David Merkel

Wealth advisers race to serve small investors who own huge pools of capital pitchbook.com/news/articles/… Don't invest in alternatives, they return less than liquid securities.

Congress Has a Housing Bill. Trump Has Other Priorities bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… Came away w/no understanding of the bills themselves. Poor article, or at least misnamed.

Alberta Expects Carbon Capture Pact to Unlock New Oil Pipeline to BC Coast bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Could be a very clever compromise deal.

SEC Delays Plan Allowing for Crypto Versions of US Stocks bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Most things about crypto are stupid, but this has a very advanced level of stupid. Also, it would be stupid to do this with prediction markets, but less so.

New rule requires most green-card applicants to apply from outside U.S. washingtonpost.com/immigration/20… Pretty stunning. I like immigrants, both legal & "illegal," they make our country better.

Everything You Do Is Being Recorded (Is there any way of fighting back?) theatlantic.com/technology/202… Interesting to read about new technologies to disentangle recorded speech and noise.

A bitcoin miner spent $860k armouring vehicles for its bosses, a fact for which we have very little context ft.com/content/71d748… Maybe the risk from having a lot of crypto isn't worth it... $COIN

The SpaceX IPO Filing Looks Nothing Like Those Of The Elite Group Of Tech Giants It’s Hoping To Join news.crunchbase.com/public/spacex-… Unprofitable, and likely to stay that way unless there is money to be made in space outside of Earth orbit... $SPCX

President Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate were on a collision course Thursday over the administration’s controversial ‘anti-weaponization fund’ wsj.com/politics/polic… Here's to Republicans turning against Trump.

AI Data Center Debt Rises as Wall Street Flags Growing Credit Risks bloomberg.com/news/articles/… It is unusual to make long-term debt bets on a new technology. What will the long-term gross margins be?

Crypto Crime Escalates With Kidnappings, Cons and Human Coercion bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Crypto should be illegal, its main use case is facilitating crime.

Musk’s xAI Fails to Pay Staff $420 for Giving Tax Returns to Grok bloomberg.com/news/articles/… What a loser.

Distressed-Debt Deals Often End in ‘Hard Default,’ Moody’s Warns bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Duh, this is utterly totally normal.

Turkey Liquidated Almost All US Treasury Holdings in March financialpost.com/pmn/business-p… This is pretty desperate; you could see Turkey melt down.

Donald Trump and sons granted ‘forever’ immunity from existing tax audits ft.com/content/57334f… Actions of a government agency can be reversed by Congress, and by the next President. This can't be forever.

An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry openai.com/index/model-di… Fascinating. Did not imitate prior human work. Took a new approach.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is parsing records of oil trades made before a March social-media post by President Trump wsj.com/finance/regula… Where there is smoke, there is usually fire.

For some young Americans caught in the least affordable housing market in decades, paying for a home has become a family affair—with strings attached wsj.com/personal-finan… It can be done if the children have good character.

The Trump administration is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies in deals that include U.S. government equity stakes, the Commerce Department said wsj.com/tech/quantum-c… The government should not be taking stakes in corporations

Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will help it turn an operating profit for the first time wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-b… They may be the only profitable one on AI so far...