A Better Newspaper

The Consumer Is Propped Up by Private Credit — Watch the BNPL Collateral

Bloomberg reports that private credit firms are increasingly financing the 'buy now, pay later' boom that's sustaining US consumer spending. The trend is raising red flags for credit raters, former regulatory officials, and others watching for hidden risk in the system.

Context: This is the load-bearing wall of the 'resilient consumer' narrative. If you're underwriting litigation or distressed assets, the opportunity is in the inevitable repricing: BNPL receivables packaged into private credit vehicles are opaque, lightly regulated, and concentrated in subprime consumers. When delinquencies surface, the forced selling — and the litigation over disclosure — will be where money gets made.

Pimco Pushes Into Private Placements as the Public/Private Wall Crumbles

The Financial Times reports Pimco is expanding into private placements, trying to capitalize on borrowers' need to raise cash as the boundaries between public and private markets blur.

Context: Read this alongside the BNPL story and the equity-leverage piece — the through-line is everyone reaching for yield and structure in private markets simultaneously. When a public-bond giant like Pimco starts hunting private deals, it signals public-market spreads are too tight to satisfy LPs. For an opportunistic funder, the tell is which borrowers are forced into Pimco's arms: distressed issuers locked out of public markets are exactly the situations where senior secured private paper earns equity-like returns.

Margin Leverage Behind the Stock Rally Is Now a Growing Worry

Bloomberg reports that the leverage which helped fuel the US equity rally has become an increasing source of unease among market watchers.

Context: Three separate stress signals in one day — consumer (BNPL), corporate (Pimco's distressed borrowers), and now equity-market leverage. None is alarming alone; together they describe a system running on borrowed money at every layer. With Polymarket pricing a 77% chance of multiple 2026 Fed cuts, the market is betting on relief — but if cuts come because something breaks rather than because inflation cooled, leveraged longs unwind first and fastest.

Polymarket: Multiple Fed rate cuts in 2026 77% ▼ 2 pts since yesterday

PE Circles Distressed Healthcare: QuidelOrtho Shops Its Testing Unit

The Financial Times reports diagnostics company QuidelOrtho is looking to sell its testing unit as private equity circles healthcare businesses. The company's shares are down roughly 90% since its rapid antigen tests were among the first approved for Covid-19.

Context: This is the COVID hangover trade in slow motion — pandemic-era diagnostics players that over-earned and over-built are now distressed sellers. The opportunity isn't QuidelOrtho specifically; it's the category. PE is treating diagnostics as a carve-out hunting ground, which means there's an arbitrage in identifying the next over-levered post-COVID health-tech name before the sponsors do.

Williams Near $5.5B Momentum Midstream Deal — The Gas Pipeline Land Grab Continues

Bloomberg reports Williams Cos. is in advanced talks to acquire rival natural gas pipeline operator Momentum Midstream for about $5.5 billion, in what would be one of its largest deals ever, according to people familiar with the matter.

Context: Connect this to the infrastructure-as-battleground theme: pipeline operators are consolidating because natural gas is the unglamorous winner of the AI data-center power crunch. Demand projections for gas-fired generation feeding data centers are reshaping midstream economics, and incumbents are buying physical capacity before it gets repriced as strategic rather than commercial. Anyone with optionality on gas transport corridors near data-center clusters is sitting on an appreciating asset.

USMCA Review July 1: Trump Says He'd 'Rather Not Have' the Deal

Al Jazeera reports that ahead of the July 1 review of the USMCA free trade agreement, President Trump warned he would 'rather not have' the pact. Analysts expect significant business uncertainty if the agreement is not renewed.

Context: A non-renewal or contentious review reprices every cross-border supply chain in North America overnight. The opportunity is in the hedge: companies with Mexico/Canada exposure that the market hasn't yet discounted for tariff risk, and conversely the reshoring/nearshoring plays that benefit from the chaos. Watch the auto and ag sectors first — they're where the tariff math bites hardest.

Japan IPOs Hit 15-Year Low Despite Surging Tokyo Stocks

The Financial Times reports Japanese IPOs fell to a 15-year low in the first half of the year, with no rapid rebound expected, even as Tokyo's broader stock market has surged.

Context: The disconnect is the signal: a roaring index that won't pull new listings means private owners and PE funds don't trust public-market valuations to clear their exits — so capital stays private. For a cross-border investor, that's a buyer's market in Japanese private companies and an opening for secondary liquidity solutions where IPO exits are stalled.

Ryan Cohen on the $56B plan to take over eBay

Cohen laid out a three-part eBay thesis: cut $2B from a ~$5.5B expense base (including $2.4B of sales/marketing that produced no user growth), grow live commerce (a ~$400B TAM) using GameStop's 1,600 stores as studios and fulfillment nodes, and build a marketplace providing liquidity for in-game digital items, which he believes could exceed eBay's physical marketplace. He argues eBay has stagnated since COVID — GMV down, active users down by 30 million, operating expenses now over half of revenue for a business with no inventory — because professional management alienated sellers. He structured the bid as 50% cash/50% stock financed off eBay's own balance sheet and is personally putting in $500 million.

Ryan Cohen on the supplier negotiation heuristic behind Chewy

Cohen said Chewy won against Amazon in a razor-thin category by operating with negative working capital — scaling to billions in revenue without consuming much capital. His procurement rule: "If our suppliers are sending us gifts in the mail, that's a really bad sign. It means we're overpaying. If our suppliers are telling us they never want to speak to us again, it means we're getting the right price." He also admitted his initial GameStop strategy — making it more like Chewy — was "really really stupid" and took over a year to recognize.

