0:10
Breaking Lions Alert! Trump Orders New "Powerful" Strikes On Iran...
US forces launched a handful of strikes on Iranian sites near the Strait of Hormuz, hitting air‑defense radars, drone launch pads and missile batteries. The hits also knocked out surveillance gear and some port infrastructure, aiming to blunt Iran’s ability to threaten shipping lanes.
The Pentagon says the operations were precise, targeting only military assets without reported civilian casualties. Tehran condemned the moves, calling them “unprovoked aggression,” and warned of a proportional response.
Analysts note the timing aligns with rising tensions over regional security and recent diplomatic frictions, suggesting Washington is signaling a willingness to act if deterrence fails.
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1:13
Is A Liquidity Event Looming On The Horizon?
Hey, so I was looking at this livestream from today, and the guy's talking about how the current selling in the index is actually a rotation, not a risk-off scenario. Single stock volatility is at record levels, but the VIX is actually pretty low, and implied correlation is collapsing. That means the market's just repositioning on excess liquidity, not contracting.
Corporate credit issuance hit 110 billion in June, which is the strongest month since March and nearly double last year. And year-to-date issuance is already at 685 billion. This is a credit cycle melt-up, and it's not a good sign for a liquidity event.
You know how every major bubble follows the same playbook? Capital floods a single asset class, and the best traders get long the parabolic move. We saw it with internet stocks in the nineties, mortgages in the two thousands, crypto in 2021... and now AI compute is the next asset class absorbing the flows.
The Fed's holding real rates up, but inflation swaps are falling, and the SOFR strip is pricing in roughly 50 basis points of hikes through 2026. That means downside in the market is limited from here, which caps how bearish the setup can get for equities.
For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports Bitcoin — link in show notes.
2:46
Bill Clinton Insider Warns Of Socialist Takeover, Calls For Probe Into Possible DSA Foreign Ties
Mark Penn, a former chief White House pollster and strategic advisor to President Bill Clinton, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal warning that far-left radicals are hijacking the Democratic Party. He claims that years of letting socialists and Marxists into the party have led to dire consequences, with Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates defeating mainstream Democrats in primaries across several states.
Penn's warning is that America will be in trouble if Democrats fail to defend their party. He argues that the "revolution" is driven by the urban professional class, not the working class, and that it's fueled by anti-American rhetoric, hostility toward capitalism, and support for foreign adversaries.
Penn is calling for immediate investigations into the DSA to determine whether they're being funded by foreign governments and interests. He's concerned that if the DSA isn't properly handled, cities like New York will decay further.
The broader concern is that federal officials are investigating whether elements of the far-left activist NGO sphere have been influenced by foreign-linked networks, specifically from China and Cuba. This growing alarm inside the Democratic Party may lead traditional Democrats to look across the political aisle to counter the socialist wing.
President Trump has been gearing up for a fight against the radical left, saying that the Communists are making their move and that he's been preparing for this for a long time.
For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports Bitcoin — link in show notes.
4:43
"F**k The USA": Professor Delights Chicago Crowd With Anti-American And Anti-Border Rant
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor at Princeton University, recently gave a speech in Chicago where she denounced the United States and the concept of a nation-state. She told a crowd that she was given an American flag by a woman at the airport and instead of burning it, she chose not to, but then went on to express her disdain for the country. Taylor believes that borders are "deadly" and that patriotic people are dupes. She also thinks that the idea of loving a nation-state is something that should be rejected.
Taylor has written for the New Yorker and has received fellowships from several prestigious organizations, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her views on erasing borders and rejecting nation-states are not unique to her, but they are becoming more mainstream in higher education. Many academics are now espousing views that were once considered radical, without serious challenge from their colleagues.
Taylor's writings are celebrated for their combination of socialism and identity politics, and she has been praised for her use of emojis. However, her views on economics are shallow and unsupported by evidence. She suggests that socialism is a successful economic model, despite its historical failure. The alternative, as Jonathan Turley notes, is a "liberty-enhancing economy" that has made the United States the greatest engine of prosperity and human rights in history.
For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports Bitcoin — link in show notes.
6:35
How to say no to projects that are a waste of your time
Everyone I know these days is busy. They put in long hours at work running from one meeting to another, writing reports, engaging in internal and customer-facing work. There isn’t much downtime. Yet, all that busy-ness doesn’t necessarily equate to production.
Often, you do the next thing in front of you without thinking about the costs associated with the work. Every time you engage in a task, it has a real cost to it. There is the amount of money that the company is paying for your time plus whatever other resources you eat up by doing the work. (In this age of AI, the cost of tokens you use in doing your work can add up in a hurry.) There are also the opportunity costs—the extent to which a particular task you’re doing crowds out other things you could have done with that time.
