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Oracle Tumbles After Mixed Results, Capex Comes In Hot; Warns Another $40BN Debt/Equity Capital Raise Coming

With tech stocks cracking for a 3rd straight day, and with the broader market closing at the lows in a surprising sign of weakness, many were looking to ORCL to kickstart the AI euphoria which has been oddly missing in recent days (and which send NVDA stock briefly just below the key level of $200). Well, for those hoping that ORCL would be the much needed spark, they may be disappointed after ORCL stock pumped in kneejerk reaction (despite Q4 earnings that were mixed at best).... then dumped after the company announced it would be joining the circus of companies selling debt/equity to fund its runaway capex.

Here is what ORCL reported for the just concluded fiscal Q4:

• Adjusted EPS $2.11 vs. $1.70 y/y, beating estimates of $1.97
• Adjusted revenue $19.18 billion, +21% y/y, beating estimates of $19.09 billion

The revenue breakdown was mixed at best, with ugly Software and SaaS prints offset by ok Infrastructure revenue"

• Cloud Infrastructure revenue (IaaS) $5.79 billion, +93% y/y, beating est $5.72 billion 
  • Cloud Infrastructure revenue (IaaS) in constant currency +92%, estimate +91.7%
• Cloud revenue (IaaS plus SaaS) $9.91 billion, +48% y/y, missing est $10 billion
  • Cloud revenue (IaaS plus SaaS) in constant currency +46%, estimate +47.4%
• Cloud Application revenue (SaaS) $4.13 billion, +12% y/y, missing est $4.17 billion
  • Cloud Application revenue (SaaS) in constant currency +10%, estimate +10.8%
• Software revenue $6.82 billion, -2.1% y/y, beating est of $6.88 billion
  • Software Support revenue $4.94 billion, -0.4% y/y, estimate $4.98 billion
• Software License revenue $1.88 billion, -6.3% y/y, missing est $1.93 billion
• Hardware revenue $924 million, +8.7% y/y, beating est $836.2 million
• Service revenue $1.52 billion, +13% y/y, estimate $1.41 billion

Going down the line: 

• Adjusted operating income $8.59 billion, +22% y/y, beating est $8.27 billion
• Adjusted operating margin 45% vs. 44% y/y, beating est 43.5%

As for ORCL's pride and joy, namely remaining performance obligations, or RPO backlog, it rose to $638 billion vs. $138 billion y/y. Good luck collecting on that.

Looking at fiscal Q1 ahead, the company was quite cheerful of course:

• Total Revenues are expected to grow from 27% to 29% (in both constant currency and USD)
• Total Cloud revenue is expected to grow between 57% and 63% in constant currency and is expected to grow between 58% and 64% in USD.
• Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to grow between 16% and 19% and be between $1.71 and $1.75 in constant currency and grow between 17% and 20% and be between $1.72 and $1.76 in USD.

Looking at the full year fiscal 2027, the company reaffirmed its prior revenue guidance of $90 billion total revenue and raises its non-GAAP EPS guidance to $8.05, which is growth of 18%.

As a reminder, AVGO imploded when it failed to raise its full-year guidance last week. Well, ORCL also failed to do so, likely disappointing the market. And indeed, according to a kneejerk take by Vital Knowledge, “The fact the F27 sales guide isn’t being raised is a disappointment.” It also writes that “this is an OK release with continued robust growth in backlog (RPOs), and the cash performance wasn’t as bad as feared,” but that the company “is still facing a period of heavy cash outflows as it builds the infrastructure needed to fulfill its backlog, and this will require more debt and equity.”

And to that point, here is the kicker that sent the stock sliding after hours. But before we get there, one more point - ORCL said that free cash flow was negative $23.7 billion for fiscal year 2026 as "Oracle continued to execute on investments to support the growth of its Cloud Infrastructure business."

As Bloomberg notes, Oracle's quarterly CapEx was higher than estimates, raising investor concerns about the profitability of the company’s AI infrastructure business. Capital expenditures, largely a measure of data center spending, were $15.9 billion in the period ended May 31, bringing the annual total to $55.7 billion, higher than Oracle’s projection for $50 billion in spending.

The company didn’t offer an outlook on its spending in the new fiscal year. Wall Street expects $61.7 billion in capital spending in the year ending in May 2027.

Which of course means that the company's free cash flow meltdown is only accelerating, and the only way ORCL can fund its staggering buildout - since it doesn't have nearly enough revenue and profit - is with even more equity and/or debt. $40 billion to be precise:

"In fiscal year 2027, Oracle expects to raise approximately $40 billion through a combination of debt and equity financing including its previously announced $20 billion at-the-market equity issuance. Oracle does not expect to issue additional debt in calendar year 2026"

The coming dilution follows the $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity raised in 2026 as part of the company's pivot away from database software to a provider of computing power for artificial intelligence work, which means it is embarking on a massive build-out of data centers for OpenAI and other customers. Alas, said pivot costs lots of money, in fact more than the company said just three months ago, and the stock  is not happy, sliding more than 5% in afterhours trading after closing at $201.26. The company’s stock had climbed 35% over the past three months, likely driven by better investor sentiment toward computing providers and OpenAI, Oracle’s most important customer, wrote Derrick Wood, an analyst at TD Cowen.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 16:55

Solar Tops Coal In US Power Mix For The First Month Ever

Solar power held a record-high 12.8% share of US electricity supply in May, overtaking coal-generated power for the first full month on record, energy think tank Ember said in a report on Wednesday. As OilPrice notes, while the share of solar-generated power jumped to a record high for a full month, the share of coal in the U.S. electricity mix slumped to 12.2% last month, the fourth-lowest monthly share of coal ever.

Solar generated an all-time high total of 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May, up by 17% from a year earlier and surpassing the previous record set in July last year, according to Ember’s data. In May, solar also became the third-largest source of electricity in the U.S., behind natural gas and nuclear power generation.

At the same time, coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Coal power output rebounded to 43.4 TWh in May, but still remained 11% below May 2025 levels.

“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the US electricity system,” said Nicolas Fulghum, Senior Data Analyst at Ember.

“From Texas to California, markets across the US are betting on solar to meet rising power needs,” Fulghum added.

Despite the Trump Administration’s assault on renewable energy and support for the coal industry, solar and wind power generation in the United States is booming, including in many red states that President Trump won such as Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, and Mississippi.

In a separate report also out on Wednesday, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie said that despite changing tax policy and regulatory actions targeting clean energy, solar and energy storage represented 91% of all new capacity installed in the U.S. in the first quarter as utilities, homeowners, and businesses seek energy security amid global gas and gas turbine supply disruptions.

States won by President Trump accounted for 74% of all solar capacity installed in the first quarter, according to SEIA and WoodMac’s U.S. Solar Market Insight 2026 Q2 Report.

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

"A Lot Of BS, Honestly": Apollo Head Says Everyone Is Measuring AI Wrong

The tokenomics debate got its sharpest contrarian voice this morning, and it came from inside the building.

John Zito Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg

John Zito, co-president of Apollo Asset Management, sat for a fireside chat at the Morgan Stanley US Financials Conference on Wednesday, where he suggested to Bloomberg that measured per unit of intelligence delivered rather than per token, prices are collapsing - even as low-value usage drives the actual bills up.

"I think tokenmaxxing and token talk is - it's a lot of BS, honestly. Like, if you look at per unit of knowledge and cost per unit of knowledge, prices are collapsing. Prices are collapsing per unit of IQ, if you did it that way."

In other words: a token is not a unit of intelligence. Price the capability instead of the throughput - the way a 2026 laptop costs what a 2010 laptop did but is 50x more capable - and the cost of "IQ" is in freefall even while the bills explode.

He also suggested that we're screwed if AI isn't just hype:

"If AI is real, it's so hyper-deflationary to so many things over the long term that it's really hard to take risk."

So a few things are going on here - the spending problem is real. The metric everyone is using to describe it is wrong. And the resolution of that tension is where the entire AI trade goes next.

As Goldman's Rich Privorotsky noted five days earlier - consensus was already migrating to exactly this frame; that the relevant economic metric is not token volume but useful task completion per watt and per dollar; that customers facing usage-based pricing "will optimize for cost per completed task," routing simple work to local models, harder tasks to the cloud, and frontier models only when required; and, that we "maybe have allocated too much spend to the Data-Centric model." When Apollo and Goldman independently land on the same framework inside a week, we're looking at a new institutional consensus forming in real time.

The French toast economy

Zito's diagnosis of why enterprise AI bills exploded will sound familiar to ZeroHedge premium subscribers: too many companies pointing frontier models at tasks that don't remotely justify the compute.

"Our IQs are so low that we're actually using [AI tools] to check out the recipe for, you know, French toast. That's where you're seeing the prices go up."

Swap "French toast" for "checking the weather" and that is, almost verbatim, the tokenmaxxing reductio we documented at Amazon - employees routing busywork through agents to climb the KiroRank leaderboard, frontier reasoning models deployed against questions a search bar answered in 2009. Zito even joked that his own IQ is "not high enough" to need what Anthropic's next flagship model - and something that only "a handful" of users genuinely need, and can monetize, the bleeding edge.

So - the mismatch between task and tool doesn't persist forever - it gets arbitraged into what he called a new economy for the sector: "The AMD chip, the Nvidia chip, all these different chips will be used and optimized for a certain use-case to solve the spend problem." Citadel and Jane Street pay anything for the frontier because their ROI is, in his word, massive. Everyone else's French toast queries get routed to something cheap.

And of course we watched this unfold over the last month. Bloomberg notes Uber set usage limits on tools like Claude Code after incinerating its AI budget, and Walmart capped an in-house AI agent - the one that helps employees with spreadsheets and presentations - after demand ran too hot. The caps are landing on exactly the low-IQ-task tier Zito is describing, while the frontier spend stays untouched.

How we got here

For readers just joining: this is the latest beat in a story that has moved very fast.

Last month we noted that the AI narrative had hit a serious snag, after Uber's COO Andrew Macdonald admitted the company couldn't draw a line between exploding token consumption and useful product output. This, after 5,000 engineers burned the entire 2026 AI budget by April. Data spanning 2,444 companies suggested only 18 cents of every AI dollar reaches users as stable product, with 44 cents going to fixing bugs the AI itself introduced.

h/t @Aiswarya_Sankar

Then came the $500 million mystery bill - an unnamed enterprise client, per Axios, torching half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month with no usage caps - landing the same week Amazon nuked its internal leaderboard and an SVP begged staff not to use AI for the sake of using AI.

