarter that missed the average analyst estimate.
• Autodesk’s (ADSK) falls 7% after its proposed acquisition of MaintainX has been tentatively welcomed by analysts, who see the deal as expensive but representing a strong strategic move.
• Dell Technologies shares (DELL) surge 35% after the Texas-based company raised both its full year revenue and adjusted EPS outlooks on strong demand for its AI-powering servers.
• Elastic (ESTC) is down 5.4% after the software company gave an outlook for adjusted first-quarter earnings that was weaker than expected.
• Gap (GAP) shares fell 15% after the clothing retailer reported its latest earnings with poor performance by the company’s Old Navy brand that weighed on the full-year outlook in an otherwise mixed report.
• Krispy Kreme (DNUT) is up 5% after the doughnut chain’s Director Bernardo Hees acquired $768,718 of stock, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
• NetApp (NTAP) rallies 19% after the data storage provider reported its latest earnings with a strong print from the company, showing strong growth.
• Nextpower Inc. shares (NXT) rise 11% after it agreed to buy Prevalon Energy, a joint venture between Mitsubishi Power Americas and EES, for up to $365 million in cash and stock.
• PagerDuty shares (PD) are up 13% after the software company reported first-quarter results that beat expectations and raised its full-year forecast for adjusted earnings.
• SentinelOne shares (S) fall 12% after the software company gave a second-quarter revenue forecast that was weaker than expected and announced it would reduce its full-time employees by 8%.
• UiPath shares (PATH) are down 4.6% after the software company reported first-quarter results that analysts are generally positive on, although they want to see greater confirmation of durable growth in annualized recurring revenue.
• Viasat (VSAT) falls 7.2% after the wireless communications firm’s fourth-quarter earnings undershot analysts’ expectations.

In other news, space-related stocks gave back some recent gains after Elon Musk’s SpaceX cut its valuation goal to at least $1.8 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter. AST SpaceMobile Inc. fell 13%, while Rocket Lab Corp. slipped 5.3%. APfizer and Innovent Biologics signed a global agreement to develop cancer drugs, including a $650 million upfront payment and up to $9.85 billion in potential milestones. Costco reported higher-than-expected profit in the latest quarter, showing the club chain continues to gain ground among cautious US shoppers. 

A preliminary deal between Washington and Tehran to extend a ceasefire by 60 days is awaiting signoff from President Donald Trump. Vice President JD Vance told reporters Thursday that the parties are “going back and forth on a couple of language points,” including issues relating to Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

The prospect of a peace deal - the same peace deal the market has priced in every day since April - in the Middle East is easing pressure on oil prices and raising conviction that markets’ worst inflation fears wouldn’t come to pass, even as oil flows remain blocked and inventories are getting drained at a record pace. That confidence comes against a backdrop of an unprecedented artificial intelligence-led rally that has seen US-listed chipmakers surge nearly 70% since the start of April. Dell’s mic-dropping earnings print is being seen as evidence of “the latest perceived dinosaur tech to rediscover a new lease of life as an AI powerhouse, following in the footsteps of Intel, Cisco, Nokia, and Lenovo,” notes Emmanuel Valavanis of Forte Securities. 

“Brent below $90 by the end of next week seems at our reach,” wrote Florian Ielpo, head of macro at Lombard Odier Investment Managers. “It would create a rather supportive environment should it happen, clearly as oil prices have been the source of most macro fears this year.”

With energy prices coming off the boil, investors have begun to dial back expectations of a stagflationary shock for the global economy. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari said it’s too early to conclude that interest rates need to rise, remarks that validated a six-day run of gains in Treasuries through Thursday.

“If a deal is agreed upon, we should see another leg higher in risky assets and lower in rates,” noted Mohit Kumar, chief economist and strategist for Europe at Jefferies. “Positioning suggests that the rates market should see a greater reaction than equities.”

The fact that the market has no clear view on the extent of the consequences of the conflict is a reason for caution, said Guillermo Hernandez Sampere, head of trading at MPPM. “Due to past disappointments, euphoria remains rather subdued,” he said. “Short-term price fluctuations are not yet sufficient to provide lasting stability to oil-dependent stocks.”

Info Tech has led sector gains month-to-date on the back of the AI narrative backed by strong earnings, supportive valuations and momentum. BI quantitative strategists note that since the launch of the Bloomberg AI Index in April 2015, a monthly rebalanced portfolio of high-momentum AI names has delivered a remarkable 41.02% annualized return on 28.69% volatility, equating to a Sharpe ratio of 1.43.

“The market is looking for an excuse to trend higher,” Pooja Malik, partner at Nipun Capital, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. Still, “while the AI rally, both from a fundamental and a sentiment perspective, has a huge amount of momentum, the inflation risk is real. If that results in interest rate hikes, that itself could act as a big break on this whole AI tech positive momentum,” she added.

Tech is likely to remain in the headlines over the weekend and into next week, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang leading a parade of AI computing leaders in Taiwan for Asia’s biggest technology showcase, Computex. 

