Morning News: June 3, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on June 3rd, 2026 at 7:11 am

Oil Rises as Hostilities Flare Overnight in the Persian Gulf

Oil’s Hormuz Alternatives Offer Only a Partial Fix

Even if Oil Prices Peak Soon, the Global Economy Will Slow This Year

OECD Warns of Severe Global Slowdown If Middle East Conflict Is Prolonged

Bank of Japan Could Raise Rates Even If Mideast Uncertainty Persists

Wealthy Russians See Empires Crumble as Putin Seizes Assets

Trump Begins Rebuilding His Tariff Wall Citing Forced Labor

U.S. Proposes New Duties Over Forced Labor in Renewed Tariffs Push

No Wonder Everyone’s Rallying Around This Terrible Idea

Warsh Pledges to Follow Best of Fed’s Traditions, While Also Looking for Change

Warsh Names Two Conservative Policy Veterans as Interim Fed Advisers

The Federal Reserve Requires Better Communication, Not Less

Berkshire Is Breaking With Buffett’s Playbook

Greg Abel Puts His Stamp on Berkshire Hathaway With Pair of Megadeals

Market-Research Firm AlphaSense Clinches $7.5 Billion Valuation in New Funding Round

Revolut Founder Is Building a Launch Pad for a $76 Billion Fortune

New Intelligence Role Puts Bill Pulte’s Housing Agenda in Doubt

DeSantis’ Plan to Gut Property Taxes Is a Soviet Power Grab

Thoughts on Improving a Struggling Housing Market

The Share of Corporate Directors Over Age 70 Is Skyrocketing

Europe Wants to Be Less Reliant on American Tech. Here’s Its Plan.

What’s Driving Trump’s Big A.I. Pivot

Meta’s “AI Layoffs” Are a Bullish Sign of More Meta Hiring

SpaceX’s Capital Needs Are Out of This World

$3.6 Million an Hour—and Other Ways to Measure Elon Musk’s Fortune

Nvidia CEO Pitches ‘Insane’ AI Returns to Billionaire Families

GameStop Posts Higher Profit, Launches $2 Billion Buyback Program

AkzoNobel Shares Plunge After Sherwin-Williams, Nippon Paint Drop $14.5 Billion Bid

CBS News Fires Scott Pelley of ‘60 Minutes’

A Psychedelics Revival Is Overdue

With Stephen Curry Deal, Li-Ning of China Shoots for Global Sneaker Spotlight

Congress Wants to “Fix” College Football. What Could Go Wrong?

Pride Groups Plan for a Future Without Some of Their Biggest Corporate Sponsors

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CWS Market Review – June 2, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on June 2nd, 2026 at 6:10 pm

(This is the free version of CWS Market Review. If you like what you see, then please sign up for the premium newsletter for $20 per month or $200 for the whole year. If you sign up today, you can see our two reports, “Your Handy Guide to Stock Orders” and “How Not to Get Screwed on Your Mortgage.”)

Last October, 60 Minutes interviewed Andrew Ross Sorkin about his book on the 1929 stock market crash. As I expected, the segment came with dire warnings concerning parallels between the market of 1929 and the market of today.

Please. This market is barely recognizable to the market of 1929. It’s a lazy argument that describes any rally as a potential new Great Depression.

This is what I wrote at the time:

I hate that this even needs to be said, but the current market isn’t anything like the market of 1929. Just as a reminder, the stock market fell 89% from top to bottom. That’s what we’re talking about when we compared us to 1929.

Many more Americans are invested in the stock market than was the case 100 years ago. There’s no gold standard today. No fixed commissions. There’s a global economy. We have deposit insurance. During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate reached 25%. Today it’s just over 4%.

Bear markets happen. We even had a brief one earlier this year. That’s part of investing. That’s quite a different thing from 1929.

During the Great Depression, 9,000 U.S. banks went insolvent. Last year, there were two.

As it turns out, people love to be scared. Despite these serious-sounding warnings, the market stubbornly refuses to crash. In fact, it’s only marched higher. The Nasdaq Composite is up more than 22% since 60 Minutes aired its segment. For good measure, CBS ran it again this past Sunday.