Then, in Part II of our reporting: 'From Singularity To Tokenomics,' we noted that the subsidy formally ended: GitHub flipped Copilot to usage-based billing on June 1 - the same morning Anthropic confidentially filed its draft S-1 - and developers hit their monthly quotas before lunch. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft all executed the same flat-rate-to-meter pivot within sixty days of each other. Sam Altman conceded that cost went from a non-issue in January to, in his words, a huge issue and a meme.

By Monday, Goldman's one-delta desk was flagging that the Silicon Data Token Spending Index had started to soften - Q1 may have been peak token-maxxing-as-KPI - and Citrini Research had coined the inevitable sequel: in a matter of weeks, the narrative went from tokenmaxxing to tokenpanic. 

We're happy everyone is now looking at this chart... You're welcome?

The Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index rolls over What enterprise customers are actually saying

Fresh comments from UBS paint an interesting picture. After polling actual IT execs at enterprise AI customers, the bank reports that token costs have become a real issue for roughly 60% of the enterprises they spoke to - "this is not a made-up media story," in the bank's own words. One customer described the GitHub Copilot pricing change in a single word: "chaos." Another got their first AI bill and heard leadership say, flatly, "we don't have the money for this." A third admitted: "we overbuilt in certain areas and are starting to feel the wrath."

Source: UBS Evidence Lab

But bears should pay attention to this part: not a single check was slamming on the AI brakes. UBS found the dominant behavior is guardrails, not retreat: caps, alerts, model-downshifting, pooled tokens - normal enterprise cost-containment. Several customers explicitly refused to throttle usage ("we don't want to throttle them... our aim is to just get our employees to start using AI") and are instead cannibalizing other IT spend - cutting external IT services, consolidating cloud, and notably, metering headcount growth - to make room for the AI line item. Even Uber, the poster child for budget incineration, has set per-engineer token caps around $1,500 a month - which, as UBS dryly notes, is still extremely high - and its CEO describes the company as full steam ahead.

So according to UBS, costs have been spiking because adoption is ramping, not because per-unit prices are inflating - the per-unit cost of intelligence is falling. Which is exactly Zito's "cost per unit of IQ" point.

Both things are true

So is tokenmaxxing "a lot of BS"? Zito is right about the denominator. Cost per unit of intelligence is collapsing, relentlessly. Open-source and Chinese models deliver near-frontier capability at 10-25x lower cost; Cursor's new model matches frontier coding performance at a tenth the price per task. Measured per unit of IQ, this is the most deflationary technology in living memory.

Zito's denominator: inference costs collapse for a fixed level of intelligence

The CFOs are right about the numerator. Gartner has found that even a 90% collapse in inference costs won't make enterprise AI cheaper, because agents devour tokens faster than prices drop and providers don't fully pass the savings through. It is also the lived experience of every company in the UBS checks. A collapsing unit cost times an exploding unit count is still a bigger bill.

Token expenditure is a meaningless productivity metric and a decisive revenue metric. Nobody underwriting a near-trillion-dollar AI IPO can dismiss it as a measure of revenue durability. That is why the rollover in the Silicon Data index is worth watching: the chart measures nothing about value created, and everything about the thing the valuations are built on.

The same logic applies to the narrative itself. Zito calls the token talk noise; that noise doubled the market value of the semiconductor industry in two months on the way up and is unwinding it now. A fundamental investor can dismiss what a narrative measures. A trader cannot dismiss what it moves.

What the 'noise' moved: semiconductor market value doubled in two months on the tokenmaxxing narrative

The unresolved question for traders: The infrastructure complex is priced for token demand going up and to the right at the frontier - Goldman's 24x by 2030. But if Zito's use-case economy arrives, a large share of that volume migrates to commodity inference: cheap chips, open models, local hardware. Volume can keep growing while the dollars - and the margins - pool somewhere other than where today's valuations assume. The UBS checks already show the mechanism in motion: enterprises aren't cutting AI, they're cutting around AI, and routing down-market wherever good enough will do.

Meanwhile, the token expenditure index printed its sixth straight down day - the longest streak since January - with Citadel's read attributing the drop to adoption becoming "less about what frontier models can do and more about the price," a shift toward cheaper models. Note what that means for the chart: six red days on an expenditure index isn't necessarily usage falling - it may be the deflation itself arriving in the spend line, the same work bought cheaper. The numerator and the denominator, colliding in one print. And savor the garnish: Citadel is one of the two firms Zito named as gladly paying anything for the frontier - and it's their desk narrating everyone else trading down.

Token prices down 6 days in a row: longest streak since January.

"Adoption is becoming less about what frontier models can do and more about the price... the recent drop in the token index may reflect some of this shift toward cheaper models"- Citadel

- zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 10, 2026

Volume and value have decoupled. The desks have noticed. The repricing is the part that comes next.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 16:33

Stop Destroying Civilization!

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

In the #MeToo years, the Left’s signature slogan was “Believe All Women!”

That directive was used to bolster Christine Blasey Ford’s preposterous and easily refuted 2018 allegations that some 35 years earlier she had been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when both were teenagers.

Two years later, the Left quietly junked that “Believe Women!” credo when Tara Reade came forward and lodged a far more credible charge that 2020 Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her when she was a Biden senatorial staffer.

Seven other women alleged that Biden acted toward them in sexually inappropriate ways. The Left more or less ignored these serial charges, and in Reade’s case, demonized her. Suddenly, the new mantra was “Believe women only if they prove useful to the Left.”

Since then, the grotesque sexual misconduct involving Democratic politicians—from New York governor Andrew Cuomo to California Congressman Eric Swalwell—has finally put #MeToo to rest. We were reminded of its demise when it was revealed that Maine senatorial candidate and socialist heartthrob Graham Platner had been discovered to possess a long social media history of crude and pornographic put-downs of women.

Indeed, an entire gaggle of former girlfriends has attested to his Nazi fascinations, his contempt for women, and his occasional physical violence against them.

So what?

Or as feminist icon and former #MeToo-er Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, speaking at a Platner campaign rally in Portland, Maine, “I’m here because Washington needs fighters, and Graham Platner is the fighter we need.”

But a fighter for what cause—and on whose behalf?

The demise of Black Lives Matter (BLM) offers another example of a recurring left-wing phenomenon: movements that begin as moral crusades and end as self-parodies. Almost every BLM cause célèbre has proved fraudulent, following a long tradition that stretches from Al Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley myth to the Duke lacrosse scandal.

The ginned-up BLM riots that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were all based on an abject lie. Brown never said, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In fact, he attacked a police officer repeatedly and was lethally shot as he charged toward the officer.

Failing actor Jussie Smollett was never attacked by white MAGA thugs in the wee hours of a cold Chicago night. Instead, the faker Smollett hired two Nigerian-Americans, decked out in MAGA hats, to stage a mock attack. Only by staging such an attack could Smollett claim victim status, attract national sympathy as a target of white hatred, and attempt to revive his fading career.

Yet, for a while, the con worked. Soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, who would go on to praise the often-violent mass George Floyd demonstrations of 2020, raged that the attack by anonymous white “racists” was an “attempted modern-day lynching.” Right—and she never apologized for spreading that lie.

The aftermath of the death of George Floyd did lasting damage to the country that still reverberates. Floyd was a career criminal. He had been imprisoned for participating in a home invasion where he pressed a gun into the stomach of a terrified young woman, who was beaten by one of his fellow criminals.

At the time of his arrest, Floyd was in poor condition both physically and legally—attempting to pass counterfeit currency, high on drugs, recovering from COVID, and resisting arrest.

He died after a police officer restrained him using an authorized but controversial protocol that involved placing a knee on the prostrate suspect’s neck—and did not heed in time Floyd’s call that he could not breathe.

What followed was the high-water mark of BLM. Four months of nightly riots led to some 35 deaths; 1,500 injured law enforcement officers; $2 billion in property damage; 14,000 arrests; and the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C., church. The current leftist habit of urban intersection takeovers, statue-toppling, name-changing, and violent demonstrations is a legacy of that summer of lawlessness.

So we still live with the toxic ripples from the aftermath and the canonization of Floyd.

Thousands of police officers nationwide were laid off in “defund the police” madness. Faddish “critical race” and “critical legal” theories led to no cash bail and the near-immediate release of hundreds of thousands of arrested violent criminals.

Our supposedly best universities, in Pavlovian fashion, dropped the SAT admission requirement and upped race-based admissions.

Racially segregated graduation ceremonies, dorms, and “safe spaces” proliferated—along with newly introduced remedial math courses at our top campuses. Indeed, professors began handing out A’s to 80 percent of the student body, as Ivy League schools now inflated grades far more than did community colleges.

Administrators and bureaucrats soon created thousands of DEI positions across universities and corporations.

This craze led to McCarthyite “diversity statements,” an epidemic of alleged victimhood, untold billions of dollars squandered, and workplace productivity diminished. And the result was certainly not better race relations.

We were just reminded again of the absurdity of the immediate post-Floyd years, after learning that the inverse of Floyd’s death had recently transpired in the United Kingdom.

Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak, a white male student, was fatally stabbed by a Sikh immigrant with his “ceremonial” sword. In truth, the weapon was an eight-inch knife mysteriously exempted from Britain’s otherwise tough laws against possession of knives.

According to reports, Vickrum Digwa called police and falsely claimed that the dying Nowak had initiated the confrontation with racial slurs, while family members attempted to conceal the weapon. (Would a Scottish highlander claim that he too had the right to carry an eight-inch broadsword as integral to his race, religion, and indigenous traditions?)

No matter—the police arrived hungry to deal with a sensational case of George Floyd-style, white-on-non-white racial violence.

Instead, they reportedly treated Digwa as the victim and handcuffed the mortally wounded and bleeding Nowak as he pleaded—nine times in total—that he could not breathe and was dying. They therefore almost certainly ensured his death. The national reaction?

No British politician went into full George Floyd take-a-knee mode—as they had in 2020, even across the Atlantic, for the felon George Floyd. The ensuing unrest, so far, seems mainly to have been limited to Southampton; there has been no mass destruction of property; there have been no mass assaults. Nowak was on the wrong side of the left-wing race-based binary of victim/victimizer and thus offered no fuel for virtue-signaling by hollow politicians. Such racial reductionism always trumps matters of class, evidence—and the truth.

As for the fate of the BLM architects? The founders never accounted for how their $90 million in donations was actually spent, but they did disappear into their newly purchased multi-million-dollar homes and have hardly been heard from since.

The episodes of existential psychodramas that come and go—after doing enormous damage to the nation—are nearly endless.

A number of American and international agencies and “experts” have now, mostly quietly, sighed that global warming was never really the existential danger that the Left swore would put “Earth in the balance” in a mere decade.

