StockMarket.News

The United States is spending 650 billion dollars to build the AI infrastructure that will define the next century and it cannot plug the machines in because it does not make the parts.

US imports of major electrical equipment hit 411 billion dollars in 2025, up 78 percent since 2020 and driven almost entirely by AI companies racing to build data centers faster than American factories can support them.

The equipment in question is not exotic or advanced.

Transformers, switchgear, and batteries, the fundamental hardware that converts grid power into usable electricity inside a data center cannot be manufactured domestically at anywhere near the scale required.

Without them, the chips do not turn on.

A data center full of NVIDIA GPUs is a very expensive warehouse if it cannot be connected to power.

Nearly 50 percent of all US data centers planned for 2026 are now expected to be delayed or canceled because the transformers needed to power them are on backorder.

Transformer delivery times that once ran 24 to 30 months now stretch to five years in some cases, three times longer than the 18-month deployment cycle AI companies actually need to stay competitive.

Here is where the crisis becomes a contradiction that no tariff can resolve.

The country that manufactures the majority of the electrical equipment the United States needs to win the AI race is China.

US imports of high-power transformers from China jumped from fewer than 1,500 units in all of 2022 to over 8,000 units in just the first ten months of 2025.

China controls roughly 60 percent of global transformer manufacturing capacity and supplies more than 40 percent of US battery imports.

The Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese goods are raising costs across the entire data center supply chain, with one analysis finding that tariffs on electric static converters alone added 1.9 billion dollars in costs on imports that were already 5.5 billion dollars annually.

One major US enterprise faced nearly 2 billion dollars in projected additional yearly tariff exposure on data center components alone.

Electrical infrastructure accounts for less than 10 percent of total data center construction costs.

But without it, the trillions being poured into AI cannot be realized.

The United States is simultaneously trying to win the AI race, decouple from China, and build at a speed its domestic manufacturing base is structurally incapable of supporting.

Those three goals are in direct conflict with each other, and the conflict is already showing up in canceled construction timelines across the country.Source: StockMarket.News

Just In: The US Federal Reserve officially cuts interest rates by 25 basis points in their third interest rate cut of 2025.

The Fed also says it will begin purchasing US Treasury Bills on December 12th and will purchase $40 billion worth of Treasury Bills in 30 days.
Source: StockMarket.News

The American housing market is BREAKING apart in slow motion.

The data just hit a level we haven't seen since the last financial crisis.

Here's what nobody in power is willing to say out loud

Google searches for "can't sell house" just hit an ALL-TIME HIGH.

Higher than COVID.

Higher than 2008, the year the entire financial system nearly collapsed. 

At the same time, searches for "help with mortgage" have exploded to levels unseen in almost two decades.

The last time this happened, 10 million Americans lost their homes.

Redfin confirmed there are now 44% more home sellers than buyers across the country.

600,000 more people trying to get out than trying to get in.

The second largest gap ever recorded.

Over 40,000 home purchases were canceled in December alone.

16.3% of every deal signed that month fell apart.

The highest cancellation rate ever tracked.

Buyers are signing contracts and then running for the exits.

Here's how they're doing it.

Buyers are weaponizing inspection contingencies as a legal escape hatch.

They find a minor crack in the foundation. 

They use it to walk away.

The real reason? They can't afford the payments.

Meanwhile, mortgage delinquencies are climbing at the fastest rate in years.

Early stage missed payments surged 30.9% in a single year.

Over 850,000 Americans are now 90 or more days behind on their mortgage.

The highest number since 2022.

Foreclosure filings are up 26% year over year.

Completed foreclosures up 59%.

Eleven straight months of increases.

DR Horton, the biggest homebuilder in America just admitted the quiet part out loud.

They're slashing prices, stacking incentives and buying down mortgage rates for buyers.

Still can't move houses.

When the largest builder in the country is struggling, the rest of the market is 6 to 12 months behind.

Nationally, employers announced 1.2 million job cuts in 2025.

Consumer confidence is near a record low.

Nobody buys a house when they're worried about keeping their job.

Here's the part that should terrify you.

Mortgage rates just dropped below 6% for the first time in three years.

That was supposed to fix everything.

It didn't, sales still collapsed 8.4% in January. 

Buyers still aren't showing up.

The cavalry came but it wasn't enough.

So is this 2008 again?

The honest answer: the structure is different. 

Most homeowners have equity. Lending standards are tighter. 

There's no wave of exploding adjustable rate mortgages.

But that's also the trap.

Owners refuse to drop prices because they have equity. 

So nothing sells, liquidity disappears. 

And the market freezes solid.

Sellers can't sell. Buyers can't afford. 

Builders can't move inventory, workers can't find jobs.

Everyone is stuck and the longer it lasts, the more fragile the whole system becomes.

