With the intervention in the Japanese yen, we should look at what happens to the yen-peso carry trade. The last time this faltered in mid 2024, take a look at ETFs like EWW and ILF. Right now, the yields on US treasuries are still higher than Japanese ones which is probably saving this trade. 

If the Japanese are going to intervene in the falling yen, then doesn’t that strengthen the yen, raise interest rates, and take away the Japanese carry trade? And shouldn’t that affect our stock market negatively? We’ve seen Japanese bond yields go up for a while but it hasn’t impacted our stocks. 

The book destruction by Anthropic reminds me of what Thanos says in Endgame: “I will shred this universe down to its last atom and then, with the stones you've collected for me, create a new one. Teeming with life that knows not what it has lost but only what it has been given. A grateful universe.”

Thanos Marvel: A Greatfull Universe

Alt: Thanos delivering a line in avengers endgame about how he wants to shred this universe down to its last atom and build a new one teaming with life that knows not what has been taken but only what has been given. A grateful universe.

static.klipy.com

Kevin Warsh gave no clue as to how he would battle high inflation and you saw the bond and stock market react violently. The hardest choices require the strongest wills. In acting this way, he follows in the footsteps of Greenspan who presided over the dotcom crash. And that is destiny fulfilled. 

This day extracts a heavy toll. Meta’s stock was punished due to its free cash flow decline while Microsoft was rewarded due to reducing capex. There’s only so much cash flow left over. When there’s too many mouths and not enough to go around, investors bail. What I predicted has come to pass.

Ashwin Viswanath@ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The $NVDA earnings out, and results having beaten expectations, but we have to keep an eye on the GPU trade broadening to other sectors, high CAPEX, desire for free cash flow from fund managers, and how the bond rates for hyperscalers have increased due to CAPEX spend. Nvidia is down after hours.

I expect Kevin Warsh to say that the Fed will resume QT, allow the MBS runoff to continue, and reinforce that the Fed has no tolerance for persistently high inflation. He’ll also tie a lower balance sheet to lower policy rates and say that the Fed will rely on the trimmed mean to measure CPI.

Even though Citadel believes that the Fed will raise rates, I don’t think they will. They’ll hold because Warsh has said that he wants to rely more on the CPI trimmed mean so that it strips out outliers and one time shocks. The CPI trimmed mean is pretty stable www.clevelandfed.org/indicators-a...

Median CPI

The median CPI is a measure of inflation computed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. It ranks the components of CPI inflation and picks the one in the middle. Its construction makes it less sen...

clevelandfed.org

Two different headlines about Jeff Bezos about the same story. This one from Fortune: fortune.com/article/jeff... and this one from TNW: thenextweb.com/news/bezos-s.... Reminder to everyone to always look behind the headlines even in a world with ever-decreasing attention spans.

Jeff Bezos says working harder is the cure for anxiety: ‘The stress goes away the second I take that first step’ | Fortune

Bezos worked through decades of stress to build the No. 1 Fortune 500 company.

fortune.com

Oil is now higher and we all know what happened the last time it was this high back in March. The only difference is back then, we still had oil reserves to draw from whereas now they are perilously low. This does not bode well for any stock.

Kimi has a promotion where if existing users share their referral code and it results in a download, both you and I get entered into a draw to get a year of free membership. Here is my code: kimi-bot.com/activities/v...

With Perplexity, you could simply select additional connectors, but now you have to select each one individually and go back to the UI to select others. I think that most Pro users selected all and it increased token consumption costs for Perplexity, so now they’re adding friction to this process.

Most of the banking stocks are on a tear and it looks like the semiconductor stocks are experiencing quite a selloff since their highs in mid June. But then again, we also know that it’s the trading revenue that’s bolstering these banking stocks. So if the AI bubble pops, what happens to them?

When will the AI bubble pop? We know Warsh wants to cut the money supply, but there’s more money printing. During the pandemic bubble, the sign was bond rates going up in late 2021 in anticipation of a Fed hike. Now we’re in a high interest rate environment and we don’t know where inflation will go.

The S&P has downgraded Oracle to one notch above junk status due to their concerns over weaker cash flows, competition from Meta & SpaceX, and the risks posed by OpenAI being the largest AI datacenter customer, making up over half of the $638 billion worth of RPO. www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/r...

Microsoft is replacing openAI with some of their own models. I wonder if they’re willing to write down the value of their investment if it comes down to it? I suspect they must’ve run the numbers on their margins and correlated it with their stock price. thenextweb.com/news/microso...

Happy Fourth of July, my fellow Americans! This view of the Pacific with our stars & stripes in the foreground signifies an unlimited expanse for our ambition. We are the greatest country in the world and we must continue to strive towards even greater heights. We are inevitable.

