Anaïs Howland

@Barchart inflation + high mortgage rates = affordability crisis, consumer pain is just starting to show up...

BREAKING 🚨: American Consumers Consumer Sentiment plunges to lowest level in history 📉📉

@jesse_vermeulen as long as you stay off the tenderloin, sure!

san francisco is the greatest city on earth prove me wrong

@yashhq_22 claude code, codex, antigravity, v0, coderabbit, langchain

solo founders, what AI tools are you actually using daily right now?

@amarifields_ If you're in SF, that barely covers rent for a few months 🫠

serious question is a $1k-$10k investment actually enough to help founders today or are we underestimating how expensive it’s become just to survive while building

@hthieblot The AI analyst for fixed-income markets: oasive.ai

If you are a solo founder, reply here and tell me what you are building.

@andruyeung Pretty cool. I know it’s real, but this honestly looks AI-generated

There’s an underwater Michelin-starred restaurant in Norway built 18 feet beneath the sea. It’s the world’s largest underwater restaurant. Guests eat a 22-course menu for ~$400 while making eye contact with jellyfish. The building is designed to survive storms and doubles as an artificial reef for marine life. We need more weird shit like this in America.

Psychologically, I get the appeal of eliminating a recurring expense. But if your mortgage rate is low, paying it off early can be a poor use of capital. The real tradeoff is opportunity cost: that money could be invested instead. At ~7% returns, money doubles every ~10y (8x over 30y)...

Paying off your mortgage eliminates your single largest monthly expense. On a $2,200/month payment, that's $26,400 a year you no longer need to generate just to break even. At a 4% withdrawal rate, that's the equivalent of having an extra $660,000 in your retirement portfolio. The paid off house doesn't show up on a brokerage statement. It shows up in how little you need to survive - and how much breathing room that creates for everything else.

30d DLQ are usually a lagging indicator. The driver seems less like mortgage rate reset risk and more like broad household cashflow pressure: inflation, insurance, taxes, consumer debt, and wages not keeping up. The worrying part is that this is showing up even among borrowers likely locked into low post-Covid mortgage payments...

🚨Attn: Mortgage Nerds Re: April Client Review Now 2 months in a row with elevated, new 30-day delinquency (40% of which is Fannie and Freddie), bucking historical seasonal trends Unprecedented in this cycle (excluding Covid) Highest Payoffs since June 2023 (57% R&T Refis) 🌩️

@FirstSquawk Not really apples to apples though since Anthropic reports revenue differently than OpenAI

ANTHROPIC’S ANNUALIZED REVENUE HAS CLIMBED CLOSE TO $45 BILLION, OVERTAKING OPENAI’S $25 BILLION, PER THE INFORMATION.

@HedgieMarkets That's why Anthropic is paying SpaceXAI $1.25B/mo 😅

🦔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🤗

@DeItaone The consumer pain is going to be real with rates this high and affordability already stretched

MORTGAGE RATES HIT 6.75%, HIGHEST SINCE JULY 30-year mortgage rates rose to 6.75%, the highest since July, up 7 bps in a day and 33 bps over 10 days, according to Mortgage News Daily. Rates are now 46 bps above April lows after rebounding from war-driven volatility that pushed them near 6.6% in March. Mortgage News Daily’s Matthew Graham says bond markets are signaling pressure on policymakers to end the war or face further economic strain. The move has lifted monthly payments by about $167 on a median-priced home, highlighting renewed pressure on housing affordability.

@OfficialLoganK @GoogleDeepMind The cost-performance tradeoff is really impressive and wild that's it's basically SOTA on computer use too!

Welcome to Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of intelligence, speed, and cost putting 3.5 Flash in a class of its own. We spent the last 6 months making sure Flash is great for real world use cases. It's available everywhere now!

@nemild @ycombinator Any similar events in SF?

Y Combinator is hosting fintech happy hour on Thursday in New York City. Thinking of a startup in stablecoins, tokenization, financial AI, agentic commerce, prediction markets ...? Join us! It's the capstone to our @ycombinator Summer 2026 NYC interviews. Link below 👇🏽

@galdayan1895 @a16z @speedrun Oasive, the AI analyst for fixed income markets. Built by ex-Google PM, ex-Wall Street trader and 2x-founder.

Last day to apply to @a16z @speedrun SR007. As an a16z speedrun scout, I've already referred 2 startups who got accepted Sell me your product in one sentence. I will rate each of them with one sentence feedback. Those who are above 9, I will reach out directly and schedule an instant meeting.

@claudeai Finally 🙌

New in Claude Code: agent view. One list of all your sessions, available today as a research preview.

@MeghanKReynolds Which banks and how to get on the list? If it's a premier company, what's the incentive for the lower minimum and placement fee when they could get so much more from it...

Heard from VC LPs this week: Multiple banks offering direct access - at large scale - to a premier company’s latest private round at relatively low minimums and a small placement fee Welcome to the Private IPO. Turns out “the doctors and dentists” aren’t so bad after all!

@desireefixler Agree with the first-mover advantage so not surprised JPM/MS are the first big banks to mark down loans. This seems to be that a lot of this is caused by contagion/panic and less from deterioration of fundamentals, what are your thoughts on this?

I worked at JPMorgan in this exact group, and it had the most conservative private credit lending practices on the Street. So it’s no surprise they’re likely the first to cut exposure and margin call. In a credit unwind, first mover advantage matters: the first to mark reality usually - though not always - suffers the least. This is not subprime GFC 2.0, but big leverage on leverage in a downturn usually ends the same way: a bunch of slow banks get left holding billion-dollar bags of shit. Archegos is a recent reminder: Goldman moved first, while sleepy Credit Suisse was left with a roughly $5.5 billion hole. Time will tell who was away with the fairies instead of de-risking. Thoughts?

Contagion is the real problem there and it started with OBDC restricting outflows then everyone else had to follow and more panic ensued. It seems like a lot of it is caused by freakout and less so by a clear deterioration of fundamentals. We've seen the market starting to price this already, the real question is: buy the dip?

@noahzweben this is awesome, have been waiting for something like this for a while! 🙌

Announcing a new Claude Code feature: Remote Control. It's rolling out now to Max users in research preview. Try it with /remote-control Start local sessions from the terminal, then continue them from your phone. Take a walk, see the sun, walk your dog without losing your flow.

The gap is massive. Systematic strategies make up ~20% of equities but only ~1-2% of the corporate bond market according to Bloomberg. We are looking at a market that is decades behind, still manual, relationship-driven, and plagued by inefficiencies. But the shift is happening. AI is finally allowing us to scale the kind of deep, fundamental analysis that used to require a human team, but applied across thousands of bonds instantly. There is a massive opportunity to disrupt this space. Stay tuned for what I’m building 👀 bloomberg.com/news/features/…