Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

Combat operations against Iran have cost the U.S. military about $25 billion in two months, a top Pentagon accounting official told House Armed Services Committee members on April 29.

The Wednesday hearing marked the first time Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine have testified publicly to Congress since U.S. and Israeli forces commenced attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. U.S. and Iranian forces exchanged fire for about five and a half weeks before the parties entered into a ceasefire agreement on April 8.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member on the committee, asked the Pentagon to account for the costs of U.S. munitions expended as well as for equipment destroyed in the course of the fighting.

Jules Hurst, the acting War Department comptroller, estimated those costs at about $25 billion.

Hurst said munitions accounted for most of it, but said he also factored in operations and maintenance and equipment replacement costs. Hurst joined Hegseth and Caine at the hearing, as Congress weighs military funding requests for fiscal year 2027.

The Trump administration has been working on submitting a supplemental funding request to Congress to cover the war’s costs, but has yet to finalize it or settle on an exact figure.

“We will formulate a supplemental through the White House that will come to Congress once we have a full assessment of the cost of the conflict,” Hurst said.

The Pentagon is already seeking a $1.5 trillion military and defense spending budget for fiscal year 2027. The request amounts to a 42 percent increase over fiscal year 2026 military spending, which totaled approximately $1.03 trillion.

Among other items, the Trump administration’s 2027 military budget request seeks $52.9 billion to boost procurement for 12 weapons systems that the Pentagon has classified as critical munitions.

In March, President Donald Trump announced he had met with the CEOs of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon parent RTX Corp., Boeing, Honeywell, and L3Harris Technologies to discuss boosting their munitions production levels. Weapons produced by the companies—including the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense systems and offensive weapons like the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile—have featured heavily in the Iran war.

Beyond the immediate material costs to replace weapons and equipment, the Iran war has also disrupted global oil and gas flows out of the Middle East, leading to rising prices for consumers.

Compass Datacenters is abandoning a massive data center project in Northern Virginia after what Bloomberg described as “intense pushback from local residents.”

The retreat comes as local opposition to data center buildouts accelerates nationwide, with residents increasingly furious over surging power demand, soaring electricity bills, land-use battles, and transmission lines cutting through neighborhoods and farmland.

We were the first to describe the epicenter of the data center buildout revolt in the Mid-Atlantic area, all the way back in the summer of 2024. This is happening as the AI infrastructure boom collides with local resistance.

Many Marylanders were upset about transmission lines and rising power bills, some of which were not necessarily due to data centers, but rather failed “green” policies by the far-left regime in Annapolis.

The Brookfield-backed data center company told Bloomberg, “Compass has reached the unfortunate conclusion that we cannot move forward. While we still believe this project offered significant benefits for the region and our neighbors, recent legal actions and compounding regulatory hurdles have effectively closed a viable path forward.”

Compass Datacenters was planning to develop more than 800 acres in Prince William County as part of the proposed 2,100-acre Digital Gateway corridor.

The project, along with a neighboring QTS development backed by Blackstone, would have created one of the world’s largest data center hubs to expand Northern Virginia’s global data dominance.

Earlier this month, Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital and co-host of the All-In Podcast, warned on X that polling data shows data centers are more disliked than ICE by the American people.

Palihapitiya posted the polling data:

He warned that local opposition is growing against data centers:

Meanwhile, our most recent report shows that nearly half of U.S. data centers scheduled to break ground this year are at risk of being canceled or delayed.

The great data center land rush is no longer a story about chip stacks and power. It is becoming a localized fight over power bills against tech bros.

With less than three weeks to go the Trump-Xi summit in China, the scramble for leverage and superiority – whether in terms of the Iran war or the just as important supply chain of rare earths – is on. That explains why the Pentagon’s push to get its hands on the rarest of the rare-earth elements leads all the way to this small port city in Malaysia.

As the WSJ reports, Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths has begun pumping out heavy rare earths, the elusive kind that China dominates. 