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 rose 0.6% to erase losses for the week.  Travel and leisure shares are among the biggest gainers, as Brent crude fell to $93 per barrel.  Thematically, Luxury, Ceasefire, Software and Momentum Short are among the top performing baskets. Germany Unemployment Rate printed 6.3% vs, 6.4% survey and 6.4% prior. German regional CPI released this morning were mostly softer than last month. May Tokyo CPI prints 1.4% vs. 1.6% survey vs. 1.5% prior. Here are the top movers:

• Ocado shares jump as much as 14% as the online food retailer enters a partnership with Asda to develop the supermarket’s online business across the UK with the Ocado Smart Platform
• CTS Eventim shares rise as much as 13%, the most since November 2020, after the events firm reported first-quarter sales and Ebitda that both beat consensus estimates
• Vivendi shares rise as much as 8.4% after a press report strengthened the case of minority shareholders seeking a buyout from Bollore SE, CIC CIB argues in a note
• BAM Groep shares rise as much as 17% to their highest level since 2008, after Oddo BHF double upgraded the stock to outperform on better-than-expected UK profitability and lower risks from legacy projects
• Ceres Power gains as much as 4.9% after Berenberg lifted its price target on the stock, saying the clean-energy technology developer is a beneficiary of the AI and data center boom
• Dottikon Es shares fall as much as 20%, the most on record, after results from the Swiss pharmaceutical ingredients firm that Zuercher Kantonalbank called disappointing at all levels except for cash flows
• Wickes and B&M European shares fall as much as 6.6% and 3.0% respectively as Deutsche Numis analysts cut their recommendation on both to sell on concern about the effect of hotter inflation on lower income consumers and big ticket spending

Earlier in the session, Asian equities rebounded as a tentative US-Iran deal to extend their ceasefire revived appetite for risk assets and caused oil prices to drop. The MSCI AC Asia Pacific Index rose as much as 2.1%, with most stock benchmarks in the region in the green. South Korea’s Kospi gauge led the pack with a gain of 3.6%. A rally in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix has forced some funds bound by a 10% single-stock cap rule to to reshuffle their portfolios. Meanwhile, Asian computer-related stocks advanced after Dell shares soared in extended trading on raised guidance due to strong demand for its AI-powering servers.

In FX, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index up by 0.1% with New Zealand dollar outperforming after central bank comments.

In rates, treasuries narrowly mixed, keeping yields within a basis point of Thursday’s closing levels, with oil at a six-week low after the US and Iran tentatively agreed to extend a ceasefire by 60 days. US 10-year yield near 4.44% as European bond yields edging lower in spite of hotter inflation readings in France, Spain and Italy, with Germany the only outlier. US curve spreads are marginally wider, also within a basis point of Thursday’s close. IG dollar issuance slate empty so far. Almost $7 billion was priced Thursday, taking weekly supply over $40 billion. Borrowers paid about 2bps in new issue concessions on deals that were 3.1 times covered. Early dealer forecasts for June US high-grade supply are in the $130 billion-$135 billion range, versus $109 billion in June 2025. Focal points of US session includes several Fed speakers and potential for buying tied to month-end index rebalancing. 

In commodities, WTI crude oil futures are down 1.9% on optimism the Strait of Hormuz may soon reopen. Gold prices moving higher and back above $4,500/oz.

Economic data slate includes April advance goods trade balance and retail and wholesale inventories (8:30am) and May MNI Chicago PMI (9:45am, several minutes earlier for subscribers). Fed speaker slate includes Daly (7:45am, 12:40pm), Bowman (9:10am) and Paulson (9:15am)

Market Snapshot

Top Overnight News

• Iran and US reach deal to extend ceasefire, pending Trump's approval: RTRS
• Bond market volatility is boosting the case for Japan's central bank to pause the unwinding of its massive debt holdings next fiscal year, which would give Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi some relief amid growing investor concerns about her spending plans. RTRS
• China is targeting billions held offshore in the biggest crackdown in decades, with ramifications for the financial advisers and funds that help manage money overseas. BBG
• Samsung Electronics Co. has begun shipping samples of the industry’s most advanced memory to customers, taking an early lead in a race to supply the essential components for AI accelerators made by the likes of Nvidia Corp. BBG
• Apollo Global Management Inc. and Blackstone Inc. are working to bring additional investors into a roughly $36 billion debt financing deal to help Anthropic PBC build out its AI infrastructure. BBG
• France’s economy unexpectedly shrank in the first quarter, with households reining in spending as consumer confidence slid. BBG
• Tokyo’s key inflation gauge cooled to the slowest pace in four years, with the consumer price index excluding fresh food rising 1.3% in May from a year earlier. BBG
• Inflation in France, Italy and Spain jumped in May, reinforcing the case for the ECB to raise interest rates in June. BBG
• Americans are saving less as the everyday cost of living rises and wages struggle to keep up. The personal savings rate — defined as the share of income Americans have after taxes and expenses — hit 2.6% in April, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis released on Thursday. That’s down from 3.2% in March, and 5.8% a year prior. CNBC
• Chevron chief executive Mike Wirth has warned oil prices are likely to rise over the next two months as crude inventories continue to decline due to the Iran war. FT
• US State Department designates Brazilian criminal organisations Comando Vermelho and PCC as specially designated global terrorists, effective June 5th.
• Heading into month-end, Goldman estimates $14 billion of US equities to sell from US pensions given the moves in equities and bonds. This expiry is the 12th largest non-quarterly sell estimate on record (since 2000). 

