Zero Hedge

US Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Jumped In May, Inventories Surge

US Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Jumped In May, Inventories Surge

With the Spring selling season in tatters, existing home sales were expected to rebound in May very modestly (+1.1% MoM) off recent record lows, but instead they outperformed, rising at 3.2% MoM (and April's 0.2% MoM rise was revised higher to a +0.7% MoM rise). That lifted existing home sales up 3.22% YoY - the strongest since September 2025...

Source: Bloomberg

That beat lifted existing home sales SAAR to its highest level of the year (but not exactly signaling a trend)...

Source: Bloomberg

“More Americans are on the move, with home sales rising to the highest level since December,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement.

“This is great news for the housing market and the economy.”

Sellers are giving up some ground on price and “meeting buyers where they are,” Realtor.com said.

In May, the median sales price of an existing home climbed 1.3% from a year ago to $429,300, NAR data show.

Meantime, inventory rose slightly from a year ago to 1.55 million, the highest since July and representing 4.5 months of supply at the current sales pace.

Sales rose in the South, Northeast and Midwest from a month earlier, while they were unchanged in the West. In the Midwest, transactions reached 1 million, the highest pace since April 2023.

First-time buyers accounted for 35% of sales, compared with 33% a month earlier and 30% a year ago.

Finally, it appears home sales are catching up to the prior decline in mortgage rates (but we note that rates have been rising since)...

Source: Bloomberg

“Improving affordability is helping drive this momentum,” Yun said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 10:11

US Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Jumped In May, Inventories Surge

US Existing Home Sales Unexpectedly Jumped In May, Inventories Surge

With the Spring selling season in tatters, existing home sales were expected to rebound in May very modestly (+1.1% MoM) off recent record lows, but instead they outperformed, rising at 3.2% MoM (and April's 0.2% MoM rise was revised higher to a +0.7% MoM rise). That lifted existing home sales up 3.22% YoY - the strongest since September 2025...

Source: Bloomberg

That beat lifted existing home sales SAAR to its highest level of the year (but not exactly signaling a trend)...

Source: Bloomberg

“More Americans are on the move, with home sales rising to the highest level since December,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement.

“This is great news for the housing market and the economy.”

Sellers are giving up some ground on price and “meeting buyers where they are,” Realtor.com said.

In May, the median sales price of an existing home climbed 1.3% from a year ago to $429,300, NAR data show.

Meantime, inventory rose slightly from a year ago to 1.55 million, the highest since July and representing 4.5 months of supply at the current sales pace.

Sales rose in the South, Northeast and Midwest from a month earlier, while they were unchanged in the West. In the Midwest, transactions reached 1 million, the highest pace since April 2023.

First-time buyers accounted for 35% of sales, compared with 33% a month earlier and 30% a year ago.

Finally, it appears home sales are catching up to the prior decline in mortgage rates (but we note that rates have been rising since)...

Source: Bloomberg

“Improving affordability is helping drive this momentum,” Yun said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 10:11

Trump-Netanyahu "Differences": A Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine

Trump-Netanyahu "Differences": A Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine

By Michael Every of Rabobank

As You Were... But As Who Was? 

Yesterday nearly saw a full restart of the Israel-Iran war, apparently pulled back from the brink by intervention from President Trump. After yet another Middle East rollercoaster for markets it’s now ‘as you were’, with oil --so everything else-- little changed. The larger issue behind that pricing, however, is the key question - ‘As who was?’

Iran set up its proxy network, centered on terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, to protect itself: if Israel attacked it, Hezbollah would attack Israel. However, Tehran now has to attack Israel, with counterattacks on it in response, to defend its ‘shield’. That’s a huge Iranian strategic setback. As such, Tehran is trying to tie Israel vs. Hezbollah to itself vs. the US to divide the US from Israel, which now have different needs: a deal vs. finishing the job militarily or via regime change. That dynamic has huge implications for when and how this war ends, so for energy, so for markets.

While Israel and Iran say they will stop their attacks, Israeli PM Netanyahu last night gave a public address where he stated: “Iran and Hezbollah are weaker than ever, and we are stronger than ever – but our battle against them is still not finished. In the last 24 hours, Iran and Hezbollah tried to impose a new equation upon us… an equation I find intolerable and unacceptable. They thought they would fire at Israel from Lebanese territory and from Iran – and we would not act. That did not happen, and it will not happen. Not on my watch!... At the moment, we are holding our fire, because after we struck the terror regime in Tehran, it ceased attacking us. In the event that Iran makes the mistake of resuming attacks on us – we will respond with overwhelming force.”

Moreover, Israel will hit Hezbollah in Beirut if it fires at Israel from south Lebanon, which Iran says is a red line that will trigger more attacks on the Jewish state, restarting this war.

If Iran tells Hezbollah to ceasefire, markets can relax;

If not, and Israel hits Hezbollah, Iran has to decide if it wants to fire at Israel - and restart the war;

If Trump forces Israel to hold back vs. Hezbollah, Iran will have linked the two fronts and divided the US and Israel – which likely sees more war.

After all, Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, its 1967 Six-Day War, its 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear programme, and its 2007 strike against Syria’s nuclear programme all took place against US wishes. To expect otherwise this time is unwise. Indeed, Trump-Netanyahu differences could be a good cop-bad cop routine to allow the US to push for a deal while Israel does the fighting.

In the background, Yemen’s Houthis claim they will restart a maritime blockade of Israel in the Red Sea, which was applied far more broadly the last time they put it in place. Obviously, that can threaten cargo and energy flows at this juncture, as a US Navy F-18 struck and disabled an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman and the EU hit Iran’s Navy… with sanctions.

In short, this crisis is far from over, even as Trump says “total victory” will be declared in the next two weeks as Iranian negotiators are “willing to give us everything,” and VP Vance added that the deal being discussed was “a home run” for the US. Yet the inside baseball question remains which negotiators the US is talking to given local reports that contact has been lost with Supreme Leader Khamenei Jr. and another that IRGV leader Vahidi was killed in a recent Israeli strike.

Elsewhere in geopolitics, Berlin says the Franco-German fighter jet project is dead, a major blow to future pan-European defence plans; Switzerland is weighing a Franco-Italian alternative to US air defences given a 5-year wait for the latter; and a French fighter jet shot down a suspected Russian drone in Latvian airspace.

That’s as Germany claimed it’s ready to take the reins from the US in talks with Putin despite Russia rejecting Ukrainian and European peace initiatives, saying instead that the battlefield will decide the war – but as Moscow pauses its CCTV systems after Israel hacked Iran’s to target its Supreme Leader. Back in the UK, a secret camera was found in the ceiling panel of the room in a sensitive government building where the decision was made to approve the new Chinese embassy.

Showing how lines on the map can move as the driver of lines on the screen, the US is considering buying the Chagos Islands to take control of the strategic UK airbase on Diego Garcia; Mauritius, whom the UK is controversially trying to hand the islands to, is today demanding they get them ASAP to avoid that outcome.

China’s Xi Jinping, on a state visit, pledged “unwavering” support for North Korea, making some things crystal clear, as Bloomberg publishes its estimates for the economic damage from a war over Taiwan: $10 trillion, apparently. Which justifies or incentivizes doing what as insurance?

In LatAm, Peru is set for lengthy vote count as its presidential race is still too close to call, and Colombia will see a presidential runoff ahead following the leftist Cepeda’s first round election loss.

In geoeconomics, the US added Alibaba, BYD and other Chinese tech champions to its military company blacklist. That’s as Anthropic's Mythos can reportedly now exploit new software flaws in mere hours and OpenAI gets ready for its IPO, Trump is mirroring Bernie Sanders in arguing the state should get stakes in AI giants - and presumably not just in military and security areas but across the economic spectrum. To say we are moving the political-economy Overton Window is an understatement: at this stage are there any actual windows left? Indeed, could the walls and the roof fall in on conventional analysis using conventional wisdom?

The European press talks of how ‘China is killing Europe’s chemicals industry. Brussels wants to intervene’ and France’s Macron is reportedly to court China to get them to address trade imbalances – offering and threatening what exactly?

Indonesia is also weighing export rule exemptions for commodity traders to try to calm local markets after the recent de facto state control of that key area of the economy.

At the same time, Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee was declared an unlawful “tax” by a US judge, as were his tariffs of course, which will now be appealed (was the lower via fee also a tax? If not, why not?).

As you were then… but as who was? And what will we be soon – besides confused?

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 09:45

Trump-Netanyahu "Differences": A Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine

Trump-Netanyahu "Differences": A Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine

By Michael Every of Rabobank

As You Were... But As Who Was? 

Yesterday nearly saw a full restart of the Israel-Iran war, apparently pulled back from the brink by intervention from President Trump. After yet another Middle East rollercoaster for markets it’s now ‘as you were’, with oil --so everything else-- little changed. The larger issue behind that pricing, however, is the key question - ‘As who was?’

Iran set up its proxy network, centered on terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, to protect itself: if Israel attacked it, Hezbollah would attack Israel. However, Tehran now has to attack Israel, with counterattacks on it in response, to defend its ‘shield’. That’s a huge Iranian strategic setback. As such, Tehran is trying to tie Israel vs. Hezbollah to itself vs. the US to divide the US from Israel, which now have different needs: a deal vs. finishing the job militarily or via regime change. That dynamic has huge implications for when and how this war ends, so for energy, so for markets.

While Israel and Iran say they will stop their attacks, Israeli PM Netanyahu last night gave a public address where he stated: “Iran and Hezbollah are weaker than ever, and we are stronger than ever – but our battle against them is still not finished. In the last 24 hours, Iran and Hezbollah tried to impose a new equation upon us… an equation I find intolerable and unacceptable. They thought they would fire at Israel from Lebanese territory and from Iran – and we would not act. That did not happen, and it will not happen. Not on my watch!... At the moment, we are holding our fire, because after we struck the terror regime in Tehran, it ceased attacking us. In the event that Iran makes the mistake of resuming attacks on us – we will respond with overwhelming force.”

Moreover, Israel will hit Hezbollah in Beirut if it fires at Israel from south Lebanon, which Iran says is a red line that will trigger more attacks on the Jewish state, restarting this war.

If Iran tells Hezbollah to ceasefire, markets can relax;

If not, and Israel hits Hezbollah, Iran has to decide if it wants to fire at Israel - and restart the war;

If Trump forces Israel to hold back vs. Hezbollah, Iran will have linked the two fronts and divided the US and Israel – which likely sees more war.

After all, Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, its 1967 Six-Day War, its 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear programme, and its 2007 strike against Syria’s nuclear programme all took place against US wishes. To expect otherwise this time is unwise. Indeed, Trump-Netanyahu differences could be a good cop-bad cop routine to allow the US to push for a deal while Israel does the fighting.

In the background, Yemen’s Houthis claim they will restart a maritime blockade of Israel in the Red Sea, which was applied far more broadly the last time they put it in place. Obviously, that can threaten cargo and energy flows at this juncture, as a US Navy F-18 struck and disabled an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman and the EU hit Iran’s Navy… with sanctions.

In short, this crisis is far from over, even as Trump says “total victory” will be declared in the next two weeks as Iranian negotiators are “willing to give us everything,” and VP Vance added that the deal being discussed was “a home run” for the US. Yet the inside baseball question remains which negotiators the US is talking to given local reports that contact has been lost with Supreme Leader Khamenei Jr. and another that IRGV leader Vahidi was killed in a recent Israeli strike.

Elsewhere in geopolitics, Berlin says the Franco-German fighter jet project is dead, a major blow to future pan-European defence plans; Switzerland is weighing a Franco-Italian alternative to US air defences given a 5-year wait for the latter; and a French fighter jet shot down a suspected Russian drone in Latvian airspace.

That’s as Germany claimed it’s ready to take the reins from the US in talks with Putin despite Russia rejecting Ukrainian and European peace initiatives, saying instead that the battlefield will decide the war – but as Moscow pauses its CCTV systems after Israel hacked Iran’s to target its Supreme Leader. Back in the UK, a secret camera was found in the ceiling panel of the room in a sensitive government building where the decision was made to approve the new Chinese embassy.

Showing how lines on the map can move as the driver of lines on the screen, the US is considering buying the Chagos Islands to take control of the strategic UK airbase on Diego Garcia; Mauritius, whom the UK is controversially trying to hand the islands to, is today demanding they get them ASAP to avoid that outcome.

China’s Xi Jinping, on a state visit, pledged “unwavering” support for North Korea, making some things crystal clear, as Bloomberg publishes its estimates for the economic damage from a war over Taiwan: $10 trillion, apparently. Which justifies or incentivizes doing what as insurance?

In LatAm, Peru is set for lengthy vote count as its presidential race is still too close to call, and Colombia will see a presidential runoff ahead following the leftist Cepeda’s first round election loss.