“No one had made a separated heavy rare earth outside of China in 20 years,” said Amanda Lacaze, Lynas’s chief executive. The company’s chief operating officer, Pol Le Roux, said it had actually been 30 years.

When China cut off exports of heavy rare-earth elements during trade tensions last year, automobile factories in the US and Europe were forced to stop production. Now, Lynas is at the vanguard of an effort by the US and allies to prevent Beijing from using its monopoly power to squeeze the rest of the world.

To minimize China’s monopoly on rare earth supply, the Pentagon has been opening its wallet in unusual ways to ensure supplies. In March 2026, Lynas announced a preliminary $96 million deal in which the Pentagon would purchase Lynas’s rare earths.

Others are in hot pursuit of the Pentagon’s money: Las Vegas-headquartered MP Materials, backed by billions of dollars in U.S. government support, is planning its own refinery for heavy rare earths that is set to come online later this year. And last week, USA Rare Earth announced a “transformative” $2.8 billion acquisition of Brazil’s Serra Verde Group, owner of the Pela Ema rare earth mine and processing plant in Goiás, Brazil, which is a “one-of-a-kind asset and the only producer outside Asia capable of supplying all four magnetic rare earths at scale, together with other vital REEs, such as Yttrium.”

Last month, Lynas began producing samarium oxide, a difficult-to-source rare earth in high military demand that is used in heat-resistant magnets for jet fighters and missiles.

“There is no doubt that 2025 was the wake-up call the United States needed to undertake bold industrial policy,” said Gracelin Baskaran, who leads the critical minerals program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Rare-earth minerals are actually not that rare when it comes to mining: it is the refining – usually a very toxic process – that is the bottleneck, which is why China which has zero environmental regulation, has become a global leader in their producftion. As the WSJ notes, rare earth minerals are already mined outside of China, including Lynas’s, which come from Western Australia. But to gain independence from Chinese supplies, “the hard part is building refining capacity. It often requires hundreds of stages to separate the rare earths using industrial acids.”

It often requires hundreds of stages to separate rare earths using industrial acids. Suzanne Lee for WSJ

For more than a decade, Lynas has had a refinery here in Kuantan, a Malaysian chemical-industry center. But it only produced light rare earths, which tend to be more common, while it sold heavy rare earths to China for processing. Last year, as the U.S.-China trade war was at its peak, Lynas finished a new heavy rare-earths processor in Kuantan.

Eliminating China from the supply chain looks as follows: machinery whirs loudly as a rare-earth mixture is bathed in hydrochloric acid and gradually separated into pure oxides that can be shipped to customers. Terbium, used in powerful magnets, comes out a deep, rich brown. Dysprosium appears as a whitish powder.

Because of their small quantities, the heavy rare earths are fitted into knee-high 55-pound cans that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars, while less-valuable rare earths such as cerium are stuffed into 1800 pound sacks. 

Heavy rare-earth elements are sprinkled in magnets so they can function at higher temperatures. That is important in cars and planes whose engines run hot.

Lynas and MP Materials are two of the leading Western rare-earths producers, and Washington wants more suppliers. In February, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. extended $565 million in loans to Serra Verde, which operates a mine in Brazil with significant reserves of heavy rare earths. Then, as noted above, last week USA Rare Earth, the Stillwater, Okla., company that has recently commissioned equipment to make rare-earth magnets, said it would acquire Serra Verde in a deal valued at about $2.8 billion, part of an arrangement that will ensure a steady supply of heavy rare earths to the U.S.

Not everything has gone smoothly with U.S. efforts. Lynas has said there is “significant uncertainty” on whether it will go ahead with an effort to build a rare earth processing facility in Texas, which was allocated $258 million in Pentagon grant funding in 2023. The estimated project costs ballooned because of challenges in handling wastewater. Instead, Lynas is building out a second, larger heavy rare-earth processing facility in Kuantan, expected to be completed in 2028. Needless to say, environmental regulations are more “lax” in Malaysia.

