The Justice Department is shaking up the team probing former CIA Director John Brennan as part of a broad investigation into an alleged years-long conspiracy against President Donald Trump , according to people familiar with the matter. The prosecutor leading the day-to-day operations in the Brennan investigation, which is being run out of the US attorney’s office in Miami, is no longer handling t...
The Justice Department is shaking up the team probing former CIA Director John Brennan as part of a broad investigation into an alleged years-long conspiracy against President Donald Trump , according to people familiar with the matter. The prosecutor leading the day-to-day operations in the Brennan investigation, which is being run out of the US attorney’s office in Miami, is no longer handling the case, according to the people, who asked not to be named speaking about a confidential inqury. It wasn’t immediately clear why the prosecutor, Maria Medetis Long, left the case, which was reported earlier by CNN. The Justice Department portrayed the move as being common inside US attorneys’ offices. “As a matter of routine practice, attorneys are moved around on cases so offices can most effectively allocate resources,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.” A former top aide to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche , Christopher-James DeLorenz, also re-located from Justice Department headquarters to work as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. DeLorenz is working on the Brennan investigation as well as other office cases, the people said. Medetis referred a request for comment to her office’s spokesperson. A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Medetis and DeLorenz. DeLorenz previously served as a law clerk for US District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida when she presided over the prosecution of Trump during the Biden administration for his handling of classified information. Cannon dismissed the case after ruling that the appointment of the special counsel leading the probe was unconstitutional. The government has subpoenaed Brennan and others asking for information related to the intelligence community’s assessments around w...
The trade landscape in 2025 and 2026 raised costs and rewrote the rulebook for who wins in consumer goods. A baseline 10% tariff on most imports, reciprocal tariffs hitting China as high as 145% at times, and the death of the de minimis loophole have fundamentally changed the competitive math. Granted, tariff conversations and discussions are ongoing, but companies that spent the last decade build...
The trade landscape in 2025 and 2026 raised costs and rewrote the rulebook for who wins in consumer goods. A baseline 10% tariff on most imports, reciprocal tariffs hitting China as high as 145% at times, and the death of the de minimis loophole have fundamentally changed the competitive math. Granted, tariff conversations and discussions are ongoing, but companies that spent the last decade building lean, China-dependent supply chains are now scrambling. But a handful of less-discussed names have been positioned ahead of all of it. Here are four that deserve a closer look. Image source: Getty Images. Continue reading
Hello and welcome to the newsletter, a grab bag of daily content from the Odd Lots universe. Sometimes it’s us, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, bringing you our thoughts on the most recent developments in markets, finance and the economy. And sometimes it’s contributions from our network of expert guests and sources. Whatever it is, we promise it will always be interesting. If you like chatting ...
Hello and welcome to the newsletter, a grab bag of daily content from the Odd Lots universe. Sometimes it’s us, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, bringing you our thoughts on the most recent developments in markets, finance and the economy. And sometimes it’s contributions from our network of expert guests and sources. Whatever it is, we promise it will always be interesting. If you like chatting with us, check out the Odd Lots Discord , where you can hang out and talk with us and with other listeners 24/7. Here’s what Joe is thinking about A couple of weeks ago, I was writing stuff like “you know, considering that there’s a war, and an oil price shock, and inflation isn’t cooling down as fast as expected, it’s pretty impressive that the stock market is only down by 3% on the year.” Flash forward to today, and we can forget about all of those qualifiers. The market is just having a good year. Right now, it’s the middle of April, and the S&P 500 is up over 4% on the year. The NASDAQ is up over 5% on the year. If you just naively extrapolated, then you’d say it’s looking like 2026 is a great stock market year in its own right. Of course, a big story prior to the start of the war was that for the first time in a while, global equities had been solidly outperforming American ones. Really since the start of 2025, internationally-diversified investors are actually getting paid. If the market is basically getting this right, that the Iran War is history (from a market’s perspective) then the thing I’m wondering about is whether we just snap back to the pre-Feb 27th regime. Here is a chart of the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM) vs. the S&P 500. It had been rising until running into a buzzsaw when the war started. But it’s closing back in on the highs of the year. For as good as the US is doing this year, the rest of the world is still doing better. On the podcast We have a fun episode out today. The Planet Money podcast is out with a new book called Planet Money: A ...
Apple’s iPhone demand boost in China continues as competitors raise prices to offset high memory costs. Apple is continuing to see strong demand for its iPhone in China, while other competitors in the region struggle, according to a report published by Counterpoint Research on Thursday. Counterpoint said that total China smartphone shipments fell 4% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the sam...
