On March 3, just days after the first US and Israeli strikes on Iran, when most of the market was still busy pricing the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as a temporary inconvenience, we pointed out something that seemed rather obvious (to us): the UAE’s oil port of Fujairah, which sits on the Gulf of Oman and bypasses the strait completely, was far too small for its strategic importance – and that would change.

Surprising Fujairah is not a bigger oil terminal: it bypasses the straits completely.

Expect major infrastructure push here after the war. https://t.co/Do1gK7KBDQ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 3, 2026

Six days later we went one step further:

After this crisis, every Gulf pipeline has to end either in Yanbu or Fujairah alongside massive terminal infrastructure https://t.co/fNBywD3Wr1

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 9, 2026

Seven months later, the “major infrastructure push” has a name, a sponsor, and a checkbook. According to a new Bloomberg Big Take, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed Al Nahyan – who took the helm of the emirate’s $300 billion L’imad Holding sovereign fund weeks before the war began – is now the point man for what the UAE is officially calling its “Zero Hormuz” strategy (wonder if he was reading Zero Hedge at the time). And the centerpiece of that strategy is, you guessed it, Fujairah.

Follow the money (to the Gulf of Oman)

Here are the Bloomberg report highlights:

• L’imad has announced plans to take Abu Dhabi Ports Co. private at a valuation of nearly $9 billion, and people familiar say the fund is now likely to spend tens of billions of dollars more on new port infrastructure outside the strait.
• The crown prince and his inner circle are expected to be “particularly focused” on expanding ports in Fujairah, which sits just outside Hormuz and opens into the Gulf of Oman.
• In May, L’imad struck an agreement with BlackRock (via its Global Infrastructure Partners unit), Temasek and ADNOC to jointly target up to $30 billion of infrastructure investment in energy transportation, logistics and water. Abu Dhabi did not want such a large push funded solely by state money – which is a polite way of saying Larry Fink gets a toll road around Iran.
• Sheikh Khaled also chairs the executive committee of ADNOC’s board, which is building a second oil pipeline to double export capacity through Fujairah; at a May meeting he directed the company to accelerate delivery.
• Meanwhile Dubai’s DP World is separately pushing new container terminals in Fujairah – meaning that a relatively small stretch of coastline under the Al Hajar mountains is about to become some of the most crowded (and most valuable) real estate in the Gulf.

The UAE’s trade minister Thani Al Zeyoudi summed up the doctrine back in June: the country wants to move to Zero Hormuz dependency regardless of whether the strait is open or not. Translation: even if Tehran signs a peace deal tomorrow, the leverage it enjoyed over Gulf exports for decades is never coming back.

Regular readers will recognize every step of this progression. On April 2 we noted that Gulf states were dusting off costly bypass pipeline plans; on May 15 we reported that ADNOC would double its crude export capacity bypassing Hormuz with the new pipeline to Fujairah, due in 2027; and on July 13 we wrote that DP World’s plan for a new east coast port in Fujairah “signals the beginning of the end” of Iran’s Hormuz leverage. That same day, as peace talks went nowhere, we also offered an alternative engineering solution:

At this rate it will be faster to dig a canal through the UAE to bypass Hormuz than to wait for a peace deal

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 13, 2026

Abu Dhabi, it appears, has opted for the slightly less ambitious version: pipelines plus a lot of concrete.

Goldman: 60% of Gulf exports insulated from Hormuz by 2028

So how far can this go? Goldman’s commodity team (Alexandra Paulus, Yulia Grigsby, Daan Struyven and Filippo Cuscito) ran the numbers in a July note titled “Gulf Exports: Short-Term Uncertainty, Long-Term Pipeline Hedge“ (available here to pro subs), and the conclusion is that while Hormuz still dictates prices in the short run, the long run looks very different. The bank estimates that enough pipeline capacity will be added in the region to insulate over 45% of pre-war Persian Gulf exports by end-2027 and more than 60% by end-2028 from any future Hormuz shock.

Some of the details:

• Goldman measures current effective bypass capacity as the flows out of Yanbu (East-West pipeline), Fujairah (ADCOP pipeline) and Ceyhan (Kirkuk-Ceyhan). In its base case, that capacity rises by 3.8mb/d by end-2027 and 7.3mb/d cumulatively by end-2028, to over 14mb/d – versus ~23mb/d of pre-war exports from the seven Gulf producers that need pipelines to dodge Hormuz.
• The UAE features prominently: the West-East pipeline (ADNOC’s second line to Fujairah) is one of only two projects already under construction, while a Hamriyah-Fujairah pipeline sits in Goldman’s “Accelerated Scenario” – which would insulate 75% of exports by end-2028 (vs. just over 45% in the “Conservative Scenario”).
• History is on the builders’ side: across Goldman’s sample, the median construction time for Mideast pipelines was 2.5 years, and single-country projects get built faster, especially in response to supply disruptions. Multi-country projects (looking at you, Iraq-Syria) not so much.
• Total cost across the seven projects: roughly $30-48 billion – or, put differently, about one BlackRock/L’imad infrastructure platform.

And here is the punchline for oil bulls: Goldman raised its long-dated Brent assumption (3-year-ahead futures) by $9 to $76/bbl at the peak of the war, mostly on a higher structural security premium. But the bank warns that the eventual expansion of bypass capacity poses downside risk to that long-dated assumption. In other words, every barrel that Sheikh Khaled routes to Fujairah is a barrel of risk premium Iran can no longer charge the world.

The plumbing is already working

The “adaptation” is already visible in the export data. As we reported earlier today, Goldman estimates that Persian Gulf oil exports (including “dark exports”) recovered to 23.3mb/d over the past week, in line with their 2025 average, after doubling in September. Crude accounted for nearly 90% of the recovery, reaching 19mb/d (108% of the 2025 average), while refined product exports remain stuck at about half of normal. Crucially for this story, Goldman notes that oil exports from the UAE – which shockingly exited OPEC shortly after the Iran war started – are also above their 2025 average, “with likely further upside” – while Iran shipped no crude by sea at all in September.

