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Senior U.S. defense officials have held talks about producing weapons and other military supplies with top executives ​of companies including General Motors (GM.N), opens new tab and Ford Motor (F.N), opens new tab, the ‌Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions. The preliminary and wide-ranging talks, which started before the war in Iran, come as the Trump ​administration wants automakers and other American manufacturers to play a ​larger role in weapons production, the Journal said. Defense officials told ⁠the newspaper that American manufacturers might be needed to backstop ​traditional defense contractors and asked whether the...

I just saw a list of the commodities that are undergoing restriction of distribution in the Strait of Hormuz. When seeing a stark view of them, together as a group, I hadn't realized how extensive it is: 1) oil (gasoline and deisel), 2) liquid natural gas (LNG), 3) urea (fertilizer for food), 4) sulfuric acid (phosphate fertilizers for farming), 5) helium (microchips). (Source: Larry Johnson, today 04/06/2026 at 9 AM E.S.T.). I would like to hear from someone who has a good, fundamental understanding of economics, about the following question, (not someone who is an academic egghead, not anyone who...

This is one of those local stories that doesn’t get a ton of traction in the national headlines, but highlights quite possibly one of the most alarming trends in modern America: the failure to get the basics right. And by basics, in this case, I mean the ability for a town or city to put out fires. Fire departments around the Denver, Colorado, metro area have been struggling to afford new fire engines, which have ballooned in costs over the years, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic/economic catastrophe of 2020 and Wall Street’s private equity companies. They also have to navigate...

Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself. His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it...

It's a ~24-minute video that primarily consists of a transcript/narration of a major speech by Elon Musk. In it, Musk announces a massive collaborative project between SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla to build what's called a "Terafab" — an unprecedented advanced chip fabrication facility (described as "the most epic chip building exercise in history"). Key points from the announcement: The goal is to produce 1 terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) of compute capacity per year, combined with terawatt-scale solar power — much of it deployed in space. This is framed as essential to advance humanity on the Kardashev scale (toward Type 1 civilization...

This chart shows manufacturing production growth (6-month average vs. a year ago). After spending most of 2022–2024 in contraction, output has surged since mid-2025 and is now approaching +2% — the strongest growth since the post-COVID rebound. So why isn't anyone talking about it? Partly because it's invisible in the jobs data. Manufacturing payrolls have been declining. If you only look at employment, you'd think the sector is still struggling. But flat jobs + rising output = productivity growth. The sector is producing significantly more with fewer workers. This is one more piece of evidence that the productivity acceleration story...

Nature documentaries abound, covering the various species as they embark on their epic migratory journeys. From bird flocks to wildebeasts on the savannah to even monarch butterflies, these travels and travails are captured in dramatic fashion. Currently, another group shift is taking place in the corporate world, where a growing number of companies are pulling up stakes and seeking out more verdant economic landscapes, escaping harsh environments wrought by Democrat tax policies. It is enough to warrant its own Netflix documentary. Have David Attenborough narrating the footage of these fiscal nomads, and title it “March of the Corporate Titans”. In...

Elon didn’t reverse that through inspiration. He reversed it by building companies that required understanding manufacturing or failing completely. SpaceX and Tesla forced engineers to learn how metal fractures, how tolerances cascade through systems, how physical iteration costs months and millions per failure. No debugging. No patches. Just physics that doesn’t negotiate. Boyle: “Training two generations of engineers.” The product isn’t the cars. It’s the people. Look at who’s founding America’s critical hard-tech companies now. The common thread isn’t Stanford or MIT. It’s time on factory floors at SpaceX or Tesla. They learned welding. They learned that “impossible” just means...

Taiwan has told Washington that its proposal to move 40% of the island’s semiconductor supply chain to the U.S. was “impossible,” Taipei’s top tariff trade negotiator said in an interview. Speaking on a local television broadcast Sunday, Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said she had made it clear to Washington that the island’s semiconductor ecosystem, built over decades, could not simply be relocated. Taiwan’s international expansion, including its investments in the U.S., is predicated on the notion that the industry remains’ rooted in Taiwan and continues to expand domestic investments, she said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.

As the Trump economy begins to boom even as inflation moderates, Democrats and the anti-Trump media are desperate for a spin that might discredit Trumponomics. Their latest Hail Mary: pushing a counterfactual narrative that President Trump’s tariffs are hurting, rather than stimulating, a manufacturing revival for blue-collar America. The latest manufacturing data obliterates that lie. In January, the ISM Manufacturing Index jumped 4.7 points to 52.6. That wasn’t just an estimate beat; it was a blowout, and an important one. The ISM Manufacturing Index is the most widely followed survey of factory activity worldwide. When it moves above 50, the...