Of course, for the super bears, any contrasting evidence is further proof of the bubble. The stock market is indeed volatile, and that’s exactly why we’re focused on the long term.

Today, the S&P 500 closed higher for the ninth day in a row. We also had a nine-day winning streak last year. The index has closed higher for the last nine weeks in a row. This week may very well be #10.

For the last few months, utility stocks have badly lagged the overall market. Watching the relative performance of utilities is often a good “tell” for the market’s overall mood.

The S&P 500 is in black and the Utilities are in blue.

For now, the market apparently has little need for safe and dependable stocks like utilities. Instead, Wall Street is madly embracing higher risk stocks. For example, Micron (MU) hit a new high today. Over the last year, the stock is up 10-fold.

Investors should certainly be more cautious in this market. The economy continues to grow but there are growing signs of concern, not of a depression, but of slower growth. Let’s take a closer look at the low-hire, low-fire economy.

The Low-Hire, Low-Fire Economy

This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its jobs openings report, better known as the JOLTS report.

The BLS said that available employment hit 7.62 million in April. That’s a jump of 731,000. Economists had been expecting 6.8 million. It’s also the highest since May 2024.

CNBC reported:

The jump in openings put the available jobs above the total of unemployed workers. The rate of openings compared with the size of the labor force rose 0.4 percentage point to 4.6%.

By industry, nearly all of the openings came from the professional and business services category, which added 668,000 positions, a possible indicator of the impact from artificial intelligence on labor demand. Health care and social assistance, the greatest engine of job creation, added 89,000. Financial activities saw a decline of 134,000. Most other categories reported little change.

One concerning stat is that the report said that hiring dropped. During April, employers hired 5.12 million new workers. That’s a drop of 419,000. Layoffs fell a bit as did quits. The quits number is often a good proxy for worker confidence. You’re more likely to leave your current job if you think you can easily get another one.

The low-hire, low-fire economy is still in play. The labor market has been like this for more than a year. This Friday, we’ll get the May jobs report. I’m expecting much of the same.

In fact, the jobless rate has barely moved. Over the last 10 months, the monthly unemployment rate has been 4.3% five times, 4.4% three times, and once it was 4.5%; plus, we never got the October report thanks to the government shutdown.

The conflict with Iran has yet to hurt the overall economy. On Monday, we got the ISM Manufacturing Index for May, and it was a good report. Last month, the index rose 1.3 points to 54.0. That’s a four-year high.

Any number over 50 means that the manufacturing sector of the economy is expanding. Manufacturing now makes up about 10% of the economy. The improved numbers probably reflect companies’ front-loading of orders as they try to navigate supply line issues during the war with Iran.

By the way, don’t listen to people who say that the United States doesn’t make anything anymore. In reality, the U.S. is a manufacturing powerhouse. The difference is that a lot fewer workers do it. Manufacturing has grown for the last five months in a row.

Some of the numbers may not tell the complete story since there’s been a massive increase in AI investments. If we exclude that, then the economy may be weaker than it appears.

For Friday, Wall Street expects to see 80,000 net new jobs and for the unemployment rate to hold at 4.3%.

Q1 GDP Growth was Revised Lower

On Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis lowered the government’s estimate for Q1 GDP growth. The initial report said that the economy grew by 2% during the first three months of this year. Now that’s been taken down to 1.6%.

These are in annualized inflation-adjusted numbers. The economy grew at a 0.5% rate for Q4. We’ll get our first look at Q2 GDP in late July. The reports are revised twice after the initial report, although the GDP numbers are frequently revised again many years after the initial report.

The Q1 numbers were helped by large tax refunds. Also, business spending in equipment rose by 17%. Profits from current production fell to $40 billion. That’s down from nearly $250 billion for Q4. Gross Domestic Income rose by 1.5% in Q4.

Along with the GDP report, we got the report on personal income and spending. This includes the PCE price index which is important because it’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation.

In April, PCE prices rose by 1.5%. Over the last year, PCE prices are up by 3.8%. That’s the highest in three years. If we exclude food and energy, then PCE inflation was up 0.2% last month, and 3.3% for the last 12 months.

Before I go, I wanted to mention the very good earnings report we had from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) yesterday. I’ll have more details in our paid issue later this week.

