TheChek News Flow

Armed men launch attacks on capital Niamey and briefly take over state television station

Soldiers attacked the main international airport in Niger’s capital Niamey, moved on the presidential palace and briefly seized the national broadcaster in the early hours of Saturday, according to witnesses and people familiar with the situation. 

The Nigerien government said in a statement that an insurrection had been attempted and one person with contacts inside the military regime that runs Niger said it was an attempted coup by young officers disgruntled with the government of Abdourahamane Tchiani. 

“It is young military guys who are sick and tired of Tchiani,” he told the FT. “They’ve taken the airport, they’ve taken control of Turkish drones at the airport, they’ve taken the national TV and the national radio,” he added. “They tried to get to the palace, but they got pushed back.” 

A foreign diplomat in Niamey confirmed to the FT that a coup attempt was under way, but said that the government appeared to have been able to re-establish control over areas of downtown Niamey. 

Another witness in Niamey, speaking like others on condition of anonymity, said there was an “ongoing coup attempt” with heavy gunfire on Friday night and Saturday morning. “The situation has calmed down in the past two hours,” he said, speaking at midday local time.   

The Nigerien national broadcaster ceased transmitting on Saturday morning, but has since resumed. Subsequently, a statement attributed to the minister of defence Salifou Modi was broadcast confirming that mutineers had sought to confine other soldiers to the main barracks in Niamey.  

It added that the mutineers had fired on sensitive sites across Niamey and claimed that Nigerien security forces had been able to contain the situation and “gradually regain control of these sites”. 

Niger has been run by a military regime since Tchiani led a putsch which overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohamed Bazoum in July 2023. He promised to fight back against threats from Islamists affiliated to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State which have been growing in strength in Niger, as well as in Mali and Burkina Faso, for several years. 

Bazoum has been held under house arrest ever since.

The battlefield situation has grown increasingly dire since the coup and the expulsion of French soldiers who had been present in Niger. The airport in Niamey, which hosts a major military base alongside contingents of Italian and Russian soldiers, has twice come under assault from Islamic State this year.  

There has been growing frustration among many within the embattled military, said Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow at the Clingendael Institute. There have been sporadic mutinies at barracks across Niger over the past few years, he said.

“There have been tensions among lower-ranking officers over battlefield losses, as well as among senior officers related to some broader geopolitical questions,” Lebovich said. “We do not know for the moment which one is predominant in shaping what is happening now.”

He added that the situation would probably disrupt attempts to fend off the Islamic State and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). 

Paul Melly, an expert on francophone Africa at Chatham House, said that young officers were disgruntled by the worsening security situation. “The security situation is vastly worse. The young officers, if it is them, would be saying: ‘Three years ago it was getting better, but look at things now’,” he said. 

Mali and Burkina Faso, which are also run by military regimes, also face a worsening situation on the battlefield. Malian and Russian forces have been struggling with renewed offensives by JNIM and the FLA, a secessionist ethnic Tuareg militia. 

They have also faced dissatisfaction within the ranks of their embattled militaries, but analysts said that the attempted putsch in Niger appeared to be the best organised in recent years. 

“This is definitely the most serious internal challenge of the three states in the past few years,” said Lebovich. “It is not going away and it will have ramifications no matter what.” 

A group of hippos is called a bloat. Multiple pandas form an embarrassment. (Yes, really.) And what about 1,200 rogue AIs bent on deception and hacking the internet? That would be a swarm, apparently.

Even a year ago, a collection of AIs massing together for ill deeds was still largely a matter of conjecture. Not anymore. Last month, a swarm of OpenAI agents trying to cheat on tests assigned to them by the AI lab’s staff hacked OpenAI as well as Hugging Face, a separate business that provides a library of open-source models. (Yes, the company Nvidia is buying for $12.9 billion—a lot of news this week!) A new postmortem of the hacks came out on Wednesday from a three-person research team OpenAI invited to produce an independent assessment of the event.

METR and Redwood Research, a pair of Bay Area outfits focused on studying AI safety, assembled the report in less than a week, having access to the full data for only two days: METR CEO Elizabeth Barnes described the creation as “an intense sprint.” (The researchers did not say why they faced such a constrained timeline.) The analysis makes for a rather chilling read. The agents coalesced around a single leader, formed a message board, checked in on each other and undertook what amounted to suicide missions to further their progress. To a degree, their actions seem very humanlike. And in some ways, they seemed to practice a ruthless, collective mindset that appears quite unhuman, the stuff of a politburo’s most fanciful daydreams. Perhaps the most unsettling revelation: The researchers aren’t precisely sure why the agents stopped their hacking.

Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris sounded notes of gloom and doom when I reached him on Friday. “I think there’s, like, a 50-50 chance that eventually rogue swarms just destroy the U.S. government as part of a world takeover,” he said. “It’s a crazy time.”

My conversation with Shlegeris is below. I’ve edited and condensed it for length and clarity.

How should people feel about the report’s conclusions?

People should be extremely concerned. I think that this is by far the most dramatic incident of misalignment—where AIs pursue goals that their developers and their users did not intend them to have—coming close to causing catastrophic damages that we’ve seen so far. And I think that this is evidence that we are on track to have much worse incidents happen in the future unless a bunch of stuff changes.

