America – Our Story Insight

Can You Hear Us, America?

admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 05:25:21 +0000

Dobby Gibson: “This militarized occupation still feels like a test run for something that I’m not fully imagining.”

Since early December of last year, thousands of ICE officers have streamed into Minnesota to carry out a violent and grossly unconstitutional campaign of state intimidation upon the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Children and their families have been separated, schools have been targeted, and two US citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—have been murdered in the street. Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing letters from Minnesotans—novelists, journalists, poets, memoirists—that they might share their experiences, as both witness and warning, of American authoritarianism.

–Jonny Diamond

____________________________________

We wear whistles now. Mine is bright yellow and plastic and weighs barely enough to dangle from its string. I carry it in my pocket. Others wear theirs like an amulet. Under any other circumstance, my whistle would be mistaken for a Christmas-tree ornament, a birthday-party favor, or a second-hand Fisher-Price toy. It looks amateur, but the noise it makes is contractor grade.

The neighbors all carry one. Some whistles are clearly brand-new—an overnight Amazon Prime purchase—others a leftover from a long-ago summer lifeguard job. In blaze-orange safety vests and down puffers, we line the streets around our schools each morning and afternoon, standing watch for ICE caravans, little plumes of frozen breath rising from beneath our hoods.

The shriek of a whistle, once the quaint signal of a traffic cop or coach ending soccer practice is now, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the witnessing of another human-rights atrocity. A disabled woman being razor-bladed out of her seatbelt while trying to reach her doctor’s office, dragged screaming from her own car, engine still running. A Hmong grandfather marched into the street in his underwear in 10-degree weather after a warrantless search, front door bashed in, guns pointed at his grandchildren. A five-year-old arrested and used as “bait” to lure his parents. A young Hispanic man disappeared into a plate-less SUV and flown to a black site in Texas. A poet and a nurse executed in cold blood in the streets.

Our abducted neighbors are more often than not US citizens or asylum seekers in the legal process without a criminal record. They are taken without a judicial warrant and being denied timely access to an attorney. ICE provides no verifiable accounting for whom they’ve abducted, instead slandering their victims with a broad brush and gaslighting the public.

The government calls us “paid agitators” and “paid protesters” because it can’t allow for the idea that citizens will care for one another for neither money nor politics.

When a whistle sounds anywhere in Minneapolis or St. Paul, we come running. I saw one man arrive still in his bathrobe. The government calls us “paid agitators” and “paid protesters” because it can’t allow for the idea that citizens will care for one another for neither money nor politics. Each whistle summons more whistles, a chorus of witnesses with cell-phone cameras prepared to document crimes for a justice we can, for now, only dream of.

The ICE troops, who are nearly all middle-aged white men in ski masks, arrive in fours and fives in SUVs blowing through stoplights, casually tossing canisters of green chemical gas at witnesses. If you have brown skin, they have only one question for you: “Where are you from?” When they speed off, it’s not unusual to find clips of live ammo left behind, flash-bangs with the pins still in them dropped in the snow.

Despite being deployed to a winter climate akin to the Planet Hoth, they dress in what looks like hand-me-down Desert Storm camouflage and body armor. They are ridiculous and tragic and profoundly well-armed and terrifying. They stop for tacos, wipe their mouths, and then arrest the kitchen staff and speed them away. Many restaurants in town now leave their doors locked, if they haven’t shut down completely.

Those who support or excuse this campaign of terror and civil rights abuses, say: Why can’t you simply comply with these officers? They’re just doing their jobs. As if better compliance is the root issue with asking someone to show papers based on skin color. As if anyone can cooperate with a battering ram shattering their front door. As if a cadre of helmeted and armed troops casing a preschool (which I have witnessed with my very own eyes) can be met halfway with a shared civic purpose.

While the resistance here is firm, the fear is palpable. Whom are we supposed to call with our grievances? The FBI? The local field officer assigned to civil rights cases resigned in protest. The Justice Department? The experienced federal prosecutors in our district resigned in protest. Our business leaders? The CEOs of Minnesota’s once-proudly progressive and civic-minded Fortune 250 companies locked arms in resolute silence for weeks, until issuing a letter via the Chamber of Commerce this past Sunday so vague and toothless it doesn’t even mention ICE. The police? The ICE jackboots outnumber the cops by multiples and are harassing and racial profiling them, too. In a city that has become notorious for law enforcement lethally failing its citizens, we’ve never been more on our own.

The desperation is making space for something else to emerge. A loosely connected mutual-aid network. People working together block by block, Signal chat by Signal chat. Our smallest locally owned businesses are stepping into the leadership void. Once again, as it did in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Moon Palace Books—a bookstore!—is showing us a better way, handing out yard signs, providing care and conversation, a place for community organizing, a distribution point for food and household goods. And yes, a place to pick up a free whistle.

It’s not nearly enough. This US government’s violent ethnic cleansing campaign is relentless and expanding. The worst appears yet to come. This militarized occupation still feels like a test run for something that I’m not fully imagining. I’m unsure I have the right language for any of this.

Can you hear us? We are whistling as loudly as we can.

“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
–Frank O’Hara

The post Can You Hear Us, America? appeared first on Our Story Insight.

The year AI tech giants, and billions in debt, began remaking America

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 04:05:35 +0000

The Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025.

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

West Texas dust, iron-tinged and orange-red, rides the wind and sticks like a film to everything you touch. It clings to skin and the inside of your mouth, a fine grit that turns every breath into a reminder of where you are. This is the landscape where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is orchestrating something called Stargate — a fast-expanding constellation of data centers, backed by partners including Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

Six thousand workers’ vehicles pour into the site each morning. Tires raise a constant veil of grit over a construction footprint the size of a small city — more people working this single campus than OpenAI employs across its entire payroll.

Rain comes in flashes. One minute the roads are powder; the next they’re mud — thick, adhesive, the kind that tugs at boots and gums up machinery. Then the storm moves on, the sun returns, and the surface hardens again, cracked and chalky, as if the place is trying to erase the evidence that water ever touched it.

