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It's far past time that the TV Academy and its voters give a nod to one of broadcast's most supernaturally funny shows.

White House Suspects NY Times Reporters Have Situation Room Recordings

Senior Trump administration officials are convinced that two New York Times reporters have somehow obtained recordings of White House Situation Room meetings, which would represent an astounding breach of security, Axios reported on Sunday. 

"We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," a White House official told Axios. "And we have no idea which ones." 

The White House Situation Room hosts some of the most consequential conversations on Earth 

The two journalists are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and the officials are convinced that verbatim Situation Room conversations reproduced in their soon-to-be-released book must have come from recordings of deliberations inside what should be the most secure conference room in the world. The book -- Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump -- will be released on June 23rd, but excerpts already posted by the Times included detailed quotes from conversations that took place in the Situation Room. 

Some of those direct quotes first appeared in an April 7 Times article on the deliberations that took place in the run-up to Trump's decision to team up with Israel in launching a major war on Iran. That report, also by Haberman and Swan, described how administration officials reacted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aggressive campaign to convince Trump to betray his campaign pledge to avoid regime-change wars.

Netanyahu was said to have assured Trump that Iran's ballistic missile arsenal could be destroyed in just a few weeks, that Iran wouldn't be able to stop traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, that Iran wasn't likely to attack other countries in the region, that a huge protest movement could be sparked into seizing power, and that Kurdish fighters from Iraq might be enticed into attacking. 

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's book is touted as providing "unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration's most closely guarded rooms"

Of course, like his infamous 2002 assurance that an invasion of Iraq would have "enormous positive reverberations on the region," all of Netanyahu's assurances about a war on Iran proved spectacularly wrong. At the time, according to Haberman and Swan's reporting, some Trump administration officials were rightly skeptical. The day after Netanyahu's presentation, CIA Director John Ratcliffe was said to have called Netanyahu's pitch "farcical." Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quoted as bluntly restating Ratcliffe's characterization: "In other words, it's bullshit." 

When Trump asked Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine to weigh in, he's quoted as saying, "Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling." 

Axios notes that the use of quotations doesn't necessarily indicate an audio recording was obtained: "Bob Woodward pioneered contemporary historical political journalism by including dialogue in his books that was reconstructed from the memories of people in the rooms where things happened." However, the fact that senior White House officials are concerned about what they've seen so far suggests that Haberman and Swan's quotes may not be mere reconstructions. What's more, the promotional descriptions of the book tout "unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms." 

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 12:05

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Nvidia To Raise $20BN In Debt From First Bond Sale Since 2021, As AI Debt Frenzy Goes Parabolic

Over the weekend, we published a length report analyzing what we dubbed "the $1.8 trillion off-balance sheet time bomb at the heart of the AI supercycle",  which focused on the recent surge in popularity of off-balance sheet SPVs, as well as $1 trillion in long-term purchase commitments, and $800bn in lease commitments, which support the AI buildout, and do so by masking the true funding costs of the AI buildout, yet which add significantly to off-BS operating leverage. Additionally, when one adds billions in variable lease payments, over $100BN in embedded capex inside accounts payable, as well as the Construction-in-Progress pipeline which reflect capacity built but not yet expensed - and the $520bn cumulative depreciation estimate is where it eventually lands - and one gets a far more ominous picture of the capital stack that is backstopping the biggest infrastructure buildout in US history, which according to Goldman will translate into as much as $1.4 trillion in 2027 capex, and much more in the following years.

We summarized the complex funding picture which is effectively a series of circular financings across the entire AI ecosystem, "vendor financing and repurchase-style arrangements mean a single counterparty's stress can propagate through several balance sheets at once. Think of it as rehypothecated leverage. Concentration compounds it: the >$2tn of remaining performance obligations across major AI players is built on a handful of very large, long-duration contracts, so the backlog that justifies the spending is also a concentrated counterparty exposure."

But even without focusing on the potentially dire consequences of this off-balance sheet funding unwinding, there is a more mundane risk propagating from the AI buildout, and it has to do with the massive leverage unleashed in public debt markets. We spent the first part of our post discussing just that, but the punchline was captured by the following three charts, the first of which shows that YTD, some $236BN in AI-linked debt has been issued, a 357% increase from the same period last year. By year-end, MS expect this number to more than double to $570 billion.

The second, and perhaps most important chart, is the one showing the dramatic increase in hyperscaler gross leverage, which has surged from 0.9x in Q3 '25 to 1.8x currently, doubling in just over two quarters, and surpassing the gross leverage of the entire energy sector. At this rate, hyperscaler debt is growing at about 0.3x turn per quarter.

Not surprisingly, as a result of the surge in combined leverage, hyperscalers are drifting wider, and after trading inside AA spreads for much of 2025, are now on top of A, and as MS warns, "may widen further on supply." And it's not just outlier Oracle: META is now trading wider to CDX IG. 

Putting it all together, what the above indicates is that hyperscalers, and the broader AI ecosystem, has gong into an all-out debt expansion mode, using both on and off-balance sheet vehicles, to fund as much of the infrastructure buildout (now that the price of 1GW of data center has increased from $50BN most recently to as much as $100BN, due to the jump in silicon density with NVDA Rubin-class racks approaching 600kW and every gigawatt carrying far more GPU and HBM content) while the window is open, and - well - while they can.

Today Nvidia could, and according to Bloomberg, Nvidia became the latest company seeking to raise at least $20 billion from its first corporate bond sale since 2021. 

The chipmaker is marketing bonds in seven tranches, with maturities spanning two to 30 years, Bloomberg reports. Price talk on the longest tenor of the Aa1/AA-rated company is a spread of about 0.9% above Treasuries, while the FT adds that "the 10-year portion of the bond was expected to yield 0.75 percentage points above US Treasuries during initial price discussions."

