UN Warns War Crimes May Have Been Committed in July Violence in Syria’s Suwayda

Core CPI Prints Cooler Than Expected Despite Biggest Jump In Energy Prices Since 2005 While PCE showed some signs of higher energy prices leaking into inflation prints, it was still February data. As we previewed, today's CPI data is for March and will bear the full brunt of the Iran War's impact on energy costs after Core CPI fell to its lowest in four years in February. The headline CPI soared 0.9% MoM (as expected) and while it was a big MoM jump, Consumer Prices rose 3.3% YoY (up from +2.4%...

US Housing Starts Collapsed In May To Lowest Since COVID With housing inventories at recent highs, the US housing market just suffered another sentiment setback as Housing Starts crashed by 15.4% MoM in May (far worse than 2% drop expected and worse since March 2024)), following a revised 8.5% MoM drop in April. Building Permits slipped 0.7% MoM (in line with expectations)... Source: Bloomberg That pulls the Housing Starts SAAR to its lowest since COVID (after reaching the highest since 2024 in April)... Source: Bloomberg Under the hood, it was multi-family (rental) starts that...

Without Subsidies, Is AI Unaffordable? Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, Let's pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users' costs. What's already abundantly clear but verboten to say as it would pop the bubble of AI valuations and triumphalism is that AI is unaffordable once the direct and indirect subsidies are withdrawn. Nothing that consumes this much electricity and requires such an immense scale of costly processing and memory capacity can be low-cost, never mind free. The major AI platforms and vendors are subsidizing corporate...