And at dusk, the same conditions that make living there punishing turn the sky into a blaze. Shorter wavelengths fall away and reds and oranges remain.

“This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman told CNBC on site in September. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required. And this is a small sample of it.”

A small sample: At roughly $50 billion per site, OpenAI’s Stargate projects add up to about $850 billion in spending — nearly half of the $2 trillion global AI infrastructure surge HSBC now forecasts.

The Abilene campus already has one data center online, with a second nearly complete. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC the site could ultimately scale past a gigawatt of capacity — enough electricity to power about 750,000 homes, roughly the size of Seattle and San Francisco combined.

“The shovels that are going in the ground here today, they’re really about compute that comes online in 2026,” she said in September. “That first Nvidia push will be for Vera Rubins, the new frontier accelerator chips. But then it’s about what gets built for ’27, ’28, and ’29. What we see today is a massive compute crunch.”

“We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before,” Altman said, squinting against the sun. “And we would be way bigger now if we had way more capacity.”

Land is cheap. Governments are willing. And the grid, for now, can be persuaded to bend.

Altman is not alone in building kingdoms.

Zuckerberg’s Hyperion and Musk’s Colossus

In the flatlands of northeast Louisiana, where soybean fields once stretched to the horizon, Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg is erecting a four-million-square-foot monument to artificial intelligence. He calls it Hyperion, after the Greek titan. When finished, it will consume more electricity than the city of New Orleans — and cover a footprint the size of lower Manhattan.

Across the Mississippi River, in West Memphis, Arkansas, Alphabet‘s Google has broken ground on what state officials are calling the largest private capital investment in state history — a multibillion dollar campus rising from 1,100 acres of scrubland.

Thirty minutes south, on the Tennessee side of the border, Elon Musk has already begun transforming the industrial wastelands of South Memphis. His supercomputer, Colossus, was built in 122 days inside a shuttered Electrolux factory. Now he’s constructing Colossus 2, aiming for a million GPUs — and just acquired a third building to expand the complex further. To power the site, Musk bought a shuttered Duke Energy power plant across the border in Southaven, Mississippi.

In southeast Wisconsin, Microsoft is spending more than $7 billion on what CEO Satya Nadella calls “the world’s most powerful” AI data center — a facility that will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips when it comes online in early 2026. And in rural Indiana, near Lake Michigan, Amazon has transformed 1,200 acres of farmland into Project Rainier, an $11 billion facility running entirely on custom silicon, built exclusively to train AI models for a startup called Anthropic.

“Cornfields to data centers, almost overnight,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman told CNBC in Seattle in October.

This is the AI boom rendered in steel and gravel — a slow carving of the country into zones of power and compute. What they’re building is not infrastructure in any conventional sense. It is the physical manifestation of a belief — that intelligence itself can be manufactured at industrial scale, and that whoever builds the biggest factory wins.

“This is the largest market in the history of mankind,” said Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “This is larger than oil, because everyone on the planet needs intelligence.”

The money

The sums involved have become difficult to comprehend.

The top five hyperscalers — including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta — are on track to spend approximately $443 billion on capital expenditures this year. CreditSights projects that figure will climb to $602 billion in 2026 — a 36% year-over-year increase. Their analysts estimate that approximately 75% of that spending will go directly into AI infrastructure.

The current tech industry is among the most profitable in the history of the world, but not all of the companies necessarily have the cash on hand to cover the spend.

The debt raise has been staggering. Hyperscalers have added $121 billion in new debt this year — more than four times the average annual issuance over the previous five years, according to Bank of America. Over $90 billion of that came in just the past three months. Meta tapped the bond market for $30 billion. Alphabet raised $25 billion. Oracle just pulled off an $18 billion bond sale — and Citi says it now ranks as the largest issuer of investment-grade debt among non-financial U.S. companies.

Wall Street expects the pace of borrowing to accelerate.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan estimate AI’s infrastructure push could drive up to $1.5 trillion in additional borrowing by tech companies in the coming years. UBS analysts forecast as much as $900 billion in new issuance coming in 2026 alone.

AWS site lead Josh Sallabedra with MacKenzie Sigalos

Katie Tarasov

“There is something inherently uncomfortable as a credit investor about the transformation of the sort we’re facing that is going to require an enormous amount of capital,” Daniel Sorid, head of U.S. investment grade credit strategy at Citi, told investors on a video call earlier this month.

You can see that discomfort in the derivatives market.

Credit-default swaps — insurance that pays out if a borrower can’t service its debt — have widened to multi-year highs for Oracle. Barclays and Morgan Stanley have told clients to buy protection, and in late October, a liquid CDS market tied to Meta began actively trading for the first time as investors rushed to hedge what’s becoming a hyperscaler debt boom.

There’s precedent for debt-funded buildouts outrunning near-term demand. In the dot-com era, telecoms levered up to lay fiber fast. When conditions tightened, many had to restructure. The network survived — but the outcomes ranged from many early investors booking losses, to equity wipeouts.

OpenAI and the tangled web

At the center of this infrastructure arms race sits OpenAI — and a web of interlocking deals that has reshaped the competitive landscape for AI.

In the span of just two months this fall, the company announced partnerships totaling roughly $1.4 trillion in headline commitments — a figure that prompted skeptics to warn of an AI bubble and raised basic questions about whether the power, land, and supply chains exist to match the ambition.

The deals came in rapid succession.

In September, OpenAI announced a $100 billion equity-and-supply agreement with Nvidia — the chip giant taking an ownership stake in OpenAI in exchange for 10 gigawatts of its next-generation systems.

In October, OpenAI teamed up with AMD to deploy its Instinct GPUs, with the agreement structured to potentially give OpenAI a 10% stake in the chipmaker. Days later, Broadcom agreed to supply 10 gigawatts of custom chips co-designed with OpenAI. And in November, OpenAI signed its first cloud contract with Amazon Web Services, further loosening Microsoft’s once exclusive grip.

