TC Energy's Columbia Gas Transmission pipeline system issued a notice requiring an "immediate pressure reduction" on Mountaineer XPress Line 100 between the Mt. Olive Compressor Station in Jackson County and the Saunders Creek Regulator Station in Cabell County, West Virginia, warning that an "expected mechanical issue" would reduce scheduled volumes.
Columbia Gas Transmission moves Appalachian NatGas to markets across the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Southeast, with connections carrying supplies deep south to export terminals on the Gulf of America.
The affected Mountaineer XPress (MXP) pipeline in West Virginia feeds two main outlets:
NatGas research firm Criterion Research provided clients earlier today with an update on the outage:
TCO declared force majeure this morning following an unexpected mechanical issue on its Mountaineer XPress (MXP) system between the Mt. Olive Compressor Station and Saunders Creek Regulator Station in West Virginia, with the pipeline set to cut the MXPSEG MA42 constraint to zero beginning with the Sept. 25 Timely Cycle.
TCO estimates 1.8 MMDth/d of firm service will be affected, roughly matching the 1.88 MMDth/d currently scheduled through MXPSEG.
MXP is a 2.7 Bcf/d Appalachian takeaway system moving Marcellus/Utica supply south through West Virginia into TCO's broader system. Upstream MXP receipts have not yet materially responded, with Sherwood flowing ~714 MDth/d, Corral ~267 MDth/d and Viking ~5 MDth/d today, but the full restriction should begin showing up in tomorrow's nominations and could force significant rerouting or production cuts if the roughly 1.8 Bcf/d cannot find alternate paths. TCO has not provided a restoration timeline and expects to issue another update Friday morning.
October gas futures climbed 4.5%, or 13.6 cents, to $3.159 per million British thermal units on Nymex as of 11:00 a.m. ET. Prices have jumped more than 12% since early Wednesday.
Flow restrictions can tighten downstream supplies even when natural gas remains abundant at producing wells across Appalachia.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 12:10
Authored by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times,
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that artificial intelligence could "be a risk to humanity as a whole" during a briefing before the United Nations Security Council on Sept. 23.
Amodei was among the top AI executives who spoke at the meeting - organized by France during the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders - which also included statements by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Hugging Face CEO and co-founder Clément Delangue.
Amodei urged the 15-member council to advance U.N. agreements that ban the use of AI to form biological weapons, and encouraged the council to build evaluation and verification systems allowing nations to hold each other accountable, establish global standards to test AI models for loss of control risks and misuse risks, and add a notification system for AI incidents that are significant to global security.
"We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe," Amodei said during his video remarks.
"But regardless of what we do, managing these risks is ultimately bigger than any one company, and it has an industry-wide and global scale."
Amodei suggested there's a chance AI could become a "country of geniuses in a data center" in fewer than two years.
Meanwhile, Altman warned in his speech that humans "could lose control of the future to AI."
"The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed," Altman said. "This would obviously be terrible. The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too great and they feel too important to slow down."
Altman said no person, company, or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else.
Calls to slow the advancement of AI have surged after Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI researcher who resigned from Anthropic, said on Sept. 8 that people building AI think it could kill us all "by the end of the decade."
OpenAI acknowledged an incident involving rogue AI agents who were able to breach the open-source AI community Hugging Face.
Delangue, the Hugging Face co-founder, told the council on Wednesday that he believed fear-based narratives are not the way to make the right decisions about the technology's future.
"We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI," Delangue said.
"The same systems that helped us during this attack are now helping us against cyberattacks we were already facing. It's also helping us fix the bugs and weaknesses in our systems before the attack."
The meeting came one day after U.S. President Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that the United States "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control" artificial intelligence, which he attempted to rebrand as "super intelligence."
Trump said he wanted to change the name because "artificial" made the technology sound fake.
The U.S. State Department ordered diplomats to use "super intelligence" in all communications following Trump's speech at the UN, according to an email sent Sept. 22 by Michael Drager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
The president has endorsed the technology and urged its expansion, insisting that the United States needs to beat China in the AI race.
"We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins," Trump said while speaking with reporters at his golf course in Ireland on Sept. 13.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 11:40Three weeks after Jefferies chemicals and materials analyst Laurence Alexander initiated coverage of Almonty Industries with a "Buy" rating and a 12-month price target of $26.25, framing it as a play on the "Western Tungsten Re-Shoring Trade," Goldman Sachs launched coverage early Thursday, describing the miner as "at the center of the Western tungsten investment narrative."
Goldman metals and steel analyst Nick Cash notes that Chinese policy restrictions have fueled supply concerns and an eightfold increase in tungsten prices since the start of 2025:
ALM sits at the center of the Western tungsten investment narrative as policy actions taken by China have resulted in global supply concerns, causing the price of tungsten to increase 8x since the beginning of 2025.