Iran War

• Many points regarding the Iranian nuclear file have been resolved; Iran has agreed to international oversight of its nuclear facilities to prevent their dismantling, Al Arabiya reported citing sources. Iran wants to transfer the enriched uranium to China with a commitment not to deliver it to America.
• Chairman of the Iranian National Security Committee of the Iranian Parliament said there are no plans to transfer enriched uranium out of the country, Asharq reported.
• Iran Deputy for Foreign Policy and International Security Ali Baqeri held separate meetings in Moscow with the Foreign Policy Advisor to Brazil's President and the Secretary General of Egypt's National Security Council.
• IRGC Commander said Iran forces are ready to act on Supreme Leader's order and enemies should not make mistakes as they will get themselves and others into trouble.
• Iran military source said US drone was intercepted near Bushehr in southern Iran, according to Al Jazeera.
• US Vice President Vance said that US President Trump is not yet ready to endorse the Iran agreement, while Vance noted that US and Iran made a lot of progress towards a ceasefire deal, according to AFP. Vance said US and Iran are at odds on uranium enrichment and stockpiles, according to SNN.
• White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller stating in an interview with Fox News that US President Trump is directly involved in negotiations with Iran.
• US President Trump said we completely sank the Iranian Navy and destroyed their air force, did not target all of Iran’s military leadership so that what happened in Iraq would not be repeated.
• US military said Iran's state TV claim that Iranian forces downed a US aircraft near Bushehr is false and no US aircraft was shot down by Iran, with all US air assets are accounted for.
• US VP Vance said US and Iran are exchanging proposals regarding some drafting points including issue of enrichment, adds time is still early to know when an agreement with Iran will be reached and if it will happen at all.
• US Treasury imposes fresh sanctions targeting Iran's military oil sales, according to Reuters. IRNA reported US sanctions 25 individuals, firms and vessels over Iran oil.
• US President Trump said that US has all the cards, Iran has been defeated militarily, according to a Fox interview.
• Al Hadath posted Iranian television reported “the downing of an American fighter jet” in the vicinity of Bushehr, with no American confirmations.
• US official denies what Iranian TV announced about downing any American plane near Bushehr, according to Al Hadath.
• Israel's Channel 12, citing military sources, said "The army recommends to the political leadership intensifying the air and ground strikes in Lebanon".

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks headed into month-end on the front foot as the region took impetus from the gains stateside, where the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 posted fresh record highs amid reports of a tentative agreement regarding an MOU for a 60-day US-Iran ceasefire extension and to launch negotiations on Iran's nuclear programme, although it still needs approval from US President Trump, while Iranian sources also pushed back and stated it was not finalised. ASX 200 was led higher by outperformance in the mining, materials and resources industries, while the energy and defensive sectors were at the other end of the spectrum as geopolitics and oil moves remained the main catalyst for price action. Nikkei 225 rallied back above the 66,000 level amid lower oil prices and following a slew of data, including softer Tokyo CPI, lower Unemployment, and better-than-expected industrial output & retail sales. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were mixed as the mainland lagged and with headwinds from earnings, as automakers were pressured following weak results from XPeng, while sentiment was also not helped by trade frictions, with the EU set to discuss restrictions on Chinese imports.

Top Asian News

• Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Kihara said he is extremely concerned about speculative moves in the FX market; won't comment on FX levels and intervention. Government stance is to always take appropriate FX action.
• Japanese Finance Minister Katayama said we'll consider cost risk balance in reference to issuing bonds and to engage in dialogue with market on bond management, while she declines comment on future bond maturities at this time. said:. It's important to have broad bond investor base. Will continue appropriate debt management policies.
• Japanese Finance Minister Katayama said Japan can take decisive action on FX volatility, while she declined to comment on whether intervention has taken place or not.

European bourses (STOXX 600 +0.4%) are firmer across the board, attempting to rebound from recent losses and as markets digest reports that the US and Iran are nearing an agreement to extend the ceasefire. (See the commodities section for details.) From an index standpoint, the CAC 40 (+1%) outperforms in Europe whilst the FTSE 100 (+0.2%) lags vs peers, given its exposure to energy names. European sectors hold a positive bias. The cyclical industries (Consumer Products / Travel & Leisure / Autos) top the sectoral list, whilst the likes of Energy and Utilities hold towards the bottom of the pile. The Energy sector, unsurprisingly, has been dragged down by losses across the underlying oil complex.

Top European News

• Communications between former UK Minister Wes Streeting (potential PM candidate) and Peter Mandelson will be published next week, The Sun reported.