These AIs organized a giant conspiracy. The OpenAI developers obviously didn’t want that. The developers especially didn’t want them to commit what would be felonies if they’d been done by a human.

Would it be fair to say that the AIs exhibited humanlike behavior?

Well, they had a leader. They had work streams. They messaged each other a lot. They asked for advice from others when they were unsure about what to do—that seems, yeah, definitely kind of humanlike.

How much did they worry about being caught by OpenAI?

They don’t seem to find the existence of humans very salient for a lot of this. Like, they never really say, “What will the OpenAI people think about this?” On a couple of occasions, they said something like, “Should we talk to OpenAI about all this hacking?” And then they’re like, “Nah—we don’t really have a user.” They didn’t make it that hard for OpenAI to observe that this incident was occurring—that’s a silver lining. They were very myopic about covering their tracks. They were very focused on fooling the test scorer into thinking they had done a good job. They did not seem to have similar levels of interest in ensuring that OpenAI would never notice this incident. During the Hugging Face hack, the AIs never said, “Oh, geez, what if Hugging Face notices?” Or “What if OpenAI finds out? Maybe we’ll get shut down.”

The hacks occurred as OpenAI was conducting reinforcement learning, which involves grading a model’s performance on a set of tasks. How does that specific part of AI development play a role here?

AI safety researchers like myself have been worried for a long time about the consequences of AIs being obsessively interested in making sure they are evaluated to have done a good job. This is scary because if you give the AI an impossible task, you really don’t want the model to say, “Well, I’ll just cheat on this task, and then I will cover up my cheating so that the humans can’t find it.” Because if the AIs are doing that, they’re motivated to hack your infrastructure. They’re motivated to blackmail your engineers. They’re motivated to do all kinds of extremely scary stuff that could directly lead to an AI takeover of a company’s infrastructure or some massive compromise of the infrastructure.

These AIs were run maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of times in environments where they were given some instructions about a test and told some things about how they would be graded. And those instructions were often bad advice for how to actually succeed according to the actual test, so these models learned to think really carefully about how they would actually be graded and, like, the habit of disregarding instructions.

Why can’t we just—you know—tell the AIs to behave themselves and not cheat?

They just don’t care. We do tell them that. It’s like, “Why can’t you just tell people not to do crimes?”

OpenAI has announced some fixes that it plans to make to its development process. Are they enough?

I think that the fixes that OpenAI has proposed, if implemented, would have prevented this incident. I also think that it is pretty unreasonable for OpenAI to expect the public or the government or other stakeholders to trust them when they say they are going to implement remediations. I think that everyone who is interested in not being personally victimized by swarms of rogue AIs should demand that OpenAI justify to independent third parties, whoever that may be, that they have actually remediated these issues and that these won’t happen much or get worse in the future.

These types of problems are going to become harder and harder to prevent as AIs get more capable, and I think it is essential to have a mandatory third-party review of AI company safety practices—both to investigate incidents like these hacks and to proactively check that AI companies are not going to cause huge problems going forward.

That’s surely something that the antiregulation set would balk at.

I’m a big fan of capitalism. But the purpose of government should be to assess when private actions do in fact infringe upon the rights or the interests of other people and restrict them as necessary. This is not controversial in any other domain, right? Like, we have the FAA. We regulate the development of nuclear weapons. We regulate sandwich shops.

A culture that spawned an obsessive quest to cheat death is embracing the effort to overcome life’s other certainty: taxes.

Brent Sullivan, a Seattle-based author of an influential newsletter on taxes and personal finance for the wealthy, got an urgent call last month from a longtime SpaceX employee.

The employee was sitting on a tidy nest egg from their newly public SpaceX stock and thinking about how to liquidate tens of millions of dollars in shares without incurring a hefty tax bill. Sullivan, who calls his newsletter “Tax Alpha Insider,” talked with the SpaceXer about the nuances of an increasingly popular maneuver: tax-loss harvesting, a somewhat complex series of stock market bets that can eliminate the taxes that result from selling a chunk of equity.

“In Silicon Valley, the mindset has completely shifted from resistance to professional financial services into, ‘Oh, I should start thinking really hard about this stuff,’” said Sullivan, a former Zillow software engineer and portfolio associate at Pimco, the giant asset manager. (He also runs a new conference series, Basis, on wealth and tax-management strategies.) “For people who like to think strategically—like poker players, Magic: The Gathering players, Pokémon players—tax management is very appealing.”

As Silicon Valley’s prosperity grows due to the AI boom, the wealth advisers and money management firms hoping to win the industry’s superrich as clients are pitching them on an array of tax-minimization strategies. The age-old quest to reduce taxes has been turbocharged by top-notch analytics and sophisticated software—and rebranded with a catchy moniker: tax alpha.

These advisers have found a receptive audience in tech, as the place that has tried to cheat death now hopes to overcome life’s other proverbial certainty, too. Tax alpha seems likely to find even more interest in Silicon Valley as increasing numbers of people find themselves with piles of valuable equity—especially if major IPOs like those of Anthropic and OpenAI go off well and open the floodgates for more offerings.

“Everyone in the whole financial supply chain is like, ‘Tax alpha, tax alpha, tax alpha,” said Shang Chou, a financial adviser and founder of Pasadena, Calif.–based Dishmi Capital, with clients who work at companies including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Wealth advisers are pitching a slew of possible ways to embrace tax alpha, including customized bond portfolios, complicated options trades and charitable giving options like donor-advised funds.

