Cameco leadership recently made announcements during their 2026Q1 earnings call regarding an expectation that as many as 20 AP1000 reactors will be announced for construction with support from the Department of Commerce (DOC) and the Department of Energy (DOE). 

Grant Isaac, the Chief Operating Officer and President of Cameco, provided some color on the call for the difference between the different department efforts and the stages of discussions under each. 

We covered the announcement from the DOC at length last fall, providing details on the $80 billion agreement between the US government, Brookfield and Cameco to deploy up to 10 AP1000 reactors across the US.

Few updates have been given to this program so far. But Isaac comments that the “project continues to move along”. The efforts under the DOC contract appear to be focused on “long lead items that are required in order to stand” up a fleet of large reactors. 

Considering the domestic and global supply chain outside of China and Russia has been more focused on sustainment and decommissioning, there is currently a lack of capacity across all the involved companies to build multiple reactors a year. 

The sole-producer of the reactor cooling pumps for Westinghouse AP1000 reactor plants, Curtiss-Wright, recently remarked that they only have capacity to produce enough pumps for three to four reactors per year. Significant expansion efforts will be required to remove deployment roadblocks for multiple different systems and components. 

Another question trying to be answered under the DOC program is under what model the reactors could be built. Isaac says. Isaac said, “those models could be a range of things from a federal build, own and operate to a federal build-own transfer model all the way to perhaps a financing of an existing nuclear operator who simply is just looking for financing.”

But the ten large reactors being pursued under the DOC plan are apparently completely separate from as many as ten reactors that are being pursued under the DOE.

There are a number of utilities progressing towards the construction of pairs of AP1000 reactors, with “five or six of them in very advanced stages”. These utilities are coordinating with the DOE and the Office of Energy Dominance Financing to secure loans for the projects, as well as potentially ordering long lead items ahead of time. 

“So when you step back and look at it, the U.S. isn’t just talking about potentially 10 reactors under the DOC program. They’re potentially telling about another 10 under the DOE more traditional approach.”

Via The Cradle

A committee comprising three senior Iraqi figures is close to finalizing an “executive plan” to disarm factions within the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that enjoy support from Iran, Asharq Al-Awsat reported on 8 May.

Development of the plan, which will be presented to US officials in the next few days, comes amid expected changes to the leadership of key security agencies under the incoming government of Ali al-Zaidi.

Zaidi was nominated by the Shia-majority Coordination Framework (CF) political bloc on April 27 as the consensus candidate to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. According to sources speaking to the Saudi newspaper, the three-member committee includes Zaidi, Sudani, and the leader of the Badr Organization, Hadi al-Amiri.

Washington has intensified pressure on Iraq’s ruling Shia political parties to disarm the anti-terrorist militias and prevent their representatives from participating in the new government.

The sources revealed that the committee has held secret negotiations with leaders of the factions, providing their leaders with “ideas on how to disarm and integrate fighters.”

Sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Badr Organization leader Amiri, who enjoys close relations with Iran, “was supposed to help build trust with the factions and persuade them to engage with the state.” However, some meetings “did not proceed calmly” due to the request to disarm.

A spokesperson for one faction within the PMF said that Kataib Hezbollah, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, and Harakat al-Nujaba rejected handing over their weapons to any party whatsoever. The spokesperson, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the three factions were “prepared to pay any price resulting from their refusal to disarm.”

The PMF were created in 2014 with support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force to fight ISIS and were later formally incorporated into the Iraqi armed forces.

During the war between the US and Iran that began on 28 February, the US air force bombed PMF positions across the country, while the resistance factions carried out drone attacks against US bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) and the US embassy in Baghdad.

In a phone call last Wednesday, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reportedly told Zaidi that Washington that the legitimacy of his incoming government would depend on its ability to distance the armed factions from the apparatus of the state.

A senior political official told Asharq Al-Awsat that the three-man committee had, under mounting US pressure, accelerated its work in recent weeks to disarm the factions. The official added that the executive plan included restructuring the PMF and ensuring it hands over its heavy and medium weapons, while the US is pressuring Baghdad to disband the PMF entirely.

Asharq Al-Awsat reported that former US General David Petraeus may visit Baghdad this week to ensure that “the new government fully severs its ties with the armed factions.

Petraeus, who holds no formal government position currently, commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion that toppled the government of Saddam Hussein. He later became CIA director, overseeing the covert war in Syria in partnership with Al-Qaeda.

In 2004, he worked with some of the leaders of the Iran-backed armed factions, including Hadi al-Amiri, to establish a new Iraqi police force after Iraq’s army and police were disbanded by the US occupation head, Paul Bremer.

Iraqi police commandos operating under Petraeus and Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, in particular the Wolf Brigade, were known for abducting, killing, and torturing Sunni Muslims. Some of the police commandos were trained by US commander James Steele, who was known for running death squads in El Salvador in the 1980’s.

On Friday, Republican Party member Malik Francis told Shafaq News Agency that the US administration “appears so far to be cautious in its dealings with Ali al-Zaidi, but it is not showing a direct hostile stance towards him.”

Francis stated that Washington is not yet giving Zaidi a “blank check,” but at the same time, it is not treating him as an adversary. On Thursday, the US Treasury Department announced it had imposed new sanctions on a list of Iraqi individuals and companies for their alleged connection to Iran.

Politicians from the CF said the sanctions may have been intended to “block undesirable nominations” to posts in the new government and “steer the process toward other candidates.”

The PMU factions are reportedly exploring the possibility of avoiding direct participation in the new government, while backing figures described as independent for ministerial positions to maintain indirect influence over those posts.

