AI Bubble, Gold Rush, and a War-Blocked Strait: The Market's Got 99 Problems and Powell Just Left the Chat

Let's set the scene: Jerome Powell exits after 8 years, hyperscalers have doubled capex to over $700 billion, a Qatari LNG tanker just made the first Hormuz transit in 40 days, and central banks are quietly buying ~60 tons of gold per month — nearly 4x pre-2022 levels. Normal stuff. Very chill market environment.

On AI, Bloomberg's Tom Slater and The Traveling Trader are singing weirdly similar songs: this might be a late-90s-style bubble, but it has real earnings behind it and Paul Tudor Jones thinks there's 1-2 years of runway left. The playbook is semis (mostly played out), then memory/storage, photonics, data centers, power, and applications — in that order. Meanwhile, $AMAT has UBS raising its target to $480 and Seaport Global initiating at $500, which feels like the Street finally reading the same memo.

The real sleeper macro story? Since the US froze $300 billion in Russian reserves in February 2022, sovereign nations quietly decided dollar assets come with an asterisk — and gold doesn't. With stablecoins processing over $30 trillion in 2024 (surpassing Visa and Mastercard combined) and China daring companies to ignore US sanctions, the dollar's monopoly on 'neutral' is getting stress-tested from every direction at once.

A federal court already smacked down Trump's Section 122 tariffs this week — turns out you need an actual balance of payments deficit to use that authority, not just vibes. The dominoes are wobbling, and the new Fed chair inherits a world that's actively workshopping alternatives to the system Powell spent a decade patching together.