The big break hit last month, when Lynas achieved commercial production of samarium. The mineral had been refined almost exclusively in China, causing a scramble among defense suppliers last year when China cut off exports in April. A report from the U.S. Geological Survey last year found samarium was the highest-risk mineral for disruption, with shortages potentially costing U.S. industry billions of dollars.

As the clock counts down to the Trump-Xi summit, where China still retains sole supplier monopoly across most rare earths, another clock is also counting down: American defense companies face a 2027 government deadline to ensure that no rare earths in their supply chain for magnets come from China. Lacaze said Lynas were supplying its non-Chinese rare earths to Japanese magnet makers that in turn supply the U.S. defense industry.

Still, Lacaze expressed concern that Western nations weren’t doing enough to ensure adequate demand. Military demand for rare earths is relatively small, so she advocated tax credits to induce larger commercial buyers—such as makers of cars and electronics—to choose non-Chinese rare-earth magnets.  

Baskaran, the critical-minerals specialist, told the WSJ that the effort to achieve rare-earth independence was still in its early stages. “While momentum is real, translating these announcements into production takes years,” she said.

Authored by Micah Zimmerman via Bitcoin Magazine,

Speaking on the Nakamoto Stage, Tim Draper told attendees that bitcoin has entered the financial mainstream and that governments now roll out “the red carpet” for the industry. He said the community is “starting to feel like something is happening” as adoption grows, and he cast that shift as the early phase of a larger transition in the money system.

In his view, people will move in stages: first from dollars to stablecoins, then from stablecoins to bitcoin as the final store of value and unit of account.

Draper praised Satoshi Nakamoto’s design of BTC as a system with no government control, no middleman banks, and no traditional account records. He described his own early journey with the asset, including buying large amounts of BTC, then losing those holdings amid front-running and failures at Mt. Gox. That episode led him to question whether the experiment was worth the risk until he watched crypto usage spread in markets around the world and decided to buy again.

To illustrate the fragility of fiat money, Draper told a personal story about a “one–million–dollar bill” that his father gave him when he was young. The bill turned out to be a Confederate note with no value, which he held up as a warning that government currencies can fail, leaving savers with worthless paper.

He connected that story to his decision to purchase bitcoin from the U.S. government in an auction of seized coins, where he paid above market because he viewed bitcoin as a superior long-term asset.

Draper: You should be scared if you don’t own bitcoin

Draper outlined a scenario in which retailers begin by accepting bitcoin alongside other payment methods and then transition to accepting only bitcoin.

In that world, he said, consumers would rush to banks to pull out their money and convert into BTC as trust in national currencies declines. He told the audience that anyone who manages a family “ought to have about six months’ worth of bitcoin” as protection against such a breakdown.

He extended that warning to sovereigns facing inflation or fiscal stress. If a government encounters hyperinflation and holds no BTC on its balance sheet, Draper argued, its currency and the wealth of its officials could become worthless in real terms.

“You should be scared if you don’t own bitcoin,” Draper said he is telling people these days, adding that those without exposure “should be very, very worried.”

Draper closed with a call to action aimed at the entire BTC ecosystem around him. He said that “those of us who have bitcoin are gonna help steer the world” as legacy currencies lose value, and he told attendees to go home and tell their families to buy bitcoin, their governments to buy bitcoin, and their friends to buy BTC.

Addressing founders and builders, he urged entrepreneurs to “push it as hard as you can,” saying that broad BTC ownership is both a hedge against currency risk and a path to a new monetary standard.

KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, is winding down its federal government audit business after losing a $64 million-a-year U.S. Army audit contract, a major setback as the Department of War under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moves to bring in another accounting firm.

According to the Financial Times, the Army’s shift to a new auditor comes as pressure intensifies on Hegseth to gain control of the DoW’s finances after nearly a decade of failed independent audits.

