Pharmaceutical Lobby Sues Over Trump Admin Program To Reduce Drug Prices

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A lobbying group that represents pharmaceutical manufacturers filed suit against the federal government on Oct. 7 over a program aimed at reducing the prices of drugs.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) stated in a legal complaint in federal court in Washington that the most-favored-nation policy, planned for Medicare by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), illegally imposes foreign price controls.

"[The program] is unlawful and clearly exceeds CMS' authority," Stephen Ubl, president and CEO of the lobbying organization, said in a statement.

"The policy doesn't make medicines more affordable for most beneficiaries, while putting future medical innovation and patient access at risk. We share the administration's goal of ensuring Americans can access and afford their medicines, but CMS cannot rewrite the law and bypass Congress to impose foreign price controls. Patients need more choices and more breakthroughs - not government price-setting schemes that undermine both."

The Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of CMS and one of the defendants named in the suit, did not return a request for comment by publication time. CMS has stated in notices that it has statutory authority to implement changes to drug pricing, including from portions of the Social Security Act.

Government officials have also pointed to part of the act stating that there shall be no judicial review of certain changes to pricing.

PhRMA, which represents 34 manufacturers including Pfizer and Sanofi, filed suit against the government during the first Trump administration over an earlier iteration of the pricing rule. A federal judge entered a temporary restraining order, ruling in favor of the group.

The rule was withdrawn after Joe Biden became president.

President Donald Trump in 2025 announced a new most-favored-nation pricing effort and has since unveiled agreements with dozens of manufacturers, including Pfizer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline.

"Americans - who have for decades paid, by far, the highest prices of any nation anywhere in the world for prescription drugs - will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs," Trump said in a speech in February.

One of the components is an update to Medicare's drug pricing model, basing pricing on the average sales price across a number of nations. The rule, due to take effect on Jan. 1, 2027, "would untether Medicare pricing from the statute and the American market, instead importing foreign price controls from 19 countries," the new lawsuit states.

Officials do not have a statutory basis to implement the program, PhRMA stated in the complaint.

"CMS relies on an obscure statutory provision," it stated, "[which does not give it] carte blanche to rewrite the Medicare program to fit policy priorities that Congress has not authorized."

Market-based pricing is critical for ensuring that Americans can access vital medicines, the lobbying group stated, and keeping the program in place would "upend ... stability and predictability, harming seniors and imperiling our nation's global pharmaceutical leadership."

The group is asking the court to declare the program illegal and prohibit government officials from enforcing it.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 17:40

Wells Fargo Faces Federal Probe Over $60 Billion Commitment To Black Homeownership

Wells Fargo is facing a federal investigation over mortgage programs designed to increase homeownership among Black Americans, as the Trump administration expands its campaign against corporate policies that make distinctions based on race, according to the Wall Street Journal.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is examining whether the bank's lending practices gave certain borrowers advantages because of their racial backgrounds, potentially running afoul of federal housing discrimination laws.

The controversy stems from a series of commitments Wells Fargo made beginning in 2017, including a plan to provide $60 billion in financing aimed at helping 250,000 additional Black Americans purchase homes over the following decade. The bank later introduced refinancing assistance targeting minority households, partly in response to criticism of its mortgage approval record.

The WSJ writes that by the end of 2023, Wells Fargo had delivered roughly 40% of the financing it originally promised. Its refinancing initiative had also reached approximately 5,100 borrowers, reducing their monthly payments by an average of $100. The bank has since largely stopped promoting these programs publicly.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued that the bank's approach raises serious questions about whether Americans were being treated differently because of their race, regardless of the programs' stated intentions.

“Even if Wells Fargo did not violate the law, its practice of dividing Americans based on race is immoral, unethical and un-American,” Turner said.

The investigation comes as Washington takes a more aggressive approach toward diversity-related corporate policies that became widespread following the racial justice protests of 2020. Other major companies, including IBM and Deloitte, have already reached multimillion-dollar settlements involving allegations tied to diversity considerations in employment decisions.

Federal housing officials are reportedly looking into comparable lending initiatives at other banks as well, suggesting Wells Fargo may be only the beginning of a much wider examination of race-conscious financial programs.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 15:40

Nasdaq Tumbles After FT Reports OpenAI Revenues Disappointing

...and just like that, the massive AI CapEx boom "excess demand" narrative is in doubt...

The Financial Times reports that OpenAI’s annualised revenue is about $20bn less than has been previously signalled, according to financial documents shared with investors, a massive gap likely to damp optimism about the growth of AI demand.

The company has recently told investors its revenues were approaching $50bn on an annualized basis at the end of September, far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

The most immediate reaction was in Nasdaq which tumbled over 1%...

The Broad AI basket is getting whacked...

Who could have seen that coming with Token Costs plumbing new lows?

And in the tokenized stock market for OpenAI (PreStocks), things aren't looking great: 

How many more of the prior statements are about to be proved false?

It appears that total token usage was not, in fact, growing far faster than the token price is dropping. And no, the Frontier models did not "model" that...

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 8, 2026

Evidence of how leveraged the entire tech sector is to OpenAI & Anthropic: an FT story about OpenAI's revenue's being less than initially reported is spurring a more than 5% drop in Oracle shares, exacerbating losses from Nvidia and AMD to Microsoft https://t.co/8rhQ9dvxXM. https://t.co/ydwuORW6Cj

— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) October 8, 2026

The entire shell-game is based on the 'demand'... and if revenues are that big a miss from expectations, there is an even bigger disconnect relative to liabilities...

Guess there was no "excess demand"

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 8, 2026

That's ok, OpenAI only has $1.5 trillion in commitments to... checks circular financing diagram... EVERYONE...

How long before the spins and denials?

What I don’t entirely understand and honestly find pretty hilarious is that the $70B OpenAI ARR figure was released on Dev Day, on September 29 How did we go 9 days without anyone from OpenAI coming out and correcting the figure? For over a week now they’ve let people believe ARR was $20 billion higher than it really is. What does that say about OAI?