The last time Google searches looked like this, the housing market lost $6 trillion in value.

Pay attention.

Bookmark and share this.Source: StockMarket.News

Here's what's going on with the Fed and Wall Street right now and it's kinda wild when you understand the full picture (save this). 

The Fed created something called the Standing Repo Facility (SRF) back in 2021 as basically an emergency lending window for banks and dealers. Think of it like this,  banks need cash overnight to keep operations running smoothly. Normally they borrow from each other in what's called the repo market but when that market gets tight when money becomes scarce and expensive, the Fed steps in and says we'll lend you cash at a fixed rate. 

Right now that rate is sitting at around 4.00%. One of the main reasons why the Fed does this is to stabilize short term interest rates. By offering cash at 4.00%, the Fed creates a hard ceiling on repo rates. If the market ever tries to spike higher, banks can simply borrow from the SRF instead forcing rates back down and keeping the financial plumbing from blowing out. 

Here's the proble, almost nobody's using it, even though they arguably should be. Over the past couple months, we've been seeing repo rates spike above what the Fed is offering through the SRF. That happens when the market gets tight and dealers are willing to pay more than the Fed's rate to access private funding. You'd think banks would immediately jump on the Fed's cheaper option, right? Wrong. Last week, Fed President John Williams called in the primary dealers basically the big Wall Street trading houses to a meeting and urged them to use the facility more. Their response? A polite but firm rejection.​

The reason is simple but tells you something important about how Wall Street actually operates, stigma. Borrowing directly from the Federal Reserve is seen as a sign of trouble.If a major dealer suddenly starts regularly tapping the Fed's emergency window, market participants interpret that as this bank is in financial distress. It's like if you suddenly started asking your parents for regular money sure it's available, but everyone notices and forms an opinion.​

But here's where it gets more interesting. Back in November, banks actually did borrow a record $50.35 billion from the SRF in a single day, the highest since 2021. That happened because the liquidity pressure got real enough that the stigma concern started becoming secondary to actually getting cash. The Fed has been draining liquidity from the system through quantitative tightening (basically shrinking its balance sheet) and meanwhile the Treasury has been issuing massive amounts of new debt competing for the same cash. Money got tight.​

Now we're at a point where repo rates are regularly trading above the Fed's offered rate but dealers still won't use the facility in size because they're worried about market perception. What this actually means is that Fed is essentially standing there with an offer that makes economic sens, but dealers are choosing to pay more money to preserve their reputation. It's a classic example of how markets aren't purely rational psychology and perception matter just as much as price. 

This is a warning sign for year end liquidity. We're heading into one of the tightest times of year for cash in the financial system month end and quarter end settlements create massive temporary demand for cash. If dealers won't tap the Fed's facility and the market doesn't have enough private liquidity to go around, you could see some real dysfunction. The Fed had that closed door meeting with the dealers partly to figure out how bad this could get and to basically explain that yes using the SRF is totally normal and they shouldn't be embarrassed.​

Keep an eye on SOFR (the overnight secured financing rate) and tri party repo rates as we get closer to month end. If those spike materially above the Fed's target range and stay there, it tells you the Fed is losing rate control, which becomes a problem not just for the Fed's credibility but for the actual functioning of these critical markets. However with all of this, I do believe SRF is actually working as designed, it's preventing rates from spiking catastrophically even though dealers aren't using it optimally and these spikes in rates will eventually stabilize.Source: StockMarket.News

November is typically one of the market’s easier months. 

Going back to 1927, the S&P 500 has finished higher in November 59% of the time, with an average gain of about 1%.

In the first year of a presidential cycle, the odds get even better, the win rate jumps to 67%.

And historically, when the market enters November already up big on the year, it still tends to tack on more gains. 

Do we still have enough momentum to finish the year strong?Source: StockMarket.News

Hollywood is hemorrhaging jobs at a historic rate and almost nobody is talking about it seriously.

Motion picture employment has collapsed, now lower than 2015 levels, erasing an entire decade of gains in just three years.

At the peak in 2022, Hollywood had added 35% more jobs than a decade prior, a streaming-fueled gold rush of content nobody needed.

Then the music stopped violently and all at once.

 A 30% employment drop from the late-2022 peak, with 42,000 jobs vanishing from Los Angeles County alone in just 24 months.

The industry blamed the writers and actors strikes first but the strikes ended and the jobs never came back.

Now we know why.

Studios are making far fewer movies and TV shows than at any point in modern memory. 

US series premieres in Q1 2025 were down 42% compared to 2022, with some streaming platforms slashing their release slates by more than half.

California now ranks sixth in the world for filming location  behind countries it used to dominate.

Nearly half of all U.S. film and TV projects are now produced entirely outside the country.

The people losing these jobs are not executives or studio heads but are sound mixers, set builders, concept artists, camera operators, and animators, the invisible workforce that makes every movie you have ever loved.

