John C. Maxwell, III @maxjcm

JUST IN: GOOGLE $GOOGL JUST ANNOUNCED AN $80 BILLION CAPITAL RAISE TO BUILD AI INFRASTRUCTURE And Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B is writing a $10 billion check to get in. Here's the full breakdown: THE DEAL: - $30B in underwritten public offerings - $40B through an at-the-market stock program starting Q3 2026 - $10B private placement to Berkshire Hathaway THE BERKSHIRE PIECE: - $5B in Class A Common Stock at $351.81 per share - $5B in Class C Capital Stock at $348.20 per share - Berkshire has been building this position since Q3 2025 THE PURPOSE: - Scale AI compute infrastructure to meet "unprecedented customer demand" - Approximately $30B of the ATM proceeds will cover 2026 employee equity tax obligations - Remaining proceeds go directly to AI infrastructure buildout

Google just opened up the floodgates for the Mag 7 to begin doing ATM offerings. The Mag 7 used to buy back stock. Now they are dumping shares in the open market. Why? AI infrastructure. As long as the capex delivers an ROI, the market may reward it, but it looks like Google feels they have tapped the debt markets enough and now need to visit the equity markets. They also got Berkshire to buy $10B at $350, showing that Berkshire is supporting the move. This is incredible to witness...but my question is...will this give the other Mag 7 companies the freedom to do ATM offerings if the market is willing to let them? This incredible to witness. $GOOGL $META $AMZN $MSFT

The US fiscal situation is much worse than that of other major economies: The US federal budget deficit stands at -6.0% of GDP, the largest among all G7 nations. The budget gap is also more than TWICE as big as the G7 average of -3.0%. By comparison, France and the UK are running deficits at -5.0% of GDP. By 2028, the US deficit is expected to widen to -7.5% of GDP, near the highest since 2021. At the same time, Italy and Canada are projected to run deficits at -2.0% of GDP over the same period. The UK, France, Germany, and Japan are all expected to hold deficits below -5.0%. The US is on an unsustainable fiscal path.

41 AI stocks have driven 70 cents of every dollar added to the S&P 500 since ChatGPT launched

BREAKING: BLOODBATH in Asian Markets TAIWAN's stock market down 3% erasing NT$3,990,000,000,000 ($133 BILLION) SOUTH KOREA's KOSPI down 3% wiping out ₩95,000,000,000,000 ($70 BILLION) JAPAN's NIKKEI down 1.5% erasing ¥14,250,000,000,000 ($99 BILLION)

Wall Street is ramping up hedges against Big Tech: The total net notional value of credit default swaps (CDS) outstanding on major tech firms is up +$1.0 billion so far in Q2 2026, to a record $12.5 billion. The total value of debt being insured against default on these companies is up +500% since Q2 2025. Oracle, $ORCL, leads with ~$6.5 billion, followed by Amazon, $AMZN, at ~$2.0 billion, and Alphabet, $GOOGL, at ~$2.0 billion. At the same time, Microsoft, $MSFT, stands at ~$1.0 billion, Meta, $META, at ~$800 million, and Nvidia, $NVDA, at ~$200 million. Furthermore, monthly notional trading volumes of Big Tech CDS trading at Bank of America are up +900% since the start of 2025. For context, most of these CDS contracts did not trade actively until 2025. Corporate borrowing tied to AI is exploding.

Over half of Americans are funding vacations with credit cards

The housing market is about to go negative for the first time since… 2007

S&P 500 total call volume hits a new all-time high

Investor demand for downside protection is plummeting: The average 3-month put-to-call skew of S&P 500 single stocks is down to 0.04, the 4th-lowest reading over the last 20 years. This measures how much more investors are paying for downside protection via put options than for upside exposure through call options. The lower the reading, the less investors are paying to protect themselves against a market decline. The average 3-month put-to-call skew has fallen -75% since March, posting the sharpest drop since April-May 2025. This metric is even lower than during the 2021 meme stock frenzy. Investors are no longer thinking about downside risk.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

Keir Starmer does NOT want the World to see how badly British Patriots want their country back Would be a shame if it went viral on 𝕏

Americans are defaulting on their student loan debt at a record pace: Delinquent federal student loan debt jumped +$12.2 billion in Q1 2026, to $171.4 billion, an all-time high. This has officially surpassed the $166.8 billion peak recorded in Q4 2019. At the same time, the proportion of seriously delinquent loans rose +0.7 percentage points, to 10.3%, the highest since Q1 2020. This comes as 2.6 million borrowers defaulted in Q1 2026, followed by ~1.0 million in Q4 2025. The average borrower entering default is now nearly 40 years old, up from 36.4 before the 2020 pandemic. The US student loan crisis is intensifying.

Wall Street Wins, Main Street Defaults “…the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) published new data showing that the share of Americans behind on a range of household consumer debts reached all-time highs in the first quarter of 2026. As the nation hurdles toward an historical record of $19 trillion in total household debt, Americans saw the highest rates of auto loan delinquency that FRBNY has ever recorded, rates of credit card delinquency near those last seen at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, and student loan delinquency at its worst since before the COVID-era payment pause….” - @BorrowerJustice

Why Xi Jinping holds the cards #China ft.com/content/b2db7e… via @ft

Global Copper Supply-Demand Model Copper Supply and Demand Outlook The copper market is expected to enter a period of growing deficits due to significant supply constraints and increasing global demand. Jefferies' supply and demand model forecasts that total global copper demand will grow at a CAGR of 2.1% from 2025 to 2030E, reaching 30,931 kt by 2030, while total supply is projected to grow at a slower CAGR of 1.7%, reaching 30,136 kt in the same period. This imbalance is expected to result in a widening deficit, with a notional deficit of (795 kt) projected by 2030E.

The large private credit fund that marked its NAV down from 100 to 81 in January just marked it down again, now to 77. Are all loans down 23% YTD, or are half the loans down 46%, or are one quarter of the loans down 92%? Which is worse?

Bloomberg: “The world has burned through oilinventories at a record speed as the Iran war throttles flows from the Persian Gulf… The rapidly shrinking stockpiles mean that the risk of even more extreme price spikes and shortages is getting ever-closer, leaving governments and industries with fewer options to cushion the impact of the loss of more than a billion barrels of supply, two months into the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz.” #economy #oil #markets #middleeastwar

Central banks were net sellers of gold in March with 30 tonnes in outflows, most since 2023

Goldman: Even after adjusting for potential delays and cancellations... we expect US data center power demand to more than triple from 31 GW in 2025 to 66 GW in 2027... Consequently, we expect this acceleration in data center power demand growth to further tighten US power markets, which we estimate are already critically tight in some regions (Exhibit 6). At the national level, we forecast the share of US data centers in total peak summer power demand to increase from 4.1% in 2025 to 5.3% in 2026 and 8.5% in 2027, leading to incremental tightness in the US power market.. We see increasing risks that [some] markets may have to turn some future data centers away and recommend hedging the upside risks to local power prices.

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