In geoeconomics, the US added Alibaba, BYD and other Chinese tech champions to its military company blacklist. That’s as Anthropic's Mythos can reportedly now exploit new software flaws in mere hours and OpenAI gets ready for its IPO, Trump is mirroring Bernie Sanders in arguing the state should get stakes in AI giants - and presumably not just in military and security areas but across the economic spectrum. To say we are moving the political-economy Overton Window is an understatement: at this stage are there any actual windows left? Indeed, could the walls and the roof fall in on conventional analysis using conventional wisdom?

The European press talks of how ‘China is killing Europe’s chemicals industry. Brussels wants to intervene’ and France’s Macron is reportedly to court China to get them to address trade imbalances – offering and threatening what exactly?

Indonesia is also weighing export rule exemptions for commodity traders to try to calm local markets after the recent de facto state control of that key area of the economy.

At the same time, Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee was declared an unlawful “tax” by a US judge, as were his tariffs of course, which will now be appealed (was the lower via fee also a tax? If not, why not?).

As you were then… but as who was? And what will we be soon – besides confused?

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 09:45

Apollo And Blackstone Raise $35 Billion For Anthropic In One Of The Biggest Ever Private Credit SPV Deals

Apollo And Blackstone Raise $35 Billion For Anthropic In One Of The Biggest Ever Private Credit SPV Deals

Back in January, when we profiled Meta's landmark $27.3 billion SPV deal named "Beignet" for the Hyperion data center located in Louisiana, in which Blue Owl provided the private credit, we said to "expect hundreds of billions of these in 2026."

Fast forward five months when we now read that Apollo and Blackstone have finalized a $35BN private credit deal that will help finance Anthropic’s growth plans, even as traditional "banks are choking" on the amount of AI debt they have to issue. 

The two private credit giants - which in a parallel universe are struggling with soaring redemption requests and gating retail investors in their private credit BDCs as documented here extensively in recent months - led the financing, one of the largest private credit deals completed, which will fund Anthropic’s purchase of Alphabet-developed chips.

The deal, dubbed project “Big Sky”, comes amid concerns that the AI frenzy has overheated the broader market. Shares in chipmakers rebounded on Monday after tumbling last week, led by Broadcom’s fall in market value. It also adds to a deluge of chip-backed loans that sparked debate over how quickly graphics processing units would depreciate as AI technology evolves.

In this type of financing structure, a special-purpose vehicle raises capital through a mix of debt and equity to purchase the chips, which are then leased to a customer, in this case Anthropic. The debt is primarily backed by the resulting lease payments, along with the unknown long-term value of the chips. In this case, the $35 billion debt facility was structured across three tranches. The senior layers — the $6 billion notes dubbed A1 and $24 billion of A2 notes — are backed by Broadcom, allowing the debt to secure lower borrowing costs aligned with Broadcom’s strong credit profile. The notes received private ratings in the mid-investment grade tier.

The transaction wrapped up days after Alphabet completed one of the largest equity offerings in history, as it looks to raise $85bn to fund Google’s AI build-out, and as SpaceX prepares for a flotation that could raise a record $86bn. Anthropic also announced it had confidentially filed for an IPO shortly after its blockbuster $65bn private financing round.

As discussed previously, the AI borrowing spree has reached beyond traditional US capital markets, where AI is expected to raise $400 billion in debt, rising to over $1 trillion through 2028 to meet roughly $1.8 trillion in capex needs over the next two years, according to Morgan Stanley...

... with Amazon raising C$14bn (US$10bn) on Monday in the largest ever Canadian dollar bond sale. 

Similar to Meta's Beignet deal, Anthropic’s deal with Apollo and Blackstone relies on a complex structure that private investment groups routinely use to finance start-ups with backing from blue-chip companies. A special purpose vehicle formed by Apollo’s Atlas SP Partners raised the debt and equity, with lease agreements for the chips ultimately supporting the value of the transaction.

Per the FT, Apollo and Blackstone structured the loan across three tranches, with interest payments on the two senior segments backstopped by Broadcom. The chipmaker is making the so-called tensor processing units, or TPUs, with Google. Its agreement to provide support if Anthropic misses an interest payment helped vastly reduce the costs on the debt.

The two senior portions of the debt were split between banks and investors. Some $6bn of so-called A1 notes were sold to banks with an interest rate 1% over Treasuries. A further $24bn of A2 notes were sold on to investors in asset-backed credit markets, priced with a yield of 5.75 per cent. Buyers of the A2 tranche included institutional investors like Apollo’s Athene insurance arm, which favors high-quality debt to back its long-term liabilities. 

The $4.5bn of junior debt, which is not supported by Broadcom and therefore exposes lenders more acutely to Anthropic, carried an interest rate of 8.5%. Investors were also offered an original issue discount of 98 cents to 99 cents on the dollar depending on cheque sizes. In other words, without the implicit guarantee from an investment grade guarantor - like Broadcom in this case - the cost of capital is roughly double. 

In addition to the debt, Apollo’s Atlas SP Partners’ structured-finance unit provided $800 million in equity, meaning it’s effectively the owner of the SPV.

A key feature of the deal is Broadcom providing a “residual value support” agreement. That means that if Anthropic fails to make the lease payments for a certain period of time, the SPV will sell the chips to pay back the debt investors. If the value of the chips doesn’t make the debt investors whole, then Broadcom will make up the shortfall for 100% of the value owed to the A1 and A2 investors.  

This type of residual value feature has been used in another mega debt deal, though it financed the construction of a data center rather than chips. As noted above, Meta provided a similar protection for the value of its Hyperion facility in Louisiana - a transaction that Morgan Stanley arranged. That allowed the so-called Beignet bonds to trade in line with Meta’s corporate debt.

For those whose head is spinning with the circularity involved, this is how we described the deal last week when it was first floated: 

Broadcom is backstopping a massive $36 billion private credit SPV with Apollo and Blackstone which will help Anthropic buy Google chips... made by Broadcom. Oh, and yes: Google owns 14% of Anthropic...

But wait, there's more... because if that wasn't enough, Morgan Stanley, which advised Broadcom and arranged the transaction, is also lending money to investors participating in the deal!

And just because this is a "chip-backed" off-balance sheet SPV where nobody really knows who holds the debt, the monstrous circularity of all the deal aspects will be ignored until the AI credit bubble cracks. 

As for the punchline: demonstrating the insane frenzy of anything involving AI, investors involved in the deal did not even know what they were investing in! According to the FT, investors pitched on the deal were not given early access to Anthropic’s financials ahead of its IPO.

Not everyone involved in the deal is a total idiot: some investors passed on the deal over the delayed-draw format of the debt, which drives down yields because the money can be withdrawn in multiple tranches over a period of time.

Yet despite the smashing success of the deal, one glaring question remains. Recall, last week SpaceX penned a massive deal with Google (to urgently burnish the IPO candidate's financials just days ahead of its IPO), according to which Google will pay Elon Musk $920 million a month for access to about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs (unlike its hyperscaler peers, SpaceX has plenty of spare compute to rent out). And yet, despite seemingly telegraphing it is dramatically "compute constrained" as the SpaceX deal implies, it still has plenty of chip available that it can sell $35B of their chips to their biggest competitor, Anthropic.

This wasn't the only such deal: just days prior, Anthropic (which will use proceeds from this private credit SPV to purchase Google chips made by Broadcom), agreed to pay $1.5 billion a month for access to 325,000 Nvidia GPU also held by SpaceX. No wonder these sham agreements were structured so they can be terminated by either party after December 2026. 

For those shaking their heads at these glaring examples of circular bubble euphoria, fear not: you will have plenty of opportunities to enjoy more such deals (going back to our point up top): Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said the company hoped to connect “investor partners with the strongest balance sheets to deliver at scale sufficient compute capacity at the lowest cost”, pointing to the deal with Apollo and Blackstone as the first of many transactions to come.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 09:15

Apollo And Blackstone Raise $35 Billion For Anthropic In One Of The Biggest Ever Private Credit SPV Deals

Apollo And Blackstone Raise $35 Billion For Anthropic In One Of The Biggest Ever Private Credit SPV Deals

Back in January, when we profiled Meta's landmark $27.3 billion SPV deal named "Beignet" for the Hyperion data center located in Louisiana, in which Blue Owl provided the private credit, we said to "expect hundreds of billions of these in 2026."

Fast forward five months when we now read that Apollo and Blackstone have finalized a $35BN private credit deal that will help finance Anthropic’s growth plans, even as traditional "banks are choking" on the amount of AI debt they have to issue. 

The two private credit giants - which in a parallel universe are struggling with soaring redemption requests and gating retail investors in their private credit BDCs as documented here extensively in recent months - led the financing, one of the largest private credit deals completed, which will fund Anthropic’s purchase of Alphabet-developed chips.

The deal, dubbed project “Big Sky”, comes amid concerns that the AI frenzy has overheated the broader market. Shares in chipmakers rebounded on Monday after tumbling last week, led by Broadcom’s fall in market value. It also adds to a deluge of chip-backed loans that sparked debate over how quickly graphics processing units would depreciate as AI technology evolves.

In this type of financing structure, a special-purpose vehicle raises capital through a mix of debt and equity to purchase the chips, which are then leased to a customer, in this case Anthropic. The debt is primarily backed by the resulting lease payments, along with the unknown long-term value of the chips. In this case, the $35 billion debt facility was structured across three tranches. The senior layers — the $6 billion notes dubbed A1 and $24 billion of A2 notes — are backed by Broadcom, allowing the debt to secure lower borrowing costs aligned with Broadcom’s strong credit profile. The notes received private ratings in the mid-investment grade tier.

The transaction wrapped up days after Alphabet completed one of the largest equity offerings in history, as it looks to raise $85bn to fund Google’s AI build-out, and as SpaceX prepares for a flotation that could raise a record $86bn. Anthropic also announced it had confidentially filed for an IPO shortly after its blockbuster $65bn private financing round.

As discussed previously, the AI borrowing spree has reached beyond traditional US capital markets, where AI is expected to raise $400 billion in debt, rising to over $1 trillion through 2028 to meet roughly $1.8 trillion in capex needs over the next two years, according to Morgan Stanley...

... with Amazon raising C$14bn (US$10bn) on Monday in the largest ever Canadian dollar bond sale. 

Similar to Meta's Beignet deal, Anthropic’s deal with Apollo and Blackstone relies on a complex structure that private investment groups routinely use to finance start-ups with backing from blue-chip companies. A special purpose vehicle formed by Apollo’s Atlas SP Partners raised the debt and equity, with lease agreements for the chips ultimately supporting the value of the transaction.

Per the FT, Apollo and Blackstone structured the loan across three tranches, with interest payments on the two senior segments backstopped by Broadcom. The chipmaker is making the so-called tensor processing units, or TPUs, with Google. Its agreement to provide support if Anthropic misses an interest payment helped vastly reduce the costs on the debt.

The two senior portions of the debt were split between banks and investors. Some $6bn of so-called A1 notes were sold to banks with an interest rate 1% over Treasuries. A further $24bn of A2 notes were sold on to investors in asset-backed credit markets, priced with a yield of 5.75 per cent. Buyers of the A2 tranche included institutional investors like Apollo’s Athene insurance arm, which favors high-quality debt to back its long-term liabilities. 

The $4.5bn of junior debt, which is not supported by Broadcom and therefore exposes lenders more acutely to Anthropic, carried an interest rate of 8.5%. Investors were also offered an original issue discount of 98 cents to 99 cents on the dollar depending on cheque sizes. In other words, without the implicit guarantee from an investment grade guarantor - like Broadcom in this case - the cost of capital is roughly double. 

In addition to the debt, Apollo’s Atlas SP Partners’ structured-finance unit provided $800 million in equity, meaning it’s effectively the owner of the SPV.

A key feature of the deal is Broadcom providing a “residual value support” agreement. That means that if Anthropic fails to make the lease payments for a certain period of time, the SPV will sell the chips to pay back the debt investors. If the value of the chips doesn’t make the debt investors whole, then Broadcom will make up the shortfall for 100% of the value owed to the A1 and A2 investors.  

This type of residual value feature has been used in another mega debt deal, though it financed the construction of a data center rather than chips. As noted above, Meta provided a similar protection for the value of its Hyperion facility in Louisiana - a transaction that Morgan Stanley arranged. That allowed the so-called Beignet bonds to trade in line with Meta’s corporate debt.

For those whose head is spinning with the circularity involved, this is how we described the deal last week when it was first floated: 

Broadcom is backstopping a massive $36 billion private credit SPV with Apollo and Blackstone which will help Anthropic buy Google chips... made by Broadcom. Oh, and yes: Google owns 14% of Anthropic...

But wait, there's more... because if that wasn't enough, Morgan Stanley, which advised Broadcom and arranged the transaction, is also lending money to investors participating in the deal!

And just because this is a "chip-backed" off-balance sheet SPV where nobody really knows who holds the debt, the monstrous circularity of all the deal aspects will be ignored until the AI credit bubble cracks. 

