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Several significant others of Yankees teammates were quick to toast the couple in the comments section.

What T. Boone Pickens Would Ask About AI CapEx

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I keep waiting for someone in the AI discussion to talk like an owner. What we get instead is a week of model releases, token counts, and model-lab valuations that look like oil majors, while the harder questions about turbines, interconnect queues, and who answers for the spend sit offstage. That imbalance would have driven T. Boone Pickens up a wall.

Boone passed away in Dallas on September 11, 2019. He was 91. He grew up in Holdenville, Oklahoma, worked as a geologist at Phillips Petroleum, quit, and built Mesa Petroleum from a shoestring into a company that could force Gulf Oil into Chevron's arms. Later he ran an energy hedge fund out of Dallas and spent a decade trying to shove the country onto wind and natural gas before the transmission system could carry either. Two things always set him off. Soft managements that treated shareholders as a nuisance. And a national energy policy that treated imported oil as something America just had to live with.

If he were still in the room this week, he would not be picking sides in a chatbot fight. He would start with the physical bill of materials that decides who can actually build AI.

Power first. Every incremental megawatt of AI load is an order for firm generation. New combined-cycle gas capacity for the post-2027 cohort is now running near $2,000 a kilowatt, roughly double the cost of earlier plants, with turbines on multi-year backorder. Existing, grid-connected gas plants have been changing hands near $1 million a megawatt, about half the cost of building new. In Boone's language, it is getting cheaper to find megawatts on the floor of the exchange than in a turbine queue.

Then metal. Copper goes into the transformers, busbars, and switchgear that move that power to the rack. Tin goes into the solder on every board and optical module. Fastmarkets' AI-chain work puts solder-related tin exposure on track for roughly a tenth of global solder-tin demand by 2030. Gallium and germanium go into power electronics and high-speed optics. The United States is 100 percent import-reliant for gallium, more than 50 percent for germanium, about 77 percent for refined tin, and about 57 percent for refined copper. China accounts for the overwhelming share of primary gallium refining. None of that stack turns on a two-year Capex slide.

Only then would he get to the denominator. What does each new dollar of Capex earn, and what did that dollar cost to fund? Underneath the math sits the question he put to every oil company he ever owned. Who works for whom?

The Mesa Years

Most readers remember the shareholder campaigns. Fewer remember how improbable the man behind them was. Boone was born in 1928 and went to Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship. After an injury he transferred to Oklahoma A&M, where he took a degree in petroleum geology in 1951. He had not yet found his footing, and his father delivered a line Boone would repeat for the rest of his life. A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan. His parents, his father added, were worried their son was a fool with no plan. Get a plan. Boone took the point. Every campaign he ran afterward began with a written plan and a number, and he had little patience for executives who could offer neither.

He spent a few years as a Phillips geologist, went out on his own, and in 1956 formed Petroleum Exploration, Inc. with two backers in Amarillo. It went public in 1964 as Mesa Petroleum, named for the flat-topped land of the Texas Panhandle. Four years later Mesa made a hostile tender for Hugoton Production, a Kansas gas company larger than itself, and won. That deal set the pattern. By 1981 Mesa was one of the largest independent oil companies in the world, with more than $2 billion of assets, and still small next to the companies Boone would go after next. Cities Service. Gulf. Phillips. Unocal.

The method was consistent. He looked for oil companies whose reserves were worth more than the equity market would credit under the people running them. He bought stock, pressed for a restructuring, a sale, or cash returned to owners, and moved on. Critics called it greenmail. Boone called it accountability.

Gulf was the campaign that defined him. In 1983 Mesa and its partners accumulated a large position in Gulf Oil, one of the Seven Sisters and many times Mesa's size. With the stock around $44, Boone argued publicly that Gulf's reserves supported something closer to $114 a share, and that management had depleted more than half the company's reserves in a decade. His remedy was not to shut anything down. It was to place a quarter of Gulf's cash flow, roughly $750 million a year, into a royalty trust paid directly to shareholders. The board refused, and in 1984 Chevron acquired Gulf for $13.2 billion, then the largest merger in American corporate history. Measured against the size of the U.S. economy, that is the equivalent of a transaction of more than $100 billion today, or roughly half of what Alphabet expects to spend on capital this year. The Pickens group realized a pretax gain of approximately $760 million.