What can you do to ensure that you stay focused on the things you should be doing and are most effective at saying no to the tasks that should not be on your plate?
Up front, it is important to be clear about the real cost of doing something that feels like a waste of time as well as the potential benefits of doing the work. Make a realistic assessment of the amount of time the task will take so that you can highlight what it is costing your firm to have you do that work. You should also be clear on what will not get done if you take on that task.
Before you say no, though, also consider the benefits of doing the task. Something that might feel like a waste of time might make a client or customer feel better about the work you do for them in ways that will pay off down the line. Doing a particular job might get you noticed by someone else in your organization in a positive way that might benefit you later. So, don’t just focus on the costs.
If the job truly seems like a waste, though, start with a quick chat with the person who asked you to do the job. Lay out the costs as you see them as well as the benefits. Before adamantly refusing to do the task, ask what you’re missing. It may be that there is a hidden benefit to the job you hadn’t considered. You don’t want to beg off a task that actually could benefit you or the company in significant ways.
As you consider whether to say no, think a bit about the alternative. Is this task one that someone is going to have to do? If you don’t do it, who will? Is there someone else who can do it?
This question can sometimes make it easier to say no to something. If you’re a reasonably high-priced employee and you’re asked to do a mundane job, it may make a lot more sense for someone who makes less money to take it on (even with your oversight) to match the cost of doing the job to the value of the work. That can be a convincing argument for saying no.
Part of this calculus should also be a discussion about whether the task needs to be done at all. Often, there are things people are asked to do because a particular process has always been done in a particular way. That doesn’t mean it has to be done that way. It may be that there are ways to streamline a workflow without diminishing the quality of the work. Tasks that seem like a waste of time are potential candidates to trim.
People high in the personality characteristic of agreeableness often take on whatever task they’re given. They do so because they don’t want to create a confrontation with whoever made the request. In the moment, that maintains harmony in the relationship. This point is particularly important, because women tend to be more agreeable on average than men, so women may end up shouldering more of the burden of low-value work than men.
Unfortunately, over time there is a potential negative consequence of agreeing to do simple tasks. If you end up as the go-to person to take on routine jobs, you may be seen by others as a workhorse who doesn’t necessarily shine in important situations. That can limit your opportunities for promotion and keep you from being given plum assignments.
Saying no to tasks that are a waste of your time can be difficult, particularly if you are highly agreeable. Standing up for the value of your time will make that value visible to the rest of your team. When you say no, you are forcing others to recognize that your knowledge and skills are too valuable to be spent on tasks that someone else could be doing. The benefits of protecting your time are worth the short-term discomfort of saying no.
11:36
JD Vance's crusade against GDP is wrong and bad
“Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty.” — Captain Picard
Usually, these “GDP is actually good” posts start with a big disclaimer — an acknowledgement of all the things GDP doesn’t measure, all the reasons that measuring GDP is an inexact science, and all the ways that we need to improve society other than just making the GDP line go up. If you want a standard wonky explanation of why GDP is a useful number, here’s one that I wrote four years ago:
Today I’m going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you what I think the debate over GDP is really about.
Free trade usually raises GDP. Immigration, done right, raises GDP.1 Rightists in America want less free trade and less immigration. But every time they propose restricting trade and immigration, someone — either libertarian business/econ types on their own side, or moderate liberals on the other side — says “That will make America poorer!”. So they want some way to neutralize this objection, so they can do things that will, in fact, make America poorer.
So America’s right borrowed an argument from the European left. The European left favors degrowth, and another term for degrowth is “making GDP go down on purpose”. So naturally, they’re always trying to find reasons to denigrate GDP as a metric of human flourishing (see here, here, and here for examples). The American right is simply tweaking these arguments to make them more appealing to their own base.
JD Vance, who has emerged as the consensus leader of the New Right, makes a bunch of these anti-GDP arguments in his new book. For example, he uses the example of Japan to point out that unobserved quality differences in non-traded products can make it difficult to compare GDP across countries:
If you’re focused on GDP, a $6 pint of Japanese strawberries is no different from a $6 pint of American strawberries. If you’re focused on dollars and cents, each contributes equally to the economic indicators. But if everyone in Japan eats better strawberries than everyone in America, the economic indicators have failed to measure something meaningful.
