The Macro Paper

🚨 CHINA'S AI PLAYBOOK ISN'T TO BEAT OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC. IT'S TO MAKE THEM IRRELEVANT BY MAKING INTELLIGENCE FREE. Chinese labs are giving away frontier-level models for free. Zhipu's GLM-5 already beats Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on key benchmarks. DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi round out 4 of the top 5 open-weight models globally, all released under open licenses anyone can use commercially. The real weapon isn't the models, it's the cost to run them. Chinese provinces like Gansu, Guizhou, and Inner Mongolia are cutting data center power bills by up to 50%. DeepSeek trained its R1 model for around $6 million, compared to roughly $100 million for GPT-4. The remaining blocker is chips. US export controls still cut China off from Nvidia's best hardware. But Zhipu already trained a full frontier model entirely on Huawei's Ascend chips, no Nvidia involved. Huawei's next-gen Atlas 950 cluster, launching late 2026, claims 6.7 times the compute of Nvidia's planned NVL144 systems. If Huawei closes the chip gap while China keeps giving away free, near frontier models running on subsidized power. The entire business model OpenAI and Anthropic are built on, charging hundreds of billions in aggregate revenue for access to intelligence, stops making sense. Why pay premium prices for marginal capability gains when a free alternative running on cheap compute gets you 90% of the way there.

Asian stocks today: 🇯🇵 Nikkei +0.86% 🇹🇼 Taiwan +2.07% 🇨🇳 Shanghai +1.08% 🇨🇳 Shenzhen +0.41% 🇮🇳 Nifty 50 +0.22% 🇰🇷 KOSPI -0.89% 🇭🇰 Hang Seng -0.63% 🇦🇺 ASX 200 -0.58% 🇳🇿 NZX 50 -0.13%

🚨 Japanese retail investors are gambling like never before. Margin buying on the Tokyo Stock Exchange jumped to ¥6.6 Trillion this month, the highest level in 32 years. This pushed the margin ratio to almost 8, which is twice the historic average. The rising margin ratio indicates that retail is getting increasingly bullish. Something similar was also happening in the Korean stock market, and since then, it has hit the circuit breaker 3 times to the downside. This means the Japanese stock market could soon start experiencing volatility like it hasn't seen in decades.

$380,000,000,000 added to the US stock market in last 30 minutes as JOLTs job openings came higher than expected. JOLTs job openings for May came in at 7.594M vs 7.30M expected, which signals that hiring is picking up again.

In 1976, Regis McKenna declined a 20% stake in Apple by saying, "It's worth approximately nothing." Today, that stake is worth $827 Billion.

🚨 7 OUT OF 10 MARKET PEAK INDICATORS HAVE NOW TRIGGERED As per the BofA report, the stock market could be approaching a top now. The US stock market has triggered 7 out of 10 bear market signals, which happened last time in Feb 2025. And what happened after that was brutal. S&P 500 crashed 21%. Nasdaq and Russell 2000 dumped 25%. Over $14 Trillion was wiped out from the US stock market in just 2 months. Bank of America says that the stock market is now in a similar phase. Consumer confidence is collapsing, credit stress is going up, and long-term growth expectations are declining. During the same time, the Fed is becoming increasingly hawkish, while BOJ yen intervention could be on the way. Combining all these together, and the stock market looks like it could soon start its downtrend.

BREAKING: $MU has now crashed over 17% from its recent high, wiping out roughly $247 billion in market value. Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix are now facing a federal lawsuit accusing them of fixing DRAM prices during the AI boom. The lawsuit claims the companies restricted memory supply while prices surged across the industry.

🚨 THE NEXT GLOBAL MARKET SHOCK MAY COME FROM JAPAN, NOT THE FED. USD/JPY just hit its highest level in 40 years. That means the yen has never been this weak against the dollar in four decades. The problem? A weak yen keeps pushing inflation higher in Japan while the BOJ is already struggling to control prices. And historically, when Japan intervenes to support the yen, it dumps US dollars and sells US Treasuries. That pushes US bond yields higher. Higher yields pressure stocks, crypto, gold, and almost every risk asset. At the same time, a stronger yen could trigger another unwind of the yen carry trade, forcing leveraged investors to sell assets globally to repay yen debt. The next 3-4 months could become extremely volatile if Japan steps in aggressively here.

$780,000,000,000 wiped out from the US stock market in the last 30 minutes as $SPX drops 1.05% from day highs.

$760,000,000,000 added to the US stock at market open as the US and Iran agreed to meet tomorrow. Tech stocks are leading the pump, as every stock in the Mag 7 is in the green. Nvidia: +1.45% Google: +2.80% Microsoft: +1.65% Meta: +3.2% Amazon: +3.7% Tesla: +3.31% Apple: +0.5%

🚨 THE BIGGEST BITCOIN BUYER IS NOW A SELLER Michael Saylor's Strategy just launched the "Bitcoin Monetization Program," which allows them to sell $BTC to fund operations. Under this program, Strategy may sell up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin. This'll be used: - To build the cash reserve for paying a dividend to $STRC holders - To replenish the cash reserve - To repurchase MSTR or STRC shares The sale won't happen at once to minimize any large impact on the price of Bitcoin. But that's not the worry. For years, markets have seen Strategy as the company that only buys Bitcoin. When they sold just $2.5M in BTC last month, the price crashed 20%. On top of this, ETFs are also selling at their fastest pace since inception. Since 2024, Saylor and ETFs have been the biggest driving force behind the BTC rally. The question is, what'll happen if the 2 largest buyers become the largest sellers?