Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Maybe it’s the bullshit detection genes that were passed down to me from my mother, but I simply can’t wind up trusting a word Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says about how much AI regulation the United States needs.
Just call it a gut reaction from me. It doesn’t mean Huang is necessarily wrong about AI. It’s just that I look at him and all I can see is one of the most financially conflicted people on planet Earth to ask about AI regulation.
According to CNBC, Huang has increasingly gained President Trump’s ear on AI policy, appearing alongside him repeatedly and pushing a relatively simple message as concerns about AI safety mount: keep moving, keep building and don’t let regulation get in the way.
What an astonishing coincidence that this also happens to be fantastic policy for Nvidia, which sits at the nerve center of a multi trillion dollar AI infrastructure boom…which itself sits at the nerve center of an even larger global economic ponzi scheme (hereinafter referred to as: the global economy).
Nvidia’s chips are effectively the picks and shovels of the entire operation. Every hyperscaler racing to build another data center, every AI lab trying to train a larger model and every corporation terrified of being left behind has helped create extraordinary demand for Nvidia’s hardware. In return, Nvidia has “invested” in a countless number of other operations that rely on its hardware. One big happy circle jerk family.
And one of the most spectacular corporate ascents in history for Nvidia. It has become one of the central pillars of the AI trade, which itself has become enormously important to the U.S. stock market. Nvidia and the other mega cap technology companies tied to the AI boom carry enormous weight in major indexes owned by investors around the world.
There is a staggering amount of money riding on the proposition that the AI spending boom continues. And sitting directly in the middle of it is Jensen Huang. It’s been the reason for my (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek opinion that Nvidia will never miss an earnings report again, because the powers that be would rather see them commit egregious accounting fraud than tell the truth about shitty numbers and watch the global economy collapse.
And now Huang is apparently becoming one of the president’s most influential voices on precisely the question that could determine how quickly this machine is allowed to keep running. You almost have to admire the efficiency.
CNBC reports that Trump has increasingly echoed Huang’s views on AI safety, while Huang has publicly dismissed some of the more apocalyptic warnings surrounding artificial intelligence. His preferred solution to many safety concerns is essentially “good old fashioned engineering.”
Maybe he’s right. But forgive me if I’m not eager to treat the CEO of Nvidia like an objective third party monk who has been summoned down from a Nepalese ashram to offer Washington philosophical wisdom about the future of humankind. The guy is a CEO of the company selling the hardware required to run the experiment.
Nvidia makes extraordinary amounts of money when OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and everyone else decides they need more compute. It makes money when data centers get larger. It makes money when models get larger. It makes money when the AI arms race accelerates. Somehow, I assume, it even makes money when I use my toaster to make an english muffin in the morning.
Presumably, Nvidia would face a less favorable commercial environment if policymakers imposed rules that materially slowed that race. Or altered my breakfast plans.
That doesn’t mean Huang is lying. It doesn’t mean his policy arguments are necessarily wrong. And it certainly doesn’t establish some secret conspiracy between Nvidia and the White House. But it does mean the conflict of interest is so enormous you can practically see it from space.
This is why I find Huang’s growing proximity to Trump far more interesting than another photograph of two powerful men smiling at dinner.
CNBC reports that Huang is expected to attend the president’s state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. The administration, meanwhile, has emphasized accelerating American AI development and resisting restrictions it believes could weaken the United States relative to China. Those positions can align extremely well with Nvidia’s commercial interests.’
Maybe that alignment produces good policy. But investors should understand who is sitting at the table and what they have riding on the outcome.
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If Exxon’s CEO became one of Washington’s most influential voices on whether America should restrict oil drilling, I wouldn’t simply write down his opinion and call the matter settled.
If JPMorgan’s CEO were advising the president about whether banks needed additional capital requirements, I’d probably keep JPMorgan’s balance sheet somewhere in the back of my mind.
And when big pharma figured out a way to “find” clinical studies questioning ivermectin’s safety record in the middle of a pandemic where they were trying to sell vaccines, despite ivermectin being on the WHO’s Model List of Essential Medicines and having been used successfully in 3.7 billion doses for the last 39 years, I didn’t trust that either. The timing was just too…perfect.
So when the CEO of the company arguably benefiting more than anyone else from the AI capital spending explosion tells the president that fears surrounding AI are overblown and additional regulation could be counterproductive, I’m going to apply precisely the same standard.
Huang’s job is not to protect my portfolio, the stock market or civilization. His job is to run Nvidia, and he has been extraordinarily good at it. That is exactly why I don’t understand the impulse to treat his pronouncements about AI policy as though they arrived on stone tablets.
The stakes here are much larger than Nvidia.
AI enthusiasm has become deeply embedded in the market’s valuation structure. Trillions of dollars of market capitalization are tied directly or indirectly to assumptions about continued AI investment, continued infrastructure spending and eventual returns on an almost unimaginable amount of capital being poured into the sector.