The DoW, which oversees an annual budget of roughly $840 billion, has not passed an independent audit in eight years, and Washington lawmakers have set a deadline for the department to do so by 2028.

“We’re ending the wasteful process of agency-by-agency opinions and slashing the number of disjointed separate audits by two-thirds,” Hegseth said. “The mission is simple: break down bureaucratic barriers to get you, the taxpayer, concrete results.”

FT sources said the Army was KPMG’s largest federal audit client, and 450 U.S. staff who oversaw the federal audit work will be transitioning to other roles.

“Over the past few years, KPMG has prioritized advisory services for the federal government,” KPMG said, adding, “We are transitioning out of federal audit roles through an orderly, multiyear process, meeting all client and regulatory obligations. As demand continues to grow across both audit and advisory, we will be redeploying our talented federal audit professionals across the firm to meet client needs.”

Meanwhile, EY remains the prime auditor for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. The Marines are the only military branch to have received an unqualified audit opinion.

The DoW says the new consolidated audit strategy will streamline the process toward full audit compliance by 2028.

Last month, Platte Moring, the Pentagon’s inspector general, stated, “This new composite approach to auditing and its implementation reflect meaningful progress toward compliance with the statutory mandate for the department to achieve a clean audit opinion by 2028.”

We have previously reported that DOGE has placed more than 400,000 DoW contracts under scrutiny, while Goldman has been bearish on government IT services for the same reason: the Trump administration is trying to clean up the financial mess inside the DoW.

The problem is that entrenched bureaucracy and swamp-like career DoW personnel appear more focused on preserving the status quo than fixing the department.

Whether Hegseth can fix the DoW remains an open question.

Authored by Jijo Malayil via Interesting Engineering,

Humanoid robots will soon assist ground crews in Tokyo as Japan Airlines launches a trial to address growing labor shortages.

Starting in May, the Chinese-made machines will assist with moving baggage and cargo on the tarmac at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, working alongside human handlers.

The initiative, run with GMO Internet Group, comes as Japan faces rising tourism and a shrinking workforce. The trial will continue through 2028, with hopes of easing workloads and paving the way for permanent deployment.

Last month, researchers in Tokyo developed a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi chip resisting extreme radiation, enabling untethered robot operations in hazardous sites like Fukushima.

Smart baggage handling

During a recent media demonstration, a compact humanoid robot carefully pushed cargo onto a conveyor belt beside a Japan Airlines aircraft and gestured toward a nearby worker, highlighting early-stage coordination in real airport conditions, reports the Guardian.

Japan Airlines officials said deploying robots for physically demanding tasks could significantly reduce strain on workers and improve overall working conditions. However, the airline emphasized that critical responsibilities such as safety management will remain under human control.

As seen in the footage, the humanoid model, known as G1, stands about 1.32 meters tall and weighs 77 pounds (35 kilograms), with a foldable design for compact storage. It features 23 degrees of freedom, enabling stable and coordinated movement. Equipped with 3D LiDAR, a depth camera, and voice input systems, the robot can navigate and interact effectively. Powered by a 9,000 mAh battery, it operates for up to two hours and can move at speeds of up to 4.5 mph (7.2 km/h).

The Unitree G1 demonstrates an expanded range of motion, highlighting significant gains in flexibility, coordination, and adaptability in humanoid robotics. According to Unitree, its development begins in a virtual setting using Nvidia Isaac Simulator, where the robot is trained to perform complex behaviors.

Engineers create a digital twin of the G1 using motion capture and video data to replicate human actions. These movements are refined through reinforcement learning, allowing the system to improve through repeated simulation. The learned skills are then transferred to the real robot using the Sim2Real approach, enabling smooth execution in physical environments.

“By combining cutting-edge AI technology with the unique flexibility of humanoid forms, the project aims to realize a sustainable operational structure through labor savings and workload reduction,” said Japan Airlines in a statement.