— Negligible Capital (@negligible_cap) October 8, 2026

* * *

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 15:35

Microreactors Rack Up Wins With Grid-Scale Plants Stuck At Planning Meetings

At the smaller end of the nuclear industry, tangible progress is becoming easier to find every week. Equipment is getting manufactured and delivered, safety reviews are being completed, and uranium is being split apart.

This is painfully contrasted against what the grid-scale reactor side of the house has to show for the past couple years of the American nuclear renaissance: big announcements about fancy plans…

Start with Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) MARVEL reactor. INL announced DOE approval of the final safety analysis covering zero-power criticality. Its primary coolant system has arrived, and criticality is anticipated in December.

MARVEL is the sodium-cooled microreactor design that the reactor being commercialized by Aalo Atomics is based on.

Last Energy followed up the MARVEL news the next day with DOE approval of the final safety analysis for its Texas A&M reactor pilot. The project now advances into the final stages of preparation before startup authorization. Its full-scale core and conventional low-enriched uranium fuel connect the experiment directly to the company’s commercial design.

Deep Fission, the reactor company placing their pressurized water design underground, received DOE approval of its nuclear safety design agreement in August.

The company also lowered and retrieved a prototype canister simulating their reactor design. The test reached 100 feet, well short of the proposed mile-deep reactor deployment, but it tested actual hardware.

Even if they have nothing to show for getting an AP1000 actually deployed, Westinghouse wasn’t to be left out of the headlines. They’ve been making progress with their eVinci microreactor program, having recently completed high-temperature criticality experiments in September.

Radiant Nuclear at least deserves a place on the watchlist with their gas-cooled Kaleidos reactor installed at INL’s DOME. The company could announce criticality on their test reactor by the end of the year. 

Now compare all of this to what the grid-scale reactors have been up to. Even the most recent $120 billion U.S.-Korea framework is relatively hollow: the terms are non-binding and sites haven’t even been selected…

The demand for nuclear energy has never been stronger, but it's not a demand for greenfield projects. Hyperscalers are in the process of contracting every single existing nuclear megawatt they can find.

Existing, not new. 

Power generation comps: nat gas still cheapest but grid queue now up to 5 years. Restart and uprates of nuclear more expensive but wait time much less. https://t.co/EI9F9GbrLE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 6, 2026

The only new megawatts data centers seem to be interested in are the ones they can squeeze from already operating plants.The recent deal between Google and Constellation could lead to as much power from a collection of uprates as an entirely new reactor plant being built.

We’re even seeing tech companies more interested in resurrecting dead plants than building new ones.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to microreactors and gigawatt-scale plants like the AP1000. But, it is disappointing to see the lack of serious and specific project announcements for restoring reliability to the national grid.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 15:20

Hurricane Shuts 63% Of US Gulf Oil Output, Threatens Refineries; Jefferies Warns Of "Fuel Supply Event"

Summary:

• Hurricane Isaias Landfall Forecasted For Late Friday/early Saturday 
• Major US Refineries In Hurricane's Projected Path 
• 63% Of US Offshore Gulf Oil Output Shut 
• 25% Of US Offshore Gulf Oil Output Shut As Hurricane Isaias Nears, Threatens Refineries

Hurricane Isaias Shutters 63% of US Gulf Oil Production

Bloomberg cites data from the Marine Minerals Administration showing US Gulf offshore oil producers have halted about 1.28 million barrels per day, equivalent to shutting in 63% of regional output.

Natural gas shut-ins reached 1.127 billion cubic feet a day, equivalent to 57% of the region's production.

By noon Central Time, workers from 121 offshore platforms had evacuated, while four rigs had moved outside Hurricane Isaias' cone of uncertainty.

This is a massive temporary hit to US crude supply. For NatGas, the national production impact is much smaller.

The next big issue is that refineries may see a decline in crude supply as offshore platforms reduce flows. Any refinery outage from storm-related damage would reduce fuel product production as a global refining crisis deepens.

Major Refineries In Crosshairs

Jefferies consumer staples analyst Kaumil Gajrawala warned clients ealrier today: "Hurricane Isaias is a fuel supply event hitting a system already stretched by the Iran war. ~25% of Gulf crude output is shut in (~4% of US production), but fuel inventories are low and diesel is $6.30 vs. $3.68 a year ago. A small disruption now has outsized price consequences. The second-order effect is freight cost, which favors asset-light models like KO (Buy), where bottlers carry the fleet and fuel exposure." 

As we noted earlier today, any abrupt westward shift in the hurricane's cone of uncertainty would put major refineries at risk, including Chevron's Pascagoula refinery on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. It refines 369,000 barrels of crude a day into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and premium base oils.

Landfall impacts for portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle are expected late Friday into Saturday morning.

25% Of US Offshore Gulf Oil Output Shut As Hurricane Isaias Nears, Threatens Refineries

Hurricane Isaias forced offshore oil and natural gas producers in the Gulf of America to halt a sizable amount of production as the Atlantic's first hurricane of the season churned toward the coast, with potential landfall impacts across portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle.

Isaias had sustained winds of 75 miles per hour and was about 460 miles south-southwest of the Mississippi River mouth overnight, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Producers with offshore rigs have already shuttered 25% of crude output and 16% of NatGas production and evacuated workers from eight platforms and two rigs.

Models increasingly point to landfall late Friday night or early Saturday morning east of major energy assets onshore and offshore in Mississippi and Louisiana. 

An abrupt westward shift in the hurricane's cone of uncertainty would put major refineries at risk, including Chevron's Pascagoula refinery on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. It refines 369,000 barrels of crude a day into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and premium base oils.

The disruption to offshore oil and NatGas rigs comes as a global refining crisis deepens, and there is little room for error in the US, as refineries operate near full capacity.

Enki Research risk modeler Chuck Watson said that oil and NatGas outages would likely last no more than a week if the forecast track holds.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 15:17

Trump Treasury Blocks $175 Million In Federal Payments To Dead Recipients

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

The Treasury Department blocked $175 million in federal payments from going to deceased recipients in fiscal year 2026 as the Trump administration expanded efforts to prevent fraud and improper government spending.

Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during the fiscal year, identifying and returning about 13,500 payments that otherwise would have gone to people listed as deceased, according to the department.

The results represent another step in President Donald Trump's push to tighten safeguards around taxpayer money. Access to Treasury's "Do Not Pay" system expanded from roughly 4 percent of federal programs at the end of fiscal 2025 to 99 percent in fiscal 2026.

"Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The administration's efforts received praise from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who spent years pushing legislation giving Treasury permanent access to Social Security death records.

"Unless you were playing Frisbee in the quad during Econ 101, you know the federal government shouldn't be sending taxpayer money to dead people," Kennedy said.

Congress advanced legislation to permanently authorize the Social Security Administration to share its full Death Master File with Treasury's Do Not Pay system, giving federal agencies more complete death information when determining eligibility for payments.

Treasury has also added safeguards to verify bank account ownership and Taxpayer Identification Numbers associated with federal payments. Those capabilities became fully operational Sept. 30, allowing Treasury to flag payments that fail verification before the money leaves government coffers.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 15:05

Citi Calls Aerospace, Defense Stocks "Close To Major Tactical Bottom" After Brutal Selloff

US aerospace and defense stocks have been tracking lower as Polymarket odds assign Democrats a higher chance of taking the Senate.

The chart below shows the S&P 500 Aerospace & Defense index approaching bear-market territory, down roughly 20% from its summer high, as Polymarket's implied probability of Democratic Senate control topped 64%.

A nearly 20% slide in aerospace and defense stocks is drawing interest from trading desks looking to buy the dip, though stepping in now risks catching a proverbial falling knife.

Citi aerospace and defense analyst John Godyn sees an opportunity to begin adding exposure. In a note Wednesday, his team outlined that many of these stocks are "close enough to a major tactical bottom." 

"Both aerospace and defense have simultaneously experienced major pullbacks and, while 3Q26 is set up to be a volatile EPS season, we think that we are close enough to a major tactical bottom in many stocks to again advocate for buying the dip selectively: Opening Positive Catalyst Watch on RTX," Godyn said.

The market's big disconnect is that Polymarket odds are weighing on these names, as fears of a Democratic sweep in the midterms early next month could cloud the outlook for military spending. But as Godyn pointed out, all of this uncertainty is happening while the proposed military spending pipeline keeps expanding.

The analyst continued, "Within defense, prefer SMID-cap defense stocks aligned with the highest growth multi-year megatrends through 3Q26 earnings: Opening Positive Catalyst Watch on HII today and revisiting others post AUSA." 

"As usual, we conducted a supplier survey (sample size of 100) to validate company commentary and build conviction: Our top OE-levered pick remains HWM, where we have a pre-existing Positive Catalyst Watch," he added. 

Godyn shows that aerospace and defense stocks in his coverage universe have taken a beating:

He notes that market positioning is more positive in aerospace names than in defense names.

For defense stocks, Godyn says the "outlook is strong," but the funding debate still rages on.

Professional subscribers can read more on aerospace and defense here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 14:40

From Force Majeure To Forced Haulage: Oracle Is Now Trucking Natural Gas To Its AI Data Centers

Two weeks ago, Oracle told the world that Project Jupiter, its massive 2.45GW New Mexico mega-campus for OpenAI, was "on schedule." It also sent a force majeure notice to the developer.

Today we found out how it plans to square that circle: with a lot of trucks.

According to Bloomberg, Oracle has been quietly keeping several data centers on track by hauling compressed natural gas (CNG) by road straight to the server farms, and is now weighing the same stopgap for Project Jupiter, where the gas pipeline that is supposed to feed the campus is running late and threatening the timeline. The plan would let Oracle bring the early phases online before the pipe enters service.

Oracle shares slid about 5.5% on the report...

.... while Bloom Energy (BE), which happens to have a 2.4GW fuel cell contract for Project Jupiter (fuel cells which, last we checked, run on natural gas), tumbled 8%

Regular Readers Will Recall...

Back on Sept 24, we reported that Oracle had sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl's Stack Infrastructure unit over Jupiter, citing potential power delays, and that Oracle and Bloom immediately launched a reassurance tour insisting everything was fine. Our take at the time: companies don't issue force majeure notices because everything is going fantastically.

Today's story suggests we were, if anything, too polite.

The root of the problem is a pipeline. Energy Transfer (ET) had to reroute the line that will ultimately power Jupiter after state regulators rejected the proposed route (per DCD, the rejection came in July after an initial application was denied in March), pushing the in-service date from this summer to next year. Meanwhile, Oracle has also put out an RFP for 2GW of new renewables in New Mexico, which tells you just how many backup plans the "on schedule" project now requires.

The "Virtual Pipeline"

And it's not just New Mexico. Per Bloomberg, trucked gas kept an Oracle data center outside Salt Lake City moving for more than a year while it waited for its pipeline, with Superior Plus's Certarus doing the hauling. Oracle is also using it for initial work at its OpenAI campus in Shackelford County, Texas, where VoltaGrid is the supplier.

Oracle's massive Project Jupiter data center in New Mexico.

A small cottage industry of CNG haulers has spotted the opportunity and is now pitching "virtual pipeline" services to hyperscalers desperate to start generating compute before the actual pipes show up. Oracle, for its part, seemed thrilled, publicly thanking VoltaGrid on X for its "cost-effective power solutions" shortly after Bloomberg came asking questions.

Shoutout to the Voltagrid team for finding cost-effective power solutions to ensure our customers can access OCI capacity on schedule. We're moving at the speed of AI, which requires innovation, flexibility, and an unwavering commitment to success.

— Oracle (@Oracle) October 8, 2026

About that "cost-effective" part.

East Daley Analytics' Jack Weixel told Bloomberg that once you add up labor, specialized equipment and the diesel to move the trucks themselves, delivered CNG costs roughly four times the price of gas at a major pipeline hub. The process is about as elegant as it sounds: gas is pulled off a pipeline, compressed into a trailer, driven for hours to the site, then decompressed to feed the generators. Even a modest AI data center needs trucks arriving constantly around the clock. Diversification at its finest.

