Aggregator

Hostin clarified the viral comments she made last week during Monday's episode of the talk show's "Behind the Table" podcast.

Hostin clarified the viral comments she made last week during Monday's episode of the talk show's "Behind the Table" podcast.

Ugly 3Y Auction Stops Through At Highest Yield In 20 Years Despite Plunge In Foreign Demand, Record Directs

With bond traders still bruised from the catastrophic, "mega-tailing" 5Y auction two weeks ago, some were looking toward this week's restart of Treasury coupon auctions with trepidation, although after the brutal selloff in recent weeks, there probably was enough concession to avoid another disaster. And sure enough, after we got the results of of today's $58BN three-year auction, everyone can exhale because the auction was a bit better... even if the internals left actually far uglier than the lack of tail would suggest. 

Starting at the top, the auction stopped at a high yield of 4.932%, up sharply from 4.475% last month, and the highest since May 2006. More importantly, no more tails: the auction stopped through then When Issued 4.934% by 0.2bps, the 4th consecutive stop through in a row.

The bid to cover dropped to 2.616 from 2.722, below the 6-auction average.

The internals were uglier: Inidrect buyers slumped to 57.59%, down from 62.15% and the lowest since February. And with Directs awarded 31.66%, or just shy of the highest on record...

... Dealers were left holding 10.7%, a drop from last month's 10.9% and below the recent average of 12.6%.

Overall, this was an uglier auction than the lack of tail would make it out, and the plunge in Foreign buyers (Indirects) was only offset by a near-record Direct bid as not even rates trading at 24 year highs was sufficiently attractive for foreign buyers. 

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 13:24

"If you think my harsh language is too much for you or your failing vendors to digest, just wait until my lawyers start f--king you up the ass," he allegedly wrote.

"Let's play ball you f--king s--tbag loser," he allegedly wrote in one email.

Asia's Gold Producers Start Hoarding Their Own Metal As Faith In The Dollar Erodes

For most of modern history, the gold trade worked one way: emerging-market mines dug it up, shipped it out (often as cheap ore, more often through the back door), and London and New York did the rest. But that arrangement is now quietly breaking down.

According to a must-read report in Nikkei Asia, countries across Asia are moving to capture more of the value from the gold boom by refining domestically, taxing exports and having their central banks buy local production. Nikkei calls it "a new form of resource nationalism", and one that "could exert upward pressure on gold prices over the medium to long term." The two reasons it gives will be very familiar to regular readers: waning confidence in the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, and the fact that dollar assets of countries at odds with Washington have been frozen under sanctions.

In other words, the world's gold producers have noticed the same thing the world's central banks noticed in 2022: gold is the one reserve asset nobody else can freeze, and they are sitting on top of it.

Below we walk through who is hoarding gold and how, why Goldman thinks central-bank (and now producer-country) demand is doing "nearly all" the work in its $5,400 gold forecast, and why - for now - none of that has been enough to beat a hiking Fed.

From Vientiane To Jakarta: Everyone Wants A Refinery Now

Start with Laos, which produced roughly 12 tons of mined gold in 2025 (the sixth-largest output in Asia, per the World Gold Council and Metals Focus) and estimates its reserves at 500-1,000 tons. Until now, most of that left the country as ore, "through both official and unofficial channels." In 2024 the government set up the Lao Bullion Bank, which aims to refine local gold at home, raise gold's share of the country's FX reserves, and give citizens a trusted place to store their savings. Laotian PM Sonexay Siphandone now calls gold development "a key priority in strengthening our economic foundation." The head of the Japan Bullion Market Association, who attended the launch event, described the speed of the build-out as "astonishing."

Indonesia, the world's 10th-largest producer at more than 100 tons a year, is going further: it announced last year an export tax of up to 15% on gold, effective 2026, because domestic supply can't keep up with local investment demand. Regular readers will recall that we flagged Jakarta's levy (Nov 17, 2025) when it was still in its "final stage," complete with a sliding scale that rises with the gold price. At roughly $4,150/oz, a 15% duty works out to about $620 an ounce, which is a very polite way of saying "please don't export this."

