Corrections Vs Bears: How The Fed Rewired The Market

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

After three decades of watching market cycles play out from both sides of the trade, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: Wall Street’s love of simple rules is one of the most dangerous aspects of investing. When stocks fall 10%, it’s just a “correction.” However, if they decline 20%, it’s a “bear market.” Simple, clean, repeatable, and printed on every financial media graphic from here to Tokyo. The problem is that the definitions of a correction and bear market have not been updated since Alan Shaw developed them at Smith Barney in the 1960s. Moreover, the market those definitions were designed to describe no longer exists.

Currently, the S&P 500 index is roughly 83% above its long-term trend line, with the Shiller CAPE (cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio) hovering near 40. That valuation level was only exceeded once in the history of American financial markets. The Fed’s balance sheet, still at $6.7 trillion, is more than eight times its pre-2008 level. Under these conditions, the old bear-market definition no longer measures what it was built to measure. A 20% decline from here doesn’t signal either a regime or price trend change. In other words, it would be only a “correction” within an ongoing bullish trend. That understanding is key to today’s discussion.

The Current Bear Market Definition Is Arbitrary

As noted, the “20% rule” traces to Alan Shaw, a technical analyst at Smith Barney in the mid-20th century. His framework was simple. Anything up to 10% was noise. A decline of 10% to 20% was a correction. Anything beyond 20% was a bear market. Shaw’s colleague Louise Yamada, who took over Smith Barney’s technical analysis practice in 2000, later described its staying power with characteristic directness: “It’s just so easy and simple to remember.”

Shaw’s framework made sense in its time. Markets in those decades lived much closer to a gravitational center of fair value. When prices fell by 20%, they often broke the market’s longer-term trend. A decline of that magnitude carried real information. It told you that selling pressure had overwhelmed buying, the market’s price trend had reversed, and the market’s direction of travel had changed from up to down. That’s precisely what the bear market definition was supposed to capture. A change in regime, not just a number.

The question is: after a 17-year-long bull market that stretched prices well beyond long-term trends, is Mr. Shaw’s measure still valid?

To answer that question, let’s clarify the premise.

• A bull market is when the market price is trending higher over a long-term period.
• A bear market is when the previous advance breaks, and prices begin to trend lower.

The chart below provides a visual of the distinction. When you look at price “trends,” the difference becomes both apparent and useful.

The distinction is essential.

• “Corrections” generally occur over short time frames, do not break the prevailing trend in prices, and are quickly resolved by markets reversing to new highs.
• “Bear Markets” tend to be longer-term affairs in which prices grind sideways or lower over several months as valuations revert.

What a Real Bear Market Actually Looks Like

The two genuine bear markets of this century make the definition’s original intent clear. Between March 2000 and October 2002, the S&P 500 lost nearly 49% of its value. It didn’t recover to its prior peak until 2007. Seven years lost. The bullish trend didn’t pause; it broke, and investors who sat through it got years of negative real returns with no policy rescue from Washington or the Fed.

The 2008 crisis was worse. From October 2007 to March 2009, the S&P fell about 57%. It didn’t return to its prior highs until early 2013. The price structure didn’t just dip below an arbitrary threshold. It collapsed, stayed down for years, and required one of the most aggressive monetary policy responses in the Fed’s history to eventually stabilize. That’s a bear market in the original sense of the word. A sustained, structural reversal of the prior bullish trend.

Now compare that to 2022. The S&P peaked on January 3 of that year, fell 25.4% to its October trough, and technically satisfied every condition of a bear market under the standard definition. By July 2023, every point of that decline had been recovered. By early 2024, the index was making new all-time highs. The 2022 decline was painful, but it did not reverse the underlying trend. Yes, prices fell, but found support well above any reasonable measure of long-term fair value, and resumed their climb. Putting the 2022 episode in the same category as 2000 or 2008 doesn’t just mislead investors; it tells the story exactly backward.

How the Fed Rewired the Market

To understand why the bear market definition needs to be revised, you have to reckon honestly with what the Federal Reserve has done to the market’s structural foundation. Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed’s balance sheet sat at roughly $800 billion. Modest. Stable. Largely inconsequential to equity prices on any given day.

Then came the crisis. The Fed launched three rounds of quantitative easing between 2009 and 2014, pushing its balance sheet to roughly $4.5 trillion. It tried to normalize beginning in 2018, then COVID hit. In two years, the balance sheet more than doubled again, from $4.3 trillion to nearly $9 trillion. As of April, 2026, it still sits at $6.7 trillion, even after years of several years of quantitative tightening.

That liquidity didn’t evaporate. It repriced every financial asset upward. It suppressed yields, starved investors of income alternatives, and effectively forced capital into equities regardless of underlying valuation. The market didn’t reach these levels because corporate America suddenly became dramatically more profitable. It reached them because the price of money was artificially held low for over a decade, which changed the math in every valuation model investors use. The result is a market structure with no historical precedent for its distance from the long-term trend.

What the P/Es Actually Tell You

The more bearish crowd consistently points to the Shiller CAPE ratio as a measure of impending doom. However, investors should understand that the CAPE ratio measures the market’s current price relative to 10 years of inflation-adjusted earnings. At 40, investors are currently paying 40 times that earnings figure for every dollar of S&P 500 exposure. That’s a lot by any historical measure, considering the historical median is 16x. The bear’s argument, and rightly so, is that the market has traded above 40 on the CAPE ratio only once before in its history, and that was at the dot-com peak. We know how that ended.

But this is important, as we have discussed many times, the problem is that valuation measures are just that – a measure of current valuation. More importantly, when valuations are excessive, it is a better measure of “investor psychology” and the manifestation of the “greater fool theory.”

Notably, valuation models are not, and were never meant to be, “market timing indicators.” There are many articles penned suggesting that if a measure of valuation (P/E, P/S, P/B, etc.) reaches some specific level, it means that:

1. The market is about to crash, and
2. Investors should be in 100% cash.

Such is incorrect.

What valuations provide is a reasonable estimate of long-term investment returns. It is logical that if you overpay for a stream of future cash flows today, your future return will be low. We can see this evidence by comparing the 10-year total return of a $1000 investment in the stock market to Shiller’s CAPE ratio, as noted above.

However, here’s where it gets interesting. Even if you don’t use the long-term median as your target, the math of mean reversion is sobering at any reasonable level. At the time of this writing, we can map each scenario from the S&P close of 7,399 (May 10, 2026), and the picture becomes clear.

Notice what that table shows. A 20% decline from current levels leaves the market at roughly 32x cyclically adjusted earnings. That’s twice the historical median. The market doesn’t even begin to approach a valuation floor that has historically supported the start of a new secular bull market until you’re down 50% to 60% from here.

That’s not a prediction; that’s arithmetic, and the difference between a correction and a bear market in today’s financial markets.

The recovery math compounds the problem. A 30% loss requires a 43% gain just to break even, before accounting for the time lost while recovering. A 50% loss demands a full 100% return to get back to where you started. For investors in or near retirement, that’s not a temporary setback. That’s a structural threat to financial security.

“A 20% decline from a market that’s 83% above trend doesn’t reach trend. It barely dents the excess. The old bear market definition was built for a different world, and that world no longer exists.”

Two Halves To A Full Cycle

I wrote about this in August 2020, right after the COVID crash had recovered, and everyone was declaring it the shortest bear market in history. My argument then was the same one I’m making now: March 2020 was a correction, not a bear market, because it never broke the long-term bullish price trend that started in 2009. The same is true of 2022. And of the Iran-related correction we saw in early 2026. Those were all pressure releases within an ongoing bull market. None of them completed the cycle.

Because that’s the part Wall Street glosses over. Every bull market is only half of a full market cycle. The second half, the bear, is when the excesses accumulated during the upswing, the overvaluation, the leverage, the speculative positioning, get wrung out through a sustained decline that resets prices back toward fundamental value. That process has played out after every major bull market in the historical record. From the 1929 collapse to the 1970s grind, the dot-com bust, and the financial crisis. None of them was optional; they were just the structural corrections of prior excesses.

The bull market that started at S&P 683 in March 2009 is now 17 years old. It’s the longest on record and has been sustained by:

• Three rounds of QE,
• A zero-interest rate policy for most of a decade,
• $5 trillion in pandemic stimulus, and
• A generational AI investment cycle that’s still in its early innings.

All of that is real. But none of it changes the underlying valuation math, and eventually, prices will reflect fundamentals. They always do. The problem for investors, however, isn’t whether a real bear market will happen; it’s when, and more practically, whether your portfolio is built to survive the transition.

As noted, the 2020 and 2022 declines share one critical feature: both recovered before prices touched the long-term trend line shown above. They were corrections in an ongoing bullish trend, and both required a significant Fed or fiscal response to stabilize. A genuine bear market, one that resets valuations toward historical norms, would require neither a quick recovery nor a policy rescue. It would require a decline large enough to reach that trend line.

The bottom line is that the 20% threshold isn’t wrong. It’s just not calibrated for a market that’s trading 83% above its long-term trend. In a world where markets lived near fair value, a 20% decline carried information about the trend. Today, it carries sentiment information. That’s a meaningful difference, and it changes how you should think about both potential corrections and portfolio risk.

Stop anchoring your risk budget to the 20% number.

The relevant question isn’t “how far has this fallen?” It’s “how far is this from where prices would need to be for the bull market trend to genuinely reverse?”

Right now, that gap is enormous. A real bear market, in the structural sense, would likely need to be a 30% to 50% decline, and possibly deeper, before prices would reach the kind of valuation support that has historically ended bear markets and started new secular bulls.

That doesn’t mean panic. It means position sizing, risk management, and stop-loss disciplines need to account for a potential drawdown far larger than the 20% threshold Wall Street treats as the danger zone.

We continue to suggest that investors maintain appropriate hedges, keep risk allocations proportional to their time horizon and income needs, and resist the “buy the dip” impulse when the dip doesn’t actually bring you closer to value.

Make no mistake, the trend is still up. The AI investment cycle is real, earnings are growing, and the tape remains technically constructive at current levels. But the distance between current prices and genuine long-term fair value is wider today than at any point outside the dot-com peak. That’s not a reason to be out of the market. It is a reason to know exactly what you own, why you own it, and what your exit plan looks like if the second half of this cycle finally arrives.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 15:15

Pope Sounds Alarm On AI "Slavery" While Church Aligns With Lefty Anthropic

Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on Monday, entitled Magnifica Humanitas (The Magnificence of the Human Person).

The roughly 42,300-word declaration, issued as a papal encyclical, warned, "The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation."

"If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity," the pontiff explained in the encyclical, while urging governments to regulate the private companies driving AI advances and warning that the pursuit of profit cannot justify mass job losses.

The pontiff called for retraining and protections for working-class folks threatened by AI-related job loss, stronger education to help students understand AI risks, and safeguards against violent, sexualized, or fake AI-generated content targeting children.

His strongest warning came on the military use of AI. Leo said AI risks making life-and-death decisions faster, more impersonal, and easier to justify, especially as cyberattacks, influence campaigns, AI kill chains, and hybrid warfare blur the line between defense and aggression.

At the event earlier today, where the pontiff unveiled the encyclical, attendees included prominent cardinals and theologians, as well as Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the left-leaning AI startup Anthropic, who leads its interpretability team.

The pope said the church and Anthropic will cooperate to "find a path for humanity in the age of artificial intelligence" ... 

Pope Leo XIV, during the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas — the first papal encyclical in history dedicated to artificial intelligence — stated that the Church and Anthropic will cooperate to “find a path for humanity in the age of artificial intelligence.

The discussion… pic.twitter.com/28zA5xeHsE

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) May 25, 2026

To note, encyclicals are among the highest forms of teaching from a pope to the Catholic Church's 1.4 billion members worldwide.

The full text can be viewed here.

Odd that the pope bashes AI but aligns with lefty Anthropic ... 

How much Anthropic does the Vatican Bank own? 

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 14:40

Everyone Talks About The Cost Of Gasoline... Soon Everyone Will Be Talking About The Cost Of Food

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse Blog. 

For most people, the price of gasoline is the most obvious consequence of the war in the Middle East. As I write this article, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is $4.56. Of course, in some parts of the country, consumers are paying much more than that. This is a big story, and the truth is that gasoline prices are going to go even higher in the months ahead.

But if you think that the price of gasoline is bad, just wait until you see what eventually happens to food prices. The price of diesel has been rising even faster than the price of regular gasoline, and fertilizer prices have been absolutely skyrocketing. Those costs will get passed along to the rest of us. It is just a matter of time. Meanwhile, our farmers are dealing with drought conditions that are unprecedented, and now a “Super El Niño” is coming.

What all of this means is that food prices will rise to very painful levels.

So even though everyone is complaining about rising gasoline prices at the moment, one prominent economist is warning that “the next story is food”…

The cost of food in the U.S. appears poised to rise sharply alongside oil prices, as war-related supply disruptions put pressure on the companies and farmers who keep the country’s shelves stocked.

“The big story right now is oil,” economist Justin Wolfers told MS NOW on Tuesday. “The next story is food.”