The size of the gain was not the lasting significance. The lasting significance was that a small independent from the Texas Panhandle had shown the market something it preferred not to see. As Boone put it, it had become cheaper to look for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange than in the ground, and the boards sitting on that discount could be made to answer for it.

Unocal showed the limits of the approach, and its most durable result. In 1985 Fred Hartley answered Mesa with a self-tender that excluded Mesa by design, and the Delaware Supreme Court allowed it. Boone lost money on the campaign. But within about a year the SEC adopted its all-holders rule, and a tender offer that treated one class of owner differently from another was no longer available to a board. Every American board still operates under that rule. The following year Boone founded the United Shareholders Association and reduced his philosophy to two sentences. Stockholders are owners. Management are employees. That is still the cleanest description of what is missing from most AI board presentations, which are full of pilots and roadmaps and almost never say who will answer for the roadmap if it is still a slide in 2028.

The Second Act

Most people with Boone's first career would have stopped. Mesa moved from Amarillo to Dallas in 1989, and by 1996 Boone had left the company that made his name. He was nearly seventy. The following year he founded BP Capital and went back to work on the same idea that had powered the raids, which is that physical reality eventually overrules the consensus story. In the years before the 2008 oil peak, when many analysts treated high prices as an aberration, he argued publicly and with his own capital that supply could not keep pace with demand. He was early more than once and said so cheerfully. He was right on direction often enough that those who dismissed him looked careless in hindsight.

His favorite story was about a geologist who falls from a tall building and, passing the fifth floor, thinks so far, so good. He meant the optimism. He also meant that you still had to land. The Pickens Plan of 2008 was that temperament applied to the whole country. Build wind across the Great Plains, build the transmission to carry it, move natural gas out of power generation and into heavy trucks, and cut the import bill. He committed real capital, including an order for 667 GE turbines for a Texas Panhandle project that foundered when transmission could not reach the load, credit markets seized, and cheap shale gas undercut the wind economics. He spent years finding homes for those turbines. It was, in effect, a dry hole with a purchase order.

The critics were right that the plan was harder than the advertisements. But the lesson has aged well. The binding constraint then was wires. Today it is wires, interconnection, turbines, and metal. Artificial intelligence did not create the problem of moving power from where it is cheap to where it is needed. It made the load arrive all at once.

The Same Signal, Forty Years Later

The idea underneath Boone's campaigns is the one worth borrowing this year. It was about what happens when an industry is flooded with cash and keeps pouring it back into the ground.

Crude prices rose roughly tenfold during the 1970s, and the majors emerged with more cash than they had sensible uses for. Michael Jensen later put the 1984 cash flow of the ten largest oil companies at $48.5 billion. Very little went back to owners. The industry kept spending heavily on exploration and development even where average returns sat below the cost of capital. The market noticed before the boards did. John McConnell and Chris Muscarella found that while higher capital-spending announcements generally helped industrial stocks, higher exploration budgets pushed oil stocks down. Owners were saying, in the only language available to them, that the next dollar sunk into the ground was worth less than a dollar left in their hands.

Set this year's numbers beside that history. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are on track for combined 2026 capital spending on the order of $700 billion to $745 billion, most of it tied to AI infrastructure. On July 22, 2026, Alphabet beat on revenue, raised full-year Capex guidance to $195 billion to $205 billion, reported free cash flow of about negative $5.9 billion for the quarter, and sold off hard after hours. The market was sending the same signal McConnell and Muscarella recorded four decades ago.

The fair caveat matters, and Boone would have offered it himself. The oil majors of the early 1980s were often reinvesting into flatter demand. The hyperscalers are reinvesting into demand that is still compounding, and cloud backlogs are real. But the question Boone asked never depended on whether demand was growing. It depended on whether the marginal dollar earns more than it costs, and whether anyone outside management is allowed to check.

The second half of his insight applies well below the hyperscalers. Proven reserves already in the ground, owned by someone else, were cheaper than new ones, and the same arithmetic now runs through the power market. Existing gas plants have been trading near half the cost of new combined-cycle capacity. The largest buyers have drawn the obvious conclusion. Rather than wait years for a grid connection, they are pulling generation toward the load. Entergy is building gas plants to serve Meta's Hyperion data-center campus in Louisiana. In Texas, ERCOT has fielded large-load interconnection requests on a scale that would have seemed implausible five years ago, and the Legislature has moved to set terms for how those loads connect.

