ChartStack
Lines of delusion.
The viral US/China binaries are reductive.
Tokens are a commodity but the frontier labs are not. They don’t sell tokens, they sell a capability lead, and you rent it at a premium until it stops being a lead.
If Chinese labs do reach cheap-and-frontier and win on the merits, this chart still isn't evidence of it. That's the actual bear case, not "China has more tokens on OpenRouter," but "the frontier lead is narrowing, so the premium tier shrinks."
DeepSeek R1 matched OpenAI's o1 on the benchmarks at ~1/27th of the price — by distilling a frontier OpenAI had to invent first. DeepSeek's V4 matched GPT-5.5-class coding at ~1/7th of the price — and shipped the day after GPT-5.5.
Meanwhile the memory cartel takes a third of hyperscaler capex.
Value accrues to the bottleneck: tokens deflate as the non-substitutable input inflates.
Magic tricks in private credit.
“If you reduce a dividend while a BDC's shares are trading lower, the current dividend yield can still look solid…A dividend cut can always be blamed on external forces and sanitized by skillful bankers who do that for a living.” — DEBT SERIOUS Full piece
The recurring dividend was cut from $0.45 → $0.32 (−29%) at the 1Q25 restructuring. In the same quarter they bolted on a $0.16 special + ~$0.05 supplemental. Note $0.32 base + $0.16 special = $0.48 — basically backfilling the old $0.45. So for three quarters the headline total ($0.51–0.53) printed above the old $0.45, even though the dependable portion had been cut by nearly a third.
The special ran exactly three quarters, then stopped; the supplemental decayed to zero. Strip the top-ups and the true run-rate shows through: $0.32, ~29% below where the regular dividend sat two years earlier.
Bitcoin was the single largest cluster of long-form coverage this week on Finance Substack.
After a ‘hawkish’ Fed and speculative money piling into SPCX, BTC spent the week in a demand crisis.
The selling actually hit new extremes — Ecoinometrics
The current ETF outflow streak has already become the largest sustained period of selling since the launch of the spot Bitcoin ETFs.
The evolution of the FOMC statement word count. — Steve
Warsh’s debut was the lowest word count since 128 in the January 2002 statement under Alan Greenspan.
Which probably doesn’t matter.
Since Volcker, the 10-year yield has been lower at the end of every Fed Chair’s term vs where it started (besides J Pow). — Steve
See also: PoliticStack, the MarketStack Terminal and MarketStack The Edit
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