Oil prices have risen over 50 percent since the conflict began on February 28, pushing gas prices to a nationwide average of over $4.50 for the first time since 2022.

Can you imagine what would happen if food prices were to rise another 50 percent from current levels?

Over the past year, many of the most common items that Americans purchase at the grocery store have already become much more expensive…

When compared to the same time last year, fruits and vegetables have seen some of the biggest price hikes. Tomatoes are 40% more expensive now than they were this time last year. Bad growing weather, tariffs, and rising fuel prices have all contributed to the huge change in tomato prices, reports the New York Times.

Coffee, another imported product, is 19% more expensive than it was last spring.

You’re also likely seeing inflated prices at the butcher counter. Meat is up 9% overall, but beef has grown even more expensive. Ground beef is about 15% pricier, beef roasts are 18% more, and steak is up 16%.

We can blame the war with Iran for the recent price hikes that we have been experiencing, because the war has made diesel much more expensive.

And diesel is used to transport most of what we eat…

What’s contributing to the price spikes? Fuel prices have soared while the Iran war prevents cargo ships from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital corridor for global oil supplies. Diesel fuel powers fishing boats, tractors and the trucks that ship 83% of U.S. agricultural products.

Just as you’re paying more at the pump, so are truckers who transport goods all around the country. Some vendors and suppliers are adding fuel surcharges to make up for the increased cost of transporting and delivering their goods.

In addition, fertilizer prices have gone absolutely haywire, and those costs will be passed along to us once harvest season arrives.

The solution to this crisis would be for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen.

But Iran isn’t willing to do that.

Instead, Iran intends to make the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz permanent…

Iran and Oman are actively discussing a permanent security mechanism for the Strait of Hormuz. Iran is pushing to institutionalize and normalize a transit fee or toll on commercial shipping vessels navigating the narrow waterway. According to an Iranian diplomatic envoy, the proposed system is designed to secure the long-term positioning of Iran and Oman as the primary regulators of the strait, effectively transforming a temporary leverage point from the recent military conflict into a permanent sovereign right.

To formalize its grip, Iran’s newly established Persian Gulf Straits Authority began applying conditional rules and hefty transit tolls, in some cases exceeding one million dollars per vessel, while granting selective exemptions to friendly nations like Russia or China. By engaging Oman, which shares territorial jurisdiction over the Strait, Iran is seeking to build a coalition that validates these tolls under the guise of funding localized maritime security.

The US maintains an opposing view on the matter, viewing the permanent toll as a non-negotiable barrier to reaching a sustainable peace deal. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, international straits are governed by transit passage protocols that guarantee the uninterrupted flow of global commercial shipping, a principle the US insists must be restored without conditions.

This is one of the reasons why there is not going to be an agreement to end the war.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio just warned that what Iran is attempting to do with the Strait of Hormuz “will make a diplomatic deal impossible”…

“A toll collection system in the Strait of Hormuz will make a diplomatic deal impossible.”

“We are very disappointed with NATO allies, we will discuss the issue of troop deployment at the upcoming meeting.”

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, a global inflation crisis is guaranteed.

And on top of everything else, now a “Super El Niño” is rapidly approaching.

We are being warned that it could potentially be the most powerful “Super El Niño” in recorded history…

Scientists have warned that an imminent ‘super El Niño’ could be even more powerful than a previous event which caused over 50 million deaths.

The 1877 El Niño was one of the most severe climate events in recorded history, triggering a global humanitarian disaster known as The Great Famine.

Climate reconstructions suggest water temperatures in a key region of the Pacific Ocean rose by 2.7°C (4.86°F), which caused disruption to rainfall patterns around the world.

If the Super El Niño of 1877-1878 killed 50 million people when the global population was just a fraction of what it is today, what would an even more powerful Super El Niño do?

An associate professor at Washington State University is telling us that “multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again”…

Estimates indicate the resulting scarcity of food and disease outbreaks killed up to four per cent of the Earth’s population at the time.

That would be the equivalent of at least 250 million people if it happened today.

Now, forecasts suggest water temperatures could potentially exceed 3°C (5.4°F) above average later this year – making the upcoming super El Niño even more powerful than the one nearly 150 years ago.

‘Simultaneous multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again,’ Deepti Singh, associate professor at Washington State University, told the Washington Post.

Worldwide food production was already going to be way down this year due to the global fertilizer crisis.

Now an immensely powerful “Super El Niño” is being added to the equation.

What do you think that all of this is going to do to food prices?

Needless to say, the answer is obvious.

We are in far more trouble than most people realize, but for now, most of the population just continues to party.

Michael’s new book, entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next,” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 14:05

Trump Tells Arab States Joining Abraham Accords Should Be 'Mandatory' - Throws Open Door For Iran In Grand Deal

President Trump is still trying to play the role of the globe's ultimate deal-maker via Truth Social, using a mix of mandatory diplomacy and ultimate economic carrots, issuing a lengthy missive on Iran talks and the Abraham Accords on Monday morning.

He introduced the post by stating that negotiations with Tehran are "proceeding nicely" before dropping a provocative diplomatic bombshell: a demand that a big list of major Middle Eastern nations immediately sign onto the Abraham Accords as a prerequisite for any broader peace framework.

The most unexpected aspect to the post laid out that if Tehran plays ball with Washington, Trump is dangling the prospect of the Islamic Republic itself joining the regional coalition, which it must be remembered hinges on 'normalization' with Israel.

"I stated that, after all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together, it should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords," Trump wrote Monday, referencing a Saturday phone call with Arab leaders.

Trump detailed further:

Those Countries discussed are Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Emirates (already a Member!), Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain (already a Member!). It may be possible that one or two have a reason for not doing so, and that will be accepted, but most should be ready, willing, and able to make this Settlement with Iran a far more Historic Event than it would, otherwise, be. The Abraham Accords have proven to be, for the Countries involved (The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kazakhstan), a Financial, Economic, and Social BOOM, even during this time of Conflict and War, with the current Members never even suggesting leaving, or taking so much as even a pause.

The above was coupled with the following ultimatum: "It should start with the immediate signing by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and everybody else should follow suit. If they don’t, they should not be part of this Deal in that it shows bad intention."

And then he dropped the significant twist related to Tehran, in claiming that several of the regional leaders he spoke with "would be honored, as soon as our Document is signed, to have the Islamic Republic of Iran as part of the Abraham Accords. Wow, now that would be something special!"

Inviting Iran to join the Abraham Accords as a part of a broader final deal framework has resulted in a lot of head-scratching, given that just weeks ago Trump repeatedly threatened to bomb the country 'back to the stone age' and effectively end 'civilization' there. US rhetoric has been filled with scorn for Iran, and yet it is now being asked to join a grand US-backed alliance.

Trump is his very long message issued a final directive in the following:

"Therefore, I am mandatorily requesting that all Countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords, and that, if Iran signs its Agreement with me, as President of the United States of America, it would be an Honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled World Coalition. The Middle East would be United, Powerful, and Economically Strong, like perhaps no other area, anywhere in the World! By copy of this TRUTH, I am asking my Representatives to begin, and successfully complete, the process of signing these Countries into the already Historic Abraham Accords."

Meanwhile, look who's fully on board and has returned to singing Trump's praises (after expressing concern over a 'bad' Iran deal in the works)...

President Trump’s most recent proposal requiring expansion of the Abraham Accords as part of a negotiated settlement to the Iran conflict is simply brilliant and would result in the most significant change in the Middle East in thousands of years.

With Saudi Arabia and others…

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 25, 2026

Whether Trump can single-handedly force countries as far apart in their foreign policies as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey... or especially Iran, into a binding alignment with Tel Aviv remains a massive question mark (to put it mildly), or rather would be incredible and highly unrealistic. 

But with the threat of "shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before" serving as the baseline, the White House has put regional powers officially on notice - in Trump's logic at least.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 13:30

It Was Never About The Climate

Authored by Silvio Canto Jr via AmericanThinker.com,

Here is a question for your long weekend:

Why haven’t you ever seen a climate change protest before the Chinese embassy anywhere?

Why is it always the US or capitalism messing up the environment?

Why don’t they show up at all when China is a bigger threat to clean air than any US city?

The answer is obvious, but I’ll say it.

It was never about the climate but rather capitalism or the US.

Check this out:

In 2024, climate activists in New York City protested alongside anti-Israel protesters at a rally headlined “Climate Justice Means Free Palestine.”

Last year, climate change celebrity icon Greta Thunberg tried to storm Israel by sea on a flotilla protesting the country’s war in Gaza, yelling “Free! Free! Palestine!” when she was refused entry.

And, last week, activists from CodePink, a far-left feminist activist group that has received funds from an American expatriate, Neville Roy Singham, living in Shanghai, took a break from their rallies supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cuba Communist Party to circulate a video on Instagram, attacking a Utah data center project backed by investor Kevin O’Leary.

That’s a busy bunch protesting against the West.

Maybe someone should tell them that the clean air in Cuba is due to a collapse of industrial activity.

Or we can always remind them of how they treat gays in Palestine or women in general.

As the article points out, these marches were always about hating the West and what we stand for.

So don’t be fooled by the slogans or some well-meaning people showing up to protest.

The root of all of this is hatred of the West and our individual freedoms.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 12:55

Huawei Touts Sanctions-Busting Chip Breakthrough, SMIC Shares Erupt

Semiconductor Manufacturing International soared to a record high in China after Huawei unveiled what it described as a breakthrough pathway for advanced semiconductor production at the IEEE ISCAS conference, without relying on the West's most advanced chipmaking equipment.

Huawei's semiconductor chief, He Tingbo, told the audience earlier today that the company has developed a "New Semiconductor Path in Practice" that replaces traditional Moore's Law-style geometric scaling with time scaling and reducing signal propagation delay across devices, circuits, chips, and systems.

Huawei's press release stated:

In her speech, she presented the Tau (τ) Scaling Law, a new principle for guiding the future development of the semiconductor industry. This law proposes replacing geometric scaling with time (τ) scaling as a new guiding principle for the evolution of both semiconductors and electronic systems. Based on this principle, innovative technologies such as LogicFolding can be used to continuously compress signal propagation delay and steadily improve transistor density, which will drive the ongoing evolution of semiconductors and electronic systems.

Tingbo said Huawei plans to make 1.4-nanometer chips by 2031 using its own "LogicFolding" architecture. TSMC has said it expects to begin mass production of 1.4nm chips in 2028, leaving Huawei about five years behind the global leader, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

Tingbo claims LogicFolding can boost chip performance and will be used in upcoming Kirin mobile chips expected this fall.

This comes as U.S. sanctions on advanced chipmaking equipment and high-end semiconductors have been aimed at slowing China's push into cutting-edge chip production.

Shares of Chinese chip stocks surged, with SMIC jumping more than 18% and Hua Hong Semiconductor hitting daily limits.

The view is that this is a potential breakthrough in China's effort to bypass U.S.-led export controls and reduce dependence on Western semiconductor equipment.

We suspect someone in the Trump team will likely weigh in on this development in the coming days, if not weeks.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 11:10



 

 