As for the punchline: demonstrating the insane frenzy of anything involving AI, investors involved in the deal did not even know what they were investing in! According to the FT, investors pitched on the deal were not given early access to Anthropic’s financials ahead of its IPO.

Not everyone involved in the deal is a total idiot: some investors passed on the deal over the delayed-draw format of the debt, which drives down yields because the money can be withdrawn in multiple tranches over a period of time.

Yet despite the smashing success of the deal, one glaring question remains. Recall, last week SpaceX penned a massive deal with Google (to urgently burnish the IPO candidate's financials just days ahead of its IPO), according to which Google will pay Elon Musk $920 million a month for access to about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs (unlike its hyperscaler peers, SpaceX has plenty of spare compute to rent out). And yet, despite seemingly telegraphing it is dramatically "compute constrained" as the SpaceX deal implies, it still has plenty of chip available that it can sell $35B of their chips to their biggest competitor, Anthropic.

This wasn't the only such deal: just days prior, Anthropic (which will use proceeds from this private credit SPV to purchase Google chips made by Broadcom), agreed to pay $1.5 billion a month for access to 325,000 Nvidia GPU also held by SpaceX. No wonder these sham agreements were structured so they can be terminated by either party after December 2026. 

For those shaking their heads at these glaring examples of circular bubble euphoria, fear not: you will have plenty of opportunities to enjoy more such deals (going back to our point up top): Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said the company hoped to connect “investor partners with the strongest balance sheets to deliver at scale sufficient compute capacity at the lowest cost”, pointing to the deal with Apollo and Blackstone as the first of many transactions to come.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 09:15

Futures Rise As Tech Rebound Extends While Oil Drops

Futures Rise As Tech Rebound Extends While Oil Drops

US equity futures are higher as Monday’s US stock gains extend into today’s trading with both tech and small caps outperforming as the AI theme resumes its global surge and US/Iran deal optimism is back (on the back of the now daily optimistic comments from Trump) broadening the rally.  As of 8:00am ET, tech enthusiasm is on display with Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.8% as chipmakers including Marvell Technology Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. posted strong premarket gains, while S&P500 futures gain 0.4%. In premarket trading, Mag7 names are mostly higher; cyclicals ex-energy are leading defensives ex-HC. A similar theme played out in APAC, with the tech-laden Kospi soaring 8.2%. Europe's Stoxx 600 is rising alongside weaker energy prices with gains driven by financials and consumer names. Oil dipped after Trump said a framework of deal "within the next 2 days," though it is unclear what has changed from previous claims over the last 2 months. Commodities are reacting to headline risk with Brent down 2.1% as Israel and Iran halt attacks and Chinese oil imports declined, and WTI below $90/bbl. The downside in energy prices has provided a mild support for global fixed income markets, with US yields 1-2bps lower across the curve ahead of the US 3-year note auction. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot index is down 0.2%. Downside in USD/JPY from a report that the BOJ could hike in June and October proved fleeting. Precious metals are steady. Bitcoin sheds 1.3%. The macro data focus will be on weekly ADP, the NFIB Small Biz Survey where the Hiring sub-index may give add’l evidence for the labor market acceleration. Keep an eye on the 3Y bond auction today

In premarket trading, Mag 7 stocks are mostly higher (Nvidia +0.4%, Amazon +0.6%, Meta +1.1%, Alphabet +0.6%, Tesla +0.6%, Apple -0.4%, Microsoft -0.3%). 

  • Chipmakers, opticals and storage firms rise, on track to extend gains, as the group rebounds in the wake of Friday’s sharp selloff.
  • Lithium stocks rise as Citi remains bullish on the metal, seeing a recovery in prices after the recent selloff.
  • Applied Digital (APLD) is up 11% after the neocloud company said it signed a 15-year take-or-pay lease with a US-based artificial intelligence hyperscaler, for 210 megawatts of critical IT load at its Delta Forge 2 campus.
  • CECO Environmental Corp. (CECO) gains 13% as the manufacturer of water treatment equipment updated its full year outlook after closing Thermon Group Holdings acquisition.
  • GDS Holdings ADRS (GDS) rise along with other Chinese cloud providers as people familiar with the matter said that China is preparing to spend around $295 billion over the next five years to build data centers across the country.
  • Mission Produce (AVO) falls 2% after the avocado supplier reported adjusted earnings per share for the second quarter that missed the average analyst estimate.
  • Nuvalent (NUVL) is up 39% after GSK agreed to acquire the company for $10.6 billion. The transaction will accelerate GSK’s entry into the lung cancer space and could help offset the looming patent expiry of its HIV drug dolutegravir, Barclays analyst James Gordon wrote in a note.
  • Perrigo (PRGO) slips 1% after the company’s CEO Patrick Lockwood-Taylor resigned from both roles and from the board, following a determination that certain personal conduct was inconsistent with the company’s code of conduct and core values.
  • SailPoint (SAIL) falls 13% after the software company’s quarterly results and outlook isn’t enough to extend recent strength in the stock, which is up nearly 70% off an April low as of last close.
  • Vail Resorts (MTN) is down 4% after the ski resort operator cut its net income guidance for the full year, attributing the reduction to “historically challenging” weather conditions in the western US.

In other corporate news, executives overseeing Oatly’s Chinese operations are said to be considering buying out the business. Apple’s iOS 27 and related software updates offer signs the of the company’s upcoming foldable iPhone. GSK agreed to buy clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Nuvalent in a deal valued at $10.6 billion to expand in oncology treatments.

After a brief pause in the rally that propelled equities to record highs, traders are returning on expectations that corporate profits will give stocks further room to run. OpenAI’s confidential filing for an initial public offering and the oversubscription of SpaceX’s share sale served as reminders of the vast demand for AI - before attention turns to Wednesday’s CPI print.  Overnight sentiment was also boosted from lower energy costs, with Brent sliding 1.5% to below $93 a barrel. Israel and Iran agreed to end their tit-for-tat attacks, while President Donald Trump renewed his claims that a US peace deal with Tehran was nearly done. 

From SpaceX’s IPO being oversubscribed ahead of books closing late Wednesday, to OpenAI filing confidentially for an IPO and said to be planning a tender sale of its shares to provide liquidity to employees, “there’s a real race for capital that’s going on,” notes CPR Asset Management’s Julien Daire, perhaps to get ahead of the moment of realization that much of this SPV chip-backed rollout is funded by American retirees putting their money in "safe" annuities.

Meanwhile in China, the country plans to spend around $295 billion to fund a nationwide AI buildout of data centers, signaling its ambition to propel the domestic AI sector and rely on local suppliers for at least 80% of technology such as AI chips. 

And speaking of China, the AI supercycle showed up in macro data overnight as well, with Beijing's export sales of semiconductors soaring 111% year-on-year in May, the fastest expansion since 2013. Elsewhere, the massive PJM power grid region is expected to see a 26-fold increase in energy storage over the next decade on the back of data-center driven load growth and lagging supply strain reliability and affordability. 

There are red flags: bond-yield levels don’t look encouraging for stocks, but it will likely take greater rate volatility to trigger another leg lower, according to Bloomberg Senior Strategist Michael Msika. Risks are mounting into a tricky June, but portfolio rotation seems to be the preferred approach, rather than cutting exposure altogether. The bond market is running ahead of the Fed policy rate, with a clear message for Kevin Warsh that rates need to be higher, and prompted Citi to lower its short-term price target for gold.  

While AI “has driven a strong rally so far, it also carries a high risk of pullbacks, which are bound to occur given the dynamic nature of the sector’s development,” said Guillermo Hernandez Sampere, head of trading at MPPM.

Warnings that a push higher in stocks could prove choppy still abound. Citigroup Inc. strategists said traders are aggressively building short-selling positions in US equities, while bullish wagers on the tech sector remained stretched. Friday’s near 5% selloff in the Nasdaq 100 has only partially reset exposure among investors, the Citi team led by David Chew noted. 

The next few weeks hold major risk events, with inflation data due Wednesday and the first Federal Reserve interest-rate decision under Chairman Kevin Warsh on June 17. 

“If inflationary risks continue to rise, a more aggressive repricing of the Fed could easily challenge current valuations and derail equity markets,” said Wolf von Rotberg, equity strategist at Bank J Safra Sarasin.

In politics, the race for California governor is on track for a two-person runoff in November between veteran Democratic politician Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton, a British-born television personality endorsed by President Trump. The Pentagon has accused some of China’s biggest companies of supporting the Chinese military, including Alibaba, Baidu and BYD.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 is rising alongside weaker energy prices with gains driven by financials and consumer names.  Health care stocks were dragged lower by GSK, which shed as much as 3.9% after announcing it would acquire US firm Nuvalent for $10.6 billion. The energy subindex was the biggest laggard as Brent crude dropped below $93 a barrel. Here are the biggest movers Tuesday:

  • Demant advances as much as 5%, to the highest since August 2025, after a BofA double-upgrade to buy removes the only negative analyst rating on the hearing aids manufacturer
  • Givaudan rises as much as 5.9%, the most in almost two months and taking the stock to the highest since late February, as Deutsche Bank upgrades the Swiss fragrance and flavor maker to buy and JPMorgan adds a positive catalyst watch
  • WPP leads European advertising firms higher after Berenberg said the sector is poised for a rerating because investors have overestimated the threat posed by artificial intelligence. Analysts initiated coverage of WPP, Publicis Groupe and Havas with buy ratings
  • Seraphim Space Investment Trust shares rise as much as 26%, their biggest jump in almost three years, after the fund said the fair value of Iceye, its largest holding, had doubled after a funding round
  • Breedon Group shares gain as much as 6.6%, the largest intra-day rise in two months, after the building materials supplier announced the $120 million acquisition of a limestone quarry near Missouri
  • Fever-Tree shares rise as much 8.2% to the highest in a month after the company said it was on track to meet expectations and extended its buyback program
  • El.En. shares climb as much as 6.3% to the highest since November 2021, after Stifel initiated the laser equipment firm with a buy rating, predicting profits to more than double over the next five years
  • GSK shares slip as much as 3.9% as Barclays analysts noted the British drugmaker will gain access to two experimental medicines in late-stage trials through its planned purchase of Nuvalent, but that upside is capped
  • K+S shares fall as much as 5.6% to their lowest since January as the German agricultural chemicals firm launches an offering of convertible bonds worth around €300 million to finance the previously-announced purchase of Qemetica’s salt business
  • Trigano shares drop as much as 7.5%, the most in over nine months, after analysts at Oddo BHF cut their price target on the maker of recreational vehicles and removed it from their list of top picks within the European mid-cap space
  • Rusta falls as much as 7.7% after the Swedish discount retailer reported its latest earnings. DNB Carnegie says the print shows a weaker-than-expected end to 2025/2026, with added headwinds from “very tough” comparables

Asian stocks rose, as bargain hunters dipped back in to buy technology stocks after a sharp selloff. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index climbed as much as 2.8%, on track to snap a three-day losing streak. The information technology sector led gains among sub-indexes, with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics contributing the most to the advance. South Korea and Indonesia led the region’s rebound, just a day after ranking among the worst performers. The rally follows a steep pullback triggered by concerns over overheating in artificial intelligence stocks. While broader concerns about the sector’s momentum remain, the recent drop has made valuations more appealing and steady earnings are helping to support sentiment. Easing tensions in the Middle East added to the positive tone, after Iran and Israel agreed to scale back strikes following a flare-up that had threatened to derail peace efforts and drew calls for de-escalation from President Donald Trump.

In FX, the dollar headed for its biggest two-day retreat in a month. Indonesia’s central bank raised its benchmark rate ahead of its next scheduled meeting to reverse a market selloff and support the rupiah. 

In rates, treasuries rose modestly as traders dialed back bets on US interest-rate hikes, led by short-dated notes as oil continued its decline after Israel and Iran agreed to stop attacks, following a flare-up in violence. US yields are richer by up to 2.5bp across front end of the curve with long end richer by around 1bp, steepening 2s10s and 5s30s spreads by 1bp and 1.5bp vs. Monday close. US 10-year yields trade around 4.545%, down 1.5bp on the day with bunds lagging by 1.5bp in the sector, gilts slightly outperforming. Bull steepening move comes ahead of this week’s first Treasury auction of $58 billion 3-year notes at 1pm New York. Treasury auction cycle resumes at 1pm New York with $58 billion 3-year notes, before $39 billion 10-year and $22 billion 30-year reopenings Wednesday and Thursday. The WI 3-year trading around 4.205% is 24bp cheaper than the May stop-out, which tailed the WI by 0.6bp.

In commodities, Brent has continued to slip, down 2.1% as Israel and Iran halt attacks and Chinese oil imports declined. Bitcoin sheds 1.3%. Precious metals are steady. Gold held steady near $4,340 an ounce. The appeal of the precious metal has steadily faded from a peak above $5,400 in January after the war in the Middle East upended expectations for US monetary policy, shifting bets from rate cuts to possible hikes.

