Tuesday morning #headlines recap
Today's edition is compressed, given I have a very busy day ahead at work…
The Hormuz truce is dead: Iran put anti-ship missiles into two tankers overnight on the US-Oman corridor, and the biggest change isn't the explosions — it's that the strike reprices insurance on every ship behind them. Noteworthy that the strike happened inside active $1M/hour US air cover — KC-135 tankers, F-35s, E-2D early-warning, MQ-9s — and the missiles got through anyway. Japan and India are now using the Iran corridor while Gulf shippers cling to the US one.
Saudi Arabia is weighing a Red Sea pipeline expansion to move oil without crossing Hormuz. Citi still expects oil to sink to $60 if Hormuz normalizes — but energy funds saw their biggest 4-week outflow on record, and the SPR fell to a multi-year-low 319.5mb.
Russia ran one of its heaviest strikes of the war on Kyiv with Ukraine intercepting zero ballistic missiles. Poland secretly transferred Patriots to Ukraine from its own operational inventory after refusing US resupply requests — the same interceptors burned through in the Iran war are now felt as a shortage in Ukraine. Analysts say that the Ukrainian supply of them is all but depleted. Sorry, no refunds to US taxpayers.
Memory/semis complex cracked hard — Samsung overtook Nvidia as the world's most profitable company and still fell ~8%, KOSPI in freefall.
A leaked Treasury report is comparing the AI boom to dot-com. The Treasury reportedly knows the GenAI buildout poses systemic financial risk and doesn't want to say so publicly. Meanwhile layoffs coming at Microsoft: cutting ~4,800-6,400 jobs, ~3,200 at Xbox. Looks like that little shitskin chick they put in charge of gaming is flying the Xbox division straight into the side of a mountain…
Labor-force participation fell to 61.5%, the lowest since 1976, with the labor force dropping -720k last month; the "jobs plentiful vs hard to find" gap points to unemployment heading toward 6%. Just like inflation, the real numbers are much higher…
Israel-Turkey friction: Netanyahu made the case for confronting Turkey and asked Trump not to supply F-35s to them (as if enough of them would be operational to matter). Separately he asked Trump not to sell Turkey air-defense arms. It’s not a proper headlines recap without at least one story of jewish tricks.
Toyota to invest $3.6B moving Tacoma production from Mexico to Texas. Good news, perhaps they are beginning to see the error of their recent ways…
Be sure to carefully observe the environment around you as you go through your day…