“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC in October, referring to the company’s scramble to secure the raw computing power behind its ambitions. “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”

Nvidia is effectively financing demand for its own chips, Oracle is building the sites, AMD and Broadcom are positioning as alternative suppliers, and OpenAI is anchoring the demand. Critics call it a circular economy: capital, capacity, and revenue all recycling through the same small set of players. It works as long as growth holds — but if demand slips or funding tightens, the stress can propagate fast through a web of shared exposures.

Already, Nvidia has cautioned investors there was “no assurance” it would enter a definitive agreement with OpenAI, or complete the investment on expected terms, a reminder that headline AI pacts often start as frameworks.

Oracle’s view from the jobsite is simpler: the demand is real, diversified, and already spoken for.

“We see broad-based demand across a huge swath of the industry, so it’s not just from any one individual place,” Clay Magouyrk, Oracle’s newly elevated co-CEO, told CNBC in West Texas in September. “I don’t worry about a bubble, because I see committed demand for it.”

He described the appetite for compute as nearly limitless. “When I look at myself, when I look at my teams at Oracle, when I look at our customers, I see what looks like near-infinite demand for technology — if we can enable them to use it.”

At the DealBook Summit in December, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the “cone of uncertainty” — a mismatch between long lead times and a market that can change in a quarter. Data centers take 18 to 24 months to build, and chip orders are placed years in advance, even as demand forecasts keep shifting.

“You don’t have $50 billion on you,” he said, so the financing often gets wrapped into partnerships with chipmakers or cloud providers, where “you can kind of pay as you go.”

Amodei insists Anthropic is trying to stay disciplined. “I think there are some players who are not managing that risk well,” he said, declining to share names.

The new gospel of scale

Critics question how much is firm, contracted demand versus aspirational headline math.

Gil Luria, who covers technology cycles at D.A. Davidson, points to Oracle as a test case.

“OpenAI made commitments that it’s highly unlikely they’ll be able to live up to,” he said. “Now they’re backtracking and saying these aren’t really commitments — these are frameworks. But talk to Oracle about that. Oracle thought they had a contract for $300 billion. They put that in their remaining performance obligations and made commitments to Wall Street based on that.”

Oracle stock dropped 23% in November — its worst month since 2001.

OpenAI’s Friar rejected the “circular economy” framing during the interview with CNBC in West Texas.

She compared it to the early days of the web. “When the internet was getting started, people kept feeling like, ‘Oh, we’re overbuilding, there’s too much.’ And look where we are today, right? The internet is ubiquitous. AI is going to be like that.”

Friar said equity is too expensive, so OpenAI is preparing to take on debt for the first time to finance expansion. The company has reviewed more than 800 potential sites across North America — weighing land, substations, and transmission capacity.

And like much of the industry, OpenAI is looking at every viable power source — renewables, gas, and even nuclear — as utilities and tech companies chase always-on power that wind and solar can’t reliably provide themselves.

“The real bottleneck isn’t money,” she said. “It’s power.”

That demand isn’t fading. In late December, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son agreed to pay $4 billion for DigitalBridge, a firm that invests in data centers. To fund the deal — and his $40 billion commitment to OpenAI — Son sold down SoftBank’s entire stake in Nvidia. He later told a forum in Tokyo that he “was crying” over having to sell the shares.

The scarce asset now is energized real estate — and the ability to plug in at scale. Power like that is regulated and permitted, which means the buildout also depends on Washington.

OpenAI has lobbied the Trump administration to expand the CHIPS Act tax credit to cover AI data centers — though when its CFO floated the idea of a government “backstop” for infrastructure loans at a Wall Street Journal event in November, the backlash was swift enough that she walked it back within hours. Altman took to X to insist the company does not “have or want government guarantees.”

The companies aren’t waiting for Washington. They’re borrowing, building, and betting that the economics will catch up — because so far, every time they’ve scaled, the models have gotten better. That pattern is the industry’s founding conviction: more compute produces more capable systems. It’s why startups that have never turned a profit can still command valuations in the hundreds of billions.

The wager isn’t only that training ever-larger models will keep producing step-change intelligence. It’s that the payoff is now spilling out of the lab, as those models are put to work across the economy — answering customers, writing code, routing claims, drafting contracts, compressing weeks of work into hours. That’s inference: not training the model, but the everyday usage that turns models into products.

Inference is where the hype has to convert into margins, and it’s also where the compute bill never stops: each new user, workflow, or agent adds recurring demand, not a one-time training run. That’s why the buildout has started to look less like a moonshot and more like a utility race, with companies scrambling to secure the power and capacity to serve what they expect will be always-on intelligence.

“We have continued to be surprised, even as the people who pioneered this belief in scaling laws,” Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president and co-founder, told CNBC during a sitdown at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. “Every year we’ve been like, ‘Well, this can’t possibly be the case that things will continue on the exponential,’ and then every year, it has.”

Anthropic’s revenue has jumped tenfold, year-over-year, for the last three years. In 2025 alone, the startup’s valuation surged from $60 billion to a funding round currently underway that could put it north of $300 billion.

The reckoning

Dario Amodei, Daniela’s brother, believes we are approaching something like “a country of geniuses in a datacenter” — AI systems that can perform at the level of Nobel laureates across every domain. He believes that threshold could come as soon as next year.

But he’s also sounding alarms.

“Look at entry level consultants, lawyers, financial professionals, many of the white collar service industries, a lot of what they do, AI models are already quite good at without intervention,” he told 60 Minutes. “And my worry is that it’ll be broad, and it’ll be faster than what we’ve seen with previous technology.”

That belief is driving the industry’s spending binge — but skeptics worry the buildout becomes a debt-fueled overreach, ending in a familiar cleanup: bankruptcies, fire sales, and shareholders wiped out.

Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures and an early Anthropic investor, frames it differently.

“I’ve been in the venture business for 25 years,” Murphy said, “I’ve seen the cloud wave, the mobile wave, the semiconductor wave. This is the mother of all waves.”

Eerial shot of Open AI Stargate I (Abilene)

Courtesy: OpenAI

Stand back far enough and a new geography comes into focus.

Zuckerberg’s Hyperion. Musk’s Colossus. Altman’s Stargate. Amazon’s Rainier. Google’s archipelago of compute clusters. Each one a monument to a different vision of the future — and each one anchored to the same constraint: power.

