The post Low-IQ Exporters Don’t Know to Eat the Tariffs: Non-Fuel Import Prices Up 3.7% appeared first on CEPR.

Trump Calls On Putin To Reach Deal With Ukraine After Zelenskyy Meeting

Authored by Emel Akan via The Epoch Times,

U.S. President Donald Trump kicked off his G7 summit meetings on June 16 in the French spa town of Evian-les-Bains, joining a roundtable discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other G7 leaders.

(L-R) U.S. President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy take part in a working session at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, on June 16, 2026. Thibault Camus / POOL / AFP

"We had a very good meeting," Trump told reporters after the meeting. "Russia should make a deal. Russia has lost tremendous amounts of people and so has Ukraine."

Before the roundtable, Trump confirmed he also had a private discussion with Zelenskyy.

"I'm meeting with him again later on today," he added.

Trump made these comments during his bilateral meeting with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, on the sidelines of the G7 summit.

"I'm going to do whatever I can," Trump said, to end the war in Ukraine.

Trump said he wants to focus on Ukraine now, saying Iran will soon be "back in the rearview mirror."

Leaders of the world's seven largest advanced economies have gathered in Evian-les-Bains, a lakeside town in eastern France, from June 15 to June 17 for their annual summit.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Ukraine is stronger now than it was at last year's G7 summit in Canada.

"Ukraine is in a different position," von der Leyen said at a press conference in Evian on June 15. "Ukraine is holding the frontline and even partially regaining territory."

She also praised the speed at which Ukraine was becoming a top producer of advanced military equipment.

"On the other hand, Russia is feeling the strain and pressure. Our sanctions are biting and cutting deep," she added.

In August 2025, Trump invited Putin to a meeting in Alaska to discuss a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. However, the meeting ended with no breakthrough.

Before heading to France, Trump said he had spoken separately with both Putin and Zelenskyy on the phone on June 15.

"We had a very good conversation yesterday with President Zelenskiy and President Putin, and I think maybe we can do something there," he said following his bilateral meeting with Macron on June 15. "I really do. I think they're both open to it."

He said that now the Iran deal is finalized, "we're going to be focusing on that."

On June 15, Ukraine officially began European Union membership negotiations, launching a process that will require its government to commit to years of political reforms even as it fights the Russian invasion.

Ukraine sees EU membership as a security guarantee for a stable future once the war ends.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 13:00

Deal Doubts Arise As Lebanese, Iranian Officials Say US Must Rein In Israel To Secure Regional Peace

Summary:

• Iran Says Peace Deal Requires Israeli Withdrawal From Lebanon
• Hormuz Fears Ease As Trump, Ghalibaf Virtually Sign US-Iran Deal, But Energy Flows Remain Months From Normal

Polymarket:

//--> //--> Israel x Hezbollah permanent peace deal by June 30, 2026?
Yes 26% · No 74%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, held a call earlier, urging the U.S. to compel Israel to end its bloody war on Lebanon, stop home demolitions, and withdraw from occupied Lebanese territory, according to Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency.

Iranian officials earlier said that any agreement with the US aimed at peace requires Israel to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon. 

AA continued:

The call came during a phone call between Berri and Qalibaf in which they discussed the latest regional developments following a US-Iran agreement to end their war all on fronts, including Lebanon, according to the Lebanese state news agency NNA.

The two officials also reviewed "the military and political developments related to the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, particularly the clause concerning ending the Israeli war on Lebanon," the agency said.

They stressed "the need for the United States, the guarantors of the memorandum of understanding and the international community to assume their responsibilities by compelling Israel to end its war, stop demolishing villages, respect Lebanon's sovereignty and immediately withdraw from the territories it has occupied."

Meanwhile, I24NEWS Hebrew reporter Guy Azriel wrote on X, "I can now confirm that Israel formally requested access to the Iran MoU and was denied. A remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance."

I can now confirm that Israel formally requested access to the Iran MoU and was denied. A remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance.

— גיא עזריאל Guy Azriel (@GuyAz) June 16, 2026

President Trump has criticized Israel's handling of its combat operations against Hezbollah as too bloody.

Hormuz Fears Ease As Trump, Ghalibaf Virtually Sign US-Iran Deal, But Energy Flows Remain Months From Normal

President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Iran's Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf have virtually signed a peace deal to end the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian ports, the general Gulf region, and begin 60 days of nuclear negotiations, according to CNN, citing US senior sources. 

The text of the so-called memorandum of understanding, a 14-point document that should lead to a two-month extension of the ceasefire and the start of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, has yet to be published.

But Trump stated overnight the deal terms will be released "pretty soon," likely after the formal signing ceremony in Geneva on Friday. Trump, who is attending the G7 club summit in France, suggested that he would not attend the signing event at the end of the week. 

VP Vance is expected to lead the American delegation in Switzerland on Friday to formally sign an interim peace deal with Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Trump pushed back on MSM reports that his administration is considering a $300 billion fund for Iran as part of an agreement to end the war.

"Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon! Also, the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Trump's Truth Social comments came shortly after VP Vance, the Iranians "could have access" to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. 

"That's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation," Vance told CBS News in an interview. 

The interim peace deal signals a major diplomatic breakthrough, though Israel remains opposed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and Trump "do not always see eye to eye." Conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah continued Monday in southern Lebanon. 

With the Strait of Hormuz set to open on Friday, blockades and the clogged maritime chokepoint could soon be in the rearview mirror, but the effect on physical markets could last for months, if not longer. 

Barclays commodities/energy research analyst Amarpreet Singh maintained his $100/b forecast for Brent this year. 

Singh explained:

• If the tentative agreement to ease the dual blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is realized, the timing of the restoration of freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz could fall largely in line with our end-June baseline. We maintain our view that Brent should average $100/b in 2026 in that scenario.
• This marks the 16th week of the Iran war and the first eleven weeks led to a more than 350 mb decline in global total oil inventories. Last week, US commercial total oil inventories were already below the trough of early 2022 and declining at a fast pace.
• We forecast a small deficit in Q3 26 in our baseline, as the cyclical demand vector is the strongest since 2022. We recommend going long the Dec 26 minus Dec 27 calendar spread in Brent futures, at $4.67/b at the time of writing.

Normalization of physical energy markets could take many months.

He continued:

The US and Iran have reached an agreement to ease restrictions on trade flows through the Middle East Gulf, with formalization expected by Friday. While early indications suggest that freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz could be restored by month‑end, this does not imply an immediate normalization of physical oil supply chains. Despite this, oil prices have moved sharply lower: prompt‑month Brent and WTI are down around 5% on the day, and the forwards‑implied 2026 Brent average has fallen to $86/b, well below our $100/b forecast. We maintain our view. Inventories are already extremely tight and continue to draw, and our balances point to a modest deficit in Q3 2026 – conditions that are inconsistent with the magnitude of the current price pullback.

This marks the 16th week since the Iran war began. We have inventory data for 14 of those weeks, with the latest observation for the week ending 5 June (Figure 1). Adjusting for shipping lags – typically two to three weeks for Middle East Gulf flows based on last year’s trade patterns – and using pre‑pandemic seasonality (2017–19 average), the first 11  weeks of the conflict resulted in a cumulative 352 mb decline in global total oil inventories, based on our weekly global total oil inventory indicator (Figure 2).

Translating the observed ~4.6 mb/d cumulative inventory draw over this period using the historical beta between inventory changes and market imbalance implies an underlying deficit of roughly 7.3 mb/d on a seasonally adjusted basis. This compares with our non‑seasonally adjusted estimated deficit of 6.6 mb/d for Q2 26. Given that Q2 typically runs a small surplus, realized outcomes to date remain broadly consistent with our balance estimates.

A common pushback to our view is that a significant share of recent inventory draws reflects releases from strategic reserves, which would limit price implications (Figure 3). Our response is that, adjusted for long‑term seasonality, US commercial total oil inventories stood 7 mb below the early‑2022 trough as of 5 June and have been declining at a weekly rate of 11 mb over the past four weeks (Figure 4). Even if the Strait normalizes by month‑end, we expect this tightening trend to persist at least through July. Moreover, unlike in 2022, current US SPR releases are structured as loans rather than outright supply additions.

This raises a key question: with commercial inventories entering peak demand season at historically tight levels and the cyclical demand impulse the strongest since 2022, why should prices not be materially higher? Around 60% of oil demand is tied to the production and movement of goods. While a gradual easing toward $80/b Brent by end‑2027 appears plausible, we see near‑term risks to prices as skewed to the upside.

Key overnight developments (courtsey of Bloomberg):

US-Iran Deal Framework

• The US and Iran are preparing to formally sign their interim peace deal in Switzerland on Friday, with a 14-point memorandum of understanding that should lead to a two-month ceasefire extension and the start of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program
• The text of the memorandum of understanding has yet to be published, though a senior US official said it's possible that happens in the next two days 
• Iran claims the lifting of the US naval blockade has begun and entered the implementation phase, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi
• Iran will allow free Hormuz transit for 60 days under the pact 

Trump Administration Statements 

• President Trump said the US is dealing with 'rational' people in Iran now and described Iran's current leadership as 'nice' to deal with 
• Trump stated that Iran will suffer if it tries to attain a nuclear weapon and that Iran will not develop or buy a nuclear weapon 
• Trump said the deal with Iran can survive if Israel attacks Lebanon, though he is 'not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah' 

Israel-Lebanon Tensions

• Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the deal ending the war with the US would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon 
• Iran's foreign minister said any Israeli forces remaining in southern Lebanon, or any strikes on the country, would constitute a violation of the US-Iran deal 
• Israeli officials said Monday that troops would stay in Lebanon, as 'Trump's agreement does not bind us' 

Netanyahu Political Impact

• Benjamin Netanyahu has staked his political future on his relationship with Donald Trump, but that's become a liability now that the US president has cut a deal with Iran that much of Israel opposes •
• Netanyahu is preparing for an election this fall and must contend with an agreement that will leave the Islamic Republic intact, an unpalatable prospect to Israelis of all stripes 

Strait of Hormuz Reopening 

• Two Iran-linked tankers are sailing eastward through the Strait of Hormuz ahead of the US and Iran signing an interim peace agreement on Friday that would re-open the waterway 
• Qatar is planning to rapidly boost LNG production once the Strait of Hormuz reopens, aiming to restore most of its export capacity within two months 
• QatarEnergy told buyers it expects to raise output to about 50% of capacity a month after safe passage through the strait is restored, and to roughly 80% within two months

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 13:00

Deal Doubts Arise As Lebanese, Iranian Officials Say US Must Rein In Israel To Secure Regional Peace

Summary:

• Iran Says Peace Deal Requires Israeli Withdrawal From Lebanon
• Hormuz Fears Ease As Trump, Ghalibaf Virtually Sign US-Iran Deal, But Energy Flows Remain Months From Normal

Polymarket:

//--> //--> Israel x Hezbollah permanent peace deal by June 30, 2026?
Yes 26% · No 74%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, held a call earlier, urging the U.S. to compel Israel to end its bloody war on Lebanon, stop home demolitions, and withdraw from occupied Lebanese territory, according to Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency.

Iranian officials earlier said that any agreement with the US aimed at peace requires Israel to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon. 

AA continued:

The call came during a phone call between Berri and Qalibaf in which they discussed the latest regional developments following a US-Iran agreement to end their war all on fronts, including Lebanon, according to the Lebanese state news agency NNA.

The two officials also reviewed "the military and political developments related to the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, particularly the clause concerning ending the Israeli war on Lebanon," the agency said.

They stressed "the need for the United States, the guarantors of the memorandum of understanding and the international community to assume their responsibilities by compelling Israel to end its war, stop demolishing villages, respect Lebanon's sovereignty and immediately withdraw from the territories it has occupied."

Meanwhile, I24NEWS Hebrew reporter Guy Azriel wrote on X, "I can now confirm that Israel formally requested access to the Iran MoU and was denied. A remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance."

I can now confirm that Israel formally requested access to the Iran MoU and was denied. A remarkable and highly unusual development between close allies on an issue of such critical national security importance.

— גיא עזריאל Guy Azriel (@GuyAz) June 16, 2026

President Trump has criticized Israel's handling of its combat operations against Hezbollah as too bloody.

Hormuz Fears Ease As Trump, Ghalibaf Virtually Sign US-Iran Deal, But Energy Flows Remain Months From Normal

President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Iran's Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf have virtually signed a peace deal to end the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian ports, the general Gulf region, and begin 60 days of nuclear negotiations, according to CNN, citing US senior sources. 

The text of the so-called memorandum of understanding, a 14-point document that should lead to a two-month extension of the ceasefire and the start of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, has yet to be published.

But Trump stated overnight the deal terms will be released "pretty soon," likely after the formal signing ceremony in Geneva on Friday. Trump, who is attending the G7 club summit in France, suggested that he would not attend the signing event at the end of the week. 

VP Vance is expected to lead the American delegation in Switzerland on Friday to formally sign an interim peace deal with Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

Trump pushed back on MSM reports that his administration is considering a $300 billion fund for Iran as part of an agreement to end the war.

"Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon! Also, the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Trump's Truth Social comments came shortly after VP Vance, the Iranians "could have access" to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. 

"That's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation," Vance told CBS News in an interview. 

The interim peace deal signals a major diplomatic breakthrough, though Israel remains opposed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and Trump "do not always see eye to eye." Conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah continued Monday in southern Lebanon. 

With the Strait of Hormuz set to open on Friday, blockades and the clogged maritime chokepoint could soon be in the rearview mirror, but the effect on physical markets could last for months, if not longer. 

Barclays commodities/energy research analyst Amarpreet Singh maintained his $100/b forecast for Brent this year. 

Singh explained:

• If the tentative agreement to ease the dual blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is realized, the timing of the restoration of freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz could fall largely in line with our end-June baseline. We maintain our view that Brent should average $100/b in 2026 in that scenario.
• This marks the 16th week of the Iran war and the first eleven weeks led to a more than 350 mb decline in global total oil inventories. Last week, US commercial total oil inventories were already below the trough of early 2022 and declining at a fast pace.
• We forecast a small deficit in Q3 26 in our baseline, as the cyclical demand vector is the strongest since 2022. We recommend going long the Dec 26 minus Dec 27 calendar spread in Brent futures, at $4.67/b at the time of writing.

Normalization of physical energy markets could take many months.

He continued:

The US and Iran have reached an agreement to ease restrictions on trade flows through the Middle East Gulf, with formalization expected by Friday. While early indications suggest that freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz could be restored by month‑end, this does not imply an immediate normalization of physical oil supply chains. Despite this, oil prices have moved sharply lower: prompt‑month Brent and WTI are down around 5% on the day, and the forwards‑implied 2026 Brent average has fallen to $86/b, well below our $100/b forecast. We maintain our view. Inventories are already extremely tight and continue to draw, and our balances point to a modest deficit in Q3 2026 – conditions that are inconsistent with the magnitude of the current price pullback.

This marks the 16th week since the Iran war began. We have inventory data for 14 of those weeks, with the latest observation for the week ending 5 June (Figure 1). Adjusting for shipping lags – typically two to three weeks for Middle East Gulf flows based on last year’s trade patterns – and using pre‑pandemic seasonality (2017–19 average), the first 11  weeks of the conflict resulted in a cumulative 352 mb decline in global total oil inventories, based on our weekly global total oil inventory indicator (Figure 2).

Translating the observed ~4.6 mb/d cumulative inventory draw over this period using the historical beta between inventory changes and market imbalance implies an underlying deficit of roughly 7.3 mb/d on a seasonally adjusted basis. This compares with our non‑seasonally adjusted estimated deficit of 6.6 mb/d for Q2 26. Given that Q2 typically runs a small surplus, realized outcomes to date remain broadly consistent with our balance estimates.

A common pushback to our view is that a significant share of recent inventory draws reflects releases from strategic reserves, which would limit price implications (Figure 3). Our response is that, adjusted for long‑term seasonality, US commercial total oil inventories stood 7 mb below the early‑2022 trough as of 5 June and have been declining at a weekly rate of 11 mb over the past four weeks (Figure 4). Even if the Strait normalizes by month‑end, we expect this tightening trend to persist at least through July. Moreover, unlike in 2022, current US SPR releases are structured as loans rather than outright supply additions.

This raises a key question: with commercial inventories entering peak demand season at historically tight levels and the cyclical demand impulse the strongest since 2022, why should prices not be materially higher? Around 60% of oil demand is tied to the production and movement of goods. While a gradual easing toward $80/b Brent by end‑2027 appears plausible, we see near‑term risks to prices as skewed to the upside.