Today's US economic data calendar includes ADP weekly employment change (8:15am), April trade balance (8:30am), May existing home sales, April wholesale inventories (10am)

Market Snapshot

Top Overnight News

  • President Trump asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to pull back from escalating his country’s strikes against Iran during a call on Monday morning, telling the Israeli leader that the United States and Iran were within days of a breakthrough clearing the way for talks on a long-term nuclear deal. NYT
  • Trump Says Peace Talks on Track After Israel-Iran Clash Ends: BBG
  • USTR Greer said to be heading to Silicon Valley to promote onshoring this week: Semafor 
  • China’s exports surged last month on demand for AI-related goods as the world’s second-largest economy shook off the impact of energy shortages from the Middle East. Exports expanded 19.4 per cent in May on a year earlier in dollar terms, exceeding expectations. FT
  • A sharp fall in China’s oil imports is keeping global prices in check despite a supply crunch lasting more than 100 days due to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. China’s int’l oil purchases fell to the lowest level in more than 8 years in May. Nikkei
  • The BoJ will consider maintaining the current pace of bond purchases beyond next fiscal year, sources said, pausing a taper process that would ‌mark a turning point in its quantitative tightening (QT) plan. But the decision could be a close call as the nine-member board is seen as split between those who want to focus on soothing investor nerves and others who see the need to steadily slow purchases to reduce the BOJ's large balance sheet. RTRS
  • Japanese policymakers said on Tuesday they stood ready to act decisively against excessive yen falls while remaining vigilant to rising bond yields that could hurt the economy, highlighting ‌the dilemma they faced in countering unfavorable market moves. RTRS
  • German industrial production grew for the first time since war broke out in Iran, fueling hope that Europe’s largest economy is weathering the jump in energy costs. Output increased 0.4% in April from the previous month, driven mainly by construction. BBG
  • China is preparing to spend around 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over the next five years on building data centers across the country, fueling Beijing’s ambition to propel the domestic AI sector and surpass the US in a potentially game-changing technology.  BBG
  • The $31 trillion Treasury market has an unequivocal message for Kevin Warsh’s Fed: Interest rates aren’t high enough. Yields on two-year notes hovered near their highest level in more than a year. BBG
  • An index of US small business optimism fell last month to the lowest level since October 2024, erasing almost all of the gains seen since Trump was elected for a second term. BBG

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of newsquawk

APAC stocks traded somewhat mixed, albeit with a mostly positive bias as indices rebounded from yesterday's losses, with sentiment helped by Israel and Iran halting their strikes, while participants also reflected on the better-than-expected Chinese trade data. ASX 200 declined as the prior day's losses caught up with the index on return from a long weekend. Nikkei 225 fluctuated and briefly wiped out all its opening gains before rebounding to print fresh intraday highs. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were mixed with the mainland kept afloat following the stronger-than-expected Chinese trade data, although gains were capped after the US Pentagon posted a list of Chinese military companies, which included Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, Tencent, NIO and Cosco among others.

Top Asian News

  • Chinese Balance of Trade (USD)(May) 105.4B vs. Exp. 91.5B (Prev. 84.8B).
  • Chinese Exports YY (May) 19.4% vs. Exp. 14.3% (Prev. 14.1%).
  • Chinese Imports YY (May) 27.4% vs. Exp. 25% (Prev. 25.3%).
  • Taiwan Balance of Trade (May) 17.91B vs. Exp. 15.2B (Prev. 14.35B).
  • Taiwan Exports YoY (May) Y/Y 51.7% vs. Exp. 37.9% (Prev. 39%).
  • Taiwan Imports YoY (May) Y/Y 54.90% vs. Exp. 37.4% (Prev. 29.2%).
  • Australian Westpac Consumer Confidence Index (Jun) 80.6 (Prev. 83).
  • Australian Westpac Consumer Confidence Change MM (Jun) -2.9% (Prev. 3.5%).
  • Australian NAB Business Confidence (May) -14 (Prev. -24).
  • Australian NAB Business Conditions (May) 3 (Prev. 3).

European bourses (STOXX 600 +0.5%) start Tuesday's trade on a positive footing with geopolitical updates quiet. FTSE MIB (+1.6%) is the clear outperformer helped by gains in Banks, while FTSE 100 (-0.3%) is the only index in the red as miners and healthcare giants fall. European sectors hold a positive bias. Insurance (+1.3%) tops the pile, with Retail (+1.0%) and Banks (+1.2%) rounding out the top 3. To the downside are Basic Resources (-0.3%), Health Care (-0.5%) and Energy (-0.4%).

Top European News

  • CBI warned around 200k more Britons are on track to become unemployed, with unemployment forecast to rise to 5.5% this year, while it cut UK GDP growth forecasts to 1.1% in 2026 and 0.9% in 2027 from prior expectations of 1.3% and 1.5%, respectively.
  • No breakthrough in discussions on finalising the Defence Investment Plan on Monday but it could still come this week, POLITICO reported citing sources.

FX

  • G10s are nearly entirely firmer against a modestly softer Buck, which remains towards recent post-NFP highs. Kiwi and sterling outperform, NOK is the laggard with Brent Aug’26 -1.5%.
  • USD a touch lower and well within post-payrolls ranges. The general risk environment has improved since Friday’s strong Payrolls, and Monday’s bid in crude. Overnight saw Kospi rise near 8%, optimism which has travelled through to European hours with bourses/US futures firm. The next inflection point, aside from geopolitics, will likely be US CPI and PPI on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. Today sees the release of NFIB small business optimism data, weekly ADP jobs, and Trade metrics. Technicals, to the upside is the 100 mark, where DXY typically loses steam, and downside is 99.80 which provided support on Monday.
  • GBP is one of the best G10 performers. A strong BRC retail sales showed consumer spending had steadied from a weak April figure with food and non-food sales accelerating sharply in May. Pantheon Macro estimates the BRC survey in isolation is consistent with a 0.6% month-to-month rise in official retail sales volumes in May. Cable took a hit on Friday’s Payrolls and continues to trade below levels seen before the data (c. 50pips), carry remains in focus into the slew of Central Bank meetings this, and next week. BoE pricing steady, still only pricing one full hike this year (c. 45bps by year-end), consistent with recent levels.
  • Antipodeans outperforming with Kiwi benefitting to a greater extent after strong Chinese trade data beat expectations across the board thanks to robust tech-related Imports and Exports. Australian NAB business confidence was out overnight, remaining negative though faring better than April’s figure. AUD/NZD dipped from a 1.2136 peak, to mark a session trough of 1.2083, AUD/USD +0.1%, NZD/USD +0.3%.

Fixed Income

  • Global fixed benchmarks are mildly firmer this morning, benefiting from lower energy prices as recent geopolitical tensions ease for the time being. In brief, Israel and Iran have agreed to halt their strikes, though recent reports have suggested that Southern Lebanon remains under fire. Trump has continued to talk up the mood, stating that a total victory will be declared in two weeks. For reference, this marks the 37th time he has suggested that a deal is imminent, CNN reported.
  • USTs (+2 ticks) are slightly firmer and trade within a 108-27+ to 109-03 range. As above, action is facilitated by lower energy prices, but with trade tentative amidst the uncertain environment. Also clouding the picture is the hawkish economic picture, with the recent NFP report pointing towards a solid labour market. US CPI and PPI (Wed/Thu) will play key roles for policymakers heading into next week’s policy decision. As for today, traders will digest US ADP Weekly Change, Exports/Imports, Atlanta Fed GDP, and Wholesale Inventories (Apr).
  • Bunds (+10 ticks) and Gilts (+15 ticks) also trade modestly higher, but with price action rangebound. In Germany, Industrial Production increased from the prior, but still remains at low levels; trade data displayed a mixed picture.
  • Over in the UK, BRC Retail Sales in May topped expectations (3.4% vs exp. 0.6%), indicating that consumers have remained resilient despite the Iran conflict; though, some of that spending may be related to the good weather experienced in the region. As for politics, UK PM candidate Burnham is reportedly poised to delay any Labour leadership bid until after the battle to retain the Greater Manchester mayoralty. Gilts trade in a 87.53 to 87.69 range.
  • Germany sells EUR 1.756bln vs exp. EUR 2.0bln 1.80% 2053, 2.50% 2035 and 2.30% 2033 Green Bund.
  • The Netherlands sells EUR 2.5bln vs exp. 2.5bln 2.50% 2035 DSL: Average yield 3.102% (prev. 2.810%).

Commodities

  • Crude futures are softer, continuing from Monday's afternoon sell-off, as Israel and Iran seemingly hold onto their promises to halt attacks on each other. Despite this, there have been reports of strikes in Lebanon but benchmarks were unreactive. Late in Monday's session, Axios reported that in a call with Israeli PM Netanyahu, US President Trump warned that if the Israeli leader went back to war with Iran, he might be fighting alone. Further on the US-Iran deal, CNN reported, citing a top Iranian official, said a deal being imminently reached is doubtful due to persistence of major roadblocks regarding Iran's nuclear programme and uranium enrichment. However, these reports have failed to damper the risk tone. WTI Jul trades at the lower end of a USD 88.80-91.55/bbl range while Brent Aug hovers around the USD 92.00/bbl mark (USD 92.00-94.42/bbl).
  • Precious metals have steadied since Friday's selloff, with spot gold hovering above the USD 4300/oz handle (USD 4313-4352/oz). Spot silver has regained the 200-SMA, trading at the upper end of its USD 67.46-68.86/oz range.
  • 3M LME Copper gains, along with the broader base metal space, amid the positive risk tone. The red metal trades at the top end of its USD 13.55k-13.77k/t range.
  • Vale said it has not seen any significant destruction in global metals demand from the Iran conflict, with strong demand for critical minerals and tighter raw material flows helping support commodity prices and margins.

Trade/Tariffs

  • US asked China to resume rare earth exports to Japan, with Washington concerned regarding impacts on global high-tech supply chains, according to Nikkei.
  • China Foreign Ministry, on the US adding Chinese firms to Pentagon list, said China always opposes US overgeneralising the concept of national security.

Central Banks

  • BoJ is reportedly prepared to raise rates by 25bps at its June meeting, Nikkei reported. The hike is to prepare for the risk of an upward revision of inflation. Also, to begin discussions around the discontinuation of its quarterly reduction in government bond purchases from April 2027 onwards.

Geopolitics: Iran

  • US President Trump said they are negotiating regarding Iran and a victory will happen very soon, while he stated they will declare total victory in two weeks and oil prices will come down post-Iran. Trump separately commented that he could have an idea on an Iran deal in one or two days, and stated the blockade continues to hold, as well as stated that they are very close to having a good, strong, powerful deal. On the Iran-Israel front, he said that Israel and Iran agreed to leave each other alone for another week.
  • US VP Vance said a potential Iran deal will be a home run for the American people and that the US will need to verify over the long-term that Iran is living up to the agreement, while he also stated that the US's interest lies in a deal with Iran, whether Israel likes it or not. Vance also commented that the primary goal is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and stated that a military option is not ruled out if diplomacy with Iran fails.
  • Iran's UN envoy hopes for US-Iran talks conclusion by the end of June, and stated the US and Iran are exchanging views via Pakistan.
  • Iranian official said no agreement can be reached unless its frozen funds are released and sanctions are lifted, while the official added that Washington made changes to the draft MoU and that this was unacceptable, according to Al Jazeera. It was separately reported that a top Iranian official casted doubt on a deal being imminently reached between the US and Iran, while the official said major roadblocks persist on issues like Iran’s nuclear program and uranium enrichment.
  • Iranian Parliament member said that if Israel attacks Lebanon or Iranian soil, then both Israel and US military bases will be legitimate targets.
  • A military source familiar with the Houthis suggest that they are "preparing major military surprises, and that the weapons that will be used in the naval or aerial conflict will be of high quality", Kan's Kais reported.
  • Two new airstrikes have reportedly been undertaken by Israel, targeting Southern Lebanon, Tehran Times reported.
  • Tasnim news agency reported air raids by Israel on two settlements in the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.IRNA reported continuation of attacks by Israeli regime on southern Lebanon.

Geopolitics: Ukraine

  • Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister said Russia and Belarus are constantly ready to use all available means, including nuclear, to ensure security, according to an interview with Izvestia newspaper.
  • Drone strike reportedly hit Sevastopol in Russian-annexed Crimea.