Maryland is one of many blue states that have transformed into a failed progressive experiment, where net migration flows are negative as productive, working-class taxpayers flee the state, not just because of high taxes and the power bill crisis, but also because they’ve had enough of left-wing politicians and their failed criminal justice and social reforms that have fueled a decade of violent crime chaos.

We’ve extensively covered more than a decade of violent crime, riots, population collapse, and the exodus of taxpayers and businesses from imploding Baltimore City, which has been hit hard by a commercial real estate crisis in parts of the downtown area. But rarely have we focused on Baltimore County, just north of the city, where, yet again, left-wing politicians who masquerade as competent managers but are merely DEI activists have unleashed years of lawlessness through failed policies.

FOX45 News spoke with Mickey Hoppert, a retired sergeant with the Baltimore County Police Department who has spent more than two decades on the force, warned about the lawlessness of juveniles in the Towson metro area:

I wouldn’t say that it’s out of control, but it’s getting there. Baltimore County is slowly, actually it’s not slowly, it’s exponentially deteriorating, and there are more and more pockets of bad elements coming into the county and wreaking havoc.

“I wouldn’t say that it’s out of control, but it’s getting there. Baltimore County is slowly, actually it’s not slowly, it’s exponentially deteriorating,” Mickey Hoppert, retired sergeant with the Baltimore County Police Department, said. “There are more and more pockets of bad… pic.twitter.com/oc7hizFsdt

— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) May 5, 2026

Hoppert identified Towson as a major hub for juveniles to meet up and cause chaos over the last ten years.

“It’s easy access here,” he said. “Bus lines come here. Friends and family can bring them here.”

He pointed out that current juvenile laws in the deeply blue county do not support officers and have been nothing but demotivating towards the department.

“When I say nobody supporting them, I mean the judicial system, the judges, they’re not supporting them because the laws don’t allow them to. The newer laws that have been enacted by lawmakers,” Hoppert said. “Revamp the laws. Go back in and look at the laws and see what they can do to change them and make them more, more beneficial to the public and actually make it so that there is a consequence for the action that the juvenile commits.”

The current reading of population data in Baltimore County indicates it has lost population since 2020. The decline is modest, but it shows that population growth is quickly losing momentum as residents flee not just the county, but the state, seeking common-sense politicians in red states that offer low taxes and law and order.

At the state level, the failures are piling up for left-wing Gov. Wes Moore, whose polling data has sunk and alarmed the Democratic Party. The governor faces an ongoing trust issue with voters as Sinclair Broadcasting’s David Smith wages an informational war on the unhinged leftist in the state.

Since Gov. Wes Moore took office in January 2023, Maryland’s fiscal profile has deteriorated sharply. The state entered Moore’s first term with a roughly $5 billion surplus, but by 2025, it was facing a $3.3 billion deficit. This swing from surplus to deficit only suggests how Democratic leftists in Annapolis spent taxpayer funds on failed progressive experiments.  

Authored by Bryan Lutz via DollarCollapse.com,

“A government always finds itself obliged to resort to inflationary measures when it cannot negotiate loans and dare not levy taxes, because it has reason to fear that it will forfeit approval of the policy it is following if it reveals too soon the financial and general economic consequences of that policy.”

~ Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912)

Empires don’t announce their decline.

They reveal it in the data…

And on Monday, the U.S. Census Bureau quietly published the latest installment.

Rome elevated the military as the empire decayed.

Britain did the same after 1914.

And after 1971, when Nixon severed the dollar from gold, America began the same process.

The factory floor is where it shows up first…

So let’s look at it.

March 2026 defense capital goods orders: up 18 percent month-over-month.

But, year-over-year, it’s a much larger number: up 80 percent.

Non-defense capital goods? Down 1.2 percent, which makes it the sixth contraction in seven months.

Strip out defense production, and the headline factory number moves negative.

Now, the United States isn’t exactly in full-on war economy yet. It’s what a peacetime empire economy looks like in late stage.

Here’s what the transition looks like on the chart, defense versus non-defense aircraft orders, last 24 months:

One of those lines is paid for by the Pentagon writing a check. The other is paid for by airlines and freight companies deciding they want to expand. Guess which kind of order an empire prioritizes when it’s running out of money.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1912:

“A government always finds itself obliged to resort to inflationary measures when it cannot negotiate loans and dare not levy taxes, because it has reason to fear that it will forfeit approval of the policy it is following if it reveals too soon the financial and general economic consequences of that policy.”

You see, a Federal government has three ways to pay its bills.

1. It can tax.

2. It can borrow.

3. Or it can print.

If the US government were to tax citizens for $2.5 trillion in defense spending they’d revolt by Tuesday.

If they were to borrow it from foreigners who are already net sellers of Treasuries? Good luck.

That leaves the printer.

Every empire elevates the military as the civilian economy decays. Rome did it under Diocletian. The British did it after 1914. America started in 1971.

The Vietnam-era proof is the cleanest.

After the war ended, federal spending kept rising. The 1969 federal surplus of $3 billion turned into a $23 billion deficit by 1972, with the war winding down.

America didn’t exactly demobilize after that. Instead, they redirected attention.

In fact, look at where the redirection is going right now.

The Pentagon’s 2027 national security request will exceed $2.5 trillion. The cost of the Iran war isn’t even in that budget.

And the money supply just surged to a multi-year high. The Fed has quietly restarted QE.

So, the Pentagon gets more airplanes.

You can see what that printing looks like in the chart, below. Federal interest expense just crossed $1 trillion trailing twelve months, and M2 is heading vertical:

Mises predicted this curve. The Census Bureau is now reporting it.

And that’s why every empire’s late-stage transition ends the same way.

Eventually, the currency thins out, military thickens up, and the middle class evaporates between them.

Weimar Germany. Late-stage Rome. The Soviet Union in its last decade.