SAIC said it made $3.23 per share for its fiscal Q1 compared with Wall Street’s forecast for $2.28 per share. That’s a beat of 41%.

CEO Jim Reagan said, “These results reflect our focus on execution and our commitment to our financial targets. We are raising our guidance to reflect this strong start, while continuing to invest for the future.”

SAIC raised its full-year earnings range from $9.50 to $9.70 per share, to $9.90 to $10.10 per share.

At one point in yesterday’s trading, the stock was up more than 18%. It later settled lower for a gain of 10%. We have a 13% gain this year with SAIC. I’ll have full details in our paid newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

That’s all for now. I’ll have more for you in the next issue of CWS Market Review.

– Eddy

Morning News: June 2, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on June 2nd, 2026 at 7:04 am

Why Putin and Trump Should Both Want Quick Peace Deals

Trump Targets Brazil With 25% Tariff, Citing Unfair Trade Practices

What Ireland and Germany Can Teach Us About Birthright Citizenship

Trump Administration Signals ‘Anti-Weaponization’ Fund About-Face

Fed Warned on Shrinking Balance Sheet in Lookback at Powell Era

Trump Premium Supercharges Bond Rallies Across Emerging Markets

Wall Street Analysts Turn Skeptical After Two-Month Stocks Rally

Citadel Set to Pay for Trading Ideas From Other Hedge Funds

Creating Abundant Market Information In a Risk-Free Way

There’s No Real Ownership of Fractional Equity Shares

A Great Fiscal Inheritance for Gen Z, and An Even Bigger Opportunity

America’s New Financial Middle: Not in Crisis, Not Thriving Either

Berkshire, Under New CEO Greg Abel, Invests $16.8 Billion in Two Days

Berkshire Is Convinced the American Dream of Homeownership Will Stay Alive

Cash Back for Replacing a Gas Stove With Electric? Not Anymore.

America’s Consumer Corporate Protector

Silicon Valley’s $140 Billion Tax Break Is Going Mainstream

How Much AI Is Too Much for Stock Investors?

Startup Impulse Space Raises $500 Million, Valued at $4 Billion

This 83-Year-Old Investor Is Elon Musk’s Biggest Fanboy

Biggest US Nuclear Fuel Enricher Is Scaling Up in Bet on AI Boom

The White House’s Missing AI Rule Book Is a Growing Liability

Bernie Sanders: A.I. Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It.

Anthropic Faces AI Spending Backlash Before IPO

Alphabet to Raise $80 Billion in Equity for AI Spending

John Delaney’s Forbright Targets $994 Million Valuation in US IPO

What Trump Delivered for Amazon

Will Volkswagen’s Massive ‘Made for China’ Bet Pay Off?

FedEx Freight CEO Says Self-Driving Trucks Are Ready for Prime Time

Genco Board Unanimously Rejects Diana Shipping’s Latest Buyout Offer

Dollar General Posts Higher Profit, Sales

Swiss Watch Exports Tumbled in April as U.S. Tariff Volatility Persists

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Morning News: June 1, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on June 1st, 2026 at 7:03 am

Oil Prices Jump as U.S. and Iran Exchange Fire

An LNG Glut Is On Its Way

Turnberry Won’t Fix Transatlantic Trade. But It’s a Start

Colombian Bonds Surge as Right-Wing Outsider Moves Into Runoff

Bond Trader Bets on Fed Hike Poised for Gut Check From Jobs Data

Wanted: A Reasonable Stablecoin Referee

Former Fed Chair Powell Delivers a Pointed Warning, Wrapped in Abstraction

Powell Says Fed Credibility Lost If President Can Fire Officials

Kevin Warsh Wants the Fed to Think About Inflation Differently

The Labor Market Is Evolving Faster Than the Four-Year Degree

Farmer Frustrations With Trump Spell Trouble for Iowa Republicans

A $5.5 Million Airport Rebrand the Trumps May Profit From

Billionaire Behind Japan’s Tiny-Room Hotel Empire Bets on US

A Chinese-Owned British Car Legend Pitches a Complicated U.S. Comeback

UAW to Strike at Key General Motors Truck Supplier Plant

This $50,000 Safety Fix Is Dividing the Aviation Industry and Washington

How to Stop the Affluent From Rigging the Housing Market

Berkshire Hathaway to Buy Taylor Morrison for $6.8 Billion

Warren Buffett’s Shareholder Letters Make a Surprisingly Great Book

Retail Investors Are Getting Into This Year’s Hottest IPOs

SpaceX’s IPO Forces Wall Street to Reorganize Around It

SpaceX Needs to Get to $5 Quadrillion to Rival Mag Seven Magic

Guess Who’s Got an AI Edge in a Tough Job Market?

