Pam @Pamcontrary

Coreweave CEO Michael Intrator says the market is acting irrationally by selling his stock. A run through SEC filings reveals Michael Intrator has been “acting irrationally” as well, selling $907 million worth of $CRWV shares this year alone. His cofounders Brian Venturo and Brannin Mcbee have also been acting irrationally. The trio has sold a combined $3.3 billion of stock since the IPO. Venturo is the second biggest insider seller of any American company this year. Their benefactors at Magnetar Capital have also been acting irrationally. They have sold more than $5.5 Billion of Coreweave stock since the IPO. A lot of people seem to be acting very irrationally.

Nice one, @LawrenceLepard From his excellent Q3 letter: drive.google.com/file/d/1vyeTGy…

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov. The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison. I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return. I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something. Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged. Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working. A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats. This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried. There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go. Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him. I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them. This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one. Three things would change the math overnight. Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined. End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them. Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine. I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it. Respectfully, Everett A. Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

Received a moving message from an aspiring mid-20s professional that, I think, captures an increasingly widespread despair among younger cohorts: "It really saddens me when I hear about the work [senior people in the field] are doing. Their work seems interesting, and I'll never get to do it. The people in their fifties and sixties, they're lucky. I'm even lucky. I feel bad for the kids who are fourteen. I at least got a chance to use my brain for one or two minutes, and that's still priceless. I got to be human. I got to be more than just some puppet who presses Enter so something can think for me. It's very depressing looking at people who are sixty, who I would love to be in twenty years. But to know that I won't get to do that because Dario said so, right? And, like, that's actually heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to know that no matter how hard you try and no matter what you do, you cannot add value as a human being in a year or two's time. It's like hitting a brick wall. You feel no motivation to build the skill, to get better, to attain wisdom and knowledge. It seems worthless to you. And all the older people are telling you all your efforts might be worthless, and they don't need you anymore. And they can just sit there and, you know, make money and leave you to drown."

Already predicting this This is their gameplay

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Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus

2 weeks ago

Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies are reportedly preparing for a public and political backlash after a catastrophic AI event, possibly as early as 2027 (via Axios). Axios reports that many industry insiders expect a major incident within the next 6–12

209 428 4K 1.3M 2K

How is this party still going on?

"Deeply Flawed": Biggest US Grid Scraps Emergency Data Center Power Auction One Day After FERC Smackdown zerohedge.com/energy/deeply-…

The $18bn in debt funding Oracle’s New Mexico data center for OpenAI is firmly in distressed territory, trading at around 84 cents on the dollar.

The US currently has 344 data centers facing delays due to failed additional funding, inability to connect to the grid, or delays on power infrastructure. A list of the top 50 with ABS tied to $NVDA chips, indicating warehoused GPUs. Force Majeure The current delay for power infrastructure to these data centers is 5-7 years. $ORCL $META $MSFT $GOOG $CRWV $NBIS

Third question on AI. A question that also remains unasked is whether the AI boom can continue without leading to a massive increase in inequality. A recent paper by Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh runs the numbers on how much revenue the AI industry needs to generate to recover its massive investment (summary and a link to the paper can be found here: brookings.edu/articles/finan…). Van Nieuwerburgh’s arithmetic should make us more concerned. AI investments will average about 3.6% of GDP annually between 2025 and 2032. Van Nieuwerburgh calculates that, using a 10% rate of return, the industry would need to generate annual revenues of about $3.7 trillion by 2032 to recover these costs (growing from its current levels of about $200 billion or so). That is significantly more than 10% of current US national income, and will likely remain around 10% of national income by 2032, even if GDP growth rose from its current level. A large fraction of this revenue will go to capital income. That means a massive increase in the share of capital in national income, which has already risen substantially over the last 25 years or so – now standing at an all-time high of about 47% (bls.gov/news.release/p…). Capital income is much more unequally distributed than labor income, so a massive increase in the capital share of national income will translate into a very sizable surge in inequality. The rise in inequality may not stop with the capital share. My work with Pascual Restrepo documents that (automation-driven) increases in the capital share of national income are typically associated with rising labor income inequality as well (see, for example, economics.mit.edu/sites/default/…). The same may happen in the next several years, boosting inequality further. What is missing from our current debate is any discussion of a fundamental dilemma these numbers pose: can the AI boom avoid both an economically costly crash and a huge increase in inequality? If the industry reaches these revenues, inequality surges. If the industry does not become profitable, a crash, with substantial costs in terms of lost output and jobs, becomes likely. My assessment would be that the industry is unlikely to reach levels of revenue Van Nieuwerburgh calculates. First, diffusion has been and will likely continue to be slow. Second, competition from open-weight models, which are getting better, will limit how much proprietary models can charge. Third, despite important advances, I still believe that AI models will not be able to automate entire occupations anytime soon, thus limiting their value to businesses as cost-saving devices. Whether this leads to a crash or not is more complicated and will depend on whether various AI companies are bailed out and what kind of support they receive. Nevertheless, even if revenues fall short of these gargantuan amounts and we avoid a dramatic surge in inequality, I expect that the diffusion of AI will push up inequality between capital and labor and within labor. If inequality does surge, a further question becomes central: can our democracy survive such astronomical levels of inequality?

@edzitron Evergreen