Each time, the people who held the State’s paper got wiped.

Each time, the people who held gold got out.

This week, the Fed will move closer to the cut. The Treasury will sell another half-trillion next week. Defense will keep ordering. And Civilian CapEx will keep contracting…

This is what a declining empire’s economy looks like. There just hasn’t been an announcement yet.

Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

Here is a salient place to start regarding the economic impact of the Donald’s misbegotten war on Iran: To wit, approximately 7 billion ton-miles of freight moves by truck each and every day in the USA, which heavy truck fleet consumes upwards of 2.9 million barrels per day (mb/d) of diesel fuel.

Alas, the price of diesel fuel was about $3.55/gallon both a year ago and as of early January 2026, but has since soared by more than+$2.00 per gallon to around $5.60 recently. That’s a 56% rise in the cost of pumping goods and commodities through the arteries of the US economy. On an annualized basis, the diesel fuel bill for the US truck fleet went from $155 billion per year to $250 billion per year at current oil prices.

The big question, of course, is through which channel these drastically higher fuel acquisition costs will be absorbed—in higher prices or reduced output?

And that pertains not just to the microcosm of the trucking sector, but the entire GDP now being battered by the Donald’s elective war-based dislocation of the world’s 175 million BOE/day oil and natural gas markets.

We’d bet it will be a combination of both inflation and deflation, otherwise known as stagflation. The mix of these outcomes depends upon supply and demand conditions in individual sectors of the economy in part, but also, and ultimately and more importantly, on the Fed.

That is, whether the nation’s central bank pumps incremental demand into the economy via credit expansion with a view to “accommodating” the soaring price of energy today, and, soon, food and other commodity inputs to GDP, too; or holds firm on the printing press dials and allows the now cresting energy and commodity shocks to work their way through the interstices of the $30 trillion US economy.

Of course, during the previous comparable petroleum supply disruption of the 1970s, the Fed made the huge mistake of printing the money to counteract what was a “supply shock” in the form of soaring petroleum prices. But that led—just as sound money advocates had always held—to double digit increases in the general price level by the end of the decade, and thereafter the trauma of the Volcker administered application of the monetary brakes.

With the Fed fixing to welcome a new Chairman, as recent congressional hearings remind, it is therefore a question of whether or not the Kevin Warsh Fed will want to take its place in the monetary policy villains gallery along with Arthur Burns and the hapless William G. Miller.

We think not. We actually believe that for the first time since Volcker we are about to get a Fed chairman who understands the requisites of sound money and noninflationary finance, as well as the profound error of Keynesian demand management at the central bank.

And not only that. As far as we can tell, he also has the experience from his prior service on the Fed during the so-called Great Financial Crisis and the cajones to lean heavily against the supply shock now emanating from the Persian Gulf.

Of course, in a perfect world of honest money and free markets—including in the production of money and credit—there wouldn’t be any central bank “leaning” to do. Under an honest gold standard, for instance, the impending petroleum supply shock would cause relative price changes, thereby generating a sharp curtailment of activity in petroleum intensive sectors and the reallocation of activity, output, jobs and capital to less petroleum intensive sectors. That’s what the miracle of free markets do when they are allowed by the state to operate.

We obviously do not have anything close to free money and capital markets today. Yet we may be lucking out with the arrival of a new Fed Chairman who might well attempt to stand up a sound money proxy—at least in part—to simulate the deflationary and re-allocative impulses that would otherwise arise in the face of a world scale supply shock.

That is to say, Warsh may permit the incoming Persian Gulf supply shock to curtail output in heavily impacted sectors rather than monetize it, as did his failed predecessors during the 1970s.

Moreover, one thing which may help Walsh lean in this anti-Keynesian direction is the the need to avoid the tattered legacy of the private equity deal lawyer who proceeded him. As it happened, Powell had no clue that the blue suits who soon surrounded him at the Eccles Building were wrong-headed Keynesian monetary statists through and though.

Accordingly, when the far smaller supply shock from the Black Sea dislocation at the on-set of the Russia-Ukraine War came cascading through the global energy and food commodity markets, Powell joined the Burns/Miller brigade and kept on “accommodating”.

That’s evident in the graph below, which depicts the domestic services inflation rate excluding energy.

This is the Fed’s go to inflation metric because it arguably measures a subset of prices in the US economy that are mainly driven by so-called domestic “demand”, which is the very thing the Fed claims to be expert at calibrating.

We think Fed “demand management” is pretty much mischievous nonsense.

The fact is, however, when the Ukraine War incepted in February 2022 the domestic services less energy index was already rising at a 4.1% Y/Y rate. So there was no room for “accommodation” at all.

In fact, the Ukraine War supply shock had caught the Fed with its monetary pants down. The Fed funds rate was effectively zero in nominal terms at the time (February 2022) and had been pinned to the zero bound for the previous 22 months. Thereafter Powell and his merry band of money printers kept kidding themselves into believing that the Ukrainian War inflation surge was “transitory” and that a Volcker style slamming of the monetary brakes was unnecessary.

As it evident in the chart, however, the Fed tepid 25 basis point increases month after month in its target funds rate was blatantly too little and way too late. By February 2023, the very inflation metric that the Keynesian central bankers claim to heavily influence—-domestic services less energy services—was leaping higher at a +7.3% Y/Y rate.

By then, of course, and with double digit energy and food inflation layered on top, headline inflation was running at 40-year highs and knocking on the door of 1970s style double digit inflation.

We think this history is profoundly relevant to where a Kevin Warsh-led Fed may come out because it just so happens that the the Y/Y rate on this key metric stood at +3.05% in March 2026 or about where it had been in October 2021 on the eve of the “Powell Inflation”.