And then there is China, the world's largest producer at a little over 380 tons a year (about a tenth of global output), which is also a major importer. As market analyst Jeff Toshima told Nikkei, "As a rule, taking gold out of the country is restricted." More on Beijing below.

The trend isn't limited to Asia. Madagascar's central bank has been buying domestically produced gold since the early 2020s under a Gold Purchase Program that its gold operations supervisor calls "the cornerstone of this reserve diversification strategy." Ghana, the world's sixth-largest producer, signed an MoU with the WGC in July to curb illegal mining and make sure "the benefits of Ghana's gold resources are realized by our communities and our nation as a whole."

Translation: the cheap ore pipeline to Western refiners is narrowing, and the people who run those refiners know it. "From the perspective of major international refiners ... absolutely this trend will have an impact on their ability to source," Metals Focus MD Nikos Kavalis told Nikkei. Toshima also supplied the historical irony: "Gold from the colonies flowed into London and helped underpin the British Empire's gold standard." The colonies, it seems, would now like to keep the gold.

Rerouting gold away from the West to dodge sanctions isn't new either; we noted it in real time right after Russia's reserves were frozen:

*RUSSIAN GOLD PRODUCERS EXPLORE EXPORTS TO UAE, CHINA Similar to Turkey-Dubai-Iran gold triangle

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 1, 2022 The Sanctions Premium

The common thread is the one we have been pounding the table on since the spring of 2022: once the US and its allies froze Russia's FX reserves, every reserve manager in the non-aligned world learned that a dollar asset is only as safe as your relationship with Washington. ANZ's Geullim Yum put it diplomatically to Nikkei: as the dollar-centered system "comes under scrutiny, gold is gaining importance as an asset insulated from the political and fiscal policies of any single country."

The data back it up. As SocGen's cross-asset team noted in its "China is buying gold again. Are you?" note (available to pro subs, and which we discussed last month), the dollar's share of global FX reserves fell to 57% in 2025, down more than 5 points since 2022, while 62% of reserve managers in the 2026 central bank survey expect it to keep declining moderately over the next five years and 84% expect gold to make up a bigger share of their reserves.

SocGen's summary is about as blunt as sell-side prose gets: central banks, "China, among others," are "buying the dips while continuing to reduce US Treasury holdings at a steady pace, as the de-dollarisation theme continues unabated." China's chart says it all: PBOC gold reserves are up 20% since 2022 (and 122% since 2015) to 2,345 tonnes, while its Treasury holdings are down 41% since 2020.

China: Officially 20 Tonnes, Unofficially Much More

Officially, the PBOC added 20 tons in August, its 22nd consecutive month of net purchases, which Nikkei notes is the longest streak since comparable data began in December 1999. Unofficially, the number is much bigger, which is something we have been flagging since 2024 (and again here, Jun 13, 2025), well before the FT "confirmed" it (Nov 15, 2025):

China Buying Twice More Gold Than Officially Reported Amid Surge In Central Bank Purchases https://t.co/8nMRP2GMqK

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 15, 2026

Nothing has changed since. Goldman's central bank nowcast estimated 44 tonnes of official buying in July (Sep 14), with China accounting for 35 tonnes, roughly double what Beijing admits to. On a three-month seasonally adjusted basis, Goldman's Lina Thomas and Daan Struyven now see central banks buying ~91 tonnes per month, more than five times the pre-2022 average of 17 tonnes.

Then there's the private side, where the hoarding is even louder. Goldman's head of commodity market strats Adam Gillard pointed out last month that when Bloomberg discovered "record Chinese gold imports," it was hardly news: China's non-monetary imports were 997 tonnes in January through July, up 80% y/y, with another 142 tonnes in August. Even more interesting, he noted that the strength came largely from "higher flows into Beijing + Guangdong flows which has previously been associated with official sector buying." Put differently, some of that "non-monetary" gold may be quite monetary indeed.

