06 Market
News Source
EXCERPT:
- Oil prices jump after U.S. seizes Iranian vessel, imperiling ceasefire The Washington Post
- Iran War Live Updates: Tehran Sends Mixed Signals on Talks After U.S. Seizes Ship The New York Times
- U.S. seizes Iranian-flagged ship, Warsh’s big week, Cursor funding and more in Morning Squawk CNBC
- Live updates: Pakistan prepares for upcoming peace talks despite US seizure of Iranian cargo ship AP News
- Oil and Gas Prices Surge After U.S. Navy Seizes Iranian-Flagged Cargo Ship Democracy Now!
News Source
EXCERPT:
The U.N. Navy is aggressively enforcing the blockade against Iran, according to a U.S. official who said two oil tankers attempting to leave Iran were intercepted and turned back by an American destroyer on Tuesday.
The unnamed U.S. official told Reuters that two tankers departed from Iran’s port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman, only to be intercepted by a U.S. Navy destroyer that instructed them by radio to turn around. Both ships complied with the order.
Chabahar is a port city on the southeastern coast of Iran. It was originally constructed in 1983, to give Iran alternatives to shipping through the Persian Gulf during the long and bloody Iran-Iraq War.
In recent years, the Indian government made about $500 million in investments to expand the two major port complexes at Chabahar, giving them more deep-water berths for large cargo vessels.
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EXCERPT:
We told you that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani would be bad, and the democrat socialist has proven to be as terrible or perhaps even worse than we warned.
He’s continued his antisemitic rhetoric and demeaning of police, wants to tax the wealthy out of existence (or at least, out of the state), and is striving to make DEI great again — just what nobody needs.
On Sunday, he announced that the city’s first city-run grocery store will open in East Harlem, and it will cost $30 million to build and take over a year to complete.
Trump could probably build a dozen of these for $30 million. Why so much? Union wages play a part, but that doesn’t explain it all, considering Mamdani had earlier promised five stores for a mere $70 million:
Even assuming New York City’s priciest union-driven construction costs, a standard-sized 25,000-square-foot grocery store should only be about $15 million to build, said Adam Lehodey, an expert at the Manhattan Institute.
“Thirty million dollars for one store is exceptionally high, considering land prices are a significant part of the capital costs of new construction, and the city has announced that rents will be waived,” he said.
The ghosts of the old Soviet Union leaders are beaming with pride when they watch this video:
Muslim Democrat NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is planning to open the first of his “Free” city-owned grocery stores in East Harlem next year.
The communist takeover of NYC is in full swing pic.twitter.com/yeCH6lW5oY
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 13, 2026
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EXCERPT:
Don’t look now, but Big Oil is making big moves to secure positions in the expanding Venezuelan oil industry as part of the Trump Administration’s plans to revitalize the country’s economy.
On Monday, Chevron officials signed a pair of deals to expand the company’s footprint in the prolific Orinoco Belt as Shell prepares to ink a major deal of its own later this week.
Make no mistake: These deals didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are the direct result of the Trump administration’s bold decision to remove Nicolás Maduro in January, launch a $100 billion reconstruction plan for the country’s shattered energy sector, and push through sweeping reforms to Venezuela’s hydrocarbon law. After years of socialist mismanagement that turned one of the world’s richest oil nations into an economic basket case, sanity is finally returning.
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EXCERPT:
Nearly every week, the headlines about AI are dominated by the news of the latest model. A few days ago, Meta announced its newest model called Muse Spark – its first under its revamped AI division. According to their internal benchmarking tests, the new model is competitive with leading rivals across several tasks.
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EXCERPT:
For decades, advertising has quietly powered the modern internet. It funded the rise of search engines, social platforms, maps, email and media, making them accessible to billions of people around the world. Most users never paid directly for these services, and yet they benefited from one of the most open and expansive information ecosystems ever created.