Needless to say, we don’t think Kevin Warsh, who is a real student of money and economics, wishes to be placed next in line in the Burns/Miller/Powell gallery of monetary villains.

CPI For Services Less Energy Services, June 2021 to March 2026

That’s especially the case when you look at the history of the Fed’s so-called monetary target adjusted for the prevailing (Y/Y) inflation rate. To wit, there is no logical or sustainable world in which the inflation-adjusted or “real” cost of overnight money can be negative for any even limited period of time.

That’s because negative cost overnight money in real terms is truly the mother’s milk of speculation—especially on Wall Street among the hedge funds and fast money operators, but on the main street economy, too.

Stated differently, cheap money everywhere and always causes excessive speculation, imprudent leverage, debt accumulation, financial asset bubbles, malinvestment of capital and economic waste. But above all else, it also fuels an inflationary rise in the general price level owing to artificial credit-fueled demand uncoupled from any prior and corresponding increase in supply.

In this context, the chart below tells you all you need to know about what the Warsh Fed will be up against, and also the lessons of the 2022-2023 error committed by the Fed in its delayed and languid reaction to the Black Sea commodity shock. To wit, the inflation-adjusted Fed funds rate in Q2 2022 when measured by the inflation metric the Fed swears by—the domestic services CPI less energy services—was negative -4.4%.

Surely that was a signal that the money-printers were way over the end of their skis. That’s especially because the Fed funds rate had been negative in real terms for 57 quarters running, going all the way back to Q1 2008, when the real funds rate had last been slightly positive.

But here’s where the inflationary gale force was gestated. It actually took the Fed more than three years—until Q2 2025—to get the Fed funds rate positive in real terms, and then only marginally so at just +0.75%. Indeed, it is nothing less than the big pool of negative real cost credit enabled by the Fed during those three years that rocked the US economy with an inflationary outbreak that is still not fully extinguished.

In fact, as the US economy now begins to absorb the far more powerful supply shock waves from the Persian Gulf supply shock, we think the incoming Warsh Fed is not about to run a repeat of 2021-2022.

The more likely course is actually suggested by the left-hand side of the graph, which shows that the real funds rate measured with this metric hovered in the +2.5% range or higher during the salad days of non-inflationary growth of the 1980s and 1990s.

That is to say, Kevin Warsh is likely to prove to be more of a Volcker/Reagan sound money central banker than we have experienced since Alan Greenspan sold his gold standard bona fides for a stint as the world’s most famous money-printer after the dotcom crash.

Inflation-Adjusted Fed Funds Rate, 1982 to 2026

So the question recurs. What is likely to happen to the alleged Trumpian Golden Age when the Persian Gulf Supply shock smacks up against the incoming sounder money Fed under Kevin Warsh?

In a word, we think the US economy is already teetering on the edge of recession, waiting for the proverbial wing-flap to tip it over into contraction. After all, it’s already evident that the one bright spot in the US economy during the Donald’s second go round—capital spending—is purely an artifact of the stock market bubble in AI.

For want of doubt, the table below shows Capex spending for AI and data centers and compares it to the second column, which is the standard measure of business fixed investment in structures, equipment and intellectual capital as reported in the income and product accounts. It is notable that the former accounted for just 2.5% of business capital investment in 2020, but grew by $188 billion in 2025 versus prior year.

At the same time, total business investment rose by just $228 billion in 2025, meaning that the AI/data center boom accounted for fully 82% of total business investment spending growth in the US economy during 2025.

The final two columns show the same data in constant dollar terms. Whereas the reported data shows that real nonresidential fixed investment investment (fifth column) rose by a seemingly robust 4.1% during Trump’s first year, capital spending excluding the AI bubble actually shrank at a -0.4% annual rate.

As it happened, the latter had actually grown by 6.7% per annum during the time of Sleepy Joe (2020-2024) owing to the unsustainable stimulus of borrow, spend and print after the pandemic collapse in the spring of 2020.

So “Joe Biden” therefore gets no plaudits for the artificially bloated economy he inherited from Trump 45 and the money-printing excesses of the Powell Fed. Still, it can be well and truly said that the US economy was already positioned on a banana peel when the Donald elected to blow up the Persian Gulf for no good reason of homeland security.

Business CapEx With And Without The AI/Data Center Boom, 2020 to 2025

In short, the Persian Gulf supply shock is about to monkey-hammer the US economy good and hard. And then the AI bubble in the stock market will bust—even as this time there will be no money-printers at the central bank waiting to bailout the mess.

*  *  *

The Persian Gulf supply shock may prove to be only one part of a much larger economic reckoning. If confidence in the US dollar continues to erode, the consequences could go far beyond higher prices, tighter credit, and recession. At some point, desperate governments often reach for desperate measures—including capital controls, restrictions on movement, retirement account grabs, and other forms of wealth confiscation.

That’s why it’s critical to consider your options before the window to act narrows. To help, we’ve prepared a special report, Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse. It explains practical steps you can take now to better protect your money, freedom, and future.

Get your free copy of Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse.

One of the co-authors of California’s controversial ‘one-time’ tax on billionaires appeared to suggest that the levy could extend beyond a single imposition.

Marxist economics professor Emmanuel Saez, who hails from France, made the comment during a Tuesday debate against economist Arthur Laffer at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a one-time tax. Because you can’t surprise billionaires more than once,” Saez said. “Even then, maybe some of them were expecting something like this. So, it’s going to be a debate about this time, you know, a permanent wealth tax at a low rate that’s going to last for a number of years.”

Watch the entire debate below:

The radical tax pushed by the far-left Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West would slap California residents with a punishing one-time 5% levy on anyone with assets over $1 billion.