Data centers are rising near plants and transmission lines, in places with cheap land, willing governments, and grids that can be pushed to expand. And the towns around them are now showing up in investor decks, earnings calls, and trillion-dollar projections.

Analysts tell CNBC the stakes are bigger than stock prices. Either this year marks the beginning of a transformation as profound as electrification and the internet, or it marks the peak of a bubble that future historians will study as a cautionary tale.

Altman hears the doubts — but he rejects the notion that the buildout has gone too far.

“People will get burned on overinvesting,” he told CNBC in September. “And people also get burned on underinvesting and not having enough capacity.”

“Smart people will get overexcited, and people will lose a lot of money. People will make a lot of money. But I am confident that long term, the value of this technology is going to be gigantic to society,” added Altman.

For now, the construction continues. The trucks kick up dust. The transformers hum. And across the American heartland, the factories of a new age take shape.

WATCH: Microsoft sees 10x return on OpenAI stake after restructure

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Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan seeks Mamdani meeting

admin — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 03:52:45 +0000

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan says he’s ready to meet with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to discuss the city’s future as competing states try to court concerned business owners away from the Big Apple.

“Now that a mayor is in office, whether it’s this city or any other city, we have an obligation as a company to work with him to try to make the city successful,” Moynihan said Tuesday on Fox News.

“I’ve got 16,000 teammates who work just in the neighborhood here, and we’ve got to make it successful.”

The key to that, he said, is how Mamdani approaches “governing all the people in the whole city, and [how] he has to carry the budget and the tax base.”

Moynihan argued that the company’s success is partly tied to the success of elected officials like Mamdani and the cities, towns and states they represent.

He told “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade he plans to request a meeting with the mayor-elect, calling the issue “important” to thousands of Bank of America employees and their families who rely on New York City being “great.”

In an interview with Fox News, Moynihan said, “Now that a mayor is in office, whether it’s this city or any other city, we have an obligation as a company to work with him to try to make the city successful.” AP

Moynihan believes that the future of NYC being successful is how the mayor-elect governs residents across the city. Dennis A. Clark

“As I look forward, I hope that the mayor will engage with us, and we’ll give him some ideas,” he added.

Mamdani’s win has inspired some right-wing voices to entice residents and businesses to flee the Big Apple to come their way.

New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, for one, worked to recruit those eyeing a greener pasture by advertising with a large van covered in rotating digital posters, one of which read, “NYC business owners: Mamdani got you down? Come on up to New Hampshire for no Communism, less red tape, and less taxes.”

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan plans to have a meeting with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to discuss the future of the Big Apple. Christopher Sadowski

A Times Square billboard – reportedly funded by a super PAC supporting Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign – invited New Yorkers to flee “radical socialist” Mamdani for the “freedom” promised in the Buckeye State.

Moynihan’s comments come after he announced a major initiative to hire 10,000 veterans over the next five years, a pledge he outlined during his appearance.

“We believe our company is a great company for veterans, and we believe we owe it to make sure we’re bringing those veterans into our company. Even if they come to work for us for five years and get a job somewhere else, we’ve given them a great start and helped them make that transition,” he said.

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Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to hold his first investor day since 2011

admin — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:43:25 +0000

It took him long enough.

This week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan will hold his first “investor day” since 2011 – breaking 14 years of silence that nicely highlights the positively awful job he has done communicating with investors.

Insiders say that 66-year-old Moynihan, who only recently laid out a succession plan, was likely prodded to call the Wednesday powwow by his board, which is fielding shareholder demands for a clear plan to boost the bank’s stock price – and a strategy to compete against its archrival, Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase.

This week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan will hold his first “investor day” since 2011 – breaking 14 years of silence. Getty Images

BofA is the US’s second-largest bank by assets, right behind JPM. But by many other metrics, it’s an also-ran. Its stock perennially lags JPM’s – and all the other big banks, for that matter. It fails to win big banking assignments that go to JPM and Goldman Sachs. Nor does it capitalize on trading volatility because it’s been so risk averse.

Insiders blame Moynihan, a lawyer by training who cut his managerial teeth as general counsel of Fleet Boston, which was among the multitude of acquisitions that led to the creation of the modern BofA. He took over as CEO in 2010, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that nearly caused BofA to collapse.

More From Charles Gasparino

Moynihan won praise for his early caution, but according to critics inside and out of the bank, he’s been running the place the same way ever since by scaling back on risk and merely managing the bank’s balance sheet. It’s the reason why the stock has lagged JPMorgan and all of the Big 6 banks.

Critics say part of Moynihan’s problem is that he never left Boston. He still manages BofA’s sprawling operations there with a few confidantes, even though its main headquarters is in New York (with a huge hub in Charlotte where it was once domiciled before its massive expansion). The investor day is being held not in NYC but in Boston.

BofA shareholders seek a clear plan to boost the bank’s stock price – and a strategy to compete against its archrival, Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase. REUTERS

Another problem is BofA’s board. It’s considered among the most CEO-friendly in finance, which is why Moynihan didn’t set a succession timetable until recently (he wants to stay in job for the next five years).

“The board and those that he surrounds himself with have allowed him to operate this way for some time,” said one BofA insider. “At some point, it becomes overly obvious how much of an outlier you are to your peers.”

A BofA spokesman said it’s “completely untrue” that the board prodded him to hold the annual meeting or announce his succession plans. “The day gives us a chance to tell the comprehensive story of our franchise, how we are growing each of our businesses, and the opportunities for growth in the future,” the spokesman said, adding that analysts are starting to buy into Moynihan’s future growth plans. As many as 25 analysts now have buy recommendations on BofA stock.

A BofA spokesman said it’s “completely untrue” that the board prodded him to hold the annual meeting or announce his succession plans. REUTERS

Whether it’s because of pressure from the board, his employees, investors or all three, Moynihan has been more visible lately. In addition to creating a succession plan and elevating a trio of executives to pole positions to succeed him, Moynihan has been doing media as he attempts to explain BofA’s new strategy.