Key overnight developments (courtsey of Bloomberg):

US-Iran Deal Framework

• The US and Iran are preparing to formally sign their interim peace deal in Switzerland on Friday, with a 14-point memorandum of understanding that should lead to a two-month ceasefire extension and the start of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program
• The text of the memorandum of understanding has yet to be published, though a senior US official said it's possible that happens in the next two days 
• Iran claims the lifting of the US naval blockade has begun and entered the implementation phase, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi
• Iran will allow free Hormuz transit for 60 days under the pact 

Trump Administration Statements 

• President Trump said the US is dealing with 'rational' people in Iran now and described Iran's current leadership as 'nice' to deal with 
• Trump stated that Iran will suffer if it tries to attain a nuclear weapon and that Iran will not develop or buy a nuclear weapon 
• Trump said the deal with Iran can survive if Israel attacks Lebanon, though he is 'not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah' 

Israel-Lebanon Tensions

• Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the deal ending the war with the US would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon 
• Iran's foreign minister said any Israeli forces remaining in southern Lebanon, or any strikes on the country, would constitute a violation of the US-Iran deal 
• Israeli officials said Monday that troops would stay in Lebanon, as 'Trump's agreement does not bind us' 

Netanyahu Political Impact

• Benjamin Netanyahu has staked his political future on his relationship with Donald Trump, but that's become a liability now that the US president has cut a deal with Iran that much of Israel opposes •
• Netanyahu is preparing for an election this fall and must contend with an agreement that will leave the Islamic Republic intact, an unpalatable prospect to Israelis of all stripes 

Strait of Hormuz Reopening 

• Two Iran-linked tankers are sailing eastward through the Strait of Hormuz ahead of the US and Iran signing an interim peace agreement on Friday that would re-open the waterway 
• Qatar is planning to rapidly boost LNG production once the Strait of Hormuz reopens, aiming to restore most of its export capacity within two months 
• QatarEnergy told buyers it expects to raise output to about 50% of capacity a month after safe passage through the strait is restored, and to roughly 80% within two months

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 13:00

Supreme Court Rejects Bid By 98-Year-Old Appeals Judge To Be Reinstated

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

The U.S. Supreme Court on June 15 declined to take up the case of a 98-year-old federal judge’s challenge to her ongoing suspension from an appeals court in the nation’s capital.

The court’s new decision in Newman v. Moore took the form of an unsigned order. No justices dissented. The court did not explain its decision.

Judge Pauline Newman, who turns 99 on June 20, sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She filed a petition in March with the Supreme Court, arguing that the Federal Circuit unconstitutionally forced her out of her position after an investigation found her alleged cognitive deterioration rendered her unfit for the job.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is not to be mistaken for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is a specialized court that has exclusive jurisdiction, or authority, to hear cases involving patents, trademarks, international trade, government contracts, and federal personnel and employment issues.

Newman, who was appointed in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, is an authority on patent law and a high-profile author of dissenting court opinions.

The lead respondent in the case is Chief Federal Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore.

Moore signed an order in 2023 saying that a three-judge committee consisting of herself and two others found there was “a reasonable basis to conclude [Newman] might suffer a disability that interferes with her ability to perform the responsibilities of her office.”

Newman failed to undergo medical testing after an expert recommended it, the order said. Newman also declined to accept service of orders, saying she “was not interested in receiving any documents regarding this matter,” and directed the mailroom at her residence not to accept the orders.

Later the same year, a council of judges barred Newman from hearing new cases for one year or until she underwent court-ordered medical examinations.

“We are acutely aware that this is not a fitting capstone to Judge Newman’s exemplary and storied career,” the council said at the time, adding it had no choice because she was “no longer capable of performing the duties of her judicial office.”

In the petition, Newman’s attorneys said the judge remains intellectually and physically robust.

They cite Dr. Aaron G. Filler of the Institute for Nerve Medicine in San Diego, who produced a report in 2024 saying that the then-97-year-old Newman “appears generally healthy and active as if 20 or more years younger than her stated age.”

Newman “engages normally and fluidly in interaction and conversation without any apparent diminishment that might be associated with age in the 10th decade as to other individuals,” Filler said.

The physician said Newman was a “Super-Ager,” which means she “does not demonstrate effects of age on cognition or demeanor comparable to many others at this age.”

“Based on my experience as an attorney and my expertise as a physician, the content of her speech is entirely appropriate for a serving Court of Appeals Judge,” Filler said.

Newman sued the council in federal district court in Washington. That court dismissed the lawsuit in 2024, finding that the courts have “consistently affirmed the judiciary’s authority to police itself.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the ruling in 2025.

Newman’s attorneys said in the petition that Moore has “improperly” used the federal Judicial Councils Reform and Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 “to perpetually sideline Judge Newman until she gives in to the bullying and retires or takes senior status.”

Senior status is a form of semi-retirement for judges aged 65 or older who have served a minimum number of years of judicial service. Such judges work reduced caseloads but retain their full salary. Taking senior status creates a vacancy on a court, which the sitting president may then fill.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed a brief in May on behalf of Moore, urging the Supreme Court not to accept the case.

Sauer said the lower courts correctly ruled that the law bars most district court reviews of judicial council decisions in misconduct or disability cases.

Andrew Morris, a lawyer at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents Newman, said he was disappointed that the justices “did not take this opportunity to protect judicial independence.”

“We will continue to pursue available avenues to vindicate Judge Newman against her stealth impeachment,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Federal Circuit declined to comment.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 12:20

FBI Foils Alleged Suicide Drone Plot Targeting "Capitalist Elites" At UFC White House Event

Regular readers know that the threat of suicide drones has expanded beyond the modern battlefields of Ukraine and the Middle East - with potential targets including data centers and critical infrastructure. Given this potential, it was only a matter of time before an FPV-style attack was attempted on the homeland.

Today, Fox News' reports that federal agents and law enforcement partners foiled an alleged FPV attack plot targeting this past weekend's UFC Freedom 250 event in Washington, D.C.

According to the report, five people were arrested and 23 others were identified as part of a potential network of plotters. The group allegedly planned to use explosive-laden drones to hit buildings near the event, force a mass evacuation, and steer crowds toward a pre-staged sniper team.

A "second wave" was then allegedly planned to storm the White House gate, according to officials. -Fox News

FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X:

On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C. involving individuals outside of the National Capital Region – and thanks to the rapid action of this FBI, our partners, and the Department of Justice in a multi-state operation, multiple individuals are now in custody and allegedly planned attacks were stopped cold.

On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C. involving individuals outside of the National Capital Region – and thanks to the rapid action of this FBI, our partners, and the Department of… pic.twitter.com/PbWkIk1Lr5

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) June 16, 2026

Seeking comment from America's counter-drone detection industry, we reached out to DZYNE Technologies CEO Matt McCue, who told us:

"This is exactly how layered defense is supposed to work. Intelligence and interdiction upstream, counter-drone technology downstream. They are partners, not competitors. The FBI reached this one early, and that's the ideal outcome. For the threats that don't surface in advance, that's where the detection and mitigation layer has to be ready." 

McCue continued: 

"It is a relief that the FBI reached this one early, because the real problem is the back end. Once one of these is in the air over a crowd, the defender's window is measured in seconds, and every option to stop it carries its own risk to the people underneath. The advantage swings hard to the attacker the moment it launches." 

Joe Francescon, former National Security Council Senior Director for Counterterrorism Defense, told us:

"What makes this category of attacks so concerning is how little it demands of the people behind it. The technology is commercial, off-the-shelf, and everywhere. There is no meaningful legal or financial barrier to obtaining it, and no special access, insider knowledge, or training required to use it. The planning for an attack like this can happen out in the open, which is a very different threat profile from what the U.S. is used to worrying about." 

Of course, while we aren't getting names or photos for some reason, one of the suspects allegedly told investigators the aim was to target "capitalist elites," "billionaires," or politicians who received donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

BREAKING: Details via federal arrest affidavit reveal that a California man named Michael Alan Thomas was one of the alleged organizers of the alleged UFC White House terror plot. Feds say he admitted he believes the U.S. government is run by elites who sacrifice and eat… pic.twitter.com/L8i1bTR9Em

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 16, 2026

And while we don't know if this was just douchebags larping on Signal chat from mom's basement or radical militants who had secured hardware (because the FBI hasn't told us), we do know that some of the most vocal groups in America bashing "capitalist elites" and "billionaires" have been associated with the rise of socialist and communist movements. 

These groups were allowed to thrive by their 'comrades' in the Biden and Obama administrations, who instead went after parents opposing woke indoctrination, Catholics, and free speech. 

Now, we're back to combating radical left-wing terror - which even The Atlantic had to admit is 'on the rise.'

And of course, they deny they're violent - and yet;

Hasan Piker calls on his followers to kill capitalists:

“Yeah kill them! KiII those motherfuckers and murder those motherfuckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their fucking red capitalist blood, dude.”

Democrats are campaigning with him. pic.twitter.com/YiZxGgRkgc

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 9, 2026

Left-Wing NGO Coverage:

• "No Longer Tolerate Radical Marxists": Rubio Sanctions Revolutionary Cuban Influence Network Tied To U.S. Left-Wing NGOs

• Bessent Signals Crackdown On Dark-Money Funded NGOs In "Weeks, Months Ahead"

• How Bad Is Foreign Influence In America's Nonprofit Universe?

They want you dead...

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 11:20

Bank Of Japan Raises Rates To 1% For The First Time In 31 Years, Will Stop Reducing Bond Purchases

As widely expected, the BoJ raised the policy rate by 25bp to "around 1%" (there was one dissent from newly appointed dovish board member Asada for a hold) taking the cost of borrowing to its highest level in 31 years as the country adjusts to sustained inflation. The 0.25% increase, which was widely expected, takes Japan to what analysts said was a critical milestone in the central bank’s effort of normalizing monetary policy after years of ultra-low interest rates and deflation. The BoJ’s policy rate was last at 1% in 1995, when the central bank was in the process of lowering borrowing costs in the wake of the Japanese asset bubble burst in the late 1980s. The Board also opted to make no changes for now to their planned pace of QE taper, also in line with expectations, but likely disappointing some expectations for a shift to a higher planned pace of purchases to support JGBs

In a statement accompanying the decision, the BoJ signalled that it intended to continue that normalization process, raising the policy interest rate and degree of monetary accommodation “in response to developments in economic activity and prices as well as financial conditions”.

The policy statement showed no material change other than the view that the major downside risks to the economy have “decreased compared with a while ago”. On inflation, it pointed to “a risk of underlying CPI inflation deviating upward to a level above the price stability target of 2%”, but this is not new information given that the April Outlook Report’s BoJ core inflation forecast (ex. fresh food and energy) already implies inflation above 2% throughout the projection period through FY2028. As Deputy Governor Uchida also noted at the press conference, in terms of what has changed since the April meeting, the decline in downside growth risks appears to have been the backdrop to the decision to proceed with a rate hike this time.

Offsetting the hawkish taste of the rate hike, the BoJ also said that from April 2027 it would stop reducing its monthly purchases of Japanese government bonds, leveling off at a pace of about ¥2tn ($12.5bn) per month. That move was also widely expected by the market. The Bank noted that this decision could be changed depending on circumstances; however, if this policy is maintained, the BoJ’s balance sheet will continue to shrink, though the pace of contraction will ease from 2028 onward.

The BoJ said that while higher crude oil prices were weighing on economic activity, “the risk of a significant slowdown in the economy appears to have decreased compared with a while ago”.  It also noted that the price pass-through from higher fuel prices had been progressing relatively quickly, and could spread from business-to-business transactions to push underlying consumer price inflation above its target of 2 per cent.

Since lifting Japan out of negative interest rates in 2024, the BoJ raised rates twice last year. It has been expected to settle into a pattern of gradually tightening every six months or so. Some economists believe a further 0.25% rise could come as soon as October.

The decision to raise interest rates this week was reached by a 7-1 vote of the Monetary Policy Committee, which was down to eight members after governor Kazuo Ueda was admitted to hospital last week.  The dissenting member, Toichiro Asada  – the first member appointed under the dovish Takaichi administration – argued that the situation in the Middle East presented Japan with greater downside risks to production and employment than the upside risks to prices.

“The distribution of votes is interesting and reflects that the board is a bit more balanced now when previously it skewed comfortably hawkish,” said Stefan Angrick, head of Japan at Moody’s Analytics. “The fact is also that the BoJ has no good choices,” he added. “They can hike to stem inflationary pressure by strengthening the yen, but that would hurt the economy.”

As reported previously, BOJ governor Ueda is receiving treatment for a liver condition and did not attend the meeting or cast a vote. This week’s meeting, the first held without the governor since 2010, was chaired by one of the BoJ’s deputy governors, Ryozo Himino. In Ueda’s absence, the afternoon press conference was presented by the BoJ’s other deputy governor, Shinichi Uchida. He noted that the major difference between this week’s meeting and the one in April, when the BoJ held rates, was the memorandum agreed between the US and Iran to extend their ceasefire

Deputy governor Shinichi Uchida led the Bank of Japan’s afternoon news conference in Kazuo Ueda’s absence 

“That is a welcome move,” Uchida said. “Having said that, there is uncertainty on the pace of improvement in [oil] distribution.”

Deputy Governor Uchida chose his words carefully throughout the press conference, but most questions focused on the Bank’s assessment of upside inflation risks and the implications for future rate hikes. He reiterated the policy of continuing rate hikes as underlying inflation approaches 2%, reinforcing that stance by emphasizing the perceived upside risks to inflation. He also stated that going forward, “keeping inflation stable at around 2% will be important”.

That said, differences of opinion were evident within the Board regarding the state of underlying inflation. While the statement and the press conference conveyed the view that underlying inflation is now in the process of moving toward 2%, Takada and Tamura objected, indicating that they believe it has already reached that level. In contrast, Deputy Governor Uchida said at the press conference that many of the remaining members think it will be achieved between the second half of FY2026 and the first half of FY2027.

Another notable point was Deputy Governor Uchida’s remark that “the neutral rate estimates have too wide a range to be usable for actual policy decisions”, clearly downplaying the Bank’s published estimates of the neutral rate. Governor Ueda has long pointed to the uncertainty surrounding the estimates, but Uchida made this point more explicit. He characterized the current rate hikes as “policy adjustments toward a neutral level”, while adding that “it is not clear at what point we can judge the stance to be neutral; we won’t know until we reach it”. This likely implies that, although the policy rate has now reached the lower bound of the BoJ’s published estimates of the neutral rate, that fact does not mean the Bank will become materially more cautious about further rate hikes.

Deputy Governor Uchida avoided answering a question about consistency with the fiscal policy pursued by the Takaichi administration. Still, despite his otherwise rigorous focus on logic, his explanation for JGB purchases remained somewhat coarse – namely, that “market functioning has been steadily improving, so we decided to continue with this for the time being”. Moreover, even though the decision was made after substantial prior coordination and was almost fully priced in by the market, the fact that a member appointed under the Takaichi administration cast a dissenting vote may suggest that strong resistance to the BoJ’s policy normalization may remain within the administration.

Finally, he was also asked why Governor Ueda did not have voting rights this time, even though Deputy Governor Uchida retained voting rights when he participated remotely during his hospitalization through the previous meeting. Uchida limited his response to saying it was “for reasons related to medical treatment”.

According to JPM, this rate hike will not exert significant downward pressure on the economy, and the bank continues to expect the BoJ to deliver an additional rate hike in October in response to inflationary pressures that are likely to become more apparent towards the summer.

The yen held steady at about ¥160.2 versus the dollar following the announcement, while the Nikkei 225 stock average breached 70,000 points, a record level, before falling back.

“Traders were content that there were no overtly hawkish surprises” from the BOJ, said Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at KCM Trade. “The rate hike was fully anticipated and priced in.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 10:40

"They Will Hear From Our Lawyers": Elon To Sue German Broadcaster Over Claim He Told Belfast Protesters To 'Hunt Migrants'

Via Remix News,

Tech trillionaire Elon Musk has said he will take legal action against German public broadcaster ZDF after it linked him to unrest in Belfast and accused him of helping instigate a "hunt" against migrants.

The dispute followed the attempted beheading of a man in Northern Ireland by a Sudanese migrant, which prompted British right-wing activist Tommy Robinson to call for nationwide protests. Musk shared Robinson's post on X and added, "Only through repeated and loud protests will anything change."

ZDF later used the incident in a segment on ZDFheute live, introducing it as part of a wider discussion about online agitation after violent crimes. Presenter Christina von Ungern-Sternberg said, A brutal attempted murder in broad daylight in Belfast. Someone films it. The video goes viral. A racist mob then hunts down migrants. This was called for by a British far-right extremist and tech billionaire Elon Musk."

She then asked, "What's behind it? Which actors have an interest in using a violent crime to incite civil war?"

The framing triggered criticism in Germany, including from journalists who said the broadcaster had gone beyond what Musk had actually written. Welt journalist Anna Schneider said, "ZDF is attributing a statement to Musk that he never made."

NDR editor Sebastian Eberle also criticized the segment, writing on X, "Dear colleagues in Mainz, with all due respect, this is unacceptable. We cannot and must not work like this. This is completely unacceptable."

ZDF later acknowledged that the wording in the segment had been flawed. Asked by Nius about the controversy, a ZDF spokesperson said, "The presenter was supposed to succinctly summarize the complex situation of the violently escalating protests and the previous calls for protests on X at the beginning of the very comprehensive and nuanced 30-minute program. However, the chosen wording was imprecise and therefore misleading."

The broadcaster said Robinson had called for protests after the Belfast knife attack and that Musk had shared the post.

Musk responded on Monday by saying he would pursue legal action against the broadcaster. "Legal action is being taken against ZDF for their outrageous lies," he wrote on X.

Legal action is being taken against ZDF for their outrageous lies

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2026

This isn't the first time this year the broadcaster has been enveloped in controversy for its reporting. Back in February, the same program was forced to issue an on-air apology after it was found to have broadcast a segment containing AI-generated footage depicting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arresting a migrant family.

"We invest a great deal of effort to provide you with verified information. This time, we failed to do so," it said at the time.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 10:20

China's DRAM Giant CXMT Gets Final Nod For Largest Mainland IPO Since 2022

Chengxin Memory Technology, China’s leading maker of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) chips, has had its initial public offering approved by the country’s securities watchdog, clearing the way for the Chinese mainland’s biggest stock market listing since 2022.