AI Is Forcing Big Law to Rethink Business as Usual

Chinese Military Sought Nvidia Chips for Years, Report Says

Nvidia Enters Windows Laptop Market, Taking On Intel and AMD

Valve, the Anticorporate Hero of the Games Industry, Has Its Antitrust Moment

Valve’s Hard-Line Tactics Clash With Founder’s Reputation as Benevolent Gamer

Prized by ‘MAHA’ Influencers and Chefs Alike, Craft Flour Is on the Rise

Whey Protein Is Running Out as Food Companies Put It in Everything

Diller Plans a Takeover Bid for MGM Resorts

The Quintessential Old-School Las Vegas Buffet Bids Farewell

Can the World Cup Help the U.S. Beer Industry Kick Its Slump?

Golf Is Now Cooler and Younger. The Stock Market Has Noticed.

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Morning News: May 29, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on May 29th, 2026 at 7:02 am

Markets Wary as U.S. and Iran Edge Closer to Agreement

An Iran Truce May Be Near. That Doesn’t Make This War Any Smarter

Ship-Tracking Data Reveal Hidden Risk of China-Vietnam Showdown

Europe Is Edging Closer to a Trade War With China. Here’s Why.

China Threatens to Launch Trade Probes Against the European Union

What Is Joint Debt and Why Is Europe Talking About It Again?

A Case For Why the U.S. Has Outperformed Great Britain

The Debut Bessent-Warsh Breakfast Left Fed Rate Cuts Off the Menu

Treasury Prepares to Make Trump the Face of a New $250 Bill

The Problem With Economics Is Macroeconomics

Dwindling Savings Are the US Economy’s Achilles’ Heel

Grocery Shoppers Are In For a Summer of Pain

A National Car Tax Would Enlist States as Federal Tax Collectors

The Record Divide Between Corporate Profits and Worker Pay

A Low-Profile Supreme Court Ruling Stands to Change How Cities Build

Is Slowing U.S. Innovation The Next Big Problem?

AI Used to Be Generative. Now It’s All About Agents

A.I. Doesn’t Have to Mean Layoffs

AI Has Made Memory Chips More Valuable Than Oil

Can the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs Live Up to Expectations?

Apollo Shops $36 Billion Debt Deal to Buy Google Chips for Anthropic

SpaceX Said to Cut IPO Valuation Goal to at Least $1.8 Trillion

Ebola Science Is Moving Fast. It Might Not Be Enough

Molecular Glue Is Shaping Up to Be the Next Billion-Dollar Cancer Breakthrough

CVC to Buy IFF’s Food-Ingredients Unit in $4.3 Billion Deal

Replimune Gets Third Try at FDA Approval After Makary Departure

How an Ambitious Energy Giant Wielded Political Power in Florida

Ryanair’s Retreat Exposes a Different Tourism Crisis

Expedia’s Still Flying High, World Turbulence and All

Hershey Bull Sees World Cup, America 250 Lifting Chocolate Sales

Swicy, Swangy, Swavory: Why the Food Industry Is Obsessed With Gimmicky Flavors

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Morning News: May 28, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on May 28th, 2026 at 7:08 am

Iceland Ousts Switzerland as Priciest Nation, Union Says

Strait of Hormuz Traffic Fades to a Crawl After Supertankers Exit

Trump’s Bind Deepens With Hormuz Shut and Hawks Pushing War

Oil Prices Climb on Renewed Hostilities in Middle East

What Plunging Pork Prices Say About China’s Economy

World’s Appetite for AI Makes China Less Afraid of Stronger Yuan

There Was No “China Shock,” There Was a Big China Boom

What Is Joint Debt and Why Is Europe Talking About It Again?