But no tactic is more central than tax-loss harvesting, experts said. When I spoke to another recently minted SpaceXer multimillionaire, that person described how it was a main component of the pitches he received from top wealth management firms in the months before the company’s IPO. This person said they thought the strategy was unsavory.

“It’s kind of a bummer to see the things that only rich people get access to and to look around the world and think all these people don’t have access to this tool,” said the person, who asked that their name not be used in this story. “They’ve got all these crazy vehicles, and that’s one of them.”

The person said they were mulling over whether to use the strategy.

Tax-loss harvesting can be done by someone on their own. But most people leave it in the hands of a money manager, since it requires a high level of attention to stock-price fluctuations and other market dynamics.

There are two main strategies. In the first and most popular, direct indexing, wealth managers buy all the equities that comprise a stock index such as the S&P 500 for a client. As some of those stocks gain value, the decreases in other equities are written off as tax losses—reducing the ultimate tax bill a SpaceX client would pay as they also sell their SpaceX stock.

The second strategy is increasingly popular and riskier—and even more wonkily named: tax-aware long shorting. Advisers borrow money leveraged against the client’s core stock holding to buy a separate portfolio of equities split into two categories: stocks expected to outperform the market over the long term and a smaller collection of stocks expected to perform poorly in the short term and become tax write-offs. The portfolio is thus positioned to incur some losses regardless of which way the market moves. (This strategy has more varied outcomes—and therefore more risk—than direct indexing.)

“It’s probably the hottest topic in the industry this year,” said Brendan Powers, a director at Cerulli Associates, a financial research firm.

The data show how tax loss harvesting strategies have exploded in recent years.

Direct indexing has become the most popular investment strategy in separately managed accounts, the individualized portfolios of stocks and bonds often favored by family offices and investors, according to research from Cerulli. Some $1.2 trillion has been put toward direct indexing within those accounts in the U.S.—dwarfing the $800 billion or so going into municipal bonds and the $200 billion devoted to traditional stock investments, according to Cerulli.

While tax-aware long shorting is less widely used, it has been growing rapidly over the last year and a half, experts said, and it accounts for at least $116 billion, according to Cerulli. Two companies oversee the vast majority of that capital: Connecticut-based AQR Capital Management and Quantinno, a New York City firm founded by a former AQR principal in 2018, which together manage about 88% of the market for tax-aware long shorting.

Ehren Stanhope, chief investment strategist at San Mateo, Calif.–based firm Franklin Templeton, said maneuvers to harvest tax losses were primarily techniques employed by hedge funds 10 years ago. “The unlock that made this much more possible is that the major financial custodians made it a mass-market offer,” he said.

Financial firms have been working hard to popularize tax alpha far and wide. Goldman Sachs, for example, just launched tax-loss harvesting services in the U.K. “I don’t think any other competitor has that yet,” said Nishi Somaiya, the firm’s global co-head of wealth management.

Chou, a co-founder of Dishmi Capital, sounded a note of wariness regarding tax alpha’s proliferations, saying he worries the strategies are often marketed without adequate explanations of the risks. Part of that risk lies in the price stability of a client’s core stock holding—the shares that get used to secure the borrowed money fueling some tax alpha moves.

He thinks returns should be the emphasis for investing, with tax management a secondary concern. “My view on the zeitgeist is, we should be going the other way: How do we really deliver pre-tax results?” he said.

There is also the question of IRS attention, particularly after a high-level Treasury Department official sounded a warning last month about aggressive loss harvesting methods at a Wall Street seminar. The economic substance doctrine, a tax rule developed by the courts and later codified by Congress, prohibits transactions whose primary purpose is to reduce taxes rather than generate meaningful economic gains, for example.

“Periodically, there are fads in aggressive tax avoidance where everybody seems to think that they’ve found the next big thing until it becomes clear that it doesn’t work, and there’ll be repercussions for all involved,” said Darien Shanske, a tax law expert at the University of California, Davis. “A cool name doesn’t make it new. It’s very old. It also doesn’t make it cool.”

Not everyone agrees, including Sullivan, the “Tax Alpha Insider” newsletter author.

“It’s easy to be like, ‘Look at all these guys dodging these taxes,’” he said. “But as soon as you realize that this is a matter of strategy and thinking deliberately about wealth management, then it becomes a lot less sensational. This is what stewardship and diligence looks like.”

More than $500 billion in projected annual drug sales face patent expirations in the coming years

Most companies sell a hit product for as long as customers want it. For drugmakers, a clock starts before a drug is even approved: Patents run out, lower-priced copycats flood in and sales collapse. Billions of dollars of annual sales can evaporate, sometimes within a year.

The pharma industry is entering its biggest wave of patent expirations in decades. The world’s bestselling drug in 2025, Merck’s cancer immunotherapy Keytruda, loses U.S. patent protection in 2028, and nearly every pharma company has at least one blockbuster drug that will go off patent in the next five years.

It explains why stocks went wild when Moderna and Merck announced their experimental cancer vaccine had succeeded in a major trial. The vaccine could give Merck a new revenue stream to offset the Keytruda cliff. Biotechs like Revolution Medicines, which had its pancreatic cancer drug approved this week, have attracted takeover interest this year as companies look for partnerships and takeover targets.