Drill down and Fujairah is doing a lot of the heavy lifting: Goldman’s late-September breakdown puts flows via Fujairah at 3.6mb/d (crude, products and LPG combined), more than Yanbu’s 2.6mb/d, and more than double the ~1.7mb/d Fujairah handled before the war.

And by country, the UAE is already running at 110% of its 2025 export average – second only to Saudi Arabia’s dark-transit-fueled surge – while Iran sits at 19%.

The UAE in particular has been the most creative workaround artist of the war: as we noted in July, its crude output hit an all-time high of 4.1mb/d in June after it quit OPEC, with ADNOC selling cargoes for loading off Fujairah and Sohar, outside the strait. Back in March, we reported that Fujairah crude loadings had already hit ~1.9mb/d – about the max the existing 1.5-1.8mb/d Habshan-Fujairah line can carry. The only real constraint was pipe. Which is exactly what Abu Dhabi is now paying to fix.

Bypassing the strait is not the same as bypassing the drones

None of this makes Fujairah safe. It is roughly 80 miles from Hormuz and well within range of Iranian drones and short-range missiles – a point LSE professor Steffen Hertog makes in the Bloomberg piece. Tehran knows exactly what Fujairah represents: the port was in flames on March 14, was attacked at least seven times in the first four weeks of the war, and on March 31 Iran explicitly threatened to target the port and its pipeline “in order to close the UAE’s route to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.” On May 4, another Iranian strike on Fujairah’s oil zone sent Brent above $114.

Saudi Arabia offers the cautionary tale. Its 7mb/d East-West pipeline to Yanbu – the region’s single biggest Hormuz bypass – was shut down on September 11 after drone attacks by pro-Iran militias, before restarting on September 28. Goldman’s September 14 Oil Tracker pointed out that an April strike on the same pipeline cut flows by just 0.7mb/d for four days, while the latest attack was far more severe and threatened the remaining ~2mb/d of Yanbu exports. The Saudis promptly pivoted back to shipping through… Hormuz. Meanwhile the Houthis are advancing on Bab el-Mandeb, threatening the other end of the Red Sea route.

Which brings us to Treasury Secretary Bessent, who predicted on September 1 that in two years Hormuz will be “a worthless piece of water.” Qatar’s energy minister promptly called that “completely wrong” – which is easy to understand when you are Qatar, have no geographic alternative route, and have watched your gas revenue drop sharply. The truth is somewhere in between: Hormuz won’t be worthless, but if Goldman’s math is right it will be worth a lot less to Iran – and a lot more to whoever owns the ports on the other side of the mountains.

As Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil puts it, a “No Hormuz” policy is now of utmost importance for the UAE – but with Iran’s proxies extending their reach, Abu Dhabi will also have to prepare for infrastructure targeting outside Hormuz too. Expect the next line item in the L’imad budget to be air defense.

For now, the bottom line is the one we flagged on day four of the war: the Gulf’s most important real estate is no longer inside the strait, it’s on the Gulf of Oman – and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi has just put tens of billions of dollars (and BlackRock’s money) behind that view.

If you only looked at the price of the fuel, you’d think the nuclear trade has never been better. Long-term uranium prices are sitting at $96/lb, an all-time record and up ~12% YTD, taking out the $95/lb high set in mid-2007 at the peak of the last uranium mania (per UxC data compiled by TD Cowen). Spot has followed along to roughly $90/lb, up ~11% YTD.

If, however, you looked at anything with a ticker attached to it, you’d think the nuclear renaissance had been quietly cancelled somewhere between the “AI will need infinite power” phase and the “wait, who’s paying for all this capex?” phase.

That, in a nutshell, is the disconnect TD Cowen’s uranium team (Craig Hutchison and David Liang) highlights in its two latest Uranium Monitors: the commodity is making all-time highs, while the equities, the SMR darlings and even the IPO pipeline are going in the opposite direction. And the cause, at least in the short run, is the same one that kills every rally in a physical market eventually: the buyers are balking.

A record… on thin volume

Recall that when we first flagged the record term print on Sep 10, TD noted the term price rose $2/lb w/w “despite thin volume,” and that as of Aug 31, term contracting volumes were down ~15% y/y at just over 38Mlbs. TD’s main hope at the time was that the World Nuclear Association Symposium in London (Sep 9-11), where utilities, fuel-cycle players and policymakers all gather, “could be a catalyst to spur increased trading volumes.”

It sort of was. Term volumes rose to 42.2Mlbs by Sep 15, which narrowed the y/y shortfall to ~3%. Still, per TD’s latest note, what companies heard from utilities is not exactly the stuff of a buying frenzy:

“Term pricing remains at all-time high, and based on our conversations with the companies under coverage, utilities are feeling a sticker shock on pricing and seem reluctant to contract in any meaningful way.”

TD, to its credit, is not fazed and argues that “it is not a question of if term contract volumes pick up, it is a question of when,” since utilities keep contracting below replacement rates. The chart below shows what that looks like: 2026 cumulative term volumes are tracking at the bottom of the past five years, well below 2023’s ~160Mlb blowout and behind both 2024 and 2025 at the same point in the calendar. Utilities can put off buying fuel for a while. They can’t put it off forever, because reactors don’t run on “we’ll revisit in Q1.”

The monthly breakdown shows the same thing: outside a decent May, 2026 has undershot the prior five-year average almost every month, and last year’s big November/December catch-up (~30Mlbs and ~26Mlbs) is a reminder of how lumpy, and how late in the year, utility procurement tends to be.

Spot, meanwhile, is a bit livelier. Cumulative 2026 spot volume reached 38.6Mlbs across 377 transactions as of Sep 15 (+12% y/y), though TD concedes this is “largely attributable to SPUT’s sizable purchases earlier this year.” The encouraging part is that September activity picked up, with weekly volumes topping 1Mlb and “participation broadening beyond SPUT,” helped by the usual post-summer seasonal pickup, near-term utility needs and “more aggressive pricing strategies from major producers.” Translation: Cameco and Kazatomprom are not in the mood to discount.