Warsh’s New Challenge: Containing Fed Hawks as Inflation Simmers

For International Fintechs, America Is the Grand Prize

AI’s Grip on Emerging Markets Fuels Rise in Stock-Picking ETFs

Another Insider Trading Case Hits Prediction Markets

The Ellison Family’s $49 Billion Ask Is an Acid Test for Markets

CEOs Still Fail to Understand the Rage Against Them

Fight the SpaceX FOMO. You’ll Be Glad You Did

The Trump Administration Is in Talks to Fund U.S. Drone Companies

Why It’s Time to Start Discussing Semiconductors Like Commodities: There May Be a Supercycle

South Korea Grapples With an AI Boom Spurring $340,000 Bonuses

With Anthropic, Do Investors Own What They Think They Own?

What It Takes to Get a Job at Anthropic

Ferrari CEO Says First EV Is Racking Up Orders Despite Criticism

The World Cup Is a Petri Dish

CVS Returns Zepbound to Drug Plans After Lilly Slashes Price

Best Buy Jumps as Shoppers Snap Up Computers, Mobile Devices

One Million New-Car Buyers Are Gone and They’re Not Coming Back Soon

Temu Hit With Fine in E.U. Over Sales of Unsafe Goods

Kimchi Can’t Save Us From Microplastics

Streaming Services Tie Up to Keep You Hooked

TikTok Changed Music, Now Labels Worry It’s Leaving Them Behind

Caesars Agrees to Be Taken Over by Fertitta in $5.7 Billion Deal

Hormel Foods Sales Rise as Turnaround Strategy Progresses

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Morning News: May 27, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on May 27th, 2026 at 7:03 am

Why a Weak Rupee Is About More Than the Oil Shock

Russian Airlines Skirt Sanctions to Keep Their Jets Flying

Oil Prices Fall as Uneasy Truce Holds Between U.S. and Iran

BP’s Ousted Chair Says He Was Fired Without Explanation

BP’s Latest Screwup Is Outweighed by Its Hedge Fund Backer

G.D.P. Is a Flawed Measure of Prosperity. Alternatives Are on the Way

Makhlouf Says ECB Committed to 2% Goal, Won’t Comment on June

Why Double-Digit Earnings Growth Won’t Stop the Next Bear Market

A Bullish Case Against Mark Perry’s “Chart of the Century”

Fed’s Logan Warns US Oil Production Won’t Fill Global Supply Gap

An Overwhelming Majority of Americans Think Taxes Are Too High

Blanche Is Trump’s Latest Enabler-in-Chief

Why MAGA Republicans Keep Winning When Trump Is Losing

Prediction Markets Are Booming. So Are Worries About Rampant Insider Trading

Trump Wants to Create More Banks. Many Firms Are Heeding His Call.

San Francisco Rents Spike 22% in a Year, Far Outpacing Other US Cities

Americans Are About to Pay Even More at the Grocery Store

Beth Ford Wants You to Know That American Farmers Are in Crisis

The All-Consuming AI Boom Forces Private Credit to Break a Taboo

Anthropic’s Latest AIs Are Making Some Customers Uneasy

Samsung Unions Approve Pay Deal That Highlights Inequality of A.I. Age

At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed

Climate Venture Firm Leaning Into AI With New $150 Million Fund

Why Huawei’s New Chipmaking Plan Has Investors Buzzing

Taiwan Said to Suspect Nvidia Chips Smuggled to China Via Japan

Memory Chip Frenzy Sends SK Hynix, Micron Into $1 Trillion Club

How SpaceX Is Structured to Favor Elon Musk

Why Spirit Airlines Failed

Airbnb and Uber Are Competing to Be the Next Big Travel Super App

Xi Jinping Quit Smoking. China Still Cannot

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CWS Market Review – May 26, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on May 26th, 2026 at 7:46 pm

(This is the free version of CWS Market Review. If you like what you see, then please sign up for the premium newsletter for $20 per month or $200 for the whole year. If you sign up today, you can see our two reports, “Your Handy Guide to Stock Orders” and “How Not to Get Screwed on Your Mortgage.”)

I said I was going to take today off, but I had enough time to send you a brief market update. The S&P 500 had a very good day, and the Nasdaq and Russell 2000 did even better.