Nonetheless, once again, the toll has been enormous. Germany wrecked its economy to seek mythical “net zero” carbon emissions—by dismantling natural gas, oil, and nuclear power plants and turning to costly, inefficient, and unreliable solar and wind power.

This green mania swept the Western world—as China built two to three coal-fired power plants a month.

The left-wing, postmodern, globalist notion of a borderless utopian world that would fuel endless “diversity” has done so much damage to Western nations that even the European Left now fears its own political suicide from the vast influxes of often hostile illegal aliens.

Millions of unlawful and unvetted entrants crashed the borders, with no desire to integrate, assimilate, or acculturate to their Western hosts. They have spiked crime, fueled anti-Semitism, and ensured unsustainable social welfare costs.

The transgender frenzy was to be the Left’s next civil rights crusade, as it constructed a new victimized class with reparatory claims against the guilty traditionalist majority.

It mattered little that gender dysphoria was an ancient phenomenon, documented even in classical literature as a rare and aberrant syndrome where physical sex was at odds with psychological sexual identification. That malady had also been well known to modern sexologists since the 19th century, who had documented it as rare, involving far less than 0.01 percent of the population.

Nevertheless, the Left invented the unnecessary Orwellian term “transphobe,” and suddenly we were off to the races with transgender biological men nude in gym showers with teen girls and transgender “women” with male musculoskeletal bodies dominating female sports.

Soon, an epidemic of teens began wondering whether they were in fact “trans” and pondering whether to undergo a battery of dangerous hormonal and chemical drug regimens—or calling themselves nonbinary, to the point where the new third sex sometimes seemed almost as numerous as the old two genders.

What accounts for these bouts of periodic, collective, and suicidal madness?

First, the craziness is almost always birthed in the contemporary, affluent, and leisured West, which alone has the capital and resources to afford such freakish sideshows.

Second, the frenzies are usually the creation of the Left, predictably birthed in universities, the media, and the bureaucracies. They appear with familiar symptoms. The irredeemable, deplorable, and “garbage” hoi polloi are supposedly too dense to be properly schooled and thus must be frightened to death in order to adopt agendas that otherwise appear to them as utterly insane.

Junk your natural-gas dryer and grill, or face massive floods on your coasts. Drop the SAT and defund the police or face endless race riots.

Hire thousands of race and gender commissars or be forever tagged as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes. Open the border and let illegal aliens enter by the millions, and thus pay partial penance for “whiteness” as the nation “checks its privilege.”

The Left is correct that few Western voters will openly embrace the unpopular elite agenda of racial fixations, globalism, laxity on crime, and degrowth environmentalism.

So, their long-term solutions have four predictable aspects:

1. Open the borders to create a more diverse, impoverished, and needy constituency.

2. Create fake “working-class” pseudo-populist candidates like the pampered Graham Platner, the God-is-nonbinary “new Christian” Talarico, and, of course, the waxen effigy of “good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.”

3. Destroy time-tested systems by seeking to demolish the Electoral College, the 50-state union, the Senate filibuster, and the nine-justice Supreme Court.

4. Gin up these end-of-days, pseudo-existential crises whose solutions require massive new taxes, bigger government, and more dictatorial elite managers.

One good sign of growing antidotes is that increasingly Americans, and indeed all Westerners, are saying no to green haranguers, no to the gender and sex demagogues, no to the race-baiting industry, no to the open-borders conglomerate, and no to ungrateful immigrants.

Their pushback might be summed up as follows: “We are no longer going to allow you to destroy ancient traditions that ensured our prosperity, security, and liberty, and which were handed down to us by generations far better than your own.”

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

OpenAI Eyes Massive 10-Gigawatt Ohio Data Center

OpenAI is moving along in talks to lease a proposed 10-gigawatt data center campus on federal land in Ohio, according to a new report from The Information, in a deal that could include financial backing from Nvidia. This comes as Ohio lawmakers unveiled new legislation aiming to regulate data center build-outs.

The massive 10 GW data center would be the largest data center development ever considered, with a potential buildout cost topping $500 billion based on current prices for chips, labor, and construction materials.

OpenAI in Talks to Lease 10 Gigawatt Ohio Data Center with Backing From Nvidia

OpenAI is in advanced negotiations to lease a proposed 10 gigawatt data center campus on federal land in Ohio as part of a deal that could include financial backing from Nvidia, according to the…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 10, 2026

Under the proposed deal, OpenAI would control the chip stacks through a long-term lease and begin making payments once the facility starts operations.

The first phase is expected to come online in 2028. For some context, 10 GW of power is roughly the output of several large nuclear reactors or about 10 large gas-fired power plants running at full capacity. Each GW can power about 700,000 to 1 million homes.

The data center development would require dedicated power generation, substations, transmission lines, cooling infrastructure, access to water or advanced cooling systems, and phased construction over several years.

Simultaneously, Ohio lawmakers have unveiled Substitute House Bill 646, which aims to regulate data center buildouts in the state.

"The Joint Data Center Study Committee has done its job," Senate Finance Chair Brian Chavez (R-Marietta), who is also the co-chair of the data center committee, said, and quoted by local outlet ABC News 5.

Bill 646 would create a new electric rate class for data centers to ensure that the costs of generation, transmission, and distribution are entirely paid by hyperscalers.

"Make sure the ratepayers are kept harmless, held harmless, and that data centers pay for whatever they're causing," Chavez said.

This year alone, Goldman calculates that hyperscalers will unleash $800 billion in data center capex.

Latest data center projects by scale:

Mapping the Buildouts 

The downside risk for the data center buildout boom is that an alarming share of projects are being delayed, scaled back, or canceled this year as local resistance groups intensify pressure campaigns over power demand, water use, land rights, and grid reliability.

Beyond NIMBY opposition, there is also growing concern that some anti-data-center movements may be amplified by foreign influence networks operating through left-wing nonprofits, and comes as China prepares to begin its data center buildout strategy.]

Today's report also comes days after OpenAI submitted a draft IPO prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, formally kicking off the process for one of the year's most hotly anticipated debuts.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 15:40

DHS Directs ICE To Deport Illegal Aliens Who Vote In American Elections

Authored by Bryan Hyde via American Greatness,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) General Counsel James Percival has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to impose strict penalties, including deportation, on illegal aliens who vote in American elections.

According to a DHS press release, the Immigration and Nationality Act directs the removal of aliens who illegally vote or make a false claim to US citizenship.

🇺🇸 DHS told ICE to deport any undocumented immigrant who votes in a U.S. election.

The directive, signed Monday, ties directly to Trump's executive order on election integrity.

Illegal voting and false citizenship claims are now being treated as deportable offenses under the… pic.twitter.com/HGSGkmewQR

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) June 9, 2026

DHS states that these provisions allow for the removal of illegal aliens if they illegally participate in our elections. No criminal conviction is required for their removal.

Percival said, “The importance of free, fair, and honest elections is without question. Echoing the words of President Trump, ‘the right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election.”

Percival added, “Illegal voting by aliens dilutes the votes of American citizens and undermines our democracy. It must have consequences.”

DHS says the directive will help further implement policies similar to those from President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”

Trump’s order directs actions across the federal government, including the verification of voter eligibility, grant administration, information-sharing, enforcement of federal integrity laws, improving voting systems, and criminal prosecution of unlawful voting by aliens.

The latest directive follows an August 2025 announcement by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which updated its policy manual to bar green card holders who have voted or registered to vote from obtaining citizenship.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 15:20

Governments Sell Bonds At Record Pace As Global Rates Rise, Spending Soars

In a world already drowning with debt, the only certainty is even more debt 

According to a new analysis by Bloomberg, governments are borrowing from syndicated bond markets at a record clip as public spending surges. That's in addition to direct sales where the government auctions off debt to institutional investors and individuals.

Sovereign issuers have sold $504 billion of the debt - which is offered to investors via banks - so far this year, a new record. Thet's more than in the first half of 2020, when in a global emergency nations were paying to support their economies during Covid-19 lockdowns.

Budget deficits have been climbing since the global financial crisis. They spiked during the pandemic, when interest rates were slashed to record lows, and are widening again as governments boost defense spending and try to protect households from price shocks driven by the Iran war. Aging populations and rising interest rates are adding to the pressure.

“The main driver of the supply is basically increased public spending, and thus bigger funding needs,” said Jens Peter Sorensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank, pointing to greater outlays on the military, infrastructure and transition to cleaner energy. 

Germany and other nations have been setting aside hundreds of billions of euros for weapons and ammunition, and the EU has relaxed its rules to allow extra spending on defense and energy initiatives that curb consumption of fossil fuels.

AS noted above, the sums raised from syndications are dwarfed by debt sold at regular government auctions, not least because the US Treasury only uses the latter to issue bonds. But hiring banks to sell offerings to investors is popular elsewhere, especially in Europe. It can be a less risky option when markets are volatile, and give debt managers greater control over the timing of the sale. 

According to Bloomberg, for eight of the last 10 years, Italy has been the biggest borrower in the market for sovereign syndications. It is leading again in 2026, having already raised nearly €70 billion ($81 billion) in the first six months. Germany, which eliminated its famous "debt brake" and rewrote its fiscal rules to splurge on defense and infrastructure, raised €14 billion from three syndications so far this year, while the UK, Belgium and Serbia sold their biggest-ever deals. Australia and Mexico are among this year’s top 10 issuers.

Since demand for government debt remains strong, particularly for shorter maturities, governments are seizing the chance to work through a busy refinancing schedule and fund higher spending despite an uncertain path for interest rates, said Johnathan Owen, a portfolio manager at TwentyFour Asset Management.

“They’re using this window while markets are healthy and willing,” he added.Of course, the more markets are "healthy and willing" the bigger the eventual revulsion will be when investors realize they have loaded up to the gills with another batch of debt that will never be repaid.

Meanwhile, as the inflationary shock of war in the Persian Gulf has driven up yields, the outlook for the global economy has deteriorated, scrambling predictions for rates. The European Central Bank is set to deliver its first hike since 2023 this week and the US Federal Reserve is expected to tighten monetary policy later this year, although what happens thereafter is less clear.

US Treasury auctions suffered from elevated rate market volatility in March, immediately after the start of the conflict. There have been few signs since that investors are losing their appetite for debt, but they are asking for more in return. A 30-year US bond auction in May was the first since 2007 to draw a yield higher than 5%. Meanwhile, the UK’s £15 billion ($20.2 billion) offering in April drew record orders from buyers attracted by the highest yield on 10-year debt since 2008.