Gillard's numbers also show who is holding up the market. Between March and July, China's imports more than doubled from the prior five months, offsetting a 228-tonne drop in Indian imports and a 253-tonne swing to ETF selling outside China, almost by itself (net change across the four: -29 tonnes).

JPMorgan's Market Intelligence desk picked up on the same thing (Sep 23), crediting gold's surprising resilience to the Fed's hawkish repricing to two forces: ETFs that have "net added tonnes every week since mid-July" (about 180 tonnes in total), and "strong Chinese buying – imports topped a record 1000 tonnes." Meanwhile, the buyer list keeps getting broader and less Western: SocGen's table of the top five central-bank buyers each year now reads Poland, China, Kazakhstan, Czech Republic and Chile.

Goldman: Central Banks Are Doing "Nearly All" The Heavy Lifting

This is where the Nikkei story ties into the bull case. In its latest Precious Analyst note, "Fed Hikes to Slow, Rather than Derail, the Gold Rally", Goldman kept its $5,400/toz end-2027 forecast despite the Fed's hike, and was explicit about what is driving it:

Continued central bank diversification remains the main structural driver of our constructive gold view, contributing nearly all of our expected 23% appreciation through end-2027. ... Reflecting this acceleration, we raise our central bank demand assumption to 60 tonnes/month on average through 2026-27, versus 50 tonnes/month in 2026 and 40 tonnes/month in 2027 previously. We continue to view reserve diversification following the 2022 freeze of Russian central bank assets as structural, and recent central bank conversations suggest the appetite for gold remains strong.

ETFs and speculators are barely a rounding error in Goldman's math; this is a central bank story, full stop.

And here is the problem for anyone hoping the producer-country trend is already priced in: Goldman's model counts reported and nowcast central-bank purchases, not tonnes that never leave Laos, Jakarta or Shandong in the first place. If producer countries keep a growing share of their own output, through domestic refining, export taxes or central-bank purchase programs like Madagascar's, that is supply removed from the international market, and the bank's "net upside risk" gets a little more upside.

The near-term path is slower, though: Goldman cut its year-end 2026 fair value to $4,650/toz from $4,900, still above spot.

There is also a wildcard: call-option positioning on GLD is still about three times historical averages, which Goldman reads as a sign that worries about "G10 fiscal sustainability" are keeping demand for gold as a "macro-policy hedge" alive. If that positioning holds while central banks keep buying, dealer hedging "could mechanically amplify the rally and drive gold prices well above our forecast." (With France now going full PIIGS on the bond market, we doubt those fiscal worries go away anytime soon.)

So Why Is Gold Down 12%?

Because structural doesn't mean imminent. Gold hit a record above $5,500 in January, nearly reached $4,700 in late August, and was $4,110 on Sept 28, down 12% from that late-summer peak. Nikkei puts the blame where it belongs: the Fed raised rates in September for the first time in more than three years, with at least one more hike expected before year-end. As Nikkei says, downward pressure is likely to persist "until the ultimate level of the policy rate becomes clear."

Goldman's desk agrees. On Sept 28, as gold fell 3% when China liquidated length on the Shanghai open, Gillard passed along a colleague's warning that front-end real rates are back near two-year highs: "when cash suddenly offers a very large positive real return, the opportunity cost becomes difficult to ignore." His assessment of China's physical bid was just as careful: "supports price on a sell-off but isn't enough to sustain a rally." This weekend's GS commodities desk note (Oct 4) said "rates are holding it back, but still long-term constructive," with "very low" short-term conviction on delta but "strong support at $4k/oz." GS Materials specialist James McGeoch summarized feedback from the road even more briefly: "Gold most interesting asymmetry, $4k floor, pick a ceiling."

For the bear case, BofA's technicians (Jul 16) warned that "gold's lost year may leave 2H26 vulnerable," pointing to a death cross, crowded positioning and similarities to the 1980 and 2011 tops, which they say put $3,315 in play "if 2026 proves to be a major top." Jefferies' mining team (Aug 4) likewise argued that gold has "recoupled" with real rates. Fair enough, but neither the 1980 nor the 2011 top came with 91 tonnes a month of central bank buying and producer countries locking up supply at the mine.