The S&P 500 closed at another new all-time high. The index has now closed higher for the last four days in a row. It’s also on pace for its ninth straight winning week.

Several big-cap tech stocks hit new highs today like Apple, Micron and Advanced Micro Devices. Some big banks also did well. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon all got to new highs today.

This morning, the Conference Board said that U.S. consumer confidence fell in May. I can’t say that’s a big surprise considering higher energy prices plus the war with Iran and concerns about the labor market.

The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index slipped ‌0.7 points to ⁠93.1 this month. Data for April was revised higher to ⁠show the index at 93.8 instead of 92.8. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index would drop to 92.0.

Consumer confidence will be a problem until inflation gets better. Stay tuned for Friday. That’s when the government will update its report on Q1 GDP growth. Initial reports said the economy grew by just 2% in Q1. Some analysts think the economy grew by more than 4% during Q2. (Those are real, annualized terms.)

Along with the GDP numbers, we’ll also get a look at the PCE numbers. This is the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. The difficult problem for us is that a rise in gasoline prices is never solely just a rise in energy costs.

Let’s say you just bought some new furniture, and it was shipped to you by truck – that’s also reflected in higher gasoline prices. If you fly for a business meeting, once again, the fuel costs are passed on.

Given the abbreviated issue this week, I wanted to share a profile I wrote a few years ago. I hope you enjoy it:

Sir John Templeton: The Last Yankee

The disappearance of the WASP ruling class that once presided over American business has gone unlamented by almost everyone—including the WASPs themselves, whose moral confidence suffered a fatal wound during the Vietnam era and never recovered. Yet every so often, we’re reminded by certain figures of just how impressive the Protestant ethos at its best could be, and how much we’ve lost with its passing.

Sir John Templeton is one such figure. Templeton wasn’t a WASP: born and bred in rural Tennessee, he was too plebian ever to fit in with the yachting set at Bar Harbor, and too intellectually superior to want to do so in the first place. Nevertheless his life, which spanned the American century, embodied seemingly every one of the cardinal Yankee virtues—discipline, thrift, service to others, disdain for material display, always doing the right thing, even at cost to oneself—without any of the Anglophile trappings or snobbishness. All the more symbolic, then, was his demise on July 8, 2008, just two months before the markets plunged into turmoil. When he died, it was as though a whole era in American finance died along with him.

Templeton was born in 1912 in Winchester, Tennessee, a small hamlet later revitalized by the Tennessee Valley Authority. He seems to have inherited the distinctively Protestant conflation of moral probity and the profit motive from his father, a small-time entrepreneur and lawyer who ran a cotton-gin business after World War I. Harvey Templeton would buy up plots of land around Winchester, and if the tenant farmers living on them were hard up, he’d let them continue on free of charge. His ethically minded son appears to have taken due note of the charitable imperative.

It was hard not to, in those days. Especially in Tennessee, where a single bad harvest was often all that separated keeping afloat from going under. As it turned out, the Templetons themselves soon felt the sting of necessity: when the Depression hit, young John received a letter saying his father would no longer be able to finance his stint at Yale, then in its second semester. Undaunted, the future billionaire turned to poker to pay his tuition.

After graduation, Templeton decided he wanted to step outside the confines of the usual and see the world. So he booked deck passage on a series of steamers and wandered around Europe and the Middle East, sleeping out of doors and eating dry bread to save money—and occasionally hitting up the casinos to replenish his funds. His mother at one point gave her son up for dead. The 24-year-old was, however, very much alive, and the international outlook sown during his peregrinations would later bear rich fruit.

For in those days, globalization as a concept didn’t exist. Much of the world was still carved up into empires, usually under European control, rendering the notion of emerging markets a moot point. But Templeton saw opportunities everywhere he went. Many years later, that change of vision would be the key to his empire.

First, however, he had to amass some capital. So after marrying Judith Folk, an unconventional Nashville belle and Wellesley grad, and furnishing a sixth-story walkup in Manhattan with cast-off furniture picked up on street corners, he set about becoming an investor. From the start, he distinguished himself with his against-the-grain way of doing things. In September 1939, with the markets in free fall from the impending war, he borrowed $10,000 to buy up 100 shares of every stock worth $1 or less on the New York Stock Exchange. Of the 104 companies purchased, 100 turned a profit, sometimes sizeable, when industry picked up again after 1945. His motto, he said, was to wait till the moment of “maximum pessimism,” and then pounce.