Kevin Green is back to break down a pair of movers in the semiconductor space. Onsemi (ON) shares are looking for direction after a mixed earnings report. Meanwhile, TSMC (TSM) executives say the White House's plans to relocate up to 40% of its supply chain to the U.S. is "impossible." KG later turns his attention to the Cboe Volatility index (VIX) as it continues a recent upward trend. He notes the $26 level as a potential one to watch that could "wash away some of the bulls." For Tuesday's trading range for the S&P 500 (SPX), KG is looking at...

BASF plant in Ludwigshafen, 1881.In its ‘Climate & Energy’ newsletter on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal’s report on Germany’s chemicals industry headlined ‘The Agonising Decline of One of Europe’s Core Industries’ reads less like an industry report than a forensic examination of an industrial autopsy. Once Europe’s formidable manufacturing powerhouse, Germany is now presiding over the steady dismantling of one of its most foundational industries – chemicals – under the combined weight of self-inflicted energy scarcity, climate moralism and geopolitical miscalculation. In Politico’s view, the auto sector has already assumed the role of Exhibit A in Germany’s economic self-harm. But...

One-third of business leaders say they’re not making a statement about Minneapolis following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, by immigration agents because it is “not relevant to their business,” a CNBC flash survey found. …More than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies signed a letter on Sunday urging “an immediate de-escalation of tensions,” but stopped short of demanding that ICE leave the state, while Democratic state officials, such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have done so. CNBC sent the survey to 550 C-suite executives on Monday and Thursday...

It is to laugh - the Democraps are taxing their businesses out of the state to continue The Somali Walz. 10:58 long

On local Twin Cities radio this morning a representative of an unnamed business said the liberal upheaval in the state is causing some businesses to rethink expansion in Minnesota. The individual, who did not want to be identified, said businesses and industry are seeing job recruitment as more challenging due to sanctuary city policies and unruly protests. Red states are more attractive.

On Monday, President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced a new series of what they called "Trump Class" battleships, a new initiative to revamp and restore the maritime industry and shore up America's maritime dominance. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also in the Oval Office and offered remarks. Navy's new class of Large Surface Combatants: THE BATTLESHIP.The most lethal surface combatant ever constructed. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/7AH5G4IJj5— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 22, 2025The president was flanked by images of the first Golden Fleet battleship, "The U.S.S. Defiant." Trump opened his remarks...

The skilled trades workforce, critical to keeping the country's infrastructure and economy running, is rapidly declining. While many companies are working to address the shortage, General Motors has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build its own pipeline of future workers. Over the past five years alone, the automaker has invested more than $242 million in its skilled trades apprenticeship program, which is geared toward training the next generation of skilled trade professionals with a combination of classroom instruction and thousands of hours of hands-on experience at a GM facility, Michael Trevorrow, GM's senior vice president of global manufacturing,...

The world's leading manufacturer of advanced chips is TSMC in Taiwan. Back in 2020, President Trump helped convince TSMC to make a major investment in building chips here in the US, specifically in Arizona.Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has agreed to build an advanced chip factory in the United States, in a response to the Trump administration’s growing concerns about the security of the global electronics supply chain and its competitive tensions with China.The decision by T.S.M.C., which operates enormous plants in Taiwan to produce chips used in most smartphones and many other devices, was confirmed late Thursday after earlier press...

For nearly a century, America’s military strength has come largely through self-reliance. We not only made the ships, airplanes and tanks, our country supplied the parts and materials for these complex systems. But a lot has changed in recent times.Unfortunately, our military has increasingly relied on sourcing parts globally -- including from possibly unreliable places like China. It’s a disastrous side effect of globalization.For example, while modern jet engines may typically include between 30,000 and 50,000 parts, ensuring they are “China-free” has proven to be incredibly difficult. We’ve already seen deliveries of F-35s delayed over this issue, revealing that supply...

In his second term, President Donald Trump certainly hasn’t been afraid to go bold — and now it could be the stock market’s turn. The slate of reforms under consideration could be the biggest positive development for our financial markets since the early days of the Reagan administration, if not since the creation of the federal securities laws themselves. It could also finally put the brakes on the rise of “woke capital.” For years, political activists have been using America’s biggest corporations as vehicles for their social agenda. They call it “ESG” — environmental, social and governance investing — but...