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In today’s post:
🐻 The Big Short Guy Has Notes
🧲 30 Of 44. All China.
🪙 118-0. On Meme Coins.
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🐻 The Big Short Guy Has Notes
Michael Burry thinks AI is now propping up America.
And he reckons the White House knows it.
"Trump and his team know that the AI narrative and the buildout is the only thing keeping this economy going, and the most positive thing happening this year," Burry wrote in a recent Substack chat.
Then the kicker: "They cannot afford to let it fall."
This is The Big Short guy. The one who spotted 2008 while the rest of Wall Street was still ordering bottle service.
Here's what's going on 👇
🐻 Burry's Bets
Burry thinks AI is holding up the economy, and he's betting against it anyway.
He recently shorted six of the trade's biggest names:
Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 1.68% )
Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 3.28% )
Palantir $PLTR ( ▼ 1.16% )
Nebius $NBIS ( ▼ 2.3% )
Micron $MU ( ▼ 2.62% )
CoreWeave $CRWV ( ▼ 2.88% )
His argument: enormous capital spending might not turn into durable returns.
Spend a fortune on data centres and you're guaranteed one thing. Data centres. Profit is a separate conversation.
He also asked the obvious question: what can Washington actually do to stop a downturn?
Governments can pass bills. They can't sign an executive order that makes a GPU cluster profitable.
📈 Meanwhile, At The President's Trading Desk
Latest disclosures show Trump made more than 1,000 trades in July, mostly in tech stocks.
That's 40+ trades per trading day. Most retail investors don't hit that number in a decade.
The highlights:
Sold $5M to $25M each in Microsoft and Amazon
Then bought back smaller amounts of both
Also traded Oracle, Intuit, Marvell, Salesforce, Meta, Nvidia, ServiceNow, Workday, and Adobe
Spot the overlap? Oracle and Nvidia show up on both lists. Burry's shorting them. The president's trading them.
Same stocks. Very different vibes.
🧠 What It Means For You
If Burry's right, a huge chunk of US economic momentum is riding on a single trade.
That's concentration risk. At the scale of a whole country.
And it probably touches your money more than you think. Big tech makes up a hefty slice of major US indexes, so plenty of "boring" index funds are quietly carrying the same AI exposure.
There are two ways to read Burry's comment:
Bulls hear: the government has every reason to keep the boom alive
Bears hear: if the spending doesn't pay off, there may not be much anyone can do about it
Both camps agree on one thing. AI isn't a sector anymore. It's the load-bearing wall.
When one wall is holding up the house, it pays to know how much of your portfolio lives in that room.
Is Burry right about AI? 🤔
For AI Investors Who Do Their Homework Before They Buy.
Most people will chase the next AI IPO on hype alone and get burned. If you'd rather understand the timeline, the retail access window, and the risk buried in the filings before you commit a dollar, the free briefing is built for you.
Everyone's watching the chip designers.
We're watching the factory they all queue outside.
One company makes 73% of the world's contract-manufactured chips. Second place has about 7%.
The orders aren't slowing either. August revenue jumped 53% year-over-year and 10% in a single month.
Here's why demand keeps coming. Cutting-edge AI chips can only be mass-produced at scale in one place. When capacity is capped and every hyperscaler wants more, the factory sets the price.
And the fastest-growing division, AI and high-performance computing (up 20% in a quarter), is also the most profitable one.
The company reports on October 15. The stock sits about 6% below its all-time high.
So is that a pause before the next leg, or the top?
Inside today's Premium+:
Why we're adding before earnings, and the number that backs it
The exact margin level that would change our mind
The Big Tech threat most bullish takes skip over
What we'll be watching on October 15, line by line
🧲 30 Of 44. All China.
China is the top producer of 30 of the 44 critical minerals the US tracks.
That's roughly two out of every three. For the stuff inside your phone, your car and your missiles.
Washington has finally noticed
The Trump administration is spending billions to build US and allied supplies of critical minerals.
The mission: loosen China's grip on the materials that defense, tech and manufacturing can't live without.