As Bloomberg writes, picking up where we left off, "the deal is extending a relentless wave of borrowing for companies spearheading the artificial intelligence boom. Firms such as Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have been tapping every corner of the debt market to build the computing capacity needed for AI’s rapid expansion, having raised hundreds of billions of dollars since last year. Investors have readily absorbed the supply."

Nvidia said that it intends "to use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, including repayment and refinancing of outstanding notes."

Nvidia last tapped the investment-grade bond market in June 2021, when it raised $5 billion. Its ambitions now are far greater.

And yet, as the FT cautions echoing our own warning, "early signs of market fatigue have prompted some tech companies to find alternative avenues for financing."

Anthropic has turned to private credit investors to seal a $35bn deal backed by Broadcom. Google’s parent Alphabet decided to issue equity for the first time in more than two decades, bringing in $85bn in fresh capital earlier this month.

In any case, the bond market clearly remains open for now; however with leverage within the AI space exploding at the fastest pace on record, it may not take much for the window to close at which point the question will again re-emerge: how will the handful of AI-leading companies fund the trillions in unfunded future obligations.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 11:25

US Gas Prices Slip Below Politically Sensitive $4 Level For First Time In Months

Summary:

• GasBuddy's U.S. Gas National Avg. Falls Below $4 per gallon 
• AAA's U.S. Gas National Avg. still slightly Above $4 per gallon (expected to fall) 
• US-Iran Peace Deal Sends Brent and WTI Tumbling 

Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, wrote on X that the national average price of gasoline has finally slipped below the politically sensitive $4-a-gallon level for the first time in many months.

Per De Haan:

The nation's average price of gasoline has fallen 9.3 cents over the last week and stands at $3.99 per gallon, according to GasBuddy data compiled from more than 12 million individual price reports covering over 150,000 gas stations across the country.

The national average is down 52.4 cents from a month ago and is 91.1 cents per gallon higher than a year ago. The national average price of diesel fell 11.7 cents in the last week and stands at $5.182 per gallon.

GasBuddy tracking 26 states where average #gasprices are below $4/gal, with more likely to join in the days ahead, so long as the Strait does reopen. pic.twitter.com/tduDAoGLKX

— Patrick De Haan (@GasBuddyGuy) June 15, 2026

"Average gasoline prices fell in 47 states over the last week, with the national average dropping below $4 per gallon late Sunday for the first time since mid-April," said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

De Haan continued, "The decline came as oil prices moved sharply lower in reaction to news of a potential deal between the United States and Iran, though it remains to be seen whether the agreement will hold. A handful of price-cycling states saw averages jump before joining the broader downward trend. The real test now shifts to the Strait of Hormuz, where any reopening and resumption of normal oil flows would be the clearest signal that this relief is durable. For now, the national average could continue falling, provided there isn't a drastic reversal and the U.S. and Iran continue moving in a positive direction."

Looking at WTI crude futures and the AAA national average for gasoline, the implied decline suggests gas prices at the pump could tumble toward $3.75 by mid-summer.

Great news ahead of midterm elections. 

Pump Pain Relief? Gas Above $4 May End Soon As U.S.-Iran Peace Deal Sends Oil Lower

The national average for U.S. gasoline prices has hovered above the politically sensitive $4-per-gallon level for 76 days, or roughly 2.5 months, as the Gulf energy shock tightened physical markets and forced emergency SPR draws.

But with President Trump declaring late Sunday, just 30 minutes before NY futures opened, that a US-Iran peace deal has been secured, and with WTI and Brent futures tumbling, pressure at the pump could begin to ease in the very near term.

National gasoline prices could slip back below $4 in the coming days or weeks if the crude selloff holds and traders begin pricing in a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Still, normalization of crude energy flows will likely take months, if not longer, to return to pre-war levels.

As of Sunday evening, AAA data show the national average for 87-octane gasoline stands at around $4.074.

Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, wrote on X shortly after Trump announced the peace deal that the national average for gas could fall to $3.75 by July 4.

De Haan wrote:

The U.S. and Iran signaling a deal has been struck. The next few days will be key to see if the agreement sticks, and if traffic begins moving in the Strait. WTI crude down 5%, as more confirmations come in days ahead, national average price of gasoline may continue to fade.

Beyond that, the national average could fall below $3.75/gal by July 4, under a optimistic timeline, but hurricane season could be a major wildcard for the rest of summer- tight global inventories mean it will take months or beyond to fully restore global oil inventories.

The next several weeks will be key- one major slip up could impact greatly prices moving forward. And with so many speedbumps in this situation, it may be foolish to think this problem is now completely over. Time will tell.

Surging gas and diesel prices over the last 2.5 months have added downward pressure on consumers, especially working-class households, who were hit with sticker shock at the pump. This shift in spending patterns is a concerning trend we have meticulously detailed:

• Here's What Happened Inside Convenience Stores When Gas Hit $4

• Here's What Happened Inside Gas Stations When Gas Hit $4

• Beer Demand Goes Flat As Even Alcoholics Pull Back With Gas Above $4

• Energy Drinks Become Latest Casualty As Fuel Shock Shifts Consumer Behavior

• Three Factors Leave Salty-Snack Demand Stale

The combination of elevated gas prices and fading tax-refund tailwinds had already begun to expose cracks in the consumer economy, particularly among lower- and middle-income households. That likely served as a warning signal for the Trump administration: resolve the Middle East conflict before worsening consumer sentiment and pain at the pump become much larger political liabilities heading into the midterms.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/15/2026 - 11:25

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