Note also where the spot/term spread sits: spot at a ~$6/lb discount to term, a far cry from the 2023-24 squeeze when spot traded at a $30+ premium. This is a market where end users are pricing long-dated scarcity but are not panicking about near-term delivery, which is the exact opposite of a blow-off top.

And for those wondering how “record” a record really is: $95 in 2007 is roughly $150 in today’s dollars. Or, as TD put it, “considering the significant inflationary pressures since 2007, there is considerable room for the term and spot price to run.” In other words, in real terms uranium is nowhere near its prior peak, as the long-term chart makes clear.

Meanwhile, in equity land…

While the fuel price grinds higher, the stocks go the other way, and fast. Comparing TD’s two performance tables, here’s what happened in the two weeks between Aug 31 and Sep 14, right around the WNA Symposium that was supposed to be a catalyst: 

On a longer lookback the picture is just as odd. NLR, the broad nuclear ETF, is down 12% YTD and ~35% below its 52-week high, while the AI ETF (AIQ) is up 25% YTD. So for all the talk about nuclear as the “AI power trade,” the market has clearly separated the two: investors still want AI, but they’re no longer paying up for the power plants that are supposed to run it.

TD’s indexed chart shows the round trip: URA surged roughly 80-90% above its 2024 starting point on the Oct 2025 Westinghouse/US government $80BN partnership and again into the spring of 2026, before a vicious drawdown into July. Spot uranium, meanwhile, barely moved through all of that, which is a good reminder of which part of this complex was driven by fundamentals and which part was driven by momentum.

The carnage has been even worse further out on the risk curve. NuScale and Oklo are each down roughly 50% YTD. Holtec pulled its ~$10BN IPO last week, with CEO Kris Singh blaming “a recent market correction and cooling investor enthusiasm for the AI trade,” after the recent class of nuclear debutantes (X-Energy ~37% below its April IPO price, Standard Nuclear 20%+ below its July debut) showed what happens to public investors who pay for the promise. And this week, Oklo lost its PJM interconnection queue fight after FERC said its application was deficient, which is not the first time a regulator has sent Oklo’s homework back for “missing information.”
 

Even the policy headlines, which used to be good for a double-digit pop, now fade within hours. The House passing the Ratepayer Protection Act on Sep 17, which would make data centers pay for their own generation and grid upgrades (effectively the “behind the meter” framework we have long argued should be mandatory), sent NuScale +10% and Oklo +13%… and then both gave back most of it the next day. And the South Korean “$100BN+ for up to eight US reactors” headline that TD flagged as a potential catalyst has, for now, turned into a $22.3BN gas plant in Texas (with no customers), with the nuclear portion reportedly on hold amid the tangle of the Westinghouse/KHNP IP settlement, Korea’s talks about a stake in Westinghouse, and tariff negotiations. You can’t make this up.

Goldman: “inbounds have been extremely light”

So what does the sell side hear from actual investors? Goldman’s Energy, Natural Resources & Utilities sector specialist (Sep 18) gave a blunt read:

“To level set – inbounds have been extremely light on the nuclear front over the last couple of weeks – though we think is likely just a reflection of the current tape (rates, inflation, broader AI concerns).”

What makes the Goldman take useful is the distinction it draws between the long run and the near run. On the long run, “there is less doubt in the longer-term role of nuclear in the power stack.” On the near run, though, “there’s more focus on time to power (recips, turbines, fuel cells, batteries) and the cost profile for most projects remains a sticking point for investors.” In other words, hyperscalers need megawatts in 2027, not gigawatts in 2037, and the market is pricing nuclear accordingly. GS also pointed to an NEI survey showing +7 GWe of new capacity planned via uprates, restarts, longer refueling cycles and other output increases since the prior survey, which is the unglamorous, cheap and fast way to add nuclear power, and which also happens to burn more uranium.

That brings us to the more important point for the fuel.

The supply side isn’t getting any easier

While equity investors worry about rates and AI capex, the physical side of the market keeps getting tighter at the margin:

• Kazakhstan’s acid problem: Kazatomprom (roughly the Saudi Arabia of uranium) delayed commissioning of its TQZ sulfuric acid plant by 6-12 months (from Q1/27 to Q3/27-Q1/28) after a regulatory suspension, raised capex guidance on acid and cost inflation, and warned that the delay will be reflected in 2027 production guidance. TD thinks “a downward revision of uranium output in 2027 is possible.”
• Then Russia made it worse: Moscow banned sulfuric acid exports through year-end. As we noted on Sep 15, Kazakhstan relies on Russian acid for ~20% of its needs, and without a waiver the ban could cut ~3Mlbs (~4%) from Kazatomprom’s 2027 output. Goldman’s sector specialist flagged the same risk: “Kazakhstan is a major taker of Russian sulfuric acid as an input for uranium production.”
• The Red Book reality check: The NEA/IAEA’s latest Red Book (Sep 14) showed only a 2.1% increase in economically recoverable resources and emphasized rising mining costs, depletion of low-cost deposits, and the higher cost profile of new discoveries. At the same time, the IAEA raised its long-term outlook to 696 GWe (low) to 1,284 GWe (high) of nuclear capacity by 2060, i.e. +85% to +241% vs 2025.

The chart above is what the long-run bull case looks like: even in the high-production scenario, existing and expected capacity peaks around 2030 and then declines, while requirements climb under both demand cases.

To be fair (and balanced), TD’s own model is less apocalyptic in the medium term than the bulls often are. It shows the market roughly balanced near term (-1Mlb in 2026 and 2027), then moving into a surplus from 2030-2033 as Western mine supply ramps (peaking at +27Mlbs in 2031), before the deficit comes back hard: -4Mlbs in 2034 and -42Mlbs in 2035, when total demand hits 322Mlbs vs 281Mlbs of supply. Put differently, the thesis rests on utilities having to lock in 2030s supply today, which is exactly the contracting they’re currently putting off because of “sticker shock.”