US Event Calendar

  • 6:00 am: May NFIB Small Business Optimism, est. 96, prior 95.9
  • 8:30 am: Apr Trade Balance, est. -56.1b, prior -60.3b
  • 10:00 am: May Existing Home Sales, est. 4.07m, prior 4.02m
  • 10:00 am: Apr F Wholesale Inventories MoM, est. 0.55%, prior 0.5%

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

Morning from Istanbul. Please don’t tell my wife, but this extraordinary city was the backdrop to the greatest night of my life some five years before I met her. Even now, the memory is vivid of that special night of passion. The heat. The noise. The sweat. A pounding heart and hours of emotional turbulence. By late evening it felt inevitable that it simply wasn’t going to happen, and that I’d leave exhausted, disappointed and slightly broken. Then, just after midnight, against all logic and expectation, came a sudden, frantic and utterly euphoric release. Yes after being 3-0 down at half-time, the "Miracle of Istanbul" arrived and Liverpool fought back and ultimately won the penalty shoot out and, with it, the Champions League back in 2005. A night I will never forget but with the way Liverpool played this past season I'm not sure when that will be next repeated.

Talking of repeats, it seems the cycle of "near a deal, not near a deal, escalation, de escalation, maybe back near a deal" continues. However for now we’re back in the “a deal is still possible” camp and in addition the AI trade has continued to bounce back this morning.  
On that, the KOSPI (+7.35%) is sharply higher after its 9th worst day in 45 plus years of history yesterday (-8.29%). The Nikkei (+2.19%) is also benefiting from a recovery in technology stocks after a decline of over -3.5% yesterday. Chinese stocks are up just over half a percent and other markets are broadly flat. S&P 500 (+0.26%) and NASDAQ 100 (+0.54%) futures are also continuing to recover after a decent session yesterday.

As I'm typing this this morning, President Trump has been speaking to reporters and has said that they are "very close to having a good strong powerful deal" and that they "could have an idea on Iran in one or two days now". Of course we've been here a few times before but the weekend stresses are fading back a little for now.  

Indeed markets swung around yesterday as we faced an array of geopolitical headlines. Initially, it looked like another rough session, with Brent Crude up over +5% in the European morning amidst the strikes between Israel and Iran we discussed this time yesterday. However, the mood soon began to turn more positive, with President Trump calling on both sides to dial things down which to be fair he tried to do late in the weekend. Then late in the European morning session, Trump posted that “Both sides, Israel and Iran, are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE! Final negotiations on “Peace” are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way. The Blockade will remain in place, and in full force and effect, until a “Final Deal” is reached. Things should move quickly.”

That post from Trump led to an initial decline in oil prices, but the bigger move lower then came after Iran’s Fars said that the military operation against Israel had ended. Admittedly, they warned that further Israeli attacks would lead to “much harsher and more crushing actions than before”, but the end to the attacks was taken positively. Moreover, Israeli PM Netanyahu later said that Israel would hold fire in Iran for now. So it felt as though for the time being at least, the weekend flare-up in hostilities had been stopped, and there was still a path for peace talks to continue.

Given the end to the Israel-Iran strikes, Brent crude ultimately came down from an intraday peak above $98/bbl in the European morning, to $94.25/bbl by the close. Or in other words, it was only up +1.25% from its Friday close. That gap has narrowed further this morning with a -0.80% fall as I type. 

Even with the pull back, concerns around inflation remained high yesterday, which cemented investor conviction that central banks would still be hiking rates in the coming months. Indeed for the Fed, markets raised the chance of a hike as soon as September to 53%, up from 44% on Friday. It's ticked down to 50% this morning.  

Given that backdrop, it was a tough session for sovereign bonds on both sides of the Atlantic. So Treasury yields rose across the curve, with the 2yr yield (+1.6bps) up to 4.16%, its highest since February 2025, while 10yr (+3.3bps to 4.56%) and 30yr yields (+4.0bps to 5.03%) saw larger increases. Notably, there were some big milestones for real yields, with the 10yr real yield (+3.7bps) closing at a one-year high of 2.20%. However, we didn’t have any Fed speakers as we’re now in the blackout period before next week’s meeting, so we don’t have much sense of how they’re thinking about the strong jobs report and whether it warrants a hawkish reaction.

Over in Europe it was a similar story, with yields on 10yr bunds (+2.2bps), OATs (+3.3bps) and BTPs (+3.4bps) all moving higher again. In fact, for 10yr OATs it took them up to a post-2009 high of 3.84%. And then in Germany, the 10yr real yield was at a 5-month high of 0.82%, despite some underwhelming data on factory orders, which showed a monthly decline of -3.8% in April (vs. -2.0% expected).

One relatively positive area yesterday was US equities, with the major indices stabilising after Friday’s slump. The recovery was particularly visible in segments that slumped the most on Friday, with the NASDAQ up +0.86%, whilst the Philly semiconductor index rose +5.61%, recovering about half of its -10.26% fall last Friday. However, the broader equity mood was more cautious, and the S&P 500 (+0.30%) recovered only a small fraction of Friday’s -2.64% decline. Indeed, almost two-thirds of S&P constituents were lower on the day, with tech and energy the only sectors to post clear gains. And the Mag-7 (-0.06%) struggled to follow the recovery in chipmakers, with Apple (-1.89%) leading on the downside amid a lukewarm reaction to the latest generation of its AI platform.

The equity weakness was clearer in Europe. In part, that was because they’d closed before the worst of the US losses on Friday, so there wasn’t the same bounce back potential. But they were also more exposed to the oil price increase, so the STOXX 600 (-0.15%) fell for a second consecutive session. There were similar moves across Europe, including for the DAX (-0.58%) and the CAC 40 (-0.23%), but Italy’s FTSE MIB (+0.63%) was the main outperformer.

Looking at the overnight data, in China both exports and imports grew at an accelerated rate in May, exceeding forecasts as surging demand for AI hardware mitigated the impact of disruptions caused by the war in Iran. Exports surged by +19.4% y/y in May, surpassing expectations of a +15% increase. This significant rise was partly fuelled by a weak performance last year, during the US-China trade war. Imports soared over +27% y/y in May, resulting in a trade surplus of $105.4 billion, the largest since January. Additionally, South Korea’s economy expanded by +1.8% in the January-March quarter compared to the previous three months, an increase from the 1.7% growth estimated in April. On an annual basis, Asia’s fourth-largest economy grew by 3.8%, revised upward from the earlier estimate of 3.6%.

Looking at the day ahead, data releases include German industrial production for April, the US trade balance for April, and US existing home sales for May. Otherwise from central banks, we’ll hear from the ECB’s Moulin

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 08:38

Beijing Readies $297 Billion Data Center Buildout Blitz In Bid To Dominate AI Race

Beijing Readies $297 Billion Data Center Buildout Blitz In Bid To Dominate AI Race

The US and China are locked in a series of races, with AI now sitting at the center of nearly all of them. This is a race not only to build the leading frontier models, but to deploy them across entire economies, unleash physical AI, and convert compute power into productivity, surveillance, military, and industrial advantage ahead of the 2030s. This is the new world we are entering, and it is moving incredibly fast. The current chapter of this story is the data center build-out phase. It will then eventually extend into space.

Goldman has already estimated that US hyperscalers will deploy $800 billion in capex this year alone on AI infrastructure. Across the Pacific, however, the scale of Beijing's data-center buildout had remained relatively opaque until now.

China is preparing to unleash a 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) data-center buildout phase over the next five years, according to a new Bloomberg News report, citing people familiar with the matter, as Beijing and Washington race to ensure their own tech giants are ahead in the frontier model race.  

The report said the National Development and Reform Commission is drafting plans for a network of interconnected data centers to be operated by state firms such as China Mobile and China Telecom.

These data centers are expected to rely heavily on domestic chip suppliers, including Huawei, for at least 80% of core technology. This is a move by Beijing to accelerate the development of its domestic chipmakers by sidelining Nvidia and AMD.

More color about the buildout:

The over-arching plan represents Beijing's most aggressive endeavor yet to lay the foundation for future Chinese AI development.

It recalls the undertakings of years past that marshalled resources to support national champions like Huawei, with the aim of replacing US technology. And it's a key prong of the "Six Networks" program announced earlier this year, covering construction of essential infrastructure spanning water and electricity to computing, one of the people said.

The report sent Chinese data-center stocks higher in the premarket: GDS Holdings rose by 5% and Vnet Group jumped 8%.

The US-China rivalry is extending well beyond the chip space. It should be viewed as a full-blown industrial race, and China's planned data-center buildout shows that Beijing is trying to fuse AI, power infrastructure, domestic chips, and state financing into a single national mobilization strategy.

Given that this is now a full-blown industrial race, Beijing's broader strategy is no longer limited to chips, data centers, and power infrastructure. It also extends into the domain of information.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned of "three vectors of foreign influence," including CCP state media, the Singham network, and foreign-billionaire dark money, behind elements of the anti-AI data center campaign in the US.

If correct, that would suggest China's playbook is not just to accelerate its own AI buildout, but to slow, divide, and politically constrain America's.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 07:45

"Device-Level" Nudity Detection: UK Gov't Blackmailing Public Into Digital ID

"Device-Level" Nudity Detection: UK Gov't Blackmailing Public Into Digital ID

Authored by Kit Knightly via OffGuardian,

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced plans, in a speech earlier today, to introduce "device-level controls" that will prevent children from viewing, sending or taking naked photographs:

According to Justice Minister Catherine Atkinson, the UK will become "the first country where it will be impossible for children to take, share or view naked pictures"

The only way this is even close to enforceable is if one or more of the following measures are in place:

  • You must verify your age by linking your digital devices to your ID.
  • You must allow the government - or whatever private third-party agency the government employs - access to your phone's data and files at all times.
  • You must allow third-party software to scan every attempted photo.

It means "nudity detection" on every app on the device, at all times. There's literally no other way of doing it. From the government's website earlier today [emphasis added]:

Apple recently introduced age checks for iPhone users, making it the first company to activate safety features by default for those who are not verified as over 18. This is a significant step forward following the government's commitments to work with industry, and one this announcement builds on.

Despite this, the nudity detection is not applied to the camera or broader apps, third-party messaging services, or search functions, meaning children can still take, view, share and save nude images. The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default

...but don't worry, just verify your age via digital ID or biometrics or whatever, and the government won't look at your internet history or share your nudes.

Over-18s will still be able to view adult content by providing proof of age.

It's the basest of blackmail, that's all.

The UK government wants to make it mandatory that everybody verifies their age by linking their ID to their smartphones or other digital devices.

That's ALL they want.

We all know what this is really about.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 07:20

Goldman Hikes Obesity Drug Market Forecast As Oral GLP-1s Go Mass Market

Goldman Hikes Obesity Drug Market Forecast As Oral GLP-1s Go Mass Market

The global weight-loss drug market is now expected to reach $114 billion by 2030, up from Goldman's prior $101 billion forecast, as analysts cite faster adoption of oral obesity pills, stronger demand outside the U.S., and improved affordability that is expanding the patient pool.

Goldman analysts led by Asad Haider and James Quigley laid out four main drivers behind the upgraded 2030 anti-obesity drug TAM forecast (previous forecast made in Dec. 2025):

1. Higher oral vs. injectable share and a higher oral TAM. With oral NBRx (new-to-brand) prescriptions (a leading indicator) now 40-50% following the strong launch of Novo's Wegovy pill, we now expect orals to represent 40% ($46bn) of the 2030 global revenue TAM (vs. 35%/$35bn prior).

2. Shifting sales mix within orals. We balance our share splits with Novo's Wegovy pill now 38% (vs. 16% prior), LLY's Foundayo now 48% (54% prior) and "other" now 14% (vs. 30% prior). We now forecast Wegovy peak global sales of $17.4bn (vs. prior $8bn) and Foundayo 2030 sales of $22bn (vs. prior $19bn).

3. Increased OUS penetration and a higher OUS TAM. Per stronger-than-expected OUS ramp for LLY's Mounjaro, we now forecast 2030 total OUS obesity sales of $48bn vs. $39bn prior, driving most of the higher 2030 Global TAM from $101bn to $114bn.

4. Updated pricing assumptions across channels. We lower pricing assumptions in the US DTC channel by 20% (to now $287 vs. prior $355) driven by lower prices across the board and higher oral mix shift.

Haider expects Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to control 82% of the global GLP-1 market share by the end of the decade.

The forecast assumes a larger shift towards oral obesity drugs.

Oral obesity drugs are expanding market share.

The oral Wegovy pill has had greater momentum since launch compared to Lilly's Foundayo.

Wegovy and Foundayo to dominate oral obesity drugs in the new forecast.

Medicare is expanding the patient pool. Goldman expects obesity coverage expansion to begin on July 1, through the GLP-1 MFN deal, modeling a potential 17 million-patient opportunity over time and $2.6 billion in Medicare-channel obesity sales in 2026, mostly skewed toward injectables.

The GLP-1 market outside the US is also set to become a major factor.

Rise of GLP-1s in China.

Goldman's revised GLP-1 TAM model for 2030 suggests obesity drugs are evolving from high-priced injectables into mass-market oral pills, broader international adoption, Medicare access, and lower consumer prices.

GLP-1 weight-loss drug headlines dominated the news cycle since 2021, with the initial hype cycle propelling Novo Nordisk shares in Copenhagen to record highs. That momentum has since sharply reversed as competitors and copycat drugs begin reshaping the market.

