00:00So it turns out there's actually some surprising opposition to the White House's push to build more data centers.
00:06What are some of the dynamics at play here, Joe?
00:08So Donald Trump's administration has been incredibly booster-ish when it comes to AI.
00:15Donald Trump appointed an AI czar. His name is David Sachs. He comes from Silicon Valley.
00:19He's very close to their AI companies.
00:21The administration rolled out an AI action plan, and essentially the stance has been to remove as many roadblocks for
00:29the industries,
00:30to help them fast-track data centers, to help them avoid state-level regulations.
00:35Another way to look at this technology is that it's something that was originated by coastal elites in Silicon Valley
00:43that has the potential to rupture communities, to cause mass job losses, to cause environmental damage,
00:50to take children away from communicating with their friends and family,
00:55to even pull people away from the church and from religious practice.
01:02And so I was keen to understand how this is reverberating within Trump's MAGA coalition.
01:09And what I found was a backlash with the kind of intensity that surprised me,
01:15and I must say surprised a lot of the people who I was talking to in Washington
01:20about the ramifications of Trump's AI policy.
01:27Why is the U.S. turning a blind eye to the shipping of sanctioned oil?
01:32The Shadow Fleet is a network of tankers moving restricted oil around the world.
01:36The aging ships are often a safety risk, with no insurance and no clear ownership.
01:42But in the last few weeks, they've been operating with Washington's partial blessing.
01:47Since the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran,
01:50Tehran has exported millions of barrels of sanctioned oil.
01:53At least 15 Iranian oil tankers have passed through the Strait of Hormuz during the war,
01:58mostly transiting dark, with their transponders turned off,
02:02and likely earning Tehran more than $140 million a day.
02:06So why is the U.S. allowing it?
02:08Well, conventional shipping is at a near standstill,
02:11and Iran has a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
02:14So Washington is worried about the price of oil.
02:17Both sides' attacks on energy facilities have pushed the price of Brent crude
02:21as high as $100 a barrel or more.
02:24Letting the Shadow Fleet operate out of Iran is one way Washington can try to push the price down.
02:30The Trump administration has also temporarily loosened sanctions on Russian oil already at sea,
02:36representing a reversal in fortunes for Moscow, which has been chafing under the sanctions.
02:41So how does the Shadow Fleet work?
02:43More than half the vessels are 20 years old.
02:46The ships can be bought up cheaply.
02:48But safety is a real risk.
02:50Their ownership is shifted through shell companies to make them hard to trace.
02:54And some ships keep changing their names, or the flags they sail under.
02:58There are other ways they avoid detection, too.
03:01Some ships turn off their transponders, send out fake locations,
03:05or carry out dangerous ship-to-ship transfers to mask where the oil is from.
03:10Western nations have long imposed sanctions on Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan oil exports.
03:16The U.S. removal of some of these restrictions has given the Shadow Fleet a new lease on life.
03:21But it has also put Washington on a collision course with Europe and its long-running campaign to stop the
03:27illicit trade.
03:35Would you make this common investing mistake?
03:38Lots of people working in the city get paid part of their bonus in shares in the company they work
03:43for.
03:44So they have a choice.
03:45Do they keep the shares, or do they sell them?
03:48There's a lesson here for us all.
03:50Let's imagine you keep them.
03:52Well, just look at what bank share prices have been doing lately.
03:55But having high levels of exposure to a single stock means there's a higher risk of volatility.
04:01It's called concentration risk.
04:03A high proportion of your investments are concentrated in one stock.
04:07So that's great if the share price goes up.
04:10But your whole portfolio could take a big hit if the share price falls.
04:15And if you have a large number of shares in your employer, that's doubly risky.
04:20Why?
04:20Well, let's say the company you work for issues a profit warning.
04:24The shares are going to be hit.
04:25And worse, you could be at risk of losing your job.
04:29No job.
04:30No income.
04:31But hey, at least you can rely on the shares inside your investment portfolio to cushion the blow.
04:36But oh no, your company shares have tanked.
04:38So I wasn't surprised to hear that nearly 75% of FT readers who will be awarded shares as part
04:44of their bonus this spring intend to sell them and diversify into a broader basket of stocks.
04:51For more bonus secrets and to learn how they weigh up the risks, tap the link in our bio.
04:58We had the Fed decision on Wednesday, U.S. interest rates on hold.
05:03Boring snoring, right?
05:05Except not, because what Jay Powell, chair of the Fed, was saying was, yeah, this inflation business coming from energy
05:13prices, we had not anticipated this and it's quite bad.
05:17He didn't exactly say it's quite bad.