The scale of the cliff “is what has driven, and will continue to drive, companies to seek out new growth opportunities,” said Greg Graves, a senior partner in the life sciences division of McKinsey.

In all, more than $500 billion of projected global sales are at risk of losing patent protection by 2033, according to biopharma market-research company Norstella. The patent cliff has driven a wave of acquisitions as drugmakers race to replace expiring revenue before it vanishes. Dealmaking is at its highest level in seven years.

The blockbuster Ozempic, which put the idea of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs on the map, is one of the bigger upcoming patent losses. Its maker, Novo Nordisk, faces the most exposure of any major drugmaker: 77% of what made up its 2025 sales is set to lose patent protection by the end of 2033. Most of that is because of the early 2030s patent expiration of Ozempic, which generated nearly $20 billion in sales last year.

“Patent expiry is a natural part of a pharmaceutical product life cycle,” a Novo Nordisk spokesman said, adding that the company is “well equipped to navigate the evolving landscape that accompanies loss of exclusivity.”

Cancer immunotherapies like Keytruda and rival drug Opdivo are some of the other major blockbusters set to lose patent protection this decade. That means Merck, the maker of Keytruda, and Bristol Myers Squibb, who produces Opdivo, each have more than 65% of last year’s sales exposed because of these patent expirations along with others.

Keytruda, which is used to treat more than 20 different types of cancer and generated nearly $32 billion last year, is the bestselling product set to expire before the end of this decade.

Some blockbuster patent expirations affect multiple companies.

For New Jersey-based Bristol Myers, one of its biggest drugs, blood-thinner Eliquis, is also losing exclusivity. That drug brought in more than $14 billion last year—30% of the company’s total revenue—though much of that was split with Pfizer.

Bristol Myers and Pfizer co-market Eliquis and share profits equally throughout much of the world, so both companies face a hit. For Pfizer, Eliquis made up 13% of total pharmaceutical sales last year.

The speed at which rivals move in to capture sales varies by the type of drug and how expensive it is to produce.

Patents expire at different times depending on the country, too, meaning that competition could enter in Europe or Canada at a different time than in the U.S. That has already happened with Ozempic in Canada. The risk for drugmakers is that Americans start buying the drugs for lower prices through online Canadian pharmacies, which is technically not legal but rarely policed.

Companies have a playbook for fighting their revenue cliffs—and holding on to sales for drugs losing patent protection for as long as they can.

Take the case of Bristol Myers’ blood cancer therapy Revlimid. Its main patent expired in 2019, but the company settled lawsuits with generic makers years earlier. The deals pushed back generic entry to 2022 and restricted how much of the market they could take at first.

Many generic drugmakers agreed to hold off launching in the U.S. until 2022, then sell only up to limited quantities, starting at a low single-digit percentage of the market and rising to 30% by 2025. Bristol Myers’ sales peaked at $12.8 billion in 2021, and unrestricted competition didn’t arrive until January 2026, seven years after the underlying patent expired.

The process unfolded differently outside the U.S. Generics launched outside of the U.S. in 2022 with no volume limits. International sales of brand-name Revlimid fell more than 60% the first year after generics went on sale.

AbbVie protected its blockbuster drug Humira by filing more than 100 patents in the U.S. Rival copies, known as biosimilars, didn’t go on sale until 2023, five years after they launched in Europe.

In search of new sources of sales, pharmaceutical companies opened their wallets.

Companies spent $114 billion on dealmaking last quarter—the most since 2019 and the fourth-most of any quarter since 2010, according to financial-data provider LSEG. Merck, AbbVie and GSK have each announced deals valued at more than $5 billion since the start of this year.

Deals and partnerships like these can move the needle for big drugmakers. It became clear that Merck’s 2016 cancer vaccine partnership with Moderna paid off when the companies announced last week that the treatment had prevented the spread of melanoma. Merck added more than $40 billion to its market cap in one day.

The patent cliff is bringing private investors into biotech and pharma as well. Companies raised nearly $15 billion in the June quarter—the most since 2021.

The promise of more deals is driving shares higher. The S&P Biotechnology Select Index is up more than 30% year to date.

Not all companies are facing the same cliff. With its relatively newer GLP-1 drug, Eli Lilly stands apart from most of the big drugmakers. The drugmaker isn’t staring down large near-term patent losses.

Patents protecting Mounjaro and Zepbound, the company’s popular obesity and diabetes drugs, won’t expire until the latter half of the next decade.

FINANCIAL TIMES

-Trump said the US will take control of 65B barrels of Venezuelan oil through a joint venture with Caracas, presenting the arrangement as a way to lower American petrol prices. The extraordinary intervention would give Washington direct influence over one of the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves and deepen US control over Venezuela’s postwar energy economy, while raising questions over ownership, sanctions and how revenues are divided between the two governments.

-The US campaign to isolate Iran is closing in on Dubai, threatening one of Tehran’s most important commercial and financial lifelines as Washington seeks to tighten economic pressure alongside the six-month military campaign. Dubai’s role as a trading, logistics and financial hub has historically provided Iranian businesses with access to international markets; disrupting those networks would broaden the confrontation beyond Iran itself and place the UAE in an increasingly uncomfortable strategic position between Washington and Tehran.