There is a reason this approach has historically been reserved for remote mines and oil rigs far from the grid, not for the crown jewels of the AI buildout.

The Napkin Math Gets Ugly Fast

The real question is scale. SemiAnalysis energy analyst Ellie Holbrook told Bloomberg that if Oracle ran just 100MW of Jupiter (roughly 4% of its eventual 2.45GW) on trucked gas, each large trailer would supply only about 40 minutes of electricity.

Let's do the (approximate) math:

• 100MW at 40 minutes per trailer = ~36 trailers a day, or one every 40 minutes, 24/7/365.
• Scale that to the full 2.45GW and you need roughly 880 trailers a day, or one pulling up to the gate every 90 seconds or so... forever.

Put differently, trucking can get the lights on in the lobby, not power a gigawatt-scale AI campus. It's a bridge, and a very expensive one, to a pipeline that New Mexico regulators have already sent back to the drawing board once.

And Oracle can hardly afford expensive bridges right now: as Bloomberg notes, the company's free cash flow is negative and expected to stay that way until more of its AI data centers are completed, while it has staked billions (and its reputation) on delivering capacity for OpenAI on time. Paying a 4x premium on fuel to keep the schedule intact is exactly the kind of cost that never shows up in the investor-day slides, right up until it shows up in the margins.

Bottom Line

As we have argued for a long time, the binding constraint on the AI boom isn't GPUs, it's power, and the "solution" of building on-site gas generation only works if the gas actually arrives. When the gas comes by truck at four times the price, the "behind the meter" model starts to look a lot like "behind the 18-wheeler."

Oracle insists Jupiter remains on schedule, and maybe it does. But when the fallback plan for a $165 billion, 2.45GW campus is an around-the-clock convoy of CNG trailers, the more likely outcome is the one hinted at by the force majeure notice: delays, higher costs, or both, with Bloom, Blue Owl and the rest of the Jupiter financing chain along for the ride.

Then again, nothing says "AI supercycle" quite like a trucking dispatch schedule.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 14:21

'Bunker Mode': OpenAI's Jaw-Dropping Math Blitz Draws Boycott, Warning Over Crypto Wallets

OpenAI just unleashed hundreds of AI-generated mathematical papers in a single release, which include breakthroughs on problems that have frustrated researchers for generations. The pace of discovery here has started to freak out mathematicians - who are now calling for a boycott - while top minds in crypto are raising a chilling question: could AI eventually undermine the mathematics protecting digital wallets before quantum computing?

On October 6, the company published 722 manuscripts covering 372 groups of related findings, all generated by an internal AI model that has not been released to the public. The papers appeared in a public GitHub repository. OpenAI says the work emerged from testing the model on roughly 4,000 research problems, with each result in the final collection using, on average, computing power equivalent to about three hours of ChatGPT Pro's thinking mode. The collection includes claims about prime numbers, geometry and the mathematics underlying computing, touching problems that have resisted some of the world's best minds for decades.

Perhaps the most startling claim concerns the Riemann hypothesis, a mathematical puzzle dating to 1859 that deals with the hidden patterns governing prime numbers - the building blocks from which every whole number greater than one can be made.

For math nerds: 

Mathematicians study those patterns through a special mathematical function, looking in particular at the points where it equals zero. The full Riemann hypothesis predicts that all the important zeros fall along one precise line. OpenAI's model has not proved that. Instead, it claims to have ruled out zeros across an enormous, permanently defined region where previous proofs offered a much narrower guarantee. If the claim holds up, it would be a major advance toward understanding one of mathematics' most famous unsolved problems.

For specialists, the dividing line in the new claim is a value of 7/8, while the full hypothesis would require 1/2. The related equations are known as the Riemann zeta function and Dirichlet L-functions. For everyone else, the point is simpler: the AI claims to have established a far stronger limit on where these crucial mathematical points can appear, without claiming to have settled the entire puzzle.

Other OpenAI papers claim progress on the Hodge conjecture - which concerns the structure of complex geometric shapes - though only for a class of objects called CM abelian varieties.

Math nerds rejoice? Or panic?

Rutgers mathematician Alex Kontorovich was emphatic in his response to OpenAI's announcement:

Quasi-RH?!?!???! Are you kidding me? If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.

RH says zeta has no zeros in Re(s)>1/2. The best we had until a second ago was a region that got thinner and thinner the higher up the imaginary axis you go. I thought maybe they'd fatten that up a bit, that'd be a massive breakthrough. But no. They got a zero free strip!!!! Insane

— Alex Kontorovich (@AlexKontorovich) October 6, 2026

The release follows OpenAI's September 8 announcement claiming to have solved the Navier-Stokes problem, which concerns the mathematical laws governing moving fluids. That earlier announcement had already sparked disputes over verification and who should receive credit for the work.

The backlash is about more than whether the proofs are correct. On October 7, the Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) urged researchers to stop working with OpenAI, arguing that the company had disregarded scientific norms by using a proprietary model to tackle advanced mathematics and then releasing the results on an unprecedented scale.

"Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power," the group said. Its statement rejects OpenAI's assertion that the release advances the field and calls for a return to research centered on human understanding.

AHM is separate from the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AGMAI), whose recommendations OpenAI says informed the release. In guidelines issued September 29, that group explicitly asked AI laboratories to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models inaccessible to the research community. But it also laid out a process for responsibly publishing results already generated, including proper citations, formal verification where feasible, independent repositories and support for human researchers trying to understand the work.

After the release, AGMAI emphasized that consultation did not mean endorsement of OpenAI's approach. It treated the publication as the beginning of scientific scrutiny, not the end. Researchers are arguing over who gets to set the scientific agenda, who can access the most powerful tools and what counts as responsible publication - not simply whether computers should be allowed to do mathematics.

Mathematician and commentator Eric Weinstein responded with a sharply different interpretation, accusing scientists of standing in the way of progress:

Exactly what I have been screaming.

Yes, I know it is hard to imagine.

But I was simply telling you a truth.