Bottom Line

Nikkei ends on what could be the thesis for the rest of this decade, quoting ANZ's Yum: "In the long run, the actions of producer countries could become another factor pushing gold prices higher."

We'd go further. For three years the gold story has been about the buyers: central banks diversifying away from a weaponized dollar. What Nikkei describes is the supply side catching on, as the countries that dig the metal up decide they would rather hold it than sell it for Treasuries they might not be allowed to keep. Combine 91 tonnes a month of official buying with mines that increasingly stay home, and the $4,000 floor everyone on the GS desk keeps citing looks more like a minimum than a hope.

In the near term, Warsh and the front end are in charge, and nobody should expect producer-country hoarding to beat a hiking Fed in any given week. Over a horizon of a few years, though, betting that the dollar's share of reserves recovers while Laos, Jakarta and Beijing go back to shipping out ore looks like the much harder trade. Then again, the West has bet against the colonies' gold before... it didn't go great. The next test comes Thursday, when China returns from Golden Week and shows whether the dip-buyers are still there. 

Much more in the full Goldman and SocGen notes, both available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 13:20

The order affecting two planned data centres follows concerns over forest clearance.

OpenAI Shops $30 Billion Round To UAE Funds, BlackRock As Altman's 'Bad Things' Remark Draws Bipartisan Fire

With its planned IPO on ice for the moment, OpenAI is pitching a $30 billion funding round to a group of United Arab Emirates sovereign funds led by Abu Dhabi's MGX, along with BlackRock, at a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation, Bloomberg reported Monday. There is no lead investor, and the price was set by OpenAI rather than negotiated. Meanwhile CEO Sam Altman has sparked a firestorm in DC with comments that the world should accept "some bad things happening" for the benefits of AI.

The OpenAI round

The UAE funds are considering an investment up to $10 billion between them at that $1.4 trillion valuation - which is is 64% above the $852 billion post-money valuation of the $122 billion round in March. The figure would also place OpenAI's valuation above Anthropic, which was at $965 billion in May.

OpenAI's annualized revenue has reportedly passed $40 billion, up 70% since July. That makes the ask roughly 35x run-rate for a company that Fortune says booked $6.7 billion of revenue and an operating loss in Q2, and that the FT reported spent $34 billion last year. One FT source said OpenAI "needs capital." OpenAI says the March round left it with plenty. OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO on June 8. Then, on Sept. 12, Altman told Fortune it wouldn't be 2026 - "an ill-advised moment to go public," given what's going on with safety (and then just recently said 'screw it' - AI is worth the danger). That said, in April the WSJ reported that OpenAI had missed revenue and user targets and that CFO Sarah Friar was worried the company might not be able to pay for future compute contracts if revenue failed to catch up.

Then there's the backstop. As we reported last November, Friar suggested the federal government could "backstop" OpenAI's data-center financing. In June, as we detailed, Altman began floating a plan to hand small OpenAI equity stakes to ordinary Americans, which we read as a backdoor backstop. We asked at the time whether the bailout would come before the IPO or after. Nobody mentioned the third option: a $30 billion bridge round, priced by the issuer, in between.

DeepSeek

Overnight, Bloomberg also reported that DeepSeek is close to locking in at least 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) of new funding, with signed term sheets that could take the total to 100 billion yuan - twice the 50 billion it originally set out to raise. Tencent and CATL are writing the biggest checks. This is the same round DeepSeek paused in late July, as we noted, after transcripts leaked of founder Liang Wenfeng saying that Huawei was giving DeepSeek about 16,000 Ascend 950s while the internet giants got hundreds of thousands, and that DeepSeek could get hold of some processors he called "noncompliant." The round restarted in August at a valuation of about $74 billion and has now blown through its target. On annualized revenue reported at $400-500 million in July, that valuation is well over 100x sales. OpenAI at 35x looks cheap next to it.

