By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com
The European Union’s dependence on liquefied natural gas from the United States is set to rise significantly, reaching 80% of all LNG imports in two years, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has warned.
In a report cited by Reuters, IEEFA noted that the European Union already imports significant volumes of U.S. liquefied gas, creating a potentially risky dependence on a single supplier.
LNG imports from the United States into the EU accounted for 58% of overall LNG imports.
Yet this dependence is only going to increase in the coming years, the outlet said, recommending more wind, solar, and heat pumps as an alternative.
This year, the United States will become the European Union’s biggest supplier of liquefied gas, even as the bloc also gobbles up every ton of Russian LNG it can buy ahead of the 2027 ban on Russian energy imports.
The motivation for that ban, in addition to punishment for the war in Ukraine, has been to avoid overwhelming dependence on a single energy supplier, which is what the EU is currently doing with the U.S.
Energy commodities are a big part of the trade deal signed last year by President Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The deal featured a commitment on the part of the EU to buy $750 billion worth of U.S. energy commodities over a period of three years.
The European Parliament earlier this year signaled it has problems with the deal, which angered the U.S. president, and he threatened to hike tariffs on EU goods unless the bloc signs the deal as is.
The arrangement elevated American LNG, oil, and refined fuels in Europe’s energy supply mix.
The actual supply of so many energy commodities, however, would be physically - and financially - challenging both for the suppliers and the buyers.
Tyler Durden Thu, 05/14/2026 - 07:20UBS analysts reiterated that Take-Two Interactive is their top U.S. gaming pick, with the highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VI still scheduled for early November.
"We recently framed TTWO as our top pick in the U.S. interactive gaming space," analyst Christopher Schoell told clients.
Schoell said, "Concerns around AI and the potential for a new wave of content to hit the market/compete for engagement have weighed on the sector," adding, "We believe the fears for TTWO are overdone and expect new GTA VI announcements, trailers, and gameplay to drive sentiment, while industry consolidation highlights TTWO's potential strategic value as the remaining publicly traded U.S. AAA developer."
Schoell expects TTWO to guide to a record fiscal 2027, with $9 billion in bookings, including about $2 billion in GTA VI full-game sales.
Schoell and his team noted, "We build on our conviction that a strong GTA VI launch in the near term, coupled with expanding RCS and in-game monetization, will likely drive more stable long-term economic returns."
Here's that bullish framework:
Turning Hits into Recurring Cash Flows: In the mid-2010s with the launch and scaling of GTA Online and NBA 2K RCS, TTWO successfully evolved its CFROI (Cash Flow Return on Investment) profile from extreme volatility to high and stable economic returns. Strong historical execution supports our view of a successful mix shift to higher margin RCS revenues ahead and continued CFROI expansion.
How Big Could GTA VI Be? TTWO's CFROI Forecast vs Past Blockbusters: Leveraging the breadth of the HOLT framework, we compare TTWO's forecasted CFROI in the launch year to CFROI levels in other blockbuster game launches. Notably, we believe the launch of GTA VI will push CFROI to one of the highest levels we've seen compared to historical game launches.
Framing Long-Term Market Expectations: In HOLT's default valuation framework, TTWO has around 80% potential upside and market expectations appear muted vs forecasts. TTWO has earned a median CFROI level of 13% the last 10 years in conjunction with a high rate of reinvestment, and the GTA VI launch should increase CFROI to near all-time high levels. Despite this, long-term market expectations imply CFROI will fade to 9%, below its historical median. We see this as a relatively low bar to clear given a bookings mix shift to higher margin RCS revenue, likely supported by a steady cadence of content releases for the established GTA VI player base long-term.
