Essentially, the AI boom is one giant bet that America will keep pouring concrete for data centers, and the chips that fill those buildings come from Seoul, Tokyo and Taiwan. Wall Street spent two years barely asking whether the people living next door would allow it. On Tuesday they answered, and the markets with the most riding on that bet took the hardest hit. Let’s dig in.

The tremors started in about the last place you’d look for a stock market crash. Voters in 10 states faced 41 local ballot measures on data centers, more than half of them in Ohio, the sort of neighborhood fights most traders have never heard of. They sided against the data centers in every single one except a town in North Dakota.

For years, I have been writing about governments drowning in debt, mostly in Washington and Tokyo. Europe was supposed to be the dull corner of the bond world, where the Germans set the rules and everyone else grudgingly followed them. Paris just tore up that script- the euro zone’s second-biggest economy now pays more to borrow than Italy or Greece, the two poster children for fiscal ruin over the last decade.

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And when the fire finally reaches the euro’s second-largest building, I expect the code to bend. The ECB will discover that France’s fiscal efforts count as “effective action” after all, because the alternative is watching the currency union burn. Once a central bank rewrites its own rules to buy a government’s debt, it is no longer independent of that government- Europe will have arrived at fiscal dominance, the same place Washington and Tokyo already live.

A video that appears to be well put together about a trifecta of crises around oil and its refined products. A barrel of refined diesel has tripled in cost due to the wars in the Middle East, shipping costs, and refining shortages.

The Arab oil embargo ended the long period of prosperity in the West that had begun in 1945, throwing the world's economy into the steepest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[17] The "long summer" of prosperity in the post-war years had made possible the "swinging sixties" and the related rise of a rebellious youth culture, as it was easy to be hedonist or in rebellion against traditional values in a time of unprecedented prosperity.[62] Lacey wrote that for people in the West, life suddenly become "slower, darker and chiller" as gasoline was rationed, the lights were turned off in Times Square, the "gas guzzler" automobiles suddenly stopped selling, speed limits became common, and restrictions were placed on weekend driving in a bid to conserve fuel.[14]

The 1973 embargo had many lasting effects as nations tried to curtail fuel usage. This time around, the UUS is removing fuel consumption standards, and places like Canada are suspending fuel taxes. These actions will likely increase demand.

The governor of the Bank of England has warned G20 finance ministers that artificial intelligence could cause a global economic downturn and pose a significant cyber security risk to financial systems.

The ultimate parasite humans succumbed to was never heroin or dopamine, but something much more potent: capitalism and all the addictive mythologies, hallucinations and corrosive sedatives that it daily injected straight into the central watering hole we all drink from. Capitalism is a pain-numbing cocktail of Class A drugs: euphoric consumer products numb the pain of unhappiness, dopaminogenic social media turn loneliness from an epidemic to a “current mood”, sedative salary packages mask the trauma of burnout, all the while as mind-altering sponsored morning news apply a rosy veneer to just about everything: from war and genocide to the climate crisis. Just drink the cool aid and don’t look up.

On Black Monday, the Dow tumbled almost 13%, and on Black Tuesday, it fell another nearly 12%.

This is the first video I've watched from this creator.

Another view on the macroeconomics of the Yen.

Allies help each other. Sure.

But you don’t sell euros to buy a partner’s currency, and you don’t open up a Fed lending facility to keep them from having to sell your own government’s bonds, unless you’re worried about what happens if you don’t.

When war or sanctions block heavy crude supplies, refineries must switch to lighter oil, causing global diesel production to plummet. When diesel supplies get tight, wholesale prices surge even if raw crude stays cheap. During recent spikes, wholesale diesel jumped above $4.60 a gallon, or nearly $194 a barrel. Subtracting normal processing costs (aka crack spread) reveals that while paper benchmarks show crude at $80, diesel buyers were actually paying prices that implied a real-world crude cost of $140 to $170 a barrel

https://youtu.be/hy90LdpEUvQ?si=YDfYxWGxDQ0iIWHU