The Freeport Navigator

Meta Platforms (META) just announced it was no longer hiring for its AI division. This raises questions… Has Big Tech overspent on AI, or at least on this stage of it? What does that mean for Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), or Alphabet (GOOGL)? Most importantly, what do we do with our money?

President Trump really wants a rate cut. He wants one badly enough to push for the immediate resignation of Fed governor Lisa Cook on the grounds that she might have fudged a mortgage application to get a better rate. He’ll likely get what he wants. I’ll spare you another rant on why it’s a terrible idea to lower rates while inflation still refuses to die and the stock market looks more and more bubbly by the day. Instead, let’s look at the bigger picture.

You know I’m a believer in AI. I use it daily. So, I’m not saying this as a skeptic or as a hater. But I think we’re starting to hit a brick wall of sorts. OpenAI came out with their latest iteration of ChatGPT (GPT-5) earlier this month. It didn’t go well. Now the mainstream media is abuzz with the “AI vibe shift.”

Late last week, Social Security marked its 90th birthday since being signed into law in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression. Ever since, generations of Americans have accumulated stories of painfully navigating this massive institution – too often about waiting rooms, endless forms, and mind-numbing incompetence. But something unusual has happened in the last few months.

Is it time to dump your AI stocks? No. It’s still too early for that. But it is time to find new investment themes to diversity into… ideally as far away from tech as possible.

Most people don’t know this, but at any given time, every stock in the market is in one of four distinct — and predictable — stages. And there’s one stage in particular where the money is made…

It is Jerome “Transitory Inflation” Powell’s last Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. President Donald J. Trump has made it clear that Powell’s time leading the central bank is coming to a close. This time next year, there will be a new clown in a gray flannel suit delivering the closing statements at Jackson Hole. So let’s reflect on the career of a man who presided over the biggest surge in inflation since Jimmy Carter was in the White House.

Everyone’s watching the wrong AI boom. While Wall Street and Silicon Valley obsess over ChatGPT-5 – or how many exaflops xAI is hoarding – they’re missing the real earthquake rumbling beneath the surface.  The foundations of the AI world are about to crack… reordering the entire semiconductor supply chain.

Are we finally seeing the effects of tariffs in prices? Last week, the producer Price Inflation (PPI) spiked to its highest levels in close to four years. If tariffs were the culprit, we could reverse the inflation by simply ditching them. It would be a problem with an easy solution. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening here.

Every pound of steel used to make a tank is not used to build an HVAC system. And even if the money is fake — “printed” and borrowed — it still is used to buy real resources that must come out of the real economy. Which brings us to our question for today: What is it we’re not seeing? What’s the rest of the story?