In Boone's language, it has become cheaper to find megawatts on the floor of the exchange than in a turbine queue. An energized site with an interconnection agreement is the proven reserve of this cycle, and the companies that hold one are not always valued for it.

Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim

Boone had a phrase for corporate delay. Ready, aim, aim, aim. He used it on oil executives who preferred another study to a decision, and it describes the enterprise AI economy with uncomfortable precision. MIT's Project NANDA work on generative AI in business, widely covered in 2025, reported that the vast majority of organizations studied were showing no measurable P&L return despite tens of billions in enterprise spend. Treat that finding as directional, not scripture. Even well-run companies are not immune to slow kill decisions. McDonald's tested AI voice ordering with IBM at more than 100 drive-thrus beginning in 2021 and ended the test in 2024 without a rollout. Ending a pilot that does not work is the right decision. The question an owner asks is why it took three years to reach it.

The tools are no longer the main problem. For a great many ordinary operating uses they are good enough. Ownership is the problem. If no executive's compensation depends on turning the spending into cash, the spending becomes theater.

Consider what Boone would do if he were thirty-five today with capital behind him. He would not start with the hyperscalers. He would start where he started with Hugoton, with a company larger than his own whose assets were worth more than its management was delivering. Today that is often a small or mid cap industrial, distributor, or services business that has announced an AI program, committed a meaningful share of its free cash flow to it, and still reports no metric tied to the result. He would read two years of filings and earnings calls and total the committed spend, including the parts buried in IT budgets and consulting contracts. He would buy enough stock to be taken seriously. Then he would pick up the telephone, because he always preferred a voice to an email, ask for the plan in writing, and give management a date. If the plan never arrived, he would take the same questions to the other shareholders and, if necessary, to the public. That was Hugoton, and Gulf, and every campaign in between. It was never about hostility. It was about a calendar.

Five Questions T. Boone Pickens Would Ask AI Companies Today

None of these are exotic. They are the questions a well-run family office puts to the operating businesses it owns, and most public boards have not yet put them to their own AI programs.

1. What is the total committed AI spend, including the pieces buried in IT, consulting, and cloud contracts?
2. Which line on the income statement is supposed to improve, by how much, and by when?
3. Whose compensation depends on that result?
4. What happens to the program if the target is missed by half?
5. How does the return compare with the simplest alternative, which is returning the capital to the owners?

The last question is the Gulf royalty trust in modern form. Managements with good answers generally welcome an engaged shareholder. Managements without them are running a science project on someone else's balance sheet. The difference is rarely the model. It is almost always the plan.

Boone would have been a handful in any boardroom this year, and he would have enjoyed every minute of it. Yet the lesson of his career is an optimistic one. The oil industry he pressed in the 1980s emerged leaner, better capitalized, and more attentive to its owners, and the shareholders who stayed the course were well rewarded. The AI buildout can follow the same path. The demand is real, the technology works, and the physical constraints of power and metal are problems that capital and discipline know how to solve. What the moment requires is owners willing to ask for the plan and managements confident enough to produce one. Boone spent sixty years insisting that a fool with a plan beats a genius without one. The companies that take that advice in this cycle will set the standard for the rest, and their owners will be glad they asked.

Sources

• Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings release - Capex guidance $195-205B; Q2 P&E purchases $44.9B; Q2 free cash flow about -$5.9B link
• Alphabet after-hours selloff on the Capex raise, July 22, 2026 link
• Hyperscaler 2026 Capex context (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft combined on the order of ~$700B-$745B depending on definition) link
• Enverus - existing gas-plant M&A near ~$1.0M/MW vs new CCGT replacement cost near ~$2.0M/MW for the post-2027 cohort (July 15, 2026) link
• Fastmarkets - AI-chain solder tin exposure rising toward ~10.6% of global solder-tin demand by 2030 link
• USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 - U.S. net import reliance: gallium 100%; germanium >50%; refined tin ~77%; refined copper ~57% link
• Chevron acquires Gulf Oil, 1984 (~$13.2B); Pickens group pretax gain (~$760M) link 1 link 2
• SEC all-holders / best-price tender offer amendments after Unocal (1986) link
• Pickens launches United Shareholders Association, 1986 link
• Mesa Power orders 667 GE wind turbines for the Texas Panhandle project, 2008 link
• Michael C. Jensen, "The Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance, and Takeovers" link
• John J. McConnell and Chris J. Muscarella, "Corporate Capital Expenditure Decisions and the Market Value of the Firm," Journal of Financial Economics (1985) link
• Entergy gas generation approved to serve Meta's Hyperion load in Louisiana link
• MIT NANDA / State of AI in Business 2025 - directional on weak P&L conversion of enterprise genAI spend; not peer-reviewed link
• McDonald's ends IBM AI drive-thru test, 2024 link