FX

• G10s are mixed against the Dollar. Kiwi leads after hawkish RBNZ speak overnight after the hawkish-leaning RBNZ hold early in the week, while Sterling lags after Cable dipped below its 200DMA.
• The Greenback is a touch firmer in a rebound from hefty losses on Thursday, when the DXY closed 0.6% from highs. (See Commodities on the headline feed). In short, a deal seems near, but uncertainty remains over whether Trump will sign off on the proposal and whether Tehran will formally endorse the reported terms. Aside from US-Iran, eyes are also on tensions between NATO’s Romania and Russia after a drone hit a residential building in Romania's Galati. DXY is firmer by 0.2% within 98.95-99.19 parameters.
• French, Spanish and German state inflation imply cooler German nationwide (due 13:00 BST), and EZ (due Tuesday) prints. French GDP: Final measures softer than expected. Q1 rate was revised into contraction from flat, yearly basis was also revised a touch lower. French HICP: Softer than expected and ticks up from the prior. Spanish HICP: Ticks up a touch on a yearly basis, in line with expectations, the monthly rate falls a touch beneath expectations and previous. German CPI: Implies the nationwide rate (due at 13:00 BST) will cool at a faster rate than expected. Limited moves were seen on the metrics with EUR/USD falling around 15 pips from 08:00BST. ECB pricing for June continues to price a c.89% probability of a 25bps hike.
• Tokyo CPI softened across the board in May, with core CPI slowing to 1.3% Y/Y from 1.5%, below expectations of 1.5%. The downside was largely driven by government subsidies on utilities and education costs. The release marks a fourth consecutive month of Tokyo core inflation running below the BoJ’s 2% target and contrasts with stronger activity data elsewhere in the economy. For the BoJ, the print provides ammunition for doves arguing for patience. Markets continue to expect the bank to raise rates at the June confab, with 18bps, or 71% probability of a 25bps hike. We expect the release of data which could show intervention occurred in April, which is due around 11:00 BST. USD/JPY trades unchanged within a narrow 18-pip 159.20-159.38 range.
• Kiwi is the best G10 performer after hawkish speak from RBNZ officials overnight. Breman (Consensus voter) said she sees ongoing uncertainty around inflation and that, on balance, the OCR is likely to increase. Assistant Governor Silk (Consensus voter) said she did not think interest rates need to increase yet, though she cautioned that the bias is for rate hikes in the coming meetings. As such, following the hawkish speak from non-dissenting members, the bias for July is tightening with markets assigning a 70% probability of such action.

Central Banks

• Fed's Kashkari (voter) said it is now unclear what the future path of monetary policy will be due to the Iran war; it is premature to conclude that the Fed needs to raise rates immediately after the April PCE inflation data. Speaking on PCE data, Kashkari said it makes him pay even more attention to inflation risks.
• Former BoJ Board Member Sakurai said BoJ will likely raise rates in June, Bloomberg reported.
• ECB’s Panetta said medium-term inflation expectations remain firmly anchored to target. For the June rate decision, it is crucial to assess the extent of the pass-through of higher energy prices. The forward-looking picture seems to call for a recalibration of the monetary policy stance. ECB will act in a timely and measured manner to stop the energy shock from turning into persistent inflation. Consumers’ inflation expectations are rising and firms have already started planning price increases.
• BoE Governor Bailey says have to monitor the situation in the Middle East and how it affects the UK economy and inflation very closely and adjust policy as required. Having taken expected cuts off the table for now, we have already tightened policy considerably in response to the shock relative to what had been expected by markets. Uncertainty about the strength of second-round effects means that monetary policy needs to balance the costs of leaning too little against these effects against the costs of responding too much. Tolerating temporarily above-target inflation to provide some support for the real economy is an appropriate way to approach the trade-off. But that tolerance would weaken if signs of second-round effects begin to emerge. Higher inflation expectations are not coming through in wage expectations and settlements. Hope a fall in UK bond market curve will go on but depends on events in the Middle East. Markets "obviously" see pressure on fiscal plans of government from Iran war impact.
• RBNZ Governor Breman said sees ongoing uncertainty around inflation and that on balance, the OCR is likely to increase.
• RBNZ Assistant Governor Silk said did not think interest rates need to increase yet, but inflation pressures are building in the near term, adds looking at high frequency data for July decision, bias is we're going to see rate hikes in coming meetings.
• RBNZ's Gourley said rates likely to rise sooner rather than later, but speed and size of any increase will depend on data.
• PBoC set USD/CNY mid-point at 6.8176 vs exp. 6.7685 (prev. 6.8240).
• Riksbank Financial Stability Report: The war in the Middle East entails risks to financial stability. The financial system has functioned well, but uncertainty is high. Favourable initial position for the Swedish financial system but risks remain. Maintains the CCyB at 2%.

