Will the Iran War Be the Catalyst That Finally Supercharges the Green Energy Transition?

“In fact, the the most rate sensitive of the big four banks. Now over the past six months, stocks kind of been all over the place. It's been climbing since March, then had a pretty steep drop off in March. What really has been driving that? Well, a lot of it has been what's been driving the overall banking sector. They have recently had upgrades from an analyst perspective. And out of earnings, they have been performing pretty decently because every segment has grown revenue, grown earnings, deposits have grown, loans, all growing in q one. They had 9,300,000,000 in capital return to shareholders in a single quarter. But at the same time, they're also the most levered of the big four. Each 25 basis point Fed cut reduces Bank of America's NII by an estimated $225,000,000.”

“The bottom line, the nineteen seventy three oil shock planted the seed for the renewable energy industry. The twenty twenty two Russia Ukraine shock, we out watered it. The twenty twenty six Iran war may be the event that forces it to grow. On the next Invest Talk, we'll look into this story, China's calculated play, how Beijing is turning the Iran war into an economic advantage.”

“Business investment surged 10.4%, the strongest growth in nearly three years, driven almost entirely by AI spending on equipment and intellectual property. One common economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics estimated that AI investment accounted for roughly half of overall GDP growth in the first quarter. Think about that. One category of spending is responsible for an entire percentage point of economic growth. That is how dominant the AI build out has become as an economic engine.”

“As of March 31, US publicly held debt reached 31,265,000,000,000, while GDP over the preceding year was 31,216,000,000,000. For those of you math buffs out there, that puts the debt to GDP ratio at 100.2%. The US hasn't finished a fiscal year with debt above 100% of GDP since 1946. It briefly crossed the threshold during the pandemic in 2020 when GDP temporarily shrank and the government borrowed massively, but the ratio fell back to below that as the stimulus ended as growth resumed and as inflation boosted nominal GDP. This time, the drivers are structural.”

“Lululemon is a couple things. It is, first and foremost, a premium athletic apparel brand, so your yoga pants, your run to train apparel, your footwear, your accessories. They have 811 stores with 65% of the revenue from The Americas and growing business in China and international markets. But they're also a brand in crisis story. They have a leadership vacuum. They have a proxy fight with their founder, margin collapse, and they're seeing North American deterioration all happening simultaneously. And that's why since May, these companies fallen dramatically. I think that a lot of the things that have benefited Lulu of the early days of athleisure was the fact that in a lot of ways, they were the only game in town. A lot of that's changed. For that reason, for now at least, I would stay away.”