The transcript from this week’s MiB: Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

~~~

Barry Ritholtz with Vimal Kapur, CEO & Chairman, Honeywell
Episode aired May 21, 2026 — Bloomberg Radio

 

Barry Ritholtz  [00:00:16] This week on the podcast. Yet another extra special guest, Vimal Kapur is CEO and chairman of Honeywell. He’s worked there for the past 37 years and not only has he been overseeing a fascinating transition, Honeywell is in the midst of breaking itself up into three distinct parts. I thought this conversation was fascinating and I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Honeywell’s Vimal. Kapur.

Vimal Kapur  [00:00:49] Pleasure Barry. Thanks for hosting me.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:00:50] Well, my pleasure to have you here. It’s not very often we get a member of the Dow Industrials as part of our guests. Let, let’s start out a little bit with your background. You received a degree in electronics engineering from the Thapar Institute of Engineering in India. What was the original career plan?

Vimal Kapur  [00:01:13] Original career plan was to work and get a job. That was a career plan? Yeah, that was a career plan. And then, you know, first I did two small stints of a job and then I joined Honeywell in early 89. It was a new company in India, so set up. So I ended up joining a startup ’cause it was set up as a joint venture between two large companies. There’s a large Indian company called Tata Group. They jointly

Barry Ritholtz  [00:01:38] Automobiles, everything. Tata

Vimal Kapur  [00:01:39] Is enormous now, everything. Correct. So they invested in this venture. It’s a big Honeywell with a lot of tech. And then they create this joint venture in which you show up and it’s basically creating something from scratch. We had no revenue when I started. Our revenue was 0.00. So you learn how to build a company, how you scale, you wear multiple hats like in a startup, you don’t have a very defined role. So I think that early experience of high flexibility and you know, growing through a very high base in a short period of time, that laid some very strong foundations. You know,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:02:14] For me, so in the United States out in Silicon Valley, we notice a lot of these startups where they end up certainly isn’t where they began. There’s a usually a pivot or three or four. What was the original idea in the joint venture and what did that eventually turn into?

Vimal Kapur  [00:02:32] They turned into what it was planned for because Honeywell did not have its automation business footprint in India at that time. So you’re talking 40 years back. So they partnered with a local company to scale the business. They already had those products and capabilities in us and they were trying to get into Asia and they formed partnerships in few countries, India being one of them. And the strategy was to penetrate the local market, develop the local capability, and we were able to do that quite well. So it’s, it’s not that we have to change our product strategy, but we have to run, learn as we go through. We had intense local competition. How do you beat that? How do we create our own, you know, our own revenue stream there. So it was a very successful story. So,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:03:14] So you come up through the operating side, not so much the, you know, Harvard Business School, Davos theory side. How much of an advantage has that been as your career clicked through all these different divisions?

Vimal Kapur  [00:03:29] I mean, I think it’s a advantage to, in a way, to work in a practical business because you have to deal with actual problems which the business deal with. And having worked in different businesses gave me an opportunity to deal with a different customer situation, different end markets, operational issue, commercial issue, product development, issue, supply chain. So I would say, I mean, there’s no replacement of formal education. One, I’m not suggesting that having a higher degrees is a disadvantage, but I would say that it is equal amount of advantage to get practical experience. And I was benefiting from variety of experiences I got in my long career in Honeywell. And

Barry Ritholtz  [00:04:08] You ran three very different businesses before becoming CEO, process solutions, building technologies, performance materials. Tell us, I mean those names seem sort of ambiguous, right? Tell us a little bit about what each of those three divisions did. Yeah,

Vimal Kapur  [00:04:26] So process, solution business is, you know, it provides automation system in the energy sector. So energy sector, think about it, refining, petrochemical, plants, other oil and gas facilities, pipeline terminals, even I would say facilities like, which may paper metals and mining. So these facilities are very complex in terms of their operating procedures and if they’re not automated, it’s nearly impossible to run them. So this business provides a sophisticated automation system to these large companies. So think about Exxon and Shell and BP as kind of a typical customer or Aramco in Middle East and ADNOC. So this serving these customer, this business was very global or is very global. Even today the business still is very successful. And I became CEO in 2014 of this business. And oil downturn happened within six months. How I becoming the leader of the business. So you learn through tough experiences. Oil price was from whatever, 140, $150 to like a big nose dive. And we did a lot of work in the downturn. Learned a lot. But primarily your question, this business is all about sophisticated automation in complex facilities. And then I moved to the building automation business where we still do automation, but now in this case buildings of different type hospitals, airports, schools, university campuses, data centers. And there the business model was very different. Now you serve multiple building through variety of channel partners across the world. And so our strength comes through product innovation. Our strength comes through channel management. Very different business model compared to what I did in, you know, in my in my process automation days and,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:06:22] And then

Vimal Kapur  [00:06:23] Performance material, performance material and technology. Very interesting business, they build technology, they build energy infrastructure. So if you wanna build a, if you are a refiner, you buy crude, which we all hear a lot about today due to, you know, ongoing Iran conflict. You don’t sell crude, you sell product, you sell gasoline, you sell diesel, you sell jet fuel. So they have options to make multiple products. And as the input changes or the market needs changes, they need to decide what are the options they have to build different offering from their perspective. This business provides technology to energy company to build energy infrastructure ’cause it’s a molecule transformation, converting one molecule to another molecule that’s a heavy technology involved behind it. So performance material and technology provides technology to the customer to build tech, you know, energy infrastructure. So very high technology or research oriented business. You have a lot of chemical engineers who are gonna invent the next best technology and you provide their technology to some very large companies. And that was fascinating to lead that business to see that cycle elimination and work in that business. So yeah, very diverse experiences in variety of sectors, different business models, which I’m benefiting today because now I have experience of dealing with different markets and different situations. And that practical experience helps you a lot as you really get into your CEO job.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:07:56] So in 2022 you were named chief operating officer, we were just coming out of the pandemic. What was that environment like? How did you take your experience at these three prior divisions where you were either president or president and CEO, how, how did that affect running operations?

Vimal Kapur  [00:08:16] I mean, I think at that time the biggest challenge that time actually was the chip shortages and how do we really redesign our products because chips are simply not available. So we really had to learn how do we redesign our products in a much shorter period of time. So think about if we design a product in one year, we had to do that in two months because there’s no other option if we don’t do that, we can’t have an alternative source of the supply and we can’t our product. So I used a lot of experiences on dealing with such different scenario in mild jobs and we were able to successfully, you know, deal with that. That was also a job. I also got exposure to the businesses of Honeywell, which I hadn’t done before. Aerospace being the biggest one. So that got added into my responsibility. So there was a lot of learning there on how that industry works, which is totally different from everything else I had done.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:09:11] Is there a throughput through materials, processes, technologies and aerospace? Or are these all completely different animals,

Vimal Kapur  [00:09:20] Different animals in the sense of the end markets they serve? Right, there are some commonality of the business models and you know, there are, there are, there’s a common denominator, but there are differences which really led me to think about whether we are good to be one company or multiple companies when I started as a CEO and part of it was the differences between them, but part of it was opportunities which is ahead of us that how these businesses independently could shape or scale much differently versus when we are together, which, which led us to do a lot of work to think about optionality and pros and cons of each option and which led us to make a decision that we are better off to split into three companies

Barry Ritholtz  [00:10:04] And we’re gonna spend some time delving into those three companies and the thinking behind it. Before we get to that, I wanted to ask you a couple of more general questions about the firm. You’ve been there so long since, since the 1980s. I’m curious, how has the culture of Honeywell changed? It’s almost 40 years, three and a half decades. Is it still essentially the same company or has everything cha like so many other companies? Yeah, I,

Vimal Kapur  [00:10:38] It evolved a lot. I would say, you know, we, there was a big change movement in early 2000 when Honeywell and AlliedSignal merged together.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:10:47] I recall.

Vimal Kapur  [00:10:48] Yep. So little bit of fun fact, AlliedSignal acquired Honeywell and changed its name to Honeywell, which doesn’t happen. The acquirer keeps name because they figured Honeywell brand was so powerful, it was more impactful. So they changed their own name. So that was a big moment, your question on cultural assimilation of two large companies, it was kind of merger of equals and it did go through its own motion of ups and downs. And that’s when Dave Cote came in as chairman and CEO of Honeywell. And Dave did a great job to rebuild the Honeywell culture, which was much more one company mindset. We are not two companies, we are one company. We are gonna put work towards one stock, one Honeywell mindset, put a lot of operational culture in the organization. So that was one phase of, you know, under, under his leadership. Then my predecessor Darius Adamczyk, he became CEO in 2017. He further enhanced our operational excellence skill. He invested a lot of effort to build more digital backbone of the companies, simplifying Honeywell in terms of internal systems we have, Darius was very passionate about digital on how to mine data and create more capability for our customers. So he created a culture of more operational excellence, more operational rigor, while Dave was much more focused on one Honeywell mindset, culture integration, not multiple companies. And as my tenure comes in over the last now two plus years, we are now pivoting from the more growth oriented company. And the reason that’s important is that over a period of time, our margin rates have grown up and we were sub 10% margin company in 2005, 2006, last date was 23%. So our earnings growth is gonna come more from the top line growth versus margin expansion. Not that we want to mar do margin expansion, but we can’t get from another 15%. There’s no headroom. So growth culture is important, which means we have to be more externally focused now. We need to understand our markets, need to understand our customers, what’s changing, need to understand our competition. So our company, even though name preserves itself as a heritage and, but it has been constantly evolving itself and that’s one of the reason this company has survived hundred in 20 years because it has courage to reinvent itself versus being inward looking and always saying that, okay, we are what we are and we are not gonna change.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:13:16] Hmm. Really, really interesting. So I used to hear people talk about automation pretty regularly as just the process of moving more and more things to machines. We kind of hear people using the phrase artificial intelligence and AI the same way kind of bluntly. I’m curious from the Honeywell perspective when it comes to automation and ai, what are the customers buying? Is it productivity gains? Is it safety improvements, is it cheaper labor or a substitute for labor? What, what is the key selling point for your customers? So

Vimal Kapur  [00:13:55] I would say the, we have to go back to where the automation industry started from to better appreciate how will AI impact automation offerings or automation products. Go back to mid seventies when this industry got created somewhere in mid 75 timeframe when computing was invented, chips were invented. There came the need to say the word has a lot of these expensive assets. Those assets are now running very efficiently. So can we move from the older technologies, which were kind of World War I and World War II era to more modern digital technologies. And the way automation system was created was that you sense a set of properties and how a particular equipment or a machine or a processor is running and then you have a software program running in a computer which is going to make sure that it gets back to the desired condition, what it wants it to be. So it’s a logic based predefined system. And the assumption was most of the time this will work in a normal situation when exception occur, human will take a call. So automation systems were always designed with a human in the loop. And human was supposed to take care of change in input condition, change in output conditions, maintain the equipment, take care of maintenance requirement down the line. Now you fast forward 50 years before AI and data science came in, the people who are running these equipment or automation system or different facilities in different environment, think of a pharma manufacturing facility or a data center. They acquired a knowledge on exceptions which were occurring in those operating conditions. But when they retire or they move on, their knowledge went along with them. So when the next set of people came in, they kind of have the same learning cycle. Maybe some of it was captured in some documents, some manuals, but not a lot. So what AI is solving for is our systems have no intelligence layer on top of the core automation layer so that when the next human being comes in, they’re not starting from scratch, they have an advantage of all the learning over the last 25 years all built in. So they get to say, when this condition occurred, nine out of 10 times this was done. It always worked. So you as a human being can say, okay, I think I will choose this. Logic makes, so humans still needs to make a decision. So I think it’s a changing the human and making them more capable at the heart of it. And the reason it becomes even more compelling now is the shortage of skills which are happening in the industrial sector for performing these kind of tasks. So I would say it’s a perfect convergence of the situation that more capability is coming into our system because of availability of data science. And at the same time situation requires this capability to be there because less people are available to do this work and that’s gonna create more capability in automation system. So automation system remains, intelligence layer is on top of it. So it makes a automation system better in terms of what it can do by preserving its capability.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:17:10] Coming up we continue our conversation with Vimal Kapur, CEO of Honeywell discussing turning Honeywell into three standalone companies. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Vimal Kapur. He is CEO and chairman of Honeywell International. He’s been with the firm for 37 years. Honeywell is a highly regarded automation and industrial company. So let’s start out with plans to break the firm up. You have three distinct entities, Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and then Solstice Advanced Materials. So let, let’s talk about that split that sounds fairly natural breakup based on industry. Tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that.