Still, times were lean before those rewards started to roll in. When Templeton bought an investment company in 1944, he had only five families as clients and didn’t see a dime’s worth of profit for three years. Eventually, though, his buy-and-hold approach began to pay off, to the point where the family could at last take a vacation, to Nassau in the Bahamas. There, tragically, Judith was killed in a freak motor-scooter accident. She was just 39.

Judith’s death was, according to the family, a loss from which Templeton never fully recovered. He did remarry, however, seven years later, this time to Irene Reynolds Butler. During this time, too, his business underwent a profound transition, with the launching in 1954 of the Templeton Growth Fund, a pioneer in the now-ubiquitous field of globally diversified mutual funds. With seed capital of some $13 million dollars and offices in an attic above a police station in the Bahamas, it was among the first firms to invest in Japan and Korea, which in those days fell under the heading of emerging markets. To manage the fund, Templeton hired John Galbraith, a gifted analyst whose trust in his boss was so implicit that he worked for him until his retirement in the 1990s without ever signing a written contract.

It wasn’t long before Templeton Growth really started to pay dividends. Galbraith’s skillful management and Templeton’s own vision made their funds top performers: $10,000 invested with them in 1954 would have grown to $2 million in 1992, when Templeton sold his stake to the Franklin Group—an annualized average return of 14.5%. Money magazine called Templeton “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century.”

As Templeton’s fortune grew, so did his philanthropy. A longtime elder of his Presbyterian church, he believed in a non-dogmatic, open-ended Christianity that allowed for dialogue with both science and other faiths. Such eschewals of doctrine were (and remain) common in much mainline Protestantism, and ultimately led him to set up the Templeton Foundation, a kind of spiritual think tank that gave grants to scholars interested in exploring the sacred implications of secular disciplines ranging from psychology to physics. He deliberately set the cash value of its top award, the Templeton Prize, at $1 million as an implicit critique of the Nobel, which ignored “life’s spiritual dimension.” Templeton would ultimately give away some $1 billion to charity, and even renounced his American citizenship to funnel the $100 million in taxes that he would otherwise have paid upon the sale of Templeton Growth towards more charitable ends. In 1987, Queen Elizabeth knighted him for his philanthropic efforts; twenty years later, Time named him as one of its 100 Most Influential People for the same reason.

Templeton maintained his spiritual serenity and curiosity well into old age, but he also voiced increasing skepticism regarding the barbarization of America’s economy. He pulled out of the dotcom and Nasdaq tech-stocks market in early 2000, just before the crash, and in 2003 predicted the collapse of the housing sector, which he saw as fueled by irrationalism and greed. More trenchantly, he wrote a private memorandum in 2005 predicting that the world would soon be plunged into financial chaos, and later publicly pronounced the stock market “broken.” For the man who all his life never flew first class and who made his own notebooks from scrap computer paper, dismay and consternation were the only possible reaction at finding the Depression-era values on which he’d been raised jettisoned in favor of the new Wall Street’s crassness and institutionalized grift. As though to signal the starkness of the change in the America he renounced, the truth of Templeton’s gloomy prophecies was already apparent when he died in late 2008.

The days of investors like John Templeton are done. The values he embodied are fast being replaced by, or transformed into, the self-seeking and self-promoting of the new careerist meritocracy. In the future, his life will serve as a reminder of another, older America, where money wasn’t everything and character was ultimately an individual’s greatest asset.

That’s all for now. I’ll have more for you in the next issue of CWS Market Review.

