But hey, Trump’s tariff tantrum was just the plot twist Wall Street needed! Cue the third-act comeback: the S&P 500 just posted one of its strongest 90-day runs in 75 years. Records shattered. Confetti rained. Optimism bloomed like a dandelion in a hurricane. Except dandelions are cheaper than stocks right now, and that’s saying something.
Thus, the prevailing sentiment appears to encourage a disposal of Palantir shares and an acquisition of those belonging to Amazon. Let us, then, examine the particulars of each establishment, that the reader may form their own considered opinion.
The Washington Post, that venerable scribe of ink and exhaustion, revealed the scheme: a five-year pilot program by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a labyrinthine beast whose paperwork could outlast the pyramids. Under this plan, Medicare Part D insurers and Medicaid programs might, if the stars align and the forms are filled in triplicate, foot the bill for obesity drugs. For patients, this would be salvation; for Zepbound’s price tag—a monthly sum that could buy a small island in the Caribbean—it would be the bureaucratic equivalent of a magic wand.
Let’s cut to the chase: there wasn’t some earth-shattering revelation about Centrus itself causing the plunge—no whistleblower with a suitcase full of radioactive secrets. No, this was something far more insidious. The Trump administration, in its infinite wisdom, decided to slap new tariffs on imports from dozens of countries. DOZENS. And Russia? Oh, they’re getting the VIP treatment here—a tightening noose of sanctions that could choke off one of the world’s largest sources of uranium.
Cryptocurrency investors, those modern-day alchemists, remain fixated on the Fed’s cryptic omens. They whisper that cheap money fuels bull runs, while tight money quenches them, as if the market were a child tethered to a pendulum of fiscal whims. Yet the digital realm of 2025, with its labyrinthine logic, thrives on engines that hum without the need for monetary octane. Behold, the tale of how this rate stasis may ripple through the crypto cosmos.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 are floundering like I do when someone mentions “tariffs” at a dinner party. -2.4% and -2.2%. Figma, on the other hand, is that obnoxious friend who wins the lottery during an economic apocalypse.
Earnings, that fickle friend, were the spark. AES outperformed forecasts, earning $0.51 per share where $0.40 was expected. But the harvest was not whole—the revenue fell short, a hollow sack in a time of need.
At the opening bell, the company’s shares plummeted as much as 13.2%, a freefall that seemed almost choreographed for maximum disorientation. Yet, like a bureaucratic form submitted too late and returned with cryptic annotations, it clawed back significant ground in subsequent trading hours. Was it the strength of its recent earnings report that stemmed the tide? Perhaps. But no such clarity exists here; instead, one must grapple with the unsettling weight of macroeconomic tremors—the latest U.S. jobs report, a document so dense with revisions and recalibrations that it might have been penned by a committee trapped in perpetual deliberation.
Behold, dear reader, the spectacle of a fiber broadband titan who, after reporting second-quarter earnings last night, found itself in a fiscal purgatory. The adjusted loss per share, though technically “beating” expectations, was less a triumph than a dirge, accompanied by the hollow cheer of cost-cutting measures. A company that must amuse its patrons with austerity is a company in dire straits, is it not?
Consider the arithmetic: a deviation of 0.1% from $1 is deemed negligible, as if the universe of finance were bound by divine precision. Two one-hundredths of a percent — a fraction so small it might as well be a footnote in the ledger of eternity. Yet what is this stability, if not the illusion of order conjured by men who have learned to dress chaos in the robes of arithmetic?