And AI is accelerating the destruction before the industry has even stabilized from the strikes.

One study commissioned by Hollywood's own unions estimated that 204,000 entertainment jobs across the U.S. will be adversely affected by AI within the next three years. 

Three-quarters of entertainment company leaders surveyed already confirmed that AI tools have been used to eliminate or consolidate jobs at their companies.

In 2025 alone, the broader entertainment and media sector cut 17,163 positions, an 18% increase in layoffs from the year before.

The Wrap says the contraction will continue in 2026, with tech giants like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon now eclipsing traditional Hollywood studios entirely.

Hollywood spent a century building the most powerful entertainment machine on earth but now streaming overextended it, strikes fractured it and AI is now harvesting what remains.Source: StockMarket.News

Wall Street just built a weapon to destroy itself, and the names on the target list should terrify you.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Barclays assembled a new index last week, one that rises in value the closer these firms get to collapse. They called it CDX Financials and they're selling it to hedge funds right now. The firms listed inside it are some of the biggest names in American finance, Blackstone, Apollo, Ares Management, MetLife, and Jefferies Financial Group. Their stocks have been in freefall since January down anywhere from 27 to 43 percent in just a few months.

 This isn't a stock market correction but rather a unwinding of a $3 trillion shadow banking system that replaced your local bank after the 2008 financial crisis. Private credit,  loans made not by banks, but by these giant investment firms became the lifeblood of thousands of American companies. It was the hottest trade on Wall Street for five straight years, minting billionaires and generating returns that made traditional finance look boring. Then the losses started showing up.

The trigger wasn't a single bank run or a housing crash but rather AI. These firms had lent hundreds of billions of dollars to software companies, and then AI started making those software companies obsolete almost overnight. Suddenly, the loans couldn't be repaid. Suddenly, the investors who had poured money into these private credit funds wanted their money back,  all at once. Apollo approved only 45 cents on the dollar for investors trying to get out. Ares, Blackstone, and Blue Owl quietly capped withdrawals too. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, investors demanded $20.8 billion back, and the funds couldn't give it to them.

Now the same banks that helped build this machine are selling the tools to tear it down. When JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs create a product specifically designed to profit from these firms failing, that is not a hedge. The people who understand the plumbing of this system best have decided it is safer to bet against it than to stand inside it. The last time Wall Street built instruments like this around a collapsing asset class, it was 2007, and the product was called a credit default swap on mortgage bonds.Source: StockMarket.News

OpenAI is on track to have massive revenue this decade but the cloud bill is even bigger so the business never actually cash flows positive and needs hundreds of billions in outside funding to keep growing. HSBC models OpenAI’s sales ramping toward $200B plus by 2030 as ChatGPT and AI tools reach billions of people but in the same window they think OpenAI spends roughly $800B on compute, mostly renting GPUs and data center capacity from Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon.  

The mismatch means OpenAI stays cash negative all decade and has a roughly $207B funding hole that needs to be plugged with equity, debt or strategic cash from partners.

What that means for the industry is that OpenAI looks less like a classic software company and more like a capital intensive utility where every new user brings a big compute bill that offsets the subscription or ad revenue. If this math is right, the near‑term winners in the AI trade are the infrastructure layer cloud providers, chip makers, and data center operators while OpenAI and companies like it sit in the middle, building great products but funneling most of the cash straight into someone else’s GPU farm.Source: StockMarket.News

We had an amazing Nvidia earnings beat, but the market still sold off. 

For the first time all year, I’m genuinely worried. Source: StockMarket.News

Past due utility balances just hit an all time high of $789, and honestly, that's only the beginning. Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation right now, which is wild when you think about it. We're talking 10 percent increases in just seven months while everything else is going up around 2 percent. 

Some states are already brutal, California's hitting 31 cents per kilowatt hour while the national average sits around 15.8 cents. The grid wasn't designed for what's about to hit it and utilities are basically saying we have no idea how to forecast this anymore. Only 19 percent of utility leaders feel confident predicting future demand and over half of them straight up don't have enough power available to connect new customers. The infrastructure just isn't there.

The real problem is AI infrastructure. Data centers are pulling insane amounts of power, we're talking 3,000-5,000+ watts per AI server compared to 300-500 watts for regular servers. Right now data centers use about 4 percent of U.S electricity but Goldman Sachs is projecting a 165 percent jump in data center power demand globally by 2030. 

The International Energy Agency thinks data center consumption will literally double by 2030. Here's the kicker though, data centers can go from concept to fully operational in 18 months, but electrical infrastructure takes six years to build. We're already seeing the strain in places like Northern Virginia where data centers are consuming 26 percent of the region's electricity. The bottleneck is real, and it's only getting tighter.Source: StockMarket.News