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Fannie, Freddie Jump After Trump Floats $1 Trillion Valuation

Zero Rss
2 days 20 hours ago
Fannie, Freddie Jump After Trump Floats $1 Trillion Valuation

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares jumped on Friday morning after President Trump said late Thursday that the mortgage giants were "probably worth $1 trillion," reviving Wall Street hopes for a long-awaited exit from government control.

President Trump praised FHFA Director Bill Pulte on Thursday for turning around Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying the mortgage giants "probably have $1 trillion in value."

Full transcript:

"...a person who's got high integrity. He's done a phenomenal job at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. You probably have $1 trillion in value there. When he took over it was much less, and I guess I'm responsible for that too because everybody wanted me to sell it in my first term for 10% of what it's worth right now. If I would've sold it, we would've lost $900 billion. We would've lost. Think about it. It's probably worth $1 trillion. People want me to sell it at $100 billion — a very small percentage of what it's worth now. And he built up a lot. Did a great job. And it's an acting position. He is not going to be permanent because I don't think you'd want to be. But he was a smart guy. You may find out some things about the rigged elections, etc. etc. I think he wants to do it. He's got a lot of energy but will be very good. He's not a permanent position. We're looking at — we are interviewing people right now. But it is somebody just to take over for a little while."

.@POTUS on @pulte: "He's very smart. He's a person who's got high integrity. He's done a fantastic job... and it's an Acting position. He's not going to be permanent because I don't think he'd want to be permanent. But he's a very smart guy." pic.twitter.com/2wqOy7VtaS

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 4, 2026

Fannie and Freddie were both up in the early cash session, rising 5% and 3%, respectively. Shares in both mortgage giants tumbled earlier this week after Trump named Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence, raising concerns that the dual role could delay the sale of the government's stake.

As of Friday morning, Fannie shares are down 34% YTD, while Freddie has slumped 38% YTD, as traders grow uneasy over the pace of the Trump administration's privatization plans. Optimism around potential share sales drove large gains in 2025.

Bose George, managing director at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW), wrote in a note, "We're comfortable with our most recently published numbers on the valuation—a current combined fair value in the $200–$250 billion range."

Related:

Christopher Maloney, mortgage strategist at BOK Financial, noted, "I don't believe I will ever see Fannie and Freddie released from conservatorship, at least not in my lifetime."

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/05/2026 - 14:00
Tyler Durden

University Of Oregon Grapples With Budget Crisis After Years Of Woke Excess

Zero Rss
2 days 20 hours ago
University Of Oregon Grapples With Budget Crisis After Years Of Woke Excess

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It appears that being unrelentingly woke means that you need fewer dormitories. The University of Oregon is facing a major budget crisis and will cut $65 million from its budget and close dorms due to low enrollment. That growing crisis, however, did not stop Oregon from burning almost a million dollars fighting against free speech. It also did not induce its faculty to offer greater intellectual diversity and tolerance to prospective students. Oregon is a cautionary tale for a generation of academic social warriors, but also an opportunity for those who want to restore balance in higher education.

Oregon has long been an example of academic orthodoxy. While most state schools begrudgingly yield to First Amendment demands and offer better free speech alternatives to private universities, Oregon is known as a hardened silo for the far left in teaching.

We previously discussed how Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley, who was blocked from the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion after tweeting “All men are created equal.” Oregon spent almost a million dollars fighting to bar such speech.

Such controversies have plagued the university for years, with no sign of self-examination by administrators or academics. The university was criticized for its monitoring of social media to punish errant thoughts or microaggressions. The law school’s law review was accused of anti-Israel discrimination.

The school previously gave special recognition to University of California (Santa Barbara) Professor Mireille Miller-Young, who criminally assaulted pro-life advocates on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara.  At the University of Oregon, she was honored as a featured speaker at the University of Oregon’s  Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Part of its “black feminist speaker series,” Miller-Young’s work was highlighted by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English to show “the radical potential of black feminism in the work that we do on campus and in our everyday lives.”

Now, the school is facing declining revenues and enrollments.

President Karl Scholz recently announced that this was due to lower out-of-state first-year enrollment, which means lower tuition revenue, increased costs, and a loss of grant funding.

Strangely, while closing dorms, the school is still building two new dorms.

Putting aside the school’s past budget judgment and discipline, the university’s reputation for intellectual orthodoxy deters many who do not want to pay tuition for their children to be indoctrinated or silenced.  Even with plunging trust in higher education, administrators and faculty cannot resist the temptation to exclude opposing voices.

