Emilyvuong

🚨 Trump Wants to Extend Iran Campaign for a Few More Weeks
Trump is reportedly in favor of continuing military operations in Iran for approximately 3-4 additional weeks, as the conflict has yet to achieve its strategic objectives.
Some notable details:
- Following a call with G7 leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged: "Nobody really knows what Trump wants from this war."
- The U.S. and Israel have yet to agree on a definition of "victory" in the campaign.
- Approximately 450 kg of Iran's highly enriched uranium remain uncontrolled, with nuclear risks unresolved.
Trump stated:

🟠 Washington reopens the trade front
📌The Donald Trump administration has launched a Section 301 trade investigation into 16 major partners, including China, the EU, Japan, India, Mexico, and Vietnam.
📌 The investigation focuses on excess production capacity—especially in major export industries. If the findings are unfavorable, Washington could impose new tariffs as early as summer.
📌 This move is seen as a way for the U.S. to reassert trade pressure after the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the global tariff program previously proposed by the Trump administration.

🚨 Iran escalates attacks on ships in Hormuz
📌 After being condemned at the United Nations Security Council for attacks on commercial ships and Gulf countries, Iran is believed to have intensified military activities, with 4 ships attacked within just 8 hours.
📌 Iran's tactics usually do not involve direct naval combat but rather harassment of commercial and logistics ships, aiming to turn Hormuz into a high-risk area. As a result, insurance premiums, transportation costs, and oil prices all increase significantly.
📌 This move may be intended to draw the United States Navy into a dire

U.S. February CPI: As Good as Expected
Many Wall Street desks view this month's CPI data as quite positive:
- Core CPI +0.2% MoM, down from the previous month
- Housing continues to cool down
- Shelter 2.96% YoY (lowest since 2021)
- Rent +0.1% MoM (lowest in 4 years)
- Service inflation slowed from 0.295% to 0.204%
-> The disinflation trend continues, giving the Fed more room to discuss interest rate cuts this year.
However, there are still cautious opinions:
- Headline +0.3% MoM remains quite high
- Supercore CPI +0.35% MoM remains above the Fed's desired level
- Services remain the main sou

📍 US employment data continues to be revised downward
📌 For 13 consecutive months, US employment figures have been revised downward after updates. A total of approximately 710,000 jobs have been removed from the initial statistics, averaging about 55,000 jobs per month.
📌 In particular, December was revised downward by an additional 17,000 jobs, marking the fifth decline in the last 9 months following data updates.
📌 Clearly, the picture of the US labor market has been overly optimistic. If this trend continues, pressure on the Fed could increase, as the health of the labor market is much

📍 The Fed's balance sheet is swelling again
In February, the Fed's balance sheet increased by $42B, reaching $6.63T — the second-highest level since August.
Since the launch of the RMP program in December, the Fed has injected approximately $93B liquidity into the system. Most of this comes from purchasing T-bills around $40B/month.
Meanwhile, MBS continues to shrink, now at $2.01T, which is 27% below the peak when the Fed was gradually allowing assets to mature.
Notably, the structure of the balance sheet is changing. The Fed is gradually reducing MBS holdings but increasing T-bill

Chinese exports to Vietnam and Vietnamese exports to the United States have increased significantly.
Vietnam continues to be a transit point for Chinese goods to the United States to avoid tariffs.

Hormuz is still under blockade, but daring ships are beginning to cross
The Strait of Hormuz remains nearly closed, but more and more ships are turning off AIS and passing through the area.
If Iran activates strong radar control, defense positions could be detected and attacked by American aircraft. Therefore, completely blocking this transportation route becomes more difficult.
Meanwhile, Venezuela's oil production has increased to about 1.16 million barrels per day.
-> Supply lines are beginning to reappear, and oil prices have sharply fallen to the 8x range.

📍Oracle discrepancy causes Aave to liquidate nearly $27M
positions. A rare incident just occurred on #Aave when about $27M wstETH positions were liquidated in a short period. The cause was not market volatility but the way the system prices collateral assets.
On Aave, each loan is monitored by the Health Factor. When the value of the collateral drops below the safe threshold, the position will be liquidated to protect the liquidity pool.
This incident involved $wstETH, a token representing $ETH staking from Lido. Due to a parameter update error in the @CAPO@ risk oracle, the wstETH exc

🚨 The U.S. Department of the Treasury plans to buy back $15B government bonds today — this is the largest buyback in U.S. Treasury history 👀

A volatile year ahead for risk assets

🚨 AI has not immediately impacted job elimination at present, but the potential is very large
- Red indicates the reality that AI is being practically used in various industries
- Green indicates the theoretical capabilities AI could achieve
The gap between these two areas is extremely large. The technology already has the capability, but businesses and the labor market are still absorbing it very slowly.
- Programming-related industries: ~74.5% of tasks can be supported or automated by AI
- Customer service: ~70.1%
- Data entry: ~67.1%
Currently, there is no wave of mass layoffs due to AI, b

🚨 Morgan Stanley loan $500M to Bitcoin miner #Bitcoin
Morgan Stanley has just provided a $500M loan to Core Scientific, with the potential to expand up to $1B if needed.
The loan has a 364-day term, with an interest rate of SOFR + 2.5%, and is used to develop data centers for AI—including purchasing equipment, land, electrical infrastructure, and building new data centers.
This move reflects a trend where miners are shifting from Bitcoin mining to AI/HPC infrastructure to leverage existing power sources and data centers for GPU and AI compute.
Core Scientific is currently restructuring its

🚨 Sau Blue Owl, BlackRock limits withdrawals from private credit funds
BlackRock has recently limited withdrawals from a private credit fund after investors requested to withdraw approximately $1.2B, but the fund only allowed about half to be withdrawn.
This move indicates that liquidity pressures are emerging in the private credit sector—where funds lend directly to businesses rather than through banks.
Previously, Blue Owl Capital and Blackstone also implemented similar mechanisms. Private credit has now become a $1T+ market, but most assets in these funds are difficult to liquidate.
Clearl

The FED's interest rate cut in March remains around 4.5%

Berkshire Hathaway begins repurchasing shares for the first time since 2024.
New CEO Greg Abel also personally bought $15M Berkshire shares.

📍BlackRock has just wiped out a loan in the private credit sector, raising concerns about the risks of private credit.
The $25M loan to Infinite Commerce Holdings was written down from $100 million to $0 by BlackRock in just three months. Previously, this debt was recorded almost fully on the books.
Infinite Commerce is an Amazon aggregator—a model that involves acquiring multiple Amazon stores and consolidating them into a retail ecosystem. This model boomed during COVID due to the surge in e-commerce and extremely low capital costs. But as interest rates rose and consumer demand weakened,

📍The US will impose a 15% global tariff this week. Bessent said the US will impose a 15% global import tariff this week. This rate increases from the current 10%. If nothing changes, US tariffs will revert to the previous "reciprocal tariffs" level in about 5 months, around August.

Many analysts believe that Trump will try to end the conflict quickly because he does not want oil prices to spike and trigger inflation in the US.
In reality, oil prices in the US are less affected by the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz.
With the world's top oil refining technology, the US is a major exporter of light (high-value) crude oil and an importer of heavy (very cheap) crude oil, with the largest production globally, reaching 13.7 million barrels per day.
The two largest crude oil exporters to the US alone account for many times the volume of other countries combined (Unit