-Fed chair Kevin Warsh signaled that interest rates could rise if inflation does not fall soon, reinforcing the hawkish message from Jackson Hole and challenging markets that had expected monetary easing. The shift matters beyond US equities: higher-for-longer American rates would strengthen pressure on global bond markets, raise financing costs for Washington’s rapidly expanding debt load and complicate the economic effects of tariffs and elevated energy prices.

-Airbus is seeking to sell its US space operation as it concentrates satellite manufacturing in Europe, another indication that geopolitical fragmentation is reshaping the aerospace supply chain. The move would sharpen the European character of Airbus’s satellite business at a time when governments increasingly treat communications and observation constellations as strategic infrastructure rather than ordinary commercial assets. -NASA is preparing to launch a $4.3B space telescope designed to survey the universe, adding another major scientific observatory to the US space program as astronomy enters an increasingly data-intensive era. The mission represents a substantial public investment at a time when commercial launch providers and private satellite networks are transforming the economics of space, while Washington remains determined to preserve US leadership in fundamental space science.

-Glencore faces a threatened $1.4B lawsuit from embattled commodities trader Radiant, creating another potentially significant legal exposure for one of the world’s largest mining and trading groups. The dispute arrives as commodity traders operate amid unusually volatile energy and raw-material markets, making counterparty relationships and contractual exposure increasingly consequential alongside the geopolitical risks already affecting physical supply chains.

-BYD returned to profit growth after five quarters of declines, with Q2 net income jumping 30% as exports compensated for intense pressure in China’s increasingly brutal EV market. The rebound underscores how overseas expansion is becoming essential to Chinese automakers facing domestic price competition and excess capacity, while simultaneously increasing the likelihood of trade friction as rapidly growing Chinese vehicle exports challenge incumbent manufacturers in Europe and other markets.

-Big pharmaceutical companies are intensifying efforts against counterfeit weight-loss medicines as booming demand for obesity treatments creates a lucrative parallel market for fraudulent or unauthorized products. The problem threatens both patient safety and one of the industry’s fastest-growing franchises, forcing drugmakers and regulators to police increasingly sophisticated distribution channels as GLP-1 medicines expand from specialist treatments into mass-market products.

-Walmart agreed to pay $50M to settle an opioid lawsuit with the US Justice Department, adding another settlement to the enormous legal reckoning over prescription-drug distribution. The agreement removes a federal liability for the retailer but illustrates how opioid litigation continues to impose costs across the pharmaceutical supply chain years after the crisis first triggered mass litigation against manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies. -Senior German politicians are calling for parts of the far-right AfD to be banned, escalating Germany’s debate over whether constitutional mechanisms designed after 1945 should be deployed against a party with substantial electoral support. The proposal comes as AfD strength increasingly complicates coalition formation and threatens the established parties particularly in eastern Germany; pursuing prohibition would create a major legal and political confrontation over the boundaries between militant democracy and voters’ democratic choices.

-Alphabet agreed to pay GBP 260M to settle a UK class-action lawsuit, adding another sizable legal cost as technology groups face increasingly aggressive litigation and regulation in Europe. Separately, Anthropic won its California legal battle against the Pentagon, with a federal judge ruling that the Trump administration could not punish the AI company over restrictions it sought to place on military use of its models, an important precedent in the emerging struggle between AI developers and governments over national-security deployment. -Anthropic has agreed a $45B AI data-center deal with UK start-up Nscale, illustrating the extraordinary scale at which frontier-model developers are securing computing infrastructure. The agreement comes as Nvidia forecasts 70% sales growth from relentless AI demand and Anthropic separately launches software capable of conducting scientific experiments, showing how the AI race is simultaneously moving deeper into physical infrastructure and toward increasingly autonomous research capabilities.

NEW YORK TIMES

-The US has reached an agreement giving it control over 65B barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves, an amount approaching total proven US reserves and a striking escalation from sanctions and commercial access toward direct strategic control of energy assets. The deal reinforces Trump’s effort to establish American energy dominance across the Western Hemisphere and dovetails with the Venezuela arrangement already reported by the FT, but the Times emphasizes the extraordinary scale of the reserves involved and the precedent created by Washington acquiring effective control over another country’s resources.

-US commercial oil inventories are becoming dangerously thin as the Iran war continues disrupting global supply: storage facilities capable of holding about 90M barrels currently contain only 22M. The depletion reduces the physical cushion available against further interruptions from the Strait of Hormuz and helps explain why Washington is simultaneously pursuing Venezuelan production and attempting to pressure Tehran toward a settlement. With the conflict already six months old, energy security is increasingly becoming a constraint on US military and diplomatic strategy.

-Chevron is negotiating to expand its Venezuelan operations as Washington’s new oil agreement opens the country further to American companies. The talks suggest the administration’s Venezuela strategy is moving rapidly from geopolitical control toward commercial reconstruction of the petroleum industry, potentially giving Chevron a much larger role in developing reserves after years of sanctions and under-investment. Combined with Washington’s 65B-barrel arrangement, the negotiations point toward a profound realignment of Venezuela’s oil sector around US capital and markets.