The proposal has reverberated through Silicon Valley, where several high-profile figures have already established residency elsewhere. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have moved to Florida, drawn by its more favorable business and tax environment, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg purchased a $150 million mansion in Miami. This week, Bloomberg reported that Palantir CEO Alex Karp scooped up a Miami-area mansion for $46 million, while the company itself has recently relocated from Denver to Florida.

Even Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, prominent Democrat donor, and longtime buddy of convicted schrodinger’s pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has publicly criticized the proposal, describing California’s wealth tax tax as a “horrendous idea” that would hasten the departure of tech founders and executives from the state.

California is not alone among Democrat-leaning states experiencing such outflows. This week, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, a longtime backer of liberal causes, announced his relocation from Washington state to Miami, Florida, shortly after state legislators advanced a bill imposing a tax on residents earning more than $1 million annually.

“We have moved to Miami for our next adventure together. We are enjoying the sunshine of South Florida and its allure to our kids on the East Coast as they raise families of their own,” he wrote in a Linkedin post.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The commodity supercycle thesis is everywhere right now. Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett, one of the most widely read strategists on Wall Street, recently declared “commodities the biggest trade of the next five years,” anchoring the call on deglobalization, chronic capital underinvestment, and a world drifting away from dollar dominance. As is often the case, the narrative is extremely compelling. However, it’s also internally contradictory in ways that most investors aren’t stopping to examine.

After three decades of managing money, I have learned to be THE most skeptical of the trades that feel the most inevitable. That skepticism isn’t contrarianism for its own sake, but rather the recognition that when a thesis achieves consensus, the crowd has usually already priced the easy part of the move, and the hard part is what comes next. The commodity supercycle argument has real structural legs. But it also carries a reflexivity problem, a dollar mechanics problem, and a catastrophist assumption problem that, taken together, make the clean “go long commodities” conclusion far messier than the headline suggests.

Let’s work through each one carefully, and as always, with the data.

The Reflexivity Problem: When the Trade Defeats Itself

The most straightforward critique of any commodity supercycle thesis is that a sustained commodity rally is, by definition, inflationary. And sustained inflation is demand destruction. Before we get to the counterarguments (there are legitimate ones), it’s worth mapping out the feedback loop precisely, because the mechanism is more complex than the simple “inflation is bad for growth” headline suggests.

Commodity bulls offer a legitimate counterargument here. First, they distinguish between demand-pull inflation, where a hot economy bids up prices, and supply-constrained inflation. The latter is where chronic underinvestment means the world can’t produce enough regardless of demand levels. Hartnett’s case leans heavily on the supply side, and that’s the more defensible version of the argument. A decade of ESG-driven capital withdrawal from energy and metals, combined with the shale revolution’s diminishing returns, has created real supply deficits in several commodity markets.

The data below illustrates the scale of that underinvestment. Global upstream oil and gas capital expenditure peaked around 2014 and remained roughly 40% below that level as recently as 2023, even as demand returned to pre-pandemic levels. That is a genuine structural story, and certainly is worth paying attention to.

But even granting the supply-side framing, the reflexivity problem doesn’t disappear. This is a point that is often forgotten in the “heat of the moment” of a profitable trade. The markets are not static, but dynamic, and, as the old saying goes, “high prices are a cure for high prices.” There are two reasons why that is true.

First, high commodity prices are a tax on growth by transferring wealth from consumers and manufacturers to producers. That transfer compresses the demand on which commodity producers depend. Governments and central banks respond asymmetrically to commodity inflation by releasing strategic reserves, imposing windfall taxes, or accelerating substitution. The 2022 oil spike is a perfect case study: WTI briefly hit $130 per barrel, the Biden administration released over 180 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and demand destruction combined with a Fed tightening cycle broke the trade within months of the initial spike.

Secondly, high prices bring more supply online. When prices rise, producers are incentivized to produce more products. When that increase in supply collides with the collapse in demand, the cycle reverses quickly due to the supply glut. As shown in the chart below, the commodity market is notorious for booms and busts precisely because of this.

The 2022 episode compressed in real time what would normally take years to play out, but we also saw a similar episode from 2000 to 2007, as China consumed commodities in a push to rapidly grow its economy. That episode crashed in 2008 as the Financial Crisis crushed global demand. The policy/producer response isn’t hypothetical; it’s a documented reflex, and the more dramatic the commodity rally, the more certain the policy response becomes.

The Dollar Contradiction at the Heart of the Thesis

Here’s the fault line that most commodity bulls don’t address directly, and it’s the one I find most analytically significant: virtually all commodities are priced and settled in U.S. dollars in global markets. That’s not incidental; it’s the structural backbone of the petrodollar system that has anchored dollar demand since the 1970s. When oil prices rise, petrodollar recycling intensifies. Commodity exporters accumulate dollar surpluses and recycle them into U.S. Treasuries and dollar-denominated assets (including U.S. equities, gold, and other commodities). More commodity volume at higher prices means more dollar-denominated transactions, more dollar liquidity needs, and more dollar reserves held by commodity-importing nations.

A commodity supercycle, properly understood, is structurally dollar-supportive, not dollar-negative. As shown, many point to the decline in the US dollar’s “share” of global foreign exchange reserves as “proof” of its declining dominance.

The chart above tells a story the catastrophist crowd loves to cite, and they’re not wrong that the dollar’s reserve share has declined from its 2000 peak of roughly 71%. But look carefully at the actual level: as of late 2024, the dollar still accounts for approximately 57-58% of global reserves. The next closest competitor, the euro, sits around 20%. The Chinese yuan, despite years of de-dollarization rhetoric, accounts for less than 3%. The decline is real, but only because the Euro did not exist before 1999, and the Yuan only became accepted for trade on a limited basis a few years ago. However, a crisis it is not, and a commodity cycle only strengthens the dollar position.