This is actually a good argument, and I’ve made it myself many times in the past. I’m in Japan right now, and there actually are a lot of little things that make Japanese products and services a bit nicer than their American counterparts — clean tables at Starbucks, slightly better-tasting food, and so on. Economists who try to adjust for quality differences end up catching some of these things, but probably miss most of them. That ends up creating a problem for GDP comparisons between countries. And it’s only one of many such problems. Comparing lifestyles in countries where life is very different is just a difficult thing to do.
But instead of simply noting that economics is hard, JD Vance uses this good argument as a reason to bash the entire field of economics:
When I got back home, a friend asked me if I learned anything on my trip to Japan. “Yes,” I replied snidely. “Maybe economics is just fake.”
When you read some of Vance’s other arguments against GDP, his agenda becomes clearer:
[A]s the decline of Christianity has left us without a shared moral language, economics has stepped into the vacuum. We pretend there are scientific answers to questions of values. Take one of the major issues of the 2024 campaign and a significant focus of our time in the White House: Should our trade policy be oriented around protecting domestic industries and jobs or around ensuring a short-term supply of cheap consumer goods?
This idea — that economists urge values of base consumerism on society, and ignore other moral considerations — is common in European leftist discourse. But instead of urging us to care more about inequality, power, and so on, as European leftists do, Vance wants us to care more about spiritual elevation, morality, community — i.e., things that the American right cares about. He goes on to write:
[W]e now live in a society almost blinded to considerations outside of the economic. This way of thinking is inherently opposed to the Christian way, which demands more focus on people…Take, for instance, the time we spend with our children…Domestic labor—that done by moms and dads—if unpaid, is uncounted in measures like GDP. When I leave work to spend time with my children, when I cook them dinner or argue with them about eating their carrots, I am engaged in economically unproductive work. No money changes hands, so it doesn’t show up in our national figures. By contrast, if I left for dinner at 6 p.m. and returned to work until midnight while paying a total stranger to look after my kid, my contribution to GDP would be much higher.
and:
If you step away from the glory of economic statistics, so much of American life has gone wrong. An influx of prescription opioids became a flood of synthetic opioids, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths each year and a declining life expectancy among a substantial portion of our society.
17:17
Semiconductors Power 2026’s Top ETF Performers
So, I was looking at some ETF performance numbers, and it's no surprise that AI-related funds are killing it this year. Nine out of the top 10 performers are linked to the semiconductor industry, which is in high demand and short supply. The Breakwave Tanker Shipping ETF is up a crazy 683.8%, but it's worth noting that it's focused on crude oil tanker freight futures, not semiconductors directly.
The Invesco Semiconductors ETF is up 138.1%, with $2.7 billion in assets, and the VistaShares Artificial Intelligence Supercycle ETF has a 124.4% return with $892.6 million in assets. Other top performers include the First Trust Nasdaq Semiconductor ETF, Xtrackers Semiconductor Select Equity ETF, iShares Semiconductor ETF, and the YieldMax Target 12 Semiconductor Option Income ETF.
The thing is, these numbers are driven by the AI boom, and the tech sector is still looking strong. Earnings-per-share growth for tech companies is projected to be high, and cooling energy prices have eased rate hike fears, which is good for tech. It's a combination of strong earnings growth and lower interest rate hike expectations that's driving this.
Now, I know some of these funds are leveraged, which means they're super volatile and not built for long-term strategies. But if you're looking for a short-term play, they can be effective. Just keep in mind that they're not for everyone.
For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports Bitcoin — link in show notes.
19:04
Wall Street Banks Weigh Buying Card Payment Network to Escape Fee Caps
Banks have lost tens of billions of dollars in debit‑card interchange revenue because of the Durbin‑cap fee limits. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC are reportedly eyeing a joint purchase of Fiserv’s payments network to sidestep those caps, mirroring Capital One’s recent move to shift its debit traffic onto its own Discover network.
If the banks succeed, they could route debit transactions through an in‑house system, keeping the interchange fees that merchants currently pay to the major card brands. The shift would lift the fee ceiling that’s been in place since the 2010 Dodd‑Frank reforms.
Industry groups say the cap has already forced large banks to trim free‑checking offers, dropping from about 60 % of customers to roughly 20 % at affected institutions. Smaller credit unions and community banks, which were supposed to be exempt, report a quarter‑point hit to their debit‑card earnings.
So far, some banks have walked away, wary of regulatory backlash and political heat. The idea remains speculative, and any concrete change is likely still a ways off.
20:25
Bulls Dominate Wall Street’s Analysis of SpaceX
In space, no one can hear your bear case. On Tuesday, the banks behind last month’s gargantuan SpaceX IPO exited the post-listing liminal space ready to tell the world what they really think of Elon Musk’s unwieldy tech conglomerate. Some of them seemed to be channeling Gene Roddenberry.