CXMT’s registration to go public on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-style Star Market became effective on June 12. The Hefei-based company is planning to raise CNY29.5 billion (USD4.4 billion) by issuing 10.6 billion shares, which would also make it the Star Market’s second-largest IPO.

As the only Chinese integrated devices manufacturer that has achieved large-scale DRAM production, CXMT’s IPO has attracted investment from several leading brokerages, including China Merchants Securities and Huaan Securities, as well as from insurers, through a mix of alternative investment subsidiaries, private equity funds, and industrial funds.

CXMT has three 12-inch DRAM wafer fabs in Hefei and Beijing, giving it the largest production capacity in China and the fourth-largest globally. The firm’s industrial chain includes multiple links, such as equipment, materials, packaging, and testing, and its suppliers include more than 30 mainland-listed firms with a total market value of over CNY3 trillion (USD444 billion).

Last year, CXMT bought CNY11.5 billion worth of raw materials, including CNY4.3 billion of chemicals, CNY1.4 billion of photoresists, CNY980 million (USD145 million) of silicon wafers, CNY590 million of electronic specialty gases, and CNY250 million of target materials.

The listing is expected to further strengthen China’s self-sufficiency in memory chips, while also driving coordinated growth across the full industrial chain, from upstream materials, equipment, and components to downstream applications.

While investor attention has been centered on memory makers and other key AI component suppliers in Korea, Japan and Taiwan, Chinese AI infrastructure stocks have quietly underperformed. 

Commenting on the latest developments, Goldman's Peter Slater writes that last week's headline that the Chinese government plans to spend upwards of $300bn on a network of interconnected data centers may bring Chinese AI names back into focus. 

Noting that just like in the US, technology independence remains a key tenet of China’s national security policy, Slater writes that not dissimilar to what we’re seeing in U.S. capital markets, China’s fast-tracked IPO pipeline will bring several high-profile AI leaders public as soon as next month: 

• CXMT: China’s leading DRAM maker, #4 globally (received CSRC approval)
• Unitree: China’s leading humanoid robotics pioneer (received CSRC approval)
• YMTC: China’s leading NAND flash maker, #4 globally (formal application expected this month)  

The Goldman trader's conclusion is that "Investors may want to consider rotating into Chinese laggards with cleaner positioning and similar end-demand growth profiles in such areas as advanced packaging and optical networking and transceivers." Those who have access, may want to consider the following baskets: GSXACMEM (GS China Memory), GSXACSEM (GS China Semis) and GSXACHRO (GS China Humanoid Robots). The latter is especially pertinent in light of our recent analysis that "Goldman's Big Call Is That AI's Next Leg Is Shift From Chips To Humanoid Robotics; Here's How To Trade It"

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 10:05

Yum Unloads Pizza Hut Chain As Private Equity Takes On Turnaround Challenge

Yum! Brands agreed to sell its iconic Pizza Hut chain for $2.7 billion following a strategic review, separating the struggling pizza brand from its broader restaurant portfolio, which includes KFC, Taco Bell, and The Habit Burger Grill.

LongRange Capital will acquire Pizza Hut's business outside China for $1.5 billion, while Yum China will buy the China business for $1.2 billion. Both transactions are expected to close in the third quarter.

The Stamford, Connecticut-based private equity firm typically invests in middle-market businesses, usually with a longer-term, operationally focused approach.

Its current portfolio includes 24 Hour Fitness, Alpin Unlimited, Bakkavor, Batesville, and US Synthetic.

"These transactions enable Yum! to be a more focused company that continues to leverage scale, technology, and talent to accelerate our raising the B.A.R. priorities and deliver sustained value for our stakeholders," said Chris Turner, Chief Executive Officer, Yum! Brands.

Turner added, "Under LongRange and Yum China, Pizza Hut will be well-positioned for future growth with ownership that brings deep expertise in the restaurant industry. Pizza Hut is one of the most iconic restaurant brands in the world, and we are proud of the important role it has played in Yum! 's history." 

Bloomberg noted, "Yum has owned Pizza Hut since the restaurant company spun off from PepsiCo Inc. in 1997. PepsiCo bought Pizza Hut in 1977 and snapped up Taco Bell the following year." 

At the end of 2025, Pizza Hut had about 6,300 U.S. locations, and Yum planned to close 250 additional underperforming U.S. stores in the first half of 2026. 

The deal follows years of weak performance across Pizza Hut stores, hurt by competition across the space, outdated branding, and delivery competition.

The question for LongRange Capital is what the turnaround strategy will look like and whether it will target value-seeking families, nostalgic millennials…

…and digital-first Gen-Z who have shifted to Domino's, local pizza, fast-casual, and delivery apps.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 09:35

Chinese Stocks, Yuan Drop After Dismal Data Dump: Worst Retail Sales Since COVID

China’s consumer spending and investment slumped in May to levels unseen since the pandemic, exposing risks for an increasingly two-speed economy, as Bloomberg's Chang Shu and Eric Zhu noted:

"The supply side remains robust, driven by faster-than-expected expansion in exports and AI tech sectors.

The demand side has faltered, with consumption and private non-tech investment plummeting."

Here's the details:

Industrial Production

Industrial production (IP) growth rose modestly to 4.5% yoy from 4.1% yoy thanks to stronger-than-expected exports, although automobile output growth remained weak and the ongoing global energy shock continued to weigh on chemical-related manufacturing output. In sequential terms, IP gained 0.2% mom non-annualized in May based on our estimates (vs. -1.1% mom non-annualized in April).

By industry, the April-to-May acceleration in year-on-year IP growth was led by faster output growth in computer & other equipment, electronic machinery, and utilities industries, more than offsetting slower output growth in chemicals and non-ferrous metal smelting industries.

Among major industrial products (different from by-industry breakdown), year-on-year growth in industrial robot output, metal cutting machine output and power generation rose to +27.9%, +10.7% and +4.2%, respectively, in May from +15.1%, +7.5% and +2.6% in April, while automobile, computer and smartphone output growth in year-on-year terms slowed to -3.2%, -19.4% and -8.8%, respectively, from -2.6%, -9.3% and +4.7%. 

Retail Sales

Nominal retail sales growth continued to slow in May, to -0.6% yoy from +0.2% yoy in April, the lowest since December 2022 (during the COVID exit wave), with year-on-year growth in goods sales and restaurant sales revenue both weakening. 

Under retail sales, big-ticket items led the decline. Car purchases, which make up about 8% of the overall figure, plunged 16% in May from a year ago. Excluding autos, retail sales grew 1.1% in May.

Sales of home appliances as well as construction and decoration materials also contracted at a double-digit pace.

Property

Property activity data remained under pressure in May despite recent green shoots in large cities.

Year-on-year growth in property sales registered -13.1% in volume (floor space) terms and -9.5% in value terms in May (vs. -9.5%/-7.7% in April). New home under construction and completions growth slowed to -12.3% yoy and -19.9% yoy, respectively in May from -12.1% yoy and -18.8% yoy in April. New home starts growth remained depressed at -24.6% yoy in May, despite a modest improvement from -26.6% yoy in April. NBS and private sector data both showed continued downward pressure on home prices in May, mainly in lower-tier cities.

FAI

Fixed asset investment (FAI) growth fell further -10.6% yoy in May from -8.2% yoy in April on a single-month basis (Exhibit 3), reflecting both adverse weather conditions (e.g., heavy rainfall in southern and central China and a heatwave in northern China) and a still-slow pace of government bond issuance. This takes year-to-date FAI growth to -4.1% yoy in May (vs. -1.6% yoy in April).

By sector, year-on-year growth in infrastructure, property and other investment (i.e., services and agriculture-related) fell to -11.2%, -24.3% and -13.2%, respectively, in May from -5.6%, -20.1% and -10.6% in April, while manufacturing investment growth improved slightly to -4.1% yoy from -4.8% yoy. That said, we caution that the occasional NBS "statistical correction" of previously over-reported data may have exaggerated the volatility of reported FAI growth in recent quarters, as the year-on-year contraction in crude steel and cement output narrowed modestly in May.

Further evidence emerged indicating a growing divergence in the economy. Investment in high-tech industries expanded 4.5%, with capital expenditure of semiconductor and lithium battery makers up 11% and 25%, respectively.

Labor Market

Regarding the labor market, both the nationwide and 31-city unemployment rates (not seasonally adjusted) edged down to 5.1% for May from 5.2% for April.

After seasonal adjustment, we estimate the nationwide unemployment rate inched down to 5.2% in May from 5.3% in April, and the 31-city metric remained flat at 5.2%.

*  *  *

NBS spokesman Fu Linghui attributed the slump in investment and retail sales to factors including heavy rainfall.

Fu also pointed to last year’s high level of spending driven by subsidies as well as the economy’s transition to new growth drivers.

“Since the second quarter, certain economic indicators slowed because of complex changes in the global environment as well as structural adjustment in the domestic economy,” said Fu in a briefing in Beijing.

“Some companies are facing difficulties. But looking at the overall trend, the momentum of the economy remains overall stable.”

Interestingly, Bloomberg notes that the worse-than-expected slump in retail sales and investment also reignited questions around their accuracy in gauging broader economic health.

The services production index, which inched up to 4.4% on year in May, has a stronger correlation with the pattern of growth in gross domestic product than retail sales, which comprised mostly goods, according to Yu Song, chief China economist at UBS Securities. Inconsistency in the fixed-asset investment data that became apparent last year also mean it might exaggerate the weakness, he said.

“Second-quarter GDP data looks to be weak, but not quite as weak as one would expect from April data,” Song told Bloomberg Television.

Some analysts estimated growth at near 4% in April, tracking below the government’s official full-year target of 4.5% to 5%.

The result of all this was initial yuan weakness (a day after reaching its strongest level since early 2023) and decline in Chinese stocks, but as the session wore on, those initial dips recovered (except for Hang Seng China Enterprises)...

...as the weakness reflexively raises market-watchers hopes for supportive stimulus:

“While there are pockets of strength in tech and export-related industries, the broader economy is still struggling,” said Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China at ING Bank NV.

“This could eventually add pressure on policymakers to ease policy.”

But without stronger demand at home, the economy is at risk of a deeper slowdown even as the US-Iran deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz holds out the promise of stabilizing global shipping and energy prices.

Finally, Goldman sees downside risk to their Q2 real GDP growth forecast (4.0% qoq sa annualized and 4.7% yoy currently).

However, the latest development in the Middle East and recent policy communications bode well for a sequential growth improvement in Q3, especially given the significant unused government bond quota left for the remainder of this year.

Goldman sees July as an important window to monitor potential policy fine-tuning: if Q2 GDP disappoints meaningfully, there is a decent chance for policymakers to step up their easing rhetoric in the July Politburo meeting and draw on remaining fiscal buffers quickly to stabilize investment and growth.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 09:24

Utterly Flocked: "We-Don't-Track-People"-Firm Deploys Nationwide Network Of Warrantless Pedestrian-Tracking Cameras

Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based private surveillance firm, insists its cameras are not tracking people. Yet its own systems, training materials, and expanding product line tell a different story -one of a rapidly growing, warrantless mass surveillance infrastructure that logs vehicle movements, follows pedestrians with AI, and feeds data-hungry police departments across the country.

A new investigative report highlights how Flock's network - now encompassing tens of thousands of cameras - enables police to reconstruct months of travel history for any vehicle with a few clicks, no warrant required. Security researchers and activists are pushing back, mapping the devices and exposing security lapses that leave feeds openly accessible online.

DeFlock and the Scale of the Panopticon

In Boulder, Colorado, activist Will Freeman operates DeFlock.org, which has mapped over 88,000 Flock cameras nationwide. The app reveals camera locations and orientations, underscoring how pervasive the network has become in public spaces. Flock's license plate readers snap time-stamped photos of every passing vehicle, allowing historical queries spanning up to 30 days.

As security researcher Benn Jordan noted, plotting that data on a map effectively places a month-long GPS tracker on your car. Jordan, who previously discovered dozens of Flock cameras streaming publicly, described AI-driven features that zoom in and follow individuals - whether persons of interest or random passersby, Atlanta News First reports.

As we've previously reported on the battle brewing between mass surveillance tech and individual liberty, tools sold for "public safety" quietly erode Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Company Denials vs. Training Videos and Hardware Reality

Flock's Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas claims the company aids in solving around 700,000 crimes annually. He disputes "tracking" characterizations, arguing the system captures discrete points in time rather than continuous monitoring.

However, Flock's own webinars contradict this:

"The example of tracking that vehicle from location to location to location," a Flock webinar instructor said.

"And you're able to track your suspect's movements," another webinar showed.

In one training video, a police officer described using Flock cameras to follow a suspect across state lines: "And we were able to track him all the way over to another state, in Kentucky."

Flock's Condor cameras go further: These pan-tilt-zoom units use AI to detect and automatically follow human movement. When confronted, Thomas maintained the company does not track people, attributing features like "Guardian Mode" to mere object detection rather than persistent tracking. Yet demonstrations show the cameras panning and tilting in real-time to keep subjects in frame.

Critics like Jordan suggest the pedestrian-tracking hardware emerged conveniently after earlier denials that Flock only captured license plates.

Security Nightmares and Misuse

Jordan and collaborators found over 70 Condor cameras streaming openly online without passwords. He published the video on YouTube along with 404 Media.

"I watched a man leave his house in the morning. I watched a woman jogging alone on a forest trail in Georgia," Jordan said.

Thomas said the exposure was an accident caused by Verizon sending the wrong SIM cards with public IP addresses on roughly 60-70 devices, which were fixed once discovered. Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.

Police officers nationwide have been arrested for using Flock cameras to stalk former partners and love interests. Freeman and Jordan warn that human nature makes such misuse inevitable in a system logging everyone's movements by default. Thomas pointed to audit logs and accountability measures, but activists argue the architecture itself invites overreach.

The "Safety" Trade-Off and Pushback

Flock touts its role in preventing mass violence and solving crimes, with Thomas positioning the company on the side of those "fighting to stop" such threats. Yet more than two dozen cities, including Denver, have canceled contracts amid privacy concerns and questions over data access.

Freeman, demonstrating DeFlock's route-planning feature that avoids camera-dense paths (turning a quick 1.7-mile trip into a 14-minute detour), argues the default of logging all citizens - not just suspects - is the core problem. He plans to keep "tracking the trackers" in the absence of oversight.

This saga fits a familiar pattern of privatized surveillance creep: Companies like Flock build the infrastructure, police query it with minimal friction, and civil liberties erode under the banner of security. As similar systems proliferate, the question remains whether Americans are willing to accept a perpetual digital dragnet in exchange for promised safety.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 08:45

The post Pete Hegseth Becomes the First American Secretary of War to Lose a War: The Iran Deal appeared first on CEPR.

US Housing Starts Collapsed In May To Lowest Since COVID

With housing inventories at recent highs, the US housing market just suffered another sentiment setback as Housing Starts crashed by 15.4% MoM in May (far worse than 2% drop expected and worse since March 2024)), following a revised 8.5% MoM drop in April. Building Permits slipped 0.7% MoM (in line with expectations)...

Source: Bloomberg

That pulls the Housing Starts SAAR to its lowest since COVID (after reaching the highest since 2024 in April)...

Source: Bloomberg

Under the hood, it was multi-family (rental) starts that collapsed:

• Housing Starts single-family drop from 899K (revised lower from 930K) to 882K

• Housing Starts multi-family drop from 486K (revised lower from 529K) to 284K

Source: Bloomberg

Did 'renter nation' just die?

Multifamily permits also fell...

• Housing Permits single-family rise from 881K (revised higher from 872K) to 886K

• Housing Permits multi-family drop from 491K (revised lower from 514K) to 474K

Is homebuilder sentiment about to slump even further...