Oregon is not the only school facing such shortfalls. Some woke institutions have closed entirely. The irony is that faculty would seem to prefer to see their institutions die than restore balance to their departments. However, this may offer a real opportunity for legislators and donors to force real changes in the culture of these schools.

As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.

We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.

If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.

If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.

Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.

When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.

When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.

It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.

For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.

That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.

A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.

There is little evidence that faculty members are interested in changing this culture or creating greater diversity at schools.  In places like North Carolina State University a study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 20 to 1.

As college and university presidents face these shortfalls, it is time for legislators and donors to demand real proof of diversity in hiring and a change in the culture of these institutions. Otherwise, schools like Oregon will continue to close dorms as they push wokeness over wisdom.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/05/2026 - 13:40
Tyler Durden

"The Rebirth Of America's Nuclear Industry": Antares Microreactor Goes Critical

Zero Rss
2 days 21 hours ago
"The Rebirth Of America's Nuclear Industry": Antares Microreactor Goes Critical

Antares just did something that has been painfully rare in American nuclear energy: it took a privately developed advanced reactor from concept to actual criticality on an aggressive, publicly stated schedule.

On June 4th at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the company’s Mark-0 microreactor achieved initial zero-power fueled criticality under the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program. 

When a reactor goes critical, it is experiencing a self-sustaining chain reaction of fissioning uranium atoms inside of its core. A zero-power fueled criticality means the reactor was taken critical at an extremely low power level to prevent any heat production or significant radiation and facilitate data collection. 

It is the first advanced reactor to hit that mark in the program and the first privately developed non-light-water reactor to reach criticality in the United States in more than four decades.

Today, an advanced non-lightwater nuclear reactor reached criticality in the United States for the first time in more than four decades.

Thanks to President Trump unleashing the American Nuclear Renaissance, this was made possible. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/UwWxdDd0ms

— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) June 4, 2026

This is not another rendering or licensing milestone:

  • Fission happened
  • Ahead of schedule

We have been tracking the microreactor industry’s rapid evolution across multiple articles. The handful of developers positioning under the new DOE fast-track authorities created by President Trump’s May 2025 executive orders. 

In early April we detailed Antares securing the first-ever Documented Safety Analysis approval for an advanced reactor under DOE-STD-1271, which is a regulatory green light viewed as equivalent to an NRC license for their test reactor. 

We covered their selection for the Air Force’s Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program at Joint Base San Antonio. And just last week we reported on their groundbreaking multi-year commercial HALEU supply agreement with Urenco, the first long-term commercial contract of its kind, securing fuel for scale beyond limited government allocations.

Today’s criticality is the concrete payoff from that string of updates.

The Mark-0 demonstration validates key reactor physics and overall system performance for Antares’ broader R1 transportable microreactor design. The unit is sized for 100 kWe to 1 MWe, with a targeted refueling interval of more than six years, factory-fabricated modularity, and high-temperature heat pipes. 

It uses TRISO fuel fabricated by BWX Technologies, drawing directly on the fuel specification and manufacturing work matured under the Department of Defense’s Project Pele military microreactor program. The U.S. Army was integrated throughout as a future end user.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright called it fitting on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary: the first new privately developed non-light-water reactor criticality in America in over 40 years. Assistant Secretary Ted Garrish noted the skeptics who doubted the Reactor Pilot Program could deliver criticality in less than a year. ANS President Mark Peters congratulated the team but correctly framed criticality as “a starting line, not a finish line.”

U.S. Chief Technology Officer Dr. Ethan Klein was a little more enthusiastic...

AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE.
AMERICAN NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE.
A HISTORIC MILESTONE.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 https://t.co/28wFYWYN7U

— U.S. CTO Ethan Klein (@USCTO47) June 5, 2026

Antares CEO Jordan Bramble on making history: “Hitting our commitments is everything to us. Nuclear in America has been defined for too long by delays, by companies that said they would and then didn’t. We said criticality in 2026, electricity production in 2027, and power to the warfighter in 2028. Today is the first of those commitments delivered on the schedule we set.”

The company went from concept to a critical reactor safely in less than 12 months. 

Criticality is the starting line. But for the first time in a long time, that line just got crossed on a credible, aggressive timeline rather than a bureaucratic one. The microreactor race has a clear early leader in execution. The question now is whether the rest of the industry and the policy apparatus treat this as the new baseline, or simply another headline before the next round of delays sets in.

Tyler Durden Fri, 06/05/2026 - 13:20
Tyler Durden

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