Ground crew augmentation

Airport ground operations still rely heavily on manual labor, with workers managing baggage, cargo, and equipment in tight, high-pressure environments. The physically demanding nature of the job, combined with Japan’s shrinking working-age population, has created a growing labor gap across the aviation sector.

The challenge is intensifying as inbound tourism continues to rise. More than 7 million visitors arrived in the first two months of 2026, following a record 42.7 million the previous year, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization. At the same time, demographic trends suggest Japan may require over 6.5 million foreign workers by 2040 to sustain economic growth, even as political pressure mounts to limit immigration, reports The Guardian.

Attempts to automate airport tasks have so far been constrained by the limitations of conventional robots, which struggle in dynamic, unpredictable environments. Humanoid robots are now being considered as a more adaptable solution, as their human-like design allows them to function within existing airport infrastructure without extensive modifications.

The rollout will proceed in stages, starting with detailed observation of operations to identify suitable use cases, followed by testing in simulated real-world conditions. The long-term objective is to integrate robots alongside human workers, assigning them repetitive and physically intensive tasks to reduce strain and improve efficiency. Continuous evaluation will guide development, focusing on safety, performance, and practical deployment, reports Aero Time.

Barclays is out with a report on nuclear and how the industry is progressing from conviction to construction. The report highlights year-to-date regulatory developments, demand and execution signals and market pricing across the industry. 

Last year, Barclays argued three core points regarding nuclear energy:

A nuclear renaissance is underway driven by energy security, decarbonization, and AI power demand
The nuclear fuel cycle is likely to be an upstream bottleneck that requires reshoring
As the theme matures, practical hurdles will take center stage, such as speed to power, labor, permitting, and unit economics

Given the run up in their broad global nuclear ecosystem index (BCGLNUCL +19%) this year, there is undoubtedly a continued interest in the nuclear theme. This also correlates with “a broad rotation from capital-light to capital-heavy (HALO) sectors”.

The market seems to be distinguishing between the themes within the nuclear renaissance, with companies in the nuclear fuel chain (BCNUCLUR +30%) providing higher returns YTD than the broader nuclear ecosystem…

The bar is being set higher by investors lately, though, with money being “less willing to fund nuclear on narrative alone, instead increasingly rewarding delivery of existing megawatts, visible permitting progress or at least a credible bridge from concept to contracted project”. 

As we detailed long before most others started realizing it, Barclays also notes how the Iran war has accentuated national energy security concerns. It has not gone unnoticed how countries like France have had little to care about with the dramatic energy market price swings, while countries like Germany and other Asian nations have suffered. 

The Iran war has also led to a plus for nuclear energy adoption in Europe based on the broader concept of the strategic autonomy agenda at the EU.

As it should be well understood by our readers at this point, the underwriting of nuclear development by hyperscalers has given significant confidence to the adoption of nuclear energy in the US. Massive energy deals from Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all highlighted the significant role to be played by a power source that’s actually clean and reliable. 

While Barclays notes there are plenty of bottlenecks that remain throughout the nuclear industry, “progress has become more visible in areas that matter most for build out”. Issues are being worked on in concrete ways throughout the fuel cycle, licensing, and component supply areas. 

The report emphasizes that the clearest evidence of progress is in the fuel cycle. Progress is turning into production at US uranium mines and major projects are progressing through development in Canada. 

Other award programs from the U.S Department of Energy are also boosting the front end of the fuel chain, specifically the $2.7 billion for enrichment capacity. 

Significant progress has also been made on the regulation front with improvements to new licensing pathways and high speed programs for iteration and demonstration of new reactor technology. 

With site-specific planning ongoing, along with early component ordering, “the industry is beginning to bridge the gap between design ambition and concrete delivery”. 

Calling back to their previous point of the labor bottleneck, this challenge is starting to work its way to be the leading issue. Unlike a lot of the supply chain issues, which are mostly solved with more money, “workforce constraints remain deeply structural and are likely to take longer to ease”. 

