Turn on the News
The news keeps coming fast and furious. Where to start?
How about the great state of New Mexico, where Larry Ellison's Oracle, one of the greatest promoters of the latest generation of compute marketed as AI, like fuck me, right, has run into troubles in the high desert. Oracle declared force majeure or, we ain’t paying, on the incomplete construction of one of their monstrous data centers, “Project Jupiter.”
The very good people of New Mexico have said, “Not from our grid" to the ridiculous energy demands of this stupidly thought tech. It is immensely amusing in corporate law, citizen initiative can be considered the equivalent of an unforeseeable force of nature.
Oracle, a once profitable company, has gone hundreds of billions of dollars in debt attempting to actualize AI nightmares. It gets better. Oracle doesn't want to pay none other than private equity pig Blue Owl.
Last spring, Blue Owl was all over the news with their investors trying to figure how big a dumpster fire was Blue Owl's balance sheet. Let’s call it bigger now. Blue Owl is already two-thirds off last year's high.
Chris Whalen has a good talk with John Dizard, former long time commodities guy with the FT, on the state of global oil and gas supplies resulting from America’s wars. Well worth reading.
Finally, the bastard patron saint of Life in the 21st Century, Dylan Ratigan is writing again and some good things. I've related to readers the story of how a few years ago, minding my own business pleasurably golfing, Ratigan called me not once, but twice, trying to convince me to start writing. Bastard.
Dylan completed the trifecta of financial people I discovered in the summer of 2008 – Susan at Naked Capitalism and John Authers then at the FT being the other two. All three taught me much about the then state of finance. I’d hate to say one is more knowledgeable than the other, but in regards to political thinking, Dylan is top of class.
Recently in The Tech-Monopolies Choking America Out, Dylan wrote, “The ten largest companies represent roughly 38 percent of the S&P 500, and 33 companies account for 100 percent of all of the gains.” Such is the state of finance under our present corporate monopoly oligarchy.
Authers also has a related piece about market concentration. Just remember, only last year, Oracle was one of the market's high flyers. Today, they also are two-thirds off those highs.
Place your bets.