Fueling the increase in issuance are higher than normal redemptions, as Covid era bonds begin to mature. Analysis by Natixis SA shows that refinancing deals by euro-area sovereigns have jumped by 26% in 2026, outpacing the 11% year-on-year increase in total syndicated issuance.

“This gap suggests the record first-half is primarily redemption-driven rather than opportunistic front-running ahead of potential rate hikes,” said Theophile Legrand, a rates strategist at Natixis, in comments made at the start of this month. Still, there are signs that some European borrowers may be looking to lock in costs before they rise, based on recent trends.

In May, “redemptions actually declined year-on year, yet syndicated volumes jumped from €32 billion to €45 billion, suggesting at least some degree of opportunistic front-loading,” Legrand added.

According to Bloomberg, the pace of issuance for the rest of the year will depend on what central banks do next. Syndications from Belgium, Spain, Austria and Portugal in May were “earlier than anticipated,” ING strategists including Benjamin Schroeder wrote in a June 3 note. Others are getting in ahead of the summer slowdown. Greece is tapping the market for €3 billion, garnering more than €36 billion of orders for a reopening of existing notes due in 2036. Meanwhile, Sweden is raising €2 billion of three-year debt. Both deals should price on Wednesday.

“There’s still plenty of euro zone sovereign debt to come to market in the second half of the year,” said Harvey Bradley, head of global rates at Insight Investment. And that's just the start, because after the second half, there will be even more debt every year going forward as record amounts of syndicated debt, both for new issuance and refis, come to market to fund a fiscal model that no longer works. 
 

 

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 15:00

Trump Says "Secret Military Mission" Allowed 200 Ships, 100 Million Barrels To Cross Hormuz

Confirming our reported from both a week ago (see "As Gulf States Plan Bypass Pipelines, US Military Is Quietly Helping Ships Cross Hormuz") and this afternoon ("Growing Number Of Oil Tankers Successfully Sneak Through Hormuz, Shrinking Iran's Leverage") moments ago Trump posted on Truth Social that he had "directed our Great U.S. Military to execute a secret mission to support Oil Tankers and other Commercial Ships through the Strait of Hormuz." Of course, the mission wasn't that secret if we discussed how the US military was helping ship cross the Strait one week ago. 

In any case, Trump added that "this effort has resulted in more than 100 MILLION Barrels of Oil making its way through the Strait, and into the Open Market. More than 200 Commercial Ships have safely traveled through the Strait," which would explain why oil prices have remained low and confirms what Goldman's Delta One head, Rich Privorotsky, wrote this morning, namely that "a lot has been thrown at the oil market and it’s simply not going up, which is remarkable given the level of escalation. The only conclusion that really fits the price action is that barrels are still getting through the Strait of Hormuz, visibly or otherwise. There doesn’t seem to be a more rational explanation."

"This wildly successful effort is because the UNITED STATES of AMERICA CONTROLS the Strait of Hormuz — NOT Iran" Trump concluded.

Trump's post also validates what JPMorgan EM strategy team pointed out a week ago, namely that ship - and crude - transits are far higher than what official trackers have indicated: 

• New higher equilibrium appears to be established in Strait with vessel crossings remaining in the c.25 per day mark for nearly a week, according to JPM EM Strategy methodology. 
• Estimated energy exports continue to be very strong - around 3.6 mbd over the past two days and the 7DMA remaining around 2.5mbd. This has been driven by strong refined chemical tanker transits which have risen to more than 50% of pre-conflict levels. 
• Reports that US are quietly coordinating with shippers to ensure safe transit without explicit escort. 

Here, JPM suggests that Bloomberg's data is showing muted transits as it can't keep an accurate read of actual crossings due to AIS transponders being turned off during crossings.

Now the question is whether Iran, whose leverage in the conflict would be viewed as dramatically reduced as a result of this development, will allow stealthy tankers and other ships, with transponders shut, to continue crossing the strait affirming Trump's implicit claim that the country no longer has control over the strait, or if Tehran will make a public demonstration of how much control it still has. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 14:45

These Are The Six States Celebrating America 250 By Raising Your Gas Tax

Authored by Larry Behrens via WattsUpWithThat.com,

The final countdown for America’s 250th birthday is on. Families will be planning road trips, parades, vacations, reunions, and cookouts to celebrate the greatest nation in history. But in six states, politicians have a different idea for the party: raise taxes.

Beginning July 1, drivers in California, Washington, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Mississippi are scheduled to see higher state gas taxes. In other words, as the country prepares to celebrate casting aside a tax-heavy king in favor of freedom, these states will use the occasion to fatten government coffers one gallon at a time.

The worst offenders will be no surprise. California, Washington and Illinois  — we’ll call them the Axis of Glut.

Their governors are often the first to fake outrage when gas prices rise. They blame oil companies. They blame “price gouging.” They blame world events. They blame everyone except the politicians who keep piling taxes, mandates, and regulations onto every gallon drivers buy.

Yet these same states already have some of the worst gas prices in the nation, some of the highest gas taxes in America, and now they are getting ready to raise those taxes again.

California’s gas tax is already the highest in the country and is scheduled to climb again on July 1, from 61.2 cents to 63.4 cents per gallon, under the state’s annual inflation adjustment. The same report noted California’s average price for regular gasoline was nearly $6 per gallon in early June.

Illinois is no better. The state says its motor fuel tax will rise on July 1 because the law requires an annual inflation adjustment. Washington joined the club with a gas tax increase last year and then baked in automatic increases going forward. Starting July 1, 2026, the state’s fuel tax rises by 2% every year unless lawmakers change the law.

This is the dirty hustle behind inflation-indexed taxes. Politicians get to raise taxes without holding a press conference to admitting it. They pass the law once, then every year drivers get mugged by a formula.

As of June 8, the national average for regular gas was $4.164, down 38.2 cents in a single month. That is welcome relief for families, workers, small businesses and anyone trying to get through summer. But the national average would look even better if it were not being anchored down by tax-heavy states that treat drivers like a rolling ATM.

The problem is not limited to the six July 1 tax-hike states. Seven of the ten most expensive states for gas are run by Democratic governors. That is not a coincidence.

Taxes play a major role in the high-price reputation of many of these states. So do their regulatory regimes, special fuel rules, anti-energy policies and climate mandates that make fuel harder to produce, refine, transport and sell.

The result is predictable.

Families, small businesses, truckers, and farmers all pay more. Then the same politicians who helped drive up the cost pretend they are shocked by the bill.

That is not compassion. That is government gluttony.

Supporters claim the money goes to roads and infrastructure. But that excuse only goes so far. Every tax increase is sold as necessary. Yet somehow the burden always lands in the same place: on the people who drive to work, school, church, the grocery store or a summer vacation.

That is what makes the timing so perfect, and so insulting.

America’s 250th birthday should be a celebration of freedom, independence and the rejection of government overreach. The American Revolution was born from the idea that people should not be treated as endless revenue sources for rulers who never seem to have enough.

Nearly 250 years later, millions of drivers will pull into gas stations in California, Washington, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Mississippi and get a reminder that some politicians still have not learned the lesson.

The country is moving toward a better energy future: lower prices, more production, more reliability and less punishment for the people who keep America moving. But these six states are choosing a different path.

America 250 should remind us why this country was born: because free people eventually get tired of being treated like revenue.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 14:40

Mexico Suspends Certain Live Animal Imports From US Over Flesh-Eating Screwworm Concerns

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

Mexico said Tuesday it would temporarily suspend imports of certain live animals from the United States following the detection of multiple cases of the flesh-eating New World screwworm in Texas and New Mexico.

The decision was made in coordination with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and covers imports of cattle, ruminants, pigs, sheep, goats, songbirds, and ferrets, according to Mexico’s agriculture ministry.

The ministry said health authorities, including the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, also agreed to strengthen health inspections of imported pet dogs at Mexico’s points of entry and assess additional measures to verify their health status.

The measures were intended to protect livestock in the northern states of Mexico, particularly in Baja California, Baja California Sur, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Sonora, where no screwworm cases have been recorded, it stated.

The ministry said health officials from both nations would continue to exchange information “in order to identify goods that do not pose a health risk and to establish the measures and conditions that will allow, in due course, the orderly and safe resumption of bilateral trade.”

The USDA said in a notice on its website, updated on June 8, that the suspension of live animal exports will take effect immediately “until we have further information from Mexico.”

Five screwworm cases have been confirmed in the United States, with the latest being reported in La Salle County, Texas, on June 9. The USDA said it is working with state partners in Texas and New Mexico to lead “an aggressive response” to the pest.

Among the confirmed cases was one involving a dog in New Mexico, the state’s first New World screwworm case. The veterinarian who reported the case was based in Texas, but the dog resides at a household in Lea County, New Mexico, according to the agency.

Affecting Humans

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), at least seven people have died from screwworm infections in Central America and Mexico as of Jan. 20.

This month, the CDC reported more than 185,000 cumulative animal cases in the same geographic areas, and more than 2,100 cases in people.

In the United States, one human case was reported at a Maryland hospital last August after a person returned from a visit to El Salvador.

To eradicate the spread of screwworms, the USDA said it has established a 20-kilometer quarantine zone with movement controls and heightened surveillance around confirmed detections. The agency is also releasing sterile flies in and around the infestation area.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week ordered the mobilization of all state personnel, including those from Texas’s University Systems, to accelerate the shipment of sterile flies into Texas and the construction of a sterile fly production facility in Edinburg.

New World screwworms are flesh-eating parasites that infect livestock, wildlife, and, in rarer cases, humans. Screwworm fly maggots burrow into the living tissue of animals, causing severe wounds that can be fatal.

Signs and symptoms of screwworm infestations include irritated behavior, head shaking, a decaying odor, and the presence of maggots, or fly larvae, in wounds, according to the USDA.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 14:00

Growing Number Of Oil Tankers Successfully Sneak Through Hormuz, Shrinking Iran's Leverage

One week ago we reported that "As Gulf States Plan Bypass Pipelines, US Military Is Quietly Helping Ships Cross Hormuz." We now have more evidence that, whether with or without a US escort, a growing number of ships are transiting Hormuz. 

According to Bloomberg, off the coast of Oman over the weekend, 16 tankers clustered together to transfer millions of barrels of oil that had been stranded in the Persian Gulf. A month ago, that area had been entirely empty. 

They’re part of a growing number of tankers that are turning their transponders off to lift oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz from a trickle to a stream. While conventional vessel-tracking data show little change in shipments, senior shipping executives, Asian oil buyers and satellite images paint a different picture: That Hormuz is now a lot less blocked, with transits becoming more steady and greater in volume. 

