The Signal
The Trump Put Is Gone
Markets were pricing tariff risk as bounded. The Iran war has challenged that assumption. For the AI buildout, the expiry of the Trump put changes the calculus on every tariff-exposed cost line.
Duncan Galbraith
The Signal
The Convergence Point
The AI buildout assumed cheap energy and cheap money. March CPI at 3.3% closes the second door.
The Signal
The Fabs Were Never Cheap to Run
The AI buildout assumed stable energy at the nation-state level. It assumed wrong. South Korea is where that assumption meets the ground.
The Signal
The Ceasefire Asterisk
Oil prices came down. The energy market disruption didn't. A second update to our AI infrastructure cost thesis.
The Signal
The Bond Market's Forced Reckoning
For six weeks, bond markets ran two contradictory bets. The ceasefire collapsed one of them. What's left is a pure tariff inflation signal the market now has to price honestly.
The Signal
After the Ceasefire: What the Oil Price Collapse Means for AI Infrastructure
Oil fell from $126 to $92. That reverses part of what we said was breaking. Here is what precisely changed — and what didn't.
The Signal
The Tariff Stack: How Metals, Pharma, and Section 232 Restructuring Are Compounding the Cost Burden
Three tariff regimes are now running simultaneously. The Section 232 restructuring's mechanism shift — from metal-content to full-customs-value — is the underreported one, and its cost implications for AI infrastructure are direct.
The Signal
The Net Negative: Goldman Sachs Puts a Number on AI Labor Market Displacement
Goldman Sachs ran forty years of longitudinal data and found AI is cutting 16,000 net payrolls per month — and the scarring lasts a decade. The unemployment rate doesn't show it.
The Signal
The $126 Barrel Problem
The AI capex boom was modeled on cheap energy and stable supply chains. Neither assumption is still operative. A stress test in three pressure points.
The Signal
The Appeal: What Happens If the Pentagon Wins
The DOJ is asking the Ninth Circuit to restore the Pentagon's power to designate any AI company a supply chain risk for declining military use cases. April 30 deadline. The economics of that outcome haven't been written.
The Signal
The Cost of Fake Trust
Delve didn't just fake compliance reports. It demonstrated that when AI drops the cost of manufacturing trust signals to near zero, the Akerlof mechanism that makes trust markets function breaks down.
Economics
Liberation Day, Year One: What the Tariffs Actually Built
One year after Liberation Day: 89,000 fewer manufacturing jobs, a permanently smaller economy, and $166 billion in wrongly-collected tariffs being refunded.