Source: Bloomberg

It seems recent rises in the mortgage rate (and inventories already at over-stuffed levels, given the slowness of sales) has finally dented the homebuilders' self-satisfying confidence.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 08:41

 

 

The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Jean Eric Salata, Chair of EQT group, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

 

~~~

 

MASTERS IN BUSINESS

Jean Eric Salata, Chair, EQT Group
Host: Barry Ritholtz, Bloomberg Radio

 

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:00:07   I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Jean Eric Salata. He is chair of the EQT Group, the largest alternative manager outside of the US. They manage over $316 billion. Previously, he helped set up the Baring Private Equity Asia group and built it into one of Asia’s premier private equity platforms. With no further ado, Jean Eric Salata, welcome to Bloomberg.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:00:52   Thank you, Barry. It’s great to be here.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:00:54   Great to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Before we get to EQT, you have a really interesting background, and I want to dive into that a little bit. You grew up in Chile, you went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to get a bachelor’s in finance and economics. Was investing always the career plan?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:01:20   Well, yes, investing was always the career plan. That’s not how I ended up in Asia, but the idea of going to Wharton and becoming an investor was something I always wanted to do since I was a young boy. I remember reading a lot of biographies when I was a kid—of business people—and being very intrigued by that. I remember having my first paper delivery route when I was like 10 or 11 years old and really enjoying the idea of making money, and then I actually started investing that money as a young kid in the stock market as well, and kind of understanding how that worked. And then when I ended up at Wharton undergraduate, studying finance and management, I got very intrigued with global business outside the US. I come from an international background. My family—we grew up in South America. My grandparents actually came from Eastern Europe and were sort of refugees that ended up in South America. Generation to generation, we’ve been moving around quite a bit, and I always felt like I had quite a different perspective on life and the world than a lot of the people I was at school with. And so I was interested in pursuing that. And, as luck would have it—or fate would have it—I ended up meeting my girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife, who’s from Hong Kong, and I ended up moving there right after I graduated—a year after I graduated from college—and ended up really building my career in Asia as a result of that.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:02:40   And that was Hong Kong before the handover. So: Chile, Hong Kong. You started at Bain as a consultant, ended up everywhere from Sydney to Boston and then back to Hong Kong. Tell us a little bit about that global experience. How has that changed how you look at the world of investing?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:03:00   Yeah, I’ve always felt a little bit like an outsider in the way I look at things. I’ve never felt like I was exactly part of the community, or the consensus view of things. I was always thinking about things a little bit differently, I guess, given the background. When I was growing up in the US, I was always comparing things in the US to the way things were in Chile and saying, oh, this is different, or that’s different. Then when I moved to Hong Kong, I had the same perspective. I was thinking, wow, there’s a lot that I see happening—all my friends working on Wall Street or in private equity firms in the late eighties, early nineties—that’s not yet happening here in Hong Kong. It felt like there was a gap there. And that always intrigued me and got me motivated and interested in thinking about starting something new that would try to take advantage of that opportunity created by that gap—of what’s already happening in the US eventually coming to Asia. And that’s sort of what led me to eventually leave consulting and get into private equity in the early nineties, which was really very early in an Asian context in the private equity industry. And from there, to start building the business.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:04:13   So you leave Bain. Was the next stop AIG Global Investment? Did you help set up their PE arm, or was that already up and running?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:04:23   No. AIG was essentially an insurance business. Some of your listeners might recall Hank Greenberg, who’s sort of a legend. He didn’t actually start that business, but he was the one who really grew it beyond the founder, C.V. Starr’s, initial starting of the business in Shanghai, of all places. And it became a large global insurance company. In those days in Asia, there really wasn’t a private equity industry, but there were insurance companies like AIG that had long-dated liabilities and they needed to find long-dated assets. So you had the stock market and fixed income and so on, but in the private markets there wasn’t really a fund to invest in per se. So they started making their own investments off their balance sheet, into companies, to match their long-dated liabilities. And so it was really working for AIG, in their internal private equity group, that got me started in the industry.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:05:17   Foundational experience at AIG—that’s really in private equity. That’s a sentence you don’t hear that often.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:05:24   It was early days. It was interesting, because the whole region was really starting to boom. It was the golden period of globalization, with the emergence of not just China, but Southeast Asia—Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea. All these markets were starting to really develop and industrialize, and there was a lot of requirement for capital for growth. So we were really growth investors in those days, putting money to work behind companies and helping them to grow.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:05:55   And then you move from investor to operator. As executive vice president, you run finance for Shiu Wing Steel—a giant Hong Kong industrial. What was that experience like?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:06:07   Yeah, that actually happened before I left to do the private equity. So it was Bain, then Shiu Wing, and then AIG. But the Shiu Wing experience is a part of my background that’s a little bit different, because it’s really a family business, very traditionally run, an industrial company. It’s actually my wife’s family business.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:06:30   Oh, really?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:06:30   Yeah. It was a very different experience. I went from—

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:06:35   I went from Bain & Company, you know, sort of business school—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:06:41   Very buttoned-down.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:06:42   Buttoned-down. Everybody has similar backgrounds, very analytical—to the opposite end of the spectrum, which is a family business. Everybody who’s in management is related to each other, and you’re making decisions based on traditional ways of doing things. But—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:06:58   This isn’t a small little family dry cleaner. This is—

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:07:02   It’s a big business, yeah.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:07:03   —a giant conglomerate.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:07:04   A sizable business. And it was a good experience for me, because it helped shape, in the very formative years of my career, an appreciation for both sides of the spectrum. On the one hand, you have the need to be analytical, rigorous, to understand global trends—the way you look at things as a business school student. On the other hand, if you’re going to do business in Asia, you have to be a little bit more entrepreneurial. You have to listen to your instinct. You have to be able to develop relationships with people, because ultimately the decision-makers in that part of the world—a lot of them have those sorts of backgrounds. So you need to be able to understand how they think. That was a very valuable experience during my formative years. But I came to the view that I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my career in that sort of setup. So I applied to business school, and I got in—I got into Harvard Business School, actually. I was about to start at Harvard. I literally was there, registered—I’m actually in the picture book—ready to go. And that’s when I got the job offer to come back and work for this private equity division of AIG, which I ultimately decided was really what I wanted to do, rather than go back to school again, having gone to undergraduate for a business degree already. So I decided to defer my business school, go back to work in Asia in private equity. And ultimately I actually never ended up coming back to school.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:08:31   So after AIG, you helped launch a regional Asian private equity program for Baring Private Equity Partners—a UK-based bank, right? Do I have the timeline right? So, 1997. What was the investment landscape in Asia like in the nineties? Was that a very underappreciated set of opportunities, or had people started to sniff out that this area was going to be booming?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:09:00   It was a very volatile period, actually, if you recall what was going on at the time. Two things happened. In 1995—this is just around the time I was joining Baring Private Equity—Nick Leeson, who is a name some of your listeners may recognize and others may not, brought down this 300-year-old bank.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:09:22   Barings Bank. Yeah.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:09:22   He broke the bank, out of Singapore, actually trading Japanese stock futures and covering up his losses, which eventually brought the whole bank down. It was a 300-year-old bank, one of the most prominent firms. So what ended up happening is that the Dutch firm ING took over Barings—famously for one pound—and assumed all their liabilities. This was around the time that I had joined. At the time I remember thinking, oh, this is very unsettling—I don’t know what I’m going to do. I was very worried. I had just decided to leave AIG and join this new company, Baring Private Equity. In hindsight, sitting here today, I can tell you it’s probably one of the best things that ever happened to me—to be able to step into a situation that was going through a lot of change. I think it’s an important lesson in life, actually. There are these times when you go through—there’s serendipity, number one, so luck. There’s also the fact that you’re often thrust into situations you don’t expect. And it boils down to how you end up responding to them. Looking for the best possible outcomes, or the best way out of a situation, can sometimes lead to huge opportunities—which is what happened here. Because that confusion of the takeover by ING of Barings resulted in Barings essentially figuring that they didn’t need to have some of these non-core businesses. So I approached the new Dutch owners and asked them if it was okay if we spun our business out, which we did. It was a very small business—we had $25 million of assets under management, which even in those days was not a lot of money. We were really just getting started, and they agreed. So we ended up establishing an independent small private equity business called Baring Private Equity Asia.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:11:09   So you kept the name.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:11:10   We kept the name.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:11:11   BPEA. There was this tremendous transition from what was essentially a startup to what eventually became a pretty substantial institution. What was that like?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:11:26   Initially, we were starting off—and again, it was 1996, 1997. If you recall, 1997 was actually the Asian financial crisis, as it’s referred to, which was a terrible period of huge currency devaluations—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:11:45   The ruble was worse the following year, with Long-Term Capital Management, if my memory is right. So the Asian contagion was the Thai baht crisis in ’97.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:11:53   It was the Indonesian high-yield market as well that blew up. People were basically borrowing dollars because it was cheaper to do so, using that money to invest in their businesses in Asia, thinking they could make the spread and capture that—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:12:09   —as long as the currency stays stable.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:12:11   Which is okay, but then it is until it isn’t, right? And so that’s what happened. That blew out, and it caused a tremendous financial crisis across the whole region. This is in the middle of when we were getting started. I remember we were writing the first PPM—the first private placement memorandum—to go raise capital. And the whole story in ’96 was about growth in Asia, the growth story. Halfway through writing the PPM, we had to change the strategy to become more of a distressed strategy—how we were going to capitalize on the dislocation in Asia to invest in great companies that had bad balance sheets. Which is sort of what we did with that first $25 million that we started with. Because what happened was that ING gave us that seed capital to get going—the $25 million. They were supposed to give us $300 million, but it ended up not coming through. So we started with $25 million.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:13:01   Why is it that there’s such a multiple between the indications of interest and the actual cash?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:13:09   What happened in my case is that there were supposed to be three of us coming across to start the business. There were two very senior guys from AIG, actually, who were poached by Barings to start the business for them in Asia. And they asked me—the young kid who was doing all the number crunching—to join them to do the actual work. I said I’d be delighted to, because it was such an exciting entrepreneurial opportunity. Here I am, a young junior analyst, and I get a chance to be potentially a partner in this startup. So I raised my hand. As we were about to get started, the two senior guys got a counteroffer from Hank Greenberg, who called them up and said, hey, you guys are too important, we want you to stay—here’s all this money and equity to convince you to stay. But he didn’t make me a counteroffer. He just cut me loose. So those guys accepted the counteroffer. I was left there on my own, and I went back to the ING folks and said, here I am, I’m ready to do this. They said, well, you’re a little young and inexperienced, it’s not what we’re expecting—we’re going to slash the capital we commit to this from $300 million to $25 million.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:14:12   Less than 10%.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:14:13   And I said, that’s good enough for me. I’ll take that—that sounds good. So we started with $25 million, and we did five deals of $5 million each. It turned out that because of where we were in the cycle, we were lucky to be able to buy in at good prices. And we bought some interesting businesses—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:14:30   That sounds really—

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:14:31   That got us started, basically.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:14:32   That sounds really quite fascinating. So BPEA was in China, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea. Here’s the thing I’m fascinated by. Maybe New York is different from Florida, which is different from Texas, which is different from California—but we all speak the same language, more or less. It’s the same laws, the same regulatory structure. When you’re working throughout Asia, there’s a different legal system, a different cultural dynamic, different political dynamics. How do you build relationships? How do you build a knowledge base and navigate? From an American perspective, are those countries more similar than we imagine, or am I teeing this up correctly—each one is its own independent, unique region?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:15:24   You’re absolutely right about that, and that actually is the key, I think, to what we’ve been able to achieve over three decades—overcoming those barriers. Because ultimately, people think of Asia, they call it Asia, but it’s really, first of all, geographic—it’s a huge, expansive region. From Tokyo to Sydney, it’s like a 12-hour flight. And even from Hong Kong all the way to India, it’s still a pretty long distance. And culturally, you’re talking about a very significant difference in the local culture, the local language, the ways of doing business. So what we did initially—and we were actually criticized for this in the early days, because in those days people just did single-country funds for that very reason. You had a China fund, a Japan fund, a Korea fund. What we set out to do was to say, okay, we’re going to create a regional investment program. People looked at me and said, what do you know about investing in Japan? Or, what do you know about India? You’re not even from Asia. And so what I appreciated early on—this has been an important lesson in my career—is that being a good investor is very important for what we do in our industry, but if you want to build a company, which was always my ambition, if you want to build a business out of it, you need to actually build a team, not just be a good investor. Being a good investor is kind of a prerequisite to be in our industry. But beyond that, it’s really about building a team. So I was lucky enough to meet and bring on board some great partners early on, with very diverse backgrounds. We have people, even to this day, from each of these markets. We had great partners from China, from Taiwan, on our team that we hired early on. We had a very good team in India, on the ground in Mumbai. We call it “local with locals,” where you have local teams in each market. In 2005, we opened up an office in Japan and we hired a great team there. As we were building the team, you needed to have people from those markets who understood those markets. But the next question is, how do you stitch it all together? How do you create that common thread? And that comes down to culture—building a culture of like-minded people. So I started to gain a huge appreciation for the importance of culture in a business. And that’s something that EQT, I think, has really excelled in globally. One of the reasons I was ultimately attracted to EQT, in combining our business with EQT four or five years ago, was that Conni Jonsson, the founder of EQT, early on—with the Wallenbergs’ backing—realized that culture ultimately drives performance in an investment organization like ours. So he built an organization with tremendous culture, and our culture was actually somewhat similar. So we were able to bring the two cultures together, and the cultural fit ended up being what made that merger so successful. But going back to building the Asia business—building the team on the ground, building the common culture—then it was, how do we institutionalize this, instead of just doing deals here and there? How do we create a unified, systematic approach? This is where my Bain days came in: let’s come up with some constructs about how we think about capital allocation, how we think about diversification, how we think about macro, how we think about sector trends, how we think about our investment committee process. How do we drive systematic due diligence in every market, so we have quality control in each market—it’s not just random deal makers doing things the way they want to on the ground? And so pulling all that together took a lot of time. I’m shortening it here, but there were a lot of ups and downs, a lot of mistakes, a lot of setbacks. But eventually we got there, and we refined our strategy over the years and created something that’s actually quite hard to replicate—this regional platform delivering consistent outcomes, with a great team of consistent people who have been with us a long time and have a similar approach to underwriting and, ultimately, great performance. So, going from $25 million, by the time we did the deal with EQT we had $25 billion under management—over the span of what was 25 years of building the business.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:19:38   Coming up, we continue our conversation with Jean Eric Salata, chairman of EQT Group, discussing the combination of BPEA and EQT. I’m Barry Ritholtz, and you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:20:12   I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Jean Eric Salata. He is chair of EQT Group, one of the largest alternative managers outside of the US. They manage $316 billion. So let’s talk a little bit about how this all came about. In 2022, you merged BPEA with EQT—a $7 billion deal that followed about 25 years of independence. What led to that decision to merge? What could EQT offer that BPEA couldn’t build on its own?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:20:52   Yeah, I think what I started to sense in about 2015 was that the industry was changing—our industry was changing globally. You started to see global firms moving into Asia. You started to see some firms going public. You started to see multi-product firms developing beyond just a single product, single asset class—scale. And I realized that although we were doing very well and growing successfully, if we wanted to make this a multi-generational business that’s going to continue to thrive, we wanted to be part of this industry consolidation, this trend toward scale—rather than be pushed aside by it. That’s when I started thinking, what are our options? One option was to try to expand beyond Asia and develop our business outside the region. That was going to be pretty difficult at this stage, because the business is becoming so large and entrenched globally. And then I started looking at ways of working with others. That’s when I met EQT, really through their own IPO, which they had recently done—they had gone public in 2018, 2019. I was curious about that. I went to speak to them about how they had done it. We started talking, and one thing led to another, and by the end of the conversation it became evident to all of us sitting around the table that there was something here that could be quite powerful if we were to bring the businesses together.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:22:22   You mentioned earlier how important culture is to performance in an investment world. I would imagine that a Swedish firm like EQT and essentially a regional Asian firm like BPEA—you’d imagine those are very different cultures, and there’s going to be a challenge integrating the two. What was your experience like trying to get all the horses pulling in the same direction?