05:21What he said was, again and again, about every 45 seconds for the entire press conference was, we don't know
05:29what's going to happen.
05:30And I'm not going to speculate, right?
05:33He said, you know, this is extremely uncertain.
05:37We're not going to speculate about war.
05:39We just don't know what the impact on the economy is.
05:43So, like, the big question for him is, and every central banker is, can we ignore inflation caused by an
05:55energy supply shock, which is the inflation that appears to be coming out of the pipe?
05:58And in theory, like, when they were all sitting at central banker school, what they were taught was, you do
06:06ignore it, because tightening interest rates doesn't make more oil appear, and you damage the economy.
06:16So, like, it gets you closer to stagflation rather than bringing the economy back in balance and bringing inflation under
06:22control.
06:23Yeah.
06:29People are drinking a lot less than they did before, and what that means for the alcohol industry is that
06:34they're sitting on a growing level of maturing inventory, or undrunk spirits.
06:40Some of the biggest names in the industry, like Diageo, Remy Cointreau, and Pernod Ricard, are sitting on a combined
06:46$22 billion worth of undrunk maturing spirits, like tequila, whiskey, and cognac.
06:53That level of inventory is the highest it's ever been in a decade, according to our analysis.
06:59This build-up has come about because back in the days of the COVID lockdowns, people started drinking a lot
07:05more, and companies could charge a lot more.
07:07After COVID and lockdowns lifted, people kept drinking, they kept partying, but then eventually inflation hit, and consumer demand really
07:15suffered.
07:15People started going out less, they started drinking less, but in the meantime, these companies were still expecting demand to
07:24keep going like it had at COVID levels.
07:26So they invested in a lot more extra capacity, they lay down a lot more of ageing spirits.
07:32This COVID boom and bust drinking cycle has piled pressure on these companies that already have significant debt burdens because
07:41of wider pressures on the industry and longer term trends for alcohol moderation.
07:46Things like weight loss drugs, suppressing our appetites for drinking, it could be the fact that we're all more health
07:53conscious and we're worried about the risks of alcohol consumption.
07:57It could also be that people are socialising differently, they're online more, they're gaming more.
08:03All these are potential downward pressures on the industry.
08:07While companies figure that out, there may be an upside for consumers.
08:10With all that excess inventory, it means that companies, in order to shift it, might have to start lowering prices,
08:17which means that your margarita might be cheaper.
08:23This tiny island holds the keys to Iran's economy.
08:26Its oil facilities haven't yet been hit in the U.S. and Israel's war with Iran.
08:30But might that be about to change?
08:33Kargisware Iran sends 9 out of 10 barrels of oil at exports.
08:36Its oil terminal was developed in the 1960s, before Iran's Islamist regime took power.
08:42Karg's island location makes it ideal for supertankers, because most of the country's coastline is shallow.
08:48Iran has kept using the island to ship oil, even since the start of the war.
08:53The U.S. already attacked what it said were military targets on the island this month.
08:57But President Donald Trump said he had chosen not to hit Karg's oil facilities.
09:01And he described the island as Iran's crown jewel.
09:04The U.S. and Israel also left it untouched during last year's 12-day war.
09:09They could easily hit Karg's oil facilities.
09:12But analysts say blowing up Karg's oil terminal would be a scorched-earth tactic, destroying the basis of Iran's post
09:18-war economy.
09:19Though now, all bets are off the table, amid an escalation in attacks by both sides on key energy facilities.
09:26Israel recently struck Iran's self-parsed gas field, the world's largest.
09:30Iran responded with strikes on core energy sites across the Gulf, including a missile attack on Qatar's Raslefon liquefied gas
09:38facility, the world's largest of its kind.
09:40We don't know whether Karg will remain a U.S. red line in this war.
09:44But energy markets will be watching, and Iran's economic future may hinge on it too.
09:52We have had very, very strong talks.
09:56We'll see where they lead.
09:57We have points, major points of agreement.
10:00I would say almost all points of agreement.
10:03Perhaps that hasn't been conveyed.
10:05The communication, as you know, has been blown to pieces.
10:07They're unable to talk to each other.
10:10But we've had very strong talks.
10:12Mr. Whitcoff and Mr. Kushner had them.
10:16They went, I would say, perfectly.
10:19I would say that if they carry through with that, it'll end that problem, that conflict.
10:26And I think it'll end it very, very substantially.
10:29We have very much in mind our partners in the Middle East.
10:33We've had great relationships with a lot of them, as you know.
10:36A lot of them were surprisingly hit.
10:38And I was surprised to see it, and so was everyone else.
10:42But we have, they're very much in mind in the discussion.
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