Even if it was hidden by all.

Until now.

Precarious scientists hold back science.

You had to pay these people properly.

And they are now openly against progress.

— Eric Weinstein (@ericweinstein) October 8, 2026

Game Over, Man?

The implications are reaching beyond university mathematics departments.

On October 7, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake urged the cryptocurrency industry to begin preparing for what he called "bunker mode." His concern is that AI could eventually discover a mathematical shortcut for breaking the digital signatures used to protect Bitcoin, Ethereum and other assets - potentially before the powerful quantum computers that security researchers have long worried about arrive.

Every conventional cryptocurrency wallet relies on a secret private key to authorize transactions and a related public key to verify them. Finding the public key from the private one is easy; reversing the process is designed to be practically impossible. Drake fears an advanced AI could discover a shortcut that makes that reversal feasible on ordinary computing hardware. In a worst-case scenario, he suggested that the widely used ECDSA signature system could become vulnerable in months rather than years. He offered that as a possibility to prepare for, not a demonstrated breach.

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.

— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) October 7, 2026

Entire tweet below.

For some Bitcoin address types, an unused address conceals its public key behind a cryptographic hash until its funds are spent - so Drake recommends a gradual move to fresh addresses, particularly by large holders whose public keys have already been exposed. He repeatedly warned against rushing: moving money incorrectly can be more dangerous than the hypothetical attack the move is meant to prevent. His advice is not a universal fix for every wallet or address format.

The warning drew sharply different reactions. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin agreed that rapid advances in AI-powered mathematics deserve serious attention, but cautioned that botched wallet migrations can cause real losses. Yehuda Lindell, Coinbase's head of cryptography, went further, saying there was "no evidence whatsoever" that the mathematical foundations of elliptic-curve security had been weakened. Drake went further still, noting the "striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs" among OpenAI's results and alleging he has seen the US government censor academic quantum cryptanalysis first-hand - "backroom interventionism is my base case." He offered no direct evidence of intervention in this release.

Back to the OpenAI release (which doesn't suggest a crypto compromise) - it has seen a few corrections. According to OpenAI's own revision history, a sign error in one paper's proof invalidated it along with two papers built on its construction, and all three - involving Weil classes and K3 surfaces - were withdrawn on October 7. Those withdrawals are distinct from the separately listed claim about CM abelian varieties. The company also revised 14 other manuscripts to repair proofs, correct statements or clarify assumptions, and updated references in 13 more. Its repository now lists 719 manuscripts.

OpenAI says the main results in 300 of the remaining 719 papers - about 42% - have been translated into Lean, specialized software that checks whether each step of a mathematical proof follows logically from the assumptions.  The software checks the statement it is given, but mathematicians still (for now!) have to determine whether that statement captures what the paper claims to prove. And for results without such computer checks, OpenAI itself acknowledges that some may contain mistakes.

The model that produced the work is still a black box controlled by OpenAI. The company has released selected reasoning summaries and promised to support workshops and further verification, but the broader mathematical community still faces the task of sorting durable advances from claims that will need revision - or withdrawal.

That leaves two questions hanging over the release. Can independent mathematicians verify discoveries arriving faster than they can reasonably review them? And if increasingly powerful AI begins changing fields as consequential as cryptography, who gets to decide how that knowledge is tested, shared and put to use?

Drake's entire tweet: 

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.

Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).

Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.

IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).

Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.

Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?

Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)

Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.

Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.

I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).

Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.

Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.

The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.

 

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 13:50

Mediocre 30Y Auction Prices At Highest Yield Since August 2000

After a subpar 3Y auction on Tuesday, and a stellar 10Y yesterday, moments ago the Treasury concluded the week's final coupon sale when it sold $22BN in 30Y paper in an average auction. 

The 30Y sale priced just after 1pm, stopping out at a 5.618% high yield, up sharply from 5.308% in September, and the highest since August 2000!

The high yield stopped through the When Issued by 0.1bps: good, but not as good as last month's amazing 2.7bps stop through.

The bid to cover was 2.542, a drop from last month's 2.612 but above the recent average of 2.411.

The internals were also average: indirects dropped from last month's near-record 79.5% to 72.3%, but that was also above the recent average of 69.1%. Directs took down 20.9%, up from 18.3% and in line with the recent average of 20.6%. And while not nearly as low as yesterday's record low, the Dealers award was 6.8%, one of the lowest on record but a rebound from September's record low 2.2%.

Overall this was a good auction, but would have been much better if the market had some time to digest the news that OpenAI's revenue was, in fact, much lower than it had previously disclosed (imagine that) which has helped send yields sharply lower as the Treasury market suddenly realizes it may not have to compete with the AI bubble for paper much longer... 

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 13:39

Yes, The Public Education System Is Broken

Authored by Amy Denton via PJ Media,

I have been in education for a long time. My first teaching job came two weeks after my younger nephew was born. His birthday is next week, and he'll be 29. Take out the five years when I was working in retail and going to graduate school, and I've been a teacher for 24 years. There is not enough money in the world to tempt me back into public education. I'd rather stay poor, thank you. I keep hearing about a teacher shortage. That's incorrect. There's not a teacher shortage; there's a people willing to be treated like dirt shortage. Why? How did public education come to this sad state? Jonathan Turley's opinion piece in The Hill speaks to the problem and nails it right to the wall.

His opinion piece titled "The Blue-State Model for Education has Failed, and the Public has Caught On" states early on that one of the reasons the public schools have gone down the drain is because of the teachers' unions. Early in the article, Turley states, "New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even "somewhat satisfied" with the state of education in the U.S." He then talks about the "education cartel," a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating alliance between unions and politicians. The cartel has rendered families and students irrelevant.

How is that possible? people ask. Without the students, there is no school system. It doesn't matter to the cartel. As long as the money keeps coming, which it does through dues, the cartel continues to operate. Personally, I have very little experience with the teachers' unions. I joined the American Federation of Teachers briefly so I could get some legal help regarding the principal at the high school where I taught. I was a second-year teacher, and he had determined that I needed to go. He was black, and I was white. The AFT pointed me to the union steward at my high school, a government teacher who was also one of the basketball coaches. He told me that there was nothing the principal could do to force me from the building. I had to leave on my own. I'm a stubborn soul, so I was determined that the principal was going to leave first. He did, two years later.