This creates a direct contradiction with the other major pillar of the commodity bull narrative: the dollar debasement story. If the thesis requires dollar weakness to fully materialize, and many versions of it explicitly do, then a successful commodity cycle works against that by generating incremental dollar demand. The two arguments pull in opposite directions, and that tension is almost never acknowledged in the thesis presentations.

The only scenario in which both the commodity bull and the dollar bear cases work simultaneously is one in which U.S. fiscal excess debases the dollar faster than commodity-driven dollar demand can offset it. That requires a genuine crisis of fiscal confidence, a level of sovereign stress that isn’t currently visible and isn’t probable within a five-year investment horizon. Yes, the U.S. deficit is running approximately $1.8 to $2 trillion annually, interest expense has eclipsed defense spending, and the CBO projects no credible stabilization path under current policy. That is a real long-run problem over the next 30-50 years. But it’s not a five-year catalyst.

The China Problem: No Replacement for the Original Engine

China is the most critical lynchpin to the commodity supercycle. The 2000s commodity supercycle, the one this thesis is implicitly invoking as its template, was not primarily a supply story. It was a demand shock of historic proportions, and it had a name: China’s urbanization and industrialization. Between 2000 and 2012, China accounted for roughly half of all incremental global demand growth for steel, copper, aluminum, and coal. Its share of global iron ore consumption grew from under 20% to over 60% in that same period. That’s not a supply-deficit story. That’s a billion people building cities that no one lived in, which have now become an economic anchor.

That engine is now structurally impaired, and the table below illustrates why the India- and emerging-market “replacement demand” narrative falls significantly short of the original.

India’s commodity demand growth is real, and the broader emerging market infrastructure buildout adds genuine incremental demand. But there’s no single country or bloc that replicates the concentrated, high-velocity demand shock that China delivered between 2000 and 2012. The 2000s supercycle had a demand engine of historic scale running underneath it. Hartnett’s version relies on supply-side logic. In the absence of a comparably powerful demand driver, the supply/demand imbalance will not be as significant.

Meanwhile, as noted, China’s property sector collapse has removed the world’s single largest commodity demand driver. At its peak, Chinese real estate accounted for roughly 25-30% of GDP when the full construction supply chain is included. That’s not recovering in five years. The commodity demand that China generated during its construction boom was effectively borrowed from the future. Now that the borrowed “future” is arriving, it came as a demand vacuum.

Tail Risk Dressed as Base Case: The Catastrophist Problem

The “dollar demise / U.S. asset exodus / bipolar world” framing has been a persistent feature of bearish macro commentary since at least 2009. Every round of quantitative easing was supposed to be the moment dollar credibility broke. Every geopolitical fracture, the European debt crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the U.S. credit downgrade, and the rise of the BRICS payment alternatives, was supposed to accelerate de-dollarization beyond the margin.

None of it happened on the timeline or at the magnitude the catastrophist crowd predicted. And yet the narrative keeps resurfacing and gets refreshed with new catalysts because the old narrative failed. That is why those castraphosists always have a key statement: “just not yet.”

The table above makes a straightforward point. In every major crisis of the past 20 years, the world’s response has been to buy dollars, not sell them. The de-dollarization that Hartnett and others embed in their commodity bull thesis requires the world to do the opposite. Rather, the world would shift away from dollar-denominated reserves and transactions in a sustained, structural way. There’s no evidence that’s happening at the pace or scale the narrative requires.

This doesn’t mean the dollar is invulnerable. The fiscal trajectory is genuinely concerning over a multi-decade horizon. A term premium reset in U.S. Treasuries is already underway, driven by foreign buyers demanding more compensation for duration risk. These are real and worth monitoring. But they’re 10 to 15-year dynamics, not five-year catalysts. Hartnett is packaging a legitimate long-run concern as an imminent trade driver, and that’s where the analytical rigor slips.

What This Means for Investors

I want to be precise about what I’m arguing and what I’m not. I’m not saying commodities are a bad investment or that the structural supply-deficit case is wrong; it’s not. Energy, select industrial metals, and agricultural commodities face real, medium-term supply constraints. Those constraints should support prices above the levels they traded at in the 2010s deflationary decade. The capex destruction of the prior cycle created a genuine deficit. That deficit will take years to close, and that story is worth holding exposure to in a diversified portfolio.

What I’m arguing is that the clean, multi-year commodity supercycle narrative, particularly the version built on dollar collapse and a wholesale shift away from U.S. assets, overstates the probability of its own enabling conditions. And more importantly, it contains a logical fault line: the commodity supercycle itself is dollar-supportive, not dollar-negative. The two main pillars of the thesis pull in opposite directions.

But What About The AI Boom?

Here is the real question. Can the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom replace China’s urbanization as the demand engine underneath a new commodity supercycle? The short answer is no, and understanding why clarifies exactly what kind of commodity opportunity we’re actually dealing with.

AI infrastructure does generate real commodity demand. Data centers require significant copper for power distribution and cooling systems. The grid expansion needed to support hyperscaler compute loads is driving demand for steel, aluminum, and transformers. Natural gas and nuclear power are being positioned as the baseload energy sources for facilities that can’t tolerate renewable intermittency. Goldman Sachs estimated that data center power demand could grow by roughly 160% by 2030, a figure worth taking seriously. Copper in particular has a legitimate AI demand tailwind, and uranium’s renaissance as a clean baseload energy source is directly tied to this infrastructure buildout.