– Eddy

Morning News: May 26, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on May 26th, 2026 at 7:15 am

Global Oil Price Rises After U.S. Strikes in Iran Cloud Peace Deal

How To Think About The Iran War — And What It Means for Oil and Stocks

Iran Signals Potential Easing of Internet Blackout Amid US Talks

The World’s Most Extreme Housing Boom Is Now Roiling an Entire Economy

How the Iran War Put Housing’s Spring Thaw Back on Ice

Italy’s Meloni Says EU Bureaucrats Stifle Economic Growth

Lula’s Stimulus Machine Is Steamrolling Brazil’s Sky-High Interest Rates

The Bond Investor Who Stuck with Venezuela Is Now Reaping Reward

Treasury Curve Flashes Higher-for-Longer Warning Under Warsh

New Fed Chair Warsh Is Doomed to Break with His Campaign Pitch

The End of the Bull Market Is Nigh

These Underdogs Are a Big Reason Why S&P 500 Profit Growth Is the Fastest in Nearly 5 Years

Jeff Bezos Missed an Historic Chance to Correct a National Debt Falsehood

Student Loan Repayments Are Being Overhauled. What Borrowers Should Know

These AI Gurus Are Charging Wall Street Banks $25,000 a Day

Bankers’ Love of Claude AI Carries a Heavy Price

China Expands Travel Curbs to Top AI Talent at Private Firms

As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words

The Homesteading Mother of 6 Taking On Big Tech

Honeywell-Backed Quantinuum Seeks to Raise $1.05 Billion in IPO

SpaceX’s IPO Is a Bet Gravity Doesn’t Apply to Elon Musk

SpaceX Writes Tesla’s Future in the Stars

Ferrari Is Finally Going Electric. Will the Purists Buy It?

BP Fires Board Chair on Governance Concerns Only Months Into Job

Lilly to Buy Three Vaccine Developers for Up to $3.8 Billion

America Can’t Produce Enough Honey

Delta’s Flight Cancellations Have Mounted, and It’s Staffing Up to Improve

The World Cup Problem That Could Disrupt All of Sports

How Barnes & Noble Became Private Equity’s Most Radical Retail Experiment

The Iran War Is Coming for Your Diet Coke

In India, You Can Get Milk Delivered Faster Than It Takes to Make Coffee

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Morning News: May 25, 2026
Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on May 25th, 2026 at 7:08 am

The Risks of Iran’s Threat to Control the Strait of Hormuz

Oil Slides as Ships Move Toward Hormuz

Saudi Crown Prince MBS Scores Unexpected Wins During Iran War

Swiss Trader Had Lucrative Role Getting Iraqi Oil Through Hormuz

Gold Gains as Prospects of Iran Deal Temper Inflation Concerns

Dubious Chinese Carbon Projects Expose Depth of European Market’s Flaws

China Traders Rush for Exit After Cross-Border Flow Crackdown

Italian Stocks Hit First Record in 26 Years Led by Energy, Chips

The Stock Market Has Never Been So Good When People Have Felt So Bad

“Monetarism” Is Confirmation That Economists Never Got The Joke

US Treasury Rout Tests Washington’s Tolerance for Higher Borrowing Costs

Strategists Warn Yields to Stay High Even If Iran War Ends

Trump’s 3,711 Trades Point to Multiple Stock-Market Strategies

Congress Has a Housing Bill. Trump Has Other Priorities

This Summer’s Teen Job Market Is the Toughest in Decades

Hyperscaler Debt Flood Brings Derivatives Bonanza

To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’

Inside the British Lab Hunting for Dangers Lurking in A.I.

Pope Says AI Should Be Disarmed to Avoid Dominating Humanity

Japan’s an AI Laggard. That Could Be Its Edge

SoftBank Shares Hit Record With Lift From OpenAI IPO Hopes

Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s Right-Hand Man Who’s Unleashing AI at Meta

$140,000 E.V.s and Heritage Gold: The Rise of China’s Homegrown Luxury Market

A Western Auto Giant Found a Lifeline: Working With a Chinese Upstart

U.S. Towns Paid for Teachers and Cops to Use Weight-Loss Drugs. It Broke the Bank

Toshifumi Suzuki, Who Transformed 7-Eleven Chain, Dies at 93

Why the Dream of the Feel-Good Millennial Brand Didn’t Last

Chanel’s Mega Dividend Brings Owners’ Windfall to $21 Billion

How Art Auctions Choreographed a $2.5 Billion Comeback

Boxing at the Pyramids Shows Egypt’s Big-Ticket Tourism Push

‘Mandalorian and Grogu’ Tops Box Office as Disney Bets on ‘Star Wars’ Revival

Reality TV Is Getting Too Dark to Watch

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