Was the advice I got worth the annual membership? Absolutely. But that was twenty years ago. I dropped my membership the next year. Today, I wouldn't join any teachers' union because at their very core, they are about representing the teachers, not the students. The unions protect every teacher, even the teachers who have no business being anywhere near a classroom. In the states where teachers are required to join a union, the power is tenfold over the states that give teachers a choice, the right-to-work states.

In states where union membership is required, even if the teacher is able to quit the union, the union will still take a deduction from the teacher's paycheck unless the teacher stands up and says "No." In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) said that taking dues from non-union members was a violation of the First Amendment. This had an effect on union membership, which dropped by 10% after the ruling. However, the unions are not letting the decision slow them down. One year after the Janus ruling, a full 52% of teachers surveyed did not know they could leave the union without paying a fee. We are now eight years after the Janus decision, and the deep blue Democrat states with powerful teachers' unions are working to make it easy to join a union but very hard to leave.

Aren't unions supposed to protect workers and allow them to negotiate on a level playing field with their bosses? During the time of the Robber Barons in the early 1900s, yes. Today, most unions serve no purpose other than to enrich their heads. Both the head of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) make six figures. The head of the Chicago Teachers Union makes six figures. Their salaries come from dues. Fewer dues-paying members, lower salaries. If the unions actually promoted better teaching and better practices, I would have no problem with them, but they don't. The problem? Money. As long as the money keeps flowing to the unions, they can do whatever they want.

While the NEA, the AFT, and state and city teachers' unions rake in the money, the students suffer. Children do not learn basic math and reading skills when they should and are simply passed along, because holding a child back today makes the school and the school district look bad. As I stated in another article, public schools are all about making things look good without any actual work being done. It's the Gilded Age all over again, but in public education.

Teachers are not allowed to give grades below 50 even if the student has never done any work. The teachers who question the policy are labeled as "difficult" or "troublemakers." Anything that makes the schools and school districts look less than perfect is seen as a problem. Rather than correcting the problem, schools cover it up. The "troublemakers" are given poor evaluations, denied the renewal of their teaching contracts, or even fired from the school and the district because they dare to question the system.

Students who graduate from high school with barely the basics struggle in college. Faculty at Harvard have been reduced to teaching high school math to incoming freshmen because the freshmen have no knowledge base. They never received it. This past May, the University of California reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among incoming students. The University of California, San Diego, faculty report showed a 30-fold increase since 2020 of incoming students whose math abilities fell below the high school level. Guess which political party most of the college professors in California vote for? California also has a very strong teachers' union. Ninety percent of teachers in California are union members. They are voting for their own destruction.

It's not just math that high school students are doing poorly in. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2023 that most California students cannot read or do math on grade level. How is that possible? When the people running the system don't care what the students can or can't do, it makes it easy to ignore the problems. It's not just California with poor test scores; the deep blue Democrat states have the biggest problems. It's not like they care.

What is the solution? Is there a solution? Turley states that school vouchers appear to be the only way to take control from the education cartel, by introducing real competition based on academic performance. I agree with him. I am 100% pro-school choice. Like him, I believe in the public schools. My parents, I, my siblings, and their children went to public schools, but what's going on today in the public school system is not acceptable.

School systems cannot simply keep churning out people who do not have the basic skills needed to survive in life. School vouchers, which allow parents to choose which school their children attend, take care of the biggest problem in public education: money. The less money the school systems get, the less there is to waste. When parents have a choice of schools to send their children to, very few choose to send their children to substandard schools.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 13:15

Apple CEO Ternus Faces First Big Test As Bernstein Finds Soft US iPhone 18 Pro Demand

John Ternus' first big test at Apple is launching the premium iPhone 18 lineup and the likely delayed iPhone Duo, which reportedly faces production difficulties ahead of its October launch.

The latest sign of iPhone demand came Monday from Bernstein technology analyst Mark Newman, who said global iPhone sales rose in August, extending an 18-month streak of annual volume growth, though early demand indications for the new premium 18 Pro lineup softened in the US and several other major markets.

"Initial market feedback on iPhone 18 Pro & Pro Max is mixed vs. the 17 lineup. In the US, Pro & Pro Max demand is down low single digits YoY with Pro waiting times shorter vs. Pro Max were longer. China, however, saw launch week sales up 12% YoY. Other regions were mixed," Newman wrote in the note.

Global iPhone sales rose 7% from a year earlier, while revenue increased 13%, supported by a 6% increase in average selling prices, Newman said. Volume growth slowed from 14% in July.

Newman's new figures show the iPhone 17 cycle remains robust. The lineup sold about 174 million units in the 12 months through August, roughly 18% more than the previous model over the same period.

China provided a stronger result, with launch-week sales of the new Pro models rising 12%. India's first three days of sales jumped 19%, while early demand appeared softer in Japan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.

Newman said Apple's fourth-quarter shipments tracked modestly below historical patterns through August. Combined July and August shipments totaled 33 million units, 57% of the quarter's consensus forecast of 58.2 million, versus a historical average of 60%.

The delayed launch of the base iPhone 18 until spring 2027 will certainly weigh on volume. MacRumors also reported potential iPhone Duo launch delays due to production woes. A greater proportion of premium models at higher prices due to a chip shortage has weighed on consumer demand, but that demand may return next year when the base model debuts.

Newman noted of the US market, "We expect robust demand for the DUO, which opens for pre-order on Oct 16, and ships Oct 23; early hands-on reviews are largely positive, and Counterpoint estimated ~6mn units to be sold in 2026, supply permitting."

Newman adds more color:

For the rest of Apple's supply chain: the late shipment of iPhone Duo and delayed launch of iPhone 18 base model weighed on near-term demand for Apple suppliers such as Largan. 