And then there is the issue of where the US gets 300,000 engineers to build all this missing power supply by 2030 https://t.co/a18crhqZ4v pic.twitter.com/tinW8SHDwM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2025

At Barclay’s recent NextGen Energy Conference in New York, the participants reportedly highlighted labor as a critical and growing execution constraint on both the data center construction and power generation construction areas. Data centers and reactor plants will find themselves competing for the same limited pool of electricians, engineers, and experienced construction labor. 

This leads to Barclays making the closing statement that “labour is now emerging as perhaps the most important residual hurdle to the pace of the nuclear renaissance, with progress in this area likely to play a key role in determining whether improving policy support and hyperscaler demand can translate into build-out at scale”.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I opened Twitter this morning and saw a photo of a group of guys, lanyards swinging, hoodies zipped, shuffling off to a “memecoin conference.”

Which is to say we have reached the point in the batshit insanity cycle where people are boarding planes and booking hotels to celebrate coins that started as jokes about dogs. Pause and really sit with that.

Memecoins are not businesses. They are not technologies in any meaningful sense. They produce nothing, fix nothing, and generate exactly zero in revenue unless you count the transfer of money from the last guy in to the guy just ahead of him. They are vapor. Digitized empty space. Financial air pockets passed hand to hand with a straight face, as if this is all perfectly rational behavior.

And right now, it feels normal.

Of course it does. Markets are pressing highs. The Shiller P/E ratio is floating around nosebleed territory at 40x still. Everyone is still making money, or thinks they are. Risk is a punchline despite AI deals falling apart and private credit imploding. In that kind of environment, a memecoin conference doesn’t look insane. It looks like networking.

Now fast forward. Not a polite dip. Not a minor wobble. A real drawdown in the stock market. 30%, maybe more. The kind that makes people stop checking their portfolios because they already know what they’ll see. The kind that turns group chats quiet.

Now try pitching Dogecoin in that environment. Try explaining Shiba Inu to someone who just watched a third of their net worth evaporate. Go ahead, tell them it’s “community driven” and see how far that gets you. What passes for clever marketing in a bull market starts to sound like a bad joke when people are bleeding money. That’s when this whole thing stops being cute. And trust me, it’ll happen.

Because memecoins don’t have a floor. There is no underlying business, no cash flow, no assets, no mechanism to anchor price to reality. When sentiment breaks, there is nothing to catch them. They don’t fall, they disappear. Liquidity dries up, bids vanish, and what was once “worth” billions becomes a ghost town of abandoned tickers and bagholders like it all existed on Alderaan the day before the Death Star vaporized it.

And yes, before the emails come in, maybe Bitcoin has a role. Maybe Ethereum does too. Fine. Debate that all you want. But crypto as a whole still sits at the far edge of the risk spectrum. It is where excess lives. It is where speculation goes when plain old stocks aren’t exciting enough.

And at the absolute tip of that spear, the sharpest, most unstable point, are memecoins. Of the $2.6T crypto ecosystem, bitcoin is $1.5T and ethereum is $274B. That would still leave about $750 billion in excess bullshit and nonsense that doesn’t necessarily need to exist for any reason.

🔥 50% OFF FOR LIFE: Using this coupon entitles you to 50% off an annual subscription to Fringe Finance for life: Get 50% off forever

They are not investments. They are momentum traps wrapped in irony. They only work as long as someone more reckless shows up after you. That’s not a strategy. That’s a countdown.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but if you need a simple rule, here it is. If the entire pitch boils down to “someone else will pay more later,” you are not investing. You are volunteering to be the exit liquidity. And in markets like this, there is always someone left holding the bag. Try not to forget that…as we rush to more all time highs.

Now read:

Did A $1.5 Trillion Pin Just Pop The Entire AI Bubble?
How One Fund Manager Is Taking Advantage Of Wartime Volatility
A Proven Skeptic Raises Another Red Flag
SpaceX, Incentives And Perception Versus Profit

—

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

With things in the Persian Gulf and the Iran War ‘stuck’… it’s apparently time to pivot back to that other ‘stuck’ war, in Ukraine. President Trump on Wednesday spoke over the phone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, with the call reportedly lasting an impressive 1.5+ hours, and the talk centered on finding ways forward both with the Iran and Ukraine conflicts.