Vimal Kapur  [00:18:26] The thinking behind that was when I started as a CEO, my incoming thesis was that we have to simplify this company. It’s performed extremely well, great return to shareholder, great service to our customer, but what will we do for the next 25 to 30 years? Are we set up for that? And my thesis was that we need to simplify this into few things where we have a scale. But I started the job in middle of 23 as a CEO of the company. Two things happened in the year of 23, which is good to kind of reflect back just three years back. That was the first year when aerospace cycle really became very strong. It was the year one where everybody said, oh, this industry is growing a lot, let’s pay more attention to it. And this was also the first year when something called AI was talked, right? So if we were sitting here three years back, we wouldn’t be talking ai. So it’s that recent phenomena. So the question we had to really ask ourself that if we have to simplify as a company and these two external drivers are occurring simultaneously, a huge demand in our largest business, which is aerospace automation, which is core to Honeywell, is going to probably redefine itself with ai. Should we do it as one company or should we do it as a, in a different construct? And that question get into a problem solving by early 24 to say, let’s look at all the scenarios, what’s possibilities, what others are doing. And as we did the work over 2024, we got more and more conviction. It’s better to separate automation and aerospace into two separate companies. But we ended up making three decisions because specialty chemical is extremely good business, which neither fitted in any one of these two. And we said it’s compelling to also spin that off as a separate company. So rather than, you know, two said, we ended up becoming three. So they became a standalone business in October of last year, doing extremely well since we spun it off now for six months. Very proud of the management team and the board, which is running this company. Aerospace will become a standalone company in about six to eight weeks from now. Six weeks actually as we speak today. 29 June is a date, and date is formed. We quite committed to that and it’s gonna be leader in segment in aerospace and KO will be a pay automation company, which will be probably one of the largest, if not the largest automation company in the world.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:20:51] Hmm. So advanced materials, does that include building technologies? And

Vimal Kapur  [00:20:57] It’s a pure play chemicals business, just

Barry Ritholtz  [00:20:59] Straight up

Vimal Kapur  [00:20:59] Chemical chemicals business. They make refrigerant, which goes into your car, which goes into your home. They have some other technologies which are related to chemicals that business is doing extremely well as a standalone company. The automation, which you mentioned building automation or automation of industrial facilities, that’s part of the remaining Honeywell, which is Honeywell Automation. Now we will not be called Honeywell Automation. We are using as, just as a equal descriptor on what the business will be. We will reimagine our name as we go by in a couple of weeks from now and we’ll reveal that name what it should be. But for sake of simplicity, the chemicals business, an aerospace business and an automation business and,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:21:39] And performance materials and technology is,

Vimal Kapur  [00:21:42] So part of it became into advanced material, advanced material solstice and then part of it is retained within Honeywell. So it’s split into kind of two.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:21:51] ’cause this is really, everybody thinks of these very broadly, but there are some really narrow specific use cases for different correct groups. So I was trying to figure out what would align with what.

Vimal Kapur  [00:22:05] So think about automation business serves three large end markets. All types of buildings, all types of energy facilities and all types of industrial facilities. That’s what we have kept in the automation. And we also are conscious that we should not make automation business serving so many segments that it’s becomes confusing again, right? So we wanna narrow down to a few very large and impactful segments. This market size is about $200 billion. We will be just shy of 20 billion of revenue. So we have a lot of runway to think about creatively what more we can do, how do we grow more. So we are not shortage of runway. Secularly automation is a naturally high growth, you know, segment because it’s something which is so basic to existence of an industrial facility or on an asset. And then when you add the AI story coming on top of it’s gonna have increasingly more growth, momentum. So all sent, all things being said. Yeah, it’s very well positioned for a compelling future.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:23:05] And what does the aerospace group do? Not, unlike ge you’re not making aircraft engines,

Vimal Kapur  [00:23:11] Right? So we do make aircraft engine for the business jet. So more mid-size,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:23:15] The smaller engines,

Vimal Kapur  [00:23:16] Smaller engine, the business jet engines we make, we don’t make the big engines, but we are a systems company. We make different component from the nose to tail of the plane. So our components are right in the cockpit. Our components, we make radars, we make navigation system, we make brakes for the plane, we make environmental controls in the plane. So we are a systems company, we make engines, we make apus. So our, our approach is system designed for a new platform. So every platform comes in and it could be a commercial plan, could be a business, it could be a defense platform. We will pitch in different components and systems of Honeywell. Customers will select many of them, some of them then that will become part of that c you know, that fleet for decades and decades. So it’s a multi-product business, not constrained to one particular product line. And the business model is more powerful because it’s a systems approach and not a component approach. So you’re right in the heart of the systems, you understand how the whole mechanics work and really add more value for our customers.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:24:23] So over the past, let’s call it 10 years, there have been a number of activist investors like Elliot management that, not just Honeywell, but lots and lots of other large conglomerates, they often agitate for share buybacks or increased dividends or sometimes just break the company into pieces. You seem to have landed pretty much in a, in a similar space as some of these activists. First, were they at all influential in your thinking or was this something that, hey, these are such different businesses, there’s no longer scale advantages of having them under one roof?

Vimal Kapur  [00:25:04] I would say the situation in our case was a bit unique because we started doing work to investigate our future optionality early 2024 and did a lot of work and actually even announced the separation of chemicals business in October. Elliot wrote a letter which was in public domain and I got to see it at the same time. And every everybody else saw it to say we should further split aerospace and rest of Honeywell too. That was their argument. There’s a more value to be created. The good news was that we already had done the work and we were convinced that’s the right thing to do, but we had not announced anything. So we treated them as another shareholder who has a point of view and we have to articulate our strategy. So there was strong convergence on the thinking and I think we worked with them very collaboratively on, you know, path forward. And I would say that there’s a lot being said on activist shareholder, but my experience is that they are, they are like any other shareholder who have a logical argument. If you have a counterpoint, you should support this with the facts and data or if you support their point, then you have to execute it. And in that case it just becomes much more of not what to do but how to do it. So our conversation with Elliot, like any other shareholder was this is a situation, here are the paths, this is how we are thinking about it. And we benefited from their expertise in capital markets, how the shareholders will react. And definitely that helped us to shape our decision in terms of, in a certain way, which was very constructive.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:26:38] Hmm, really, really interesting. So we seem to go through these long phases where conglomerates kind of become in style. They become favored. You oversaw $14 billion in m and a, which sounds like a lot of money, but we know really isn’t, you know, that’s not a, that’s not a mega buying spray. And for a long, for the longest time it seemed like there was a financial advantage to being a conglomerate. At what point does that structure stop being an advantage? What does it, what does being part throwing all these different pieces under one roof, what does that prevent the company from doing?

Vimal Kapur  [00:27:21] I think every business model has an era. So I think we have to go back to what created this era of conglomerate or larger companies. The, it really started from the, when the word was started becoming more globalized, after 2000, China came into WTO, the word became more global and there was much more global trade, which became the norm on how companies were growing. So all US companies started growing globally, but at the same time they were able to drive a lot of productivity by taking manufacturing into Asia. A lot of, you know, manpower, productivity by doing work in different virtual way with a lot of IT skills coming in. So there was a case to make bigger companies bigger because they had the unique know-how to drive a lot of productivity and scale at a global scale because they were already present there. And that cycle persisted for almost 15 years till the time that value was captured. And that value capture became generally known. Therefore the question started asking to say is creating this complex company worth it or simplification or a sector focus is a better way to do it. So I think there was a reason that proposition really worked well and created a lot of value. Take a case of Honeywell, our shareholder value creation from a time of 2000 to 2000 17, 18, 1 of the best in class and the entire s and p. So it’s not that anything was wrong, we created tremendous shareholder value. But now this point of saturation comes in and then it really brings you to the point of specialization if the markets have scale and you can preserve scale while you’re a specialist. That’s best of the both words. And that’s what we are, we are doing now to create a scale aerospace company, a scale automation company. We are still very global. We still have very mature processes, but at the same time we are focused on singular segment. So I guess like in everything else you learn through cycles and this cycle is all about having the mix of scale and specialization. This will persist until something else comes in now where there’s a case to do something else and I feel good about where we are in our position and this is gonna create much more shareholder value.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:29:36] So 20 years before you started talking about breaking into three pieces, your fellow Dow component, general Electric went through the same process, arguably with not a whole lot of success, they started out fairly richly valued, there wasn’t a whole lot of room to grow. And I’m curious, when you’re thinking about breaking into three, are you looking at other companies like General Electric and saying what can we learn from what they did right, what they got wrong, what, what missteps they made? I

Vimal Kapur  [00:30:11] Think the situation for each company is very different because separation cannot create value alone by itself. You have to be convicted that the standalone asset has enough growth, potential and invest and asset base which is gonna grow, which is gonna create value. So I think comparing example you gave versus Honeywell is absolutely very different portfolio. Apples

Barry Ritholtz  [00:30:34] And oranges,

Vimal Kapur  [00:30:34] Very, very different. I mean, so I would say that our drivers were more around what I talked about, our stock price were more static. We were more, we did not destroy any shareholder value. So our question was how do we create more shareholder value with external factors coming in? Growth of aerospace, growth of AI is that inflection point for us to make a different decision. So we did it more from a point of strength versus we have some crisis coming in. So sometime you use your point of strength to make the right decisions and we did it fast and we did it right. I think every other company we came from a different circumstances, but the decision on the outward looked very similar. They looked like they all did the same thing, but they all came from very different backgrounds and you know, different set of assets. When, when we started looking at it, some people believed that we got influenced by success of ge. I want to remind that GE success came post our decision. That was a process which was occurring. So yeah, you have, that’s a data point to say they’re also doing it. But some of the success we have observed some outstanding work by the GE leadership team that really started happening 24, 25 timeframe. We were far along the way in our own analysis by that time. So I think those are kind parallel things happening. So there’s no one thing you can attribute to say that this thing influenced it. It’s a combination of the reason which all come together and that’s what really brings us to where we are today.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:32:05] I like this phrase in your thesis of the current transition from automation to autonomy with artificial intelligence as the dividing line. How far along that process are we as a country are the industrial sector and Honeywell.

Vimal Kapur  [00:32:27] So let’s say that we as a country have an advantage of being the leader in the space of cloud and data science and companies like Honeywell has responsibility to take the knowhow which the tech sector is creating, be it Microsoft, be it Google, be it Nvidia and all the, you know, very capable tech companies. How do we bring that capability into our sector? Because our customer is not gonna go and they’re not looking to buy a cloud capability or they’re not looking to buy a AI LLM, they wanna solve a problem, they wanna run a business, they wanna run an operation, they wanna have more uptime, they wanna have more, you know, profitability. So our job is to take our system to what I mentioned to you before and add this intelligence layer and what this intelligence layer is all about, taking capability from the tech companies. Take large language models from the likes of Google and Nvidia, use the cloud power which is there from Amazon and Microsoft, but really build a purpose-built offering from an industrial sector. And as we are doing that, we are able to create the agentic models for our customers and that’s what they buy from us. The underlying plumbing, what we have, they don’t wanna know it, they don’t wanna know how this is built, say, so you’re automating this piece of my work. That’s great so I’m gonna get more productivity for that, how much I should pay you for it, right? So I would say we are in the state that this is no more a hypothesis. We are in the, not in the early innings, but we are in the stage of deployment of these capabilities across different customer base. The why it is not taken up at scale is because our customers have to go through a significant change management in their organization. ’cause fundamentally the roles of people are changing. Some roles require skills which are less important today and some more new skills are required and they can’t do that overnight just because I created a new set of technology, they have to absorb it, they have to ingest it. But we have some fabulous examples on customer using in scale in different sectors like university systems, quick service restaurants, people are using some of our technologies at a very large scale in refineries, et cetera. So I would say that if I’m sitting with you it 12 months back, I would’ve said very modest deployment sitting today, I would say I’m very excited on what opportunity we see a year from now. I would argue that the penetration will go up, substantially up because it’s a real economic value creation from what we are really profiting and we as a country are leading because we have the core components of this technology and now we have to, you know, take this capability across the world and our customers excited. They really like what we are doing.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:35:16] Earlier you mentioned restaurant automation. What does Honeywell do for either fast food service or casual dining?

Vimal Kapur  [00:35:26] So think about it. I mean when you look at a small fast food dining restaurant, there’s not much automation in that. But it consumes energy for sure. I mean let’s take a typical McDonald’s restaurant as just as an example. There’s a kitchen there, there’s a fryer, there’s a refrigeration. It’s just keeping a lot of products there. There’s of course lights going on. These assets were never thought as a way to improve energy efficiencies by companies like us. We say we should automate a large hospital. It’s massive. There’s a lot of opportunity there, a large building. These assets were never paid attention by us because there was no technology available. But when the cloud technology came in, we are able to connect these assets flawlessly, you know, in a matter of hours. And then you’re able to use a lot of AI based rule set to understand what should be the energy consumption actual versus what it is today. And give that tools to the owner to say, you know, an example, we connected a quick service chain in uk, I think something like 500 plus of their restaurants into a single operating system and they’re observing 30 to 40% energy reduction. Wow. Like anything else, the good old management principle, what you inspect is what you get. Once these were thinking running off my own, nobody paid attention even though their desire to do something, there was no mechanism. So we created an easy mechanism to make this available to the customer. So all of a sudden they’re able to generate a lot more productivity without adding too much of cost. And that’s a part of the new tools which is coming in, which was not possible. And that gives me a lot of excitement that this is gonna be much more level of, you know, productivity efficiency, which is less talked about. You know, whenever there’s AI dialogue, it’s about jobs, it’s gonna cut jobs. Nobody talks about economic value creation. It is doing a real value for our customer base, making people more productive. That’s the story of the industrial side, which is probably requires more, more amplification.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:37:26] So what’s the Peter Drucker quote? You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So forget 500 restaurants. What is Starbucks? 30,000, McDonald’s 40,000.