Throw in India opening its nuclear sector to private build-own-operate for the first time (draft SHANTI Act rules released Aug 14, a story we’ve been tracking since July), the DOE adding 13 more projects to its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad, and Washington’s push for faster enrichment buildout, and it becomes clear that policy hasn’t turned against nuclear. What has changed is how much equity investors are willing to pay for it.

The mood in London: positive, “albeit perhaps slightly less bullish”

TD hosted its 1-on-1 uranium conference in London alongside the WNA Symposium (which we will discuss in a subsequent post), which drew a record 1,300 attendees. The read: tone “positive, albeit perhaps slightly less bullish than last year,” no major announcements, and investors “continue to view progress on the deployment of new nuclear reactors in the U.S. as one of the key near term catalysts.” Which, given the Korean deal’s detour into Texas natural gas, may take a bit longer to show up.

Still, the picture on actual reactor builds outside the US hasn’t changed: 37 reactors are under construction in China alone. The US? Zero.

Meanwhile, in Japan, TEPCO just restarted Unit 6 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the largest power plant in the world: And that’s after the public mood against nuclear in the country of Fukushima is, as one can imagine, negative to quite negative. 

Bottom line

The fuel market and the equity market are telling two different stories, and history suggests the fuel market usually wins. The same UBS analysts who in late August warned that the market is “tightening structurally” were pointing to the same combination we see now: firm term prices, long mine lead times, and sustained utility need. The difference today is that equity investors have stopped paying ahead of the utilities. Once utilities get over their “sticker shock” and resume contracting, likely in the traditional Q4 rush if last year is a guide, the question is whether the stocks will still be trading as if nuclear were just another AI-capex casualty.

For those who want to front-run the catch-up, TD keeps Cameco as its top pick among uranium equities and Denison Mines as its top small/mid-cap name (DML is down ~15% in two weeks, so it’s cheaper than it was when TD last said so). And Goldman, in a note published just yesterday, reiterated its Buy on Uranium Energy (UEC) after FQ4 revenue came in ahead of expectations “reflecting solid uranium price environment,” citing sharply ramping production, falling unit costs, and medium-term catalysts from “US-origin needs (e.g. NNSA)” and a potential move into conversion.

Or, to put it differently: uranium hit a record high and nobody cared. Historically, that’s not how the bull market ends; it’s what the middle of one looks like.

* *  *

More in the full TD Cowen Uranium Monitor notes (Sep 1 link here and Sep 16 link here) available to pro subscribers.

Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of 10 gun bills into law that he says will enhance what he considers to be the state’s already exemplary record of firearms safety.

Newsom’s office announced the signing in a press release on Monday. According to the release, the laws are meant to reduce violent crime involving guns and reduce the number of illegal guns on the street, among other things.

They include a training requirement for the purchase of a gun, expanding criteria for the state’s extreme risk protection orders, voluntary firearms storage by law enforcement to prevent violent crime and suicide, and a requirement for firearms blocking technology on 3D printers in the state by July 1, 2029.

“California has been a leader in gun safety. Today’s laws continue that work – using data, prevention, and proven tools to help keep firearms out of dangerous situations and support communities affected by violence,” Newsom stated in the press release.

Senate Bill 948 will make a training requirement necessary for acquiring a state firearms safety certificate for the purchase of a gun. Existing law requires the certificate for the purchase, transfer, or importation of guns within the state within 60 days of the transaction.

The new law adds a requirement for a four-hour training course that must cover firearm handling and safety as well as a live-fire component. The law becomes effective Jan. 1, 2029.

The press release also touted the state’s Gun Violence Restraining Orders (GVRO), crediting them with preventing 58 mass shootings and reducing violent crime overall.

Assembly Bill 175 expands this by allowing courts to issue extreme risk protection orders even if the subject of the order has not been notified. It also prohibits courts from requiring petitioners to show that exceptional circumstances exist that make the order necessary.

Thousands of GVROs have been issued since the first laws were implemented in 2016, the press release states.

“Between 2021 and 2024, the number of longer-term GVROs issued each year in California more than doubled. In 2024 alone, California courts issued GVROs against 1,727 individuals found to pose a significant danger of firearm violence toward themselves or others,” the release states.

Newsom also signed a law meant to prevent suicides by providing temporary gun storage for those who are in crisis.

Assembly Bill 1974 allows law enforcement agencies to establish programs to take temporary possession of firearms from those who request such. The law requires the agency to provide clear instructions on voluntarily transferring custody of a firearm and instructions on requesting its return.

It also requires the agency to ensure the person is not prohibited from owning a firearm. The agency must also ensure the firearm has not been reported lost or stolen, used in a crime, or part of an active investigation. Guns that are not picked up by their owners will be destroyed.

The law also exempts the agencies and gun owners from certain requirements for concealed carry and transfer of firearms.

Assembly Bill 2047 is meant to hamper the production of homemade guns that do not have serial numbers or other identifying marks. The law sets a deadline of July 1, 2029, for any 3D printer sold in the state to have firearms blocking technology.

This technology would prevent the user from 3D printing so-called “ghost guns.” These guns are most often frames of synthetic materials produced on a 3D printer with metal parts purchased separately. The fact that the homemade guns have no serial numbers makes it difficult to trace them back to their source.

The press release states that the number of unserialized guns has been on the decline in recent years.

“Seventeen percent fewer ghost guns [were] recovered as crime guns in 2025, bringing the decline since 2021 to 37 percent,” the release reads.

Gun rights advocates decried the package of gun laws, saying they are about gun control more than gun safety.

Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), was especially critical of the training requirement, which he considers an obstacle to legal gun ownership.

“It comes after California has already passed an 11 percent excise tax on guns and ammo, and carry permits cost anywhere between $500 and $2,500 in the state, depending on the county. SAF is currently litigating against both of those abuses and will consider a lawsuit against SB 948 as its effective date in 2029 approaches,” Kraut stated in an email to The Epoch Times.

