The Macro Paper

Global Capital Markets Simplified: News, Research, Every Macro Headwind.

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

🚨 CHINA'S AI PLAYBOOK ISN'T TO BEAT OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC.

IT'S TO MAKE THEM IRRELEVANT BY MAKING INTELLIGENCE FREE.

Chinese labs are giving away frontier-level models for free.

Zhipu's GLM-5 already beats Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on key benchmarks.

DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi round out 4 of the top 5 open-weight models globally, all released under open licenses anyone can use commercially.

The real weapon isn't the models, it's the cost to run them.

Chinese provinces like Gansu, Guizhou, and Inner Mongolia are cutting data center power bills by up to 50%.

DeepSeek trained its R1 model for around $6 million, compared to roughly $100 million for GPT-4.

The remaining blocker is chips. US export controls still cut China off from Nvidia's best hardware.

But Zhipu already trained a full frontier model entirely on Huawei's Ascend chips, no Nvidia involved. Huawei's next-gen Atlas 950 cluster, launching late 2026, claims 6.7 times the compute of Nvidia's planned NVL144 systems.

If Huawei closes the chip gap while China keeps giving away free, near frontier models running on subsidized power.

The entire business model OpenAI and Anthropic are built on, charging hundreds of billions in aggregate revenue for access to intelligence, stops making sense.

Why pay premium prices for marginal capability gains when a free alternative running on cheap compute gets you 90% of the way there.

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

BREAKING: $MU has now crashed over 17% from its recent high, wiping out roughly $247 billion in market value.

Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix are now facing a federal lawsuit accusing them of fixing DRAM prices during the AI boom.

The lawsuit claims the companies restricted memory supply while prices surged across the industry.

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

🚨 THE NEXT GLOBAL MARKET SHOCK MAY COME FROM JAPAN, NOT THE FED.

USD/JPY just hit its highest level in 40 years.

That means the yen has never been this weak against the dollar in four decades.

The problem?

A weak yen keeps pushing inflation higher in Japan while the BOJ is already struggling to control prices.

And historically, when Japan intervenes to support the yen, it dumps US dollars and sells US Treasuries.

That pushes US bond yields higher.

Higher yields pressure stocks, crypto, gold, and almost every risk asset.

At the same time, a stronger yen could trigger another unwind of the yen carry trade, forcing leveraged investors to sell assets globally to repay yen debt.

The next 3-4 months could become extremely volatile if Japan steps in aggressively here.

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

$780,000,000,000 wiped out from the US stock market in the last 30 minutes as $SPX drops 1.05% from day highs.

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

$760,000,000,000 added to the US stock at market open as the US and Iran agreed to meet tomorrow.

Tech stocks are leading the pump, as every stock in the Mag 7 is in the green.

Nvidia: +1.45%
Google: +2.80%
Microsoft: +1.65%
Meta: +3.2%
Amazon: +3.7%
Tesla: +3.31%
Apple: +0.5%

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

$760,000,000,000 added to the US stock at market open as the US and Iran agreed to meet tomorrow.

Tech stocks are leading the pump, as every stock in the Mag 7 is in the green.

Nvidia: +1.45%
Google: +2.80%
Microsoft: +1.65%
Meta: +3.2%
Amazon: +3.7%
Tesla: +3.31%
Apple: +0.5%

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

🚨 THE BIGGEST BITCOIN BUYER IS NOW A SELLER

Michael Saylor's Strategy just launched the "Bitcoin Monetization Program," which allows them to sell $BTC to fund operations.

Under this program, Strategy may sell up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin.

This'll be used:

- To build the cash reserve for paying a dividend to $STRC holders
- To replenish the cash reserve
- To repurchase MSTR or STRC shares

The sale won't happen at once to minimize any large impact on the price of Bitcoin.

But that's not the worry.

For years, markets have seen Strategy as the company that only buys Bitcoin.

When they sold just $2.5M in BTC last month, the price crashed 20%.

On top of this, ETFs are also selling at their fastest pace since inception.

Since 2024, Saylor and ETFs have been the biggest driving force behind the BTC rally.

The question is, what'll happen if the 2 largest buyers become the largest sellers?