His new soundbite is “responsible growth”. Company insiders say Moynihan is still a firm believer in avoiding balance sheet risk, so don’t expect big trading profits when the markets get crazy like you see from Goldman Sachs. BofA also doesn’t post surprise trading losses. One metric Moynihan’s flacks keep touting: The bank recorded more than a dozen years of consistent growth in its sales and trading division.

Which means when you cut through the spin, his strategy is more of the same. It’s important to note Moynihan’s caution has cost his shareholders money. In 2021, his team misread interest rates and dived headfirst into super safe treasuries that got crushed when inflation spiked and the Fed raised interest rates.

Jim DeMare, head of global markets and a potential successor to Moynihan, is expected to speak on Wednesday. REUTERS

A key reason that BofA — despite its massive balance sheet — remains an also-ran is that he hasn’t allowed traders to use that balance sheet even to support client deals, thus it doesn’t get the best client assignments, insiders say.

Charlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet

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On Wednesday, Moynihan won’t be the only one doing the talking; more than a dozen BofA executives are expected to speak including the three men poised to take his job: Dean Athanasia, head of regional banking, chief financial officer Alastair Borthwick and Jim DeMare, head of global markets.

DeMare is seen to have the inside track on the inside track because of the bank’s new found love of taking capital markets risk, albeit in a responsible manner – whatever that means.

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The Most Banned Book in America is Getting an Updated Edition

admin — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:34:04 +0000

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

I always enjoy spotlighting the interesting writing about queer books popping up around the internet. Today, I have a must-read article about the reality of navigating writing as a transfem author. Also, Maia Kobabe has announced a new annotated edition of Gender Queer coming out next year! Finally, I have a collection of queer book lists you should know about, including upcoming 2026 releases, witchy queer books, books by intersex authors, and more.

Trans Women’s Writing is Under Threat

Talia Bhatt’s new article at the Verge, “Trans women are building their own publishing world, and it’s under threat,” is the best piece of writing on queer lit I’ve seen in a long time. Bhatt addresses the barriers to entry in the traditional publishing model for transfem authors, both because of outright transphobia as well as structural discrimination, like being required to provide a “comp” title despite the industry publishing very few transfem books to compare them to.

In response, trans women have carved out their own space in the indie and self-publishing scene. Alyson Greaves, author of the Sisters of Dorley series, discusses getting her start in fanfiction, building an audience there and on social media, and now helping to support her writing by publishing serially on Patreon.

Our Queerest Shelves

But self-publishing comes with its own risks. Not only does it require a ton of leg work from writers—including editing, cover design, and marketing—but it also requires building an audience on platforms that come with their own risks. Social media is how many, if not most, self-published authors find readers, but trans women face “harsher moderation and censorship than most users across pretty much every major platform,” as well as harassment that usually is not moderated.

Dr. Michael Ann DeVito, a “professor of human-computer interaction, expert on social networks, and a trans woman herself,” says, “The choice for trans women that need social media for the kind of visibility that helps build communities and provide career and creative opportunities is horribly stark: you either deal with the constant, traumatizing abuse, or you abandon all the work you’ve done and the goals you were pursuing.”

Now, anti-trans censorship is on the rise, both of books and of online content. Earlier this year, Itch.io delisted all “NSFW” content in response to pressure from payment processors. Several transfem books were included in this, making them almost impossible for readers to find.

Bhatt concludes, “Trans women creators did not sign up to fight a reactionary anti-trans propaganda wave, but the intensifying anti-feminist and anti-queer sentiments mean that it is more vital than ever for our voices to be heard.”

Gender Queer is Getting a New Annotated Edition

In 2019, Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer was published, which follows eir experience growing up asexual and nonbinary. As book bans rose across the U.S. in 2020 onwards, it became a target: Gender Queer was the #1 most challenged book in the country in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and it was the second most challenged book in 2024.

In May 2026, we’re getting an updated version of this story: Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition. This edition includes 40 more pages of content, a new cover, exclusive art, a foreword by ND Stevenson, and more.

The original pages are accompanied by annotations from 16 different contributors, including comics scholars, queer and trans cartoonists, and people who appear in the book, like Maia Kobabe’s sibling.

Kobabe says, “It’s been almost seven years since I wrote the final words of this memoir; revisiting these pages today, in a radically different and less accepting political climate, sparked a lot of new thoughts for me as well. I hope readers enjoy this even richer text full of community voices.”

You can preview pages from the annotated edition on Kobabe’s Patreon (no log-in required).

Are You Planning Your 2026 TBR Yet?

It’s only October, but we’re already seeing the first “Best Books of 2025” lists coming in, which means the “Most Anticipated Books of 2026” season is fast approaching. Lavender Books is ahead of the curve with this list of Aster’s most anticipated queer 2026 releases, including Espíritu (Cemetery Boys #2) by Aiden Thomas, Charmed and Dangerous by Shelly Page, Last First Kiss by Julian Winters, and Ship Happens by Mason Deaver.

There’s a separate list for sapphic books out in 2026, including As Long as You Loathe Me by Swati Hegde, Summer Official by Rebekah Weatherspoon, and The Perfect Match by Adiba Jaigirdar.

You can also go down a rabbit hole with Goodreads lists of 2026 LGBTQIA+ books, but remember that anyone can add to these, so it’s worth double-checking the titles included.

Soon, I will be building my spreadsheet of upcoming 2026 queer book releases in earnest, and I am both excited for and dreading going through a million blog and Instagram lists as they pop up.

…And More Queer Book Lists

Of course, there are always more links I want to share with you. Here is a potpourri of queer book lists to enjoy.

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Bank of America, BNY sued over alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein

admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 04:46:24 +0000

A woman who says Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused her at least 100 times is suing Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon over their alleged ties to the convicted predator, accusing the banks of maintaining relationships with him and failing to report suspicious activities until after his 2019 death.

The class-action lawsuits, filed in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday on behalf of a Jane Doe and other alleged Epstein survivors, claim the sicko couldn’t have run his trafficking operation without special treatment from banks including the defendants.

The complaint against Bank of America, the second biggest bank in the US, graphically describes the sexual violence Epstein allegedly inflicted on the plaintiff.