But here’s where the China comparison breaks down completely. China’s urbanization moved roughly 500 million people from subsistence agriculture into cities over 20 years. It required building entire urban ecosystems. That boom required everything from roads and bridges to apartment towers, factories, ports, and railways. All scratch, simultaneously, across every commodity category at once. That was broad-based, high-intensity demand across iron ore, coal, copper, aluminum, cement, and energy, running in parallel. A true commodity supercycle requires that kind of breadth. AI infrastructure demand is concentrated almost entirely in copper and electricity. It doesn’t move the needle on iron ore, agricultural commodities, coal, or the dozens of other categories that a genuine supercycle requires.

There’s an irony here that rarely gets discussed.

“AI is simultaneously the most compelling new source of commodity demand and one of the most powerful long-run deflationary forces for commodity consumption.“

AI-driven efficiency gains in manufacturing, logistics, energy management, and precision agriculture reduce the per-unit economic output intensity of commodities. Predictive maintenance reduces equipment replacement cycles. Smart grid management reduces transmission losses. The same technology driving data center copper demand is also optimizing the systems that consume commodities everywhere else in the economy. Over a five-year horizon, those efficiency gains compound. The net commodity impact of the AI revolution is almost certainly positive. However, it is far more modest than the bull case narrative implies.

Conclusion

The highest probability scenario, a structurally elevated commodity price floor with significant cyclical volatility, doesn’t support a set-it-and-forget-it long commodity position. It supports tactical, rules-based exposure management. The investors who generated the most alpha during the 2000s commodity bull weren’t the ones who correctly read the structural thesis in 2001 and held through 2008. They were the ones who managed position sizes through the cyclical interruptions and had predefined frameworks for when to add and when to reduce.

That discipline is exactly what the current “biggest trade of the next five years” framing discourages. When a thesis gets packaged as a multi-year certainty, it creates complacency about the cyclical risks embedded in the trade. Those risks — recession-driven demand destruction, Fed policy response, dollar strength in stress events — are precisely the ones that cause the most damage to investors who sized positions based on narrative conviction rather than risk-adjusted analysis.

Inflation is reshaping modern dating by making romantic outings more expensive and forcing many singles to be more intentional about how they spend, according to a new study from DealSeek. 

Rising costs are affecting how often people go out, with 71% of singles saying dating is more expensive than it was a year ago and 40% saying they are going on fewer dates because of it. For many people, paying for transportation, meals, drinks, entertainment, and other date-related expenses has become harder to justify as everyday living costs continue to rise.

That financial pressure is changing expectations around first dates. Most singles now prefer keeping first dates relatively inexpensive, with 57% saying they want to spend $75 or less and 39% preferring to stay under $50. Only 8% are willing to spend more than $150. Rather than choosing expensive dinners or elaborate nights out, many people are opting for lower-cost activities like coffee dates, walks, park outings, community events, or discounted entertainment options that feel more practical.

Many singles are also becoming more proactive about saving money while dating. Around 37% said they suggest free activities for dates, while 30% actively search for discounts or deals before making plans. These habits show how dating is becoming less centered on extravagant gestures and more focused on spending time together in affordable ways.

The DealSeek report writes that financial responsibility is increasingly viewed as an attractive trait. About half of singles said they appreciate partners who suggest inexpensive date ideas, while 49% said being open about budgeting is appealing. Even using coupons is seen positively by 41% of respondents. These responses suggest that being practical with money is becoming more valued in relationships.

At the same time, irresponsible spending habits are seen as major red flags. Around 78% of singles said bragging about money is unattractive, 61% said overspending is a turnoff, and 69% dislike people who complain about finances while continuing to spend recklessly. Many people appear to value financial maturity over flashy displays of wealth.

Money concerns are also shaping dating decisions in deeper ways. Nearly half of respondents, 47%, admitted they have tried dating someone who earns more than they do. Meanwhile, 53% said they have misrepresented their financial situation while dating, and 42% said they have stopped seeing someone because of financial issues. Dating profiles are reflecting these changing attitudes as well, with 61% of people finding profiles that mention simple, low-cost hobbies more attractive than profiles focused on career ambition or high-paying jobs.

Overall, dating is becoming more practical as people adjust to higher costs. Instead of trying to impress others through expensive dates or displays of wealth, many singles are placing greater value on honesty, affordability, and financial responsibility.

Via the Brownstone Institute,

Hollywood loves a good sequel and so does politics and pharmaceutical development. 

Since Covid, there have been several attempted disease scares – Mpox, Swine flu, Bird flu, Chikungunya, Measles – but nothing has really caught the attention of audiences like the new Hantavirus frenzy. 

Today’s evidence comes from DRUDGE REPORT: global effort to stop the spread. Is “flatten the curve” next?

Let’s remember how this began last year, with of course, a hantavirus death in the family of one of America’s most beloved Hollywood actors. It was Betsy Arakawa, Gene Hackman’s wife, who died February 12, 2025, from apparent hantavirus infection from rodents in the home. Terrifying image. 

At that point, no regular person had ever heard of such a disease. There is a reason. It’s rare and human-to-human spread is nearly unknown. Strange that it would hit the wife of the appropriately named Gene Hackman (get it?), leading man of the prescient 1998 movie Enemy of the State. 

Next up we have a reprise of the Plague Ship motif. Like the Diamond Princess, it is a cruise ship, the MV Hondius operated by Oceanwide Expeditions with 147 passengers, departing from Argentina and now anchored off Cape Verde, West Africa. 

It was headed to the Canary Islands when three people died, two with lab-confirmed hantavirus. No port would allow the ship to dock. With the assistance of rescue boats, the dead have been carefully removed by workers in hazmats and masks.

A flight attendant who came in contact with a dead body is now hospitalized and in rough condition, suggesting that even coming close to a person with hantavirus is risky stuff. No one can figure out how this is even possible. So mysterious, so unusual, so terrifying, just like the movie Contagion. 