As we reported last week, the increase in Gulf producers’ ships going dark to sneak through undetected by Iran is at the heart of the rise in flows, coinciding with a period where the US has been helping ships navigate through the waterway. The recent volumes add to signs that the oil market is managing to route enough to buyers and avert a price surge as the Iran war causes the biggest supply disruption in oil market history.

Commenting on the growing number of stealthy ship transits, earlier today Goldman's Delta One head, Rich Privorotsky, said that "a lot has been thrown at the oil market and it’s simply not going up, which is remarkable given the level of escalation. The only conclusion that really fits the price action is that barrels are still getting through the Strait of Hormuz, visibly or otherwise. There doesn’t seem to be a more rational explanation."

Middle East producers have been using vessels they control to ferry barrels outside of Hormuz - avoiding the stratospheric fees that would be commanded by the small number of shipowners willing to transit. After exiting, they then transfer oil onto tankers that take the cargoes to buyers in Asia and elsewhere.

The weekend transfers off Oman were identified by satellite imagery from the European Union’s Copernicus browser. TankerTrackers.com Inc., which tracks vessels using satellite images, said it identified 12 ships with non-Iranian Middle Eastern barrels conducting transfers outside of Hormuz on June 6 alone.

“This is oil coming from Iran’s Arab neighbors,” TankerTrackers.com said. “Yet another reason why oil isn’t $200 a barrel right now.”

Ships engaging in Ship-to-Ship (STS) transfers.

“There’s an increase in trends as we’re observing,” said Larry Johnson, head of freight at commodity trader Mercuria Energy Group. “They’re mainly or exclusively government-owned ships that are making it through,” he said, adding that those vessels “seem to have channels of communication and means of securing safe passage somehow, some way.”

At least some of the ships that have crossed are doing so under the cover of darkness, and with lights on board switched off, Bloomberg said citing sources. Crews have also been instructed to stay off the radio.

About 2 million barrels a day of oil and related products are now flowing out of the Gulf, according to Rapidan Energy Group - a level that’s far below normal, but much higher than earlier in the conflict.

As JPMorgan recently discussed in detail, those flows, coupled with a plunge in Chinese buying, surging US exports and workarounds such as pipelines running hundreds of miles across the Middle East, have helped bring oil prices down almost 30% from their peak at the height of the war.

President Trump on Wednesday said in a social media post that “lots of oil is getting out” of Hormuz. A day earlier, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a conference that tanker traffic is “rising very meaningfully.”

With the prospect of more supplies, the Middle East’s main oil benchmark has steadily fallen toward pre-war levels. Before the effective blockade of Hormuz, the strait handled around a fifth of all oil supply in a global market of more than 100 million barrels a day.

Trump on Wednesday also said Iran would “pay the price” for delaying negotiations for an interim peace deal, after renewed attacks overnight put further strain on a fragile two-month truce. Trump said he retaliated against Iran for shooting down a US Apache helicopter near Hormuz.

There are other signs of more supplies getting out of the region. In recent days, both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have offered to sell oil outside Hormuz, indicating that barrels crossed the chokepoint. Satellite imagery show a steady run of ships loading at UAE oil terminals in recent weeks. Asian buyers are generally receiving more offers for barrels that are getting out, and expect further shipments to emerge in the coming days and weeks, according to traders involved in the market who asked not to be identified.

At least two supertankers each capable of hauling 2 million barrels of crude crossed Hormuz late last month and began signaling off the coast of Kuwait.  Both are managed by Kuwait Oil Tanker Co., according to the Equasis maritime database, and neither has broadcast a signal since then. One shipowner who asked not to be identified also said it had been contracted to carry barrels transferred from Kuwaiti ships that crossed Hormuz, while others said they believed Kuwait secured transit for more than two very large crude carriers. 

The bigger Kuwaiti flows follow a similar pattern that has emerged for barrels from the UAE. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) sold at least 14 million barrels of its oil in a tender that concluded at the end of last week, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Those cargoes are due to start loading this month.

Ships conduct oil cargo transfers off the coast of Oman. Most had their satellite transponders switched off.

Adnoc is among the firms to have moved crude through Hormuz with transponders off to avoid detection, Bloomberg reported last month. The company has continued to ship barrels at a healthy rate across the strait in recent weeks, according to two people familiar with its operations, who asked not to be identified as the information is private.

Satellite images also show that ships have continued to load at some of the country’s key terminals. An oil tanker was seen loading on six of the eight days there were images at Zirku Island in May, according to Copernicus data. Prior to the war, that terminal was able to load more than 1 million barrels a day of crude and condensate, according to intelligence firm Kpler.

Before some of the most recent transits, roughly a quarter of the non-Iranian large oil tankers trapped inside the Persian Gulf had escaped, shipping data showed in late May. Around 90 are still trapped, compared with roughly 160 in early April, according to Georgios Sakellariou, a freight analyst at vessel-pool management firm Signal Maritime.

So what does it mean if a growing number of ships are exiting the gulf? Well, according to Goldman's Privorotsky, this would indicate that "Iran’s leverage over global energy markets may be far lower than many (I) assumed. If there is no credible mechanism to materially disrupt flows, then the geopolitical risk premium becomes difficult to sustain. I’ll reserve judgment, but for now the price action remains bearish, even if the headlines do not."

Still, the risk is not gone, and the Delta One trader says that a potential tripwide that sends prices spiking again is one of the two: Iran striking energy infrastructure outside its borders, or US actions moving beyond tactical degradation and toward regime change objectives.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 13:40

Stellar 10Y Auction Stops Through Thanks To Surge In Foreign Demand

After yesterday's mediocre 3Y auction, moments ago the Treasury held a stellar 10Y reopening (of cusip QQ7). 

The sale of $39 billion in 9 Year-11 Month paper priced at a high yield of 4.538%, up from 4.468% last month, and 0.1bp through the 4.539% When Issued. This was the first stop through following 4 sequential tails for the tenor.

The bid to cover rose from 2.402 to 2.565, well above the six-auction average and the highest since Sept 25.

Internals were impressive: indirects surged to 78.21% from 63.95%, which was one of the 5 highest on record; the last time we saw such feverish foreign demand was in Sept 25.

And with Directs sliding to just 9.5%, the lowest since January, Dealers were left with 12.32%, far below the 21.39 recent average.

Overall, this was a stellar 10Y auction, a big improvement to yesterday's 3Y (which wasn't bad), and a sign from the bond market at least that today's CPI was nothing to be concerned about. 

 

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 13:32

Goldman Breaks Down Build America 250 Impact On Construction Stocks

The Build America 250 bill is a proposed transportation infrastructure funding package covering federal projects between 2027 and 2031 and would succeed the Biden-era Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which expires in the coming months.

Goldman analysts, led by Ben Rada Martin, stated that the Build America 250 bill has cleared House committee approval with limited amendments, providing greater clarity around $580 billion for highways, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure.

One main point from the Goldman note is that Build America 250 is not another IIJA-style boom. For the Federal Highway Administration, Martin sees only about an 8% nominal increase relative to IIJA levels, after IIJA delivered a more than 50% federal funding uplift.

Martin pointed out that bridge funding jumped by about 29%, while rail and transit programs face reductions. He expects public highway spending to grow by 6% in 2026 and 5% in 2027, though much of that reflects inflation rather than real volume growth. After adjusting for construction cost inflation, he expects flat-to-slightly negative volume trends.

"Nominal uplift, with a mix shift to bridges, transit sees cuts: We go through the 1,000-page draft document and amendments to date, with the recent bill implying a broad continuation in spending with a category mix shift toward bridges (+29%), while rail and transit administrations see cuts," Martin wrote in a note published on Monday.

Highways in detail - Limited expansion, especially net of inflation

Goldman's prediction model indicates that public construction should continue to grow, but at a slower pace after a very strong 2021 to 2025 period.

Martin said the stock impact of the Build America 250 bill on construction-linked companies is viewed as neutral to slightly negative.

Engineering and Construction - Neutral/Mix:

• US (GVA, AECOM, J): We view the bill as broadly net neutral for GVA (diversified civil contractor), as funding implies flat to modest real volume declines. For Jacobs and AECOM (engineering and design firms), we see a modest negative impact, reflecting cuts to rail and transit. While state and local infrastructure accounts for ~25–30% of revenue for both companies, we believe they are relatively overweight transit versus traditional infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, tunnels).
• EU (Ferrovial): The bill is likely to be neutral for Ferrovial's construction division - with Webber and Ferrovial Construction largely exposed to the broad US infrastructure segment, across bridges, highways, waterworks, and energy. When it comes to future infrastructure projects (P3), Ferrovial could benefit from lower government infrastructure spend, given lower crowding out effects increasing private market opportunities and ROI.

Lightside building materials

• (EU - Sika, SGO) - Neutral: Construction Chemicals are used in more complex engineering projects and in greater quantities in infrastructure refurbishment. Hence, we see the uplift in funding towards Bridge renovations as a positive, while see this to be offset by lower funding in transport and transit related categories. Sika is the most exposed with US Infra representing c.7% of Group (GSe).

Heavyside building materials - Neutral/Mixed:

• Cement (EU - Buzzi, Heidelberg, Latam - CX) - Neutral: Cement in our view is relatively project agnostic between bridges and highways. Hence, we see neutral implications, with strong Bridge spend offset by lower transport funding and limited uplift in nominal highway spend.
• Aggregates (EU - Heidelberg, Latam - CX) - Slight negative: Given only a small nominal funding increase for highways (key aggregate end-market), and expectations of continued pricing growth (c. +MSD) and inflation in the category, we believe levels of volume growth may be muted. While other spend categories of growth (Bridges) are less aggregate intensive.

The understanding here is that Build America 250 keeps federal infrastructure spending ongoing, but it should not be viewed as a new infrastructure supercycle.

Professional subscribers can read the full GS construction note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 13:00

The IPO Boom: Where Will The Money Come From?

Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The media hype surrounding SpaceX’s upcoming mid-June initial public offering (IPO) is immense. The company recently filed its S-1 with the SEC, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion and a capital raise of up to $75 billion. Some believe its valuation could rise to $2 trillion after the IPO. In its wake, Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) confidentially submitted IPO registration statements to the SEC. Expectations are that both AI model companies will enter the market within the next 3 to 6 months, with rumored valuations approaching or exceeding $1 trillion each. Stripe, the quickly growing payments company, is rumored to be on the IPO docket as well, with a valuation that could exceed $150 billion. Consequently, the coming IPO boom will have wide-reaching impacts.