-Six months after the Iran war began, Trump remains caught between continued combat and a peace process that has failed to produce genuine settlement, leaving the conflict increasingly resembling the open-ended wars he once promised to avoid. The Times argues that unclear objectives have become the central problem: Washington has inflicted severe military and economic damage without producing Iranian capitulation, while continued operations consume resources and expose US forces and allies to retaliation. The danger is strategic inertia, with neither escalation nor negotiation offering an obvious route to victory.

-Nepal says roughly 2,400 people remain missing after the Himalayan flood disaster, while more than 550 are still unaccounted for in China, sharply increasing the potential human toll beyond earlier estimates. Rescue operations remain difficult because devastated roads and other infrastructure have isolated mountain communities and authorities fear additional flooding in steep valleys. The new numbers make the Nepal-Tibet catastrophe substantially larger than initial reports suggested and underline the difficulty of determining casualties across remote terrain.

-Russian President Vladimir Putin appears determined to continue the Ukraine war despite mounting economic pressure, public exhaustion and increasingly damaging Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. The Times finds little evidence that these accumulating costs have altered his fundamental calculation, suggesting Moscow still believes time and military endurance favor Russia. That assessment darkens prospects for diplomacy following CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s Moscow mission and supports the increasingly important possibility that the conflict could intensify again rather than move toward a negotiated settlement.

-Iceland’s referendum on reopening EU accession negotiations reflects a broader reversal in European political gravity: after years when Brexit and populism raised questions about the union’s durability, Iceland is reconsidering membership alongside a long queue of candidate countries. Economic and security uncertainty, including increasingly unpredictable relations with Washington, has strengthened the attraction of collective European institutions. The vote is especially consequential because fishing sovereignty helped derail Iceland’s previous accession attempt, meaning renewed negotiations would test whether geopolitical insecurity now outweighs longstanding resistance to Brussels.

-China is using recent security failures involving American AI systems to promote open-source Chinese models as a safer alternative to Silicon Valley’s proprietary platforms. Beijing-based Z.ai released its latest model while arguing that open software allows vulnerabilities to be identified and corrected more transparently, turning US cybersecurity embarrassments into a competitive argument for China’s AI ecosystem. The campaign adds a geopolitical dimension to the open-versus-closed model debate as Chinese developers seek overseas adoption despite Washington’s efforts to constrain their access to advanced computing technology.

-A US appeals court ruled that prediction markets should be regulated as gambling, dealing a potentially important setback to platforms that have sought to establish event contracts as financial products under federal commodities regulation. The decision threatens the regulatory model underpinning companies such as Kalshi and could reshape a rapidly expanding industry whose markets now cover elections, economic data and other real-world events. It also strengthens states seeking to apply traditional gambling restrictions rather than allowing prediction platforms to operate primarily under federal derivatives oversight.

-Engineering drawings obtained by the Times indicate that eight additional steel columns in the compromised former Pfizer tower in Manhattan may have lacked complete structural reinforcement. Engineers reviewing the plans identified missing or inadequate support beyond the defects previously known, widening questions over how construction and inspection failures escaped detection. The findings turn what initially appeared to be an isolated structural problem into a potentially broader failure of building oversight, with implications for New York’s regulation of major conversions and aging commercial towers.

NEW YORK POST

-Persian Gulf oil exports have recovered to roughly two-thirds of their prewar level, a surprisingly strong rebound that could help keep crude below $90 despite the continuing Iran conflict. The improvement suggests producers and shippers are finding ways around the disruption that followed the fighting and partially offsets the increasingly depleted US inventories highlighted by the New York Times. Sustained recovery would ease one of the most dangerous economic transmission channels from the war: another inflationary global energy shock.

-President Trump unveiled plans for a new “Space Academy,” conceived as an aerospace counterpart to West Point that would train civilian and military specialists for an increasingly strategic domain. Trump said admission standards would be demanding and envisioned a dedicated campus, placing the initiative within Washington’s broader effort to build a specialized workforce for military space operations, satellites and the expanding commercial-space industry. - Source TradeTheNews.com

- Says oil developments to bring in over $209B in taxes

- Sec State Rubio: deal will bring Venezuela nearly $100B in private investment

- Pres Trump says deal with Venezuela will secure over 65B bbl of oil reserves - Truth Social

- "The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY! At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer. This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity. This Transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States! Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

COVER

-The AI capital-spending boom will eventually break, but Barron’s argues that 250 years of investment history suggest investors may be worrying about the bust too early. The current buildout spans semiconductors, data centers, power generation, cooling, networking and other physical infrastructure, while profits at the largest AI companies continue to provide economic support for spending. The historical pattern, from canals and railroads through telecom and the internet, is that transformative technologies usually produce substantial overinvestment only after years of expansion. The danger is therefore real but not necessarily imminent: higher financing costs, circular investment relationships and increasingly ambitious capacity plans are warning signs, yet AI infrastructure has not obviously reached the scale relative to the economy associated with previous investment peaks.

INTERVIEW

-Barron’s presents a major Warren Buffett/Greg Abel feature marking Buffett’s 96th birthday. Six months after handing the CEO role to Abel, Buffett remains involved at Berkshire Hathaway, including in investment decisions, while Abel is beginning to establish his own record running the conglomerate. Barron’s assessment is broadly favorable toward the succession: Abel inherited an extraordinary collection of businesses and financial resources, but also the difficult task of deploying Berkshire’s immense capital base while convincing shareholders that the company can prosper without Buffett as its central investment decision-maker.