However, the Apple supply chain continues to outperform the Android ecosystem, and we believe the upcoming product cycles, including the iPhone 18 launch in 1H27 and the 20th-anniversary iPhone lineup in 2H27, should sustain investor sentiment and underpin valuations. 

Newman maintained his "Outperform" rating on Apple and a 12-month price target of $370, citing the strength of the existing iPhone cycle and upcoming product launches.

Among Wall Street analysts tracked by Bloomberg, 58% (about 33 analysts) rate Apple a "Buy," 30% (about 17 analysts) rate it "Neutral," and six rate it a "Sell." The average 12-month price target among the analysts tracked is around $334.

Jefferies and Bank of America analysts have also noted soft iPhone 18 demand in various major markets, as it appears that chip shortages pushing handset prices to unaffordable levels are weighing on consumer demand. Then again, there's also buy-now-pay-later, or, like many folks these days, consumers can take out longer-term loans for their phones.

Professional subscribers can read the full note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 12:40

US Government Moves $1BN In Seized Bitcoin After $770MM Transfers

By Cointelegraph

The US government completed another major transaction involving seized cryptocurrency hours after moving a significant amount of Bitcoin to a Coinbase Prime wallet.

Blockchain data from Wednesday showed that a wallet associated with crypto seized by the US government had transferred more than 12,267 Bitcoin (BTC), worth more than $1 billion at the time of publication. The move came just hours after similar transfers from the government totaling $770 million in BTC to a Coinbase Prime wallet.

Arkham Research linked the wallet moving the Bitcoin to the recovery of funds from the 2016 Bitfinex hack, in which hackers stole 119,756 BTC. The identity of the owner of the recipient address was unknown at the time of publication.

This is insane!

The U.S. government just transferred out another 12,267 $BTC ($1.01B).https://t.co/esJntewKzzhttps://t.co/sLXScezBrB pic.twitter.com/U64EA8AJwp

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) October 8, 2026

Cointelegraph reached out to the US Marshals and the Department of Justice for comment on the Coinbase Prime transfers but did not receive an immediate response.

Estimates suggest the US government held 328,372 BTC as of 2026, resulting from seized assets in criminal cases and investigations. US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 establishing a strategic Bitcoin and crypto reserve, but lawmakers are still attempting to codify the order into law.

Previous movements from the government-labeled wallet have sparked speculation about potential liquidations, but a sale would conflict with US President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, which specified that seized Bitcoin should not be sold and should become part of the country’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

In July, the US government moved $297 million in Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) to Coinbase Prime, with funds originating from high-profile US government crypto seizures.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 12:25

Golden Naked Trump Statue Unveiled At European Parliament

A golden statue of a naked Donald Trump is on display at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, at one of the busiest intersections connecting two of the Parliament's buildings, and is scheduled to stay until Thursday. Named Orange Plague, the 8.5-foot sculpture shows the US president holding justice scales and a long golf club, its ball made to look like the world, while sitting on the shoulders of a smaller, clothed man. Text on the plinth reads: "I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back."

Jens Galschiot, the Danish artist who created the sculpture, said: "Trump represents one of the greatest threats to the rules-based world order, democratic values and our common effort to solving the climate crisis."

"We must address this issue and stand together against such destructive influence."

Galschiot said the statue, covered in 23-carat gold leaf, was inspired by the story of The Emperor's New Clothes, in which a vain leader parades naked through the street, believing he is dressed in the finest clothes.

In the fairytale, no one tells him that he is naked out of fear and flattery until a child points out his nudity and the emperor becomes a figure of ridicule.

Per Clausen, a Left-wing Danish European Parliament member, invited the artist to exhibit the statue in the building.

He said that he was not worried about a potential reaction from Trump, adding: "If someone is so thin-skinned that they cannot tolerate this sculpture being exhibited in the European Parliament, then they have no place on the world stage."

The statue was previously on display during the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), which was held in Brazil last year. It also made an appearance in Germany during this year's Munich Security Conference.

Worth reading in full over at The Telegraph.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 10:35

Consumers May Be Eligible For Up To $280 In Equifax Credit Reporting Settlement

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

Millions of consumers whose credit information was inaccurately reported by Equifax because of a coding error may be eligible for compensation from a proposed $100 million class-action settlement.

Equifax Inc. corporate offices in Atlanta on Sept. 8, 2017. Tami Chappell/Reuters

The settlement covers U.S. consumers for whom Equifax reported a credit score or credit attribute to a third party between March 17, 2022, and April 8, 2022, that differed from what would have been reported without the coding issue, according to the court-approved settlement website.

Consumers who received an email or mailed notice are considered settlement class members based on Equifax's records.

To receive money, eligible consumers must submit a valid claim by Dec. 28. Claims can be filed online through the settlement website or submitted by mail.

It is currently estimated that each claimant could receive between $95 and $280. The actual amount will depend on how much money remains after court-approved attorneys' fees, litigation expenses, administrative costs, and other expenses are deducted, as well as the number of valid claims filed.

Attorneys representing the class have said that the settlement could cover roughly 4 million people nationwide.

Those who object to the settlement's terms or wish to exclude themselves from it must do so by Nov. 27.

The settlement has received preliminary approval from a federal judge but is not yet final. A final approval hearing is scheduled for Jan. 22, 2027.

The settlement would resolve nearly four years of litigation stemming from a coding problem in one of Equifax's computer systems in the spring of 2022.

According to the complaint, Equifax allegedly provided inaccurate scores on consumers applying for auto loans, mortgages, and credit cards to a range of banks and other lenders.

The scores were sometimes off by 20 points or more in either direction, the plaintiffs said, potentially affecting the interest rates consumers were offered or whether their applications were approved.

The plaintiffs alleged that Equifax violated the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires credit-reporting agencies to follow reasonable procedures to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of the information they provide.

Equifax has denied wrongdoing and has not admitted that it violated the law.

In August 2022, the company acknowledged that it had identified a coding issue in a system used to calculate certain elements, or attributes, of credit scores. Equifax stated at the time that fewer than 300,000 consumers experienced a score change of 25 points or more.

