Bloomberg Opinion

🦈 Happy 50th birthday to the mother of all shark films: Jaws! Sharks haven't had much to celebrate in that time, but in Belize there's a *RAY of hope. read for free via Bloomberg Opinion *pun intended, IYKYK https://lnkd.in/eUVecWxA

🎥 So I used to think prepping was a pastime of the paranoid. But I’ve recently changed my view: In our increasingly volatile world, where climate change intensifies the likelihood and severity of extreme weather and geopolitics is running hot, taking steps to improve your household’s resilience is common sense. 📄 Read the piece for free over at Bloomberg Opinion https://lnkd.in/dtbYCxNT

The $29trn Treasury market needs to trade reliably. Leverage reform should help that without being a capital giveaway for the biggest US banks. But it still doesn’t look like driving demand for bonds as Bessent hopes. See how it could effect Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. Read more at Bloomberg Opinion https://lnkd.in/emTkYzAz

If you come home early from vacation and find robbers ransacking your house, you could call the police and try to stop the crime. But the true alpha move would be to help the robbers load your valuables onto the truck and then tell them which of your neighbors are also on vacation in exchange for a cut of the profits. Banks are choosing the alpha option, basically abetting theft from themselves by backing new projects to extract and burn fossil fuels, thus stoking the planetary heating that stunts economic growth and their own insurance and mortgage businesses. Gift link to my column for Bloomberg Opinion https://lnkd.in/egD_qE2G

Crime and insecurity top voter concerns across Latin America, a trend that’s likely to benefit rightwing parties when Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru pick presidents within the next 16 months Read my latest for Bloomberg Opinion here https://lnkd.in/dBeN2E96

$14 billion raised so far and it'll just about run out by the end of this month -- that's the staggering losses of Elon Musk's xAI. The company is out now trying to raise another $9.3 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. In today's column I question whether the cash burn will ever end. Grok has some serious disadvantages against other chatbots/AI models, making this a particularly risky bet in an ocean of risky bets. Read on Bloomberg Opinion here (gift link!): https://lnkd.in/emvNJ-AE #ai #elonmusk #xai

Selling TSB Bank could offer Banco Sabadell an escape from BBVA's takeover bid, tossing another spanner into the works of European banking consolidation. Read more at Bloomberg Opinion    https://lnkd.in/eY98WXB2

In business as in politics, one of the worst things you can do is expose yourself as a flip-flopper. And this Pride Month is shaping up to reveal a record number of corporate wafflers. A long list of companies have all declined to renew or scaled back their corporate sponsorships of Pride events and marches this year. Management teams seem to think it’s a better business decision to risk upsetting LGBTQ customers and employees than potentially anger the right and the Trump administration. 🔗 Read my Bloomberg Opinion on how companies that jumped into Pride for good business reasons are exiting based on vibes rather than data. https://lnkd.in/eDTSsUSz 📽 Or watch the tl;dr video version:

Elon Musk’s xAI is spending $1 billion a month. Neither way of making money — selling access to a chatbot or charging other companies to build things using its AI models — seems to have blockbuster potential for the company, says Dave Lee. Read the column: https://bloom.bg/4l7kzr7

Republicans in Congress look set to gut clean energy credits to pay for their tax bill. Hopes that the Senate will dilute the zealotry of the House bill look misplaced, if the Finance Committee’s language is anything to go by. That leaves the project of decarbonizing the US grid more dependent on a sector that has made its peace with President Donald Trump’s agenda but also has other pressing considerations: Big Tech. Hyperscalers dominate when it comes to signing the corporate PPAs that get wind and solar projects built. Just four account for about three quarters of contracted capacity signed so far this year. Renewable energy doesn’t provide all the needs of datacenters. But such projects are quick to build and help meet decarbonization pledges, including offsetting emissions from the gas plants that are also benefiting from the AI race. Most importantly, electricity bills take less than 2% of the hyperscalers’ revenue, so the loss of tax credits represents a rounding error in extra costs. Those same deep pockets also make Big Tech crucial to another decarbonization effort: Nuclear power. Read about it here at Bloomberg Opinion https://lnkd.in/e-HU6tsD