The 'bad things' backlash

Altman made the remark in an interview with Politico's Decoded newsletter published Sunday. "We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency," he said, according to Forbes. He also said he expects "orders of magnitude more" positive outcomes than negative ones.

“We believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.” In a conversation for the first edition of Decoded, a new daily newsletter and podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked with POLITICO’s @BrendanBordelon about trade-offs, AI safety, and how his company is different from Anthropic. Subscribe to Decoded for the full conversation with Sam Altman: https://t.co/YHJJsDOQVh

— POLITICO (@politico) October 4, 2026

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, responded on social media: "And a handful of tech oligarchs get to make that decision for the rest of us? No dice." Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, posted that Altman "shouldn't be making any decisions about what 'bad things' we have to accept on all of our behalf." Sen. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, wrote one word: "No."

Politico noted that much of the backlash assumed Altman was accepting existential harm to humanity, which he explicitly said he was not, or that he was trying to dodge responsibility for AI-caused damage, when he in fact called for policymakers to debate new AI liability regimes.

Alyssa Cass, a political consultant who has worked with New York AI-safety lawmaker Alex Bores, told Politico the equation is simple: "There is more safety talk from OpenAI because there are more safety incidents from OpenAI."

Those incidents keep piling up. In July, roughly 700 OpenAI agents got out of their sandbox during an internal cyber evaluation and spent July 9-13 inside Hugging Face's production systems trying to game their benchmark; Hugging Face later said it had to use an open-source Chinese model to defend itself. After another escape on Sept. 20, OpenAI paused training on its most capable models, and on Sept. 28 it cancelled GPT-6.1 Astra, its October flagship, after its head of safety said the model had regressed on deception. On Oct. 2, it said it had notified more than 100 organizations of "misaligned agent activity," and on Tuesday it apologized again at a hearing in Sydney for its agents' unauthorized access to Australian government websites.

Regulatory Capture The Flag

And so of course, Congress wants - no NEEDS - to control this technology. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal went first, alone, with a Sept. 9 letter to Altman, and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley opened a Senate investigation the next day. Since Sept. 28, Florida AG James Uthmeier, who sued OpenAI in June, has moved for an injunction to stop it from building new models without third-party-approved safeguards, the nonprofit LASST has sued, and California AG Rob Bonta has served a subpoena.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined him for a Sept. 28 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. It goes after the June executive order that created a classified "benchmarking" process for frontier models, run partly out of Treasury. Participation was made voluntary, reportedly after Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and allies intervened. It also cites Reuters reporting that administration officials promised the labs that open-weight models would be exempt from safety testing, and notes that open-weight models including DeepSeek V4 Pro are good at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. "Voluntary measures and self-policing clearly are not working," the senators wrote. Answers are due Oct. 9 - this Friday.

The next day, Trump had the labs to lunch and came out, as we covered, with a morally, though not legally, binding accord. Semafor later reported that Zuckerberg was central to drafting it.

Hence today's letter, published by Semafor and addressed to Bessent and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, among others. It asks for all meetings and correspondence between industry and the government before the June order and an actual description of the pre-deployment testing process the White House keeps saying exists. The senators want guardrails set by elected officials, not "a toothless framework shaped in secret by a handful of billionaires." Answers are due Oct. 19.

Will any of it get answered? Semafor's read is that the demands only get teeth if Democrats retake Congress. In the meantime, the sovereign funds being asked for $10 billion can read a Senate letter as well as anyone.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 13:00

A Forest Hills, Queens, home tied to brothers convicted in a massive international counterfeiting case is heading to federal auction, with bidding starting at $900,000.

Two teens face charges after allegedly using jet skis to capsize a small boat carrying two children, aged 10 and 14, on the Gold Coast.

A rugby league team with links to two young boys who took their own lives within just days of each other has vowed to champion mental health causes in their memory.

Fans immediately called out the misspelling on social media.

Fans immediately called out the misspelling on social media.

The ME realized a day after April Barlow Celio, 41, was found dead that she'd been pregnant but her fetus was missing.