Vimal Kapur  [00:37:36] This applies to all of these kind of assets and many people have done this work. So it’s not that we have created some new invention. Some of them have done this kind of discovery, but this effort was not very standardized. It’s like a custom made thing somebody will do because you are a big company, you can afford it. But when you do it a large scale, there are hundreds of these chains, there are hundreds of retail stores. We’re also doing similar work, one of the big retail store chains, very similar example. So these distributed assets are becoming a way of capturing value at one end of the equation. On the other end of the equation, when you have retirees coming and our customers are worried about knowledge going out of the door, they’re looking at a mechanism of knowledge capture so they can perform their task. That’s also penetrating very rapidly. So scenarios are different. Some scenarios are looking at, I never paid attention and now I can do it. Some are saying I have less people do something about it and but the capability is fundamentally the same, it’s the same capability which solves both the problem

Barry Ritholtz  [00:38:39] Coming up. We continue our conversation with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of Honeywell discussing the state of automated technology today. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Vimal Kapur. He is CEO and chairman at Honeywell. The company he has worked at for the past 37 years since starting there as an engineer. So I’m curious as to how some technologies seem to just take forever to find their way into the real world. You know, if you travel around the world, I remember the first time I saw one of the point of sale handheld units in a restaurant in Europe, I don’t know, maybe it was 15 years ago. And I was astonished, wait, I don’t have to request a check. They come then they have to give ’em the key, the card, they go away like we’ll take a check. They come by. It’s, it seems to have taken a decade to make its way here. What are some of the impediments to some of this, some of the cutting edge technologies that’s obviously using a bunch of tech that already existed. Is this a problem getting adaptation even though it was clearly more productive, more efficient, faster turn of tables? Like I was astonished how long it took. So I for the United States to implement That’s

Vimal Kapur  [00:40:26] Fair. I think there’s a scenario in your example because it’s a technology displacement of some old method versus a more new method. But the reason I believe more bullish about it is that we are solving a known problem. And the known problem is word has less people to do a lot of work around skilled labor in the industrial world. That’s a real problem. So our solution is not trying to find a problem, we are finding we are giving a solution to a known problem. Adoption rates are lower because of the change management issue. But this is a change management of the order of 18 months, 24 months, 30 months. Not a decade. Not a decade, right. So I remain very optimistic given my, you know, experience in these sectors. The adoption rates here are gonna be much more quicker because the problem is real. We are not inventing the problem. This problem exists for a, and by the way, this problem is everywhere in the world. This is not a US problem. Only skilled labor, skilled labor. Europe has more population shrinkage than us go to Japan and Korea, they have the same problem. China, China as well. China has population shrinkage, right? So this is a universal issue. This is not invented here. Now we get excited on the job displacement happening with robots and humanoids. That’s a small portion of a manufacturing industry that probably is also displacing some tasks which humans are not willing to do. Like lifting boxes, right? Yeah. I mean okay it’s not very interesting. But then there are other jobs with other sectors which we address where a physical AI or intelligence layer is gonna create a tremendous amount of economic value. So

Barry Ritholtz  [00:42:05] I keep hearing people compare that intelligence layer of artificial intelligence to the internet. I’m wondering, and you seem very bullish and excited about everything AI can do, is there a better comparison? Is the industrial revolution a better framework for thinking about the impact of AI over the next 10, 50, a hundred years? I think the

Vimal Kapur  [00:42:31] AI impact will be different in each sector. And I think if we make it too broad brush, we are losing the bigger picture. But when we are making it specific to a segment, then you’re being more precise to say in context of the end markets we serve the industrial sector, I talked about examples there. It’s all about the skill shortage issue, which is very different from if we are using AI for better search engine, if I may, using AI for, you know, making a summary of our talk, which somebody can do in, that’s a very different use case. And one can argue is it gonna add productivity or not or is it gonna take away jobs? That’s a different scenario from simply not having people to do work. Very different scenario. And I think that makes our case more compelling. The adoption rates are driven by a near real, real need versus we are trying to create a need which is unknown and that’s not being talked a lot more, a lot more dialogue is around job displacement. But those are more in the jobs which could be automated like finance function or HR function. Maybe to a certain degree it’s true, but not to the point. My personal view is that it’s gonna have the amount of impact which is being talked about.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:43:43] So let’s talk about some of the challenges of this technology layer and some of the black hats out there. When Mythos came out, I would imagine a company like Honeywell set up and took notice the idea of AI taking over industrial controllers, power water, air conditioning, all that stuff has to be thought of as a genuine threat. Nobody wants rogue thermostats or what have you. How do you look at the threat from a, a powerful entity like Mythos and how much of an arms race are we in to harden all of our, you know, soft underbelly?

Vimal Kapur  [00:44:27] So I think we have to appreciate the fact that where we are deploying ai, it is substantially different from what we are generally talking about in broader public domain. If you think of applying AI in an industrial system, let’s take a case of a hospital and I want to apply AI into automation system to make it more efficient. The data of that is not in public domain. The data is in Honeywell system or it’s one of our competitors system. So you cannot go to internet and train anything ’cause there’s nothing to train on. So that makes data friction as a big problem in industrial sector, which in a way becomes a protection layer for us. But that doesn’t

Barry Ritholtz  [00:45:07] Mean, so the friction becomes a protection layer, but

Vimal Kapur  [00:45:09] It doesn’t mean we should not do anything about it, right? It’s to say, oh, I’m protected. It means we should take it seriously to think of potential threats coming in because if the data friction is removed, which is hard to do, but it humans are very intelligent. So we have worked very hard to remove the data friction and also use our domain knowledge because interestingly you cannot solve a horizontal problem in industrial domain. What I mean by that is you do not have a software application like a CRM system or an HR system. The problems of each sectors are very different. If you’re a refinery, you’re trying to produce more jet fuel and more diesel. If you are a life sensors manufacturing facility, you’re trying to produce drug with minimal quality giveaway. But if you’re a data center, you want more uptime, your problems are so different. So we can’t create a magic AI application and sell to everybody. We have to be purposeful that where do we use our data and what problem we solve, which only come from years of experience. So those two really become in a way a constraint for a generic company to come in because the data friction and lack of understanding of domain, which means companies like us, which possess both have to solve this problem. And that’s why we are very bullish about it, to say we are gonna do it. We are gonna take all the capabilities from tech companies and build new set of capabilities to take our industry from a pure play automation to more towards autonomy. And autonomy doesn’t mean humans will disappear, humans will become more empowered, human will become more capable. And to the extent there’s some skill shortages, it’ll address that point.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:46:48] So let’s talk a little bit about how tumultuous the past 12 months have been in terms of geopolitics. We not only have the war in the Ukraine, but now in Iran we had the on again off again on again and most recently off again tariffs. How does this affect how a company like Honeywell thinks about reshoring and bringing manufacturing back to the United States thinks about supply chain issues? How do you plan in such a tumultuous environment? Well,

Vimal Kapur  [00:47:21] It’s definitely a challenge for companies to have more stability is what companies want. So I would say that companies like us have very mature processes to deal with it. So every time this issue occurs, we have some sort of disturbance for, depends, four weeks, eight weeks, 20 weeks, who knows depending on the situation. So we have learned how to deal with it, but it doesn’t come without a cost. You lose some growth in that window, you may have to incur extra costs like it happened in case of tariff because when tariff got announced, we have no choice but to pay it. Right? Right. Now whether we can recover it or not as a subsequent decision,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:47:57] Are you one of the many companies that have filed litigation to get, get refunds?

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:01] We did not file any litigation.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:48:03] How big of a hit was

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:05] Tax. It was not big for us. We were mostly down to the second part of your question. We have been doing manufacturing local for local for multiple years. So we made for us in US made for Europe in Europe, made for China. In China. So we don’t move a lot of stuff around. However, what we cannot control is the global nature of the components we buy. Right? If I have

Barry Ritholtz  [00:48:26] To buy everything in the supply chain and raw materials. Correct.

Vimal Kapur  [00:48:29] Because we can’t make everything. So if it, if a component is made in Korea, like batteries, we have to buy it from there. And if a component is made in China or somewhere else, we have to buy it from there. So that impact is certainly not under our coverage because we don’t have an endless capacity to invest in everything. But our core manufacturing, we have 150 factories, you know, and they’re well dis the world distributed around the world and they’re well distributed across the world. I mean, so we are so we don’t have this foundational challenge of reshoring, but we certainly have to deal with changing environment in which we have to think about more local supply based development aligned to what the expectations are at this point of time. Huh.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:49:15] So we’ve noticed that defense budgets really around the world, not just here in the United States, ha have been rising and there certainly has been fairly robust demand for aerospace. There’s a big upgrade cycle just kind of starting. A lot of the fleets are pretty old. How do you look at this in terms of risk and opportunity? How are you thinking about defense and aerospace?

Vimal Kapur  [00:49:38] The defense is a big opportunity for our aerospace business. That’s about 40% of the aerospace business. Wow. So it’s certainly the current changes in geopolitical environment and government spending more money is only positive. So it’s gonna become a even more growth driver for the business compared to what it had. So when we started this thesis two and a half years back, we did not predict this level of demand in the defense. But now that’s really a reality. Whether it’s in us, whether it’s some of our US allies, there’s a lot more growth opportunity across the board for different products and services we provide.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:50:14] And then there’s been some debate about the future of technology and industry. China seems to be running away in a couple of areas like energy transition and robotics. From where you sit, is the lead gonna pass back and forth or is there a clear winner and that’s a potential problem for the United States, both strategically and economically? I think

Vimal Kapur  [00:50:40] We have to look at what’s, look ahead, what’s this trying to look back and be, you know, skeptical about it. I will look ahead the problems, which the word HA is in ahead of us. We clearly know the US lead in ai. So how do we protect the lead? We clearly have a lead in quantum, which is one of the businesses we own that. How do we really keep that scale?

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:01] You do, I didn’t realize what, what does Honeywell do on the quantum space? So

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:05] We own a business called Quantum in which Honeywell has a majority stake. We spun it off a separate company in 2021.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:11] Oh, okay. All

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:12] Right. So it’s not, it’s Honeywell investments in that company versus it’s not part of Honeywell.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:51:17] I recall, yeah, I crawl that way back when. That’s right. Really 2021. Really fascinating.

Vimal Kapur  [00:51:22] Correct. So there are technologies in which us have an advantage, us have to rebuild its supply base for some of the critical sectors like semiconductor, like pharmaceutical, which are mission critical. And I think that’s underway. But we need to have patients that those things take years to happen. There’s not a switch to say, right, we wanna do it. And those things show up, they can take 5, 7, 10 years. Hmm. So I think it’s heading in the right direction. We as a country has all the capabilities. We have the capital, we have the knowhow, but we have to refurbish some of our skills, which we lost over a couple of years in few portions of industrial sector. But let’s not forget, we have very, very capable companies which created the same sector all over the world, right? So those have not gone away.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:52:06] So reassuring is not as challenging as a lot of people make out. It is

Vimal Kapur  [00:52:10] More thoughtful in terms of which, how do you prioritize all things being equals Reassuring is the right thing to do, but my personal view is we should pick up the top five and say, okay, here are the five we wanna go. Really go after and make it successful. ’cause try to do everything is gonna be just extremely difficult in order of prioritization.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:52:28] So final question before I get to our, our speed round. What do you think when, when it comes to automation and artificial intelligence, what do you think business people and investors for that matter really are misunderstanding? What, what little nugget that you’ve experienced would give them a little more insight into what the future looks like? I think

Vimal Kapur  [00:52:49] The point we discussed earlier that the automation gets heavily enabled by AI and really create the intelligence layer and that opportunity to create sales is being underestimated. I think this opportunity is real because of the skill shortage, because of the knowledge gap, which has I got created over a period of time. So I truly believe that’s something which needs more, more conversation and more emphasis.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:53:15] So. So I only have you for another three minutes, so let me click through these questions really quickly. Starting with, tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

Vimal Kapur  [00:53:26] My early managers, I mean, I was lucky to have some very good managers who taught me different things, you know, not to be fearful about whom you’re talking to. How do you think about value propositions? How to think global scale. So I think in Honeywell you’re blessed to have some very strong leaders in different part of my career and in the first 15, 20 years, which really shape you because if you, what shapes you as the first 15 ish years of your life? ’cause once those value system is built in your brain, you kind of live with that. And I was benefiting from some very powerful ventures in different parts of the company. Let,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:54:01] Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading recently?