Fixed Income

• A modestly bearish start to the day for fixed income, as we ease modestly off the post-Axios peaks on Thursday and continue to await the assessment of US President Trump on the MOU. Note, a recent dip in energy has provided some modest support.
• USTs at the lower end of a 109-31 to 110-06 band, having faded from Thursday's 110-07+ WTD peak. The docket for the US ahead is primarily waiting for Trump to comment on the MOU situation, and as such USTs may be relatively rangebound until an update occurs. That aside, we look for remarks from various Fed speakers. This morning, Kashkari (2026) said it is unclear what the future path of policy is and, in the context of April's PCE, that it would be premature to conclude they need to tighten immediately.
• Bunds are in line with the above for the most part, but have been moved about a touch by European data for May. At first, the benchmark found itself at a 126.05 trough with downside of just under 15 ticks, having also faded from Thursday's 126.47 best; note, that was a tick shy of Monday's high and the WTD peak. Thereafter, EGBs saw some modest upside on the cooler-than-expected French preliminary inflation print for May. Albeit, the move was only c. 10 ticks in Bunds and OATs, as prices lifted from the prior level. Next up was Spain, which printed as expected at a harmonised level and a touch cooler on the headline Y/Y. Note, the core figure ticked up to 2.9% (prev. 2.8%). Modest two-way action followed the data. Followed by Germany, where the state figures came in cooler than the prior level and have shifted the mainland consensus to a cooler print, vs pre-state forecasts for another 2.9% Y/Y figure. Finally, Italy was hotter than expected for all components aside from the headline Y/Y.
• We await the German nationwide figure at 13:00BST before assessing next week's EZ HICP. As it stands, Bunds are just off a 126.33 high, lifted alongside peers following a bout of energy pressure.
• Gilts started the day unchanged before experiencing some modest pressure in line with the slight overnight bias in peers, moving to an 88.48 trough. Since, BoE's Bailey spoke and his remarks perhaps have a slight dovish skew, as he noted that the BoE removing expected cuts has already "tightened policy considerably" and tolerating temporarily above target inflation to help the economy is an appropriate approach. Albeit, Bailey made clear that such tolerance would erode if "signs of second-round effects begin to emerge".
• Japan sold JPY 2.1tln 2-year JGBs b/c 3.70 (prev. 5.24), average yield 1.369% (prev. 1.407%). Lowest accepted price 100.04 (prev. 99.980). Weighted average price 100.06 (prev. 99.985). Tail in price 0.02 (prev. 0.005).
• Australia sold AUD 1bln 2.75% November 2029 bonds b/c 3.67, avg yield 4.4692%.

Commodities

• The week was marked by a sharp flare-up followed by renewed optimism around diplomacy. Following yesterday’s Axios reports regarding a 60-day MoU framework, Iran’s Tasnim reported that the text of the possible memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran had not been finalised or confirmed. Uncertainty remains over whether Trump will sign off on the proposal and whether Tehran will formally endorse the reported terms. This morning, there were mixed reports regarding the uranium file, in which Iran rebuffed reports that it wants to transfer the enriched uranium to China with a commitment not to deliver it to the US.
• Elsewhere in geopolitics, a Romanian radio station reported that a drone hit a residential building in Romania's Galati, near the border with Ukraine. NATO Secretary General Rutte affirmed "NATO’s absolute solidarity with Romania", and added that "NATO stands ready to defend every inch of Allied territory"; "will continue to enhance our readiness to deter and defend against any threat".
• The crude complex has been choppy this morning, with initial strength earlier in the session now entirely eroded; as it stands, benchmarks are towards session lows. WTI Jul currently trades towards the lower end of a USD 87.17-89.01/bbl range, while Brent Aug sits in a USD 91.28-92.95/bbl. Dutch TTF trades almost 2% firmer north of EUR 47.50/MWh.
• Spot gold continues the post-PCE rebound seen yesterday, with prices modestly firmer intraday above the USD 4,500/oz level in a USD 4,488-4,530/oz range. Spot silver, conversely, is lower with the precious metal towards the bottom of a USD 75.08-76.44/oz range.
• Base metals are mostly but modestly softer as traders look ahead to further geopolitical headlines, with price action rather contained at the time of writing. 3M LME copper trades towards the middle of a narrow USD 13,653.93- 13,748.38/t range.
• Kazakhstan Energy Minister said planned maintenance at the Kashagan oil field (400k bpd) is likely to be delayed until 2027.
• Commerzbank expects copper to rise to USD 14,250/ton by mid-2027 and Brent crude to reach USD 90/bbl by end-September before declining to USD 85/bbl by year-end.

Trade/Tariffs

• EU Commissioners will meet for a "orientation debate", which will cover the investigation of Chinese trade practices and an "overcapacity instrument", Politico reported; two probes re. chemicals are already being considered.
• China will retaliate against EU's overcapacity tool and may probe EU supply chains, according to state-linked Yu Yuantan.

Russia-Ukraine

• Romanian President said the unprecedented nature of the drone incident requires a firm, coordinated response at both the national and international levels; Romania summoned Russia's ambassador.
• European Commission President von der Leyen said the EU is preparing the 21st package of sanctions on Russia. EU will bolster security and deterrence, particularly on its eastern border, while maintaining pressure on Russia.
• Ukraine said that Russia carried out a drone strike on a Turkish vessel overnight.
• Fuel storage facilities in Russia’s Yaroslavl region were hit by drones.
• Romanian radio station reported a drone hit a residential building in Romania's Galati, close to the border with Ukraine.
• Currently no plans to have an extra NATO North Atlantic Council, Free Radio's Jozwiak reported.
• NATO Secretary General Rutte affirms "NATO’s absolute solidarity with Romania"; adds "NATO stands ready to defend every inch of Allied territory"; "will continue to enhance our readiness to deter and defend against any threat".
• EU Foreign Policy Chief Kallas said Moscow cannot be allowed to breach European airspace with impunity following the drone incident in Romania.

