June
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is trading $60 billion worth of its stock for the ownership of Anysphere, the company that operates Cursor, a popular AI coding agent.
The deal comes less than a week after SpaceX’s initial stock offering that sent the company’s value above $2 trillion.
The U.S. dollar’s value rose, dropping the Japanese yen within a fraction of its lowest value since 1986. The yen sank to 161.8, near its two-year low of 161.96.
Any breach beyond that level would have dropped the yen to its lowest point against the greenback in 40 years.
The European Central Bank (ECB) raised its policy interest rate by a quarter point to 2.25% last week, becoming the first G7 country to do so since the Iran War began.
It was the bank’s first increase since Sept 2023 & was widely expected. Financial Times reported.
Oil’s price gyrations and record price swings during the Iran War – rising past $120 a barrel at one point, only to drop into the mid-$90s soon after – have exhausted traders trying to outguess Iran’s volatility and White House social media posts that conflict with each other from one day to the next.
Jun 17
As in other fields such as batteries & minerals, China has made itself an essential link in AI’s global supply chain - China’s optical modules link AI chips & servers. The country’s semiconductors are quickly evolving to rival the best of those made in the West.
Jun 15
HEDGE FUNDS bet that AI will wipe out outsourcing companies.
Publicly traded companies operating call centers, providing similar services are doomed by AI, hedge funds are betting, The funds are“shorting”the stocks, the funds will make money when the targeted stocks fall in value.
Gold bullion has become the chief reserve asset now held by the world’s central banks, replacing U.S. treasury securities, which have been the main reserve for more than a half century, according to a new report from the European Central Bank (ECB).
Oil prices will continue to rise through July as reserves continue to deplete, Chevron CEO told a 28 May investment conference in NYC.
The buffers & shock absorbers are being steadily drawn down & the ability of the market to absorb this imbalance is drastically diminished today.
Bond markets are tanking around the world, driving up the interest rates that governments must pay to service their ever-increasing public debt loads.
The chief force driving investors out of bonds has been the energy shock rippling out of the Iran War. However, worries about the fiscal outlook for Japan and the U.K. sharpened the bond sell-off in those countries last week.
In the U.S., the national debt recently surpassed the GDP for the first time since the end of World War Two.
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As AI pervades professional services especially those that bill by the hour such as attorneys & accountants make these professions vulnerable to IA takeover.
Private equity firms are turning away from investments in these businesses fearing the long term risk AI presents - FT.
Jun 24
Global investors are pouring funds back into dollar-based assets.
In the week of 8 June, bets in the futures markets on the strengthening dollar rose the most in any week since 2018 to their highest values in more than a year, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Inundated with withdrawal requests for the second consecutive quarter, private equity firm BlackRock has again limited redemptions.
The company’s $13b HPS Corporate Lending Fund received requests for cash payments totaling 13% of the fund’s assets this quarter through early June.
In its new outlook report, Pacific Investment Management Co. (Pimco) said that “the default cycle is reasserting itself, & we expect significantly higher losses in lower quality credit such as leveraged & private lending.”
The “credit loss cycle is upon us,” the report stated.
Jun 16
Private Investor Funds Limit Clients Withdrawals. Partners Group, a Swiss private asset manager with a portfolio spanning private equity, infrastructure, real estate, & private lending, has limited withdrawals by wealthy clients from its flagship fund to 5% of assets per quarter.
Loans that British banks make to non-financial companies are the least since 1998, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reported.
In 2025’s third quarter, such loans totalled 59 percent of the U.K.’s GDP, the smallest proportion in 28 years. In 2008, the figure was 90 percent.
The digital asset industry is preparing for cyberattacks based out of quantum computers, according to the Financial Times.
Quantum computers take advantage of the quirks of matter at the atomic and subatomic level to process huge amounts of data at speeds far faster than today’s best supercomputers.
While still in its early days, quantum computers have been evolving rapidly and could be in commercial use as early as 2030, by some estimates.