The question now, and certaintly analyst Quigley, is simple:

When does Novo finally bottom?

Professional subscribers can read the full GLP-1 TAM note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 06:55

Since Lockdowns, A 12% GDP Loss; Half Of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen

Since Lockdowns, A 12% GDP Loss; Half Of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was in fact far greater than official statistics indicate. 

What follows will shore up this intuition, using new techniques and numbers from an innovative project called RealityIndex.co. 

It’s true that official data is bad enough, showing a 26% loss in purchasing power, slow growth in output, and only marginal improvements in real income. The labor participation rate and worker/population ratio never fully recovered and continue to fall.

Output has been lackluster. It’s supposedly running 2.3% which is about half the postwar norm for US economic performance. It feels like a general downshift. Official data shows a brief recession in 2020 followed by gradual economic recovery overall. 

But is this even true? In 2024, Brownstone Institute commissioned a study (by E.J. Antoni and Peter St. Onge) that concluded that we have never really entered recovery after 2022. We’ve been in a technical recession since that time. They got this with some limited adjustments of price data bumped up against output data. That study was met with brutal attacks, with every critic falling back on official data and doubting the supposed extremism of the conclusion. 

That’s where matters have stood even as reports pour in concerning broken labor markets, no raises for 1 in 4 professional-class workers, and sketchy Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data that seems barely above zero thanks mainly to medical-sector subsidies, government spending, and social services. Then there are the learning losses showing dramatic declines in test scores among affected students. 

We are left with real questions. How can consumer sentiment be at historic lows given that the overall data seems to raise no loud alarms?

In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence has come along to make these complicated calculations possible, ones that seek to discern and delineate the huge gaps between official data and reality. The goal is to come up with real data concerning real prices, sans the many different methods that the Department of Labor uses to adjust price changes. 

For example, housing prices are not measured directly but rather converted to owners’ equivalent rent (OER). Medical service prices are adjusted for consumption, not premiums or final bills. When consumers substitute one good for another, that is also factored in. When the quality of a good or service improves, the statisticians apply what they called hedonic adjustments, which are invariably designed to minimize price increases and never run the other direction. 

Where does this leave those of us who are looking for a plain index of prices? A veil has been put over that basic question and answer, such that we don’t know for sure. This matters tremendously for issues like raises, examining cost of living increases, taxes, and pension payments. Everything is adjusted for inflation to convert it to real valuations but if we don’t have a clear number, what are we to do?

This is why we should be thrilled about a new study/service called the Reality Index. You are free to browse the site yourself and examine every aspect of the method. Essentially, the site owner, an independent intellectual in Madrid, Tom Elliott, has deployed tools of AI to wholly reconstruct price indices in a way that is consistent with actual prices. His results are absolutely eye-popping. I’ve examined the method here in detail and found no fault. 

The Wall Street Journal has also taken notice. This is good news and raises the possibility that we can finally get to the truth. 

The core of the problem is a constantly changing methodology in official data. The formula was changed eight times over 35 years. All the changes seem technical and vaguely justifiable, once explained. Adding them all up, you get wild distortions in the data that the index is supposed to reveal. All these changes came home to roost in the great inflation of 2021-2024, which might be entering a second wave right now. 

In 1983, owners’ equivalent rent replaced basic housing prices. The new formula was based on an estimate of what homeowners would have to pay to rent their own homes. But in real life, people pay mortgages, property taxes, and home prices. When home prices and mortgage rates rise faster than rents, the new formula understates the housing inflation real households face. 

In 1996, the Boskin Commission announced that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was overstated because people substitute higher-priced goods for lower-priced goods which are too slow in being calculated. The agency made the correction to eliminate the bias in the fixed basket of goods. The problem is that every single adjustment ended up forcing the reported rate to be less than a plain addition of the same goods over time. 

In 1998, there was a new fashion for hedonic adjustments. This stemmed from an observation that quality is always improving, especially in digital goods and computer functioning. The idea is that you might be paying the same or even more but you are getting more bang for your buck with quality shifts. You guessed it: hedonic adjustments drew the inflation rate lower. Notably, hedonic adjustments never run the other way, raising prices when quality decreases. 

In 1999, a geometric mean formula replaced arithmetic mean for most CPI components. This was intended to capture substitution effects. This was the change that ended up disguising the increase in medical service costs. By looking at consumed services rather than actual prices, the inflation rate in this sector ended up burying inflationary trends. This highly technical adjustment completely ignored all the ways in which substitution is a behavioral adaptation to inflation, not a reduction in the inflation experienced. 

In 2002, we got a continuation of this same method with new “chained CPI” which changes the basket weighting based on new purchasing patterns. Sure, if people buy less beef and more chicken, the household will experience inflation in a different way. But this ignores the manner in which the substitutions themselves are a response to higher prices. In 2017, the new calculation was applied to taxes causing people to pay more than they otherwise would have under the old method. 

In 2018, the hedonic adjustment strategy was expanded to a huge new range of products including smartphones, residential telephone services, internet services, and cable and satellite television. In 2020, at the same time the composition of M1 was changed and not retrospectively applied such that the data is essentially useless. Following money supply data became more difficult. Then in 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped looking at the actual cost of medical services and started only looking at claims, completing the consumption-only bias against actual posted prices. In 2025, a month went by with no data collection at all. 

So what happens when we strip all this away and examine actual prices as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, without all the many adjustments? We find that a basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 1980 costs $515 per the Reality Index in 2025. The official CPI reports only $391. 

That means that real prices have run 32% higher over 45 years than the government reports. Over a 55-year window, the Reality Index ran 54.4% faster than CPI. 

To put it another way, consider the loss of purchasing power since 1980. According to the CPI, the loss has been to make $1 in 1980 worth only 26 cents. According to the Reality Index, the loss is greater: $1 in 1980 is now worth only 19 cents. By any standard, that is a shocking devaluation. All of this became much worse starting with lockdowns. 

There is much more work to do with this method. The charts could be interactive. They can also be set for real-time updates. They will be if Elliott continues to develop this. He should. There might even be commercial value in this. 

Think about the implications. Isolating from the beginning of the Covid period to the present, Elliott’s data estimates as much as a 40% loss in purchasing power over six years. Or perhaps closer to 50%. Here is a zoom in of the above chart covering 2019 to the present.

This seems correct to me. Government data, meanwhile, logs only a 26% loss. That’s a massive gap between the official data and what prices actually reveal. With an AI re-rendering that tracks purchasing power – the flipside of the increase of prices – we get numbers closer to 50%. That means that Covid cut the value of the dollar in terms of goods and services to half its former value.

I asked AI to map this out in terms of year-over-year changes in prices. CPI shows a peak in 2022 followed by a decline in the rate of increase. Reality Index shows that the devaluation actually intensified and never fell below 6%. This explains so much about consumer sentiment and political shifts. People feel it even if official data never revealed it. This kind of chart forces a rethinking of the history of the last six years.

There are still larger implications. We measure national output with the Gross Domestic Product, a national income statistic used since the 1930s. For output data, it would make no sense to report it in nominal terms without factoring in inflation. As a result, the GDP is usually reported in real terms, with an inflation adjustment that is continually compounded on an annual basis. 

Elliott’s own data – which is shocking enough – did not go into the implications for GDP. But I was able to use a simple AI tool to make those adjustments, adding the corrected price index as the deflator metric. 

The result is rather astounding. The recession of 2020 never really ended in a sustained way. Charted by hard numbers and then by percent change, you gain a very different picture of present levels of output. It causes one to completely rethink the last six years. 

The official definition of recession is two quarters of declining real GDP. In revised data, we’ve had consistently negative GDP in all but three quarters since summer of 2022. In those three quarters, output barely rose above zero. Mostly real GDP has been falling, a recession without end. 

Overall, Grok AI estimates a loss of 5-12% of GDP from 2019 to present using Reality Index numbers. Sorry but read that again. Instead of any recovery, we’ve seen as much as double-digit declines in GDP overall since 2020. This is the cumulative loss spread out over six years. 

That’s roughly half of the losses of the full period of the Great Depression, which was more catastrophic than people know. Most research from the 1930s, for example by George Selgin, shows that this was not a normal business cycle but a structural hit tracing to the very coercive measures designed to fix the problem. Price controls and market disruptions made a bad situation far worse. This is precisely the sort of hit that should worry us the most. 

The lockdowns were a similar situation: a massive exogenous shock to commerce, accompanied by a huge devaluation of the currency. It amounted to a gigantic transfer of wealth to elites, the largest in history, followed by a destruction of wealth of the middle and lower classes. 

At least during the Great Depression, people knew it was happening. It was officially documented. Our times are different. We have heard nothing for six years except happy talk about economic recovery. Based on real data, the opposite has happened, most tracing to the disastrous lockdowns of 2020. 

The beauty of this data is that it is subject to replication. Anyone can look at the methodology and disagree. Be my guest. From what I can see, the actual picture is far closer to the reality that most people are experiencing. 

In other words, that only one in four workers has had a nominal raise in five years barely scratches the surface. The reality could be that we’ve lost as much as 12% of national output since the lockdown era, along with a halving of the currency value. It’s somehow worse that we are only now able to document this. 

Also, I would like to see his methods applied to my own concern over effective household income per hour of work. We keep hearing that household income is rising in real terms without considering that it generally takes two incomes to provide what one once did. It won’t do to pretend that two incomes in a single household is double the income when one person has been drafted into the workforce to sustain living standards. 

Adding that consideration in here, and the dramatic change in household remuneration between 1950 and 1990, would be very revealing. After all, only 1 in 5 households (with children under 18) had two income streams in 1950 where it is 3 in 5 today. That is effectively a diminution of wages per household hour and not an increase in income. Add that consideration and you would generate a chart of declining living standards in the decades before lockdowns delivered the final coup de grâce. 

And that is where we are today. Households are scrambling to keep the bills paid while juggling children and domestic life while running from job to job to keep the flow going as best they can. Meanwhile, they money they earn has less buying power than ever. It’s no wonder consumer sentiment is rock bottom. 

It is long past time for this technical work to be done. What Tom Elliott has provided is what index numbers should provide: clean and stable comparisons of the same or similar products over time, no adjustments, refinements, and manipulations. Run those numbers against conventional output numbers and you produce a very different picture of economic performance since 2020. 

We’ve lived so long with distorted statistics. It fascinates me that the person who finally did it is an independent data expert in Spain rather than an employed academic in the US. That itself is revealing.

The big picture is that the lockdowns, not only nationally but globally, were far more catastrophic for us economically than has been generally admitted or recognized. It is not unusual in the history of economics for the really bad news to emerge years and even decades after an exogenous shock such as war. 

We would rather not wait that long. The crisis is too real and the public knows, even if the official data does not admit the truth. 

Lockdowns were a kind of war on the population. The economic carnage might have sliced off half of the purchasing power of the dollar and cut output by as much as 12% over six years (in real terms, leaving aside missed counterfactual growth on the previous trajectory), even as labor participation never recovered and continues to fall. 

Did Covid kick off a kind of permanent recession? How many decades must pass before we admit what happened? More precisely, how much longer will it take before the public mind recognizes what they did to us? 

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 06:30

These Are The World's Most Prosperous Countries

These Are The World's Most Prosperous Countries

The world’s richest countries are not always the most prosperous.

As Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufeld details below, according to the Atlantic Council’s 2026 Prosperity Index, the world’s most prosperous countries tend to combine economic strength with high living standards.

Meanwhile, the U.S. places 38th overall, far below many smaller advanced economies, highlighting the gap between wealth creation and broader quality of life.

Europe Leads Global Prosperity Rankings

Europe dominates the rankings, claiming 30 of the top 40 spots. Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden all place in the global top five.

With a GDP per capita of $90K, top-ranked Norway benefits from a resource-rich economy in which oil revenues are channeled into its $2.2 trillion sovereign wealth fund. Having doubled in size over the past decade, the fund helps finance public services such as healthcare and education while supporting long-term economic stability.

High-ranking Iceland and Denmark also combine expansive social programs with competitive business environments and high levels of public trust. Along with their smaller populations, these factors can support stronger overall quality-of-life outcomes.

The rankings below measure how effectively countries convert wealth into broader living standards, including healthcare, education, equality, minority well-being, and environmental quality.

Notably, Central European economies such as Slovenia (#10) and Czechia (#12) outperform many larger and wealthier peers. Strong performances in equality, healthcare, and education help these countries rank ahead of major economies including Germany (#13) and France (#23).

Their performance suggests that prosperity is shaped not only by national wealth, but also by how evenly resources and opportunities are distributed across society.

Singapore Leads Asia in Prosperity

Singapore ranks 18th globally, standing out for its high GDP per capita of $93K and strong public infrastructure. It also has one of the highest life expectancies in the world.