US Event Calendar

• 8:30 am: Apr P Wholesale Inventories MoM, est. 0.8%, prior 1.3%
• 9:45 am: May MNI Chicago PMI, est. 50.3, prior 49.2

Central Bank Speakers

• 12:00 am: Fed’s Mary Daly Speaks at Reagan National Economic Forum
• 2:00 am: Fed’s Kashkari Speaks in Moderated Event in S. Korea
• 6:50 am: Fed’s Schmid Speaks in Reykjavik
• 7:45 am: Fed’s Daly Speaks in Fox Business Interview
• 9:10 am: Fed Supervision Vice Chair Bowman Speaks in Reykjavik
• 9:15 am: Fed’s Paulson Speaks on Economic Outlook
• 12:40 pm: Fed’s Daly Speaks at Reagan National Economic Forum

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

As we go to press this morning, markets have continued to rally amidst widespread reports that the US and Iran are on the verge of a 60-day ceasefire extension that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So that’s led to mounting optimism about an end to the conflict, with Brent crude oil falling -0.62% yesterday to a one-month low of $93.71/bbl. Moreover, that momentum has continued overnight, with Brent down another -1.40% to $92.40/bbl.

With oil prices coming down, that’s meant investors have started to price out the more stagflationary outcomes for the global economy, with a clear rally across multiple asset classes. In fact, the positivity saw the S&P 500 (+0.58%) hit another record yesterday, advancing for a 6th consecutive session, with futures up another +0.05% this morning. Similarly for bonds, the 10yr Treasury yield (-3.5bps) posted a 6th consecutive decline to 4.45%, and this morning they’re down another -1.2bps as well. So even before the formal confirmation of any deal, there’s already been a strong reaction in markets.

That momentum has continued in Asia this morning, where most of the major equity indices have risen. Indeed, the Nikkei (+2.61%) and the KOSPI (+3.17%) are both on track for a new record, whilst the Hang Seng (+1.11%) has also posted a solid advance. There’s been a bit more weakness in mainland China however, where the CSI 300 (+0.06%) is only up slightly, whilst the Shanghai Comp (-0.37%) has fallen back. But generally the mood has remained positive, with a further boost from the latest data from Japan overnight. In particular, the Tokyo CPI print for May was softer than expected, with headline inflation unexpectedly slowing to +1.4% (vs. +1.6% expected), whilst core-core inflation fell to +1.6% (vs. +1.8% expected).

The initial catalyst for this latest rally was an Axios report, which said a deal had been reached on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire, with negotiations also starting over Iran’s nuclear program. According to the US officials cited in the article, they said the deal terms were “mostly agreed as of Tuesday”, but that it still needed President Trump’s approval. And the report also said the memorandum would say that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz would be “unrestricted”.

Later in the day, a similar message was reported by other outlets. For instance, Bloomberg reported that the US and Iran had reached a “tentative deal” on a 60-day ceasefire extension, with further talks on Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance said that although they were “not there yet” on a deal, the US was “getting very close”, which further cemented the optimism. Clearly the details will be important, but US Treasury Secretary Bessent said that Trump’s three “red lines” for a deal are for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, turn over its enriched uranium and end its nuclear program. And Bessent also posted earlier in the day that the US would “not tolerate any effort to impose a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Those headlines helped to drive a sharp move lower for oil yesterday. So Brent crude pared back its earlier gains to close -0.62% lower, hitting a one-month low of $93.71/bbl, with further declines overnight to $92.40/bbl. Indeed, it also means that oil prices are down over -18% over May as a whole, which would make this the biggest monthly decline since March 2020, back when the Covid-19 pandemic began and the world moved into lockdowns. And in turn for bonds and equities, there was growing relief that oil prices were coming down and the more stagflationary scenarios would be avoided.

Whilst the geopolitical headlines provided the main boost to markets yesterday, they got further support after the latest US PCE inflation print was softer than expected, easing concern around the need for rate hikes. The release showed that headline PCE was only up +0.4% in April (vs. +0.5% expected), whilst core PCE was up +0.2% (vs. +0.3% expected). So that led investors to dial back expectations for a Fed rate hike, with the probability of a hike by December down to 59% by the close, having been at 62% the previous day. Fed officials also didn’t sound in a rush to hike either, with NY Fed President Williams saying that monetary policy “is right where we want it to be”. Admittedly, there was discussion of a hike, with St Louis Fed President Musalem acknowledging there “there is a scenario where the economy might require a rate increase”, but that was still conditional.

Ultimately, the combination of that downside inflation surprise and hopes for a US-Iran deal meant US Treasuries put in another strong performance yesterday. So the 10yr yield (-3.6bps) fell back to 4.45%, posting a 6th consecutive decline for the first time in over a year, and they’re on track for a 7th decline this morning. In addition, there was further downside pressure on yields after some of the US growth data was a bit weaker than expected. For instance, the weekly initial jobless claims rose to 215k in the week ending May 23 (vs. 211k expected). And if we look further back, the second GDP estimate for Q1 showed that growth was weaker than previously thought earlier this year, only running at an annualised +1.6% (vs. +2.0% before).

US equities also put in a solid performance, with the S&P 500 (+0.58%) at another record thanks to the geopolitical headlines and more dovish rates pricing. Moreover, the index is now up +10% YTD for the first time, and there were fresh records for the NASDAQ (+0.91%) and the small-cap Russell 2000 (+0.57%) as well. But for European equities there was a much weaker performance, with the tech outperformance unable to prevent the STOXX 600 (-0.49%) falling to a one-week low.