This note is for research and discussion only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security. Sargasso Capital Management may hold positions discussed or related instruments and may change those positions without notice.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:20

Xi At WH: We Should Strengthen Communication, The Thucydides Trap Can Be Overcome

Arrival Ceremony and initial Trump-Xi remarks:

Xi: "We Should Strengthen Communication... the Thucydides Trap can be overcome."

The moment of President Xi's arrival at the White House:

NOW: Trump welcomes Xi Jinping to the White House. pic.twitter.com/zvXVkxqaGj

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 24, 2026

For more of our analysis and what to expect:

Read: Mr. Xi Comes To Washington: What Wall Street Banks Are Expecting

*  *  *

Chinese stocks slipped overnight as the two-month extension of the US-China trade truce fell short of some Wall Street expectations (some desks were hoping for +6 months), offering limited reassurance that today's talks would deliver a long-lasting trade deal, stabilize bilateral ties, and ease uncertainty over global trade.

The mainland CSI 300 Index dropped 1.7%, while the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index pared losses and closed flat. Broader Asian equities also came under pressure after a global bond selloff gathered pace as investors responded to stronger-than-expected US economic data on Wednesday and weak Treasury auction demand amid increasing fears of further Federal Reserve tightening

The two-month truce extension through Jan. 10 removes an immediate source of uncertainty but falls short of the three-to-six-month extension some Wall Street desks were hoping for. 

As we detailed in an overnight note titled "Mr. Xi Comes To Washington: What Wall Street Banks Are Expecting," President Trump rolled out the red carpet for President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday.

President Xi Jinping just arrived in Washington, D.C. for a state visit to the U.S.

President Trump and Mrs. Trump warmly received President Xi and his wife Madame Peng Liyuan at the airport. pic.twitter.com/MkXecYvx2Z

— Mao Ning 毛宁 (@SpoxCHN_MaoNing) September 24, 2026

B-1 Lancer flies over as President Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi to the United States.

Looks like an episode from The Office the way the camera zoomed in on Xi’s face. pic.twitter.com/cqOYgKwnsQ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 23, 2026

Xi's first White House visit since September 2015 includes bilateral talks, a South Lawn ceremony and a black-tie dinner later today with technology executives including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Tesla/SpaceX's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman. Private tea with the Trumps and a National Archives visit are also on the books. 

The high-level diplomatic visit comes as unresolved disputes mount. Trade talks center on the duration of the tariff truce, a proposed "Board of Trade" arrangement covering roughly $30 billion in goods on each side, and potential Chinese purchases of soybeans, Boeing aircraft and LNG. Rare earth supplies, technology restrictions, Iran and Taiwan also loom over the summit.

On the AI front, low-cost Chinese open-weight models are pressuring US frontier labs and eroding moats. Restrictions on advanced chips, allegations that Chinese companies distilled US models, and a proposed AI hotline add another layer to negotiations.

The broad expectation across JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, TD Cowen and Raymond James is that the summit will produce limited breakthroughs. Wall Street's focus now shifts to how long the truce lasts and whether either side makes concrete concessions.

Earlier this morning, former acting deputy US Trade Representative Wendy Cutler told Bloomberg TV that the temporary US-China trade truce extension signals Trump's dissatisfaction with Beijing's rare earth exports and agricultural purchases.

It's a "way, way shorter time than China had hoped for; China wanted to extend that truce until the end of Trump's term," Cutler told Bloomberg's Heidi Stroud-Watts.

She continued, "We're at a point in our relationship with China where big deliverables are just no longer possible, and we're talking about managing the relationship and keeping it stable, but not improving and strengthening it."

Matt Maley, a veteran Wall Street strategist and chief market strategist at Miller Tabak + Co., wrote in a note that the two-month extension may disappoint investors who were hoping for a longer-term deal and may not bode well for equities. "A lot of investors that I have been speaking to were hoping for a six-month extension," he said.

Read what JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, TD Cowen and Raymond James have to say here.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:15

She passed away two days after the birth of their daughter, Sofia.