Apple’s iPhone demand boost in China continues as competitors raise prices to offset high memory costs. Apple is continuing to see strong demand for its iPhone in China, while other competitors in the region struggle, according to a report published by Counterpoint Research on Thursday. Counterpoint said that total China smartphone shipments fell 4% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period last year.
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller says he is cautious about the need to lower interest rates in the near term due to the energy shock triggered by war in Iran during remarks at Auburn University. (Source: Bloomberg)
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller says he is cautious about the need to lower interest rates in the near term due to the energy shock triggered by war in Iran during remarks at Auburn University. (Source: Bloomberg)
watch now VIDEO 4:44 04:44 AI demand metrics are broken and only Anthropic is being realistic Tech The main demand signal for artificial intelligence looks explosive on paper, but it may be significantly overstated. Anthropic , by pricing its tools for that reality, might be the best-positioned AI company if a correction comes. Tokens are the basic unit of AI usage: words and characters that make ...
watch now VIDEO 4:44 04:44 AI demand metrics are broken and only Anthropic is being realistic Tech The main demand signal for artificial intelligence looks explosive on paper, but it may be significantly overstated. Anthropic , by pricing its tools for that reality, might be the best-positioned AI company if a correction comes. Tokens are the basic unit of AI usage: words and characters that make up both the queries users send and the output models generate. Chatting with an AI consumes a couple of hundred tokens per paragraph. Agentic AI, where models write code, browse the web, and execute multi-step workflows, burns through thousands more per session. Using the rates of Anthropic's latest model, one million tokens of input (prompts) costs $5, and one million tokens of output (the model's responses) costs $25. AI companies cite the boom in token consumption to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on infrastructure to serve it. But token consumption is becoming a distorted metric. Meta and Shopify say they have created internal leaderboards that track how many tokens employees use. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he'd be "deeply alarmed" if an engineer earning $500,000 a year wasn't using at least $250,000 worth of compute — measuring what an engineer spends on AI instead of what they produce with it. Once companies start measuring AI adoption by volume, employees optimize for the metric instead of the outcome. "If your goal is to just burn a lot of money, there are easy ways to do that," said Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, which processes AI workloads for thousands of enterprises. "Resubmit the query to ten places. Put up a loop that just does it again and again. It's going to cost a lot of money and not lead to anything." Jen Stave, executive director of the Harvard Business School AI Institute, hears the same from enterprise leaders. "I've talked to a dozen CTOs or CIOs who are all saying, 'Actually I'm having a really hard time finding an RO...
The End Of Oil Volatility As A Weapon Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog, This is the only chart that matters right now… not borrowing costs ( @lukegromen ). It’s the weekly chart of Brent Crude. I’ve been telling my patrons for three weeks in the Market Reports that the Brent Crude chart has all the earmarks of a market being manipulated UP to support a narrative … That narrativ...
The End Of Oil Volatility As A Weapon Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog, This is the only chart that matters right now… not borrowing costs ( @lukegromen ). It’s the weekly chart of Brent Crude. I’ve been telling my patrons for three weeks in the Market Reports that the Brent Crude chart has all the earmarks of a market being manipulated UP to support a narrative … That narrative is Donald Trump is a madman who broke the world and is losing in Iran . Look at the chart carefully, you see big gaps between weekly closes and opens. Also, note the tails to the downside versus the wicks to the upside. Tails are much longer than wicks…. telltale signs of a market that has topped but someone is trying to keep reflating it. Why? Many reasons, from speculations, positions, narrative control, etc. Markets are the sum total of all of these players. But the reality is that you can only manipulate a market over a short period of time (H/T @armstrongeconomics ) unless you control the total pricing system for that market… i.e. central banks and currencies…. and why the gold and silver markets have been manipulated for years. Oil is a market of immense volatility, with 5-year moving average of its Range/Price topping 7% on a weekly basis, which is in bitcoin territory. It should be the most boring market on the planet, since everyone depends on it. But it isn’t. It trades like a penny stock on a double espresso. (H/T Dennis Miller). Someone profits from that volatility. Someone works with others to create that volatility. All Roads don’t lead to DeMoines, FYI. Oil volatility is the enemy of certainty. It retards investment in some cases and redirects it to other less viable investments in others… c.f. Wind, solar, LED lights, and all this Watermelon (Green on the outside, Commie Red on the inside) nonsense. If we want a world of predictability, which is the essential purpose of Human Action (H/T Mises, something most Miseseans have forgotten), then we have to acce...