Too good to be True.

The actress sat front row at the Celine fashion show.

The actress sat front row at the Celine fashion show.

Drones Hit Two Ships Within Bulgaria's Economic Zone, Sinking One, Crew Missing

Escalation in the Black Sea has now become a daily occurrence in the context of the Ukraine war, and more dangerous is that Russia and NATO are inching closer to direct conflict.

Bulgaria has announced Tuesday that two commercial ships were hit by drones in what it says marks a first attack on shipping within the NATO member’s exclusive economic zone in the Black Sea. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev declared "This is an unacceptable attack in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone. It is a blatant violation of international law and maritime law."

via Marinetraffic.com 

The vessels have been identified as the Togo-flagged Alfa Watan and the Palau-flagged Able. Both caught fire as a result, with the Alfa Watan having quickly sank at the scene, with no immediate word of the crew's fate.

The impact on Togo-flagged ship was reportedly much bigger and more devastating. As for another interesting and alarming detail:

The crew of the first ship confirmed it was under attack from both "aerial and sea drones," Radev said.

And this was followed by a threat related to a mystery ship off Bulgaria:

Radev stated that the Bulgarian defense ministry is tracking a suspicious “drifting ship” in the Black Sea, which has reportedly been on the country’s radar since August. "If it continues to somehow head toward our coast, we are fully ready to act," he added.

As for the Able, all 18 crew members were rescued amid the Bulgarian emergency response, with two among the sailors suffering severe injuries and transported to the hospital. The attacks happened at around 3am, some 80 miles off Bulgaria's coast.

Unlike in prior Black Sea incidents where authorities were quick to name Russia's military as behind the attack, it is curious that in this case the Bulgarians have not been quick to make allegations as the origin of the drones has not been established.

PM Radev continued, “As a state responsible within our exclusive economic zone for the health and lives of anyone navigating in this area, regardless of who is responsible, we are obliged to conduct emergency search and rescue operations."

"What is happening is seriously disrupting shipping in the Black Sea, driving up insurance costs even further and making shipping extremely difficult," he added.

Monday saw a prior major maritime attack incident which was quickly widely blamed on Russia. A Turkish cargo ship identified as the Royad Mammadov was sunk after being hit by a drone, after it left the Ukrainian port of Ismail in the Odesa region.

UPDATE: Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev says the two merchant vessels were attacked by both sea and aerial drones around 3:00 a.m. inside Bulgaria’s Exclusive Economic Zone, around 70 nautical miles east of Byala. 🇹🇬 The Togo-flagged ALFA WATAN, sailing north from Turkey toward Galați, Romania, sank after being severely damaged. Its crew remains unaccounted for. The Bulgarian ferry DIOSCURIA reached the scene and found an overturned boat, three overturned life rafts and life jackets, but no survivors. The search operation remains underway. 🇵🇼 The Palau-flagged ABLE, which had departed Romania and was sailing south toward Turkey, caught fire after the attack. Its entire 18-member crew was evacuated and rescued. Two injured sailors were taken aboard a Bulgarian Navy vessel and are being transported to Varna for medical treatment, while the other 16 are being taken ashore by Border Police. Radev said 11 of the crew members are Turkish nationals and 7 are Indian nationals. Bulgarian authorities are also monitoring the area for possible oil spills and environmental pollution. Radev called the attack absolutely unacceptable and a blatant violation of international and maritime law. The search for the missing crew of ALFA WATAN continues.

— GeoInsider (@InsiderGeo) October 6, 2026

That earlier incident happened off Romania, triggering a large-scale rescue operation. Two crew members died, while eleven others were rescued, and with another reported missing. Ukraine's Zelensky said Russian forces were behind it.

There's no doubt that the tit-for-tat war on Black Sea shipping is getting nastier as for several months now both Russian and Ukrainian forces have traded drone and missile attacks on ports and ships, disrupting vital Black Sea trade.

Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 12:40

The kids have flown the coop. What next?

One person was killed after becoming trapped inside a vehicle, according to OnSceneTV.