Day: June 15, 2024

France, Germany and Britain on Saturday condemned Iran’s latest steps, as reported by the IAEA, to further expand its nuclear program, Report informs via Reuters.

In a remarkable development, Azerbaijan’s rail transport sector has experienced a significant boost in the first five months of 2024. According to the State Statistics Committee, 7.7 million tons of cargo and 3,268,800 passengers were transported by rail

Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict marks the latest wrinkle thrown into the 2024 campaign between President Biden and former President Trump ahead of their November contest.

For Biden, the outcome blunts Republican claims of a two-tiered Justice system and the weaponization of the DOJ against the president’s political rival. But those close to Biden said the personal toll will be heavy for a man who is close with his family, as evidenced by a quickly arranged trip to Delaware to be with his son following the verdict. 

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, said the psychological impact on Biden is the biggest question in the aftermath of the verdict.

“You know, Joe Biden has lost two kids and he’s watched his son battle addiction. And this is a blow. This is a blow,” Axelrod said on his podcast, “Hacks on Tap.”

But the verdict also creates a curveball for Trump and his campaign, who must weigh how aggressively to attack the president over his son. The former president has at times called for a special counsel to investigate the Biden family, and has frequently accused Biden of being “crooked,” but he has also spoken publicly about his own family’s struggles with addiction. 

“It’s a very tough situation for a father; it’s a very tough situation for a brother or sister; and it goes on, and it’s not stopping, whether it’s alcohol or drugs ot whatever it may be,” Trump told Fox News on Thursday, two days after Hunter Biden’s conviction. “It’s a tough moment for any family involved in that.”

Hunter Biden was found guilty 11 days after Trump was also convicted on starkly different matters. Hunter Biden was found guilty of three federal gun charges over lying about being a drug addict during the purchase of a firearm while Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a hush money case involving falsifying business records.

The reaction of each defendant after each verdict couldn’t have been further apart, however.

Trump frequently railed against the judge in his case, which he often deemed “rigged” and blamed on President Biden directly while in Hunter Biden’s case, he and his father both said they accept the jury’s verdict while acknowledging the recovery efforts of the younger Biden.

“Politically, [Tuesday] speaks to the ultimate character contrast between the two men running for President: a family man vs. a businessman,” said Michael LaRosa, first lady Jill Biden’s traveling press secretary during the 2020 campaign. “Trump and his family throw tantrums, and whine, complain or attack the judge and judicial system, while the President and the Biden family show nothing but humility and respect for the process, the jury, judge, and the system — even when they are handed a heartbreaking outcome.”

The dueling verdicts have also left Republicans wondering if there is a strong argument for the GOP to use against Hunter Biden in the aftermath of his conviction.

“The [Hunter Biden] conviction definitely helps provide a ‘But Hunter’ retort to criticisms of Trump’s ethics from the left. But the fact that it revolves around clearly personal behavior as opposed to some official actions means it’s probably more of a soundbite than an argument,” said Stewart Verdery,  a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Bush and CEO of Monument Advocacy.

Several members of the close-knit Biden family, other than the president himself, attended the trial in Wilmington, including first lady Jill Biden. After the verdict, Biden made an unplanned trip to Wilmington before leaving for Italy on Wednesday to see his son.

The personal nature of Hunter the trial is one reason why Republicans may not look to make political hay out of Hunter Biden’s conviction.

One Republican strategist noted that the case deals with gun rights and addiction, two subject areas where base GOP voters might actually be sympathetic to the president’s son.

“The point about the weaponization of the DOJ is right,” said one Republican strategist, noting Hunter Biden originally had a plea deal in place that would have seen him plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and avoid prosecution over the gun charge.

“Republicans don’t care about the gun charge. It’s not about the gun charge. It never was about the gun charge,” the strategist said. “It was about the taxes and documents and connections to what they’re doing overseas.”

As election day draws near, Hunter Biden will face a whole new set of legal troubles, right in the heat of the general election.