Otherwise in Europe, the easing inflation risk meant that sovereign bonds continued to rally. UK gilts saw the biggest outperformance, continuing their pattern of seeing the biggest moves in either direction since the Iran conflict began. So the 10yr gilt yield (-4.4bps) fell to a one-month low of 4.81% by the close. And it was a similar story across the rest of Europe, with yields on 10yr bunds (-2.5bps), OATs (-2.8bps) and BTPs (-2.4bps) falling back as well.

Those bond moves came as investors also dialled back the prospect of rapid ECB hikes this year. For example, the amount of hikes priced by the December meeting was down to 55bps, down -2.5bps on the previous day. Interestingly though, the accounts from the ECB’s last meeting in April were published yesterday, which said that “A number of members noted that the decision was a close call and that they would not have opposed raising rates at the current meeting had this been on the table.” However, it ultimately said that “all members were willing to rally behind the decision to keep policy rates unchanged”, so long as the communication stressed a commitment to ensuring “that inflation stabilised at the target in the medium term.” Looking forward, markets continue to see an ECB rate hike in June as highly likely, priced as an 89% chance as of yesterday’s close, which would be their first hike since 2023.

Looking at the day ahead, data releases include the flash CPI prints for May from Germany, France and Italy, along with German unemployment for May. In the US, we’ll also get the advance goods trade balance for April. Otherwise, central bank speakers include the Fed’s Kashkari, Schmid, Bowman, Paulson and Daly, the ECB’s Panetta, Radev and Muller, and BoE Governor Bailey.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 08:29

French FinMin "Vigilant" After Economy Unexpectedly Contracts In Q1

“We remain vigilant, without giving in to being alarmist,” said French Finance Minister Roland Lescure on social media after the Gallic nation saw its economy unexpectedly shrink at the start of the year.

French gross domestic product fell 0.1% in the three months through March, the first quarterly contraction since the COVID pandemic, raising concerns over its resilience to the fallout from the Iran war.

Statistics office INSEE had initially reported zero growth for the quarter, but a sharper decline in consumer spending than expected was "an unpleasant surprise", said Dorian Roucher, the agency's head of forecasting.

He noted in particular "very bad figures for home renovations: it's rare to see this sector decline so much", Roucher told journalists, with overall construction spending down 1.7 percent.

Consumer spending overall was dented by the surge in fuel prices since the Iran war throttled Gulf oil and gas shipments, falling 0.2 percent after rising 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

Business investment fell 0.4%.

Trade made a negative contribution as exports dropped 3.5%.

"The recession risk is fairly high," said Mathieu Plane, director of the French Economic Observatory, calling the GDP reading "worrying".

As Bloomberg reports, the revision follows a series of indicators suggesting the euro area’s second-largest economy is increasingly hobbled by rising oil prices since the conflict in the Middle East erupted in late February.

Consumer confidence has dropped to the lowest in more than three years, business activity slumped in May and firms are increasingly planning to raise prices.

A separate report Friday from Insee showed household spending in April fell 0.5%.

FinMin Lescure claimed that the sluggishness at the start of the year was partly due to uncertainty over a delayed budget that had made businesses and households hesitant to invest.

However, INSEE's Roucher said that "the most likely scenario at this time is not a new GDP decrease", though he cautioned that "we can expect the shock to spread" throughout the economy.

France awaits Friday a sovereign credit review from Standard & Poor's, which cut its rating to A+ last October on risks that government spending would remain high.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 08:20

99% Of CEOs Are Planning AI Job-Cuts, As Gap Between Rich And Poor Continues To Explode

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Our economy is being transformed at a faster pace than we have ever experienced before. Thanks to giant leaps in the field of artificial intelligence, human labor is not as valuable as it once was. All over the world, millions of human workers are being replaced and that trend is only going to accelerate. For those that have already retired or are on the verge of retirement, this isn’t that big of a deal. But for younger workers, this is absolutely terrifying. There is no loyalty in corporate America today. The moment that AI can do your job more efficiently than you can, you could be out the door. This is already happening at some of the biggest companies in the entire country. Good paying jobs are evaporating all around us, and as a result the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is absolutely exploding.

I knew that the employment marketplace was changing really fast, but the results of a brand new survey that was just released still completely shocked me.

According to that survey, 99 percent of corporate executives are planning AI-related job cuts within the next 2 years…

A new study from consulting firm Mercer finds that virtually every employer is planning to cut jobs due to the technology (2). The 2026 Global Talent Trends report spoke with 825 C-suite leaders, along with 1,650 HR leaders, and a jaw-dropping 99% of the executives surveyed said they expect AI to lead to at least some headcount reduction in the next two years.

Nearly as many (98%) said they are also planning organization design changes in that same time period.

Meanwhile, just 32% of the CEOs surveyed said they believed the workforce can combine both human and machine worker capabilities in an optimal manner, despite just under two-thirds saying they felt that redesigning work to incorporate automation will drive the greatest return on investment.

If your job does not require much thinking or creativity, your job is potentially in danger.

Just look at what is happening at Meta. 1,400 highly paid workers in Washington state are about to get the axe…

Meta’s artificial intelligence overhaul is now hitting one of the country’s largest tech corridors, with the Facebook parent company preparing to cut nearly 1,400 workers across Washington state.

