Key Events This Week: FOMC Minutes, PMIs, Industrial Data; WalMart And Home Depot Earnings

US Removes Syria, Including Al-Nusra Front, From Its List Of Terrorism Sponsors Following a decade-and-a-half of a Washington-led full economic siege of the Syrian state, and after a fierce CIA-backed proxy war (Timber Sycamore) to oust Assad over that same period, this week has witnessed the huge milestone of the United States finally removing Syria from its state sponsors of terrorism list. The designation itself had stretched back several decades, and it placed major hurdles in the way of international investment, but with the Monday move by the State Department many of...

Domesticating AI - It's Not Coming, It's Already Here Authored by Howard Armitage via New Atlas, When my neighbor wanted a vision of what his fence could look like, I didn't hesitate to ask ChatGPT to create a mock-up. I took a photo of the fence and asked it to overlay a potted Jasmin espaliered to it, after a couple of tweaks, and all of about one minute later, it gave me this: AI-generated mock-up created from the author’s original fence photograph Howard Armitage During a recent conversation with a diving buddy, he pulled...

How Resilient? By Bas van Geffen, senior macro strategist at Rabobank A cargo ship was hit by an unknown object near the coast of Oman yesterday. The vessel took some damage, but the company reported that “crew, vessel, and cargo are all safe.” The ship has since left the strait, and tankers continue to transit. Still, these attacks force a rethink about the safety of the Strait of Hormuz, just as shipping from the Gulf region was starting to pick up again. The International Maritime Organization temporarily halted its evacuation plan for...