Massive Lithium Lode In Appalachia Could Power 130 Million EVs: USGS America’s worrisome dependency on foreign sources of lithium could become a thing of the past: About 328 years’ worth of last year’s lithium imports is buried in Appalachia, according to a new analysis published by the US Geological Survey (USGS). That’s about 2.3 million metric tons of undiscovered but economically recoverable lithium — aka “white gold.”   […]

Hershey CEO Says GLP-1 Boom Fuels Demand For Gum And Mints Hershey reported first-quarter sales and earnings that exceeded Bloomberg-tracked analyst expectations, driven by higher candy prices and resilient consumer demand. Beyond the earnings report, CEO Kirk Tanner made one very notable comment in prepared remarks: demand for gum and mints remains strong, with the category benefiting from “functional snacking” tailwinds tied to […]

Here Come The Cancellations: Brookfield-Backed Compass Pulls Out From Major Northern Virginia Data Center Project Compass Datacenters has decided to withdraw from its plan to develop a major data-center corridor in Northern Virginia after spending years pursuing approvals and investing tens of millions of dollars, according to Bloomberg. The company ultimately concluded the project wasn’t feasible due to mounting legal […]

CCP Moves To Tighten Oversight Of Gig Workers Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Beijing is moving to tighten its grip on tens of millions of gig workers—an increasingly vital but volatile segment of China’s labor force—prompting warnings from analysts that the effort could deepen social tensions rather than contain them. Delivery workers from Chinese shopping platform Meituan gather for a […]

What Is the Trump Administration Really Trying To Do With The Latest Comey Indictment? On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina handed down a two-count indictment against the former FBI director James Comey, charging him with threatening the life of President Donald Trump and transmitting that threat across state lines. The basis for the charges: an Instagram post from May 2025 in which Comey […]

Trump Says Gas Prices Will Drop “Like a Rock” Once Conflict Ends, As Senator Breaks With GOP Leadership On War Powers Summary Trump: “The [price of] gasoline and the oil will go down rapidly once the war’s over.” GOP Sen. Collins switches vote on war powers. Bessent on X: “Amid the impact of Economic Fury, Iran’s currency has hit an all-time low. The Iranian people deserve a new era, which the corrupt and shambolic […]

$25 Billion: Hegseth Accused Of Lowballing Cost Of Iran War Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has been in a very public spat and back-and-forth with Congressional Democrats over the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request, as well as over Iran war strategy and mounting costs. Hegseth has turned to some classic wartime fearmongering: “What is it worth to ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon?” – he posed to […]

AI Hype Meets Hardware Crunch As US Power Equipment Market Eyes $65 Billion Boom Wood McKenzie has released a report that US spending on power generation gear for data centers alone could hit $65 billion by 2030, more than triple the $20 billion logged last year. Data center capacity is forecast to reach 110 GW by the end of the decade, with Bloomberg also commenting that “total US spending on power-plant equipment may climb to […]

Goldman Maps Retailer Exposure To Working-Poor Consumers As Gas Soars With the nationwide average gasoline price accelerating above the politically sensitive $4-per-gallon level, and the consumer backdrop for low-income households darkening, Goldman analysts published a note on Wednesday identifying which big-box retailers have the greatest exposure to working-poor households. “Our economists expect spending headwinds from higher […]

Apple Drops After Mixed Results: America, Europe Revenue Miss; Iphone Sales Disappoint, But China Surges Again Ahead of today’s AAPL earnings report, we’ve had a mixed picture from Mag 7 earnings so far: GOOGL soared to a record high, MSFT and AMZN both dropped (although they recovered much of their losses throughout the day) and META crashed, all on different reads of their capex. Which leaves AAPL to complete the picture of the […]

Rising Venezuelan Oil Exports Help Insulate The US From Energy Crisis If the primary purpose behind the Trump Administration’s snatch-and-grab operation against the illegitimate president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, was not readily apparent in January, it should be crystal clear today.  Under Maduro, around 75% of the country’s energy exports were going to China.  This year, the US will be receiving around 50% of the oil […]

House Unanimously Approves Bill To End 76-Day DHS Shutdown, Sending Measure To Trump Well that was anticlimactic… On Thursday, the House of Representatives approved by voice vote a Senate-passed bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, clearing the way to end the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history after 76 days. The measure now heads to President Trump’s desk. The shutdown, which began […]

The Vaccine Safety Signal The Media Still Won’t Read Authored by Dr. Joseph Fraiman via the Brownstone Institute, The serious-adverse-event signal found in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccine trials has been in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly four years. Mainstream media outlets, on the rare occasions they address it, have treated it not as evidence to be weighed but as misinformation to be managed – dismissed on […]