🧲 The Wake-Up Call
In April 2025, China slapped export controls on seven rare-earth elements and the magnets made from them.
Suddenly America realised how much of its economy runs on Chinese supply. Semiconductors. EVs. Missiles. Advanced computing.
That's a lot of eggs in someone else's basket. And the basket owner just started charging a cover fee.
The response has pulled in basically everyone with a government badge.
Five departments are now on the job: Defense, Energy, State, Commerce and Interior, plus government financing agencies.
They're backing mining, processing and magnet production. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the toolkit includes:
Billions of dollars in financing
Government purchase commitments
Price guarantees
Partnerships with Australia, Japan, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia
That last one matters. Washington is building supply chains with allies too, so America doesn't have to dig every hole itself.
⏳ The Catch
Mines don't pop up like food trucks. Building mines, refineries and magnet plants takes years.
Industry experts say fully replacing Chinese supply is unlikely in the near term. China still holds serious sway over processing and exports.
And recent supply disruptions show the dependence is still very real, despite all that US cash.
Even aerospace companies, busy testing alternative materials and recycling programs, expect China to stay an important supplier for years.
The cheque has been written. The delivery date is TBD.
🧠 What It Means For You
Two sides to this coin.
Potential winners: US and allied miners, refiners and rare-earth magnet makers. Government financing, purchase commitments and policies favouring non-Chinese supply could finally make their numbers work.
These are projects that used to get steamrolled by cheaper Chinese production. Now they've got Uncle Sam in their corner.
Potential losers: manufacturers in defense, autos and semiconductors. They stay exposed to fresh export restrictions, supply hiccups and volatile mineral prices while the new capacity gets built.
Long-term tailwind for one group. Short-term headache for the other.
🪙 118-0. On Meme Coins.
California just banned its politicians from launching meme coins.
And the vote wasn't even close. 118 lawmakers said yes. Zero said no.
And in politics, unanimous agreement is rarer than a meme coin that holds its value.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2409 on Sunday, part of a stack of consumer protection and government ethics bills.
The goal: stop public officials from cashing in on their jobs through speculative tokens.
The bill passed the Senate 40-0, then the Assembly signed off on the final version 78-0. Bipartisan support, in 2026. Somebody check the water supply.
🪙 What The Law Actually Does
California public officials can't issue meme coins. That covers public officers and certain public employees.
Exchanges can't list politician-faced coins for Californians. Any meme coin issued on or after Jan. 1, 2027 that uses the image or likeness of a federal, state or local official is off the menu for California residents.
The profits can be clawed back. Courts can order money made in violation of the law to be surrendered.
Someone's actually enforcing it. The state attorney general and certain local prosecutors can bring civil actions.
Note the word "federal." A coin featuring a Washington politician could still be blocked for Californians if it launches in 2027 or later.
🏛️ Why Now?
Donald Trump launched his own meme coin in 2025.
Newsom name-checked Trump's token directly when announcing the law. Subtle, it was not.
The bill's author, Assemblymember Avelino Valencia, argues politician-linked tokens create two problems:
Officials can profit from their positions
Special interests or foreign actors can buy assets tied to government officials
In other words, critics worry these coins could work like a campaign donation with a ticker symbol.
Quick refresher on what we're dealing with: meme coins get their value from online attention and speculation, with no business underneath them.
California's official definition says they're digital assets inspired by memes, characters, current events or trends, pushed by promoters building an online community to buy and trade them.
🧠 What It Means For You
This is a narrow law. It targets politician-linked tokens and leaves the broader crypto market alone.
But it still matters in a few ways:
Californians may simply not see some future political tokens on their exchanges from 2027.
Exchanges have more compliance homework. This adds another state-level rule to an already messy patchwork of U.S. crypto regulation.
Political meme coins now carry regulatory risk on top of their usual risk, which is already "could drop 90% because someone tweeted."
The bigger signal: scrutiny of crypto, political influence and conflicts of interest is growing, and states aren't waiting for Washington to act.
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