Vimal Kapur  [00:54:05] So books I read variety, both from leadership to sector specific. The recent one of the book I’m reading is the Price from Daniel Yergin. If anybody is interested about oil economy, please do read it. Six months back I started reading Chip War. So some of the sector specific things, but also read about leadership of some of the people I admire. Dave Cote, who was chair C of Honeywell for a long time. He has some very fascinating book. “Winning Now, Winning Later” in the, joined our board recently. She has some fascinating leadership books. So I read some of them, I read a lot of books on China. I think it’s underestimated the scale of that economy. So I think we just need to, there’s a book called Words View, China’s View of the Word, very interesting book. It’s like we have a view about China, what about their view? Have we ever asked them the question, why do you, what do you do? So I kind of have very diverse the reading habits of, you know, waiting from my business specific to leadership to some of the country’s specifics. Yeah, toggled around a lot on that. And,

Barry Ritholtz  [00:55:11] And our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interest in the career in either engineering or management?

Vimal Kapur  [00:55:22] I mean, both are fascinating career. I would say engineering is a career which gives you a lot of options. So do pursue that because it gives you a wide variety of choices. Management is something that people should do who have more willingness to take a risk and have courage to make decisions. Because in the end, at some point in your career, you will have to do both. And if you think that’s not your sphere, that’s something you’re not good at it. I would rather argue than you choose something you’re really good at versus otherwise you’re going to get saturated at some point. But management is an excellent carrier by itself. So both are, both are excellent.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:56:00] And our final question, what do you know about the world of automation, engineering and artificial technology today that might’ve been useful 37 years ago when you first started at Honeywell?

Vimal Kapur  [00:56:14] I don’t know. I think I’m always excited about learning new technology all the time. You know, I’m still very curious to read things, how they work. I think I will say that staying curious is very important for us as a human being. We should never be satisfied on what we know. We should always ask the question, what we do not know. Whether it is about a technology or a business process or for that matter, any fact of life and more you are curious, more successful you are because you’re open-minded and you’re always willing to learn. And that has been my principle all my life. Always learn something new about anything. And you feel very fulfilled.

Barry Ritholtz  [00:56:52] Huh? Really, really terrific. Vimal, thank you so much for being, thank you very much. So generous with your time. We have been speaking with Vimal Kapur, CEO, and Chairman of Honeywell. If you enjoy this conversation, well be sure and check out any of the previous 637 we’ve done over the past 12 and a half years. You can find those at Bloomberg, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the correct team that helps put these conversations together amongst the many people who helped me. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 ~~~

 

 

 

The post Transcript: Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell appeared first on The Big Picture.

Spencer Pratt Literally Uses LA Shithole Filth As Campaign Ad

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Spencer Pratt is running a campaign unlike anything seen in Los Angeles politics. The former reality star turned mayoral candidate isn't just talking about the city's collapse into filth, crime, and decay - he's making the evidence work for him.

His team has taken to the streets with power washers and stencils, blasting clean messages like "IMAGINE IF THE STREETS WERE THIS CLEAN" and "SPENCER PRATT FOR MAYOR" directly into the grime accumulated under Democrat leadership.

The tactic is as simple as it is devastating. The cleaned sections stand out starkly against the surrounding trash and dirt, creating a living advertisement for change.

Spencer Pratt has launched a campaign where filthy Los Angeles streets are power washed using a stencil reading "imagine if the streets were this clean."

Imagine letting the streets get so dirty under your leadership that your opponent can use them as a billboard.

- Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) May 24, 2026

If Democrat Mayor Karen Bass wants the signs gone, her administration has to actually clean the streets - something residents say hasn't happened consistently for years.

? NOW: Socialists are FURIOUS that Spencer Pratt's campaign is now POWER WASHING the streets clean spelling the words "IMAGINE IF THE STREETS WERE THIS CLEAN"

"SPENCER PRATT FOR MAYOR" ???

Karen Bass has allowed FILTH to become an ad against her ?

KEEP PUSHING, COMMON...

- Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 24, 2026

Pratt's approach highlights the stark reality Los Angeles faces.

Recent reports and viral videos paint a picture of a once-great city reduced to dystopian conditions: massive homeless encampments overrun by rats, open-air drug markets operating brazenly, and public spaces buried under tents, trash, and human waste.

One video shows entire networks of makeshift homes under bridges tapping into city power.

Another resident-driven idea gaining traction involves marking potholes and blighted areas with pro-Pratt messages, forcing city crews to respond faster to erase political opposition than to basic maintenance.

Pratt has been vocal about the root causes. In campaign videos, he stresses that Los Angeles doesn't have a homelessness problem so much as a drug addiction and failed leadership crisis. He points to billions spent with little visible improvement, calling out the "Homeless Industrial Complex" of nonprofits and bureaucrats who profit from perpetuating the cycle rather than solving it.

His five-step plan focuses on mandatory treatment, clearing encampments, cracking down on crime and drug use, and prioritizing public safety. "If that addict on your street were your own son, what would you do?" he asks, framing the issue as a moral and practical emergency.

The establishment is not amused. As Pratt surges in polls and fundraising - recent figures show him closing the gap on incumbent Karen Bass - the attacks have intensified. Hollywood figures and metropolitan leftists have lashed out, with "Price is Right" host Drew Carey calling Pratt a "serial scammer" and telling voters to reject him in a foul-mouthed rant.

? NOW: LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is surging SO MUCH in the race against Karen Bass that the Democrat machine is lashing out, launching desperate attacks

Pratt is SEIZING on anger regarding homelessness, fires, crime and dilapidation

"People are FREAKING OUT he's...

- Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 25, 2026

Pratt's organic, creative tactics, and direct appeals - have rattled the machine. Supporters see it as a masterclass in connecting with frustrated residents tired of excuses.

Decades of progressive policies prioritizing open borders, soft-on-crime approaches, and massive unchecked spending have produced predictable results. California has funneled enormous sums into homelessness programs, yet streets remain filthy and unsafe. Residents navigate urine-soaked doorways and blocked infrastructure daily while officials tout statistics that don't match lived experience.

Pratt's personal stake adds weight. His home in Pacific Palisades was lost in the fires, an event he ties directly to leadership failures. He frames his run as fighting for his family and the city he loves, rejecting the decline as inevitable.

This isn't just another election cycle in LA. Pratt's campaign forces a confrontation with reality: voters can continue down the path of managed decay or demand basic competence - clean streets, safe neighborhoods, and accountability. The power-washed messages make the choice literal. As the June primary approaches, Angelenos are paying attention.

The broader lesson extends beyond one city. When leadership prioritizes ideology over results, everyday life suffers. Pratt's unorthodox push represents a rejection of that status quo in favor of practical restoration. Whether it translates to victory remains to be seen, but the conversation he has sparked is long overdue. Los Angeles deserves better than managed decline.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 10:35

Pentagon Conducts First Military Drill In Venezuela Since Maduro Overthrow

On Saturday, the US military conducted a highly visible drill right in the heart of Caracas, marking the first known American military exercise on Venezuelan soil since the chaotic January 3rd operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

The show of force involved two US Marine Corps Osprey aircraft touching down near the recently reopened US Embassy in Caracas, which went operational only two months ago, in March.

via Reuters

"The drill, which the Venezuelan government said it had authorized as an evacuation drill for possible medical emergencies or disasters, included two MV-22B ​Osprey aircraft that landed near the U.S. embassy and vessels that entered Venezuelan ​waters in the Caribbean Sea," Reuters detailed.

Venezuela's Foreign Minister Yván Gil had announced and previewed the drill to the local population, and dubbed the action a 'rapid response' exercise in the heart of the capital.

There were reports of protests in the capital, by those who reject their country being used for American military drills:

While some Caracas residents gathered to observe the aircraft, a group of protesters elsewhere in the city displayed a Venezuelan flag with the message 'No to the Yankee drill' to express their opposition.

However, other crowds reportedly gathered just the watch the large Marine Corps Ospreys sweep in low to the city.

The US Embassy later revealed that Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of US Southern Command, was personally on board one of the Ospreys.

This marks Donovan's second high-profile visit to Caracas since the January raid, which left a bloody trail of at least 83 dead - mostly Venezuelan military forces, Cuban presidential guards, but also reportedly four civilians.

According to an official post on X by the US Embassy, Donovan's itinerary made for a busy day: "[Donovan] participated in bilateral talks with high-ranking representatives of the interim government, met with the leadership and staff of the United States Embassy, and observed the joint force conducting a military response exercise," it said.

Trump and Rubio posters TORCHED in Caracas streets

Protesters stomp and set them ABLAZE

‘Hands off Venezuela’ — right after US military drills hit country pic.twitter.com/JZrilpEjWr

— RT (@RT_com) May 24, 2026

The current Venezuelan government, now helmed by Acting President Delcy Rodriguez (Maduro's own former vice president), has been moving quickly to manage domestic optics.

The irony is that there has not in the end actually been 'regime change' in Venezuela - only government 'decapitation' - with Maduro on US soil and in federal custody. Rodriguez is a socialist as Latin American leaders have come, and she presides over the same government - only this time while serving Washington oil and business interests.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 10:00

Dr. Oz Fires Back After Joy Behar's TrumpRx Meltdown

Authored by David Manney via PJMedia.com,

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the 17th administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, answered Joy Behar after the longtime co-host of The View warned viewers about President Donald Trump's prescription drug initiative.

Behar said once Trump puts his name on prescriptions, “We're all going to die.”

Joy Behar claims "we're all going to die" because Trump wants to lower drug prices with TrumpRX. pic.twitter.com/uG458SU1AD

— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) May 19, 2026

She also reached for Trump's past business failures, as if cheaper medicine belongs in the same dusty joke drawer as casino chatter and late-night monologue scraps.

Dr. Oz didn't need a medical chart to spot the problem, saying TrumpRx.gov still has no medication for Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), though they're working on it.

https://t.co/8XMXPxEXtl pic.twitter.com/1brcfTOarK

— DrOzCMS (@DrOzCMS) May 20, 2026

His joke landed because Behar's reaction sounded less like analysis and more like a smoke alarm installed over a toaster sitting near a burning pile of pine boughs: loud, frantic, and not especially useful once breakfast remains intact.

President Trump announced on May 18 that TrumpRx would expand with over 600 generic medications. The AP reports:

The beefed-up website is the Trump administration’s answer to criticism from Democrats who have called TrumpRx performative and noted that many of the brand-name drugs it has featured are cheaper with insurance or have lower-cost generic versions sold elsewhere.

It also marks an effort to respond to a top voter concern for November’s midterm elections: affordability. Health costs are a worry for many Americans, an issue compounded by the Republican-led Congress’ recent cuts to Medicaid and the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies this year that sent some people’s premiums skyrocketing.

The expansion is made possible by partnerships with other online pharmacies, including Amazon Pharmacy, GoodRx and billionaire investor Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, Trump said at an event at the White House.

TrumpRx doesn't directly sell drugs, and it won't replace insurance for everyone, but it gives uninsured patients, high-deductible families, and cash-paying customers another place to check before surrendering at the pharmacy counter.

Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs and a regular Trump critic, appeared at the White House event and backed the expansion. Cuban's presence should've slowed the usual reflexive sneering; a Trump critic stood beside Trump because lowering drug prices helps people who don't care which political tribe gets credit when the receipt shrinks.

Behar could've asked fair questions;.

Americans should want details about pharmacy benefit managers, deductibles, manufacturers, and insurance rules. Drug pricing has enough trapdoors to swallow a family budget whole.

Instead, she saw Trump's name, grabbed the nearest panic button, and started whacking it like a carnival game she had no chance of winning.

The token conservative on The View, Alyssa Farah Griffin—I think she's the sacrifice, honestly; I can't keep up with the dissected corpses—pushed back during the segment and pointed out that lower drug prices can help real families. Sunny Hostin, unsurprisingly, also raised concerns, but Behar gave viewers doom theater.

Behar's verbal bullets were blanks, and even the blanks sounded tired. She didn't test the claim against the numbers, or anything for that matter, simply firing first and hoping the smoke would pass for thought.

Dr. Oz held the stronger ground because he kept the focus on access, prices, and practical relief. Prescription bills don't arrive with political footnotes; seniors on fixed incomes don't care whether Joy Behar approves of the label. Parents stretching paychecks want to know whether the medicine costs less, whether the pharmacy has it, and whether they can make rent after filling the bottle.

TrumpRx won't solve every failure in American health care; no website can unwind decades of government bloat, drugmaker games, insurance headaches, and pharmacy middlemen. Yet a price-comparison tool with more than 600 generic medications gives families one more way around a broken system.

Behar mocked the name, while Oz pointed back to the medicine cabinet. One side filled airtime, as the other side at least tried to lower the bill.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 08:00

My day of remembrance for those who have been lost reads:

• Memorial Day. Eric Paliwoda was a big dude. Probably six-foot-six. Those big, meaty hands that would swallow your own in a tight handshake. His jaw stuck out, exaggerated by a lip full of dip. He was raised in Connecticut, but seemingly emerged from a Nebraska cornfield, ready for war.A short, ten-year-old Memorial Day piece worth pulling up again for the weekend. Quiet, well-said, no flag-waving. (STSW)

• The Legend of Chief Shannon Kent: Coffee or Die on the late Navy cryptologist and Senior Chief — a profile of a remarkable career and the quiet community that knew her. Memorial-weekend reading. (Coffee or Die) see also Fullbore Friday: The secrets we keep. Every Naval officer should know his name, but few do. He was born in 1925, and he is still with us. What a story. Imagine you are just your standard-issue U.S. Navy fleet Lieutenant in your late 20s. You missed the big war, but you are ear deep in the next one, the Korean War. You know, on paper at least, you are flying a plane outclassed by your opponent. Doesn’t matter. Then one day you find yourself facing not just a better aircraft—but outnumbered by them. To make it even worse, you find out after the merge that you are not facing the JV team, but the varsity. (CDR Salamander)