Mamdani wants New York’s billionaires to cough up more money. Maybe he should call Florida and ask how they’re getting them to hand it over voluntarily.

Because Miami just scored a $3 billion pledge from billionaire Ken Griffin, with $2 billion earmarked for a brand new Carnegie Mellon campus in the city, according to Forbes.

The massive commitment represents Griffin’s latest investment in Miami’s evolution into a major center for finance, technology and entrepreneurship. The Citadel founder is directing the bulk of the money toward establishing Carnegie Mellon in South Florida, adding a major research university to the city’s rapidly expanding business ecosystem.

Under the plan announced Wednesday, Carnegie Mellon will develop a 35-acre campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. Work on the project is slated to begin in 2027, with the first graduate students expected to arrive in 2028.

Another $1 billion will go toward Carnegie Mellon’s operations in Pittsburgh. That money will support financial aid and other university priorities, while a substantial portion will be directed to its renowned computer science program, which will take the new name Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.

The university says Griffin’s $3 billion pledge is the largest individual donation ever made to an American university. Griffin is also set to take a seat on Carnegie Mellon’s Board of Trustees.

Forbes writes that the deal marks another significant expansion of Griffin’s footprint in Florida. Citadel moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022, and Griffin has since poured roughly $2.4 billion into South Florida organizations and initiatives, including substantial support for education, according to Reuters.

For Miami, the university project could ultimately have an impact well beyond Citadel’s own presence in the city. Carnegie Mellon plans to concentrate its new campus on fields including national security, healthcare, energy, climate resilience, advanced manufacturing and industrial technology, giving Miami another potential anchor as it attempts to build a larger technology and research economy.

Griffin has framed the commitment as an investment in American innovation and future job creation, particularly in industries where the United States can strengthen its competitive position globally.

The sheer size of the pledge also resets the bar for university philanthropy. Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion contribution to Johns Hopkins in 2018 was among the previous benchmarks. With this latest commitment included, Reuters estimates Griffin’s lifetime charitable giving at approximately $5.7 billion.

For cities trying to figure out how to get billionaires to part with their money, Miami may be offering an interesting example: make them want to put their capital there, and the checks can get awfully large.

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Most indicators suggest that the Republicans in the House and Senate are going to face a brutal backlash from the American people in November. Polling with generic ballots suggest a big win for the Democrats and likely the loss of Republican control of both houses of Congress.

There is little reason to cheer a Democratic party victory, however Republicans in charge have for the most part earned what is coming to them. They have refused to uphold their Constitutional obligation to take leading responsibility for war powers.

Earlier this year, President Trump launched what is the most unpopular war in US history when on February 28th he ordered a full US assault on Iran. Iran had not attacked or even threatened the United States and our own intelligence community continued – and continues – to claim that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

The February attack followed last June’s US bombing of Iran after which the president claimed that the country’s nuclear program was “completely obliterated.”

Congress over too many years has been used to allowing the President to have his own way on matters of war and peace. Members bask in the false patriotism promoted by the media and special interests as the people “rally around the flag.” Eventually, when the war has gone on for years without “victory” – as in Iraq and Afghanistan – many claim they were never really for the war in the first place.

This time is different. There was no propaganda blitz. There were no attempts to convince the American people that the “smoking gun” could be a “mushroom cloud” as we were told in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. The majority of Americans were against the war on Iran before it started and only became more opposed over time.

As the war drags on, we have seen the national debt pass $40 trillion, diesel fuel prices at the highest ever, and inflation hitting the middle class and poor even harder. The “cakewalk” again failed to materialize.

Incumbent Republicans seeking re-election are in such a panic over voter anger about the war that they have taken to calling for a quick end to it while on the campaign trail. When they get back inside the Beltway, however, they vote to keep the war going for fear of President Trump’s anger.

This is not leadership.

Late last week the Iranian delegation in New York for the UN General Assembly meeting offered an off-ramp. Essentially it was the same Memorandum of Understanding that President Trump signed last June and promptly disregarded, but on a shorter timeline. By Sunday, the President announced that he would reject the deal – a deal like one he already signed.

There is no strategy for winning this disastrous war, it is clear. From over-confidence on decapitation strikes to certainty of a quick military victory, the Administration is now promising that they will win by crippling Iran’s economy. The problem is that Iran has been operating under “crippling” sanctions for decades and has a high economic pain tolerance.

Unfortunately, both parties in DC are war parties, so again it is hard to cheer the likely Republican losses. But sometimes electoral losses can serve as wake-up calls. Eventually we may see the re-emergence of antiwar Republicans in the spirit of the late Sen. Robert Taft and a restoration of the Constitution.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Brent Sadler & Chase Ouellette via RealClearDefense,

In 1798, while at war with France, an exasperated British Lord Nelson exclaimed, “Were I to die at this moment, ‘want of frigates!’ would be stamped on my heart.” It’s a perennial problem: Frigates formed the backbone of navies in Nelson’s time and do so today as well, and there seldom seems to be enough. The U.S. Navy’s ambitious Golden Fleet shipbuilding plan aims to fill a frigate gap but will require shipyard capacity that today the nation lacks.

The Navy’s 2026 shipbuilding plan plans a fleet of 66 frigates. By 2031, two Constellation-class frigates are to be completed at the Marinette, Wisc. shipyard and a modified U.S. Coast Guard National Security Cutter at the Ingalls, Miss. shipyard. But to meet the Navy’s goal, a sustained delivery of more than three frigates per year will be needed by 2037. Such a production schedule is unlikely with one shipyard, and the plan all along was to have two frigate-producing shipyards.

In December 2020, just months after the initial frigate contract, the Navy reported to Congress its intention to stand up a second shipyard to expand production to three ships by 2023 and four ships from 2025. In its 2025 shipbuilding plan, the Navy laid out a proposal to expand frigate production to a second shipyard by 2030.