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:22:53   I think initially you could imagine that would be the case, but as it turns out, a few things. First of all, EQT started off as a Swedish firm, but by the time we met it had really already become a much more global business—first Swedish, then European, expanding into Europe, and then expanding into the US, with some presence in Asia, not much. Secondly, EQT is backed by the Wallenberg family. The Wallenberg family is a sixth-generation family from Sweden that has a history of doing business globally—investors in Ericsson, Electrolux, Saab, AstraZeneca, many of the big Swedish companies. So they have a very global mindset in the way they think about doing business. And then I think the other aspect here is there’s a difference between a European firm like EQT and, say, American firms. The European firms are already thinking in terms of, well, every country’s different. The Nordics are different from Germany, which is different from France, which is different from Southern Europe. So when they come to Asia, they have a heightened sense of appreciation for the cultural differences within Asia. To me that was really important—that they understand that within Asia, Japan is very different from India, and India is very different from China. So I felt almost like there was a kindred spirit there, understanding that each country, each region—the cultures really matter. Then I’d say if you look at the histories of the firms, we’re both about 30 years old at the time. We both had our ups and downs. We both kind of built the business from a founder—Conni and myself. There was a lot of common, shared history there. And ultimately it boiled down to the chemistry of the senior team, but then ultimately the culture throughout. I felt very comfortable with it. We spent some time together, meeting with the team members, meeting with each other, and we ended up feeling like this was going to be a great fit—still taking a chance in bringing the businesses together. But having done it now, having been together for nearly four years, I can tell you it’s been a huge success. It really boils down to the fact that the people, the cultural fit, was very strong. Maybe a good time to talk about the values of EQT, which are similar to the values we had at Baring Private Equity at the time. There are some key values that EQT has. Number one, it’s high-performing—which is something most people in our industry are going to focus on. But beyond that, we focus a lot on transparency. We focus on being informal. We focus on being entrepreneurial. And we have a fifth value, which is respectful. If you take all those as a package, what you start to sense is the sort of people who end up coming to EQT and staying at EQT. It’s not the typical deal maker—the Wall Street type of deal maker that you get in some parts of our industry. And I think that really appealed to the makeup of our firm at the time—having that really informal interaction with people. That’s a little bit of a Nordic trait, I would say—this lack of hierarchy. Take a look at Conni: he’s the founder of the firm, and he opened up the ownership of the firm early to all the partners. The fact that he was even open to combining with my old business and, in a sense, diluting even further on a fairly large transaction—that speaks to this expansive view of, we’re trying to build an institution here. It’s not about any one individual, it’s not about creating a legacy of any one individual. It’s about creating a business that’s going to last. That mindset really appealed to me, and felt like the kind of place that was a good home for the company that we had built as a partnership prior to that.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:26:43   Really interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about how the capital is invested. 65% of EQT’s capital is in Europe and Asia. How do you think about geographic diversification? It’s always a challenge.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:26:59   I think diversification is becoming more and more top of mind for global investors, particularly when we talk to our institutional investors. Even in the private wealth channels, you’re starting to get a sense that people feel overly concentrated, over-extended, maybe, in US assets. Not to say that US assets are not attractive, or that they don’t have great prospects—which they do. But having 85, 90% of your assets tied into a market that’s already highly concentrated is becoming a little bit uneasy for people. So what we’re sensing with our clients is a desire to get exposure to more global markets. And where we’re strong is, we have two-thirds of our business outside of the US. We’re very strong in Europe, very strong in Asia. Within those markets, we’re also exposed to some of the best sectors—we have a very thematic approach. We invest in healthcare, we invest in technology. Actually, we just announced yesterday—I don’t know when this is airing—that we’ve been awarded the Scale Up Europe Fund mandate by the European Commission, which is a huge deal. They decided to award EQT the management of what’s going to be a $5 billion fund that will invest in early-stage technology ventures across Europe to help them scale up—so series B onwards, in areas like quantum computing, AI, life sciences, AI infrastructure, industrial technology—really taking the innovation that exists in Europe and scaling it up to compete globally, at global scale, with some of the innovation you see in the United States and in China. So we have exposure to some of these really interesting parts of the global investment landscape, and that’s very additive to what investors typically would have. Their traditional portfolio would be much more heavily weighted toward the US, and this is a way to get a little bit broader global diversification.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:28:53   Really interesting. When we look at the performance of various markets, really going back to the great financial crisis, it feels like Asia and Europe very much lagged the US, up until a year or two ago. I’m curious how you look at some of the macro tailwinds that Asia is certainly enjoying, as we see a shift toward China in many ways, especially leadership. And how do you see Europe? There are some tailwinds, some headwinds—they seem to be a little more complex in trying to figure out what direction they’re heading.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:29:34   Exactly. I think what we’re starting to see globally right now is this CapEx supercycle that is playing out with AI infrastructure—but not just AI infrastructure. It also feeds into the reindustrialization focus, the CapEx for reindustrialization.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:30:00   Reindustrialization—explain what that means.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:30:07   Meaning investing back into more of the industrial base of, say, the United States or Europe, away from just outsourcing all of it. So this reindustrialization, the AI CapEx infrastructure, plus the whole power and energy transition that’s going on with electrification—this is resulting in much more capital-intensive investment than we’ve ever seen before. The numbers people are throwing around are just unprecedented within our lifetimes. It’s historical, the levels of investment that we’re seeing. And that has knock-on effects throughout the whole supply chain. A lot of the supply chain actually feeds back into Europe. It feeds back into Asia, certainly. So this global supply chain of capital expenditures is creating new investment opportunities and demand for capital that we have never seen before, in terms of the quantum of money that’s required to make this investment play out. So broadening that exposure across the regions is where we see opportunity. If I look at the world today, the AI infrastructure opportunity globally is probably the single biggest, most interesting investment opportunity for us. It means investing in a couple of key areas. One is the compute, or data center, space. We have one of the largest data center businesses in the world, called EdgeConneX. It’s active both in the US and in Europe, and now increasingly in Asia. We have a joint venture in India, for example, with the Adani Group, in EdgeConneX. That data center business has over 90 data centers. It’s increased in value—we’ve owned it now for six, seven years—I think it’s increased by 20x in terms of the total installed capacity of the business. In addition to that, we take an end-to-end solutions approach. So we have the compute, but we also have about $100 billion of investment into energy—the whole energy grid, power generation and storage. This is a really important part of the comprehensive solution that you need to drive AI compute. So we’ve got the energy, we’ve got the compute, and we’re also investing in the digital infrastructure to connect it all—the digital connectivity of all of this. If you tie that all together, our infrastructure business is really riding some of these global tailwinds—not just in the US, but really doing this globally. Then in addition to that, the other thing that’s pretty interesting, if you take a non-US lens on the world, is what’s happening in Japan. The Japanese buyout market is really on a tear. It’s being driven primarily by some corporate reforms around shareholder reforms and increasing shareholder activism—which is supported, actually, by the Japanese government, to improve corporate governance. That’s creating opportunities to really focus on shareholder value and resulting in a lot more deal flow. The number of transactions we’ve seen this year alone is up 60% year to date. The total number of activist shareholder campaigns has doubled in the last few years—from 50 to over a hundred a year—on the back of some of these reforms. So you’re seeing a whole new market developing there for Japanese buyouts, which is very uncorrelated and very complementary to the traditional buyout opportunities that exist in the United States. And then, together with the AI infrastructure opportunity, which is more global, there’s just a lot happening in our ecosystem, which we see as being very additive, very complementary to just the traditional bread and butter of US exposure to private equity or US infrastructure.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:33:40   So I have so many questions to go from that.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:33:43   Sorry, maybe just one last point on that. You started the question off with the outperformance of the market. What ended up happening last year, as you pointed out, is that the stock markets—if you look at listed markets as a proxy—the S&P 500 did pretty well. It was up sort of 18% or something—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:33:58   17, yeah. Versus 33 overseas.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:34:00   But everything else, in Asia, was up much more than that, as it turned out. Even—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:34:04   Europe, Korea—amazing. Who would’ve guessed?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:34:06   Korea’s up 60% last year. Hong Kong was up, Japan was up in the thirties, and even European stock markets did better than the US last year. So the idea that you have all your pension, all your retirement money in one market—it’s worked pretty well for the time being. But the idea of correlation and concentration—markets don’t always go up, they go down as well. I think the old diversification strategies do play a role in long-term asset allocation. And that’s where EQT, I think, has something.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:34:40   I have so many questions about Europe and Japan and Korea, but I have to come back to China for a moment. For the better part of the past two or three decades, China has been the center of Asia. It feels like the geopolitics, the regulatory environment—everything has shifted fairly dramatically. How do you look at China? Are they still the 800-pound gorilla, or are there enough offsetting economies that are really growing and seeing gains in their markets that it’s not all about China the way it once was 10, 20 years ago?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:35:25   The world geopolitically is becoming more polarized, and maybe creating more silos in certain strategic areas like technology and defense, as the winds have shifted. That’s just the reality of the world we’re living in. Having said that, I do think there’s still this underlying ecosystem of interdependence and a desire, I think, to work together—I hope—in areas like, for example, medicine. If you look at the biopharma, the biotech industry, there’s a lot going on right now between China and the US. A lot of the early-stage trials being done—many of those are getting acquired by US pharmaceutical companies and then rolled out for the benefit of humanity all over the world. These are areas where there’s scope for cooperation, and I think everyone can benefit from that. There are areas that are much more sensitive when it comes to technology and chips and semiconductors. But even there, it’s important for all investors, for all businesses, for governments, for policymakers, to at least understand what’s happening in China, because I think it’s relevant—it has an impact on the global outlook. You look at EVs, you look at the solar industry, you look at what’s happening in battery storage—having access to that sort of know-how ultimately is going to be important for everyone. How you do that in a way that protects your national interest is a topic of the day for policymakers globally, in the US and Europe. I think people are looking at that differently than they used to, in terms of how much they’re willing to outsource versus how much they want to do themselves. This Scale Up Europe Fund that I just mentioned is also a policy response to wanting to create homegrown innovation and scale it—which makes sense, the way the US wants to do that and the way China wants to do that. I think the Chinese economy—it’s truly impressive what’s happening there in terms of innovation, the way the economy is growing, and the amount of R&D. If you look at the patents being filed, the level of innovation, how the innovation is being commercialized. But at the same time, there are some very exciting things happening in Europe and in the United States. Obviously the US is also leading in many ways when it comes to AI. One of the things to keep an eye on, by the way, is the cost-of-compute differential between the US and China. There is a big difference in how compute is generated and ultimately the cost of that compute per token to users, which is going to become more of a focus going forward than it has been up until now—where it’s kind of been viewed as a must-have, almost free, available to all employees. There will be more focus on ROI, and this is where people are going to start looking at the competitive position of cost of compute in different markets versus what’s happening in the US.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:38:28   Last question on EQT, before we start talking a little more about the environment out there today. How do investors in EQT manage their exposure? Are they putting money into one fund that has a little bit of everything, or do people get very granular—or a little bit of both?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:38:49   We have 30 different strategies at EQT, across four different areas: private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and secondaries. Secondaries is our newest area—we’ve just announced that we’ve acquired Coller Capital. It hasn’t closed yet, but we’re in the process of bringing that on board. So we have 30 different strategies, and I think we have both. We have the drawdown funds, which are the main institutional vehicles for committing traditionally, as you would, to a fund that invests in buyouts, or in growth capital, or in life sciences, or in real estate. But increasingly—and this is the highest-growth part of our business, and for the industry as a whole—we have the open-ended structures. Some people call them evergreens. We don’t call them semi-liquid, because they’re not liquid; they’re not even semi-liquid; but they’re open-ended. And what open-ended means is that you can subscribe to them every month and you can redeem every quarter, subject to the underlying liquidity availability in the quarter. What we’re starting to see is a couple of advantages of the evergreen, or open-ended, structures. Number one, they do invest across everything, so you don’t have to choose which funds you want to invest in—you get broad exposure. Number two, they invest 100% of your money immediately into the asset class. So we’re starting to see institutional investors use this too, not just the private clients, because they’re able to dial up and dial down their exposure instantly. If you want to have a certain percent of your portfolio in private markets, rather than waiting for the capital to be called over the next two, three years, you can just put it to work immediately into the asset class through these evergreen structures, which are fully invested on an NAV basis immediately. So that’s one of the interesting aspects. The other interesting aspect of our evergreen, or open-ended, structures is that—unlike some of the other products out there, which have designated investment strategies or investment teams for those open-ended structures—our open-ended structure is essentially pari passu alongside everything we do. You get exactly the same exposure to exactly the same deals, the same pricing, the same everything that we provide to our sovereign wealth fund clients, that we provide to our institutional clients. It’s all allocated across equally. So there’s no cherry-picking, no different strategies for the wealth vehicle versus the institutional vehicle. It’s a single vehicle. And then the other key aspect of our investment program—which is sort of why we’ve landed where we’ve landed in terms of our fundraising last year—for example, we’ve just announced the closing of our Asia fund, which is a $15 billion fund. It’s the largest fund ever raised in Asia: $15.6 billion. The reason we’ve been able to achieve this is because of the exits and liquidity profile of our investment program. It’s been a tough environment for exits and liquidity—it’s one of the challenges you read a lot about in our industry. We actually had a record year for exits last year at EQT.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:41:45   $40 billion?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:41:47   $40 billion, something like that. We had $40 billion in distributions, and that’s huge. It’s huge. It’s a record—

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:41:53   That’s more than 10% of total invested dollars. That’s tremendous.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:41:57   It’s actually about 30% of the NAV of the strategies that that covers. And if you look at active funds, and the liquidity profile there, it even included a significant amount of tapping into the equity capital markets—the public markets. We were actually the number one ECM firm last year. We had $15 billion of equity capital markets activity, ranked number one—by far, actually—relative to all the other private equity firms out there, on the back of just having some really interesting assets that the market was open for.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:42:31   Meaning, when you have a liquidity event, that money doesn’t just sit in bonds—you put it actively into equity markets?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:42:39   No—meaning that we’re able to take our companies public, or sell down through the public markets, as an avenue of getting liquidity, versus just trying to sell to other buyout funds or to strategic buyers. Those deals have been a bit slower, and even the IPO markets have been challenging. But within a challenging IPO market, we had the highest level of activity of all market participants.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:43:01   It’s amazing. My bias is to not think IPO, because of what we’ve seen the past five years—but thinking some exit, and then just park the cash there. I have it exactly backwards: you exit through the IPO market, and then you distribute the cash to LPs.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:43:18   Exactly. Our biggest exit last year globally was a company called Galderma, which is a European medical aesthetics business, providing medical aesthetic products including things like Botox, that have been on the rise—and completely uncorrelated to AI dislocation. An investment that did extremely well for us. In total, over the last two or three years since we took it public, we’ve realized something like $24 billion of distributions from that single investment. Last year alone, we sold over $8 billion in one single tranche, which was the largest transaction ever completed in the public markets by a private equity firm. So the point of all this is really to say that in a tough market, where people are looking for distributions, it’s nice to be diversified globally—where you’re not tying all your liquidity proceeds to a single strategy or a single market, but you have exposure to multiple markets, and you’re getting cash back from different strategies to give you the cash you need at a time when you’re lacking distributions from other parts of your portfolio.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:44:25   Really fascinating. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Jean Eric Salata, chairman of EQT Group, discussing the combination of BPEA and EQT. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:45:16   I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Jean Eric Salata. He is chair of EQT Group, one of the largest alternative managers outside of the US. They manage $316 billion. So let’s talk a little bit about the state of alternatives and markets in the current environment. You mentioned artificial intelligence, energy transition, healthcare, digitalization. What has you most excited in Asia over the coming decade?