Its ranking reflects decades of state-led investment in housing, healthcare, transportation, and education, helping transform Singapore into one of the world’s most efficient and competitive economies.

Overall, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all rank in the top 30, scoring well economically but often lower than Northern Europe on equality and social indicators. At the same time, aging populations, rising housing costs, and intense work cultures continue to weigh on broader well-being across several advanced Asian economies.

Why the U.S. Ranks Behind 37 Other Countries

The U.S. ranks 38th overall despite being the world’s largest economy.

The country scores relatively poorly on several quality-of-life indicators, including inequality, environmental performance, and access to opportunity among minority groups. It also ranks 46th globally in life expectancy, the lowest among comparable high-income nations. That gap has continued to widen over time.

The ranking underscores a broader paradox: while the U.S. remains a global leader in innovation, capital markets, and economic output, those advantages have not translated evenly into health outcomes or social mobility.

Prosperity Is About More Than Wealth

The 2026 rankings reinforce a growing global reality that economic strength alone no longer guarantees high living standards. Increasingly, the world’s most prosperous countries are those that combine wealth creation with strong institutions, accessible healthcare, social mobility, and sustained investment in citizens’ well-being.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the top 50 economies by GDP in 2026.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 05:45

5 Future Scenarios For Post-Conflict Iran

5 Future Scenarios For Post-Conflict Iran

Authored by Christian Milord via The Epoch Times,

There likely are more than five scenarios that Iranians could opt for as hostilities unwind, but the following five visions represent the paths Iran could take this year. Will 2026 onward become the Third Islamic Republic, following the first (1979-1989) and the second (1989-2026)? We can only speculate on the outcome of this third evolution, which might or might not be powered by clerics.

First, in the fluid situation on the ground in Iran, There are many forces at work. When the dust clears, Iran might fall right back into the same rut it has traversed since 1979. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei might be at the top of the pyramid, while President Masoud Pezeshkian and members of the Assembly of Experts, Cabinet, Courts, Guardian Council, and Parliament will appear to remain loyal to the ideology of militant Shia Islam. Over 80 percent of Iranians are Shia, while the remainder are adherents of Sunni Islam, the Baha'i faith, Christianity, and inter-religious practitioners.

In this scenario, the dreaded Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would continue to hold sway as a parallel military force to the national armed forces (Artesh) of Iran - which is by now also fully under the control of the Islamic Republic. While similar to the oppressive prior Mukhabarat (internal intelligence/security) in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Assad dynasty in Syria, the IRGC has both an external and internal arm that metes out its own version of justice abroad and at home. Once again, Iranians would be forced to look over their shoulder and censor their own behavior. The regime would rebuild its military weapons arsenal, fund foreign terror proxies, and manipulate the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint with inspections and tolls.

Next, when the conflict concludes and a ceasefire holds, balkanization of the nation might unfold. In Iran, there are large numbers of Balochs, Kurds, Turkmen, etc., who will compete to defend their own interests in a country divided by a limited economic pie. It will be difficult for the regime to rebuild its military arsenal following months of devastation.

Third, following a tenuous ceasefire and shuttle diplomacy, Iran will descend into civil war. There are parallels between Iran's current status and Syria under the rule of Bashar al-Assad (2000-2024). Both paranoid regimes have had little trust in their own citizens to handle freedom and opportunity. Bashar was far more brutal than his father, Hafez al-Assad (1971-2000), and his harsh measures against protests plunged Syria into civil conflict for thirteen years (2011-2024).

Apparently, Mojtaba Khamenei is more hardline than his father, and as supreme leader he would attempt to crush any voices for democracy and justice. His interlocking relationship with the IRGC would help to pave the way to widespread oppression. The outcome of this civil war would be difficult to predict since Iran has a much larger population than Syria, and periodic demands for civil and economic reform often unfold in several urban areas.

Fourth, If a ceasefire is effective and the free flow of commerce commences through the Strait of Hormuz, will Iranians look to the past as a guide to build a brighter future? Will they reject the excesses of the Islamic Republic and seek to create greater economic opportunity and equality for women? It appears as if a large portion of Iranians would favor exiled diaspora leaders such as Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as a transitional figure to assist internal reformers in shaping a representative government. Of course, the brutal IRGC would attempt to thwart any reformist movement.

Fifth, this last scenario offers some hope. Are the remnants of the Islamic Republic leadership capable of turning away from permanent conflict? Through intense negotiations with several stakeholders, there is a breakthrough to possible peace and security. Instead of merely paying lip service to basic reforms, Iran's leadership would agree to allow for greater freedoms for women, hold open elections, and promote economic growth.

That would include discarding kangaroo court trials that deny rights to Iranians who are arrested. While Iran doesn't have a history of democracy, incremental baby steps in that direction could occur for the sake of Iran's future prosperity and security. The regime would agree to cease funding foreign terror proxies, surrender the half ton of enriched uranium that's underground, halt the production of long range ballistic missiles, and free up the Strait of Hormuz to global commerce.

In this scenario, it's possible that former Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mohammed Khatami, and Hassan Rouhani would be consulted on reforms that formerly were vetoed by Parliament and the supreme leader. Incrementally normalizing relations with Israel and other regional states could gradually unfold, although signing up to the Abraham Accords might be a tall order. If this fifth option fails, Iran might be doomed to repeat history once again.

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

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 05:00

Google Met Top German Govt Officials Many Times To Discuss Online "Hate Speech" And "Disinformation"

Google Met Top German Govt Officials Many Times To Discuss Online "Hate Speech" And "Disinformation"

Authored by John Rosenthal via DailySceptic.org,

Data provided in a German Government response to a parliamentary question on online censorship show that Google met with top German government officials dozens of times between early 2022 and spring 2024 to discuss suppression of online “hate speech” and “disinformation”.

Major online platforms and search engines (X, Facebook, TikTok, Google, etc.) are required to take measures to suppress “illegal hate speech” – i.e., illegal per the standard of European laws – and allegedly harmful “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As shown in the US House Judiciary Committee’s recent report on European censorship of the internet, the tech companies are in constant contact with EU officials on DSA “enforcement”.

But the German Government’s parliamentary response shows that there have been regular and extensive contacts with the German Government on these subjects as well – and that by far the most frequent such contacts have been with Google. The DSA creates censorship prerogatives not just for the EU as such, but also for EU member states, and Germany is known to make particularly ample use of these prerogatives. It is indeed national “speech laws”, of which Germany has the strictest in Europe, that platforms are required to enforce under the DSA.

The revelations are relevant not just to Germans, but also to Americans, British and indeed the world, because DSA enforcement is neither territorially nor linguistically limited. It applies to all speech in any language from any source anywhere in the world: i.e., so long as it is visible via the internet in the European Union. Online platforms may choose to comply by geo-blocking certain content – in particular, alleged “hate speech” – just in the EU where it is illegal. But they also can and frequently do take the technologically simpler and less costly path of removing the content in question outright.

Moreover, the DSA explicitly sanctions the use of visibility-filtering – i.e., algorithmically limiting the reach of content rather than removing it – and visibility-filtering is necessarily global. It affects the discoverability and visibility of speech all around the world. As shown here, under the pressure of the DSA, visibility-filtering has become the go-to method employed by social media platforms to suppress alleged ‘mis-’ or ‘disinformation’.

Search engines like Google can, of course, act even more decisively to restrict the reach of alleged ‘disinformation’: namely, by downranking websites or webpages in search results or even excluding them altogether.

The parliamentary question submitted by Germany’s opposition AfD (Alternative for Germany) party in March 2024 expressly relates to both censorship methods, or what its authors describe as “removal or reach throttling of user posts or user accounts”.

Both question and answer bear the title “Meetings of Representatives of the Federal Government with [Tech] Companies and Funded Non-Governmental Organisations on the Topics of ‘Hate’ or ‘Disinformation on the Internet’”. A first set of data provided in the Government response concerns meetings with NGOs. These include, for instance, the publicly-funded German NGO HateAid, which has been assigned the status of a “trusted flagger” of allegedly problematic online content under the DSA.

A second set of data covers the meetings on “hate speech” and “disinformation” with the tech companies themselves. It provides details – date, place, participants, topic, etc. – on no fewer than 53 meetings in the stated time period. An excerpt can be seen below. (The Government also included a few meetings on other topics, such as the protection of minors, in the data.)

It should be noted that, by the Government’s own admission, the data are not exhaustive and only cover meetings involving top German government officials, such as ministers or ‘state secretaries’ – i.e., the highest-level civil servants in German government ministries. Lower-level contacts are explicitly not included, and the Government response notes that it has no legal obligation to record all meetings, i.e., even at the highest levels.

Some of the meetings were publicised by the German government at the time of their occurrence, but most of them were confidential. This is noted in the data, with some of the meetings even being deemed “not suitable” for public knowledge. In other cases, it was merely deemed “unnecessary” to inform the public.

The data include, for instance, a January 2023 meeting in San Francisco between Elon Musk, who had only just recently completed his acquisition of Twitter, and the German government’s then minister for digital affairs Volker Wissing. The subject of the meeting was “how Twitter deals with false information, new requirements under the Digital Services Act”. This meeting was publicised in Germany.

The data also include no fewer than 13 meetings with representatives of Meta on topics like “disinformation in the context of RUS[sian] war against UKR[aine]” (March 3rd 2022 at the Digital Affairs Ministry in Berlin) and “questions of cybersecurity and how Meta deals with disinformation” (February 12th 2024, with a German Interior Ministry official in Menlo Park, California). TikTok was involved in seven of the meetings.

But by far the greatest number of meetings were with Google. Google participated in no fewer than 34 of the meetings included in the data, and no fewer than 29 of them were bilateral meetings between Google or its parent company, Alphabet, and the German government. YouTube, a Google subsidiary, was also sometimes involved.

Then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, identified by the initials “BK” (Bundeskanzler), participated in two of the meetings with Google and three of the meetings overall. Other participants on the German side included Scholz’s chief of staff Wolfgang Schmidt; another top Scholz advisor, state secretary Jörg Kukies; the minister of the interior, Nancy Faeser; the minister of justice, Marco Buschmann; the economics minister, Robert Habeck; two top officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; a top official of the Ministry of Digital Affairs; and Klaus Müller, the head of the agency responsible for German DSA implementation, the Federal Network Agency. Müller remains the President of the Federal Network Agency under current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The vice-president of the agency, Wilhelm Eschweiler, also met with Google on two different occasions.

Participants from Google’s side included Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Alphabet/Google’s President of Global Affairs; the Google Vice-President for Trust and Safety; and Google’s Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy. CEO Sundar Pichai personally participated in no fewer than four of the meetings.

Topics discussed included “hate speech, fake news and disinformation on the web”, “disinformation in the context of RUS[sian] war against UKR[aine]”, “Digital Services Act and how to deal with mis- and disinformation on platforms”, “disinformation and DSA”, “disinformation, resilient democracy, illegal content, hate crime”, “strengthening the resilience of democracy and dealing with disinformation”, “key challenges of Google and YouTube with respect to cybersecurity and disinformation”, and so on and so forth.

Among other venues, meetings took place at the German Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other relevant ministries in Berlin, as well as at the offices of the Federal Network Agency.

No fewer than three of the meetings took place at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin, the German equivalent of the White House.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 03:30

Pro-EU Ruling Party Wins Armenia Election In Landslide, Kremlin Blasts Western Interference

Pro-EU Ruling Party Wins Armenia Election In Landslide, Kremlin Blasts Western Interference

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's party has won parliamentary elections, according to Monday's result, after a vote which has signified the small Caucasus nation's major pro-Western shift.

His Civil Contract party secured 49.81 percent of the vote, while the main opposition party Strong Armenia - seen as pro-Moscow, finished a distant second with 23.29 percent. National turnout in the country of three million people was close to 60%.

Pashinyan claimed a "historic victory that will ensure Armenia’s eternity and development" while also vowing to "continue the course of rapprochement with the West" - but while balancing the pursuit of positive relations with Russia.

Anadolu/Getty Images: Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory in the parliamentary elections early Monday morning.

Prime Minister Pashinyan has made known his intentions for his country to eventually join the EU. However, Strong Armenia party is claiming that the winning side in reality mounted a campaign of interference and intimidation: 

The second-placed Strong Armenia bloc is led by Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and is under house arrest for allegedly advocating for the government’s overthrow. He has rejected the charge as politically motivated.

Karapetyan called the elections "shameful" and denounced alleged violations and repression, saying dozens of his campaign staff had been arrested. Armenia’s Investigative Committee said it had opened 59 criminal cases over alleged electoral violations and detained nine people.

The Kremlin itself has also pounced on this theme, with Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova alleging unfair and illegal tactics unleashed by local authorities on Russia-friendly interests inside Armenia.

"On June 7, parliamentary elections were held in Armenia in an atmosphere of unprecedented pressure on the opposition and interference from the West, primarily the EU," Zakharova commented.