Peer Review Is Broken – Here’s How To Fix It Authored by Rob Jenkins and Michael R. Jenkins via the Brownstone Institute, Within academia, there seems to be a growing consensus that the peer-review system—once the backbone of academic scholarship—is broken. But is it irreparably so? Perhaps. At the very least, the breakdown of its current form is worth exploring. However, rather than abandoning the entire endeavor, we believe […]

Engineering Bottleneck Drives Major Deals Across Nuclear Services In the latest development with private equity firms making moves in the nuclear industry, Arlington Capital Partners has acquired nuclear engineering specialist ENERCON from funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management.  The deal includes merging ENERCON with Arlington portfolio company Pond & Company. The combined entity will operate under the ENERCON name, […]

Sternlicht’s Starwood Real Estate Fund Gates Redemptions Earlier this month, when much of the attention was largely focused on private credit, we warned that one of the old, familiar credit market time-bombs, commercial real estate which for many years had been penned as the “Next Big Short”, was deteriorating rapidly: according to the latest TREPP CMBS monthly report, March saw a surge in the CMBS delinquency rate, which jumped by […]

Feds Charge Sinaloa’s Governor, Senator, Mayor, & Other Top Officials With Running A Narco-State Submitted by The Bureau’s Sam Cooper, Federal prosecutors in New York have charged ten current and former senior Mexican government officials — among them the sitting governor of Sinaloa, a sitting federal senator, the mayor of the state capital, and the state’s former secretary of public security — with conspiring to protect […]

Iran’s Ghalibaf Tells Iranians ‘Unify’ As US Blockade Seeks To ‘Make Us Collapse From Within’ Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has since the war’s start and prior assassinations of top leaders including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei become the most visible figurehead representing the Islamic Republic to the world, has continued trolling the United States even as President Trump is renewing fresh military strikes amid […]

GDP Shocker: 75% Of US Growth In The First Quarter Was Due To AI On the surface, today’s Q1 GDP print was unremarkable: Real GDP grew 2.0% annualized in the first quarter, somewhat below consensus expectations of 2.3% and reflecting a surprisingly small rebound in government spending after the shutdown drag in Q4. Federal government spending contributed only half as much to real GDP growth in Q1 (+0.6%) as it subtracted in Q4 […]

DeSantis Rolls Out Redistricting Map – Partisan Framing May Put It In Legal Peril Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rolled out a proposed redistricting map for the state this week, but the way he did it could give ammunition to lawyers mounting inevitable legal challenges that will follow the map’s expected approval by the legislature, both Democratic and Republican observers say. Some Republican legislators are uneasy with DeSantis’ […]

Breaking The Stalemate By Bas van Geffen, Senior Macro strategist at Rabobank Energy prices continue their ascend –with Brent futures trading above $124/barrel – after media report that the US may try to break the stalemate in the US-Iran war by force. Axios reports that military leaders will brief Trump on potential military options today. Reportedly, the Pentagon is preparing a wave of “short and powerful” strikes on […]

Fidelity, Vanguard Halt Donations To SPLC After Federal Indictment Fidelity and Vanguard have stopped processing donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center through their donor-advised fund platforms, citing the organization’s recent federal indictment on fraud charges. The moves came April 29, eight days after a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and […]

The Most Splendid Housing Bubbles In America Authored by Wolf Richter via Wolf Street, In 27 of the 33 big and expensive cities we track here, mid-tier home prices in March were down from their respective peaks in prior years, led by Austin (-26%), Oakland (-25%), and New Orleans (-19%). Now also filtering into these mid-tier home prices is the “mansion shortage” in San Francisco, the epicenter of the AI investment bubble. […]

Caterpillar’s Parabolic Rise Continues As AI Boom Supercharges Generator Sales Hyperscalers are deploying as much as $725 billion in capital expenditures this year, primarily on AI data center buildouts, and it comes as no surprise that Caterpillar posted solid first-quarter earnings, as surging on-site power demand has created a boom for the company’s power-generation business. CAT is one of the world’s biggest makers of machines […]

Political Violence And The Willful Self-Deception Of The Left Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClearPolitics, Violence motivated by political differences has emerged as a defining, if alarming, feature of 21st -century American civil life. Neither side in our nation’s increasingly dangerous ideological divide has a monopoly. But one side, the Democratic Party and its allies, refuses to acknowledge the increase in mayhem from […]