Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Artificial intelligence is about to become one of the most consequential issues in the 2026 midterm elections.
Maybe not immigration-level consequential or inflation-level consequential. But over the next two months, I think Americans are going to hear a lot more about a question that, until very recently, mostly belonged to Silicon Valley and a relatively small group of researchers: should the United States government force the development of frontier AI to slow down?
That question exploded into the political mainstream today. My take is that we may only get one chance to stop AI before it gets out of control, so let’s make sure we do it. President Trump spent Monday rejecting these types of growing warnings, calling the idea that AI could eventually escape human control a “HOAX” and comparing those concerns to what he regards as previous political hoaxes.
“I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World,” Trump wrote.
His position is that America needs to develop AI as quickly as possible, excessive regulation risks handing the technological advantage to China, and Washington shouldn’t stand in the industry’s way. Trump went so far as to call AI and data centers potentially “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History,” bigger than oil, gold, diamonds or even the internet. His administration has also favored voluntary government evaluation procedures for certain frontier models rather than mandatory licensing or preclearance.
Later in the day on Monday, Trump’s comic book nemesis Kamala Harris took almost precisely the opposite position. “The frontier of artificial intelligence is advancing at an alarming speed,” Harris said, calling for Congress to urgently pass legislation creating a new federal entity responsible for oversight and independent testing of advanced AI. She also called for the United States to pursue an international agreement, including with China, designed to establish safety standards and limit the speed of AI development.
And there, in a single day, is the outline of what could become a major midterm debate: accelerate versus slow down, beat China at virtually any cost versus coordinate internationally to establish limits, and keep Washington largely out of the way versus create a new federal regulator overseeing frontier AI.
And the issue is unusually consequential because the stakes aren’t confined to politics. They extend directly into the stock market, as I wrote about days ago in my piece Congress Could Kill AI Stocks Before AI Kills Us.
My argument was simple: virtually the entire AI investment boom rests on an assumption of continued rapid development. Hundreds of billions of dollars in expected spending on chips, data centers, electricity, networking equipment and infrastructure are ultimately downstream from that assumption. Slow the technology down and Wall Street eventually has to slow some of those assumptions down with it.
Monday offered a glimpse of that possibility. AI-linked stocks fell after some of the industry’s most important executives began publicly supporting a slower pace of frontier development. Nvidia fell about 3%, AMD roughly 4%, and several other AI-related names suffered considerably larger declines. Investors suddenly had to contemplate something that has barely been incorporated into the AI bull case: what happens if the constraint on AI isn’t chips, electricity or capital, but the federal government?
Which brings me to Trump. My suspicion is that Trump would say almost anything necessary to keep the stock market and the AI investment boom moving higher. That’s my interpretation, not something I can prove, but it isn’t difficult to understand why a president would be reluctant to embrace a policy that could potentially kneecap one of the largest capital-investment booms in the country…and his favorite political scorecard.
What is harder for me to accept is the idea that Trump somehow understands the technological risks better than the people actually building these systems. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have now all publicly supported slowing or “pacing” frontier AI development.
Whether it was a PR stunt this weekend or not is moot at this point. These are people running organizations developing some of the most advanced AI systems on Earth, with access to information about their capabilities that almost nobody outside those laboratories possesses.
Trump, by contrast, is effectively telling them that the danger they’re warning about is a hoax. That creates the somewhat ironic spectacle of Trump finding himself on the opposite side of an AI safety debate from Elon Musk, along with Altman, Amodei and other leaders of the industry. Whatever you think of those people, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take seriously the possibility that they understand the capabilities and risks of the technology they’re actually building better than politicians do.
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There are legitimate arguments on Trump’s side. Regulation could entrench today’s largest AI companies, crush smaller competitors, slow beneficial innovation and potentially give China a strategic advantage. There is also an obvious incentive problem when the largest companies in an industry ask Washington to regulate an industry they already dominate. Those aren’t trivial objections, and Trump is right to raise them. But neither are the warnings coming from the laboratories themselves.
And that is why I think AI is suddenly positioned to become a major political football heading into November. The debate is no longer theoretical. One side of American politics is beginning to argue that frontier AI is moving fast enough to require federal intervention. Trump is arguing that slowing it down could sacrifice America’s economic and strategic advantage. Meanwhile, some of the people actually building the technology are warning that some form of slowdown may be necessary.
For investors, the implications could be enormous. The market has spent the last several years pricing an extraordinary amount of future AI growth into semiconductors, utilities, data centers, networking companies and Big Tech. Very little of that valuation framework appears designed for a world in which Washington deliberately steps on the brakes. You don’t need Congress to ban AI for the numbers to change. You simply need development timelines to stretch, testing requirements to increase, liability risks to rise or hyperscalers to conclude that they don’t need to spend quite as urgently as Wall Street currently assumes.
I wrote several days ago that AI regulation could arrive much faster than investors expect and potentially become a catalyst for a market crash. After today, I think that possibility deserves considerably more attention.