Schoell offered clients his expectations ahead of earnings and guidance next Thursday:
As highlighted in our recent earnings preview, we expect TTWO's F4Q results to come in at the high-end of guidance (company reporting May 21). The main focus however will be the initial F27 outlook. We expect management to guide to a record year alongside GTA VI's release, where our prior survey work points to significant pent up demand and pricing power. Similar to precedent, we believe initial guidance could be conservative, setting up for a beat and raise narrative. This was the case for both GTA V (Fiscal 2014) and RDR II (Fiscal 2019), when the company outperformed its initial bookings outlook by several hundred million. We look for $9.0B of bookings in F27, incl. $2.0B of full game sales for GTA VI. Our est. assumes higher amort and S&M alongside GTA's release, albeit visibility into magnitude is limited and could drive variability to NT EPS (UBSe $6.16/$11.47 of Adj. EPS in F27/F28). We recently published an interactive model which allows investors to input their own unit/pricing assumptions for GTA VI and underlying PC/console/mobile growth.
Shares peaked in late 2025 at around $260 and have since tumbled to $190. Shares are currently clawing back some of those losses.
UBS maintains a Buy rating and a $300 price target, implying about 33% upside from Wednesday's levels.
Professional subscribers can read the full TTWO/GTA VI note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.
Tyler Durden Thu, 05/14/2026 - 06:55If the National Rally (RN) candidate wins in the French presidential election next spring, far-left mayor Bally Bagayoko of multi-cultural Saint-Denis has said it will be invalid, calling for a “popular insurrection” if this were to occur.
One social commentator on X, Alain Weber, posted frankly about the reality France is facing: “Contrary to what the Democrats of this country thought, the danger will not come from Jean-Luc Mélenchon but from Bally Bagayoko, who is the calm face of the civil war being prepared in the suburbs.”
Attached to his post was an interview of Bagayoko with Jean-Michel Aphatie on LCI Direct in which he tells the shocked host that if RN wins the election next year, they will never have “popular legitimacy,” only what he calls “institutional legitimacy.”
The mayor also said that those who attempt to “normalize the far right” are “dangerous,” adding that “if the far right comes to power, which we do not want, we will do everything so that it cannot happen.”
During another interview on Oumma.com, a Muslim community media outlet, the mayor of Saint-Denis also attacked President Emmanuel Macron, the Bolloré group’s media outlets, and even certain left-wing parties, according to Le Figaro.
Blaming Macron for the rise of the far right, Bagayoko stated: “Under Macron, the far right has never been so strong. We’re now at almost 140 racist members of parliament,” calling them all “guardians” of RN’s history and doctrine, according to the portal.
Returning to the theme of inevitable insurrection, Bagayoko told the host: “It’s either us or them… that is to say, the far right,” adding later that he was “firmly convinced that the people will rise up” if RN wins next spring, while ignoring the fact that an RN victory would indicate voters exercised their democratic will.
Warned to “be careful” by the host, lest he “be accused of inciting insurrection,” the Saint-Denis mayor doubled down: “All the important reforms in this country have been achieved through popular uprisings,” he said, citing the storming of the Bastille and the Yellow Vest movement.
As noted by Weber, the danger of Bagayoko is real. “He is manufacturing the psychological conditions for a refusal of alternation, that is to say, quite simply, the conditions for a cold civil war, then hot.”
It is shocking to witness the rise of the far-left LFI mayor and the influence he now wields, when, in fact, he received just 13,506 votes out of approximately 64,000 registered voters in Saint-Denis.
However, his voice calling for justice for the wrongs committed against those he sees as having been oppressed by France for centuries has been capturing headlines since his election in March.
In a recent example, Bagayoko drew ire from the local state prefect when it was revealed he had removed a photo of Macron, traditionally on display as a sign of respect, relegating it to a corner of his office and, by some accounts, turning it upside down.
“The portrait will remain in its place until the state fulfils its obligations under the Republican Pact, particularly toward the residents of our territory,” he said, presumably referencing Saint-Denis, a town with a population of some 150,000, as their territory.
Whose territory? That, we can suppose, would be of the Blacks and other minorities, as he has called the city “la ville de Noirs.”
We know that when Bagayoko speaks of “eliminating inequality,” any past colonial oppression and slavery are high up on his list, as he sees these as part of today’s problems. However, as pointed out point-blank by Marion Maréchal, president of Identité Libertés, in a recent interview, “Monsieur Bagayoko has a greater chance of being a descendant of slave traders than I do.”