Anything that threatens that narrative, including disappointing returns, slower model development, power constraints, tougher regulation, customers deciding they have bought enough GPUs for a while and/or me discontinuing use of my toaster in the morning, potentially threatens much more than one semiconductor stock.
AI will also play a massive role in the upcoming midterm elections. There is also a very real case that if we pass a certain point waiting to regulate AI, we may not have a chance to in the future. And there’s also arguments that AI CEOs are calling for regulation to stifle competition. Whatever the case, we have to go about regulation ideas in a more objective fashion.
Jensen Huang may ultimately be correct that engineers can manage these risks without heavy government intervention. He may be correct that excessive regulation would damage American competitiveness. Those arguments deserve to be evaluated on their merits.
But they should also be evaluated alongside the economic incentives of the person making them. There is something almost comical about watching the man standing closest to the cash register explain why everybody needs to keep shopping. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to be skeptical in this situation.
Follow me one more time. Huang runs a company whose fortunes are intimately connected to the continuation of the AI boom. The Trump administration has publicly emphasized American AI dominance, economic growth and strong financial markets. Where those interests overlap, Nvidia has every reason to make its case as aggressively as possible.
And Huang could be doing exactly that. Good for him. But I’m not confusing excellent corporate strategy or political relationship building with an independent assessment of whether AI poses serious risks or requires additional oversight.
When the CEO of the company selling the picks and shovels tells Washington that the gold rush shouldn’t be slowed down, I don’t hear the voice of an impartial referee…I hear the guy selling the shovels telling everyone to keep digging.
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Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 13:30
A worsening ocean freight price shock is reviving concerns about the supply-chain disruptions seen during the pandemic and the 2024 Red Sea crisis.
If continued through the fall and winter, higher shipping costs could intensify inflationary pressure, squeeze corporate margins, and weaken growth. Together, these factors raise the risk of a broader economic shock, particularly if diesel prices remain elevated.
Bank of America retail analyst Lorraine Hutchinson warned in a note Saturday that ocean freight rates have jumped 201%, approaching the 250% spike seen during the 2021 container ship shortage. Meanwhile, AAA national average diesel prices near $6.50 a gallon are crushing truckers' margins and boosting rates on the nation's highways.
"Most contracts are set in the spring, but we're watching this for those using spot rates and as a potential headwind for 2027," Hutchinson said.
Beyond container rates, the Baltic Dry Index, which tracks freight rates for several vessel classes, including Capesize, Panamax and Supramax vessels, has jumped to December 2023 highs.
"We see the current surge as something of a perfect storm, with vessel supply tightening and demand firing in both basins at the same time," Thurlestone Shipping analysts said.
A prolonged freight price shock could carry today's shipping squeeze into the 2027 contracting cycle, exposing businesses to higher transportation costs and increasing pressure to pass those costs on to consumers.
Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 13:00Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
While the same 'current thing' leftists who spent years on climate, oil and "Palestine" now chants that AI will wipe out the human race, FBI Director Kash Patel just announced that the agency is using the technology to actively prevent mass shootings, including school attacks, before they happen.
Patel said artificial intelligence helped the bureau prevent possible school shootings in North Carolina and about half a dozen other states, and that he has increased the FBI's use of AI by 605 percent.
That is the version of AI that the pause-and-treaty crowd does not want discussed.
? JUST NOW: In a MASSIVE win, FBI Director Kash Patel announces that half-a-dozen states' possible school SH00TINGS were thwarted through the use of AI
One was just stopped in North Carolina ??
"We've done it in North Carolina and about half-a-dozen other states to prevent... pic.twitter.com/SKzwJIkvnV
The comments match what he told the Senate Judiciary Committee days earlier. When he took the job, the bureau had two test use cases for artificial intelligence. "We just hit our 140th, that's a 605 percent increase since I've been in this seat, to process information to triage intelligence, analyze, and get this information out to our local partners."
This is not a science-fiction sermon. It is tip triage.
Patel has been making the operational case since spring. On Sean Hannity's podcast he said the old FBI treated modernization as an afterthought.
"AI was never used at the FBI till we got there, literally crazy," he said. "I'm using it everywhere."
The bottleneck was volume. The National Threat Operations Center takes thousands of tips a week. "If we had just humans look at it, we would never sift through them all." He put the question more sharply still: "What's the point of collecting terabytes of data if you can't sift through it?"
The North Carolina case is the one he keeps returning to. "We stopped a school massacre in North Carolina because we got a tip and we were able to triage it with artificial intelligence." A separate New York school threat, he said, was disrupted after "a tip from our private-sector partners who are building out AI infrastructure."
In a Fox News op-ed he described the machinery. When a call hits NTOC, AI generates a transcript, drafts a summary of the threat, scans open cases for matches, and assigns a lead value so the hottest tips rise first.