Now, that ecosystem is being reshaped. Over the past year, the rapid adoption of generative A.I. and the corresponding decline in traditional search traffic for many publishers have intensified questions about how the next phase of the internet will be funded.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the new front door to information. Instead of typing queries into a search bar and sifting through links, users are turning to A.I. systems to deliver direct answers, recommendations and decisions. Platforms like OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic are redefining how information is accessed altogether. Meanwhile, incumbents like Google are integrating A.I.-generated overview answers directly into search results, signaling a structural shift in how users discover information.
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EXCERPT:
Nvidia is the undisputed king of AI chips. But thanks to the AI it helped build, the champ could soon face growing competition.
Modern AI runs on Nvidia designs, a dynamic that has propelled the company to a market cap of well over $4 trillion. Each new generation of Nvidia chip allows companies to train more powerful AI models using hundreds or thousands of processors networked together inside vast data centers. One reason for Nvidia’s success is that it provides software to help program each new generation of chip. That may soon not be such a differentiated skill.
A startup called Wafer is training AI models to do one of the most difficult and important jobs in AI—optimizing code so that it runs as efficiently as possible on a particular silicon chip.
Emilio Andere, cofounder and CEO of Wafer, says the company performs reinforcement learning on open source models to teach them to write kernel code, or software that interacts directly with hardware in an operating system. Andere says Wafer also adds “agentic harnesses” to existing coding models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT to soup up their ability to write code that runs directly on chips.
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EXCERPT:
Republicans are continuing their uninterrupted streak of woefully underperforming in elections. However, in the first of its kind referendum on Big Tech data centers, voters are showing that a party that embraces land sovereignty over Big Tech dystopian land grabs will win the day.
Sadly, Republicans have chosen to be on the losing side of the issue.
The public is being asked to shoulder a burden to facilitate a supposed technology whose benefits are very unclear and dubious.
In a first of its kind local referendum, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, voted by a margin of 2-1 for a referendum that will require all future data center projects in the area to be approved by a vote of the city’s residents.
The referendum was sparked in the wake of Oracle and OpenAI’s Stargate facility setting up shop in the area. The proposed 1.3 gigawatt facility will consume the power equivalent of over one million households.
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The American military says the blockade of the vital shipping route has been “fully implemented”
American warships have effectively blocked Iranian trade through the Strait of Hormuz, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said.
“A blockade of Iranian ports has been fully implemented as US forces maintain maritime superiority in the Middle East,” CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper said in a statement on Tuesday evening.
“In less than 36 hours since the blockade was implemented, US forces have completely halted economic trade going into and out of Iran by sea,” Cooper added.
The markets are obsessed with the Strait of Hormuz. Why it matters less than you think– www.cnbc.com
News Source
EXCERPT:
… The U.S. ‘blockade’ of Iranian ports around the Strait of Hormuz (SOH) is under a week old. When the U.S. naval blockade was announced, some worried it would make things worse by further enraging Iran or the rogue Iranian military, who may then attack ship traffic, ports, or people. Thankfully, it’s been relatively calm. However we may be just one drone strike, one stray Iranian missile, or one nasty Hormuz mine blast from an escalation. An assault directly on an American warship would send oil prices soaring. It’s a scary and tentative time.
That said…
MY TAKE → The Strait of Hormuz is not as important to global energy as it was just a few weeks ago. Here’s why. Over the past few years, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have very smartly built back-up pipelines. Those pipelines – a whopping 7 million barrels per day capacity in Saudi and about 1.5 million per day flowing across the UAE have – have cut the flow of shipborne oil out of the Hormuz by half.
We know the Strait matters massively to more than just oil. I’ve been very clear on concerns about shortages of fertilizer, jet fuel, other refined products and even helium for semiconductor manufacturing. Even if the Strait returns to pre-war shipping levels soon – by the way, something absolutely no one is counting on – it could take months to get back to any state of normal for energy and related supply chains.