And more of her remarks via TASS:

She stressed that the preliminary results announced by the republic's Central Election Commission indicate that the Civil Contract party of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, which declared its victory, "did not receive a monopoly on power." "Moreover, compared to the previous electoral cycle, its support has noticeably decreased," Zakharova added.

Recent years of war between Christian Armenia and its better-armed Muslim neighbor Azerbaijan (which is a secular Republic) has seen tensions ratchet between one-time close allies Armenia and Russia. 

Armenia has long been a key member of the regional Russian-led bloc, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). However, Armenia froze its participation since 2024, outraged over Russia's failure to protect ethnic Armenians during Azerbaijan’s 2023 takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russia since played a 'peacekeeping' role with some limited troop deployments; however, Armenian Christians had already been booted from the ancient enclave. Armenian officials (and the population) have since expressed bitterness that Moscow didn't do more to bolster its historic claims on Nagorno-Karabakh. The episode was seen as a devasting, region-altering loss.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 02:45

Tiny X-Ray Telescope Could Unlock The Moon's Hidden Chemistry

Tiny X-Ray Telescope Could Unlock The Moon's Hidden Chemistry

Authored by Tokyo Metropolitan University via ScienceDaily,

Researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have used simulations to show that a small, newly developed X-ray telescope could help create a chemical map of the entire lunar surface. Such a map would be a major step toward understanding how the Moon formed, changed, and evolved over time.

A new compact X-ray telescope could help scientists produce the first-ever complete map of the Moon’s chemical makeup. Credit: Shutterstock

Their detailed modeling, which included both the telescope detector and a realistic Moon orbiting satellite mission, suggests that one telescope could map five important elements in about two years. A larger five by five array of detectors could produce sharper maps and complete the work more quickly.

Mapping The Moon's Chemistry

The Moon's geological history is still not fully understood. One major reason is that scientists do not yet have a complete geochemical map of the lunar surface. Because researchers cannot simply collect samples from every part of the Moon, they must rely on remote sensing methods.

One of these methods is X-ray fluorescence imaging. In this approach, detectors are pointed at the Moon to capture X-rays emitted by specific elements after they are struck by solar radiation. Those signals can help reveal which elements are present across different regions of the surface.

Why Complete Lunar Maps Are Difficult

Earlier observations from the Apollo and Chandrayaan missions produced useful partial maps, but a full global map is still missing. Creating one is technically difficult for several reasons. Missions have limited time to gather enough sunlight driven X-ray signals, and detectors can degrade during long periods in space.

The problem is especially difficult near the Moon's poles. In these regions, solar X-rays are weaker, which makes it harder to collect the signals needed to identify surface elements.

A Compact X-Ray Telescope For Lunar Orbit

To address these obstacles, a team led by Airi Toida and Prof. Yuichiro Ezoe of Tokyo Metropolitan University has proposed using a compact X-ray telescope on a satellite orbiting the Moon. The telescope would allow wide area observations of the lunar surface during strong solar flares, when the Sun provides more intense X-ray illumination.

Traditional X-ray telescopes are often too large and heavy for this type of mission. By contrast, the team's compact telescope was originally designed for studying Earth's magnetosphere and weighs less than ten kilograms. Its small size could make it practical for long term lunar satellite observations.

The detector has also been tested in radiation conditions far harsher than those expected in lunar orbit. That durability could support robust, wide area, high resolution imaging over an extended mission.

Simulations Show A Path To A Full Moon Map

The researchers then added the telescope's specifications into a numerical simulation to test whether a satellite mission could successfully map the Moon. Assuming 300 solar flares per year and a single telescope aboard a Moon orbiting satellite, the simulation showed that the whole lunar surface could be mapped for five elements - oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, silicon - in two years, using a grid size of 70 x 70 kilometers.

Because the telescope is so compact, the team also examined a satellite carrying a five by five array of telescopes. According to the simulations, this 25 telescope system could reduce the mission time to one year. With two years of operation, it could also map sodium, while improving the grid size to 30 x 30 kilometers.

A New Window Into Lunar Geology

If either mission concept becomes reality, it would produce the first complete map of elemental abundance across the entire Moon. That achievement would give scientists a powerful new tool for studying lunar geology and reconstructing the Moon's long and complex history.

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21H04972.

Journal Reference: Airi Toida, Daiki Ishi, Yuichiro Ezoe, Masaki Numazawa, Kumi Ishikawa. "Numerical simulation of light-element geochemistry of the lunar surface using a compact and lightweight XRF imaging spectrometer." Earth, Planets and Space, 2026; 78 (1). DOI: 10.1186/s40623-025-02326-2

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/08/2026 - 22:35

Tiny X-Ray Telescope Could Unlock The Moon's Hidden Chemistry

Tiny X-Ray Telescope Could Unlock The Moon's Hidden Chemistry

Authored by Tokyo Metropolitan University via ScienceDaily,

Researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have used simulations to show that a small, newly developed X-ray telescope could help create a chemical map of the entire lunar surface. Such a map would be a major step toward understanding how the Moon formed, changed, and evolved over time.

A new compact X-ray telescope could help scientists produce the first-ever complete map of the Moon’s chemical makeup. Credit: Shutterstock

Their detailed modeling, which included both the telescope detector and a realistic Moon orbiting satellite mission, suggests that one telescope could map five important elements in about two years. A larger five by five array of detectors could produce sharper maps and complete the work more quickly.

Mapping The Moon's Chemistry

The Moon's geological history is still not fully understood. One major reason is that scientists do not yet have a complete geochemical map of the lunar surface. Because researchers cannot simply collect samples from every part of the Moon, they must rely on remote sensing methods.

One of these methods is X-ray fluorescence imaging. In this approach, detectors are pointed at the Moon to capture X-rays emitted by specific elements after they are struck by solar radiation. Those signals can help reveal which elements are present across different regions of the surface.

Why Complete Lunar Maps Are Difficult

Earlier observations from the Apollo and Chandrayaan missions produced useful partial maps, but a full global map is still missing. Creating one is technically difficult for several reasons. Missions have limited time to gather enough sunlight driven X-ray signals, and detectors can degrade during long periods in space.

The problem is especially difficult near the Moon's poles. In these regions, solar X-rays are weaker, which makes it harder to collect the signals needed to identify surface elements.

A Compact X-Ray Telescope For Lunar Orbit

To address these obstacles, a team led by Airi Toida and Prof. Yuichiro Ezoe of Tokyo Metropolitan University has proposed using a compact X-ray telescope on a satellite orbiting the Moon. The telescope would allow wide area observations of the lunar surface during strong solar flares, when the Sun provides more intense X-ray illumination.

Traditional X-ray telescopes are often too large and heavy for this type of mission. By contrast, the team's compact telescope was originally designed for studying Earth's magnetosphere and weighs less than ten kilograms. Its small size could make it practical for long term lunar satellite observations.

The detector has also been tested in radiation conditions far harsher than those expected in lunar orbit. That durability could support robust, wide area, high resolution imaging over an extended mission.

Simulations Show A Path To A Full Moon Map

The researchers then added the telescope's specifications into a numerical simulation to test whether a satellite mission could successfully map the Moon. Assuming 300 solar flares per year and a single telescope aboard a Moon orbiting satellite, the simulation showed that the whole lunar surface could be mapped for five elements - oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, silicon - in two years, using a grid size of 70 x 70 kilometers.

Because the telescope is so compact, the team also examined a satellite carrying a five by five array of telescopes. According to the simulations, this 25 telescope system could reduce the mission time to one year. With two years of operation, it could also map sodium, while improving the grid size to 30 x 30 kilometers.

A New Window Into Lunar Geology

If either mission concept becomes reality, it would produce the first complete map of elemental abundance across the entire Moon. That achievement would give scientists a powerful new tool for studying lunar geology and reconstructing the Moon's long and complex history.

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21H04972.

Journal Reference: Airi Toida, Daiki Ishi, Yuichiro Ezoe, Masaki Numazawa, Kumi Ishikawa. "Numerical simulation of light-element geochemistry of the lunar surface using a compact and lightweight XRF imaging spectrometer." Earth, Planets and Space, 2026; 78 (1). DOI: 10.1186/s40623-025-02326-2

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/08/2026 - 22:35

4 In 10 American Adults Report Having 'Mental Health' Problems

4 In 10 American Adults Report Having 'Mental Health' Problems

Over the past few years, a lot of progress has been made in accepting and understanding mental health problems.

Having long been seen as a sign of weakness, mental health issues in their many varieties and severities have become much less of a taboo.

As Statista's Valentine Fourreau notes, the pandemic, which left many people feel isolated, powerless or overwhelmed, accelerated that trend, as it not only caused a spike in symptoms of anxiety or depression, but also led more people to open up about their problems.

In a Statista survey from 2025-2026, the prevalence of self-reported mental health problems varies greatly across countries, suggesting that people in some countries, e.g. China or Japan, may be more hesitant to open up about mental health or simply less likely to identify certain problems as mental health issues.

Which Countries Report the Most Mental Health Problems? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista's chart shows, more than 4 in 10 U.S. adults reported that they experienced symptoms of mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety or depression in the 12 months preceding the survey, making an open discourse about mental health issues all the more important.

With that in mind, we give the last word to AOC, who exclaimed over the weekend that "we are not the crazy ones. We are sane!"...

Arguably, if you have to tell people that you're sane in public, you probably...aren't.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/08/2026 - 22:10

4 In 10 American Adults Report Having 'Mental Health' Problems

4 In 10 American Adults Report Having 'Mental Health' Problems

Over the past few years, a lot of progress has been made in accepting and understanding mental health problems.

Having long been seen as a sign of weakness, mental health issues in their many varieties and severities have become much less of a taboo.

As Statista's Valentine Fourreau notes, the pandemic, which left many people feel isolated, powerless or overwhelmed, accelerated that trend, as it not only caused a spike in symptoms of anxiety or depression, but also led more people to open up about their problems.

In a Statista survey from 2025-2026, the prevalence of self-reported mental health problems varies greatly across countries, suggesting that people in some countries, e.g. China or Japan, may be more hesitant to open up about mental health or simply less likely to identify certain problems as mental health issues.

Which Countries Report the Most Mental Health Problems? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista's chart shows, more than 4 in 10 U.S. adults reported that they experienced symptoms of mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety or depression in the 12 months preceding the survey, making an open discourse about mental health issues all the more important.

With that in mind, we give the last word to AOC, who exclaimed over the weekend that "we are not the crazy ones. We are sane!"...

Arguably, if you have to tell people that you're sane in public, you probably...aren't.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/08/2026 - 22:10

Chinese Article Warns VPN Use Alone Can Trigger Punishment Under Expanding Censorship Regime

Chinese Article Warns VPN Use Alone Can Trigger Punishment Under Expanding Censorship Regime

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

A widely circulated Chinese social media article warning that internet users can be punished simply for bypassing China's online censorship system has drawn attention to what observers say is an expanding clampdown on access to the global internet.

The article, published June 2 on Chinese social media WeChat and later archived by California-based nonprofit China Digital Times, which tracks China's state censorship, compiled a series of publicly reported cases of suppression on the use of virtual private networks (VPNs).

People play computer games at an internet cafe in Beijing on Sept. 10, 2021. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

The cases included fines imposed on users who accessed overseas websites, penalties for selling VPN services, arrests related to the dissemination of overseas political content, and investigations into internet activity dating back several years.

The article challenged a common assumption among Chinese internet users that using VPNs for research, accessing foreign websites, or utilizing overseas artificial intelligence (AI) tools is unlikely to attract official scrutiny as long as no sensitive content is shared.

"But from publicly disclosed cases, VPN use itself has already become a target of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) investigation," the article said.

The examples highlighted in the article suggest that the CCP is increasingly focused not only on what users do online, but also on how they access the internet.

One of the most notable cases involved a resident of Ningde, Fujian Province, who was penalized in 2024 for allegedly using a VPN to browse overseas websites in 2020.

According to the article, police reviewed historical internet records and later imposed an administrative penalty, prompting criticism from some legal observers who questioned whether the action complied with China's statutory limitations on administrative punishment.

The case stood out because it appeared to demonstrate the communist regime's ability to revisit years-old internet activity rather than relying solely on real-time monitoring and censorship.

Chinese legal professionals interviewed by The Epoch Times said that the enforcement action raised questions about the scope of retroactive investigations. Under China's Administrative Penalty Law, administrative violations generally cannot be punished if they remain undiscovered for more than two years, although certain exceptions apply.

The article also cited cases involving individuals punished for selling VPN services and users fined solely for establishing unauthorized internet connections, when there was no indication they had distributed overseas information.

The reported cases come amid broader efforts by the CCP to tighten control over cross-border internet access.

Under Chinese regulations, businesses and foreign nationals requiring international connectivity are generally expected to use telecommunications channels approved by the regime, while unauthorized VPNs and proxy services remain subject to censorship.

Wang Xin contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Mon, 06/08/2026 - 21:45

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