"This specific threat intake process helped the FBI quickly act and stop an attacker plotting a mass shooting at a North Carolina preschool," Patel urged.
The same overhaul, he wrote, helped the bureau identify and locate 6,300 missing children last year - a 30 percent increase - and arrest 2,000 abusers, a 20 percent increase. In a Richmond case, facial recognition tools were used to pull 8- and 12-year-old children away from a would-be abuser now facing 50 years.
The tools are being used to rank leads and get them to agents and local partners before someone walks through a school door.
It's not something that has been considered by the doomer leftists now literally calling for AI to be 'switched off'.
San Francisco and London just got an NPC software update. The banners changed. The wardrobe did not.
Dozens marched from OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters to Anthropic's offices and on to San Francisco City Hall, demanding Mayor Daniel Lurie declare a local "AI state of emergency." Chalk on the pavement read "Extinction is on the table."
Organiser Hunter Glenn told reporters, "I was pretty scared about the possibility of extinction for awhile." In London, "PauseAI" and "Pull The Plug" rallies formed after Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could "kill all humans" within a decade. Their slogan: "10% chance of extinction? 100% chance of resistance."
Scott Jennings had already mapped the rotation. "It's always the same apocalyptic crowd moving from one issue to the next. Responsible guardrails are one thing, but handicapping American innovation while China speeds ahead with zero regulation isn't sound policy - it's just foolish."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave the extinction industry a simpler number. There is a "0% chance" the world ends in 2030. "2030 is not going to be the end of the world."
A U.S. pause would not freeze the technology. It would freeze the labs already winning and hand the century's defining stack to Beijing. Europe sold GDPR as virtue and now hosts none of the world's dominant labs.
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale told Jesse Watters the scare is not civic caution. It is a campaign.
"These guys don't believe in God. They're atheists, but they've created something they believe is God," Watters said, laying out Lonsdale's point. "This is their Messiah, and this is their end of the world."
Lonsdale was direct. "There is a coordinated campaign to make the American people afraid." San Francisco, he said, dropped Christianity and still wanted a messiah and an apocalypse. "If you give up religion, you want some kind of messianic complex, some kind of big thing to believe in. These effective altruists - this is their Messiah, this is their end of the world, this is their obsession."
An industrial revolution is coming that would be "amazing for America if we get it right." The people trying to stop it, Lonsdale said, "hate America."
That theology now has a policy shop. Bill Gates is back on the emergency circuit calling AI an "alien intelligence."
"I don't think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be," he told Reuters. "Governments are way behind on this one." Then the Hollywood script: "There's all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem. AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It's here, and we better do like it shows in those movies."
On a podcast he went further. "It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI." He wants a permanent cross-border watchdog stitched from nuclear inspections, aviation rules and ozone treaties - and a meeting with Xi Jinping. In the same news cycle his foundation pledged $1 billion over two years to spread AI through schools, clinics and farms. Alarm in one hand. Pipeline in the other.
President Trump has already rejected the slowdown. "We're leading China in AI," he said. "Whoever wins AI, wins." A lot of the horror stories being shopped around, he added, "won't happen."
Trump also answered the doomer circuit with an appointment, not a pause. He said he is forming an "AI Force," modeled on Space Force, and will name a high-IQ "AI Czar" to keep the United States first while the left's latest scare campaign is treated as what he called it: another hoax.
"AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country's GDP," he said. "We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way."
"We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows," Trump added, noting that bad actors can be handled with the criminal and civil courts already on the books - not a Gates-style global leash.
? BREAKING: President Trump announces he will be appointing a HIGH IQ "AI CZAR" and launches the "AI FORCE"
Trump says we will UNLEASH AI and that the propaganda will fail
All of this will be geared towards not only BUSTING anti-AI hoaxes but keeping America number one. LET'S... pic.twitter.com/Cy3T8R1cBK
One future is the FBI using models to transcribe a threat call, score it, match it, and get a cop to a North Carolina preschool before the shooting starts. The other is a global committee, a Netflix doom documentary sold as the new Inconvenient Truth, and a street mob that needs the next wipeout the way some people need a weather report.
China is not holding a pause-and-pray summit. Chinese firms have been accused by U.S. officials of stripping American models at industrial scale. Beijing's spy chief has treated AI as a Party-control problem, which is another way of saying the CCP wants the weapon.
Patel's point is narrower and harder to slogan away. Used by cops, under the law, the same class of tools the doomers want parked under an international inspectorate is already being used to find missing kids, rank tips, and stop school plots. Every plot that never makes a headline is a child who goes home.
America can build the thing, police the abuse, and keep the lead. Or it can let the extinction church write the rules while the bureau that just started using the tools is told to wait for permission from a committee Gates wants to staff.
* * *
Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 12:30