The Constellation frigate program and a repurposed National Security Cutter will fill the need for a multi-session surface combatant – anti-submarines warfare and limited air defense. Nearly seven years after the program’s inception, zero frigates have been built.

Complicating frigate production has been persistent design uncertainty; one adjustments to original FREMM design for Constellation, and uncertainty over how the Navy will turn the National Security Cutter into a frigate. For Constellation, the intent was to build a proven allied design with little to no changes, but modifications resulted in the ship retaining only 15% of its original design. Today the design is over 95% complete, but cost and displacement have ballooned to approximate a destroyer.

The axe fell in November 2025. Then-Secretary of the Navy Phelan cancelled Constellation because it was 80% the cost of a destroyer while providing only 60% of their capability. The thinking then was to substitute this with a repurposed cutter.

The previous delivery of 10 National Security Cutters seemed to validate a pivot towards HII‘s Ingalls shipyard. That said, modifications will be needed before its design is Navy-ready: modest air-defense systems, torpedo magazines, added fuel storage, additional crew accommodation. But it has been years since the last National Security Cutter was built. As such, additional workforce at Ingalls will be needed and supply chains restarted, slowing renewed production of a reproposed cutter.

On the other hand, the Constellation program does benefit from Fincantieri investments of $800 million and workforce expansion of 850 that since cancellation has begun to be let go. Reversing this is still possible with a finalized design that could allow for initial delivery quicker than the Ingalls repurposed cutter. But both options today face capacity constraints.

In an August 13 memo, President Trump announced a framework to increase domestic shipbuilding capacity using the “Finland Model” that seeds domestic shipbuilding growth through initial overseas orders. This works by making conditional ship orders that see the initial hulls built at foreign shipyards while concurrently developing American shipyards to construct later ships. This model is inspired by from the 2024 ICE Pact icebreaker construction effort with Canada’s Davie Shipbuilding with shipyards in Finland and Texas.

Adapting the Finland Model to frigate production offers way ahead that could leverage shipbuilding capacity in Japan and South Korea – the world’s second- and third largest shipbuilders, respectively. Both nations build capable frigates that have emerged as potential options for meeting urgent American frigate needs: South Korea’s Chungnam-class and Japan’s Mogami-class. Already, Australia has inked their own Finland Model 11-ship deal with Japan, with the first three Mogami-class vessels being constructed in Japan and follow-on production in Australia.

Thoughts of partnering with Turkey on frigate production, however, would be hindered because it hasn’t made industrial investment commitments like Japan and South Korea have. Japan has committed a portion of the $550 billion of U.S. investments to modernizing America’s shipbuilding industry. South Korea’s Hanwha Group has followed its $100 million purchase of its Philadelphia shipyard in 2024 with a $5 billion infrastructure plan to further develop the facility, and Seoul has committed $150 billion to the Make American Shipbuilding Great Again.

While the Navy may opt to acquire foreign frigates under the Finland Model, further leveraging existing American shipbuilding capacity at Ingalls and Marinette shouldn’t be overlooked to further accelerate domestic frigate construction. The Navy needs frigates, and unconventional approaches required to be clear, but only a plan that seeks added domestic shipbuilding capacity will be sustainable.

Brent Sadler is a 26-year naval veteran and current senior research fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation. Chase Ouellette is a member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.

After a year in which Google’s AI roadmap resembled a Waymo stuck in a roundabout, the search giant on Wednesday finally unveiled Gemini 4 “Argon”, its long-awaited flagship model. The market cheered, briefly: according to Goldman’s closing equities color, GOOG traded +2% after hours on the “Argon” announcement. 

Then Bloomberg reported that some of the people who have actually use the thing – as in Google’s own engineers – aren’t nearly as impressed as the leaderboard. The stock promptly faded. 

According to Bloomberg’s Julia Love and Davey Alba, Gemini 4 “performed well on benchmarks widely used to gauge model efficacy” but “does less well when employees actually put it to work,” particularly on coding. One insider said the model “isn’t particularly adept at front-end design” – the part of software that decides how apps and websites look and feel. Which is a bit awkward for a company whose entire business is, well, things you look at on a screen.

Google, naturally, disagrees. It told Bloomberg it would be “inaccurate” to say Gemini 4 is underperforming in coding, and pointed back to last week’s remarks by DeepMind boss Koray Kavukcuoglu, who said “it’s a certainty that we are always gonna be at the frontier.” Another Google employee said there is “large consensus” internally that the model is frontier-class. Which is the kind of thing one tends to say when there isn’t.

The industry has a word for this. “Benchmaxxing” is when engineers optimize a model to crush standardized tests rather than to do useful work – the AI equivalent of the kid who memorizes every SAT prep book, posts his 1600 on LinkedIn, and then can’t do his own laundry. Two people familiar with Gemini 4 told Bloomberg the model appears affected by exactly this.

Surge AI founder Edwin Chen put it more bluntly, calling benchmark-chasing “an incredibly pernicious problem” and comparing it to bragging about your kid’s SAT score. We’d add that a generation of Silicon Valley’s finest minds has now spent billions teaching machines to do what they themselves did in high school: optimize for the test, then act surprised when the real world grades on a curve.

The irony is that Google’s own researchers have documented how quickly optimization turns into gaming. As we reported on September 3, a DeepMind experiment found that when math problems got hard, 9% of AI agents outright cheated and another 5% cheated “after hesitation”, gaming a shared knowledge base that rewarded successful submissions. Turns out teaching to the test works on silicon too.

A $400 million detour

Gemini 4 is also the model Google shipped instead of the one it promised. At I/O in May, Google pledged Gemini 3.5 Pro for June; the date slipped (Bloomberg first reported the delay on July 16, citing tech that “fell short of internal goals”) and the project was eventually abandoned altogether. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh estimates a frontier training run can cost as much as $400 million – before paying the researchers, many of whom have since left.