I am impressed by Kimi v 2.6 agentic capabilities and how I’m able to audit its chain of thought. I asked it to research some nuclear energy stocks for me, and look at how I’m able to see which skills it is retrieving, how is executing Python code, and any activities it is doing in its terminal.

Between LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, when do you use these frameworks versus building lighter-weight primitives? Also, for fine-tuning or embeddings, is it better to use PyTorch and TensorFlow to write custom classes to define layers, weights, and dimensions or just Hugging Face?

This is a great article that outlines 3 ways in which the AI bubble might burst (dotcom-style violent crash, 2008-style economic contagion, or slow deflation due to unusable infrastructure) and what the EU can do to take advantage of it when that happens: federicozebele.substack.com/p/this-is-wh...

This Is Why AI is a Bubble — and What EU Should Do

What the consensus says. What it stays silent about. And what would actually happen if it burst.

federicozebele.substack.com

With the release of Google open knowledge format, I wonder if DBT is in serious trouble. With OKF, all data analysis can be automated and you don’t need a dedicated data analyst anymore. You do of course need ETL and data catalogs - that never changes no matter how the tech landscape changes!

Microsoft’s take on the AI frontier ecosystem snscratchpad.com/posts/fronti.... To accomplish this, they must “hot swap” models. Before that, they must create an Azure service out of an open source model. Then, get rid of LLM-as-a-judge evals. Finally tie in observability and Azure API management.

A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the firm in an AI-driven economy.

snscratchpad.com

Software stocks are getting disrupted due to AI, yet have to destroy their 70% gross margins even more by using the frontier models. If AI wasn’t there as a growth catalyst in 2022 when we were in a bear market, I wonder where their stock prices might be today. What if ChatGPT and LLMs didn’t exist?

Amazon voiced concerns about Anthropic‘s Fable model despite investing in them. Why would they do this? My theory is that they ran the numbers on token costs which were too much for their customers. They’ll probably deploy a Chinese open source model as an AWS service www.reuters.com/business/ret...

Amazon voiced concerns about Anthropic AI models before US  government's crackdown, source says

Amazon CEO ​Andy Jassy raised concerns about security risks in Anthropic’s most advanced AI models.

reuters.com

Friday March 10, 2000 was the peak of the dotcom bubble. 📉 Dr. Strange saw 14,000,605 possibilities and only 1 victory against Thanos. Add 14,000,605 minutes to March 10, 4pm ET and you get Friday, October 23, 2026 7:26am ET before the market opens. We’re in the endgame now.

Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Endgame

Alt: Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Endgame signaling to Tony stark with his index finger that this was the only chance at victory out of 14 million possibilities to take the infinity stones from Thanos’s gauntlet.

static.klipy.com

Anthropic will spend $200 million to study AI job disruptions. It comes soon after Dario called for a halt to further AI development. With OpenAI seeking a government stake, we know why – their unit economics are bad. But what’s in it for Anthropic spending this money? www.usnews.com/news/busines...

As Anthropic and OpenAI tokens get more expensive, the hyperscalers will simply take open source models and launch their own distinct AI services on their clouds, similar to what they did during the Big Data days with Hortonworks.

In Feb about $1T in market cap was wiped off from SW stocks due to fears that Anthropic would eat into their market share. Anthropic recently closed a round that values it at almost $1T. Yet, today, software stocks are up a lot. How can both sectors be up simultaneously? fortune.com/2026/02/05/s...

The ‘dumb money’ steps in as traders lose $1 trillion on the realization that AI will eat tech companies first | Fortune

The chaos is mostly a tech-stock phenomenon. The equal-weight S&P 500 is actually at a record high.

fortune.com

Google Health doesn’t save you time with its generative AI features. It suggested to me to snap a picture of a snack I was taking and it would automatically calculate the calories. It completely botched the job and cost me more time in deleting the entry. I will simply stick with MyFitnessPal.

The $NVDA earnings out, and results having beaten expectations, but we have to keep an eye on the GPU trade broadening to other sectors, high CAPEX, desire for free cash flow from fund managers, and how the bond rates for hyperscalers have increased due to CAPEX spend. Nvidia is down after hours.

Effects of generative AI on dev productivity: #AI tool usage ⬆️ 65% 🟰PR throughput ⬆️ 8%. Most orgs in 5-15% range, below the 3x-10x expectations. Coding is about 14% of dev time but AI tools introduce new bottlenecks like additional reviews, tech & cognitive debt newsletter.getdx.com/p/ai-product...

AI and engineering AI productivity gains: More modest than expected

Findings from DX’s longitudinal analysis of AI’s impact on velocity from November 2024 to February 2026.

newsletter.getdx.com