AI regulation isn’t just becoming a technology issue anymore. It is becoming an election issue, and with trillions of dollars in market value now tied directly or indirectly to the assumption that AI development continues at breakneck speed, what Washington decides to do about it could become a stock market issue very quickly thereafter.
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Tyler Durden Tue, 09/15/2026 - 17:00
Brazil's October 4 general election is around the corner and is already sparking a rally in local markets, with a presidential runoff expected on October 25.
Right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro is statistically tied with socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in potential runoff scenarios.
"Brazilian elections could not be more uncertain and competitive, as recent polls demonstrate. Voting intentions now show right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro technically tied with current President Lula in a potential second-round runoff. This political shift comes as the country witnesses some of its most intense institutional noise, centered on the Supreme Court (STF) and the Banco Master case. The next important event around these developments will be the extraordinary Supreme Court session," Goldman analysts wrote in a note on Monday.
The latest Quaest survey released on Monday showed Bolsonaro at 42% and Lula at 40%, within the poll's two-percentage-point margin of error. A separate BTG/Nexus survey put Lula at 47% against Bolsonaro's 46%, highlighting how tight the race remains.
Last Thursday, Polymarket showed Bolsonaro overtaking Lula, with that lead maintained as of Tuesday morning. Bolsonaro's odds of winning currently stand at 52%, while Lula's are around 45%.
Brazilian stocks have rebounded alongside rising Polymarket bets on a Bolsonaro victory.
The tight presidential election race comes amid a deepening Supreme Court crisis over Banco Master that has impacted Lula. Later today an extraordinary session will be held to consider whether to authorize an investigation into Justice Alexandre de Moraes over alleged ties to banker Daniel Vorcaro. Moraes denies wrongdoing and has described the allegations as politically motivated.
For markets, the one development is the resilience of Brazilian assets against a difficult macro environment. The rally is consistent with traders pricing in that a new government could produce a different fiscal and economic-policy direction.
Goldman analysts outlined the Brazil rally in charts:
However, Deutsche Bank analysts believe that the next administration, whoever leads it, will be forced to address the fiscal challenge via spending cuts.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/15/2026 - 16:40Authored by Tim Donner via Liberty Nation,
No one who lived through it will ever forget Nov. 22, 1963, that day of infamy when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was the story of the century. Few will remember that, on that same day, legendary author and theologian C.S. Lewis also died; a story that would have ordinarily attracted front-page attention was relegated to a footnote on the back pages. The point is that timing is everything, and so it was with a speech for the ages delivered by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Republican Midterm Convention on Sept. 10.
As he delivered the address, the nation was preparing for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and conservatives were mourning the assassination of Charlie Kirk one year earlier. There was little room for other news to rise to the top. But now that the dust has cleared from a highly emotional weekend, it is time to give this speech the attention it deserves.
Any Republican can blister the Democratic Party with criticism from dawn to dusk. After all, that's part of the job. But when such a beatdown, such a thorough condemnation, is delivered by someone so intimately associated with that party for six decades, whose father and uncle were both assassinated, and who ultimately turned away from the party long defined by his family at great personal cost, it is worth a close listen. It will rank as one of the most power-packed speeches chronicling the decline of the Democratic Party ever delivered.
Let's set the scene and then let Kennedy's words speak for themselves. The drama was already thick because Bobby's speech was in Dallas, where his uncle was murdered in broad daylight 63 years earlier, setting the nation on a path of self-destruction from which it is still trying to recover. He spoke as if he were channeling Ted Sorensen, the legendary speechwriter who penned JFK's unforgettable expression in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
This was like a great sermon where, if you stepped back and considered the content, you knew most of the facts, but they had never been organized quite that way and by a person so ideally positioned to deliver the message. So, before it vanishes into the mists of history, let's take you through this tour de force, lightly edited for space. You can watch the full address here.
Kennedy on FireKennedy softened up the crowd and drew laughs by starting off, "I'm 72 years old. And for 70 years of my life, I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention ...
"I grew up in a Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my uncle John Kennedy, of my father Robert Kennedy. Ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring idealistic vision for America. My uncle ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism. Does that sound familiar?
"The Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class. Nearly every cop and firefighter was a Democrat. Our party was a champion of the Bill of Rights and particularly for unbridled free speech. It was wary of centralized government power and corporate privilege and secret intelligence agencies. My uncle and father understood the connection between free markets and functional democracy. They stood firmly against crony capitalism on the right and socialism on the left. They were all for competition, for meritocracy, and for excellence, which they thought should be a universal aspiration for Americans ...
"My family played critical roles in building NIH and CDC into centers of gold standard science that transformed America into this relentless dynamo of international research. They promoted physical fitness, and they protected women's sports ... They stood with Israel as the bulwark of democracy ... They saw Israel as America's most critical frontline ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism ...
