China Ruins AI's Party While The UK Holds a Car Boot Sale – Hypernormal Week
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In this episode.
Inflation vs the oil war — why June's CPI and PPI prints are already out of date, and what new Fed chair Kevin Warsh's "plenty of work to do" really signals
The AI repricing — Korea's Kospi jumps 8% in a day, SK Hynix trades at a 50% premium to itself, then TSMC delivers a fifth straight record quarter (profits +59%) and the stock has its worst day in over a year. The question is no longer "is AI real?" but "what are you prepared to pay for it?"
The issuance flood — $345bn of new US stock this year, hyperscaler CapEx heading past $1 trillion, widening tech bond spreads, and why late-cycle bull markets tend to drown in exactly this kind of paper
IBM's worst day on record — down 25% as customers cannibalise legacy IT budgets to pay their AI bills
Hormuz and the Tanker Wars playbook — why crude is calm, why the real tightness is in refined products and crack spreads, and why energy is now a cheap tail-risk hedge
Gold falls 3% with a war on — the safe-haven bid goes to the dollar and energy instead
Chip diplomacy — Xi Jinping's open-source AI coalition of 29 countries, the UAE's airstrikes-for-semiconductors upgrade, and the bifurcation of AI into a Western proprietary stack vs a Chinese open-source one
Britain's car boot sale — 154 takeover bids worth £165bn since 2023, Rotork gone at a 73% premium, just 11 IPOs restocking the shelves, and the pound rallying on hopes of a fiscally conservative chancellor under PM-in-waiting Andy Burnham.
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