ALM owns one of the most important tungsten development asset outside China, the Sangdong mine in South Korea
However, we believe the stock is increasingly reflecting a continuation of today's exceptional tungsten market as well as an aggressive production profile for Sangdong.
Almonty's Sangdong mine in South Korea is key to conflict-free tungsten supply for the West as Beijing has ramped up restrictions that collide with the upcU.S.ing US rearmament cycle.
He cautioned that his estimates diverge from Wall Street consensus in two areas:
Almonty has moved to expand conflict-free tungsten supplies through a multiyear, take-or-pay offtake agreement with Sandvik Group subsidiary, centered on recovering tungsten from existing tailings at its Los Santos mine in Spain. The miner has also established a strategic partnership with Rwanda's government, while South Korea approved the miner earlier this week to supply Western markets.
Goldman's valuation stands well below the broader Street consensus. Bloomberg data show a consensus 12-month price target of $24.73, compared with Nick Cash's $13 target. Almonty's analyst coverage now comprises 9 "Buy" ratings and one "Hold" rating following Goldman.
Jefferies' Alexander noted earlier this month, "Almonty offers long-dated leverage to Western tungsten supply-chain re-shoring through Sangdong, Panasqueira, Browns Lake, and planned downstream oxide capacity. China controls ~80% of supply, while defense procurement restrictions begin in 2027."
Almonty shares fell 6.5% to around $12.74 on Thursday morning, slightly below Goldman's 12-month price target. The broader space, viewed through the lens of the VanEck Rare Earth and Strategic Metals ETF (REMX), has also declined in the back half of summer.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 11:25Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
There. I’ve said it. I’ve gone from pussyfooting around and saying the AI bubble could pop in 6 to 10 months…which I still believe…to the very definitive statement that if the bond market keeps acting like this, the equity markets will get slaughtered. And I mean, wrath of God type shit.
This isn’t even a particularly sophisticated thesis. After all, if I’m delivering it, it can’t be. It’s just math.
Treasuries sold off hard on Wednesday, sending the 10-year yield up roughly 14 basis points to about 5.11%, after touching 5.14% intraday, its highest level since 2007.
The 30-year climbed to roughly 5.4%, while the 2-year jumped to about 4.9%. This is the latest leg of a bond selloff that has been building for months, with the 10-year alone up roughly 35 basis points in September and long-term borrowing costs now pushing into territory we haven't consistently dealt with since before the Global Financial Crisis.
Inflation fears, pornographic government borrowing needs, spiking oil prices and expectations for additional Fed hikes are all feeding the move. In other words, the bond market keeps trying to tell everybody something, and equity investors keep sticking their fingers in their ears.
Well, the bond market isn’t the equity market. It can’t be gamed, f*cked around with using call options, it can’t be ignored and it can’t be rigged…at least, not without massive consequences. The equity markets in the U.S. are roughly $70 trillion in size, but they ultimately sit on top of the price of money established in the bond market.
Treasuries alone are more than $30 trillion, and their yields help determine what mortgages cost, what corporations pay to borrow, what private equity can finance, what the government pays on its debt and, ultimately, what investors should be willing to pay for a dollar of future corporate earnings. Stocks can ignore that math for a while. They cannot ignore it forever.
It’s as simple as this: as long-term interest rates continue moving higher, virtually every important piece of financial math gets worse, all at the same time.
The discount rate used to value stocks rises, which makes future earnings worth less today. Mortgages get more expensive. Corporate borrowing gets more expensive. Private equity deals and private credit…much of which is already FUBAR but not showing it yet…become harder to finance. Leveraged companies have to refinance debt at higher rates. Consumers pay more to borrow and the federal government pays more to service its enormous pile of debt.
Rising rates are a slow, methodical wood chipper for anything built on cheap money. Anything like…oh, I don’t know…the entire f*cking economy of the last two decades—especially after the Fed went full MythBusters during Covid, rejecting the reality of the economy’s death, and substituting its own by papering over the whole thing with $4 trillion in freshly printed cash.
It’s also a real shit sandwich because bonds become increasingly attractive competitors to stocks. There isn’t a magic yield where a siren goes off and the stock market automatically crashes, but there is a point where enough pressure accumulates that something breaks. If things keep heading in the direction they are in, that point will come before the end of the year undoubtedly, in my opinion.
Lest we forget, we are entering this experiment carrying an almost comical amount of debt. Total U.S. federal debt has crossed $40 trillion. CBO expects the government to run roughly a $1.9 trillion deficit in fiscal 2026, with debt held by the public around 101% of GDP. Net federal interest expense is projected at roughly $1 trillion this year and CBO expects it to reach $2.1 trillion by 2036.
We are already borrowing enormous amounts of money, partly to pay interest on money we previously borrowed, while the rate at which that debt gets refinanced keeps rising. It’s just simple arithmetic.