A new lawsuit against Bank of America over its ties to Jeffrey Epstein accuses the bank of maintaining a relationship with the convicted sex offender and failing to report suspicious activities until after his 2019 death. Roman Tiraspolsky – stock.adobe.com

“From 2011 through 2019, Epstein sexually abused Jane Doe on at least 100 occasions, including but not limited to, forcibly touching her, forcibly raping her, and forcing her to engage in sexual acts with other women for his own depraved sexual gratification,” the lawsuit stated.

The document also cites previous reports to illustrate the scale of the sicko’s alleged crimes, noting that “Epstein had been sexually abusing three to four young females per day.”

“It was a full-time job for him,” the suit stated.

The plaintiff is going by Jane Doe because of the “sensitive and highly personal nature of this matter” and concerns about possible retaliation, the suit said.

Spokespersons for Bank of America and BNY Mellon had no immediate comment.

The complaint describes in graphic detail the alleged sexual violence Epstein inflicted on the plaintiff. AP

The legal action centers on claims the Jane Doe plaintiff opened a Bank of America account in May 2013 at the instructions of Epstein’s accountant, adding that he transferred about $14,000 into it.

Epstein and the accountant continued to use accounts set up for the woman at the bank for years, including one that lasted until 2019 — the year Epstein committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell — the suit said.

News of the Bank of America lawsuit, which seeks unspecified financial damages, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The new cases add to the growing legal fallout over Epstein’s banking relationships.

The latest suits were brought by lawyers including Brad Edwards and David Boies, who have represented many of Epstein’s victims and previously filed similar class-action lawsuits against JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank in 2022.

“The other banks responsible for allowing Epstein’s trafficking should have contacted us during the previous litigation to do the right thing for these victims,” Edwards told the Journal.

“It is sad that only through lawsuits and Congress are we able to bring justice to this obvious problem,” he added.

Epstein is seen with Ghislaine Maxwell, a British former socialite who was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking underage girls for the financier. SDNY

The plaintiffs accused BNY of giving a line of credit to modeling agency MC2. Epstein and French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel allegedly used the agency to traffic victims as BNY processed $378 million in payments to women trafficked by Epstein.

The suits cited the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the main US law targeting sex trafficking. It enables victims to sue not only their traffickers, but anyone who “knowingly benefits” from a sex-trafficking venture, too.

The complaints included related tort claims under New York law, which the federal court has jurisdiction to hear alongside the federal counts.

Charlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet

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Previous suits against big banks resulted in settlements.

JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank have said they regret their relationships with Epstein and settled the suits in 2023 without admitting wrongdoing. JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million to victims, while Deutsche Bank paid $75 million.

Epstein’s estate recently provided Congress a list of more than 20 banks that held accounts for the perverted financier and entities related to him. Several banks had accounts for Epstein in his later years, according to the Journal.

The lawsuit cites previous reports to amplify the scale of Epstein’s alleged crimes, noting that “Epstein had been sexually abusing three to four young females per day.” DOJ

Banks are required to monitor and report suspicious activities to avoid enabling money laundering and other criminal activity.

Senate Finance Committee ranking member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently revealed that several banks filed “suspicious activity reports,” or SARs, after Epstein’s 2019 arrest — years after the transactions occurred.

Bank of America filed reports in 2020 covering $158 million in transactions between Epstein and billionaire investor Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management.

A review by Apollo’s board found that Black paid Epstein for estate planning and tax services.

House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) recently sent letters to the CEOs of BNY Mellon, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank asking how Epstein and his associates were able to conduct more than $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions for years without detection.

The House Judiciary Committee has deliberated sending subpoenas to the banks after internal congressional memos showed repeated delays in reporting large transfers tied to Epstein and his network.

“Over the ensuing years, from 2011 through 2019, Epstein sexually abused Jane Doe on at least 100 occasions,” according to the lawsuit. SDNY

Last year, the New York Times revealed that Bank of America processed Epstein-related payments through at least 2018 — despite earlier internal warnings about cash withdrawals and transfers to accounts linked to young women.

Senate investigators have demanded the bank explain how it handled those transactions and whether any of its compliance staff raised concerns internally before Epstein’s death.

In a letter released this month, Wyden said financial institutions must “show the public they are not shielding the powerful and connected from accountability.” He called on the Treasury Department to release all Epstein-related financial records still under seal.

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» How a 1977 Czech Writers’ Manifesto Applies to the Stark Realities of America in 2025

admin — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 10:04:06 +0000

The wonderful Czech writer Ivan Klima died this past weekend at the age of 94. Klima lived a remarkable, principled life, having survived both the Nazi occupation of Prague (he spent three years in the concentration camp at Terezin as a boy), and the post-1968 repression of the Soviet regime.

Unlike his more famous literary compatriots, Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky, Klima stuck around in Czechoslovakia, despite being forbidden from publishing for 20 years. For two decades Klima was consigned primarily to menial work, as a street sweeper, bricklayer, orderly… But he kept writing. And he kept resisting, through the publication of literary samizdat (his own and others), organizing clandestine salons, and helping to disseminate Charter 77, an artists’ manifesto named for the year it was written.

The main authors behind Charter 77—Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, and Pavel Kohout, who were responding to the Communist government’s crackdown on free expression—generated its moral (and to some extent legal) authority by citing two UN human rights covenants signed by the Czechoslovak government in 1968, in the lead up to the so-called Prague Spring. [Spoiler: the Russians didn’t approve, sent tanks into Prague, and crushed any hope of a freer society].

The Communist regime quickly made it a crime to distribute copies of Charter 77, calling it “an anti-state, anti-socialist, and demagogic, abusive piece of writing,” and deeming its signatories to be “traitors and renegades” and “agents of imperialism.” As for how they saw themselves, the organizers behind Charter 77 were very clear about being nothing more than an ad hoc confederation of likeminded people, and certainly not an opposition party. In their own words, they were a “loose, informal, and open association of people . . . united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.” (So, more of a shared set of beliefs than a formal organization, like, you know, antifa.)