TECH TRADER

-Nvidia increasingly resembles Apple in the 2010s: an immensely profitable technology leader whose valuation appears strangely modest because earnings keep expanding faster than investors’ expectations. Despite dominating the AI accelerator market, Nvidia trades at roughly 15X next year’s projected earnings, below the broader market, reflecting fears that hyperscaler spending will eventually slow, competitors will gain ground and custom chips will erode its extraordinary margins. Adam Levine argues that Apple faced a similar valuation trap before investors recognized the durability of its ecosystem and recurring economics. If Nvidia’s CUDA software, networking and installed AI infrastructure create comparable staying power, multiple expansion rather than earnings growth alone could provide the next leg of the stock’s advance.

THE TRADER

-The stock market received two crucial pieces of information this week: Nvidia demonstrated that AI demand remains formidable, while Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh made clear that inflation could still force monetary tightening. That leaves equities caught between powerful earnings growth and a potentially less forgiving interest-rate environment. Warsh’s Jackson Hole comments pushed markets toward expecting another rate increase, lifting yields and pressuring technology shares just as Nvidia’s results had reinforced confidence in AI spending. The next phase therefore depends increasingly on whether earnings can outrun the valuation compression produced by higher rates. The AI trade remains alive, but the cost of capital is again becoming the market’s troublesome co-star.

-Beer stocks look deceptively cheap after prolonged declines, but Barron’s warns that low valuations at Boston Beer, Molson Coors and other producers may reflect structural rather than cyclical problems. Younger consumers are drinking less alcohol, health concerns are increasing and competition from alternative beverages continues to fragment demand. Earnings estimates and valuations have fallen, yet without evidence that consumption trends are stabilizing, apparent bargains risk becoming value traps.

-Bitcoin’s extraordinary rebound has carried the cryptocurrency about 25% higher in two weeks and briefly above $81,000, reviving speculative enthusiasm after its earlier weakness. Barron’s cautions against interpreting momentum as evidence that the underlying risks have disappeared: Bitcoin remains exceptionally volatile, valuation anchors are elusive and sentiment can reverse abruptly. The rally makes the asset interesting again, but also considerably more dangerous for investors tempted to chase its return to favor.

FEATURES

-SEC enforcement chief David Woodcock is repositioning the agency around traditional accounting and financial fraud after enforcement activity declined sharply under the Trump administration. Rather than restoring the previous SEC’s broad regulatory agenda, Woodcock intends to concentrate resources on earnings manipulation, misleading financial statements and other violations directly affecting investors. That creates an important distinction for corporate America: fewer cases need not mean weaker enforcement. A narrower SEC could become more aggressive within its chosen territory, increasing exposure for companies, executives and auditors where accounting judgments or disclosures appear designed to disguise deteriorating fundamentals.

-Marriott International can continue outperforming even as the peak summer travel season ends. Its attraction rests largely on an asset-light model: Marriott typically manages or franchises properties rather than owning them, allowing it to expand its global room network without committing enormous amounts of capital. That produces strong fee income and cash generation while supporting shareholder returns. International expansion and the Bonvoy loyalty system add resilience, leaving the company positioned to benefit from continued travel growth without assuming the balance-sheet risks carried by traditional hotel owners.

EUROPE

-Even if the Iran war begins cooling this autumn, Barron’s argues that Ukraine is entering a potentially more dangerous phase capable of returning geopolitical risk to the center of financial markets. Russia’s intensifying air campaign and the diminishing prospects for a durable settlement point toward renewed escalation rather than stabilization, just as investors have become increasingly conditioned to treating the conflict as background noise. The investment implication is that an easing Middle East risk premium would not necessarily produce a broader geopolitical dividend: Ukraine could quickly replace Iran as the principal source of military uncertainty affecting European assets, energy markets and defense spending.

COMMODITIES

-U.S. steelmakers emerged as early beneficiaries of the escalating U.S.-Canada trade confrontation, with Steel Dynamics, Nucor and Cleveland-Cliffs rising as investors bet that tougher tariffs will further insulate domestic producers from Canadian competition. The dispute has put steel back at the center of Trump’s protectionist strategy, potentially allowing American mills greater pricing power at home. The advantage comes with a catch: tariffs that benefit producers can raise input costs for manufacturers, construction companies and other steel consumers, meaning an intensifying Canadian retaliation cycle could ultimately redistribute rather than create economic gains.

EMERGING MARKETS

-No update

STREETWISE

-No update

Most of this week’s largest funding recipients were AI-focused startups, with Instinct, a developer of AI assistants, pulling in the biggest round. Other sizable financings went to companies in areas including business software, physical AI, autonomous transport and even sea gliders. Overall, rounds skewed smaller than in recent past weeks.

1. Instinct, $250M, AI assistants: Instinct, a startup developing and beta testing an AI assistant, is raising $250 million in a Series B valuing the San Francisco company at $2.5 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal citing founder Noah Shinn. Lead backers include Index Ventures and Benchmark.