The most important item to emerge was that Putin reportedly proposed declaring a ceasefire in Ukraine on May 9, which is Russia’s ‘Victory Day’ in World War II, and Trump endorsed the idea.

Pool via Reuters

Russian Presidential Aide for Foreign Affairs Yury Ushakov told reporters that the call was initiated by the Moscow side – and according to him, “Vladimir Putin informed his American counterpart of his readiness to declare a truce for the period of Victory Day celebrations.”

Here is some of the readout and Ushakov’s remarks to the press in Moscow:

“At Trump’s request, Vladimir Putin described the current situation along the line of contact, where our troops are holding the strategic initiative and pushing back the enemy’s positions,” Ushakov told reporters.

“Both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump expressed essentially similar assessments of the behavior of the Kyiv regime led by [Volodymyr] Zelensky, which, incited and with the support of the Europeans, is pursuing a policy of prolonging the conflict.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has devastated swathes of Ukrainian territory, killed thousands of civilians and forced millions to flee their homes.

Putin said he was ready “to declare a ceasefire for the duration of Victory Day celebrations. Trump actively supported this initiative, noting that the holiday marks our shared victory,” Ushakov said.

The timing is interesting, given that the White House is clearly consumed with the Iran war, the Hormuz Strait crisis, and the expanding economic fallout globally and at home. Putin it seems is seeking the opportunity to soften Washington’s stance toward Moscow’s perspective of the Ukraine war.

But they did also heavily discuss Trump’s Operation Epic Fury. Ideas for resolving the conflict were discussed – though few details on this have emerged. Putin as expected called for peace, and said that extending the ceasefire was the right move by Trump. According to some of the published statements:

“Vladimir Putin considers Donald Trump’s decision to extend the ceasefire with Iran to be the right one, as this should give negotiations a chance and, overall, help to stabilize the situation.”

But Putin also “highlighted the inevitable and extremely damaging consequences not only for Iran and its neighbors, but also for the entire international community, should the U.S. and Israel resort to military action once again,” Ushakov said.

He added Russia was “firmly committed to providing every possible assistance to diplomatic efforts” on the Middle East war, and said the call was held at Moscow’s initiative.

Despite that Iran remains a key regional ally of Russia’s, it remains that Moscow has benefited from both the easing of sanctions on its oil exports at sea, and rising global oil prices – both the result of the Iran war.

Russia x Ukraine ceasefire by end of 2026?
Yes 26% · No 75%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Previously, Kremlin leaders have offered a deal where Iran could keep its enriched uranium but hold it on Russian territory, to ensure the continuation of its nuclear energy. This, Moscow has reasoned, could serve as a basis for a grand deal with the US.

The last of the giga-caps to report today, the increasingly more misnamed Meta Platforms, had some good news to report for the just completed Q1. It also had bad news, and judging by the plunge in the stock price, the market is focusing on the latter. 

First, the good news: the company reported revenue and EPS both of which beat estimates, and guided Q2 revenues which came in roughly in line with estimates. Here is the breakdown. 

EPS $10.44 vs. $6.43 y/y, and beating estimates of $6.66; one note: the EPS print included a $8.03BN income tax benefit recognized in the first quarter of 2026. Excluding this benefit, EPS would have been $3.13 lower or $7.31 (at a 37 effective tax rate)

Revenue was also solid across the board

Revenue $56.31 billion, +33% y/y, beating estimate $55.51 billion

Advertising rev. $55.02 billion, +33% y/y, beating estimate $54.16 billion
Family of Apps revenue $55.91 billion, +33% y/y, beating estimate $55 billion
Reality Labs revenue $402 million, -2.4% y/y, missing estimate $508 million
Other revenue $885 million, +74% y/y, beating estimate $741.4 million