The IPO market, which has been stagnant for the last four years, is bubbling with excitement. The headlines surrounding the IPOs are hyperbolic, banker fees are enormous, and social media is teeming with bullish sentiment on how high the new shares may trade after going public.

While IPO boom talk is great for clickbait, nobody is asking the most important question. Where will the money come from?

Putting Context To The IPO Boom

To understand the size of the coming IPO boom, some historical context is necessary. Prior to the pandemic, the US IPO market raised approximately $30 billion per year. In late 2020 and throughout 2021, the SPAC boom led to a surge in IPO offerings. Since then, however, as we share below, IPO issuance has been relatively lean.

The 2026 pipeline is shaping up to be the second-largest in at least the last ten years. SpaceX alone is raising up to $75 billion per its SEC filing. Add OpenAI’s expected cash raise of $60 billion, Anthropic at $15 to $20 billion, and Stripe around $10 billion, and the pipeline of known IPOs coming to market is approximately $160-$165 billion. Moreover, the total market valuation of these deals could surpass $4 trillion. Assuming no other deals come onto the market, the four deals would be larger than the last four years’ worth of deals combined.  

Dilution vs. Capital Absorption

Some pundits are using the word “dilution” to describe the impact of the IPOs on the market. While not necessarily misused, the term is most often used to describe what happens when a publicly traded company issues new shares in the market, diluting the value of existing shares. Simply, existing shareholders who do not buy new shares see their ownership percentage decline.

Given that the expected stock offerings are IPOs rather than add-on offerings by a publicly traded company, the term “dilution” is not appropriate to describe the upcoming offerings. The more accurate term is capital absorption.

Capital absorption is the process by which large new stock offerings pull money out of existing financial markets, as investors sell existing holdings or redirect cash to purchase newly issued shares. While it is true that someone must buy the shares being sold to fund an IPO purchase, that buyer, in most cases, is simply recycling existing market capital rather than introducing new money. Thus, while an IPO is not dilutive to the stock being offered, it is dilutive to the financial markets, as the total investible dollars, in theory, remain unchanged; they just get spread out a little more thinly.

Where Does IPO Capital Come From?

IPO capital comes from three primary sources, each with consequences for existing market participants.

The first is institutional rebalancing. A large asset manager running an equity portfolio that wants meaningful exposure to a new IPO must trim existing positions and potentially use existing cash or raise new funds to create room for the new holding. While selling by any manager is unlikely to create a ripple in the market, because the stocks, bonds, and other assets they sell vary widely, simultaneous selling across thousands of institutional portfolios can have an impact.

The second is retail liquidation. Similarly, individual investors who want to participate in an IPO need cash to do so. Some of that cash may come from savings, but like most institutional accounts, they will raise cash by selling existing equity holdings. Keep in mind that every retail investor who liquidates an S&P 500 index fund to buy SpaceX or another IPO is, de facto, a seller of all of the stocks in the index.

The third source is capital from sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and foreign institutional investors, who are expanding their equity holdings. Often, their funds represent new money entering the financial markets rather than a rotation within them. The participation of these funds might reduce the impact of IPOs on other stocks and financial assets.  

The net effect of all three sources is that existing holdings largely fund new ones. At the scale being contemplated in 2026, that rotation is large enough to create a meaningful headwind across financial markets.

Index Inclusion Impacts

The direct capital absorption from the IPOs themselves is significant, but it may not be the largest structural effect. The more consequential impact comes from index inclusion.

Passive index funds and other passive strategies do not choose their holdings. When a stock is added to the index they track, they must buy it in proportion to its weight in the index. Typically, this is a minor event, as most IPOs are small enough that inclusion is minimal. The 2026 IPOs are different.

Consider the top ten S&P 500 holdings shown in the table below. SpaceX at $1.75 trillion, combined with Anthropic and OpenAI at roughly $1 trillion each, represents approximately $3.75 trillion in total market weight. That is nearly equal to Apple’s entire market capitalization, the second-largest stock in the index. An S&P 500 index fund adding all three IPOs would need to proportionally reduce the weight of every other holding in the portfolio to make room for those additions.

Fortunately, the impact will happen in waves over time. SpaceX’s inclusion will trigger the first wave of forced rebalancing. Anthropic and OpenAI, expected to follow within months, each trigger their own.

Index Inclusion Timing

The impact of index inclusion, as discussed above, depends heavily on timing, and the timeline is accelerating in ways that are concerning for existing index investors.

Index providers have a financial incentive to include these large companies quickly. The more assets that track their indexes, the more licensing revenue they generate. An index that excludes the most valuable and talked-about companies in the market risks losing relevance and assets to competing benchmarks. That incentive is resulting in a significant rewriting of the rules by the indexing companies.

Nasdaq reacted first. In early May 2026, it revised its methodology to allow any newly listed company with a market cap in the top 40 to enter the Nasdaq 100 after just 15 trading days, eliminating the minimum float requirement entirely. Under those rules, SpaceX could be a Nasdaq 100 constituent before most investors have had time to assess its first earnings report.

The S&P 500 is moving more slowly but in the same direction. S&P Dow Jones Indices has proposed cutting the seasoning window from 12 months to 6 and waiving the four-quarter profitability requirement for companies above a certain market-cap threshold. Even under that accelerated timeline, a mid-June SpaceX IPO would not reach S&P 500 eligibility until around December 2026. Thus, the largest wave of forced passive buying may still be months away.

The market impacts begin at the IPO and may be felt for many months after.

Summary

Think of the stock market as a jar full of marbles. For the new SpaceX and other marbles to fit in the jar, either the jar must be enlarged, or some of the other marbles must shrink. 

Given the current monetary environment, the jar, or available capital, is unlikely to grow significantly. The Fed is no longer providing the flood of liquidity that enabled the easy digestion of the SPAC boom in 2020 and 2021. Rates are higher, savings rates are lower, and the equity market is already trading at elevated valuations. Simply put, there isn’t much extra liquidity.  Thus, the other option is for the collective market cap of everything else to decline.

In reality, there will be some shrinkage of marbles and an enlargement of the jar. The extent of both will help determine how the IPO boom is received and its impact on other stocks. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 12:40

Number Of US Home Sellers Hits Highest Level In 6 Years In May: Report

Authored by Rob Sabo via The Epoch Times,

Homebuyers held more leverage over sellers in May, with sellers outpacing prospective buyers in 35 of the nation’s 50 most populous metropolitan markets, according to a June 9 report from real estate brokerage Redfin.

The number of sellers reached its highest level since 2020.

Home sellers outnumbered buyers by nearly 47 percent for the month, up slightly from 46.4 percent in April, but retreating slightly from the peak of 49.5 percent in December 2025, Redfin researchers said.

The numbers are in stark contrast to 2021, when there were 36.4 percent fewer sellers than buyers as mortgage rates under 3 percent sparked a buying frenzy.

A typical buyer’s market has 10 percent more sellers than buyers, which gives prospective buyers greater negotiating power since there are an abundance of homes from which to choose. 

“While the gap between homebuyers and sellers has narrowed slightly since the end of last year, house hunters still have far more negotiating power and less pressure to make rushed decisions,” Redfin senior economist Asad Khan said.

“Buyers in most of the country can be selective and ask for concessions, while sellers still need to price competitively to stand out.”

There were more than 1.48 million sellers in May, up by 0.4 percent from the previous month and the highest number of home listings since 2020, Redfin noted. On the other side of the equation, just 1.01 million buyers were looking for new residences.

Sellers entered the market in greater numbers in April in part due to a slight easing in mortgage rates, but buying demand compressed in May as mortgage rates crept higher, Redfin noted. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for the week ending June 4 was 6.48 percent, Freddie Mac reported. At the end of May, however, that rate hit a year-high at 6.53 percent. 

Existing home sales increased by 3.2 percent in May, while total for-sale inventory ticked up by 3.2 percent, the National Association of Realtors reported. Homebuying may be slightly slower through the final two quarters of the year, however, as interest rates are expected to remain unchanged until the summer of 2027, Goldman Sachs researchers said. Elevated mortgage rates reduce homeowner affordability.

Multiple Sun Belt metros lead the nation in seller imbalance. The strongest buyers’ market was Nashville, Tennessee, which had 17,494 hopeful sellers versus 7,614 prospective buyers, an imbalance of 129.8 percent.

Miami, Florida, had 122.3 percent more sellers than buyers (19,426 to 8,740), followed by three Texas cities: Austin at 116 percent (18,281 to 8,462), Houston at 110.8 percent (45,968 to 21,809), and San Antonio at 107.5 percent (19,552 to 9,423).

Buyers outnumbered sellers in a handful of markets, creating more favorable conditions for purchasers, Redfin stated. Nassau County, New York, had 38.3 percent more buyers than sellers, Milwaukee had 29.1 percent, and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, had 24.9 percent. Sellers in those markets can benefit from higher sale prices, multiple bids, fewer concessions, and reduced time on market, according to Freddie Mac.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 12:00

Taiwan Test Fires US Mobile Launchers Into Waters Directly Facing China For First Time

China's PLA military has long been known to intimidate and threaten the self-ruled island of Taiwan, mainly with large military exercises which sometime encircle it partially or completely, or else with a heavy naval boat presence in the Strait of Hormuz.

Taiwan's military often reacts by scrambling its own fighter jets to closely monitor the PLA maneuvers - seen as a natural defensive and reactive move. But this week, in a rare moment, Taiwan is finally doing some proactive flexing of its own.

EPA-EFE

"Taiwan fired U.S. mobile missile launchers into the strategic waters directly facing China for the first time, sending a message of resolve to Beijing and Washington," The Wall Street Journal reports.

This involved over 30 test rocket launches via truck-mounted High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. Importantly, the launch site was an area near a river mouth on Taiwan's western coast.

"This is sending a message to the Chinese that they are going to get hit hard if they try to come across the strait—and will end up with far fewer ships than they started with," Grant Newsham, a retired US Marine colonel who served in several Indo-Pacific roles, told WSJ.

The WSJ continues with further context:

The drill was the highlight of two days of military exercises showcasing Taiwan’s preparations to combat an amphibious invasion. China considers democratically self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory and hasn’t ruled out potentially using force to absorb the island.

...Such exercises also serve as a signal to Washington that Taiwan is committed to defending itself and deserves U.S. support, with a $14 billion U.S. arms package currently on hold.

Back in April, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed cross-strait relations: "All sons and daughters of China share the same Chinese roots and the same Chinese spirit. This originates from blood ties and is deeply embedded in our history – it cannot be forgotten and cannot be erased," he said at the time.