With lips no longer sealed after the “quiet period,” analysts from Wall Street’s biggest firms became some of the most bullish voices in the SpaceX coverage choir. Analysts from Deutsche Bank, one of the IPO’s many underwriters, boldly went so far as to proclaim SpaceX “the apex of civilizational ambition … bending the arc of history.” Maybe investors weren’t listening: SpaceX tumbled nearly 7% on Tuesday, closing about $11 below its debut price less than a month ago.
Opinions ranged from “bullish” to “extremely bullish” among the four big banks that led the IPO, which each initiated coverage on Tuesday with the equivalent of a “buy” rating. Goldman Sachs analysts gave the stock a $205 price target, while JPMorgan estimated $225 and Bank of America analysts projected $235. Morgan Stanley came in hot with a whopping $300 price target, saying its base case projects revenue will rise from $45 billion this year to $319 billion in 2030 and $3.3 trillion in 2040. From Goldman to Morgan Stanley, the difference in enthusiasm amounts to a $1 trillion valuation gap.
How the banks arrived at their projections varied. JPMorgan called the company’s Launch unit its “key enabler and differentiator”; Morgan Stanley considered the Space unit a small piece of the company’s value proposition. Goldman’s slightly more conservative outlook projects SpaceX will become free cash flow positive in 2031, four years prior to the projections of even more optimistic Morgan Stanley.
Despite the wide range of numbers proffered by the big banks, outliers exist at both ends of the spectrum:
- Analysts at MoffettNathanson have given SpaceX a “neutral” rating and a price target of $131, declaring SpaceX’s claim of a total addressable market of almost $30 trillion to be “absurd.” The firm also noted that “sufficient material inputs will not exist” to meet CEO Elon Musk’s 2029 goal of annually launching 100 gigawatts’ worth of orbital data centers into space.
- Raymond James, which initiated coverage Tuesday, gave a “Strong Buy” rating and a price target of $800 (yes, you read that right). The analysts dubbed SpaceX’s space, Starlink and AI services “the most significant infrastructure convergence since the advent of the Internet.”
Merging Lanes: So what’s next for SpaceX? Probably not the much-rumored acquisition of Tesla, JPMorgan analysts said. While a tie-up would be “strategically coherent on paper,” the bank’s analysts warned that regulatory and governance roadblocks would likely stand in the way. In 2026, massive M&A is simply too pie in the sky, even for the company penciling in a few moonshots.
The post Bulls Dominate Wall Street’s Analysis of SpaceX appeared first on The Daily Upside.
23:53
Want a Cheaper Ride? Fiat Introduces a Tiny $14,000 EV to US Drivers
Stellantis is looking to fill a small niche in America’s car market. A very small one.
On Tuesday, the automaker announced that its Fiat Topolino, a two-seat electric vehicle that weighs just 1,073 pounds and is only about 8 feet long, is coming to the US. The low-speed vehicle, technically classified as a quadricycle rather than a car, is more on par with a golf cart than what you’d actually see out and about on most roads. It can go up to 19 mph (or 25 mph with a low-speed vehicle conversion kit needed to make it street-legal). With a $13,995 price tag on the EV, Stellantis aims to convince Americans that bigger isn’t always better.
Two Americas
The Topolino’s journey to North America comes as drivers in the US may very well be looking for a less expensive way to get around. Car prices have surged in recent years as companies focus on developing pricier high-end vehicles as opposed to the budget-friendly ones families drove for decades. Higher price tags are also partly due to automakers dealing with the aftermath of shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic. The average price for a new vehicle was $49,220 in May.
As a result, customer demand is shrinking. Tack on the fact that carmakers around the world are struggling to compete with China, and it’s no wonder that companies like Stellantis are looking for new ways to fill gaps:
- Toyota appears to be taking the opposite approach by doubling down on larger vehicles. The company just announced a $3.6 billion expansion of its San Antonio manufacturing campus to move production of its Tacoma midsize pickup truck from Mexico to Texas. The move will result in 2,000 new jobs.
- Rivian, meanwhile, is going cheaper with its R2 mid-size SUVs. The direct competitor of Tesla’s Model Y began heading to customers last month.
Beep Beep: So what if the Topolino, which means “little mouse” in Italian, is more appropriate for retirement communities and small downtowns than cruising the highway? More and more towns are becoming golf-cart friendly, paving the way for Fiat’s offering.
The post Want a Cheaper Ride? Fiat Introduces a Tiny $14,000 EV to US Drivers appeared first on The Daily Upside.