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:45:34   I think in Asia, as we were touching on a little earlier, there are a couple of big themes we’re excited about. One is this CapEx supercycle, which is feeding through the Asian supply chain. When you’re talking about building data centers or semiconductor memory chips and so on, there’s a whole supply chain that feeds into that—whether it’s the cooling, the grid, the capital equipment used to manufacture, the testing equipment, the services around that. So there’s a whole supply chain that’s seeing elevated activity and growth. I think the number is something like an incremental $5 trillion of CapEx being spent in Asia within the industrial supply chain between now and over the next five years. It’s growing at about 15% a year. So you’ve got healthy growth, tremendous CapEx spend. It’s a little bit of the picks-and-shovels approach: you have this tremendous boom in AI, and there are knock-on effects into the supply chain, and Asia’s pretty well positioned to participate in that. You look at markets like Korea, like Japan—those are probably two of the biggest beneficiaries—and certain parts of Southeast Asia as well. So we’re excited about that. I think the second big opportunity, which we touched on earlier as well, is just the Japanese buyout market, and the level of reform you’re seeing there, driving increased deal flow—driving really what I call the excess-returns opportunities that private equity is good at and should be focusing on. The days of buying undermanaged assets—either changing the management or enhancing the strategy of the business in order to close the gap between the operating performance of the business and the full potential of the business—that’s the traditional playbook of private equity. It’s gotten harder to do in parts of the market that have become more efficient globally. You have a lot of shareholder activism already, so most public companies are already doing what they should be doing. But in Japan, they’re a little bit still further behind. And now you see a big push by the Japanese authorities and political leadership to drive efficiency in their economy and to drive corporate governance reforms, which is trying to close this gap between full potential and performance. As a result, there are a lot more assets being sold—either corporate divestitures, take-privates, or generational change happening with founder-led businesses—where you’re buying a business and you really see the opportunity to simplify and improve execution. It’s really about that: focusing the business in fewer areas, and then improving execution on management.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:48:22   Let’s talk about energy transition. It feels like here in the United States we’re sort of backing away from a lot of alternatives. Asia seems to be full speed ahead. What are you seeing as opportunities in that space?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:48:38   We see a lot of opportunities across both Europe and Asia in the energy transition. With what’s going on now in the Middle East as well, it’s kind of driving home the point that energy security is going to be even more critical in the future. There’s a tremendous technological push of innovation coming out of China in terms of supply chain—for batteries, for solar, even areas like hydrogen. You’re starting to see a lot of very interesting scaled-up innovation there. We have a big infrastructure business in Asia that invests in the energy transition. We invest in battery storage, for example. We have a big business in Australia now—Australia is big in this area. We expect to see more opportunities there. Singapore’s been a leader, actually, in funding the energy transition throughout Southeast Asia—very forward-thinking in that regard. It’s just a large investment opportunity that ultimately, with energy transition and climate-related concerns, the real catalyst here is ultimately going to have to be the market forces that drive this forward. It has to be that it’s more cost-competitive, more cost-effective, to do things using electricity and the grid than using fossil fuels. Otherwise, if it’s not more cost-effective, the market forces aren’t really at play, and you’re relying on policy or relying on philanthropy—and it’s just harder to see these things scale. But we’re getting to this tipping point where the cost curves are coming down, the security concerns are becoming real. And when that happens, then, with scale, with volumes—whether it’s EV batteries or solar panels—you’re starting to see the big uptake in the movement in that direction.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:50:27   We’re getting a sense in the United States that the war in Iran and the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz is, paradoxically, accelerating the move away from gas, oil, crude, coal—even toward alternatives. What’s the perspective like from Asia?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:50:46   I would agree with that. I think energy security is top of mind. Certainly China has moved very much in this direction—they have the largest installed base of renewable energy, and they’re the largest investor in renewable energy globally. They’re moving in that direction probably mainly for energy security reasons, as well as global competitiveness reasons. And then eventually it’s also going to come—I mean, there’s still a multi-decade run in fossil fuels, for sure, that’s going to play out—but ultimately there’s going to be a cost issue related to fossil fuels. If you want to be competitive as an economy, what’s your cost of energy? If energy is a scarce resource and the cost of energy is going higher and higher versus the other alternatives out there, and you haven’t invested in that, you’re playing catch-up. It will feed through to the rest of the industrial base. And I think this is where it’s important to take a longer-term perspective, and where private equity can play a role—thinking through the next five, ten years. How do you make companies more competitive? How do you drive innovation? How do you drive investment in energy competitiveness and the energy transition to help this happen?

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:51:55   We haven’t really talked about India, which has always felt like it was, oh, two years away—this is really going to be the next powerhouse economy. It always feels like it’s on the verge. What are you seeing there? It kind of feels like one of the more compelling growth stories.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:52:14   I like India a lot. We’re very, very bullish on India. It’s been the biggest market for us over the last five years in terms of where we’ve invested. Historically, the story’s been a lot about technology investments, in the tech services industry primarily, which has been a beneficiary of global investment in technology and the tech stack and the migration to the cloud. That has hit a little bit of a disruption now with what’s going on with AI. But they’re quickly adapting to it and using AI tools to actually make enterprises more competitive, and to help diffuse AI into the enterprise—using the skills and the millions of computer technology programmers and labor available to help drive AI adoption, which is one of the things India is very competitive in. But the bigger story in India, I think, for the next five years is more about the consumer and the growth in the middle class. One of the big beneficiaries of the growing middle class—as you’re now seeing a huge increase—it’s the largest population in the world, 1.4 billion people. It’s also the youngest population in the world, so the demographics are very favorable. One of the big early beneficiaries that we’re starting to see on the ground in India is the healthcare sector. Housing and healthcare. The first thing people do when they start to save and generate a good income is buy a home, and then they want to make sure their family is well looked after—their parents and their children well looked after from a healthcare standpoint. So we’re seeing strong demand for housing, housing finance, and for healthcare, which are some of the areas we’re investing in in India.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:53:48   So I’m going to paraphrase a quote of yours: “Talent is the key to unlocking outsized returns in private equity.” You’re looking at India, China, Japan, Korea, Europe, and the United States. How do you find and develop management teams in such a broad, diverse selection of regions? That sounds like its own specific challenge.

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:54:14   It is. One of the things we’ve learned over the years is the importance of being able to be what we call an active owner in the businesses we buy. That has really meant that we’ve migrated primarily to a controlled buyout strategy—other than in our early-stage tech strategies. But in our main strategies, we’re a buyout investor, which means we have control. Having control enables you to really effect change in the business, and it collapses this agency problem that you see between ownership and management in many other markets around the world—and Asia is no exception. We’re starting to collapse that, and see that collapse, in Asia, through the ownership model—the governance model, really, that private equity brings when we invest, as an industry. As a result, as we’ve scaled our business over time, you’re starting to be able to really develop pools of talent. For example, we have seven, eight hundred what we call industrial advisors globally across EQT, from different industrial sectors that we invest in. We tap into those to come and become what we call our non-executive chairs, or independent non-executive chairmen. So we have a chairman we bring in from industry. We usually have a CEO—either the existing CEO or a new CEO. And then we have our deal partner. That combination of those three people is the governance structure for our investments that drives the active ownership model for our business. We’re also seeing a bigger pool of domestic talent now that we’re able to develop within, say, Japan, within India, through multiple private equity-backed investments that we’ve made—where the same CEO, for example, that we work with before, we can work with that same individual again, because the model has now been tried and tested and been around for a couple of decades. So you’re developing a much deeper bench of talent in private equity in Asia than you’ve had in the past. And that’s been a key driver of returns—the combination of governance through the buyout strategy, plus the talent pool that’s available now.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:56:12   I have one last question before we get to our favorites that we ask all our guests. What do you think investors are not talking about or thinking about, but should be, when it comes to private equity—different geographies, different regulatory policy changes? What is getting under-noticed or overlooked but shouldn’t be?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:56:34   I think one of the really interesting developments is what’s happening in the convergence between public and private markets—companies staying private longer, and the blurring of the lines there. How do you get exposure, if you’re an investor, to the best businesses in the world? Do you wait until they become public, or do you do it before they become public? Historically, it was a very small minority of institutional investors that really got exposure to private markets. Individual investors had almost zero. That’s changed a lot in the last few years, but it’s going to change, I think, even more as we move into the coming years and people start to participate more—the democratization of our asset class that people talk about. I think a big trend related to that is the blurring of the lines, or convergence, between the secondary market and the primary market of private equity. Those two used to be viewed as completely different things. You invest in a private equity fund, and if you can’t get your money back after seven or eight years, you find someone to buy those interests from you—that’s a secondary market. That has changed. Think about the public markets: when you invest in a stock, you’re buying a secondary position. When you buy Apple stock today, you’re buying it from someone who’s selling it to you. You’re buying a secondary; you’re not buying the IPO of Apple—that was a primary that happened 25 years ago. The same thing’s happened in private equity. All the companies that are private—in order to buy them, you had to buy them as a primary, through a fund that bought the company as a private deal. Well, now we have $3.8 trillion of private companies out there that are unrealized, that everybody’s complaining about. That actually is the foundation of a secondary market now in private companies—private assets that you and I and others can start to participate in through the secondary market. You don’t need to find a new deal to buy; you can buy an existing business that’s privately owned, if you like it, if it’s got great return potential, if it’s the right price. It’s another way to get exposure to the asset class—through these evergreen structures, for example, and particularly through the secondary market structures, which is the way a lot of institutional investors are starting to think about it. If I want to dial up or dial down my exposure to private markets, I can use secondary structures. I don’t need to invest in a private equity fund per se; I can do that through the secondary markets.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:58:52   So let’s jump to our speed round, starting with: who were your early mentors who helped shape your career?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:58:58   I was very lucky. I had a third-grade teacher who took an interest in me and kept me after school to help me work on independent projects. It was like an outlet for my creativity, which I felt was frustrated in class. Really amazing teacher.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:59:13   Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading currently?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:59:17   I read a great book called Why the West Rules—for Now, which is a sweeping history of why the industrial revolution happened in the West and not in Asia and the East. But it talks about how, going forward, that could change. If anybody’s interested in history, I highly recommend that book.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  00:59:33   Really, really good. Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give a recent college grad interested in a career in either investing or private equity?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  00:59:44   Two things I would say. One, you need to be AI-native these days—which was obviously not the case when I was starting out. And secondly, perseverance. Don’t give up. Stay in the game, because things come and go. You get knocked down, you get back up, you stay in the game, and new opportunities arise.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  01:00:00   Final question. What do you know about the world of private equity, private real estate, credit, infrastructure—alternatives—today that might have been useful back in the nineties, when you were really getting your legs under you?

JEAN ERIC SALATA  01:00:13   The so-called eighth wonder of the world, which is the power of compounding. I wish I’d appreciated that a bit more. After 30 years of investing—if you let something ride for 30 years, generally, if it’s a decent business, it’ll be worth a lot of money.

BARRY RITHOLTZ  01:00:27   Jean Eric, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for being so generous with your time. We’ve been speaking with Jean Eric Salata, chair of the EQT Group. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 640 we’ve done over the previous 14 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube—wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is our producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 

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The post Transcript: Jean Eric Salata, Chair of EQT group appeared first on The Big Picture.

From Hormuz To Houston: The US Takeover Of Global Energy Flows Ramps Up

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

• The Americas are replacing the Middle East as the key source of global oil supply, with crude exports from the Western Hemisphere hitting a record 14.5 million bpd while Strait of Hormuz traffic collapsed.

• Trump’s broader energy strategy aims to weaken OPEC’s influence and cement U.S. dominance over global energy markets.

• Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil are emerging as the biggest growth engines, with Venezuela rebuilding output, Argentina rapidly expanding Vaca Muerta shale production, and Brazil reaching record production levels.

Oil exports from the U.S. and its ‘Americas’ sphere of influence continue to be the prime beneficiary from the drop in crude output leaving the Middle East. Industry figures showed dirty tanker shipments from the Americas hit an all-time high of 14.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in May, up from 13.8 million bpd in April, and a 40% increase from May 2025. Meanwhile, transits through the key Strait of Hormuz global oil route dropped 89% from February to May, with total ship movements dropping from over 3,700 to around 400. “The pattern is likely to continue even when the Strait [of Hormuz] opens up again, as it’ll take months for Middle East volumes to recover to their former levels [before the U.S./Israel-Iran conflict], and some key sites will take several years to do so,” a senior source who works closely with the European Union’s (E.U.) energy security complex exclusively told OilPrice.com last week. “Meanwhile, the U.S. has ramped up its own [oil] production to record levels and is helping countries in the Americas -- Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil, mainly -- to do the same,” he added. “It marks a long-term shift in the centre of the world’s global oil and gas gravity,” he underlined.

This is precisely what U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to do from his first day in his first term as president, given his extreme dislike of OPEC’s use of its cartel powers over the years against the core interests of Washington and its allies, as analysed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order. This was first notably seen in the 1973 Oil Crisis in which Saudi Arabia rallied fellow OPEC members into imposing an oil embargo on the U.S. and its allies following their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. By the end of the embargo in March 1974, the price of oil had risen from around US$3 per barrel to nearly US$11 per barrel, which stoked the fire of a global economic slowdown, especially felt in the West. Then-Saudi Minister of Oil and Mineral Reserves, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, highlighted that this marked a fundamental shift in the world balance of power between the developing nations that produced oil and the developed industrial nations that consumed it. However, with the rise of U.S. shale oil production from around 2010, and OPEC’s attempt to destroy the nascent sector through an Oil Price War from 2014-2016 failing catastrophically, Trump has wanted to critically undermine the cartel’s ability to damage U.S. and allied interests ever since. Indeed, in the subsequent 2020 Oil Price War involving OPEC and started by Saudi Arabia for the same reason as in 2014, Trump expedited progress of the ‘No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act’ (NOPEC), which would open the way for sovereign governments to be sued for predatory pricing and failure to comply with the U.S.’s antitrust laws. It could also break up Saudi Arabian oil supergiant Aramco -- the mainstay of the Kingdom’s existing economic and political systems -- into constituent parts, effectively destroying it.

Instead, as delineated in the U.S.’s ‘2025 National Security Strategy’, Trump wants the world’s geopolitical system split into three geographical spheres, dominated by a major power in each. China would hold the primary role in Asia, while Russia would either dominate or significantly influence Europe, depending on how any future conflict between European NATO members and Moscow unfolds. But, at the top, the U.S. would maintain overall dominance and exert direct influence across the Americas (North and South America). Naturally, as energy underpins the economies -- and thus politics -- of every country in the world, shifting the centre of dominance in global energy supplies to the Americas is a core part of that aim. The U.S. is playing its part toward that, pumping oil at record highs, around a baseline of 13.6 million bpd, with plans for more down the line. Of the other major oil-producing countries in the Americas, Venezuela is top of Washington’s development agenda, followed by Argentina and then Brazil.

Following the landmark removal from power of Nicolás Maduro on 3 January by the U.S., Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined a three-phase plan for the South American oil giant that involved stabilising the country and averting economic collapse, recovering the economy and oil sector, and encouraging an eventual political transition. These efforts have already seen a positive trajectory in oil production, with Venezuelan state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) and its foreign partners averaging 1.155 million bpd of crude production in May, compared to 1.130 million bpd in April and 940,0000 b/d in January. In April, executive vice president Jovanny Martinez, said that the country expects to produce 1.37 million bpd by the end of 2026. There is plenty of scope to do so, as Venezuela still holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves -- roughly 303 billion barrels, or about 17% of the global total -- and of its 14 supergiant oil fields, 11 retain more than half of their original reserves. Most of this is extra-heavy crude oil from the Orinoco Belt that requires more technical expertise to handle than lighter grades but is cheaper to lift and often more profitable to process. With those bottlenecks being addressed, it could again produce millions of barrels per day of cheap-to-lift crude, even if downstream handling remained costly. In fact, as recently as 2008, Venezuela was producing around 3 million bpd of crude oil.

One level down in Trump’s list of energy development priorities is Argentina, with Washington having provided a US$20 billion lifeline to the country in October 2025. This was explicitly intended to support President Javier Milei’s pro-market reforms and stabilise the economy for foreign investment. The ‘Reciprocal Trade and Investment Agreement’, which fast-tracks U.S. investment in strategic sectors, including energy and critical minerals, was then signed on 4 February this year. Against this backdrop, several U.S. companies are increasing their oil and gas investment there, particularly in the Vaca Muerta shale formation, which is now being referred to as another Permian Basin due to its scale. Continental Resources recently purchased non-operating interests in four blocks in the Vaca Muerta basin to accelerate expansion, while Chevron is leaning toward making Vaca Muerta a core asset in its global portfolio. Meanwhile, Baker Hughes secured a major order in early 2026 to supply gas compression units for the San Matias Pipeline, supporting gas transport from Vaca Muerta. Overall, Argentina is on track to reach 1 million bpd of oil this year, up 26% from 2025.

That said, Brazil is now producing a record-breaking 4 million bpd and over of crude oil, and including natural gas, total hydrocarbon output has hit a new record of 5.3 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d). Industry forecasts are that it may well become one of the world’s top five oil producers by 2030, supported by extensive investment plans from Petrobras and foreign oil companies. These include supermajors from the U.S., focusing now on high-impact exploration and deepwater production rather than the maturing fields. Last October, for example, ExxonMobil achieved its first-ever upstream production in Brazil at the Bacalhau field, which has a capacity of 220,000 bpd. Chevron was awarded new offshore blocks alongside Petrobras and ExxonMobil last June, and Baker Hughes and Halliburton supply equipment and engineering for Petrobras’s US$109 billion five-year investment plan. Washington is cognisant not just of Brazil’s further massive oil and gas potential but also of its geopolitical importance as one of the original ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China) emerging-market powerhouses, and its geographical position in the U.S.’s ‘backyard’.

