Tucker Carlson tells Alex Jones he's open to supporting JD Vance for President. "I've always liked JD Vance. I think he's really smart."

Alphabet is joining the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing Verizon effective June 29. The swap tells you everything about where the economy has shifted over the past two decades. Verizon had been in the Dow since 2004, when it replaced AT&T. Its exit comes down to a shrinking stock price and modest growth that made it increasingly irrelevant in a price-weighted index. Alphabet, meanwhile, became a viable candidate after its stock split lowered its per-share price enough to fit the Dow's weighting mechanics. Alphabet now joins Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft in the blue-chip index. The Dow was originally built to represent the breadth of American industry. Steel, oil, railroads, chemicals. Today it's becoming a reflection of something different. Five of the 30 companies in the index are now mega-cap tech platforms, and the one that just got swapped out was a legacy telecom. The deeper story is that Verizon represents the infrastructure layer that these tech companies run on, and even that business couldn't keep pace with the companies it serves. The pipes are a commodity. The platforms built on top of them are where the value accrues. This swap just made that reality official in the oldest stock index in America.

"In the Soviet Union, bread is bread. In the US, if you want to reinvent the croissant, you can. That is human creativity." Vlad Barbalat, CIO at Liberty Mutual, on what makes America different.

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Silver has now lost half its value since hitting an all-time high of roughly $122 in January. It's trading around $60 today. This has been one of the most violent round trips in commodity market history. In January, silver swung $2 trillion in market cap over 14 hours. It then suffered its worst single-day crash in 46 years, with gold and silver vaporizing $6.52 trillion in combined market cap over 48 hours. In February it crashed 22% in two hours, dropping $17 to below $74. In March, futures plunged another 13% in a single session. Back in January we had Josh Phair on who explained that banks were quietly accumulating silver while keeping a lid on prices and that someone tried to take a third of New York's silver supply and the whole system shut down. In February we had Vince Lanci on who laid out how JP Morgan had been hoarding silver, how China's supply chain was getting cut off, and how the market was structurally stressed. The story underneath the price action is that silver remains caught between its identity as an industrial metal and its aspirations as a monetary one. It surged 147% in 2025 on supply deficit narratives and safe haven demand, then gave it all back when CME margin hikes triggered forced liquidations and the dollar strengthened on Warsh's nomination. The same volatility that made silver exciting on the way up made it brutal on the way down. As we noted back in January, gold and silver were already near historic lows against Bitcoin. The question then was how much longer silver bugs were going to get that deal. Five months later, with silver cut in half and Bitcoin holding the mid-60s through a war, a hawkish Fed, and an AI-driven dollar rally, the relative case for a fixed-supply digital asset over a commodity that can swing $2 trillion in a single session continues to sharpen.

OpenAI says they have shiped 30+ new models, features, and tools for the API in the past 6 months.

"He should be vilified throughout history for this unreasonable risk he took with all of our lives." Rand Paul on Anthony Fauci and gain-of-function research.

Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly directed Meta to build a prediction markets app called "Arena," according to a New York Times report citing two anonymous employees. Meta has not commented and the report has not been independently verified. The app would function independently from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger and is being built by a small team to compete directly with Polymarket and Kalshi. The initial version will probably use a video game-like points system instead of real money wagers, though Meta reportedly hasn't ruled out letting users bet real money eventually. DraftKings and FanDuel parent Flutter Entertainment both dropped more than 2% on the news as the market priced in what it means to have a company with 3 billion users entering this space. Worth noting that Meta has tried this before. In 2020 the company launched Forecast, a crowdsourced prediction app using a points system, and shut it down in 2022. Meta has historically struggled to get standalone apps adopted outside its core social networking products. Insiders cautioned that Arena remains in development and may never be released. The timing is notable regardless. Prediction markets exploded in popularity during the 2024 presidential election. Polymarket is reportedly raising at a $15 billion valuation. Kalshi partnered with Nasdaq. The CFTC is actively working on a formal regulatory framework with a proposal currently under White House review. Robinhood and Interactive Brokers have both rolled out event contracts. If the report is accurate, the largest social media company in the world wants in.

"If you build a fortress balance sheet, you're able to do things that others will not." Vlad Barbalat, CIO at Liberty Mutual, on why sitting on $120B in bonds isn't enough.

The House Financial Services Committee just scheduled a field hearing for the CLARITY Act on July 17, titled "Building the Future of Finance: How the CLARITY Act Unlocks Innovation." The Senate Banking Committee advanced it 15-9 on May 14 with bipartisan support and it landed on the Senate Legislative Calendar on June 1, making it eligible for a full floor vote without any further committee action. The bill splits digital asset oversight between the SEC and CFTC, with investment contract assets falling under the SEC and digital commodities like Bitcoin under the CFTC. The math on the Senate floor is tight. Republicans hold roughly 53 seats and clearing the 60-vote filibuster threshold requires at least 7 Democratic votes. Only 2 Democrats voted yes in committee and both gave themselves explicit exit ramps on a floor vote. The two main sticking points are an ethics provision restricting government officials' financial ties to crypto and developer protection language around whether writing open-source code can expose someone to money-transmitter or securities liability. The August recess is a hard gate. Once the midterm campaign cycle is fully engaged, senators in competitive races become significantly less likely to take a pro-crypto vote. House Agriculture subcommittee chair Dusty Johnson signaled the House will fast-track passage if the Senate moves before recess. This hearing on July 17 is another signal that the House side is keeping pressure on.