Tropical Storm Nolo is among multiple other storms churning in the Pacific, including Hurricane Polo and Odalys, which are barreling toward Mexico.

Brian Serven's bunt attempt Wednesday resulted in him taking a ball of the face.

New Home Sales Soared In August, Prices Plunged As Mortgage Rates Spiked

With homebuilder confidence plumbing new depths (and Housing Starts and Permits plunging), expectations were surprisingly for a small bounce back in new home sales in August (after collapsing in July).

Analyst consensus was correct, with a 6.4% MoM jump (+1.3% MoM exp) with July's 10.5% MoM plunged revised dramatically higher to just 4.3% MoM decline. August was the biggest surge in sales since February, but still left sales down 2.0% YoY...

Total new home sales SAAR jumped to 864k - its highest level of 2026...

Median new home prices tumbled, down 5.8% from a year ago to $393,700....

Additionally, average new home sales price plunged almost $50K to $478,700, lowest since since August 2024...

This was the biggest monthly drop in average new home prices on record!

Interestingly, the supply of new homes for sales continues to tread water along with homes under construction. A trend that has been clear all year...

And finally, here's a weird one - as mortgage rates have soared (now back above 7.00%), so sales have also soared?

So did homebuilders finally slash prices as the final 'incentive' to restart sales? Or was this a last minute rush into homes ahead of rate-hikes and soaring mortgage rates?

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:11

The retired actress debuted her weight loss transformation last month during another rare outing.

The retired actress debuted her weight loss transformation last month during another rare outing.

News that an automated AI agent hacked a government IT system raises big questions about regulating the tech.

Some residents may have been overcharged by $1,000 in a blunder that has City Hall critics demanding heads roll.

Murphy's update comes after stars Jane Lynch and Lea Michele weighed in on the "Glee" reboot discussion.

Murphy's update comes after stars Jane Lynch and Lea Michele weighed in on the "Glee" reboot discussion.

A Perfect Storm - Where Are The Umbrellas?

By Michael Every of Rabobank

As the Wall Street Journal puts it today, ‘A perfect storm is raging in the bond market’ as US 10-year yields are at 5.11% vs. 4.93% at yesterday’s close, the largest one-day rise since 2025’s “liberation day”; Canada’s are at 3.95% vs. 3.83%; the UK’s 5.35% vs. 5.20%; Australia’s 5.38% vs. 5.25%; Germany’s 3.55% vs. 3.46%; France’s 4.66% vs. 4.50%, and Japan’s 3.05% vs. 2.98%.

You can blame some of that on yesterday’s data, where the Eurozone services PMI was marginally better than expected at 53.0 and the US manufacturing and services PMIs leaped to 57.0 and 58.7 respectively. It’s great that seven months of Middle East and Russia-Ukraine war with high energy prices haven’t dented growth. The downside is there’s little reason for ‘rate cuts!’ And just imagine if geopolitics gets worse or economies must ‘run hot’ to rearm at pace.

In terms of energy, US Energy Secretary Wright has stated a US diesel export ban won't work, but Politico says the White House is still preparing plan for 90-day ban even as some GOP lawmakers and oil industry representatives are fighting to stave off the announcement. In short, it’s perhaps not for nothing that European, UK, and Aussie diesel prices have been climbing, and where markets might be in for another battering.

Xi Jinping is at a high-stakes US summit with Trump, where their trade truce has been extended… until 10 January: after that, who knows? Germany, which isn’t present, has surrendered anyway: Euractiv reports Berlin is seeking to loosen the EU’s ‘made in Europe’ rules and “rejects protectionism and discrimination” – not more Chinese imports, apparently.

Yet this is about far more than tariffs: Bloomberg notes China is holding sensitive F-35 parts which were mysteriously diverted to Hong Kong (which brings the security of international shipments of goods into question). And, of course, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg claim China backs Iran and the Houthis, while its ‘Russia cannot lose’ stance is already accepted.

Trump and Xi are also discussing AI, as the Australian government saw its websites attacked by a Claude agent, a claim was made that Claude may have cracked the secrets of efficient molecular gene editing, with vast implications, top AI leaders warned the UN of global security risks as such systems grow more powerful, and Mark Zuckerberg unveiled an AI ‘charm’ device that can fit on a keychain – so now there is no escape anywhere. The market impact of this is unclear: the potential coming storm isn’t.