"While the score may have shifted, a score shift does not necessarily mean that a consumer's credit decision was negatively impacted," the company stated at that time.

The episode was a major setback for Equifax, which was also the target of a massive data breach in 2017 that exposed the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans.

Federal prosecutors later charged four members of China's military with hacking Equifax and stealing sensitive personal data, including names, Social Security numbers, and birth dates.

In the aftermath of the 2017 data breach, Equifax agreed to pay at least $575 million to settle investigations and claims stemming from the breach. Under that settlement, consumers were offered free credit monitoring or the option to seek a cash payment, initially advertised at up to $125.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 10:20

The post Mortgage Rates Hitting Century Highs appeared first on CEPR.

Thumos-Maxxing

By Benjamin Picton, senior market strategist at Rabobank

US sovereign yields steadied yesterday as a 10-year bond auction saw strong investor demand. $39bn of bonds were sold with a high yield of 5.30% with a bid to cover ratio of 2.77x and low primary dealer takedown. The result signals that investors are beginning to view government debt as attractive at current levels and eased fears of a disorderly correction in bond prices that had been sparked by a poor 5-year auction in late September that saw the second-longest tail on record.

Relative valuations may be playing a role here as US equity indices pulled back from record highs. US equity market breadth is remarkably narrow, with AI-adjacent tech megacaps leading indices higher in recent times as many other sectors struggle for traction. The AI narrative had a wobble yesterday as SpaceX 5-year CDS spreads widened by 16.5bps to 197bps. That follows news that the company is seeking to raise $40bn in fresh debt financing to buy NVIDIA chips, with similarly large deals also in the works for Broadcomm ($50bn) and Oracle.

Markets were probably not reassured by comments published by the FT yesterday that “investors whom SpaceX has previously approached about financing its multibillion-dollar chip purchase said they only received a short two-page deal memo with pictures of outer space and an arrow pointing out that the company was going to build data centres “somewhere in the universe”.” The ambition is admirable, but for a market that is already running long on vibes this might have been a bridge too far.

Similar wobbles in the AI narrative have emerged Down Under as the Aussie market seeks to digest the initial float of data centre operator Firmus. Firmus had been seeking to raise $5.5bn at a valuation of approximately $30.5bn, which would have made it the second-largest IPO in Australian history, trailing only the privatisation of a public telecommunications monopoly in the late 1990s. The Australian Financial Review reports that the original offer price of A$11/share is now repricing closer to A$8.25/share as key local pension funds opted to pass on the float and demand from US long-only funds proved weaker than expected.

While US bonds were finding bids and investors were casting a more critical eye over the AI investment boom, European sovereign yields were again under pressure. French 10-year OAT yields were up by 11.8bps to 4.86%, Italian 10-year yields were up 9.7bps to 4.62% and Greek 10-year yields rose 8.9bps to 4.47%. Even the not-quite-European UK saw a sharp lift in borrowing costs, with 10-year gilt yields rising 6.8bps while Bunds bucked the trend to see yields finish slightly lower. The Wall Street Journal reports that France is considering issuing more short-dated debt; a fresh instance of a developed market economy behaving like an emerging market.

With the turmoil in European bonds ongoing, and riots across France generating unwelcome visual metaphors of people dining calmly as the streets burn, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday issued a rallying cry to Western civilization. He gave a speech in Athens with the Parthenon as the backdrop, urging the West to regain its Thumos, the “fire of passion, strength, courage, pride”. Rubio mounted a defense of nationalism, decrying the transfer of sovereignty to global bureaucracies. He argued that the West is now at a crossroads where decisions taken today will determine whether it remains pre-eminent or resigns itself to “atrophy and servitude and decline”.

SECRETARY RUBIO: This thumos, as the Ancient Greeks called it - the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride - is the heart of great civilization. Without it, nations lose their will to fight, to strive, to survive. https://t.co/r5hfm550Zw

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 7, 2026

According to Rubio, the US has chosen the former and is seeking to extend the frontier in advanced manufacturing, superintelligence, drones, weapons, warfare; chips, minerals, cyber, and “every other domain of human possibility”. Doubtless this is why recent calls from US tech CEOs to “pace the frontier” of artificial intelligence development were met with short shrift by the White House, and intrepid back-of-the-napkin risk taking is perhaps viewed more positively in the United States than elsewhere.

Rubio’s remarks were pointed directly at Europe, and particularly the European Union. The criticism of global bureaucracies reflects earlier criticisms in the US’s 2025 National Security Strategy where the US warned that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” and urged it to re-capture its civilizational self-confidence, stating clearly that the United States would seek to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” and lend support to “healthy nations” of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe.

These latter were widely interpreted as a pledge to support right-wing nationalist political movements on the continent in similar fashion to how the United States has (successfully) supported pro-US right-wing movements in South America. Newswires this morning are reporting that right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro has won the support of four key centre-right parties ahead of a runoff vote against incumbent leftist Lula de Silva. Installing a more Washington-friendly (and perhaps China-unfriendly) government in Brasilia would be the last major piece of the puzzle for the Donroe Doctrine in South America, leaving only Canada as a problem to be solved in the Western hemisphere.

Rubio went on to say that there are emerging signs that Europe is beginning to awake from its “long slumber”, pointing to rising defense spending and the recent agreement over Greenland as examples of progress. He also pointed to expansion of production and manufacturing, though – perhaps politely – he declined to be specific in this area.

That’s as China yesterday rejected European calls to voluntarily limit exports of hybrid electric vehicles into the European market. It was hoped that China would agree to a soft quota that would reduce China’s share of the European market from 30% to 15%, and that the need for more overt trade restrictions to protect European industry and invite retaliation from the Chinese side might therefore be avoided.

Clearly, that is now unlikely to be the case. It’s worth noting that another broad policy ambition noted in the US National Security Strategy was “encouraging Europe to take action to combat mercantilist overcapacity…” Are we about to see that ambition realized through an assertive and self-confident European policy response? It would mark a departure from ten years of criticism of the United States doing exactly the same thing.

Tyler Durden Thu, 10/08/2026 - 09:25