• A Suicide. He’d been on five or six deployments, defusing bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the previous decade-plus, and was a few years away from retirement. He knew his trade and trained his soldiers hard for our upcoming deployment, which would include missions of varying lengths in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. But he was also loud and gregarious and flirtatious, and the special waggishness that comes from a youth spent in combat could be mistaken for frivolity. A Memorial Day weekend essay on veteran suicide that does the rare thing of being specific instead of statistical. Hard to read; worth reading. (Colossus)

• Marine who crawled under bridge to plant explosives approved for Medal of Honor: Marine Capt. John Ripley hung demolition charges beneath a key bridge, swinging hand-over-hand for three hours while under fire. Task & Purpose on the Medal of Honor for the 1972 Đông Hà bridge demolition. The story has been told for fifty years; the medal took as long. (Task and Purpose)

• Chasing the Man Who Stole the Gods
How investigators tracked down a former child soldier whose thefts drove a global art conspiracy. (Businessweek)

• Experience: we found a baby on the subway — now he’s our 26-year-old son: A short first-person Guardian piece that has no business being as moving as it is. Read it in two minutes and feel slightly better about people. (The Guardian)

• They knew they were dying soon, so they threw a party: Living funerals — where people near the end of life plan and attend their own memorials — are becoming increasingly popular. A WaPo feature on the rise of “living funerals” — people with terminal diagnoses gathering loved ones while they can still enjoy it. Gentle, surprisingly upbeat, and worth the read. (Washington Post)

• We need better stories about the future.: Mayer argues the doom-loop dominating tech discourse is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Imagination is a strategic resource we keep underinvesting in. (Ashley Mayer)

• Inside Israel’s High-Tech Campaign to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker: A WSJ deep-dive on the intelligence and targeting infrastructure Israel has built to systematically pursue every individual identified from October 7. Disturbing in its precision regardless of where you sit on the conflict. One by one, militants who videotaped their exploits that day have been identified and killed, in a measure of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution (Wall Street Journal)  see also The Challenge for American Jews: The Atlantic on the political and identity crosswinds American Jews are navigating right now — Israel, the Trump-era right, and a left that has moved on key questions. A thoughtful piece even if you disagree with the framing. Progressive alliances are weakening, political identities are shifting, and emotional ties to Israel are being strained. What now? (The Atlantic)

• Miles Davis: A Visual Dictionary: Fast cars, huge shades and, surprisingly, any old trumpet: These are the things that made Miles Miles. Miles Davis, the jazz legend and style innovator who would have turned 100 this month, remains for many people the pre-eminent avatar of cool. And while Davis’s greatest legacy is musical, he also cut a distinctive image over the course of his five-decade career. (Davis died of pneumonia in 1991, at 65.) His style shifted alongside his sound, but he had his touchstones — face-obscuring sunglasses and ticket-magnet sports cars among them. (New York Times)

Video of the day: World War II told in 20 Episodes with Tom Hanks

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

 

The great digital media valuation collapse

Source: Axios

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

 

The post 10 Memorial Day Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

At Last Minute, SEC Suddenly Delays Plan To Allow Crypto Versions Of US Stocks

Authored by Micah Zimmerman via Bitcoin Magazine,

The Securities and Exchange Commission has pumped the brakes on its highly anticipated “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, pushing back the release of the framework as it weighs input from traditional stock exchanges and other market participants wary of the plan’s sweeping implications, according to Bloomberg reporting.

The SEC, under Chair Paul Atkins, was preparing to release the so-called innovation exemption as soon as this week.

The framework would create a new regulatory pathway allowing digital tokens linked to publicly traded company shares to trade on decentralized crypto platforms — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — bypassing the constraints of traditional stock exchanges. 

The exemption is part of Atkins’ broader “Project Crypto” initiative, which aims to relax existing crypto restrictions in line with the Trump administration’s pro-crypto agenda.

The SEC was reportedly leaning toward permitting third-party tokens — digital representations of stocks like Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla — to be issued and traded without the consent of the underlying public companies. 

This means outside actors, not the issuers themselves, could create blockchain-based wrappers tracking a company’s share price and list them on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.

These tokens may not carry traditional shareholder rights like voting or dividends, though the SEC is reportedly considering requiring platforms to provide those rights or risk delisting.

Why the SEC is delaying

The timing of the exemption’s release has been pushed back as the agency weighs feedback from stock-exchange officials and other market participants who met with SEC staff in recent days. 

The World Federation of Exchanges — whose members include Nasdaq, Cboe, and CME Group — previously warned the SEC in a November 2025 letter that such exemptions could “dilute” existing investor protections and “distort” competition by giving crypto exchanges a regulatory shortcut unavailable to traditional markets. 

The group cautioned that granting legitimacy to tokenized stocks before full compliance implementation would “undoubtedly have negative — potentially acute — consequences” for U.S. markets.

The tokenization debate is unfolding against a backdrop of competing visions for the future of U.S. equity markets. Nasdaq, which received SEC approval in March 2026 for its own tokenized securities proposal, is pursuing a different model: one that keeps all trades on-exchange with full shareholder rights intact, built on the DTCC’s enterprise blockchain. 

The innovation exemption, by contrast, would sanction a parallel, crypto-native market running alongside the existing system — potentially fragmenting liquidity across dozens of third-party token issuers for the same underlying stock.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 06:20

70% Of All Crypto 'Wrench Attacks' Happen In France: Report

About 70% of all wrench attacks, physical attacks against crypto holders and their families, carried out in an attempt to steal digital assets, occur in France, according to Bitcoin journalist Joe Nakamoto. 

There have been 41 crypto-related kidnappings in France so far in 2026, Nakamoto said, or about one attack every two and a half days, he added. 

As CoinTelegraph's Vince Quill reports, Nakamoto attributed the rise in wrench attacks to know-your-customer data collection, which is stored in centralized servers that were compromised in several high-profile data leaks, including the 2020 leak of hardware wallet provider Ledger’s customer data.

That data leak disclosed the identities, home addresses and emails of more than 270,000 customers worldwide, he added. Jameson Lopp, the CEO of crypto wallet and key management company Casa, said:

“France is the canary in the coal mine, demonstrating how financial regulations create a surveillance apparatus that causes direct harm to bitcoin holders.”

An overview of wrench attacks in France so far in 2026. Source: Joe Nakamoto

Opposition to know-your-customer data collection is mounting inside the crypto and Bitcoin communities, as digital asset holders continue to be targeted with physical attacks and kidnappings, prompting a need for increased security measures.

Don’t become a target: Bitcoiners offer advice to safeguard against attacks

The attacks are typically orchestrated by criminals living abroad, who contract young people living in France to carry out the physical attacks, Nakamoto said.

Users can stay safe by using crypto custody services that offer security features like a pre-agreed-upon word or phrase that lets a custodial or key management company know the holder is being actively attacked.

A database of known wrench attacks. Source: GitHub

The company can then freeze the assets, making sure they are not accessed by the attackers, and can even alert law enforcement authorities, he said.

He also suggested keeping a “decoy” crypto wallet with a small amount of funds to hand over to criminals in the event of an attack. 

Finally, crypto holders should keep a low profile and not discuss crypto topics online or make it public knowledge that they hold digital assets, he added.

At least 88 individuals have been arrested in connection with crypto wrench attacks in France, according to Vanessa Perrée, the country’s national prosecutor for organized crime.

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 04:35

"The World Is Losing Trust": Foreign Investment In Germany Plunges To Lowest Level Since 2009

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Foreign companies are continuing to shy away from investing in Germany, with the number of new projects falling last year to its lowest level since 2009, representing an eighth consecutive annual decline.

An analysis by the auditing and consulting firm EY, reported by the German Press Agency, found that foreign investors announced 548 new projects in Germany in 2025. That was 10 percent fewer than the year before.

Henrik Ahlers, the head of EY in Germany, said the figures were a “warning sign for Germany as a business location. Germany is falling behind, and other European locations are developing significantly better.”

He said Germany has talked for years about the need for reform, but has done too little, while other countries have made government services more digital, simplified their tax systems, and made it easier for companies to do business.

“In Germany, high taxes, high labor costs, expensive energy, and at the same time, paralyzing bureaucracy are stifling investment,” Ahlers noted.

“Germany’s inability to reform has now become known worldwide. Unfortunately, little remains of its image as a strong, high-quality location and an economic rock in turbulent times,” he added.

The fall in investment comes at a difficult time for the German economy. Last month, the Halle Institute for Economic Research said company bankruptcies in Germany had reached their highest level since 2005.

The institute recorded 4,573 bankruptcies among partnerships and corporations in the first three months of the year. That was higher than the level seen during the 2009 financial crisis.

The last time the figure was higher was in the third quarter of 2005, when 4,771 bankruptcies were recorded.

The rise was especially sharp in March, when bankruptcies were 71 percent above the average for the same month between 2016 and 2019.

Germany’s industrial sector is also under pressure. A Reuters report last August said 245,500 industrial jobs had been lost in Germany since 2019, before the coronavirus crisis.

Volkswagen has become one of the clearest examples of the problems facing German industry. The carmaker plans to cut around 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 after reporting a sharp fall in profits.

Its net profit fell 44 percent in 2025 to €6.9 billion, the lowest level since the fallout from the emissions scandal. Revenue was almost unchanged at just under €322 billion, while global deliveries slipped slightly to just under 9 million vehicles.

Volkswagen blamed the fall in profit on problems at Porsche AG, U.S. import tariffs, and the cost of restructuring the business. Porsche’s operating profit fell from more than €5 billion to just €90 million in a year.

Volkswagen finance chief Arno Antlitz said the company’s current level of profit was not good enough, explaining the drop had been “shaped by geopolitical tensions, tariffs, and intense competitive pressure” but noting that the company’s current operating margin was “not sufficient in the long run.”

Across wider Europe, EY said foreign investors announced 5,026 new projects last year, down 7 percent from the year before.

France remained in first place with 852 projects, followed by the United Kingdom with 730. Germany was third.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said the figures showed that international confidence in Germany was falling.

“The world is losing trust: Foreign companies are investing less and less in Germany,” she wrote on X. “In 2025, the number of investments fell by 10% to the lowest level since 2009. Germany can no longer afford the reform refusal of the Black-Red coalition!”

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2026 - 04:00

Shurk: Prominent Democrats Must Go To Prison

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Until then, it’s open season on all of us...

Reports last week confirmed that former special counsel Jack Smith “secretly arranged” to preserve evidence in his criminal cases against President Trump in order to maintain the threat of future prosecution once the president leaves office.  This is not a big surprise.  

Democrats have thrown every civic norm out the window in their ruthless efforts to target Trump’s businesses and send him to prison for life.

In his quest to imprison an American president, Jack Smith accused Trump of engaging in a conspiracy to “overthrow” the 2020 election, as well as retaining possession of classified documents after leaving the White House.  Both allegations are ridiculous, and Smith’s own words make him sound like a lawfare hitman and anti-MAGA zealot.  He told members of Congress in January, “Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, it was foreseeable to him, and that he sought to exploit the violence.” 

 Smith stated emphatically that Trump committed “serious crimes.”

Serious crimes?  You mean like using the FBI to spy on all the Republican presidential primary candidates in 2015 and 2016?  Oh right, that was President Obama.  Or fabricating intelligence in order to justify a counterintelligence operation against candidate Trump?  Oh, that was Obama’s corrupt CIA director, John Brennan.  Or paying British Intelligence operatives to manufacture a fake “Russia collusion” dossier implicating Trump?  Oh, that was Hillary Clinton.  Or using the FBI and CIA to frame President Trump as a Russian spy?  Oh, that was Obama and Clinton, too.  Or sabotaging President Trump’s administration by using a Democrat spy on the National Intelligence Council to construct a false story about an innocuous phone call in order to trigger a bogus impeachment?  Oh, that was Intelligence Community Democrats attempting to hide Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine by, again, framing President Trump for a quid-pro-quo “crime” he never committed.  Or submitting fraudulent documents to the FISA Court in order to maintain spying operations against President Trump?  Oh, that was corrupt James Comey, corrupt Robert Mueller, corrupt Andrew Weissmann, corrupt Norm Eisen, corrupt Mary McCord, and their Democrat accomplices in the FBI and DOJ who covered up Obama’s illegal spying operations while framing President Trump as a criminal, spy, and traitor.

Listening to Jack Smith call President Trump a “serious” criminal sounds ridiculous when serious criminals Obama, Clinton, Brennan, Comey, and legions of their Democrat colleagues, subordinates, and co-conspirators in the DOJ, FBI, CIA, D.C. courts, and FISA Court (see Judge James Boasberg’s impeachable offenses) have never been properly investigated or punished for undermining President Trump’s election, sabotaging his administration, and framing him for treason.  The most powerful Democrats in the country organized a coup d’état in broad daylight and dragged the country through a barbed-wire field of partisan propaganda for the last ten years, and Jack Smith wants Americans to be upset that President Trump retained documents that he was entitled to possess?  It’s just such lunacy.  The constant gaslighting from D.C. operatives is equally infuriating and exhausting.

Glossing over the Democrats’ monstrous Russia Collusion Hoax, their relentless efforts to subvert the Trump-led government, and their continuing obsession with tossing the president in prison for imaginary crimes is bad enough, but Jack Smith does what all Democrats do: He pretends that the January 6, 2021, protest for election integrity was an attempt by Trump and his supporters to overthrow the government.  This lie is so brazen that it’s astonishing how Democrats can keep telling it with straight faces.

The people who showed up at the Capitol that day had one objective: to express their strong belief that mail-in-ballot fraud, violations of multiple states’ electoral statutes, and numerous voting discrepancies had tainted the 2020 election.  Several senators intended to make these very arguments before the certification of the election’s results.  The people who gathered outside the Capitol were exercising their First Amendment right to assemble peaceably.  They were unarmed.  Most had no criminal records.  A large number had served their country in various capacities.  Most who entered the Capitol walked around as tourists, took pictures, interacted in a friendly manner with Capitol Police, and posed no threat to anyone.

Only after law enforcement officers chose to fire flash-bang grenades on the assembled crowd did a section of the protest turn into something that could be described as a riot.  Trump supporters — not police officers — died on January 6.  Ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional rights were thrown into a state of fear of being hurt or killed.