Her comments came in the wake of the cancellation of an event commemorating the abolition of slavery in Vierzon, an RN stronghold. The town, which has only been holding the event since 2006, says the move is due to budget cuts, while many are predictably calling out RN for refusing to honor the importance of ending slavery.
In fact, the issue for many on the right is more complex. “The memory of slavery must not concern only Europeans. The Arab-Muslim slave trade: 17 million victims. The intra-African slave trade: 14 million victims,” Maréchal noted to viewers. She and many others would prefer a commemoration that addressed all wrongdoers, not simply Whites and Westerners.
In March, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that designated the Atlantic slave trade and its involvement in the slavery of Africans as “the most serious crime against humanity.” According to a UN statement, it seeks an order that “confronts historical truth while building mechanisms for equitable futures.”
But many want to know why the issue of African enablers, middlemen, and traders is never called out. “Since the beginnings of the trans-Saharan slave trade in the 7th century, Africans had been selling slaves to Arab Muslims,” and as demand grew from the New World centuries later, ethnic Africans happily met it, wrote Marie-Claude Mosimann-Barbier for Le Figaro last month, in a piece covered by Remix News.
“Long before the arrival of Europeans and the development of the Atlantic slave trade, internal slavery was a structural reality in most African societies,” she wrote.
The question for today is why anyone is welcoming the cries for insurrection from an activist mayor who has shown zero respect for the existing Republic of France — and zero interest in its continuation?
Tyler Durden Thu, 05/14/2026 - 06:30Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's description of "suffocating" the Iranian regime through economic and financial pressure, whether via sanctions or the US military blockade of the world's most critical maritime chokepoint, now appears to be showing up in the data.
New geospatial intelligence indicates that Iran's main crude export terminal has gone quiet, while a separate report suggests seaborne oil exports have effectively been halted for the past month.
The first report comes from Bloomberg, which cited European satellite imagery showing a massive bottleneck developing at Iran's energy complex: no ocean-going tankers at Kharg Island, the country's main export terminal, on May 8, 9, and 11. This marks the longest stretch in no crude tanker loadings since the US-Iran conflict began nearly three months ago.
Kharg Island’s loading terminals were observed completely empty yesterday for the first time since mid-April, despite 19 tankers waiting nearby with ~25M bbl of capacity.
A recent 80,000 bbl oil slick suggests sustained infrastructure damage has halted all crude departures since… pic.twitter.com/6EKKigQghP
Iran continued loading crude throughout the early weeks of the war, using tankers as floating storage after the US Navy effectively blocked ships from exiting the Hormuz chokepoint in mid-April, creating a massive energy bottleneck for Tehran.
At the end of last week, we reported that a massive oil leak spanning dozens of square miles of water was spotted off Kharg Island. This was based on open-source satellite imagery.
Image source: Soar"The slick appears visually consistent with oil," said Leon Moreland, a researcher at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, to Reuters. He believes it covers an area of approximately 45 square km (nearly 18 sq miles).
While it's unclear what may have caused it, or the extent of possible damage to Kharg Island's infrastructure or possibly docked tankers, the island has been attacked by US aerial forces in the recent past.
If Kharg Island remains idle and storage capacity reaches its limit, Iran could be forced into deeper oil production cuts.
"To our best knowledge, Iran hasn't successfully exported any crude oil by sea over the past 28 days. Some refined products managed to escape because US OFAC did not slap sanctions on those tankers," research firm Tanker Trackers wrote on X.
To our best knowledge, Iran hasn't successfully exported* any crude oil by sea over the past 28 days. Some refined products managed to escape because US OFAC did not slap sanctions on those tankers.
In addition, Kharg Island hasn't loaded any tankers since 2026-05-06 as a result…
This very development would support Bessent's claims: "We are running a marathon over the past 12 months, and now we are sprinting toward the finish. They are not able to pay their soldiers. This is a real economic blockade."
Ten days ago, Bessent forecasted that Iran's oil industry may need to start shutting in wells "in the next week" as the country's crude storage is "rapidly filling up."
"Their oil infrastructure is starting to creak," he said. "It hasn't been maintained again because of our decades-long sanctions against them."
Tyler Durden Thu, 05/14/2026 - 06:30