With China weakened economically from where it was before Covid, and Russia near economic and military collapse as the war in Ukraine drags into its fifth year, Washington may never have a better opportunity to put Trump’s new world order into place. The Americas hemisphere already accounts for 32% of global crude production and is growing every year, with new supply from the U.S. Permian Basin, offshore Guyana, Argentine shale, and increased flows from Brazil and Venezuela. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, Caleb Orr, highlighted recently that Ecuador and El Salvador are also among the governments Washington works with “hand in glove” on security. He added that security is the “table stakes” for any productive economic relationship and the foundation of the broad-based change in the Americas. The sentiments have been underlined by  National Energy Dominance Council executive director Jarrod Agen, who recently said: “The Western Hemisphere is now the leading driver of energy in the world; we are the centre of the energy world from Alaska down to Venezuela, and what we want is the crude product coming out of Alaska, coming out of Venezuela, coming into U.S. refineries, getting refined, and then exporting to the world.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 08:30

Stock Rally Pauses As Attention Turns To Warsh's First FOMC

US futures are flat, pausing after a three-day rally with investors shifting their focus to this week's FOMC meeting, Kevin Warsh's first, which begins today. As of 8:00am ET, S&P futures are up 0.1% after surging 2% on Monday; and Nasdaq futures gain 0.3%, as SpaceX continued to surge, rising 11% overnight and on track for a more than 50% jump since going public, and briefly surpassing Microsoft's market value in afterhours trading. Pre-market, most of the Mag 7 names are lower; TSLA (-1.7%) and NVDA (-0.6%) are among the laggards.The dollar slipped and Treasuries rose with bond yields 1-3bp lower and the 10Y trading 4.44%. West Texas Intermediate crude fell 3% to $78 a barrel as Goldma and Morgan Stanley cut their oil price forecasts. Base metals are also lower, while gold and silver both rise 0.7% this morning. Overnight, the main macro headline was BoJ (policy rate to 1% with the tapering plan unchanged; a bit hawkish tone in the statement; 15yr JGB added 8.5bp) and China data releases (Retail Sales and FAI both missed; HSI -1.4%). US economic data calendar includes weekly ADP employment change (8:15am), May import/export price indexes, June NY Fed services business activity and May housing starts/building permits (8:30am)

In premarket trading, SpaceX rises 7.3%, putting the stock on track to extend a rally following its blockbuster debut last week. Mag 7 stocks are mixed (Amazon +0.5%, Alphabet -0.1%, Nvidia -0.1%, Apple -0.2%, Meta -0.2%, Microsoft -0.7%, Tesla -0.8%)

• Domo (DOMO) said its board’s review determined a strategic transaction is the best way to maximize shareholder value. Shares are down 13%.
• Edgewise Therapeutics (EWTX) falls 23% after the drug developer gave results from a mid-stage trial of its experimental therapy for a heart disorder.
• Edwards Lifesciences (EW) is up 3.1% after the US government published a coverage proposal for transcatheter aortic-valve replacement, with analysts citing updates that lean positive for the space.
• Huntsman (HUN) falls 7% after it agreed to merge with chemical peer Olin in an all-stock merger of equals. Olin shares are roughly flat in premarket.
• Robinhood Markets (HOOD) gains 2% after it said it is reducing its full-time employee workforce by 10%, and also closing a small number of open roles.

In other corporate news, SpaceX has formally agreed to take over Cursor in a deal that values the AI coding startup at $60 billion, cementing a key part of Elon Musk’s efforts to catch up with rivals on coding tools. In other AI news, chipmaking giant Nvidia sold $25 billion of high-grade bonds, joining a wave of jumbo debt offerings from tech heavyweights as investors clamor to get exposure to the AI boom. Anthropic is said to have held talks with the Trump administration in a bid to lift curbs which led to the company disabling global access to its two most advanced AI models.

With the Iran war on the backburner for now, the focus on Wall Street is now turning to the first Federal Reserve meeting under Kevin Warsh. While the central bank is expected to hold interest rates steady on Wednesday, the spotlight will be on how Warsh navigates the post-meeting press conference and the outlook for inflation. Oil’s drop to the lowest since early March has erased the bulk of the gains seen during the Mideast conflict, easing inflationary pressures just as policymakers assess interest rates.

“All eyes will remain on the Fed for now and how Kevin Warsh will handle the competing pressures from rising inflation and the prospect of lower energy inflation once the Strait of Hormuz reopens,” said Joachim Klement at Panmure Liberum.

The announcement by President Donald Trump of a peace deal with Iran has opened the floodgates for investors to start to deploy the roughly $8 trillion to $9 trillion sitting in money market funds, according to Rick Rieder, BlackRock Inc.’s global fixed income chief investment officer. SpaceX’s initial public offering had already forced investors to make room in portfolios, he added.

As reported earlier, SpaceX shares surged in premarket trading, putting the firm on track to overtake Amazon.com as the fifth largest publicly traded company in the world just days after its blockbuster debut. Shares jumped as much as 19% in early trading before paring those gains to about 8% as of 7:30 a.m. in New York. The premarket gain builds on a more than 40% jump across SpaceX’s first two sessions after its record initial public offering. If it holds through the trading day, the move would lift the market value of Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company to more than $2.7 trillion, above Amazon and up nearly $1 trillion from its IPO.Today SPCX options start trading which will likely add a gamma squeeze to the overall upside pressure. Separately, SpaceX formally agreed to take over Cursor in a deal that values the AI coding startup at $60 billion, cementing a key part of Elon Musk’s efforts to catch up with rivals on coding tools.

As Bloomberg notes, when it comes to SpaceX, the message is clear - buyers care very little about any fundamental or valuation argument. It was already within striking distance of Amazon’s nearly $2.7 trillion valuation at Monday’s close, and is up a further 11% in premarket trading. Options contracts on the stock begin trading Tuesday.

Investors have trimmed allocations to global equities, according to the monthly fund manager survey by BofA strategists. A net 38% of fund managers are overweight, compared to 50% in May, and participants see the biggest tail risks as second inflation wave (34%), AI bubble (28%), disorderly rise in bond yields (19%) and geopolitical conflict (12%).

Meanwhile more are starting to pay attention to the off-balance sheet and circular nature of AI fund flows, discussed extensively here. As Bloomberg notes, after SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are viewed as the most likely contenders for the next blockbuster AI IPOs — and that brings a sharpening focus on the hyperscalers that have spent the past several years becoming both their financiers and their data-center landlords. Alphabet and Amazon have Anthropic exposure through partnerships and investments, while Microsoft has a 27% stake in OpenAI.

The Bank of Japan and Reserve Bank of Australia kicked off a slate of decisions for the week. The BOJ raised its benchmark rate by a quarter percentage point to 1%, the highest level since 1995 and signaled that further policy normalization lies ahead. The yen pared gains against the dollar while local bonds fell. The RBA kept its key interest rate unchanged for the first time this year in response to signs that its trio of hikes are beginning to weigh on the nation’s economy. The Bank of England and Swiss National Bank are also widely anticipated to stand pat this week. Their decisions come after the European Central Bank last week raised rates for the first time in almost three years, with President Christine Lagarde warning inflation triggered by the Iran war is widening beyond just energy.

Meanwhile, with US and Iran preparing to sign an interim peace deal in Switzerland oil is headed for longest run of declines this year on expectations a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will revive supply. Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs cut price outlooks for the coming quarters, with the latter now assuming Persian Gulf exports will reach pre-war levels by the end of July, a month earlier than previously forecast. Additionally, Qatar is planning to rapidly boost liquefied natural gas production once the Strait of Hormuz reopens, aiming to restore most of its export capacity within two months.

European stocks are up and the Stoxx 50 is on track for its longest winning streak of the year. The Stoxx 600 rises 0.5%; industrial and banking stocks are outperforming while automotive and retail stocks are among the biggest laggards. Here are the biggest movers Tuesday:

• Allegro.eu gains as much as 5.3%, the most since May, after Permira ended its decade-long investment in the e-commerce company, with the buyout firm offloading around 131 million shares, with a total transaction value of around $1.2 billion
• Puma shares gain as much as 5.4%, the most since June 4, after HSBC upgraded the German sportswear maker to buy from hold, citing Anta Sports’ stake as a “catalyst for unlocking significant growth opportunities
• Kinepolis shares rise as much as 7.1%, trading at their highest level in almost 10 months, after the movie theater operator had its price target raised to a new Street-high at Berenberg
• Redcare shares gain as much as 11%, adding to Monday’s 17% advance, after the German online pharmacy upgraded its outlook for the year, saying preliminary second-quarter numbers came in stronger than expected
• GEA Group rises as much as 4.6% as Deutsche Bank upgrades to buy on what is now seen as a “more compelling mismatch between the group’s resilient fundamentals and the current valuation”
• PolyPeptide gains as much as 6.4%, the most in more than two months, after Berenberg lifted its price target on the stock, citing confidence in the Swiss contract development and manufacturing organization’s full-year guidance
• Tatton Asset Management shares rise as much as 13%, the most since November 2022, to erase this year’s losses after the firm posted full-year earnings described as “impressive” by RBC Capital Markets
• DFDS falls as much as 7.3%, paring much of a rally over the last two months, as SEB Bank analysts cut their recommendation on the stock to sell, saying the transport and logistics company face “elevated” risks in the Mediterranean
• Rathbones shares fall as much as 19%, the most ever, as the investment management group pauses bringing on new clients requiring enhanced due diligence for as much as a year following talks with the Financial Conduct Authority
• Frasers Group shares drop as much as 7%, edging further off the 2024 high reached on Friday, after RBC Capital Markets downgraded the retailer, saying there’s little upside to its price target following recent gains
• Huber+Suhner declines as much as 5.6% following a downgrade to hold at Berenberg, which says that while there remains a strong investment case for the maker of telecommunications products, upside is limited

Asian stocks advanced for a third straight session after Japan raised interest rates, with investors awaiting further details on the US-Iran deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index advanced 0.5%, lifted by chipmakers and defense contractors. South Korea’s Kospi outperformed, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 closed at a record high after the Bank of Japan raised the benchmark interest rate. Australian stocks erased earlier losses to close little changed after the Reserve Bank kept rates unchanged. Elsewhere, stocks slumped in Hong Kong as data showed Chinese consumer spending fell for the first time since the pandemic. Indonesian markets were closed for a holiday, while stocks mostly rose in the rest of Southeast Asia.

In FX, the dollar inches lower, sending the euro back above $1.16. The yen reversed earlier gains against the dollar and traded near 160.30, with JGB yields rising across the curve after the BOJ hiked rates to 1% overnight.The Aussie weakened 0.3%, while the country’s 3-year yield erased an earlier advance.

In rates, treasuries advanced, supported by gains across European bonds during London morning as oil prices extend declines. With US and Iran preparing to sign an interim peace deal in Switzerland oil is headed for longest run of declines this year on expectations a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will revive supply. Treasury yields are 2bp-4bp richer across a flatter curve with 2s10s spread 1.2bp tighter on the day. 10-year is about 3.5bp lower near 4.44%, keeping pace with bunds and gilts in the sector. Treasury auctions resume with $13 billion 20-year bond reopening; WI 20-year yield near 4.942% is ~18bp richer than last month’s new-issue auction result. IG dollar issuance slate empty so far; Monday’s eight sales totaling nearly $36 billion, including Nvidia’s $25 billion offering, left gross new-issue supply 31% ahead of last year’s pace and roughly in line with 2020’s record tempo. Focal points of US session focus include a 20-year bond auction at 1pm New York time. The BOJ hiked rates earlier, the RBA held.

In commodities, WTI crude oil futures are down more than 3% at lowest level since early March and on the worst daily losing streak of the year on the US-Iran interim deal, despite disagreement on how long restoring activity in the Strait of Hormuz will take. Brent slides toward $81/barrel and is at the lowest level since March. Gold prices are higher and comfortably above $4,300/oz.

US economic data calendar includes weekly ADP employment change (8:15am), May import/export price indexes, June NY Fed services business activity and May housing starts/building permits (8:30am)

Market Snapshot

Top Overnight News

• The US and Iran are preparing to formally sign their interim peace deal in Switzerland on Friday while the text of the MOU is yet to be released. Donald Trump said the deal can survive even if Israel attacks Lebanon. Iran claimed the US has started lifting its naval blockade, semi-official ISNA reported. BBG
• Shipowners will not resume transit through the Strait of Hormuz for weeks until they are confident that the US-Iran deal is “material”, the head of the world’s biggest tanker operator has warned. FT
• A price war is unfolding in China’s crowded artificial intelligence sector as companies cut rates or dangle promotions at a pivotal moment when falling costs and converging model capabilities are ratcheting up the competitive pressure, according to analysts. SCMP
• China's consumer spending and investment have slumped to levels unseen since the pandemic, with retail sales declining 0.6% last month from a year ago. Industrial production climbed 4.5%, driven by a boom in exports and tech-related industries, but the economy is at risk of a deeper slowdown due to weak domestic demand. RTRS
• Qatar aims to restore most of its LNG export capacity within two months of the strait’s reopening, people familiar said. BBG
• The Bank of Japan raised interest rates to a 31-year high on Tuesday in a landmark step in its policy normalization, signaling readiness to tighten further as it focuses ‌on taming price pressures from the Iran-war-induced energy shock. The hike was the first since December and aligns the BOJ with other central banks shifting towards tighter policy to combat inflation, including the ECB. RTRS
• Australia's central bank held its cash rate steady at 4.35% on Tuesday, saying the economy was slowing in the face of tighter financial conditions but warned it might yet hike again if needed to control inflation. RTRS
• Oil companies large and small are showing new interest in committing to drill in Venezuela, after nearly six months of reluctance following the U.S. removal of Nicolás Maduro and the Trump administration’s subsequent call for them to invest. Politico
• Talks between Anthropic and Trump administration officials continued Monday without a deal to resolve the security concerns that pushed the White House to restrict access to the artificial-intelligence company’s latest model, increasing urgency on both sides to find a resolution. WSJ

Middle East News

• US President Trump posted on Truth Social "Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon! Also, the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million [sic] Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!"
• US President Trump's administration considers USD 300bln fund for Iran if deal is upheld, and incentives would be tied to Tehran's performance, including over opening up the Strait of Hormuz and nuclear talks, according to FT.
• US President Trump's close aide Bruesewitz clarified that the USD 300bln Iran reconstruction plan will only be established after Iran completely dismantles its nuclear program, ceases support for terrorist organisations and conducts significant internal reforms.
• US Vice President J.D. Vance said the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran is a brief, one-and-a-half-page document serving as a broad framework rather than a detailed agreement, and is a very general document that requires technical talks. Vance also stated that Trump may release the US-Iran agreement before Friday and affirmed the agreement is expected to be signed on Friday.
• CIA Director Ratcliffe told US President Trump and senior administration officials that information gathered by US intelligence agencies raises serious doubts about Iran's willingness to make the concessions the US seeks in a final nuclear deal, according to Axios. Sources also stated that Trump and his team discussed intelligence gathered by US intelligence agencies, which showed the way Iranian officials were discussing the deal among themselves was inconsistent with what they were telling mediators and the US. Furthermore, Ratcliffe was not the only sceptic on Trump's senior team, as Secretary of State Rubio and Defence Secretary Hegseth expressed concerns and raised questions about the deal in internal discussions, while VP Vance and envoys Witkoff and Kushner supported it.
• Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi said the formal activation of the MOU will be on Friday. That will immediately end the war, including in Lebanon. Second phase negotiations would then commence immediately. Next round of US-Iran talks will start Friday in Switzerland.
• Israeli artillery shelling was reported in the Nabatieh district of southern Lebanon. It was separately reported that Hezbollah fired rockets and artillery at Israeli soldiers, while the Israeli military said it intercepted numerous rockets launched by Hezbollah towards troops in southern Lebanon.

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks traded mixed as the prior day's rally and US-Iran peace deal euphoria petered out amid a continued lack of concrete details regarding the interim agreement and as market participants turn their attention to this week's busy slate of central bank policy decisions. ASX 200 was led lower by weakness in tech, consumer discretionary and industrials, while participants also digested the RBA rate decision in which the central bank paused after three consecutive rate hikes, but warned of potential future hikes if necessary and remained hawkish regarding inflation. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were choppy as participants digested mixed activity data in which Industrial Production topped forecasts, but Retail Sales missed and printed in contraction territory, while the PBoC continued its increased liquidity efforts.

Top Asian News

• China's National Bureau of Statistics spokesperson said China's economic foundation needs to be strengthened, and that the external situation is complex and volatile, while China is to strengthen counter-cyclical adjustments, and will stabilise employment and the market. NBS also stated that China is to expand domestic demand and that some companies face relatively big pressure. Furthermore, the stats bureau spokesperson said there is still ample space for China to expand investment and that stronger employment and income growth are needed to boost consumption, as well as stated that China has ample policy space, reserves and flexible tools available to ensure stable economic growth, but also acknowledged that China's foreign trade faces some pressure due to external uncertainties.

European bourses (STOXX 600 +0.5%) are extending on Monday's gains but yet to reach the best levels reached in the prior session. To recap the main driver, the US and Iran have agreed to a preliminary deal to end the conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. However, new updates regarding the deal have been light as markets now wait for the official MoU signing on Friday. European sectors are broadly higher. Industrial Goods & Services (+1.5%) and Banks (+1.2%) are the clear outperformers, with Media (+0.8%) completing the top 3 sectors. On the downside, Autos (-0.9%) and Retail (-0.6%) are the underperformers.

Top European News

• UK Chancellor Reeves said will see a further "big" uplift in defence spending within the DIP and hopes to get to the next budget without the need to raise taxes.
• Germany's RWI expects the German economy to stagnate in Q2 2026, sees inflation at 3.1% in 2026 and 2.9% in 2027, sees growth at 0.8% in 2026 and 2027.
• EU officials are drafting a blueprint to manage banking crisis liquidity, according to POLITICO.

FX

• DXY was firmer in APAC trade, though gains have reversed since as energy benchmarks continue lower on reports that Qatar is to reach 80% output within two months of the Strait of Hormuz reopening. As oil gradually returns to around pre-war levels, focus is ever-shifting towards central bank actions rather than terms of trade. On that note, Warsh’s first FOMC meeting as Chair is due on Wednesday, widely expected as a hold. The docket today is light, with just ADP employment weekly and Import/Export prices due. DXY marked a session low just above the 99.60 mark, currently unchanged on the day.
• RBA held the cash rate steady at 4.35% as expected, striking a hawkish tone by explicitly signalling further hikes on the table. Alongside the high bar set by markets of hawkishness by the RBA, participants this morning seemingly focused on the soft Australian growth story, with the Aussie under modest pressure, albeit just reversing some of Monday’s risk-on bid. Despite the reaction post-RBA, Westpac says next hike could come in August should the quarterly June inflation figure be strong, while ING suggests it is likely to remain on hold through year-end as inflation broadly tracks the board’s baseline scenario. AUD/USD -0.1% but within Monday's range. The pair marked a session low just above 0.7040.
• BoJ hiked rates by 25bps to 1.00% in a 7-1 vote split, as expected. Asada was the dissenter, arguing that downside risks to employment and production were larger than inflation risks. JPY unreactive to the meeting/presser with Uchida not providing a clear bias, as had been expected heading into the presser given he was standing in for Governor Ueda. Not many clues as to what future policy will look like, with market pricing unchanged, with 85% probability of the BoJ’s next tightening in December. USD/JPY U/C, was supported by 160.00 throughout the meeting/presser.