Going down the line:

Operating income $22.87 billion, +30% y/y
Operating margin 41% vs. 41% y/y

Broken down by segment: 

Family of Apps operating income $26.90 billion, +24% y/y, beating estimate $24.26 billion
Reality Labs operating loss $4.03 billion vs. loss $4.21 billion y/y, vs estimate loss $4.77 billion

Ad impressions were more mixed with ad impressions beating, Avg price per ad in line, and Avg family service users per day missing

Ad impressions +19% vs. +5% y/y, beating estimate +16.2%
Average price per ad +12% vs. +10% y/y, in line estimate +12%
Average Family service users per day 3.56 billion, +3.8% y/y, missing estimate 3.61 billion

The last one is a problem because as shown below, this is the first drop in the company’s DAP in years.

Looking ahead, the guidance was also solid with a modest increase in Q2 revenue:

Meta sees revenue $58 billion to $61 billion, in line with the estimate $59.56 billion
Meta still sees total expenses $162 billion to $169 billion, also in line with  estimate $164.6 billion

That was the good news. The bad news, as a quarter ago when the company was slammed for its massive increase in forecast capex spending, had everything to do with – what else – capex.

Just like last quarter, Meta raised its capex outlook for the year, again, extending its streak of plowing historic levels of investment into the race to build ever-advancing artificial intelligence systems. 

The social-media giant projected full-year capital expenditures between $125 billion and $145 billion, far exceeding analysts’ estimates and marking a roughly 7.4% increase from the $115-$135 billion range the company had previously projected. The company is dealing with “higher component pricing” and additional data center costs”, CFO Susan Li said in a statement. At this rate, which has seen the company raise its capex by $10BN every 3 months, the company’s Free Cash Flow will be deeply negative soon. 

And as capex soars without a corresponding increase in revenue/EBITDA, the company’s Free Cash Flow is now set to turn negative in 2026.

To offset its AI spending, Meta has recently imposed a number of cost-cutting measures. Last week, it alerted staff in an internal memo that it would be cutting roughly 8,000 jobs and wouldn’t be filling 6,000 open roles. The company had already carried out other, more limited cuts earlier this year that hit its hardware division Reality Labs, among other teams.

Evercore ISI estimated the May layoffs will save the company about $3 billion annually, and that companies will rely more on AI agents to help do tasks that once required human employees. “We believe the industry is just beginning to realize the growth opportunities coming out of agentic deployments – and the stepped-up level of investments required to support them,” Evercore analyst Mark Mahaney said in a note to investors.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had already signaled that his company will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade. And that was before a memory chip shortage triggered a surge in prices. The firm has announced billion-dollar deals with Nvidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Broadcom Inc. for chips and other hardware and is building several massive data centers to power its efforts. 

The silver lining is that there are some early signs that Meta’s investments in AI are beginning to pay off. Earlier in April, Meta debuted its latest artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark — the first released since Zuckerberg embarked on a multibillion-dollar overhaul of the company’s AI organization last year. Additional large language models are expected to roll out later this year.

The company is also facing its various legacy risks: Meta faces a threat from mounting child safety litigation. In a landmark ruling in March, a jury found Meta liable for a 20-year-old woman’s mental health struggles, which she said were caused by her addiction to social media. While Meta must pay millions to the plaintiff, the ruling could expose the company to billions of dollars in risk from additional lawsuits. Two other bellwether cases are scheduled to go to trial in California state court later this year. Meta acknowledged on Wednesday that it continues to “see scrutiny on youth-related issues and have additional trials scheduled for this year in the U.S., which may ultimately result in a material loss.”

While Meta’s stock rallied following Muse Spark’s unveiling, wiping out prior losses, it tumbled after the market was less than happy with the yet another capex increase which has yet to show tangible returns on the top line. META plunged as much as 6%, sending its stock back to red for the year.