HAPPY SATURDAY TO THE STREET
And welcome back to Street Tweets from The Street Sheet!
Apple (AAPL) built a $599 laptop and accidentally fixed… Windows?
The MacBook Neo barely shipped before Microsoft (MSFT) assembled an all-hands engineering squad to overhaul Windows 11.
Performance, reliability, memory efficiency, fewer annoying ads. Thirty years of competitive pressure distilled into one embarrassing fast-follow.
Never doubt the power of consumer choice. Competition works, people.
— Brooks & Cas
MARKET REVIEW & PREVIEW
Markets ripped higher midweek after President Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran, sending oil prices sharply lower and easing immediate fears of an energy shock. But the relief may prove temporary. Inflation reaccelerated in March, consumer confidence hit a record low, and weekly jobless claims posted their biggest jump in weeks. In this economy, only the whiplash is certain.
Next week will add a few more twists and turns to the rollercoaster. Thursday’s jobless claims report will show whether last week’s uptick was noise or the start of a broader labor market slowdown. And Tuesday’s Producer Price Index will offer another key read on whether inflation pressures are still building.
Goods gone wild.
Core goods inflation’s jump last month was the highest run rate in 35 years. (Assuming you politely ignore the pandemic years.)
The chart does the talking here, and it’s not exactly whispering.
The AI cold war is heating up.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are now pooling threat intelligence to stop Chinese labs from distilling their models into cut-rate copies.
When your fiercest competitors become your intel-sharing partners, you know the stakes are getting serious.
Risk-off? Have you seen the White House?
The bar for "safe haven" assets has never felt more relative.
Diet DOJ.
Prosecutions for white-collar crime have been falling for decades under both parties, but the current trajectory is something else.
If you were planning a financial crime, the timing has rarely been better. Not financial advice. To be very clear.
Silver screen vs. slide deck.
The Wolf of Wall Street runs 3 hours and features almost zero PowerPoint.
A week on Wall Street runs 100 hours and features almost exclusively PowerPoint.