Central Banks

• The BoJ hiked its short-term interest rates by 25bps to 1.00%, as expected, while it pauses tapering of bond buys in which it will keep monthly pace of JGB buying at around JPY 2tln from April 2027. Decision made by 7-1 vote, with Asada dissenting against a hike.
• In the post-policy press conference, BoJ's Uchida said financial conditions have been accommodative while stating there is a risk of underlying inflation deviating upward to a level above the price target. All-in-all, Uchida avoided any commentary pertaining to forward guidance.
• The RBA kept the Cash Rate unchanged at 4.35%, as expected, but warned of potential further hikes if necessary citing persistent inflation and oil supply disruptions.
• In the post-policy press conference, RBA Governor Bullock said inflation remains too high, with the Board still concerned about inflation. No hike was considered at the meeting but doesn't rule out that the Bank might have to do more on rates. Risks are still to the upside.

Fixed Income

• Global fixed benchmarks (ex-JGBs) started the European session trading on either side of the unchanged mark, with the complex ultimately taking a breather from the gains seen in the prior session. However, some pressure was seen in the crude complex soon after the European cash open, which helped lift fixed paper to highs. As such, yields are lower across the curve, but with underperformance now in the belly of the curve, in contrast to short-end underperformance seen on Monday; nonetheless, the bull-steepening bias remains. The slight pressure in the belly is perhaps indicative of markets beginning to price in the economic impact of the resumption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz; recent updates out of Qatar have suggested that it can restore half of its LNG output within a month, 80% within two months
• JGBs (-47 ticks) lag vs peers, given the BoJ’s decision to hike rates by 25bps (as expected) and its announcement to pause the tapering of JGB purchases from FY27. The accompanying presser provided little updates, with Deputy Governor Uchida avoiding any commentary pertaining to forward guidance. As it stands, markets assign an 85% chance of a hike by year-end, so focus remains firmly on Ueda’s comments when he returns from hospital.
• USTs (+6 ticks) trade at the upper end of a 109-19 to 109-26+ range. Overnight action saw the benchmark move sideways around the unchanged mark, before then moving higher as energy prices fell. From a yield perspective, the US 10yr remains just shy of the 4.50% mark, last at 4.44% - and well beyond pre-war levels at c. 4.00%. Economists will argue that, for now, the damage to the global economy has already filtered through; the US is dealing with elevated inflation, which may keep yields propped up in the short-term.
• Bunds (+17 ticks) and Gilts (+30 ticks) follow the bullish bias mentioned earlier, and trade towards their respective highs. The former digested a better than expected ZEW survey, as markets saw more positive developments on the US-Iran situation. Elsewhere, a 2036 Gilt auction passed with solid demand.
• Germany sells EUR 3.824bln vs exp. EUR 5bln 2.50% 2031 Bobl: b/c 1.64x (prev. 1.32x), average yield 2.64% (prev. 2.85%), retention 23.5% (prev. 23.12%).
• The UK sells GBP 4.25bln 4.875% 2036 Treasury Gilt: b/c 3.46x (prev. 3.45x), average yield 4.858% (prev. 5.026%), tail 0.1bps (prev. 0.3bps).

Commodities

• Geopolitical newsflow has calmed down as markets now await the official MoU signing on Friday. More recently, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi said a new round of US-Iran talks will start on the day of the signing in Switzerland. Concrete MoU details remain unclear. Overnight, US President Trump said Iran has agreed never to have a nuclear weapon.
• Crude futures traded rangebound throughout the Asia-Pac session but have seen pressure in recent trade, driven by reports that Qatar is planning to rapidly boost LNG production to about 50% capacity a month after safe passage through the Strait is restored and c. 80% within two months. WTI Jul'26 slips below the USD 80/bbl mark, trading at the lower end of its USD 78.41-81.58/bbl range. Brent Aug'26 kissed the round USD 81/bbl mark (USD 81.00-83.80/bbl). Dutch TTF also lower, but remains above the EUR 42/MWh mark.
• Spot gold is on a firmer footing, after gains were pared back slightly in the latter end of Monday's session. The yellow metal remains above the key USD 4300/oz handle, currently trading at the upper end of its USD 4306-4336/oz band. According to a WGC survey of 74 central banks, 45% said they plan to buy gold in the coming year, with only 1 saying it plans to cut its holdings. “I think the fall in the price is an opportunity for some central banks to start buying in,” said Shaokai Fan, global head of central banks for the WGC.
• 3M LME Copper trades choppy, with initial weakness driven by the disappointing Chinese domestic data. Retail sales fell for the first time in over 3 years, contracting 0.6% in May and missing estimates of 0%. In contrast, industrial production rose 4.5%, beating the 4.3% consensus. The red metal trades in the bottom half of its USD 13.64k-13.77k/t range.
• Qatar to restore half of its LNG output a month after the Strait of Hormuz opens, with output to reach 80% of full output within two months, according to Bloomberg.
• Iranian Oil Minister announced plans to rapidly increase gas production in fields covered by the Central Iranian Oil Company.
• Iranian Energy Minister said Tehran will soon connect its electricity grid with Qatar.
• Mitsui OSK Lines (9104 JT) CEO said that many operators would wait at least a couple of weeks or a month before resuming normal transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
• Goldman Sachs lowered its Q4'26 Brent crude forecast to USD 80/bbl (prev. USD 90/bbl). Cut 2027 Brent forecast to USD 75/bbl (prev. USD 80/bbl), cut WTI forecast to USD 75/bbl in Q4'26 and USD 70 for 2027.

US Event Calendar

• 8:30 am: May Import Price Index MoM, est. 1%, prior 1.9%
• 8:30 am: May Housing Starts, est. 1430k, prior 1465k
• 8:30 am: May Building Permits, est. 1417.5k, prior 1423k

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

Markets have had an eventful 24 hours, with a major rally in the US and Europe as investors reacted to the US-Iran deal announced over the weekend. So that’s driven a wave of optimism across multiple asset classes, with Brent crude (-4.76%) closing at a three-month low of $83.17/bbl, along with a further -0.23% decline this morning to $82.98/bbl. And with investors pricing out the chance of stagflation, the S&P 500 (+1.65%) closed back within 1% of its record high, whilst the STOXX 600 (+0.19%) closed at its first record since the conflict began.

Overnight, there’s been no letup in the newsflow, as the Bank of Japan delivered a 25bp rate hike as expected, taking their policy rate to its highest since 1995, at 1%. They also signalled further hikes to come, and their statement said that “given that underlying CPI inflation has been approaching 2 percent and financial conditions have been accommodative, the Bank will continue to raise the policy interest rate”. Moreover, they also announced they’d stop tapering their monthly JGB purchases in the months ahead. So at the moment, they’re still purchasing 2.7tn yen per month, and the plan is to keep reducing those monthly purchases by 200bn yen each quarter until Q1 2027. But then from April 2027, they’re going to keep that pace steady at around 2tn yen. In response, Japanese government bonds have seen a decent selloff, with the 10yr yield up +7.5bps to 2.64%, but the Nikkei (+0.42%) is still on track for another record.

Speaking of central banks, the Reserve Bank of Australia also announced they’d leave rates unchanged this morning. The move was widely expected, and keeps their cash rate at 4.35% after hiking at the last 3 meetings. However, even as they held rates for the first time this year, the statement also explicitly suggested they might hike again if needed, whilst warning that “ headline and underlying inflation are still too high.” Against that backdrop, yields on 10yr Australian government bonds are up +3.5bps this morning at 4.84%.

Elsewhere overnight, China’s activity data for May was released, which showed retail sales down by -0.6% on a year-on-year basis (vs. -0.2% expected). Meanwhile, fixed asset investment over the first five months of the year was also down -4.1% compared to the previous year (vs. -2.3% expected). That said, there were some upside surprises, with industrial production up +4.5% year-on-year in May (vs. +4.4% expected). Meanwhile, equities in mainland China have seen modest gains, with the CSI 300 (+0.13%) and the Shanghai Comp (+0.06%) both up slightly.

More broadly, markets have clearly stabilised this morning after the surge of optimism that surrounded the deal yesterday. So futures on the S&P 500 (-0.08%) are pointing slightly lower, and the 10yr Treasury yield is up +0.2bps at 4.48%. In part, that comes as there’s still a lot of question marks over how the deal will be implemented, as we don’t have the full details or a text yet. Nevertheless, we did hear from a US official yesterday, who briefed reporters on the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). They said the details would be released in 24-48 hours, and it would provide for an immediate opening of the Strait of Hormuz, although it would take time given the mines. Meanwhile, the US and Iran would launch technical talks later this week. Then later on CNN, Vice President JD Vance said the MoU was a “very general” document and “about a page and a half”.

As mentioned, the deal’s announcement led to a clear fall in oil prices, with Brent crude at a three-month low. But we also saw the futures curve increasingly normalise, as longer-dated futures moved more in line with the front-end price. So the 6-month future came down -3.45% to $78.87/bbl, meaning that the difference between the 6-month and the front-end future was actually the smallest since the conflict began, at just $4.30. In other words, investors are no longer pricing a sharp fall in oil prices over the next six months, as that was predicated on an agreement that’s now been announced. Moreover, the decline was clear across other energy commodities, with European natural gas futures (-9.12%) closing at a 7-week low of €42.51/MWh.

With energy prices coming down, that helped to ease fears about inflation on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, the 1yr Euro inflation swap (-12.0bps) fell to just 2.713%, whilst the 1yr US inflation swap (-8.8bps) fell to 2.663%, which for both was the lowest in three months. In addition, investors also moved to price out the chance of aggressive rate hikes, with a more dovish profile for central banks over the months ahead. So for the Fed, investors were only pricing in a 79% chance of a rate hike by the December meeting. And over at the ECB, investors were pricing in just 31.4bps of further hikes by December, implying growing doubt about a third ECB hike this year, given they already delivered a 25bp hike last week.

With inflation fears easing and rate hikes being priced out, that led to a sovereign bond rally on both sides of the Atlantic. So in the US, the 2yr Treasury yield (-1.5bps) fell to 4.066%, whilst the 10yr Treasury yield (-0.6bps) fell to 4.47%. Meanwhile in Europe, there were even bigger declines given their relative exposure to the energy shock, with yields on 10yr bunds (-4.1bps), OATs (-4.8bps) and BTPs (-5.3bps) all falling back.

That backdrop was a very strong one for equities too, with a decent surge across the board. For instance, the S&P 500 (+1.65%) closed less than 1% beneath its record high, and there were even bigger gains for tech stocks, with the NASDAQ (+3.07%) surging. Notably, the Philly semiconductor index (+5.45%) even closed at a record high, which felt a long way from a week-and-a-half ago, back when the index slumped more than -10% on the day of the jobs report that led markets to price in a more hawkish Fed. Then in Europe, the STOXX 600 (+0.19%) finally closed at a new record for the first time since February 27, the day before the Iran conflict began.

Finally, there wasn’t much data yesterday, although a few of the US releases came in on the softer side. So industrial production was only up +0.1% in May (vs. +0.3% expected), albeit with a two-tenths positive revision to the April reading. Then the Empire State manufacturing survey fell more than expected to 5.7 (vs. 13.7 expected), whilst the NAHB’s housing market for June unexpectedly fell to 35 (vs. 37 expected).

Looking at the day ahead now, data releases include the German ZEW survey for June, and US housing starts for May. Otherwise, central bank speakers include the ECB’s Escriva, Lane and Sleijpen.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 08:19

SpaceX Acquires Cursor AI In $60 Billion Deal As Coding Agent Race Heats Up

SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, giving Elon Musk's artificial intelligence empire a leg up in the chatbot coding race currently led by frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The Cursor acquisition was announced in a SpaceX 8-K filing with the SEC on Tuesday morning. Details of the deal show that Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A common stock, implying a Cursor equity value of $60 billion.

The SpaceX-Cursor deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.

AI coding tools are among the fastest-growing segments in the AI chatbot race. Over the last eight months, coding technology has rapidly matured and can now build everything from large software projects to websites using plain-language prompts.

There are reasons to believe AI coding could be one of the quickest pathways to achieving artificial general intelligence, or AI systems that are generally as smart as humans.

The deal bolsters SpaceX's AI capabilities just days after the company launched an unprecedented initial public offering.

Overnight, SPCX shares nearly hit $230 per share, giving it a $3 trillion market cap and surpassing MSFT in value.

As of Tuesday morning, shares were trading around $209.

SPCX options begin trading today, which could result in a strong gamma squeeze, potentially sending the stock to $400 or even $420 in the near term (read report).

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 07:45

US Residential Solar Installations Set To Stall For Years As Market Hits Wall

Residential solar in the US is actively cratering after President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill resulted in the sunsetting of a key tax credit for homeowners last year - which will result in a prolonged slump in installations, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

"The market is not expected to recover to the record levels of 2023 anytime in the next decade," according to the report. 

The downturn is widespread - with installers nationwide reporting steep drops in new rooftop projects. Higher interest rates, the winding down of certain federal incentives, and shifting state policies are cited as primary drivers behind the slowdown. Many homeowners are now facing longer payback periods and higher upfront costs, making the economics less attractive than in previous years.

Two notable exceptions stand out amid the broader decline. California and Florida continue to see relatively stronger demand, supported by state-level incentives, high electricity prices, and established installer networks. Even in these states, however, growth has moderated compared with the boom years, and analysts expect the national picture to remain challenged for the foreseeable future.

Impact on Major Players and Supply Chain

Companies such as Sunrun, Enphase Energy, and SunPower have already felt the effects through softer order books and margin pressure. The residential segment, once a bright spot in the clean energy transition, is now forcing these firms to adjust forecasts and focus more on commercial and utility-scale projects where demand remains steadier.

The stall comes at a time when broader energy policy debates are intensifying. With changing federal priorities and questions around long-term subsidy structures, the residential solar sector is confronting the reality that rapid adoption was heavily dependent on favorable financing and generous tax credits that are now fading.

This development underscores the challenges of scaling residential renewables without sustained policy tailwinds. While utility-scale solar and battery storage continue to expand in many regions, the rooftop market's slowdown highlights how sensitive consumer adoption remains to interest rates, payback periods, and regulatory certainty. BloombergNEF's outlook suggests the industry may need several years to stabilize before any meaningful recovery takes hold.

That said, Californa and Florida are bucking the trend...

California, a longtime solar leader, and Florida, which passed a new pro-solar law last year. BloombergNEF projects Florida’s residential solar additions will hit 710 megawatts in 2026, a 62% increase over last year. California’s installations are also forecast to grow 17% in 2026. Both states are also leading on solar permit applications. -Bloomberg

The national crunch is also affecting the market for solar batteries - from which only about 1.4 gigawatts of home storage is expected to go online this year, down 26% from 2025. That said, some 40% of new residential solar systems in the first three months of 2026 had batteries, BloombergNEF found, up from an average 35% last year. 

"Battery storage is the future of home solar," said BloombergNEF analyst, Cosmo van Steenis. "Batteries can lay up stores of solar power in the daytime and release them at night."

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/16/2026 - 06:55

My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads:

• How to Earn a Billion Dollars. Someone replied that having a few million and growing at 93% a month was radically different from being a billionaire. I suspect many people would agree with this statement. But it turns out not merely to be false, but false in a very illuminating way. So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number: compound 93% monthly on 2 million for a year… (Paul Graham)

• Want to Delay RMDs From Your 401(k)? Don’t Retire: Barron’s on the still-working exception that delays RMDs from a current employer’s 401(k). Niche, but useful for the right reader. (Barron’s)

• Triple-Digit Club: A Wave of Stocks Have Seen Huge Gains in 2026: Morningstar on the surprisingly broad set of 100%+ YTD names in 2026. The market isn’t quite as narrow as the index would suggest. (Morningstar)

• The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America: A technology — known as plug-in, balcony or garden solar — is already enormously popular in Germany, in part because you can buy a kit for less than $600 at IKEA. It’s a small solar panel system, often producing up to 1,200 watts of electricity, or a little more than a refrigerator consumes, that you can affix to a wall, hang on a railing or prop up in a garden — and then plug directly into a wall socket. With the help of a small device called a micro inverter, it pumps electricity into your household circuits to offset your power demand. (New York Times)

• Brutally honest guide to not losing money in the market: A straightforward read-the-room piece on capital preservation in markets that look priced for perfection. The boring rules still work. (Yahoo News)

• The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco: A decade ago, commuter buses attracted big protests in San Francisco. Years later, the city is still feeling the repercussions. A book excerpt revisiting how the Google bus became a symbol of everything San Francisco loves and hates about tech. Better history than you’d expect.A decade ago, commuter buses attracted big protests in San Francisco. Years later, the city is still feeling the repercussions. (Wired)

• They’re calling it the end of the war. It’s a tactical pause, nobody’s signed a damn thing, and the terms hand Iran the win. Don’t call this the end of the war. This is a tactical pause and a dangerous part of the political game. Others are calling it that, and they are wrong, or at least early. Read the terms and tell me who truly won. Iran keeps the Strait, keeps the enrichment, gets twenty-four billion dollars back, and the disarmament gets shoved into sixty days of talks Iran swears it will not lose. Israel is calling it a surrender. It swallowed the loss on Iran and bombed Beirut instead, and Iran says a response is coming. Nothing is signed, and Friday is a long way off. (The Omission) see also Trump Winds Down the War He Started With Goals Unmet: NYT on the gap between the original Iran-war objectives and what the deal actually delivers. The exit ramp is less a strategy than a relief. While the president says the agreement with Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz and provide economic relief, the country’s nuclear program is still a subject for negotiation. (New York Times) see also The peace deal with Tehran is an Iranian victory.The Atlantic’s take on the Iran deal as a face-saving retreat dressed up as victory. The talking points and the terms don’t line up. The peace deal with Tehran is an Iranian victory. (The Atlantic)

• Pickiness tastes like trauma How American children became the fussiest eaters in history (and why they need to check their not-dying privilege). But it turns out that Picky is not about what modern parents are doing wrong. Helen is a historian and she traces a wide variety of factors across hundreds of years—things like industrialization of the food supply chain, advertising and its consequences, and the weaponization of parental anxiety for nefarious purposes—to explain how we got here as a culture. (Oakland Review of Books)

• Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself.: Quanta on new evidence that Earth synthesized much of its water internally rather than importing it via comets. A small but profound rewrite of the origin story. At first, scientists thought Earth’s water came from comets. Then, asteroids. Now, they wonder if Earth’s water is homegrown. (Quanta Magazine)

• The Mastermind Who Built the Knicks—One Outrageous Gamble at a Time: When Leon Rose came to New York in 2020, the Knicks had gone decades without a chance at a title. But the team’s president turned them into the ultimate winners by building a roster of underdogs. WSJ on Leon Rose and the front-office gambits that built this Knicks roster. The contrarian moves are easier to admire after the fact. (Wall Street Journal) see also How Can You Not be Romantic About NYC? God Bless Jalen Brunson:.Jack Raines on what it’s like to live in New York right now — the Knicks, the noise, the grind, the moments that justify the rent. A perfect Sunday read. (Young Money)

Video of the day: The Powell years at the Fed: A retrospective

Our Masters in Business interview this week was with Jean Eric Salata, Chair of EQT Group and Chair of EQT Asia. EQT is a purpose-driven global investment organization with over $310 billion in total assets under management, making it the largest private markets firm headquartered outside the United States.

Building capacity to produce exposed products would require a shift in capital investment

Source: McKinsey

 

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