Officially, Biejing seeks a 'peaceful reunification' of the independent island to the mainland, while many Washington officials fear it could at any point launch an outright invasion and political takeover.

WATCH: Taiwan conducted its first HIMARS live-fire on its western coast, the primary PLA invasion corridor.

32 of 36 planned rockets fired; 4 misfires under investigation.

Previous HIMARS drills were on the east coast. pic.twitter.com/9Z1xPWMgIK

— Clash Report (@clashreport) June 10, 2026

But the reality remains that any PLA direct military intervention would likely be in response to a provocation, and wouldn't just materialize out of thin air. Beijing has at times warned that the growing billions of dollars in arms that Washington has been providing Taiwan could be just such a provocation. 

Xi's China has also been very alarmed at the growing (direct) US military footprint in its own backyard, given the presence of American military advisers, said to be present in some of Taiwan's small islands which lie close to the Chinese mainland.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 11:05

Peacefire

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Welcome to the ‘peacefire’. After Israel and Iran were pulled back from the brink of new war by Trump on Monday, Wednesday morning Asia time saw him then strike Iran, and it fire at US bases in the Gulf, in response to Tehran downing a US Apache helicopter. It appears the US hit radar and missile/drone facilities around and in the Strait of Hormuz while Iran didn’t hit anything due to its missiles being intercepted.

Looking at the areas the US struck in Iran last night, one plausible explanation is that they targeted the infrastructure Iran uses to control shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. In effect, they may have hit the “toll booth” and related facilities — including military/security… https://t.co/xq6OwcEQbV

— Anas Alhajji (@anasalhajji) June 10, 2026

It seems both sides can now attack each other on a limited/proportional scale under a ‘ceasefire’ while peace negotiations continue… which Trump says are now in the “final throes”, and cynics point out such finality is always thrown further into the future.

The latest suggestion there is that Iran may dilute its highly enriched uranium stockpile rather than destroying or handing it over, which would be a serious US climbdown if so; that’s as Trump elsewhere mused that he might set up a Marshall Plan for Iran – but would want half their oil in return.

On Iran, TRUMP tells @ABC: “Somebody's going to have to build all that infrastructure, new bridges, new this, new that, new power plants… they're talking about a trillion dollars, probably more… that's why we'll probably get involved in rebuilding.”

“But, we’ll get half their…

— Akayla Gardner (@gardnerakayla) June 9, 2026

Yet allowing Iran to keep its nuclear potential is not going to be acceptable to Israel, meaning no long-term peace in the region whatever the US decides. Meanwhile, Israel continues to attack Hezbollah, so far to no promised retaliation from Iran. As noted yesterday, that points to Iran’s failure to link Lebanon to its own conflict and to force Israel to stop hitting its proxy there. It goes without saying that the latest US strikes against it further underline that Tehran is not as in control of all elements of this crisis as some media and analyst takes would have it: this ‘peacefire’ arguably suits the US more than Iran.

Furthermore, note oil had slid ahead of the latest attacks after the US energy secretary said Hormuz transits are ‘meaningfully’ climbing. Crucially, there is evidence suggesting the US Navy is ushering more oil through Hormuz, with transponders off, than official data on ship movements show. Indeed, both the UAE and Kuwait are now offering crude to Asia again, while Saudi jet fuel supply to Europe is higher than before the Hormuz closure (first discussed here "As Gulf States Plan Bypass Pipelines, US Military Is Quietly Helping Ships Cross Hormuz"). That may not get much fanfare, but it is extremely significant if so.

Of course, oil then climbed after the US strikes on Iran - and a Hormuz reopening date beyond what we already expected (September) was just flagged. Trump had echoed our thinking when talking about Labor Day, September 7, as a possible reopening date, but yesterday Vice-President Vance noted it could take “weeks” or even “months” to get to a deal - but one will “absolutely” happen before the mid-term elections. That means November! Of course, if more oil is getting out of Hormuz, how destructive that extended closure timeline will prove for the global economy is unclear – but the tail risks aren’t eliminated.

Elsewhere in geopolitics, Taiwan’s opposition leader told the US and China not to use her country as ‘pawn’. Recall Bloomberg yesterday claimed a $10 trillion price tag if problems emerge there. How many plan Bs are being put in place on that risk basis?

In geopolitics-adjacent geoeconomics, the EU wants to use African solar power for its own energy future – which will logically require not just up to €100bn in investment there, and Africa not wanting that power for its own economy, but an EU ability to physically protect such installations in a region plagued by Islamist attacks and Russian influence in places. That could therefore cost more than €100bn.

Meanwhile, Germany announced the planned Franco-German fighter jet scheme dead, and Airbus flagged plans for a German-led alliance to replace it. There are also suggestions the UK will be forced to cut its contribution to a proposed UK-Italy-Japan fighter jet and cancel its new Navy destroyers if they don’t further hike taxes, which would be politically damaging. Who could have known that massive rearmament is very expensive and tricky to coordinate?

In related technology issues, Brussels has ordered Meta to open up WhatsApp to rival AI agents, as the White House reined in its new AI-testing unit while Anthropic released the new ‘Mythos-class’ model to the general public ‘with guardrails’. That’s as the Wall Street Journal notes Wall Street is enthusiastically funding AI in any way possible, and Europe’s ASML warned the EU against politically directing chip supplies as part of its AI plans.

In markets, the Korean KOSPI was down 4.5% today after being up 8.2% Tuesday after being down 8.3% on Monday (and 5.5% on Friday).

The US 10-year yield was at 4.53%, not yet at the level requiring a new Iran deal story from Axios.

Wall Street is embracing the crypto it once feared, according to Axios - as Reuters notes, ‘Under the Trump crypto playbook, the family always wins. Investors don’t.’

Now back to the ‘peacefire’.  

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 10:50

Oil Prices Extend Gains After Another Big Crude Draw, Cushing 'Tank Bottoms' Loom

Oil prices are higher this morning on renewed fighting between the US and Iran (and Trump rhetoric), while API reported a major crude inventory draw (for an eighth week in a row).

Additionally, in its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook released on Tuesday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported the closure of the Strait is depleting global inventories, keeping prices high.

"Global oil markets remain highly volatile as very limited shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has caused oil producers in the Middle East to reduce crude oil production by more than 11 million barrels per day (b/d) in May compared with pre-conflict levels. This drop in production has resulted in large global inventory draws to meet demand. Under our assumptions, we expect global oil inventories will fall by an average of 6.3 million b/d in 2Q26 and by 7.6 million b/d in 3Q26," the agency said.

So this morning, all eyes are on the official data to see just how fast those inventories are depleting...

API

• Crude -9.1MM

• Cushing -1.1MM

• Gasoline -1.2MM

• Distillates +1.3MM

DOE

• Crude -7.23mm

• Cushing -801k

• Gasoline +186k

• Distillates -200k

Following API's reported a huge crude draw, the official data showed a seventh straight week of crude inventory declines. Gasoline stocks saw a build for the second week in a row...

Source: Bloomberg

Cushing 'tank bottoms' are looming...

Source: Bloomberg

US gasoline stocks are barely off their lowest levels since 2014 for this time of year...

Source: Bloomberg

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve saw another huge drawdown this week for a total of 66.2 million barrels since the Iran 'mini-war' started (16% of the pre-war total)...

Source: Bloomberg

Rig counts continue to rise with US crude production just shy of record highs...

Source: Bloomberg

US crude and product exports dipped last week but remain notably elevated from pre-war levels...

Source: Bloomberg

WTI was hovering just below $90 ahead of the official data

Despite the higher tensions, crude futures are down by more than a quarter since their peak at the end of April, aided by a combination of a plunge in Chinese imports to multiyear lows, record American oil exports and large releases of emergency reserves.

The retreat is a sign that oil markets are, for now at least, coping with the disruption and physical markets look well supplied.

“At the moment the market is trying to find some equilibrium,” Wael Sawan, Chief Executive Officer of Shell Plc, said on the sidelines of the Wall Street Journal CEO Council in London.

“It’s more driven by short-term headlines. And so if I look at the reality, we’re of course drawing down on those inventories fast.”

"While diplomatic efforts remain ongoing, the latest military exchanges have reintroduced a geopolitical risk premium into oil markets," Reuters quoted Priyanka Sachdeva, senior market analyst at Phillip Nova, as saying.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 10:40

From Token-maxxing To Token-panic: Citrini Warns AI Goldilocks Narrative Hitting A Wall

When the world and their pet rabbit was buying the hype and extrapolating trends to infinity and beyond, we dared to highlight a few 'economic' realities of the new 'tokenomics'.

From Singularity To Tokenomics: The AI Narrative Just Hit A Serious Snag

Was Amazon's Tokenmaxxing Fiasco Behind Claude's $500M Mystery Bill?

From Singularity To Tokenomics, Part II: The Subsidy Just Ran Out - And GitHub Users Went Splat

This morning we got confirmation of this AI reality questioning from none other than Goldman Sachs Partner, Rich Privorotsky, who highlighted that Token Spend had 'peaked'...

And now, Citrini Research - who infamously issued a less than utopic view of the world under AI back in March - has written a follow up on the status quo of the AI ecosystem, noting that in just weeks we’ve gone from tokenmaxxing to tokenpanic.

In March, we and many others were writing about the astounding growth in token consumption driven by the release of agents and more intensive models.

This was enough to send the infrastructure trade sharply higher – the market value of the semiconductor industry doubled in two months.

But that goldilocks narrative is beginning to hit a wall. The corollary of explosive token usage is explosive cost to customers, which is coming just as the US labs and hyperscalers are turning up the dial on monetization. The public story is increasingly turning to corporate pushback.

The first real signs of this shift were from the much-discussed report of Uber burning through its entire AI budget in just four months.

Then there was the anonymous report of a $500 million oopsie.

In the past week, the idea has turned into a media avalanche.

According to The Economist’s reporting, Anthropic’s ARR has increased 5x since the start of the year, reaching $45 billion in May.

Great for the lab, but it also means the “AI Opex” line item on P&Ls is going through the roof.

The issue is not just Anthropic. Sam Altman also confirmed that all of a sudden cost is a huge issue (and acknowledged the virality of the idea).

“Probably the second biggest theme is just around cost. People are really saying, it’s kind of become a meme now, but, “My company spent my entire 2026 budget in Q1. Can you make this more efficient?” We are continuing to push on that more with models. I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend, but that went from, at the beginning of this year, an issue that never came up. I know. People were totally happy with the amount they were spending, to all of a sudden, a huge issue.”

Microsoft’s AI Chief added to the unflattery this week after cancelling Claude Code licenses in May.