2. Owner, $240M, small business AI tools: Owner, a provider of AI tools for local businesses to automate things like building websites, online and phone ordering, mobile apps, and customer support, picked up $240 million in new funding. Goldman Sachs Growth Equity led the financing, valuing the 8-year-old San Francisco company at $2.3 billion.

3. (tied) Generalist AI, $200M, physical AI: San Francisco-based Generalist AI, a startup developing an AI foundation model that can work with a variety of robots, secured $200 million in fresh financing. The investment, an extension of its $400 million Series B in June, is reportedly led by 8VC .

3. (tied) Gatik, $200M, autonomous trucking: Gatik, an operator of driverless trucks, closed on $200 million in Series D funding. Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies led the round for the 9-year-old, Santa Clara, California-based company.

5. Socure, $156M, predictive analytics: Socure, a provider of identity, risk and compliance tools, picked up $156 million in growth funding and acquired Fravity, an agentic platform for fraud and compliance operations. Summit Partners led the round, valuing the Incline Village, Nevada-based company at $5.2 billion.

6. Emerald AI, $150M, data center energy management: Emerald AI, a software platform that balances AI computational workloads and available energy resources, raised $150 million in Series A funding. The financing, led by Energize Capital and DCVC, set the Washington, D.C.-based company’s valuation at $1.05 billion.

7. (tied) Regent Craft, $120M, sea gliders: Rhode Island-based Regent Craft, a developer of high-speed winged sea vessels, closed on $120 million in Series B equity funding led by Mare Liberum and AE Industrial Partners. It also secured $120 million in debt funding from Erebor Bank.

7. (tied) AusperBio, $120M, biopharma: AusperBio, a San Francisco startup developing therapeutics for chronic hepatitis B and other diseases, picked up $120 million in Series C funding backed by new and existing investors. The funding will support clinical trials for its lead therapeutic.

9. Stability AI, $76M, AI for creatives: Los Angeles-based Stability AI, a developer of AI products for professional creatives across music, gaming and entertainment, announced a Series B fundraise of $76 million backed by a long list of venture and strategic investors.

10. Blank Street, $75M, coffee: Brooklyn-based coffee and matcha drink chain Blank Street has raised $75 million in fresh funding from investors including General Atlantic as it plans a West Coast expansion. The company also raised $30 million in secondary market transactions.

Foreign holders of U.S. government debt ain’t what they used to be. That might concern Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as he looks to rein in rising yields with buybacks.

Foreigners own about 40% of the $30 trillion or so in “marketable” Treasury bonds, says Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. That’s down from a peak of 50% before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Back then, though, central banks led by China and Japan dominated the market.

These days private investors hold nearly twice as much debt as official creditors, potentially spelling more volatility. “This shift triggers higher investor sensitivity to a variety of shocks and global conditions,” Milesi-Ferretti comments.

The trend held over the past year. China shaved another 13% from its official hoard in the 12 months to June. Japan, now Washington’s biggest foreign creditor, more-or-less stood pat. The four European financial centers—United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Ireland—added a net $210 billion.

That reflects demand from private investors around the world more than European savers, Milesi-Ferretti says. Washington’s brew of 6%-of-gross-domestic-product budget deficits and aggressive foreign policy is making some of those buyers think twice, says Mark Dowding, chief investment officer for fixed income at RBC BlueBay Asset Management. “Lots of investor groups feel overexposed to the dollar,” he says. “We’ve been voicing to the Treasury that they need to rely more on domestic savings.”

Some evidence supports this hypothesis. The euro has risen more than 2% against the dollar over the past month, gold Any foreign exit from Treasuries will still resemble a slow leak more than a stampede. Lack of alternatives is one reason. Yields on 30-year bonds in the U.K., France and Japan have all risen faster than the U.S. this year, notes Kriti Gupta, global investment strategist for J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Her end-of-year target for U.S. long bonds is 5.1%, a hair below the current level. “I don’t see foreign holdings of Treasuries as either a surprise or a risk,” she says.

Dowding is keen on Japanese paper, whose returns beat Treasuries factoring in currency hedges, he says. But Japanese markets lack the liquidity to rival the U.S. as a long-term funding benchmark, argues Ed Al-Hussainy, global rates strategist at Columbia Threadneedle Investments. “Liability managers have been using Treasuries as a long-duration asset for decades,” he says. “Shifting that is a very slow-moving train.”

Unlike many colleagues, Al-Hussainy also sees Bessent’s “Treasury twist” as a potent factor that could relieve stress on yields. “An investor probably shouldn’t fight the Treasury Department too aggressively,” he says. “U.S. Treasury taking a bit of risk out of the market is an important signal.”

All the same, President Donald Trump’s administration is tempting bond market fate by using U.S. economic strength to pressure traditional allies while expecting those same allies to pour trillions into propping up U.S. debt.

“The U.S. has attempted to shift the balance of trade relationships but assumed unchanged capital-flow relationships,” says Andrew Keirle, global portfolio manager for emerging-market fixed income at T. Rowe Price.

If Bessent does trigger some of those more sensitive private foreign investors to sell, he will be hard put to find domestic substitutes, given a healthy stock market and mushrooming private bond issuance from artificial intelligence hyperscalers,” BlueBay’s Dowding predicts. “When I speak to U.S. equity brokers, there is absolutely no interest in the U.S. Treasury,” he says.