The president’s son is scheduled to go on a separate trial in September on federal tax charges, and his sentencing in the gun case will also take place later this year. Trump is also enmeshed in three other state and federal cases stemming from efforts to overturn the 2020 election and potential mishandling of classified documents, but those cases are almost certain not to reach a jury before Election Day.

Still, legals battles could make their way to the debate stage in June, when President Biden and Trump will meet for their first presidential debate, a potential window into how both campaigns will treat what’s happened in the courtroom.

So far, the Biden campaign has on several occasions marked Trump a “convicted criminal” and Biden trolled Trump during the trial as being “free on Wednesdays,” the day of the week that court didn’t meet.

Trump’s campaign has for years attacked the Biden family as being criminally corrupt, but since the Hunter Biden convictions, Trump and Republicans have been fairly muted about attacking Hunter and his father.

The personal toll on Biden could also help resonate with a wider electorate.  In his first statement on his son’s  verdict, the president appealed to other families with loved ones with addiction by saying they “understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side.”

Kate Bedingfield, former White House communications director, said people connected to conversations about the Biden family’s struggles during the 2020 campaign.

“Even people who maybe didn’t even feel that sympathetic towards Biden politically resonated with the way he talked about his family, supported his son,” she said on CNN on Tuesday.

Hardware stocks are being rewarded over software for the first time in a decade thanks to the AI boom.

Guillaume/Getty Images

• Software stocks have been slammed this year after a long period of strong performance.
• Meanwhile, hardware stocks are reaping the benefits of the AI boom as their profits soar. 
• “You’re building the car and the engine, but you have no passengers in software,” Baird’s Ted Mortonson said.

The fast-growing adoption of generative artificial intelligence has shaken one of Wall Street’s most successful tech trades over the past decade.

Software stocks, known for their high profit margins and asset-light business models, have consistently outperformed their asset-heavy and lower-profit hardware counterparts since 2014.

The NYSE Arca Computer Hardware Index is up 312% over the past 10 years, compared to a gain of 576% for the Dow Jones US Software Index over the same period.

But that dynamic has been flipped on its head this year as companies race to buy AI-enabled GPU chips from hardware providers, including Nvidia, AMD, Super Micro Computer, Broadcom, and Dell.

Year-to-date, hardware tech stocks are outperforming software tech stocks by a whopping 30 percentage points.

YCharts/Business Insider

Software stocks, including MongoDB, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Workday, have been slammed this year after their earnings results failed to convince investors that AI-fueled profits are imminent.

It’s hard to monetize AI as a software company

The dynamic at play, according to Baird managing director and tech strategist Ted Mortonson, is reflective of the fact that software companies are having difficulty monetizing AI while hardware companies enjoy booming business.

“This GenAI cycle is infrastructure, all infrastructure,” Mortonson told Business Insider this week. “The cloud titans are now spending $200 billion this year, which is up 50% on data centers. That’s the horsepower, or the engine of Gen AI.”

Mortonson said that while hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on expensive GPUs to develop large language models, there are few applications that can deliver a significant return on investment for software companies and their customers.

“30% of the Fortune 500 have moved to the cloud. 10% of that are Gen AI capable. So, we have a long way to go for software and an acceptable return on invested capital to materialize. That’s why you’re not seeing it in software. There is no return on invested capital because there’s no applications. So, you’re building the car and the engine, but you have no passengers in software,” Mortonson said.

Mortonson explained that one of the key challenges for companies to make good use of generative AI technologies is the need to organize and structure their data in a format that can be understood by Gen AI.

That process can take 15 months at minimum, and based on Mortonson’s recent conversations with software-focused tech executives, very few of them have even started the process.

“It’s not going to happen until late 2025 to 2026. It’s just not there. It’s a nothing burger,” Mortonson said.

IT budgets are tight

Software companies are also dealing with tight IT budgets as their customers reprioritize their spending away from software and towards GPU hardware.

“Major corporations realize that AI is a ‘must get it right’ proposition, and as a result are overweighting semis and hardware spend, at the expense of software spend currently. We expect this to continue for the foreseeable future,” strategist Larry Tentarelli of Blue Chip Daily told Business Insider.