“Anthropic is extremely expensive, and I think many people are urgently looking for alternatives”

This cost concern didn’t just come out of nowhere.

First, agents and more advanced reasoning models use orders of magnitude greater tokens.

Corporates have widely distributed these tools and encouraged their use just as the average user was gaining the ability to casually run enormous bills.

Second, prices for frontier models are increasing as providers are flipping to usage models and preparing for public market debuts.

In a unified front – OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google – have all implemented pricing shifts towards usage/tokens, as they simply can’t afford to endlessly subsidize their products for power users.

• April 2: OpenAI changed Codex pricing to align with API token usage instead of per-message pricing

• May 19: Google changed Gemini subscriptions from “daily prompt limits” to a “compute-used” model.

• June 1: Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot transitioned to usage based billing

And what does a rate sheet mean really if you have no idea what your usage burns in practice?

Claude’s Opus 4.7 & 4.8 have the same “list price” as prior versions, but use a “new tokenizer” that may use up to 35% more tokens for the same fixed text.

Is this an existential problem or just the VC playbook at unimaginable scale?

Subsidize demand, gain market share and lock-in, then monetize. After all, companies are spending a trillion in capex to make trillions in revenue, right?

Well either way we’ve reached Monetization, and maybe not by choice. As fast as lab revenue is growing, the fundraising has grown even faster.

The money going towards building and running AI has exploded. The deepest pockets in the world – hyperscaler cash flow, venture capital, sovereign wealth, public credit, private credit, public equity – are footing most of the bill. Eventually, customers have to start picking up the tab.

Free-AI is ending. Tokenomics is beginning.

What happens when underlying costs of compute become more transparent and directly traceable to outcomes? The ROI debate is about to be answered in real time, across millions of users and use cases.

For the median user, maybe not a whole lot changes. But science projects, freewheeling agents, and curiosities will either get cut or offloaded to open source models. Companies will restrict AI functionality and invest in oversight and observability. Budget constraints will pit AI spend against headcounts. Providers will become more competitive on pricing and will begin to optimize physical and digital architecture for efficiencies.

In many (most) situations, good enough will do. The cost of running open-source, discount, or mini models is going down while their capabilities only improve. This week saw another batch of open source models like Nvidia latest Nemotron family which includes advanced general-purpose models as well as highly efficient, compact versions optimized for local deployment and specialized agentic uses. As the frontier continues to advance, inference costs drop precipitously for a fixed level of intelligence. Why rent a Ferrari when a Vespa does the trick?

Of course, frontier models with highly specialized functions can continue to command an intense premium, but will serve a smaller segment of the market. A top lawyer can still bill at thousands per hour, even if millions of other workers are making minimum wage.

But even across the high end, the gap between US and Chinese offerings is worth noting. Qwen 3.7 and Deepseek V4 are still behind Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 in terms of benchmarks, but they are 10x - 25x cheaper.

Since releasing V4 Pro and V4 Flash in April, Deepseek has shot past Anthropic to the top of the charts on OpenRouter in terms of tokens processed.

Meanwhile, Cursor, one of the most used coding agents, released their new model that was post-trained on compute provided by xAI after their $10 billion deal. The base model is a different Chinese open source model by Moonshot and it was trained on data Cursor gets from its customers. The results are even stronger than Deepseek, it’s comparable to 4.7 and 5.5 for 10x lower cost per task and is one of the fastest frontier models.

There are obvious other “considerations” for large US enterprises that may prevent a mass exodus to Chinese alternatives. Plus, greater integration into workflows adds to lock-in. But there is a growing trend of application layer companies that will continue to post-train on open source base models for specialized workflows like coding and legal.

But what does this mean for the AI trade?

First, to be clear, revenues for labs and hyperscalers are going to grow. Token usage for top Anthropic models continues to go higher. Regardless of the pushback, frontier models can certainly create meaningful value especially in high-stakes fields like tech and finance, and there are still plenty of levers to pull in the monetization phase. The entire point is for them to start making money.

Likewise, this won’t fix near-term compute constraints.

But we do think that cost and efficiency only become more important as the bills get bigger. Themes of local inference, miniaturization, smart routing, observability, price competition, and efficient model architecture will grow. Competitive pressures and price competition are likely to stay.

Subscribers can read the rest of Citrini's note here...

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 10:20

10 Reasons You Shouldn't Ignore This Week's Sharp Reversal And Selloff

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Today’s reversal and selloff may end up being just another volatile session in an ongoing bull market. But I think investors would be making a mistake if they dismissed it outright, because it might not be. Sharp reversals often reveal underlying stress that has been building beneath the surface long before it becomes obvious in the major indices.

Here are ten reasons today’s move deserves attention.

1. Valuations Are Historically Extreme — The market is entering this period of volatility from one of the most expensive starting points in history.

The Shiller CAPE ratio recently pushed above 40x, a level only seen during the dot-com bubble and the post-pandemic liquidity boom. Meanwhile, total U.S. market capitalization sits around 237% of GDP, putting Buffett Indicator readings near all-time highs.

History doesn’t tell us exactly when valuations matter. It does suggest that when starting valuations reach these levels, future returns become increasingly dependent on continued optimism rather than fundamentals.

2. The SpaceX IPO Could Be a Sentiment Marker — For months, I’ve speculated that a potential SpaceX IPO could coincide with a market top. Market peaks are often characterized by investors assigning extraordinary valuations to extraordinary companies.

• Morningstar Just Issued The Most Bearish SpaceX Valuation Yet

• Skeptics Step Back From SpaceX

• The SpaceX IPO May Be The AI Bubble’s Final Test

Asking public investors to absorb one of the largest and most highly valued IPOs in history is a difficult proposition when liquidity conditions are tightening, valuations are already stretched, and risk appetite is showing signs of fatigue.

3. Crypto Remains the Tip of the Risk-On Spear — Crypto continues to function as the purest expression of speculative risk appetite:

• Saylor Adds 1,550 Bitcoin To “Hold The Line”

• Bitcoin Bulls All Have A Breaking Point

• Saylor Breaks The ‘Immaculate’ Bitcoin Narrative

Michael Saylor and Strategy appear to be doing everything possible to defend both the price of Bitcoin and investor confidence surrounding the Bitcoin treasury trade. Yet recent attempts to support sentiment have not generated the response bulls were hoping for.

As I’ve argued for some time, if crypto begins to crack meaningfully, it will likely be a warning sign for broader risk assets. Historically, the most speculative assets tend to weaken first. If crypto goes, the rest of the market rarely remains immune for long.

🔥 80% Off If You Subscribe Today: This coupon allows for 80% off of annual subscriptions and results in a 85% savings over paying the monthly rate for a subscription to the blog. You keep the discounted rate for as long as you wish to remain a subscriber: Get 80% off forever

4. Violent Price Swings Are Characteristic of Market Tops — One of the most overlooked warning signs isn’t the direction of the market—it’s the behavior of the market.

A -3% Nasdaq session followed by a +2% rebound and then another -3% decline is not evidence of stability. It’s evidence of uncertainty.

Major market tops are often accompanied by increasingly violent swings as institutional investors distribute risk while retail investors continue buying dips. Volatility expands, conviction falls, and price action becomes erratic.

Healthy bull markets tend to climb steadily. Topping processes tend to look chaotic.

5. The Consumer Is Running Out of Room — The U.S. consumer remains the backbone of the economy, but cracks continue to emerge: The American Consumer Is Piss Broke.

Credit card balances remain elevated, delinquency rates are rising across several lending categories, savings buffers have largely been exhausted, and wage growth is no longer providing the same cushion it did several years ago.

Consumers can continue spending longer than many expect, but the direction of travel is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

6. Treasury Auctions Continue to Show Sporadic Demand

Today’s 3-year Treasury auction tailed, reinforcing concerns that demand for U.S. government debt remains less robust than policymakers would prefer: The Bond Market Is About To Break Washington.

While one auction does not make a trend, repeated tails suggest investors require higher yields to absorb the growing supply of Treasury issuance.

The bond market remains the most important market in the world. Right now, it still looks uneasy.

7. The Next Fed Chair Won’t Have Many Easy Options — The next Federal Reserve chair may inherit one of the most challenging policy environments in decades: New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Job Is Impossible.

If inflation remains sticky, aggressive rate cuts become difficult. If growth slows meaningfully, keeping rates elevated becomes painful. And if asset prices begin falling while inflation remains above target, policymakers could find themselves trapped between conflicting objectives.

The old playbook of simply cutting rates to rescue markets may not be available.

8. Credit Markets Are Sending Warning Signals — For months I’ve been arguing that investors are ignoring a growing list of warning signs across the economy and financial markets.

Private credit continues to show signs of stress, yet receives remarkably little attention compared to equities. But private credit is only one area to watch: 10 Areas Of The Market I'd Avoid Right Now

Credit problems rarely stay contained. They spread slowly, then all at once.

9. Market Breadth Remains Fragile — Index performance continues to mask weakness underneath the surface.

A relatively small group of mega-cap technology names still accounts for a disproportionate share of market gains. When leadership narrows to a handful of stocks, markets become increasingly vulnerable to sudden sentiment shifts.

The broader the participation, the healthier the rally. Narrow leadership often emerges late in the cycle.

10. Rate Hikes Are No Longer Unthinkable — Perhaps the biggest assumption embedded in markets today is that the next move from the Fed will eventually be lower rates: Time For Rate Hikes

But if inflation proves more persistent than expected—or begins accelerating again—the conversation could shift in a hurry.

Markets have largely priced a future of easing. They are far less prepared for a future in which policymakers are forced to tighten again. Even if additional hikes never arrive, the fact that they’re back in the conversation should get investors’ attention.

Final Thought

No single indicator rings a bell at market tops. But when extreme valuations, weakening credit conditions, volatile price action, fragile consumer finances, and growing policy constraints begin appearing simultaneously, investors should pay attention.

Today’s reversal may ultimately prove meaningless…but could also be one of those days that looks much more important in hindsight. I think it could be the latter.

--

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

As of May 20, 2026 I personally no longer actively trade (read my story here). My investing/saving is done by recurring contributions mostly to sector ETFs and a few select equities, trusted third parties who oversee my accounts, and advisors. Such advisors or funds, through individual equities, options, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, or other securities, may have positions in, exposure to, or holdings of names mentioned herein that I know nothing about. Basically, via index funds, ETFs and individual equities it is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything at any point. As of the same date, May 20, 2026, in an attempt to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve also excluded myself from fantasy sports, sports betting, online and in-person casinos and prediction markets.

And all positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Tyler Durden Wed, 06/10/2026 - 10:00