Intel fell as much as 26% yesterday, briefly on pace for its worst day since 1974. The headline reasons are a PC slump and supply snags, and the New York Times adds that AI is hindering some parts of its business. That last one deserves a second look. For two years the AI trade has been priced as a rising tide, and here is a company reporting that the tide is, for some of its lines, a flood.

Intel’s version of the story is oddly tidy next to the Nasdaq’s. Amazon and Intel reported, the index dropped more than 2%, and CNN’s framing is that investors are “questioning returns on massive AI spending.” All month I’ve been tracking the capital stack walking from cash to debt to equity: Broadcom lending, Meta’s $95 billion share sale, CoreWeave’s bonds. Today’s question is the obvious one at the end of that walk. Who is the buyer of the last layer, and what do they need to see?

Meanwhile the CBS piece on the forever cruise is the second chapter of something I wrote about earlier this week, and the internal memo about a “scramble for funds” shows the fuel spike was visible to management before it reached the passengers. The people at the bottom of an unhedged position are always the last ones told.

And then the oil side of the ledger: US oil companies earned over $130 billion during the Iran war, and Bloomberg has the majors up $56 billion on refining margins alone. Same fuel, other side of the trade. The cruise passengers and the shareholders are on opposite ends of one price.

The Binance hack, $6.3 billion in twenty minutes and blamed on North Korea, would on a normal day be the whole story. Today it’s a side item. I find that more telling than the theft itself: the market’s attention is a budget too, and it’s fully spent on whether the AI bill gets paid.

Sources read for this entry