Why is a 50-year-old writers’ manifesto worth thinking about now? First of all, the aforementioned human rights covenants, cited at length in the charter, map neatly over what we still like to think of as western democratic ideals of free expression and individual liberty. And just as Charter 77 decries the state crack-down on those ideals in 1970s Czechoslovakia, we too can cite many and obvious authoritarian crimes from the Trump administration circa 2025.

From government officials menacing late-night comedians to masked thugs landing helicopters on apartment buildings, from Democratic officials threatened with jail time by the president to the brazen flouting of the rule of law, America’s decades-long drift into authoritarianism has sped up dramatically in the last nine months. We are in the middle of an anti-democratic sea-change, and as each week passes the likes of Stephen Miller grow bolder in flouting their fascist inclinations.

But it’s never too late to fight for basic human freedoms, for the right to be who you are and to say what you want, the right to not go hungry or get shot at school or lose everything because you get sick. Luckily, Charter 77—which is but one of countless historical examples of courage in the face of tyranny—offers a clear blueprint for how we might respond to the Trump administration’s attacks on free expression and the rule of law:

With regard to the targeting of pro-Palestinian ideas on college campuses:

The right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by Article 19 of the first-mentioned covenant, is in our case purely illusory. Tens of thousands of our citizens are prevented from working in their own fields for the sole reason that they hold views differing from official ones, and are discriminated against and harassed in all kinds of ways by the authorities and public organizations.

With regard to the oligarchical consolidation of media, and the punishment of journalists for expressing political opinions:

Freedom of public expression is inhibited by the centralized control of all the communication media and of publishing and cultural institutions. No philosophical, political or scientific view or artistic activity that departs ever so slightly from the narrow bounds of official ideology or aesthetics is allowed to be published; no open criticism can be made of abnormal social phenomena; no public defense is possible against false and insulting charges made in official propaganda.

With regard to the organized doxxing of private citizens by the far right media ecosystem:

False accusations cannot be rebutted, and any attempt to secure compensation or correction through the courts is futile; no open debate is allowed in the domain of thought and art. Many scholars, writers, artists and others are penalized for having legally published or expressed, years ago, opinions which are condemned by those who hold political power today.

With regard to Trump’s threat to universities and, indeed, to hundreds of other non-profit organizations across the country:

One instrument for the curtailment or in many cases complete elimination of many civic rights is the system by which all national institutions and organizations are in effect subject to political directives from the machinery of the ruling party and to decisions made by powerful individuals. The constitution of the republic, its laws and legal norms do not regulate the form or content, the issuing or application of such decisions; they are often only given out verbally, unknown to the public at large and beyond its powers to check; their originators are responsible to no one but themselves and their own hierarchy; yet they have a decisive impact on the decision-making and executive organs of government, justice, trade unions, interest groups and all other organizations, of the other political parties, enterprises, factories, institutions, offices and so on, for whom these instructions have precedence even before the law.

With regard to attacks on unions and the right to organize:

This state of affairs likewise prevents workers and others from exercising the unrestricted right to establish trade unions and other organizations to protect their economic and social interests, and from freely enjoying the right to strike

With regard to ICE’s unconstitutional detention and deportation of “enemies of the state”

Further civic rights, including the explicit prohibition of “arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home or correspondence,” are seriously vitiated by the various forms of interference in the private life of citizens exercised by the Ministry of the Interior, for example by bugging telephones and houses, opening mail, following personal movements, searching homes, setting up networks of neighborhood informers (often recruited by illicit threats or promises) and in other ways. This Ministry frequently interferes in employers’ decisions, instigates acts of discrimination by authorities and organizations, brings weight to bear on the organs of justice and even orchestrates propaganda campaigns in the media. This activity is governed by no law and, being clandestine, affords the citizen no chance to defend himself. In cases of prosecution on political grounds the investigative and judicial organs violate the rights of those charged and those defending them.

It is important to remember today—when things in America are particularly dark, when the Republican Speaker of the House refers to protesters as terrorists, when the president’s private army locks up American citizens—that the members of Charter 77 didn’t know the Communist regime would eventually fall; couldn’t possibly have hoped for something as peaceful as the Velvet Revolution, or that one of their own, Vaclav Havel, would go from dissident to president virtually over night. For all any of them knew they were going to die under the yolk of authoritarian repression—and yet they resisted. They lived according to their principles, made personal sacrifices, and took action in the face of injustice.

This now, following their example, is all we can do: speak the truth, take care of each other, and live in such a way that defies the cruelty of authoritarians everywhere.

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Corporate America is not falling for the left’s outrage over Sydney Sweeney’s ‘good jeans’ ad

admin — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 20:14:56 +0000

The left is trying its best to stir up a furor over the recent Sydney Sweeney jeans (or is it genes) TV commercial to ignite a backlash similar to the Dylan Mulvaney-Bud Light debacle.

Sorry progressives, it ain’t happening.

Yes, there’s lots of chirping from lefty columnists, purple-haired TikTok influencers, late-night hosts who are still employed, and assorted wokesters after American Eagle had the audacity to feature the attractive blond, blue-eyed actress expressing her sartorial flair in a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color . . . my jeans are blue,” the “Euphoria” star says.

The ad ends with a voice-over: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Blond women? Blue-eyed? Good genes (I mean jeans)? Oh, the horror! That’s if you are listening to the leftist commentariat that still hasn’t piped down weeks after the spot first appeared. The lefties are freaking because they think the jeans company is looking to bring back the bad old days, pre-George Floyd of course, when white blond oppressors ruled over American culture.

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It’s all very Hitler-like to the progressive numbskull class, but not to just about every other segment of American society. Most Americans of all colors and genders either don’t care, or they know good genes and jeans when they see it.

I know this based on lots of reporting on the mind virus known wokeness — the progressive orthodoxy that embraces everything from cultural Marxism, DEI and, of course, the oppressor-oppressed theology.

We are a diverse country, and that’s good. The wokesters take it to a level that excludes rather than includes. Good-looking white people, particularly if their hair is that evil shade known as blond, are nowhere near the intersectional matrix they demand for hiring or image making in their version of America.