"[Islamism] by its own accounts is waging an existential war against our country and against Western liberal democracies. It's an ideology that has subjugated and impoverished and tyrannized and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran, and they openly promise to do the same to us. Democrats opposed government coercion, defended individual rights, believed that government should give Americans information, good information, and then trust them to make up their own minds. Democrats and labor leaders fought fiercely in my generation to stop illegal immigration at the border.
When It All Came Crashing Down"During COVID I watched the Democratic Party turn against every one of its essential values, its principles, and all of the policies that define my party. Democrats turned away from gold standard research and blindly defended industry-sponsored, agenda-driven science written by corrupt and captive regulatory agencies.
"And the Democrats, which were once the champions of the American Constitution, systematically obliterated the Bill of Rights. And particularly beginning with the First Amendment, under the guise of combating misinformation, Democrats censored hundreds of scientists and physicians who questioned the government's dubious COVID pronouncements and orthodoxies [Thirty-seven] hours after President Biden took the oath of office, he ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove my accounts ...
"Democrats obliterated the second leg of the First Amendment, the guaranteed right of assembly, by social distancing regulations that were completely un-science-based. Democrats violated the third leg of the First Amendment, the freedom to worship. They closed every church in our country for a year ... Democrats torpedoed the 7th Amendment right to jury trial by giving liability shields to the giant pharmaceutical companies. No matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter how grievous your injury, you could not sue them. Democrats violated the 5th Amendment by shutting down 3 million businesses with no due process and no just compensation. Democrats shut down the 4th Amendment, protection from unlawful searches and seizures, by forcing Americans to disclose their medical information before they could exercise their constitutional rights. In a single year, my party obliterated 250 years of constitutional guarantees. The only Bill of Rights that they left unscathed was the Second Amendment, and probably only because there is a Second Amendment."
"And then the party of my body, my choice forced citizens to wear masks and to submit to invasive and intrusive medical interventions against their own wills. The party of MeToo - remember that we were all supposed to listen to women and to believe women - they cruelly silenced the voices of tens of thousands of mothers who believed that their children had suffered vaccine injuries. The Democrats declared war on women's sports, effectively destroying Title IX.
"Democrats condemned meritocracy openly and celebrated mediocrity. The Democratic Party became the party of elites, labeling working Americans as deplorables. Democrats cultivated deep ties with Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, Big Insurance, and the mainstream media. They embraced policies that divided Americans along racial lines. They abolished my uncle's physical fitness test because they said that competition was bad for children.
Trump Derangement Syndrome Blinds the Democrats"The Democrats abandoned all of these values and all of their traditional values, offering Americans only one policy, the one policy that they stood for, the unbridled, sociopathic, and blind hatred of a single man, Donald J. Trump. And they were so confident that Trump hatred alone was sufficient to win elections that they abandoned accountability and made our government a predatory organism of monumental incompetence and corruption.
"The Democrats dismantled the public integrity safeguards and opened the floodgates to thieves and fraudsters who fleeced the American medical regulatory agencies for $100 billion annually during every year of the Biden administration. They somehow lost 360,000 children, and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.
"The Democratic Party, in short, lost its way. I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today. It struck me this was no longer about left and right. It was about sane and insane. It was about common sense and communism. In April 2023, I ran for president hoping to summon my party back to its bedrock values. But the Democratic Party had lost faith in American voters and, utterly ironically, lost faith in American democracy. They were convinced that they would lose the ballot box. They couldn't win. And so they unveiled a lawfare strategy to prevent an election from occurring. They sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden, and then attempted to remove us all from the ballot. A lot of you think that the lawfare was just against Donald Trump. It was mainly against him, but they sued Dean Phillips. They sued Marianne Williamson. They sued Cornel West. They sued Donald Trump 50 times in 38 states to remove him from the ballot ...
"Here was the Democratic Party that in my youth, the biggest issue that we had that my father and my uncle fought for was voting rights, and particularly in the southern states, to guarantee that every American had a right to cast a ballot. And here's that same party 60 years later using all of its ingenuity and all of its power to make sure that Americans could not vote for the candidates that they wanted to vote for. They excluded me from the debates. They canceled the primaries. The Democratic Party changed the rules to make sure I could not win, and neither could the other people who were running as Democrats, no matter how many votes we got. And for the first time in history, they canceled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris. No elected delegate was ever consulted.
"A party of no kings simply anointed a queen."
So, there you go, a speech so well received that some have spoken of Bobby as a potential vice presidential or even presidential candidate in 2028. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become a historic figure not just by switching parties and doing the unthinkable by aligning with Donald Trump, but by challenging elite power structures that had all but ignored the nation's outbreak of chronic disease and tyrannized the nation during the pandemic. He has established that he is a warrior with a lasting legacy, and if his speech to his newfound Republican colleagues is any indication, he would appear to have many arrows remaining in his quiver.
Tyler Durden Tue, 09/15/2026 - 16:20