A Conservative Audit Of The Left's Ruling Assumptions

Global Demand Destruction: Subsidies, Empty Gas Stations, Rationing, Flight Cancelations, Export Limits, Price Controls In the past two weeks we have discussed demand destruction as a result of soaring oil prices (here and here), and we are increasingly seeing anecdotal evidence of just that (here is a table from Goldman we showed previously, laying out where demand destruction is most acute). We start, as always, with Asia which has emerged as ground zero of the global energy crisis - as a reminder last week we first presented a map by JPMorgan's...

Tanker Armada Races For Hormuz After Iran Says Strait Is Open An armada of at least eight oil tankers set off toward the Strait of Hormuz immediately after Iran’s foreign minister said the vital waterway was fully open to shipping. Five of the carriers, which had been anchored north of Dubai, were moving into the waterway on Friday afternoon, soon after Iran’s foreign minister said it was completely open, vessel tracking data compiled by Bloomberg show. Three more, which were waiting about 70 miles west, have also begun moving in the direction of...

China's DeepSeek Debuts Flagship AI Model As Compute Race Intensifies Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched a preview version of its long-awaited V4 model, ending months of silence from one of China's most closely watched AI labs and arriving a year after its R1 release sparked U.S. market turmoil and concerns across Silicon Valley AI firms. The rollout signals that DeepSeek is full steam ahead in the frontier-model race: DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-effective 1M context length. DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T total / 49B active params. Performance...