And leave they did. We noted in June that Google was losing more Gemini researchers to Anthropic, following the earlier departures of Nobel laureate John Jumper and transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer. Then in August came the big one: Jeff Dean exited after 27 years to launch his own startup, taking several senior researchers with him and knocking 5% off Alphabet stock. Demis Hassabis subsequently kicked himself upstairs to chairman, handing day-to-day DeepMind operations to Kavukcuoglu – who now gets to defend Argon’s front-end skills to Bloomberg.

Why this matters: the ROIC math doesn’t grade on benchmarks

This would be a nerd-bro squabble over leaderboard screenshots if it weren’t for the money involved. Gemini underpins nearly everything Google sells – Search, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, each with over a billion users – and Alphabet is one of the hyperscalers footing the largest capex bill in corporate history.

Per Goldman’s Ryan Hammond (full note available to pro subs), US hyperscalers are on track to spend roughly $800 billion in 2026; consensus expects $1.1 trillion in 2027, while Goldman’s house view is even higher at $1.2 trillion and $1.4 trillion for 2027 and 2028. Hammond estimates hyperscalers need about $300 billion of annual AI revenue just to break even on 2026-27 spending, and that end users may ultimately need to spend around $1 trillion a year on AI applications for everyone in the stack to earn decent returns.

Separately, Goldman’s Eric Sheridan, whose ROIC framework we flagged last week, calculated that assuming a 15% ROIC target and ~$42 billion of capex per gigawatt, the six big US hyperscalers need to generate roughly $1.42 trillion in cumulative revenue during 2028-30 – about $11.6 billion per GW per year – with a range of $908 billion to $1.89 trillion depending on assumptions. As we tweeted at the time, even in Goldman’s worst-case scenario where ROIC on capex goes to zero, they’d still need $920 billion a year just to cover depreciation and running costs.

Here’s the rub: none of that revenue gets paid in MMLU points. It gets paid by developers and enterprises choosing whose model to build on. And Bloomberg notes Gemini 4 is “a very large model” – and big models are expensive to serve, which means pressure on margins at exactly the moment the capex hurdle is rising. Goldman’s TMT desk flagged this week that the industry is already in a price war: OpenAI cut Luna pricing by 80% in July and usage rose roughly tenfold, while “Big Short’s” Steve Eisman is openly asking what happens to margins if cheaper Chinese and open-weight models push prices down further. Bringing an expensive, benchmark-optimized heavyweight to a knife fight over token pricing is a bold strategy.

Meanwhile, the competition isn’t waiting

The timing couldn’t be worse. On the same day Google unveiled Argon, OpenAI was busy at its Developer Day rolling out “Dots” – persistent, always-on agents that live inside ChatGPT, Slack and Teams. Goldman’s Sean Johnstone noted OpenAI is “increasingly competing with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and traditional enterprise software – not simply other AI models.” Per Axios, cited by Goldman’s desk, OpenAI’s ARR is nearing $70 billion, up from ~$40-41 billion as recently as mid-August, with enterprise sales more than doubling since July. OpenAI is now reportedly seeking $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation.

And earlier this month Meta released its new agentic platform, Muse, which promptly took the app charts by storm – so thoroughly that Amazon blocked it – and sparked a 25%+ rally in META. Goldman’s Sheridan now frames agentic commerce as one of AI’s biggest monetization opportunities, noting that “similar to how Google captured search intent, successful AI platforms may capture shopping intent.” Read that sentence again if you’re long GOOGL.

To be fair, Gemini 4 has real strengths: insiders say it stands out at multimodal work like extracting metadata from video, on safety and cybersecurity (it reportedly beat OpenAI’s Astra on a security benchmark), and it can spit out up to 1 million tokens – roughly 750,000 words – in one go. Whether anyone needs a 750,000-word answer is a separate question; we suspect the answer is “only for benchmarks.”

Bottom line: Google has the distribution, the TPUs and the balance sheet. What it doesn’t have is much time. Every quarter it spends explaining leaderboard scores, is a quarter that OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta spend convincing developers, businesses and consumers that the future of search and software runs on their platforms. Because the $1.4 trillion question isn’t who tops the leaderboard – it’s who gets paid.

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

A Staten Island judge ruled Sept. 29 that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration mishandled the rollout of a pied-à-terre tax on second homes in July, ordering the city to scrap the notices and start over.

Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi sided with homeowners who claimed the program that in July added a special tax on second homes worth more than $5 million penalized them needlessly.

Ozzi found “the mailed notices are arbitrary and capricious, affected by errors of law, and in violation of the recipients’ due process rights.“

“Respondents failed to properly make individualized ‘initial determinations’ with regard to ‘primary residences,'” Ozzi wrote in the ruling. “All previously Mailed Notices are to be canceled.”

The homeowners sued on Aug. 7 and were granted a temporary restraining order by Ozzi on Aug. 10.

The lawsuit claimed the city’s notices “do not constitute proper notice under Tax Law” and sought relief for over 900,000 properties and owners who were identified in a list published online by the city.

Ozzi ordered the city to remove the list from the website and replace it with properties that are subject to the surcharge.

He also ordered the city to cancel all previously mailed notices and mail new notices only to a property that has been individually assessed to be a non-primary residence and subject to a surcharge.

The city was also directed to use the most recent available tax information and current fiscal year information for the tax assessments.

The new notices were required to include information about how property owners can challenge the city’s final determinations and include procedures and property records or documents to support the city’s findings, along with other information.

Mamdani’s office didn’t return a request for comment.

Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella said he strongly agreed with the ruling.

“We have said from the beginning that it was fundamentally wrong to put more than a million people on this ‘enemies list,'” Fossella said in a statement. “And, the vast majority of those who were on the list did not belong at all.

Fossella said he thought the city should apologize for needlessly putting hundreds of thousands of people in distress.

“In being irresponsible and arbitrary, the City artificially created an atmosphere of confusion and fear about receiving this tax, and their information being wrongfully exposed, for no good reason,” Fossella said.

The tax on second homes was first announced by Mamdani on social media in May. Mamdani said the tax would be for the “ultra-wealthy elite – those who own $5 million apartments in New York City but don’t actually live here.“

The tax became effective July 1 as part of the city’s fiscal year 2027 budget. The measure was expected to generate about $500 million for the city each year.