"We're not in the business of predicting the future. We're in the business of being prepared for all its eventualities." Vlad Barbalat, CIO at Liberty Mutual, on managing $120 billion without macro bets.

"Sanctions are of absolutely no value until you trade them. When we put sanctions on Iran, they have not changed their behavior. In exchange for removing sanctions, we may be able to get something significant." Rand Paul on CNBC this morning.

"They’re holders. They’re believers in these companies." - Robinhood’s Steve Quirk on SpaceX IPO

Digital Chamber CEO Cody Carbone testifying before the Senate Banking Committee today. "We're already seeing, after the GENIUS Act passed, cheaper, more competitive payment options for Americans."

Markets started 2026 pricing in 2 rate cuts by July. Now there's a 25% chance the Fed actually raises rates at the July 29th meeting. At Warsh's debut FOMC last week the dot plot flipped from zero officials projecting hikes to 9 of 18 penciling in at least one. The median year-end rate jumped from 3.4% to 3.8% in a single quarter. Warsh killed forward guidance on day one and withheld his own dot entirely. No sitting chair has done that in recent memory. Markets heard "hawkish" and panicked. Warsh is walking into a trap he can't escape. Hyperscaler free cash flow is plummeting as AI CapEx explodes past $600B. Google already issued equity. Oracle already went to the debt markets. As @JOHN ARNOLD pointed out on the latest @TEN31 Timestamp, we're rapidly approaching the zero bound on free cash flow for these companies and once you cross into negative territory they have no choice but to tap capital markets. Accommodative financing conditions aren't optional if the AI buildout is a matter of national strategic interest. Home buying conditions are at their worst levels in years with 30-year mortgage rates tethered to the long end. The administration declared housing a national emergency priority. Hard to square that with meaningfully higher rates when a huge chunk of the voting base is getting crushed. Then there's the fiscal math. Non-discretionary federal outlays are bumping up against 100% of tax receipts. The Treasury shifted issuance to the front end to cut financing costs. A rate hike at exactly that part of the curve would blow the entire plan up. Warsh and Bessent have both publicly called for a new Fed-Treasury accord, citing the 1940s wartime precedent where the Fed operated in lockstep with Treasury. As Arnold put it, correlation is going to one across all these institutions. You don't get into the positions these guys are in by being completely situationally unaware. The dot plot says hawkish. The constraints say otherwise. Volcker 2.0 is off the table.

U.S. FDA to fast-track early clinical trials in bid to reverse shift of drug development work to China and Australia.

DOJ charges 455 defendants across 45 states in healthcare fraud schemes totaling $6.5 billion.

“How many companies provide hundreds of thousands of GPUs in a publicly available cloud? There’s the three hyperscalers and us.” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh just dropped that bold claim as the company scales toward hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of GPUs.

19 million barrels through Hormuz in one day, an all-time record. Energy abundance is economic policy. When oil is cheap, everything is cheap.

Apple is about to kill Sparrow Wallet on macOS. The deadline is June 30. Since 2023, more than a dozen fake "Sparrow" apps have appeared on Apple's App Store. Users have lost their savings, in some cases their life savings, to these impersonators. Craig Raw, Sparrow's developer, holds the registered US trademarks for both the name and logo. He's been publicly warning Apple about the scam apps since early 2024. They keep showing up. Craig created a placeholder app, never published, to warn users that Sparrow is desktop-only and the App Store copycats aren't real. Apple's response? They flagged his developer account for "dishonest activity" and scheduled it for termination. The developer fighting scammers got flagged. The scammers who stole life savings kept operating on Apple's platform. If Apple follows through, every new Sparrow install on macOS fails after June 30. macOS development ends entirely. This matters because Sparrow is the best desktop Bitcoin wallet available, full stop. Multisig. Coin control. Hardware wallet integration. Tor support. UTXO management that most wallets don't even attempt. Free. Open source. Built by one developer who cares more about his users than his revenue. And one automated decision by a trillion-dollar company could end it on an entire operating system. This is why platform gatekeeping is a systemic risk for freedom tech. If your tools need a gatekeeper's blessing to exist, they aren't freedom tools. We have to build on open platforms. Download Sparrow now from

Sparrow Wallet

Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet

Sparrow is a modern desktop Bitcoin wallet application supporting most hardware wallets and built on common standards such as PSBT, with an emphasi...

before the deadline. And repost Craig's announcement to help get Apple's attention before it's too late.