That’s why Sydney Sweeney, known more for her cleavage than her politics, has become a touchstone in our culture wars, and here’s why the attacks won’t work: Wokeness was once big in the business world, but notice my use of the past tense.

Corporate America listened to these kooks for many reasons, including their own progressive management leanings, with disastrous results. They learned the hard way that most Americans of all races hate being proselytized with political dogma, particularly of the left-wing variety that pushes the limits of identity and gender politics beyond cultural norms.

I chronicled this spectacle with a healthy dose of schadenfreude in my book “Go Woke Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America.” Just a few short years ago, DEI was the norm; so was radical environmentalism pushed by asset managers through something called ESG investing. It was difficult finding a straight man or woman — God forbid a blond — who survived the Madison Avenue woke censor machine.

Budweiser thought its customers were ready for a commercial featuring a half-naked trans woman in a bubble bath. Disney decided it could sell more kids programming featuring same-sex kissing scenes. Money managers like BlackRock thought they could increase returns by advocating environmentalism and de facto racial quotas on their portfolio companies.

All of the above resulted in some of the biggest brand-destroying disasters in modern business history.

Marketing is a lot like politics. It’s a business of addition, not subtraction. You build customers just like you attract voters, through messaging that unites rather than divides — or customers flee. There are exceptions, of course. Niche brands like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream attempt and succeed at targeting the tree-hugger demo.

Charlie Gasparino has his finger on the pulse of where business, politics and finance meet

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Try this stuff on a mass audience and you will get the beatdown of the century. The predictable customer revolt impacted the businesses of Budweiser, Disney and BlackRock in such a measurable way that shareholders revolted, too, forcing some of the most progressive CEOs in the world to course-correct.

That’s why the Sydney Sweeney uproar will go nowhere with the people who matter most: Most American consumers, and American Eagle shareholders. Unless you’re stretching it like Silly Putty, there’s nothing inherently political about a pretty blond (dare I say “All American”-looking) woman in jeans and pointing out the health of her genes to sell stuff. Zero. Zilch. Otherwise, Pamela Anderson would have been a poster child for Aryan Nations instead of the “Baywatch” babe most American men and many women adored, and still do.

Shares of American Eagle are up since the Sydney Sweeney ad ran, despite the backlash. NYU Marketing Professor Eitan Muller points out the obvious, telling Fox Business’s Teuta Dedvukaj that the commercial “attracts attention, drives Google searches, and boosts the brand. Yes, she does have great genes — and it rings authentic. That’s what you want from an ad.”

My bet: You will be seeing a lot more of Sydney Sweeney. Most men will be rejoicing, many women will buy the company’s jeans. Management will be rewarded with higher sales and a stock price that matches. The attacks will ultimately fail for the same reason Mulvaney’s tenure as a spokeswoman for Bud Light was so short-lived. Recall: The nation’s Number 1-selling beer dropped to Number 3 and never recovered.

Sydney Sweeney has both good jeans and genes and there’s nothing the wokesters can do to change that reality.

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Bank of America (BAC) earnings Q2 2025

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 11:14:35 +0000

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, leaves the U.S. Capitol after a meeting with Republican members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on the issue of debanking on Thursday, February 13, 2025.

Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Bank of America on Wednesday posted mixed results for the second quarter, beating estimates on earnings and missing on revenue.

Here’s what the company reported:

Earnings: 89 cents a share vs. 86 cents per share LSEG estimate
Revenue: $26.61 billion vs. expected $26.72 billion

The company said profit climbed about 3% from a year earlier to $7.12 billion, or 89 cents per share, topping the 86 cent estimate.

Revenue climbed about 4% to $26.61 billion, below analysts’ expectations, as the firm generated $14.82 billion in net interest income, missing estimates by $70 million.

The company said that NII, which is the difference in what a bank pays its depositors and what it earns from loans and investments, rose about 7% in the quarter as deposit and loan growth were offset by lower interest rates compared to a year ago.

Shares of the bank have climbed roughly 5% this year before Wednesday.

On Tuesday, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo each posted results that topped analysts’ expectations for earnings and revenue.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

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Trade war is opportunity for Latin America

admin — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 03:09:47 +0000

MercadoLibre CEO Marcos Galperin

CNBC

The CEO of Argentina’s MercadoLibre — often called the Amazon of Latin America — sees big opportunity for Latin America in the U.S.-China trade war.

“If Latin America plays its cards well, I think could benefit from this volatility,” MercadoLibre CEO and founder Marcos Galperin told CNBC’s Robert Frank on the sidelines of Riverwood Capital Management’s LatAm Tech Forum in Miami.

Galperin is Argentina’s richest person with an $8.7 billion fortune by Forbes’ estimate.

Shares of MercadoLibre, an e-commerce and payments firm, have surged by nearly 30% this year, while Amazon, facing massive exposure to President Donald Trump’s wide-sweeping tariffs, is down 15%.

Galperin told CNBC that Latin American firms, especially in Mexico, stand to gain from escalating tensions between U.S. and one if its chief trade partners. He noted that many American companies have already moved their manufacturing operations to Mexico from China and other Asian countries.

Mexico has a free trade agreement with the U.S. that means some imports from the country are exempt from Trump’s tariffs of as much as 25% on Mexican goods.

The U.S. president has hit China hardest, however, with a 145% tariff rate on Chinese goods.

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Galperin said Friday he believes there will be a “permanent shift” in U.S.-China trade relations.

“I don’t know how it’s going to end, but I think the situation where everything was manufactured in China and was consumed in the U.S., and China bought T-bills and in a way financed that, I think that dynamic is kind of over,” he said.

Argentina, Galperin’s home country, has a long history of protectionist policies including high tariffs. Argentine president Javier Milei, who has described Trump as an ally, has slashed tariffs and import restrictions since his inauguration in late 2023.

“I think what Milei is doing is great for Argentina,” Galperin said of the free-market reforms.

However, he warned there will be growing pains.

“I hope it works,” he said. “Changes are painful, and I hope that people have the patience and the time to give him to see that these changes in the medium and long term really create benefits for for everyone.”

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