There is still no breakthrough between the US and Iran nor of a settlement in the broader region, where tensions smoulder. Putin said his election turnout shows Russians support his military agenda as Foreign Minister Lavrov told the UN that Moscow will not pause its Ukraine ‘operation’, and Ukraine’s Zelenskyy warned of a “painful winter” for Russia if energy truce talks fail. A Russian military helicopter also violated Polish airspace, seeing Warsaw scramble fighter jets. Tony Blair urged PM Burnham to rejoin the EU, which both British voters and the EU get a say in. Argentina’s President Milei demanded Falklands talks with the UK. “My job is to assume things get worse,” Australia’s new defence chief told the financial press. Stormy enough for you?

Meanwhile, the Financial Times echoes something stressed here regarding Japan: “The threat of appearing as a vassal state is growing ever more real for middle powers.” The depressing global realpolitik is that middle powers are NOT powers, just caught in the middle.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful: Japan and South Korea are being looked at by the US to ease its shipbuilding and ammunition bottlenecks. However, that means the US has less tolerance for those not working with it and will exert pressure to get the outcomes it wants. The US Treasury openly pushing the ‘independent’ BOJ to end the Yen Carry Trade via rate hikes, threatening a perfect storm for some assets, in exchange for a strong JPY, cheaper commodity imports, and more Japanese domestic investment into defence industries is one key example.

Another is Canadian PM Carney saying he modelled the “extreme tail risk” of the US invading: his army envisioned insurgency tactics like the Afghan mujahedeen. Canada had plans to invade the US under the British Empire, the US had similar ones to invade Canada, and many militaries have wild scenarios in desk draws. This exercise was undertaken as headlines warned the US might invade Greenland. Instead, we have a peaceful new permanent US-Greenland-Denmark security treaty with a de facto loss of Danish sovereignty - which Canada supports.

The US will not tolerate free trade with a country not sticking to its China tariffs, as the USTR just made clear; nor will it accept a large open border with a country that drifts away from it geopolitically. These are not normative statements but realpolitik facts. Economists can model the win/lose of Canada shifting from the US economy, which supports its true value-added industries, to a Europe which needs far less of them (as Ottawa is already seeking carveouts from the EU’s “burdensome requirements” re: deforestation). Geostrategists don’t need to model the extreme fat tail risks in geopolitics when the government is already showing us a “We can be Afghanistan if necessary” national strategy.

However, the tide seems to be flowing in the other direction in that region. Mexico is close to a new USMCA deal, Venezuela is a US client state, Greenland a US security protectorate, and Brazil’s presidential election might see pro-Trump Bolsonaro, Jr. elected. Moreover, 14 Western hemisphere states joined the US to sign a ‘Joint Statement on Defending Hemispheric Sovereignty’ to enhance economic cooperation, explore investment screening mechanisms, safeguard critical minerals supply chains, promote trusted suppliers for digital infrastructure, and fight “narco-terrorism.” In short, even if we have wild weather in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and storm clouds may even be gathering over parts of Asia, don’t let headlines cloud your vision over the most likely weather on other fronts.

Regardless, when you look at the conflating global backdrop, unless and until geopolitics provides us with new rays of sunshine, there are not going to be enough umbrellas for those who think, act, or trade like it’s 2005 or 2015.

Australia, which has long been in that camp but usually doesn’t need an umbrella, has just seen its Prime Minister rain on that parade (“The post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose.”), as has the RBA Governor (“We’re moving into a new world… Can we afford to be that open now? Can we afford to be so dependent on other countries for certain essentials?”). But what’s the policy prescription going to be then, and when? “What is GDP *for*?” Aussie employment data today were an odd mix that doesn’t help matters. Jobs growth was 39.5K, double estimates, but all part time as full-time positions fell, and unemployment was a whisker shy of 4.7% at an official 4.6%, up from 4.5%.

If you need me, I’ll be by the umbrella stand.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 10:00

This is one World Cup booking that doesn't have a Hollywood ending.

Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman star in this oddly-paced yet mostly cute rom-com based on Ali Hazelwood's bestselling novel.

The Rangers' fate will be determined by the play of Igor Shesterkin and Adam Fox.

The 2025 and 2026 Virtual Reali-Tea Awards are heading to streaming!

The 2025 and 2026 Virtual Reali-Tea Awards are heading to streaming!

The four-time Olympic medalist shared several photos of the two — including one snap of them sharing a steamy kiss.