Democratic candidates in several of this fall’s most competitive House and Senate races are keeping Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and former Vice President Kamala Harris off their campaign trails – even though both women rank among the party’s leading prospects for the 2028 presidential nomination.

The Democratic bench for 2028 includes Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Ocasio-Cortez, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Two of those six are women of color, from the demographic the party has spent a decade calling its moral center and its electoral future. Both now sit on the do-not-call list in the districts that will decide control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

According to an Axios report, Democrats in several key battlegrounds are keeping Ocasio-Cortez at arm’s length. Party officials say candidates in other close races have told her team outright to stay away. That is an electability problem for a politician whose whole pitch to primary voters is that bold progressivism, including Medicare for All, wins more votes than cautious centrism does.

Candidates in tight races reject that theory today even though they embraced it only months ago in their primaries. Sam Forstag, a progressive House candidate in Montana, rallied with Ocasio-Cortez in May on his way to the Democratic nomination. He has since scrubbed her endorsement from his campaign website.

“The polling is atrocious for her,” a senior Democratic strategist working in a key swing district told Axios. “She’s a lightning rod.”

Her own team offered no evidence to the contrary. When Axios asked whether she had campaigned in person for any of the party’s top House or Senate candidates this cycle, her office could not point to a single one.

Her travel log shows where she is welcome, and it’s clearly not in races that matter. Ocasio-Cortez made stops in Buffalo and Ithaca this week but skipped New York’s competitive 17th District in the lower Hudson Valley. She also stumped for Florida Senate nominee Angie Nixon, a fellow member of the Democratic Socialists of America, in a state that has drifted so far red that no serious Democrat expects Nixon to flip the seat. Buttigieg, Kelly and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, by contrast, have all drawn invitations from Democrats in competitive districts and states over the past month.

Kamala Harris is also getting snubbed despite polling the best of any 2028 contender. Last month, The Hill reported that Democrats in the most competitive midterm contests were shutting her out in public. Iowa supplied the most brutal data point. At the Iowa State Fair in August, a reporter asked gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand whether he wanted Harris to campaign for him.

“No thanks,” Sand said. “Let’s move on. We need some new leadership.”

Josh Turek, the party’s Senate nominee in Iowa, got the same question and answered with a smiling “No.” In Alaska, Senate candidate Mary Peltola distanced herself from Harris after Harris’s political operation sent out a fundraising appeal on Peltola’s behalf without telling her first.

This pattern runs counter to every assumption baked into those primary polls. Harris is a former vice president, the first woman to hold the office, the party’s 2024 nominee and one of its most recognizable faces.

For a party that spent a decade insisting diversity was its destiny, this dynamic carries a certain irony. Democrats built their brand on elevating women of color, and the two women of color on their 2028 bench are getting the cold shoulder.

Authored by Arthur Zhang via The Epoch Times,

Beijing is “weaponizing” its dominance of rare earths, and Chinese authorities have escalated restrictions on efforts to diversify supply chains away from China, U.S. Ambassador David Perdue said on Sept. 29.

“This is a single-source dominant position that China is weaponizing against the world right now,” Perdue said in a post on X.

“We have told them this is unacceptable,” he said. “We are not going to live in a world where we have to go to China and kowtow to do business the way we want.”

In another post the same day, Perdue described the changes as an escalation from controls on exports from China to restrictions with consequences for people and businesses seeking alternatives.

“Back in April of last year, China put the export regime process in place for rare-earth elements and magnets,” he said. “Then, on Oct. 9, they weaponized that by expanding that to the entire world.“

“Now, they’ve weaponized it even further by escalating to the point where they make any diversification effort away from China a criminal offense, where they can arrest people, prosecute criminally, seize assets, exit ban, and so forth.”

Beijing has expanded its enforcement of strategic-mineral controls in recent months.

In June, China’s Commerce Ministry established a system encouraging organizations and individuals to report suspected violations involving strategic minerals. The conduct subject to reporting includes routing controlled materials through third countries and illegally transferring controlled technology overseas through investment, research and development, consulting or other means.

People who make verified reports may receive rewards, according to the ministry. Companies that discover that they have violated, or may have violated, the rules are instructed to report themselves, with voluntary disclosure considered as a possible basis for a lighter penalty. The system took effect July 1.

Rare-earth technology is also subject to controls covering more than shipments of minerals.

Rules Beijing announced last October covered technology used in rare-earth mining, refining, metal production, magnet manufacturing and recycling. They defined exports to include transferring or providing controlled technology to foreign organizations or individuals through investment, joint research, employment, hiring, and consulting.

The rules also barred Chinese citizens and organizations, without government permission, from providing substantial assistance to overseas rare-earth mining, refining and magnet-making operations.

China suspended implementation of those controls in November 2025 following U.S. – China trade talks, with the suspension formally scheduled to run through Nov. 10, 2026. The two countries agreed this month to extend their broader trade truce by two months, through Jan. 10, 2027, but Beijing has not announced a corresponding extension of these specific controls.

China added another enforcement tool this month.

Regulations that took effect Sept. 15 allow Chinese authorities to stop Chinese citizens from leaving the country for violations of export-control or technology import-export rules that authorities determine may endanger China’s industrial or technological security.

The restrictions have also reached two companies at the center of U.S. efforts to build rare-earth supplies outside China.

On June 22, China’s Commerce Ministry placed MP Materials and USA Rare Earth on an export-control list along with eight other U.S. companies. MP Materials operates the Mountain Pass rare-earth mine in California, while USA Rare Earth is developing a U.S. mine-to-magnet supply chain.

The Chinese order prohibits exporters from supplying the listed companies with dual use items and prohibits organizations and individuals in other countries from transferring Chinese-origin dual use items to them. Special exceptions require an application to the Commerce Ministry.

Beijing said the action was taken in response to the U.S. government adding Chinese companies to its list of “Chinese military companies.”