Griffin recession call | Europe Hormuz plan | Gold selling turns

Futures are barely moving this morning. The S&P 500 is sitting just under its record. Nasdaq is coming off a 10-day run. The pace slowed, not the level.

Spending held up. Credit quality stayed stable. The consumer is still showing up.

Oil is ticking higher again, back near $96. The blockade is in place, but talks are still being floated. Traders are pricing both paths at once.

One crack: luxury. Hermès missed. The stock dropped. High-end demand is starting to wobble.

Investor Signal

Stick with businesses tied to steady spending. Banks, staples, services. Be careful with high-end discretionary. If oil keeps rising, costs hit margins fast. If the index stalls near highs while fewer stocks participate, expect rotation.

If you have money in the markets, Public Law 63-43 could have a huge impact on your wealth in 2026.

Three words buried deep in Section 10 of this 112-year-old law may give President Trump the power to make a critical move on May 15.

A former advisor to the CIA, Pentagon, and White House says meetings are already happening behind closed doors.

See the move he believes could trigger a historic wealth supercycle.

That's not a typo. Investor offers this week would value Anthropic at $800 billion or more. In February the company raised at $350 billion. More than double in six weeks. The company hasn't accepted yet. But the number sets a floor regardless.

The revenue behind it is real. Anthropic went from $9 billion annualized at year end to $14 billion in February to $30 billion now. Enterprise customers are driving all of it. The Pentagon dispute, the Mythos release, and OpenAI's public attack on its accounting all landed in the same two weeks as these offers.

Here's what makes the timing significant:

Investors aren't ignoring the pressure. They're reading it as confirmation the company matters enough to fight over.

The Floor 

Whether Anthropic accepts a private offer or goes public, $800 billion is where the conversation starts. That number just moved the entire AI valuation debate.

France and the UK are organizing a maritime coalition to clear mines and escort ships through Hormuz after the war ends. Germany is expected to join. The mission is deliberately designed to exclude the United States. This week France and the UK held a video conference with several dozen countries to discuss post-war management of the waterway. The U.S. was not in the room. China and India were invited.

The reason is straightforward. The U.S. launched the blockade. That makes it a party to the conflict. Europe is positioning as the neutral actor that reopens the strait. That kind of influence lasts longer than military force.

Germany has 12 specialist minesweeping vessels. The U.S. largely decommissioned its minesweeping fleet years ago. Europe actually has more relevant capacity for this specific mission than Washington does.

The Shift 

The U.S. controls the blockade. Europe is positioning to control what comes after it. Those are two different kinds of power. Only one shapes the next decade of global energy access.

Elon’s SpaceX filing just hit the mainstream.

Reuters, CNBC, and Barron’s are now confirming what I flagged months ago.

Behind the scenes, 21 banks — including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — are lining up for “Project Apex.”

Wall Street is now pointing to June.

That gives you a short window to act before the frenzy begins.

Click here to get the FREE SpaceX pre-IPO recommendation now.

For three years, central banks bought gold at record levels. More than 1,000 tons per year from 2022 through 2024. Then the war started. Now they're selling.

Turkey sold 131 tons in March to stabilize its currency. Russia reduced holdings to cover budget shortfalls. Ghana and Poland sold reserves for defense spending and foreign currency. The logic is simple. Gold bought as insurance becomes the payout when the crisis arrives. The crisis arrived.

Here's what the selling tells you:

Both the buying and the selling make sense. They're the same bet at different stages of the same crisis.

The Insurance 

When the strongest pillar of gold demand becomes a net seller, the floor shifts. The policy was bought for exactly this moment. Now it's being used.

Meta and Broadcom extended their custom AI chip partnership through 2029. Meta committed to 1 gigawatt of its own custom chips initially, with plans for multiple gigawatts by 2027. These chips will be the first AI silicon built on a 2 nanometer process. They're built specifically to reduce reliance on Nvidia.

This follows Broadcom's deal with Google for custom TPUs and the Anthropic agreement for 3.5 gigawatts of Google compute. Three gigawatt-scale commitments to Broadcom in two weeks from three different companies. Every major player is locking in custom silicon to reduce Nvidia dependence. Broadcom is the one designing chips for all of them.

The Infrastructure Layer 

Broadcom doesn't need to pick a winner. It just needs to keep building for whoever's racing. Three hyperscalers. Three commitments. Two weeks. That's not luck. That's position.

At the Semafor conference in Washington this week, four serious voices gave four different reads on the war's economic impact. 

Citadel's Ken Griffin said recession is inevitable if Hormuz stays shut six to twelve more months. Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz said markets are systematically mispricing geopolitical risk. He noted the SVB collapse triggered seven times the market reaction of Russia's Ukraine invasion, not because SVB was more consequential, but because markets knew how to price a bank failure and didn't know how to price a war. The same dynamic is playing out now.

Neuberger Berman's CEO said the economy holds through mid-summer but early fall gets dangerous as petroleum reserves deplete. Steve Rattner said he sees no recession and expects consumers to stay resilient.

Same data. Four different conclusions. That disagreement is the signal. When this group can't align, the range of outcomes is wider than any single forecast captures.

The Range 

The smartest capital allocators in the room couldn't agree. That's not confusion. That's an honest read on how much genuine uncertainty is sitting in the system right now.

Every institution this week read the same environment and made a different commitment. 

Anthropic drew bids near $800 billion as revenue tripled in six weeks. Meta locked in chip supply with Broadcom to secure future compute. Europe began planning Hormuz security without the U.S. in the room. Central banks sold gold to pay for the crisis they bought the gold to prepare for. Top investors split four ways on recession risk. 

The uncertainty isn't a malfunction. It's what happens when the range of outcomes is genuinely this wide.