💸 57% Feel Poorer Now

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Trump's approval rating just hit 33%.

That's a three-point drop in a month, and the lowest the FT has clocked since it started tracking in May.

Dig into the internals and it gets worse.

57% of voters now say they're financially worse off under Trump. Last month that was 53%.

Four points in thirty days. Sentiment is deteriorating faster than a supermarket avocado.

Republican approval fell more than two points to 72%, another record low for this survey.

Zoom in on the economy specifically and it's sharper. Only 53% of Republicans approve of his handling of jobs and the economy, down nearly eight points in a month.

Eight points from his own team. That's the political equivalent of your mum leaving you on read.

Across all voters, nearly two-thirds say the economy is heading in the wrong direction.

56% of voters disapprove of the 50% tariff on roughly $20B of Canadian goods.

Ottawa hit back with retaliatory tariffs, which happens every single time and somehow still surprises everyone.

$20B of goods with a 50% surcharge on top. Someone pays that. Usually the person standing at the checkout.

Meanwhile the war in Iran is leaning on fuel prices, consumer prices, and US borrowing costs simultaneously. Three pressure points, one wallet.

Approval polls don't move markets. They move policy.

A president polling at 33% with midterms less than two months away has a very strong incentive to make the cost of living look better, quickly.

Historically that points in a few directions:

Also worth clocking: if voters flip the midterms, gridlock is back on the menu. Markets have historically been fine with gridlock. Fewer new laws, fewer surprises, more predictability.

Political weather turns into policy. Policy turns into your grocery bill.

He's calling it "10x bigger than the largest product in history."

The last time a claim that bold turned out to be true, the product was called the iPhone...

...and investors who owned Apple beforehand saw it run as high as 7,537%.

An analyst believes this launch could be bigger.

We just published a free briefing naming 3 stocks positioned for the launch.

Read it now, before the launch.

Trump says he's made "Hundreds of Billions of Dollars" for America.

Not for himself. For you, apparently.

That was the message on Truth Social, and he wanted it on the record

"I do this for our Country, not myself," he wrote, saying the gains on stocks and other holdings were "for the U.S.A., not myself."

Then came the grievance about "Radical Left Democrats" and a closing verdict on the criticism: "Very unfair."

"Hundreds of billions" is a range you could park several entire companies inside.

The post named no holdings, no timeframe and no account. Just the headline figure and the feeling.

Big claims usually arrive with a spreadsheet. This one arrived with a complaint.

For investors, that's the whole lesson. A number without a source is a mood, and moods don't show up in your portfolio.

Jensen Huang just declared "AGI has arrived."

That's the CEO of Nvidia. The company that sells the shovels. Announcing that the gold is real.

He said it after OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra.

Astra ran out of benchmarks to fail.

OpenAI also says Astra has already helped solve long-standing open problems in mathematics. Problems that beat humans for years, handled by a product with a monthly subscription button.

It's rolling out today to a limited set of organisations, then to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users within days.

Also landing on the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock. Which means it arrives inside the software your employer already pays for, whether anyone asked or not.

Huang's framing was all about the hardware.

Astra's generation was trained on over 100,000 Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips, in a four-year sprint from "write me a poem" to "solve the unsolved."

Then he dropped the real number, almost as an aside: "400K GPUs coming online next."

That's roughly four times the compute of the thing that just triggered the AGI announcement. Casually mentioned in a congratulations post.

Is it a milestone, or a sales pitch with a milestone attached? Probably both.

The quotable bit is "AGI has arrived." The tradeable bit is "400K GPUs."

One is a philosophical claim nobody can settle. The other is a demand signal from the man who counts the orders.

For the rest of the market, the interesting detail is distribution. Astra hits Azure and Bedrock at the same time as ChatGPT, so the hyperscalers get the capability, the compute bill, and the customer relationship in one go.

The AI trade has been running on projected demand for two years. Huang just put a number on the next chunk of it.