The Federal Reserve says domestic nonfinancial debt reached roughly $84 trillion in Q2: $21.4 trillion of household debt, $24 trillion of business debt and $38.7 trillion of government debt. Every additional turn of the interest-rate screw matters when you’re applying it to numbers that large.
Then we get to Wall Street, where apparently the response to historically expensive stocks has been: what if we bought even more of them with borrowed money? FINRA margin debt was about $1.45 trillion in August, up roughly 37% from a year earlier, after reaching a record $1.50 trillion in June. Leverage works wonderfully until it doesn’t. Stocks rise, collateral values rise, investors borrow more and that borrowed money can buy still more stocks. Look at margin debt/GDP:
Now, reverse the arrows. Stocks fall, collateral values fall, margin requirements bite and people start selling because they have to. Selling creates more selling. That’s how leverage turns a correction into an avalanche.
And finally here’s where I think people may be making a much larger conceptual mistake. Everybody has spent the last 15 years assuming that eventually we simply return to the financial environment we became accustomed to after the Global Financial Crisis: zero rates, endless liquidity, cheap leverage and central banks standing behind asset prices.
What if we don’t? What if this is the reckoning?
QE1 began in 2008. Then came more QE, zero rates, negative rates overseas, COVID stimulus, trillions in fiscal spending and one of the greatest expansions of financial assets and leverage in history. For years, people like Peter Schiff and other monetary bears have argued that we weren’t eliminating the consequences of excessive debt, we were postponing them. Maybe the bill has finally arrived. Like Schiff says, maybe this will be “The Real Crash”.
The private-credit market is already giving us little previews. Consumers aren’t exactly sitting on Fort Knox either. Americans have about $18.8 trillion of household debt, including $1.26 trillion of credit-card balances and $1.71 trillion of auto debt. Roughly 7% of current credit-card balances were transitioning into serious delinquency at an annualized rate in Q2. Now pour higher rates on top of that.
Yet somehow, against this backdrop, financial markets have decided this is an excellent moment to completely lose their minds.
AI infrastructure is increasingly being financed through enormous amounts of debt, leases, guarantees and special-purpose vehicles. Recent reporting has identified hundreds of billions of dollars of AI exposure supported by guarantees that can keep financing off Big Tech balance sheets, while broader estimates of off-balance-sheet obligations tied to the AI ecosystem run into the trillions.
The bond market is already starting to notice. Zero Hedge wrote yesterday that hyperscaler credit default swaps at all new all time wides:
Meanwhile, SpaceX just went public at close to 100x sales. And then there’s crypto, an entire multi-trillion-dollar financial ecosystem whose necessity I remain unable to locate…and whose risks are multi-dimensional in ways I’m not sure everyone has considered yet.
That’s what scares me about the setup. We don’t have cheap stocks, low leverage and pristine balance sheets encountering slightly higher rates. We have enormous government debt, enormous consumer debt, enormous corporate borrowing, record margin leverage, stressed private-credit liquidity, speculative AI financing, crypto, gigantic valuations and investors who have been conditioned for nearly two decades to believe that every meaningful decline will eventually be rescued by the Federal Reserve.
Now raise the risk-free rate underneath all of it. And don’t stop doing raising it. Something has to…and will…give. In fact, if bond yields keep climbing, my view is that eventually a lot of things give at the same time.
This could become wrath-of-God-type stuff. Not because I’m predicting the apocalypse, but because there is an extraordinary amount of leverage sitting on top of asset prices that were built for a world where money was cheap, and the bond market is threatening to make money expensive again.
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There is, of course, one enormous caveat: bonds can recover. If inflation falls, economic growth slows and long-term yields retreat substantially, the pressure valve opens. Discount rates fall, refinancing fears ease and equity multiples become easier to defend. The whole process can be postponed again.
But if long rates continue grinding higher and the market starts believing 5%-plus Treasury yields aren’t an aberration but the new regime, I don’t see how the current structure survives.
It’ll be a massive wreck. Maybe a crash the likes of which we haven’t seen before. And then my guess remains that the ultimate destination is some form of yield-curve control or similarly aggressive intervention. If policymakers eventually cap Treasury yields while inflation and fiscal deficits remain problematic, I think gold could go absolutely berserk. My long-term $10,000 gold thesis would become considerably less ridiculous.
But people keep skipping over the important part: you don’t get the rescue until something requires rescuing. That means pain first. Potentially enormous pain.
My thesis has become remarkably simple. If the bond market calms down, we can have another conversation. If yields keep going higher from here, I think a massive stock-market crash becomes increasingly difficult to avoid.
Not because of doomsday saying or permabear “fearmongering”, or because Peter Schiff has been yelling about it for 20 years. Because eventually, no matter how much bullshit Wall Street invents, math still eventually wins.
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Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 11:10