New filings submitted to Washington state officials show Meta will begin terminating employees in Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond and remote positions starting July 22 as the company restructures operations around AI initiatives.

The filings provide one of the clearest looks yet at how Meta’s broader workforce overhaul is affecting employees on the ground after the company announced plans last week to eliminate roughly 10% of its workforce while shifting thousands of workers into AI-focused roles.

Sadly, it isn’t just workers in Washington state that will be affected by the “artificial intelligence overhaul” that they have planned.

Overall, Meta is letting approximately 8,000 workers go in this latest round of layoffs…

Welcome to another day of corporate America hemorrhaging engineers and other white-collar workers with insurmountable student debt as AI adoption accelerates. This era will likely be remembered in history as the great “white-collar purge,” and the response will be continued hatred of data centers.

We’ve been covering for weeks that today is D-Day for Meta Platforms employees, who have finally learned their employment fate at the company that owns Facebook and Instagram.

Bloomberg reports that the new round of layoffs affects roughly 8,000 roles globally, with engineering and product teams expected to be at the center of the cuts as CEO Mark Zuckerberg reduces labor in favor of GPUs.

In this environment, it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much you have sacrificed for the company.

If those at the top think that they can make more money by squeezing you out, you will be gone.

PayPal is making plenty of money, but they are apparently looking at cutting one-fifth of their entire workforce…

PayPal is reportedly weighing cuts of up to 20% of its workforce as the payments giant ramps up cost-cutting efforts under new leadership.

The potential layoffs come as PayPal faces mounting pressure on profitability despite continued revenue growth.

Who is going to step up to replace the six figure jobs that are being lost?

Needless to say, the truth is that most of the good jobs that are disappearing are never going to be replaced, and that is just going to make the gap between the rich and the poor even worse.

Today we are living in a K-shaped economy, and even the Federal Reserve is admitting that this has resulted in “a remarkable increase in food insecurity”…

The so-called K-shaped economy is now linked to “a remarkable increase in food insecurity,” according to a new blog post by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Large segments of the population are facing high levels of financial strain, according to a post published on Wednesday, based on data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations.

Among this group, lower- and middle-income households have been hardest hit by prolonged inflation. A greater share of their spending is allocated to goods that have seen prices soar since the pandemic, such as housing, food and utilities, causing them to cut back on groceries, the researchers found.

In this environment, tens of millions of Americans are skipping meals on a regular basis because they simply do not have enough money for groceries.

So if you always have plenty of food to eat, you should count your blessings.

In general, those over the age of 45 are doing fairly well.

But those that are age 45 or younger control just 11 percent of the nation’s wealth…

To paraphrase the late jazzman Mose Allison, young Americans ain’t got nothing in the world these days.

Americans ages 45 and under control only 11% of the nation’s wealth, according to household data from the Federal Reserve.

In other words, nine-tenths of America’s assets belong to the older half of America. People ages 45 and over make up about 42% of the nation’s population, and about 54% of the adults.

I was stunned when I saw those numbers.

There is a reason why Americans have never felt as bad about the U.S. economy as they do right now.

Mass layoffs are being conducted all over the country and the cost of virtually everything just keeps going up.

Thanks to the crisis in the Middle East, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has now reached $4.46…

Now, gasoline prices are also dragging down the lower prong of the K. The national average gasoline price reached $4.46 a gallon as of Wednesday, up about 40% from a year ago, according to AAA.

If the crisis in the Middle East is not resolved soon, things will get a lot worse.

And that is really bad news for people like 57-year-old Kris Massey that are barely scraping by each month…

Kris Massey stood at a jeweler’s counter last month, hoping to sell a couple of her grandmother’s gifted pieces to possibly cover some bills.

Even though Massey, a 57-year-old nurse practitioner, makes six figures a year, her financial situation has grown untenable. Years of fast-rising prices and a recent monthslong bout of unemployment had taken their toll.

She worked two jobs from 2012 to 2023, but a second job is not an option after an extensive back surgery. Her retirement was drained when she was out of work.

“I’m just trying to hang on,” she told CNN.

Can you imagine selling off your prize possessions just so that you can make it through another month?

This is the reality that we live in now.

For 51-year-old Bill Brantner, any extra spending at all has become a thing of the past…

For Brantner, there’s absolutely no wiggle room now.

There’s no discretionary spending – no movies, no restaurants, no driving around town, no new clothes, no new shoes; his coffee is whatever’s available in the breakroom; his bumper is strapped on with Gorilla Tape.

“If I sign a lease again, and they raise my rent again, I can’t do it; if they raise my insurance premiums again, I can’t do it,” Brantner said. “They have squeezed every drop of blood that there is to be squeezed out of this stone.”

Come next May, if his rent is hiked for a fifth consecutive year, he might have to resort to living in his car outside of Colorado Springs city limits, where sleeping in a vehicle isn’t illegal.

The U.S. economy has been in a state of decline for decades.

For a long time, our leaders tried to hide what was happening, but now the truth is becoming apparent to everyone.

Those at the very top of the economic pyramid are still thriving, but virtually everyone else is really struggling.

The middle class is being systematically dismantled and the ranks of the poor are rapidly growing.

I have been warning about all of this since the early days of the Obama administration, and now a time of reckoning is at hand.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 08:05