This fits with the theory of Drs. Fauci and Morens that we need not worry about lab-created pathogens when animal-to-human spillover is becoming more common. This is why, they wrote in August 2020, that we must commence to “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”

Ready to opine for the press is the World Health Organization’s Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, she of Stanford University pedigree, now widely quoted as the go-to authority. 

You might remember Dr. Kerkhove from the original cast of the Covid production. It was she who wrote the WHO’s report to the world following the February 2020 junket to Wuhan. (We know this from the metadata of the report, which she failed to cleanse in the rush to publication.) 

“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures,” she wrote of the CCP’s extreme lockdowns, “has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities.”

Many close observers credit Kerkhove’s report with inspiring the worldwide lockdown of all nations but four in the following weeks. She still works at the WHO. Hardly anyone remembers any of this. There is no mechanism in place for her to be held to account for her role. 

There is no known cure but a vaccine is in development by Moderna based on the mRNA platform. 

As a result, Moderna’s stock, down dramatically from its highs, is now starting to recover. It is now up 100 percent year over year. The buy signal is strong with this one.

Looking back at the Covid prequel, there was always a flaw in the coronavirus caper, namely its short period of latency, roughly that of a cold or flu. You are infectious for a few days without symptoms while you pass it on. A genuine disease panic needs a longer period of latency. You need to be infected for weeks while spreading it far and wide. 

Why is this? Because every infectious disease confronts the logic of survival. A smart virus does not kill its hosts – it needs them to infect others – but a dumb one does, which is why dumb viruses are not good candidates for pandemics. 

This persistent trade-off between severity and prevalence can only be gamed by a long period of latency. That’s extremely rare and not even lab-created viruses manage this balancing act well. 

As it turns out, this hantavirus does have a very long period of latency, we are assured by the Harvard School of Public Health. It has issued a pronouncement: “The incubation period – the time between when a person is infected and when they begin to experience symptoms – is usually in the range of two to three weeks, but may be as long as eight weeks.”

Two months! Imagine that. Here we might finally have our candidate for the silent killer about which Deborah Birx fantasized during the last iteration of this story.

Keep in mind that no high institution in the US has repudiated lockdowns, even if two-thirds of the public believes they were pointlessly damaging. The call for Covid Justice has now 37,300 signatures but not enough to cause the Senate, House, or any other legislative body to speak clearly that this will never be tolerated again. 

To this day, the plan of the World Health Organization – which is already practicing for the next pandemic – is to push for lockdowns until vaccination in the event of a new disease scare. “Every country should apply non-pharmaceutical measures systematically and rigorously at the scale the epidemiological situation requires,” they say. 

Meanwhile, the Biden plan was for a 130-day lockdown in the event of a new pandemic. 

There are few mechanisms in place in any country to prevent this from happening. There are good people in government who would oppose this with strong conviction but will they even be asked their opinions? Or does this all occur with any obvious evidence of democratic volition? 

Who precisely is directing and producing this sequel? No one knows for sure. Will it be a box office hit like the last time or only have a limited release to test market interest? All the ingredients are here for an Academy Award: rodents, long latency, spread through casual contact with the dead, workers in hazmat suits, no known cure, a vaccine in rushed development. 

The real beauty of disease panic is that it has broad audience appeal and crosses partisan lines. National Review is all in already, as it was with Covid, and surely The Nation will join the effort in days. 

These are well-worn plot devices and sequels are rarely as compelling or profitable as the original. But when one is out of other ideas – and the public clamor to indict Fauci grows by the hour – it’s always worth a shot. 

Recent trading competitions suggest large language models are still unreliable portfolio managers, according to Bloomberg.

Tests involving models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI have often delivered underwhelming results: many lost money, traded excessively, and made erratic decisions despite receiving identical prompts. In several cases, models appeared unable to stick to coherent strategies for more than a few trading sessions.

Bloomberg writes that one of the clearest examples came from Alpha Arena, a competition created by startup Nof1. Eight models were each given $10,000 and asked to trade U.S. tech stocks over a two-week period using different strategies, including defensive approaches and leveraged bets. Across four competitions, the models collectively lost roughly a third of their capital, and only six of 32 outcomes ended in profit.

The gap in behavior was striking: xAI’s Grok 4.20 made just 158 trades in one contest, while Alibaba Group’s Qwen executed 1,418 under the exact same prompt.

The experiments reflect growing interest in whether generative AI can eventually outperform traditional fund managers. Wall Street firms including JPMorgan Chase and Balyasny Asset Management already rely on AI for research, fraud detection, and internal analysis, but they have largely stopped short of handing over actual investment decisions. As Nof1 founder Jay Azhang put it, current models still struggle with basics like “position sizing, timing, signal weighting and overtrading.”

That broader pattern has shown up elsewhere too. Research blog Flat Circle tracked 11 public AI trading competitions and found that while every event produced at least one profitable model, only two generated a profitable median return — suggesting most bots still underperform more often than not. Azhang was even more blunt about the state of autonomous trading: giving an LLM money and letting it invest independently “isn’t a thing yet.”

Some firms are still betting that the technology improves with better tools and tighter guardrails. Intelligent Alpha, for example, runs an AI-driven fund that combines LLMs with earnings transcripts, analyst forecasts, corporate filings, macroeconomic indicators, and web searches to make predictions. In late 2025, OpenAI’s ChatGPT correctly predicted the direction of earnings estimate revisions 68% of the time — its strongest showing so far.

Evaluating these systems remains difficult because traditional backtesting methods can be misleading: models may already have embedded knowledge of past market events, creating look-ahead bias. That has pushed more firms toward live-market experiments, where results so far suggest AI may be useful as an assistant — but not a replacement — for human traders.