Nevertheless, Smith continues to propagate the lie that the three-hour event at the Capitol was somehow the greatest threat to the country since 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War (real comparisons that Democrat propagandists continue to make).  Smith and his fellow Democrats desperately wish for Americans to believe that a hot-chocolate-drinking gathering of grandparents, revelers, and veterans was somehow going to topple the government of the United States.  If a crowd of retirees is capable of overrunning Washington, what’s the point of a trillion-dollar military budget?

Smith’s perpetuation of the Democrats’ J6 propaganda is bad enough, but the fact that he treats that day as equivalent to the Civil War is all the more preposterous given that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their fellow Democrats openly encouraged Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists to burn down neighborhoods, loot businesses, and murder civilians throughout the summer of 2020.  If President Trump “caused Jan. 6” and the events of that day were “foreseeable” to him, then the violence and mayhem of 2020’s so-called “summer of love” were certainly foreseeable to Democrats.  The BLM riots of 2020 were the most costly in American history, and Vice President Harris encouraged Democrats to donate money to a bail fund that put arsonists, rapists, and murderers back on the street.

Were the Democrat-organized riots of 2020 “foreseeable”?  

Of course.  

Did prominent Democrats “exploit the violence,” as Smith accuses Trump of doing with January 6?  

They absolutely did. 

Biden and Harris ran for the White House on the message that the violence would end once they were elected.  

Will preening, self-righteous Jack Smith investigate, harass, arrest, or prosecute any of these Democrats?  Of course not.  Will Democrat rioters be tossed into pre-trial solitary confinement and refused bail by partisan prosecutors and judges?  Definitely not.  To this day, Democrats celebrate BLM and Antifa domestic terrorists as champions for civil rights.  When Democrats burn cities to the ground, the arsonists get statues.  When MAGA Americans protest for free and fair voting, they are condemned for crimes they never committed.

Unfortunately, this is how leftists all over the world now operate.  

Brazil’s communist President Lula has imprisoned his predecessor, President Bolsonaro, for supposedly trying to overthrow the government.  French President Macron has permitted his political opposition, Marine Le Pen, to be prosecuted and convicted for similarly bogus “embezzlement” crimes.  Germany has flirted with designating the popular anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany, a “terrorist” organization and banning its candidates from running for office.  When the “wrong” candidate won Romania’s presidential election eighteen months ago, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the outcome by blaming “Russian interference.”

If President Trump hadn’t possessed the financial resources and sheer grit to face down the onslaught of malicious and meritless prosecutions against him, he would likely be in a courtroom or a prison today.  If he hadn’t been re-elected a third time, January 6 defendants would still be awaiting trial or serving time in prison for an imaginary “insurrection.”

Screw Jack Smith.  He’s no lawman, and he has no principles.  He’s nothing but a corrupt propagandist, partisan hack, and lawfare assassin.

Nothing will change until prominent Democrats are prosecuted and convicted for their crimes.  Until then, it’s open season on all of us.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 23:20

Which US States Gained The Most Residents In 2025

Nearly 15 million Americans moved in 2025, with many relocating across state lines in search of lower costs, job opportunities, and warmer climates.

This map, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, shows net migration per 10,000 residents across all 50 states in 2025, revealing where population inflows were strongest and which states saw the biggest outflows.

The data comes from HireAHelper.

Southern and Mountain West states dominated the rankings for inbound migration, while several high-cost coastal states continued to lose residents.

The data reflects large-scale shifts happening in the country’s population distribution, both from the Eastern half to the Western half, as well as shifts away from more expensive states to cheaper, often inland ones.

The Mountain West Over the West Coast

In 2025, the Western half of the U.S. saw a continuation of post-COVID trends as people left behind coastal states like Washington (-10.7) and Oregon (-9.0) in favor of more inland Mountain West states like Wyoming (+26.0), Utah (+7.3), and especially Idaho (+63.2).

The data table below highlights the net migration loss/gain per 10,000 inhabitants in 2025:

The more populous coastal states, which have long been hubs for key economic sectors like tech and aviation, have seen a number of moves in recent years owing to jobs either relocating or shifting to remote work.

Nowhere on the West Coast saw a bigger drop than California, which saw a net migration loss of -25.1, as nearly 100,000 residents left behind the increasingly unaffordable state in favor of cheaper neighboring states like Nevada, which lacks a state income tax.

The Cost of Living Factor

California is not alone in losing people over affordability issues. If net migration trends are any indication, other high cost of living states such as New York (-28.2) and Massachusetts (-37.9) also increasingly shed residents.

A majority of the Northeast fared similarly, with all states but Delaware, Maine, and New Hampshire seeing more people leave than arrive in 2025.

And in the immediate region surrounding the nation’s capital, the states of Maryland (-27.4) and Virginia (-13.7) also saw negative net migration, likely reflecting in part the large reduction in the federal workforce seen over the course of the year.

The Rise of the Sunbelt

If one region is seeing across-the-board growth, it’s the South, led by states like South Carolina (+79.7), Tennessee (+43.6), and Alabama (+36.6).

Long one of the more economically depressed regions of the country, a combination of lower costs of living and nicer weather has led to rapid growth for southern “Sun Belt” states such as Arkansas and Oklahoma, to say nothing of massive favorites like Texas and the Sunshine State of Florida.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The Decline of Housing Affordability in the U.S. on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 22:45

The Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule Is Fully Enforced In 2026 - What Beneficiaries Need To Do Now

Authored by Adam H. Douglas via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If you inherited a traditional IRA from someone who was already taking required minimum distributions (RMDs), you may have to take annual withdrawals for the next decade, and the account must be empty by the end of the tenth year.

Many inherited IRA beneficiaries must now take annual RMDs. Vitalii Vodolazskyi/Shutterstock

The Internal Revenue Service waived penalties for missed withdrawals from 2021 through 2024 while the rules were being finalized. That grace period is over. Starting with the 2025 tax year, the rules are fully enforced. If you missed a 2025 RMD, a 25 percent penalty applies unless you take corrective action now.

Who Does The 10-Year Rule Apply To?

The SECURE Act, passed in 2019, eliminated the "stretch IRA" for most non-spouse beneficiaries. Under the old rules, you had an option to spread withdrawals across your own lifetime. That option is gone for most people who inherit today.

If you are a non-eligible designated beneficiary (NEDB), which covers most adult children and other non-spouse heirs, the 10-year rule is probably going to apply to you. In general, you are exempt if you fall into one of these categories:

• The surviving spouse of the deceased
• A minor child of the deceased, though the 10-year rule applies once you reach adulthood
• A beneficiary who is chronically ill or disabled
• A beneficiary who is not more than 10 years younger than the original owner

What if none of those apply to you? Then the 10-year rule is likely to be your framework.

When Do Annual Withdrawals Have To Start?

The answer depends on whether the original IRA owner died before or after their required beginning date (RBD), generally April 1 of the year following the year they turned 73.

• If the original owner died before their RBD and was not yet taking RMDs: No annual withdrawals are required, and the account must be emptied by end of year 10.
• If the original owner died on or after their RBD and was already taking RMDs: The general rule is that annual withdrawals are required every year, and the account must be emptied by end of year 10.

If your parent was already taking RMDs when they passed, you must take a distribution every year from year one through year 10 - you cannot skip years and take everything in year 10.

The 10-year clock starts the year after the original owner's death. If you inherited the IRA in 2022, your deadline to fully empty the account is Dec. 31, 2032.

How Much Has To Come Out Each Year?

There is no fixed percentage. Your annual RMD is calculated using two inputs:

• The account's balance as of Dec. 31 of the prior year
• Your life expectancy factor from the IRS Single Life Expectancy Table in IRS Publication 590-B

The calculation:

Prior year-end balance ÷ life expectancy factor = Your RMD for the year

Your life expectancy factor is based on your age as of Dec. 31 of the current distribution year. Look up that number in the IRS table each year; it changes as you age. You recalculate annually using the updated factor and the prior year's Dec. 31 balance.

Your IRA custodian can often provide this calculation directly. A tax professional can verify it, which is worth doing in your first distribution year.

What Happens If You Missed Your 2025 RMD?

The penalty for a missed RMD is 25 percent of the amount you should have withdrawn. The IRS reduces that to 10 percent if you take the corrective distribution and file Form 5329 within the two-year correction window.

Here is what to do if you missed a 2025 distribution:

• Take the missed distribution now. Withdraw the full amount you should have taken in 2025 as soon as possible.
• File Form 5329. This IRS form reports additional taxes on qualified retirement plans. You will attach it to your tax return or file it as a standalone form.
• Request penalty abatement, if applicable. If this is your first missed RMD and you have a reasonable explanation, the penalty might be waived by the IRS. Attach a written explanation to Form 5329 when you file.

Rather than risk it not being waived, act now. The two-year window for the reduced 10 percent penalty is already running.

FAQs About The Inherited IRA 10-Year Rule What Is The Difference Between An Eligible Designated Beneficiary And A Non-Eligible Designated Beneficiary?

An eligible designated beneficiary includes surviving spouses, minor children of the deceased, disabled or chronically ill individuals, and beneficiaries not more than 10 years younger than the original owner. These individuals can spread withdrawals over their lifetime instead of following the 10-year rule. Everyone else is a non-eligible designated beneficiary subject to the 10-year rule. Most adult children who inherit a parent's traditional IRA fall into the NEDB category.

Can I Wait Until Year 10 And Take Everything Out At Once?

It depends on when the original owner died. If they died before their required beginning date and had not yet started RMDs, you are not required to take annual distributions and may take the full balance in year ten. If they had already started RMDs, annual withdrawals are required throughout the 10-year period. Taking everything in year ten in that case does not avoid penalties for missed annual distributions in earlier years.

How Do I Find My Life Expectancy Factor For The RMD Calculation?

Your life expectancy factor comes from the Single Life Expectancy Table in IRS Publication 590-B, available at irs.gov. Find your age as of Dec. 31 of the current distribution year and read the corresponding factor. Divide the account's prior December 31 balance by that factor to get your RMD amount. Your IRA custodian may also calculate this for you. Verifying it independently is advisable, particularly in the first year of distributions.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 22:10

$150 Humanoid Robot House Cleaning Service Threatens To Undercut Maid Services

It's no secret that some humanoid robotics companies are training their machines for work on factory floors, while others are positioning their bots to enter homes in the coming years.

One of the first real signs of humanoids entering homes today is a new cleaning service in San Francisco that uses what appear to be Unitree humanoid robots trained to clean everything from floors and countertops to stovetops, mirrors, and nearly any surface in the house.

Called "Gatsby," the new service deploys humanoid robots to homes for a flat service charge of $150.

"We just made U.S. history. Today, Gatsby ran the first-ever consumer cleaning by a humanoid robot in the United States," Gatsby wrote in a press release earlier this month.

The company noted, "We picked someone random off our SF waitlist, they booked a cleaning, we delivered the robot, and it cleaned their entire apartment on its own. No humans inside. This is the first of its kind in the U.S., and we're proud to be the pioneers writing this line in the history books today."

For the average deep clean of a typical U.S. home, the price ranges between $200 and $400, and for much larger homes, $500 or more, according to Angi List. This means the robotic cleaning service can even undercut an independent cleaner or a professional cleaning company, which often employs migrant workers.

News of Gatsby's cleaning service comes as shipments of humanoid robots are expected to ramp up this year and accelerate by the end of the decade, according to a recent UBS note.

The goal of tech firms is very clear: deploy these bots first on factory floors, in warehouses, and at logistics hubs, then move into consumer markets once the machines become reliable enough for home use.

Once these bots enter the consumer market, they will begin to chip away at demand for migrant labor and drive down household costs for services such as cleaning, cooking, laundry, and other chores, which have traditionally required human labor and can cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 21:35

Trump Indicates He'll Sign Bill Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump has indicated he would sign a bill to make daylight saving time permanent as a House of Representatives committee advanced a measure that would codify the change.

U.S. President Donald Trump returns to the White House in Washington on May 15, 2026. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

"Big Vote today (48-1!) in the Energy and Commerce Committee on a Bill including The Sunshine Protection Act, which will be making Daylight Saving Time Permanent! This is so important in that Hundreds of Millions of Dollars are spent every year by people, Cities, and States, being forced to change their Clocks. Many of these Clocks are located in Towers, and the cost of renting, or using, Heavy Equipment to do this twice a year is prohibitive!" Trump wrote on Thursday in a Truth Social post.

The president said that there is considerable "work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice yearly production," referring to the changing of the time. He also said that "it will also be a very nice WIN for the Republican Party."

"We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day - And who can be against that - This is an easy one!" Trump added.

Known as the Sunshine Protection Act, the bill was proposed by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), who released a statement saying that it would "bring us one step closer to ending the outdated and unpopular practice of changing our clocks twice a year."

"Floridians and Americans across the country are tired of the biannual time change, and the evidence is clear that permanent daylight saving time can improve public health, reduce traffic accidents, lower crime and encourage more outdoor activity," he said in the statement.

In a social media post last year, Trump urged Congress to address the issue.

"The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day. Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!" he wrote in April 2025.

For years, advocates have called for the United States to stop making the twice-yearly changes. Among those urging that the country stick to one time for the entire year are the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

A poll from The Associated Press and NORC released in October 2025 also found that only 12 percent of Americans favor the current daylight saving time system. Around 47 percent are opposed to the current system and 40 percent are neutral, it also found.

The United States first started using the time shift more than a century ago, during World War I, and again during World War II. Congress passed a law in 1966 that allowed states to decide whether to participate but required their decisions to be uniform across their territories. All states except Arizona and Hawaii make the time shifts, and those two states remain on standard time year-round.

According to Buchanan's office, the Sunshine Protection Act was included in an amendment to a larger bill, the Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 05/24/2026 - 21:00

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