“Every body is scrutinizing on the SaaS side, every single seat, because IT budgets are so tight right now,” Mortonson said.

This dynamic means that hardware stocks will continue to outperform software stocks through 2025, according to Mortonson.

“We’re in a mini hype cycle. This is the bottom line, until we can get the infrastructure tuned, reduced costs and the applications are designed to work off this next-generation architecture. Until that happens and the data is migrated, the enterprise software GenAI will not materialize,” Mortonson said. “The cart is in front of the horse as it relates to GenAI software. There’s just no applications.”

Steve Eisman of “The Big Short” fame told CNBC this week that he, too, expects hardware stocks to continue their outperformance relative to software shares.

“The moats that some of the software companies, not all but some, have around their businesses are not going to be quite as high. You can make an argument that the revaluation of hardware is going to continue and that some parts of software will derail,” Eisman said.

Business Insider

• Bitcoin is predicted to hit $500,000 by 2029, according to Bernstein.
• The bullish outlook is driven by a sustained boom in demand for bitcoin ETFs, combined with constrained supply.
• Bernstein initiated MicroStrategy stock at “Outperform” with a $2,890 price target.

The price of bitcoin is set to soar to $500,000 by the end of the decade, according to a recent note from Bernstein.

In an initiation note of MicroStrategy stock, Bernstein analysts Gautam Chhugani and Mahika Sapra said bitcoin is poised to soar 659% from Friday afternoon levels to hit half-a-million dollars by 2029.

The culprit for the massive price increase is booming demand for bitcoin ETFs, which have attracted tens of billions of dollars in assets since their launch earlier this year.

That soaring demand, combined with an ever-dwindling supply of bitcoin, creates a ripe supply-and-demand dynamic that should thee the cryptocurrency continue to rise in price.

“This is led by unprecedented Bitcoin demand ($190Bn AUM in 2025E vs. $60Bn today) via ETFs run by the world’s leading asset managers, and Bitcoin supply being constrained,” Bernstein said.

Chhugani and Sapra said their base case projection for the price of bitcoin is $200,000 by 2025, $500,000 by 2029, and $1 million by 2033.

The analysts had previously expected bitcoin to reach a cycle high of $150,000 in 2025, but they upped their estimates due to strong ETF flows.

The firm’s forecast was part of its note initiating coverage of Microstrategy, which Bernstein said is “building the world’s largest Bitcoin company.”

The firm rates MicroStrategy at “Outperform” with a $2,890 price target, representing potential upside of 94% from Friday afternoon’s price.

MicroStrategy has amassed 1.1% of the total bitcon supply, an amount that’s worth about $14.5 billion. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy has a total market valuation of $26 billion.

Bernstein argues that MicroStrategy deserves the premium valuation as it offers investors an “active-leveraged” strategy compared to passive bitcoin ETFs.

“Over the last 4 years, MSTR’s active strategy has delivered a higher Bitcoin per equity share – BTC/share has grown 67% i.e. from 6 bitcoin per diluted share in Q4’2020 vs. ~10 today,” Bernstein said.

Bitcoin traded just above $65,000 on Friday, about 12% below its record high of nearly $74,000.

Dr Anthony Fauci grilled by House Republicans on Covid origins  BBC.com

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran and Sweden agreed Saturday to a prisoner swap, freeing Hamid Nouri, convicted of war crimes by Sweden over mass 1988 executions in the Islamic Republic, in exchange for two men held by Tehran.

Iran released Johan Floderus, a Swede who had been working for the European Union’s diplomatic corps, as well as a man identified as Saeed Azizi by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

They “are now on a plane home to Sweden, and will soon be reunited with their families,” Kristersson wrote on the social platform X.

Oman mediated the swap, the state-run Oman News Agency reported. Iranian state television reported Nouri was already freed and would be heading back to Tehran.

In 2022, the Stockholm District Court sentenced Nouri to life in prison over his role in the executions. It identified Nouri as an assistant to the deputy prosecutor at the Gohardasht prison outside the Iranian city of Karaj.

График движения составов нарушен после взрыва на высоковольтной подстанции региона.