James King on ASML's EUV denial versus new US Commerce evidence

ASML emphatically denied US allegations, stating it has never shipped an EUV machine to China nor any component specifically designed for one. But the US Department of Commerce escalated by presenting specific documentary evidence that ASML shipped specialized transport equipment and components compatible with EUV lithography to Chinese entities. King notes ASML's most advanced EUV machines are unique worldwide, and if China obtained even one, there'd be no reason it couldn't eventually make the world's most advanced semiconductors.

Context: The escalation contradicts the narrative of post-summit US-China détente following the recent Trump-Xi meeting.

Alice Han on Hong Kong being cut off from frontier AI models

Han said Anthropic barred Chinese nationals from working on its frontier models (codenamed 'fable' and 'mythos'), and JP Morgan and Goldman cut off their Hong Kong employees from Anthropic's models — effectively treating Hong Kong like mainland China. With roughly a quarter of Hong Kong's GDP in financial services employing 250,000 people, she argues this structurally downgrades the city's pledge to be a cross-border hub with access to both Chinese and American models. She also argues US export controls have been largely futile, estimating China is only a few months behind on building LLMs.

Scott Galloway on AI hitting entry-level jobs hardest

Galloway cited data that since late 2022, early-career workers aged 22-25 in the most AI-exposed occupations (software development, customer service, accounting) saw a 13% relative employment decline, while workers 30+ in the same fields saw employment grow 6-12%. Recent-grad unemployment (ages 22-27) ended 2025 at 5.6% — above the 4.2% overall rate and the highest December level since 2020, an unusual flip where grad unemployment exceeds non-grad. 43% of employed recent grads were in jobs not requiring a degree.

Scott Galloway on the $944B endowment hoard and the 8% excise tax

Galloway noted US universities hold nearly $1 trillion in endowed assets ($944B across 657 institutions); Harvard's $53B endowment is over $7M per undergraduate and has grown ~$2B a year since 2018 while class sizes stayed flat and tuition rose. Unlike private foundations, which must legally distribute at least 5% annually, universities face no payout mandate. He noted the 2025 'one big beautiful bill' raised the endowment excise tax to 8% for institutions with over $2M per student — hitting Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT.

Acquired on the IP flywheel that built Disney

The hosts traced Disney's entire model to a 1928 disaster: distributor Charles Mintz secretly signed away nearly all of Disney's animators while Universal owned the Oswald IP, dropping Disney Studios' value effectively to zero. By 1934, merchandise royalties exceeded film-rental revenue. The full flywheel: create animation-based IP audiences fall in love with, maximize distribution in the primary vehicle, feed it into ancillary nodes without oversaturating, and vault/re-release every ~7 years to capture each new generation — with animation key because characters don't age and are always available. Notably, 99.95% of Disney's market cap value was created after Walt's 1966 death.

Morning Brew on Wall Street's recruiting arms race down to age 18

First-year IB analyst jobs pay $160K-$200K, but offers now go to college sophomores two years before they'd start work. Bankers themselves dislike recruiting freshmen, but the timeline keeps moving earlier because no single bank will unilaterally wait — boutiques compete to be first, and a recruiter expects it to drift back to freshman year with 18 as the floor. A career coach argued the compression functions as hidden gatekeeping: "The earliness of the process kicks out anyone who doesn't learn about it immediately, and the people who learn about it immediately are the ones whose parents work on Wall Street."

Sadhguru on why incapacitation-based sentencing breeds violence

Sadhguru explained the insider mechanics of why long-sentenced inmates become uncontrollably violent: once a person already faces life with no possibility of a death sentence, additional killings carry no real consequence beyond more solitary, so deterrence collapses — "What will you do to me? At the most you'll put me in the solitary." He also claimed that after introducing a meditation program in an Indian prison whose solitary unit had been occupied every day of its 136-year history, the unit then sat empty for months on end.

Jay Stratton's account on the origins of US government UAP investigation

The guest recounted that in 2008, Jay Stratton — then head of air and space warfare at the DIA — was shown a video of a triangle UAP hovering over a nuclear weapons site, taken by Air Force security guards; unable to find any office handling UFOs, he started a program called OAP that lost funding in 2010. The guest claimed multiple interviewees went on the record — and some testified under oath to Congress — that crashed UAP craft have been recovered and in some cases contained non-human bodies, though all stayed within what they could lawfully disclose. As a physicist, he argued engineering Einstein's general relativity equations could theoretically produce observed UAP behaviors, but the engineering doesn't yet exist.

Lou Diamond Phillips on the Academy refusing to recognize AI performances

Phillips, re-elected governor of the actors branch of the Academy, said the first AI performance — Val Kilmer in an upcoming film — will not be recognized by the Academy because its rules require every performance to be human-based: "He will not be recognized by the Academy because it's not a human-based performance."

North Carolina Bans Litigation Financing Outright — A First Among States

North Carolina has become the first state to pass an outright ban on third-party litigation financing, the practice in which outside investors fund lawsuits in exchange for a share of any recovery.

Context: Litigation funding has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry and a recurring target of tort-reform and insurance-industry lobbying. A blanket state ban — as opposed to disclosure or registration requirements adopted elsewhere — is a notably aggressive precedent that other states and the funding industry will watch closely.

Goldman: Post-Hormuz EV Surge Could Trim Oil Demand by 2027

Goldman Sachs said in a note that accelerating EV adoption following a Hormuz-related oil supply shock could cut global oil demand by up to 0.32 million barrels per day by late 2027. The bank reported that global EV sales penetration rose 3.4 percentage points last month to 26.1%, its second-highest level ever.

Context: The figure is modest against ~100 mb/d of global demand, but the mechanism matters: supply shocks that spike prices accelerate substitution, which then structurally erodes the demand the shock was supposed to threaten. This ties directly to the recent Strait of Hormuz disruption affecting energy markets.