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Today’s Agenda

Florida Runs on Foreigners

Sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I’ll look up “Florida Man” stories to cheer me up. Today’s selection did not disappoint: “Florida man shoots neighbor’s pregnant cow five times after it wandered onto his property.” “Florida man who fishes for sharks uses drone to save teenage girl from drowning in rip current.” “Florida man breaks Del Taco window after he’s denied tacos at closing time.”

There’s something oddly comforting about the fact that somewhere, some guy from Boca Raton is having a way worse day than me! But after reading Jonathan Levin’s latest column, I was reminded that a lot of Florida men aren’t from Florida at all. They’re immigrants.

Florida is a tapestry of foreigners. There are working-class immigrants, like the Venezuelan nationals likely to lose their Temporary Protected Status after the Supreme Court decision on Monday. There are the international investors with mega yachts who snatch up real estate assets with cold, hard cash. And there are the business owners who account for a third of the state’s entrepreneurs.

Without foreign investment, the state’s economy — and its housing market, in particular — will struggle to stay afloat. “President Donald Trump’s immigration policies may already be having a chilling effect on this market, as my colleagues Augusta Saraiva, Michael Smith and Anna J. Kaiser reported this month,” Jonathan writes. “Beyond just scaring off undocumented immigrants, the Bloomberg report said that the Trump administration is also cutting off Federal Housing Administration mortgages to buyers with temporary immigration status.”

Patricia Lopez says it’s hard to believe that less than a year ago, Trump — a Florida man himself — was singing a completely different tune on the campaign trail: “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he told the All-In podcast last June.

“If only Candidate Trump could get a meeting with President Trump,” she writes. “Maybe he could convince him that giving green cards to graduates who wish to stay in the US, and contribute their talents to the country that educated them, is a great deal — for America and for Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile in Memphis …

I can’t claim to know what it takes to build a computer that’s big enough to power an artificial intelligence startup. The closest thing I’ve come to that is the camera obscura I made in college out of an old Amazon box. But I imagine it requires a lot of work and moving parts and permissions.

Which is why it surprised me to hear that Elon Musk is building “a massive supercomputer housed in a plant powered by methane gas-burning turbines that emit an undisclosed amount of pollutants into a disadvantaged community” in Memphis. And, wait ’til you hear the kicker: Mary Ellen Klas says Musk found a loophole that allows him to do this with no environmental permits.

“According to the local utility provider, Memphis Light, Gas and Water, Musk’s xAI facility will need an estimated 1 million gallons of water a day and up to 150 megawatts of electricity — more than is currently available in the city,” Mary Ellen writes. What’s worse, “Southwest Memphis is home to Boxtown, a historically Black community with higher rates of cancer and asthma and a lower life expectancy than other parts of the city,” and the engines powering the project emit ozone-depleting nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde into the air.

How is any of this legal?? A lot of residents are wondering just that, especially as Musk embarks on building a second lair to power Grok. Read the whole thing.

Bonus AI Reading:

  • Opening up Apple’s AI to third-party developers increases the likelihood that the iPhone will get a killer AI app before its competitors. — Dave Lee
  • AI might eventually take over research analysts’ jobs, but first it will take over the worst parts. — Matt Levine

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“A Europe Situation”

So much for “I’ll end the war on day one!” After a two-hour phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, Trump determined that the war in Ukraine is “a European situation” and rid himself of the matter. Unless Congress forces Trump to intervene, Marc Champion says the US president “can leave the long, thankless task of mediating a peace settlement to the pope, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or whomever wants to take it on.”

“The US president didn’t fail to end this war, because he never tried,” Marc argues (free read). While a Nobel Peace Prize would have been nice, unity was never the true goal of his bromance with Putin: “His focus was from day one to achieve a reset with Russia that would deliver an economic bounty to the US.”

Putin is now free to drag out negotiations and “Ukrainians have little choice but to fight on,” Marc writes. “Without the future ability to defend itself, their country will no longer exist as a sovereign state. As far as Moscow is concerned, Ukraine is a Frankenstein nation, patched together from others.” Europe’s leaders now face a choice: Do they cobble together funds to help Ukraine make ends meet? Or do they leave it defenseless? Trump made his bed, but the Old World doesn’t have to lie in it.

Bonus Russia Reading: Centrists are winning elections again, thanks to US chaos and Russian aggression — but not for long. — Marc Champion

Telltale Charts

Crypto!! We haven’t talked about it in a while. It’s still very much a thing — see: this Senate bill, this crime wave and this memecoin dinner — but Andy Mukherjee says central bankers are having a hard time navigating this uncertain chapter of monetary policy history. Could Bitcoin eventually throw their beige book out the window? If it does, will the Fed become irrelevant? A new report assessing whether central banks can use their monetary tools with tokens — dubbed “Project Pine” — sheds some light on the subject. “The Fed needn’t fear a tokenized world,” writes Aaron Brown. Andy agrees, but warns that the transition might get messy: “As the use of tokens increases, demand for bank reserves could become volatile and hard to predict.”

If you thought Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff talk was gonna spark a shipping logistics nightmare à la the LOL Surprise Doll Scare of 2021, Thomas Black says you’re sorely mistaken. Sure, some retailers will rush to get their goods from China before the 90-day pause is up, but “the feared tsunami [of goods] may turn out to be more of a minor swell,” he writes. “Even if there were a strong surge of shipments, it won’t cause anywhere near the kind of prolonged chaos at ports and warehouses that retailers suffered during the Covid pandemic. Consumers are in no mood nor in any kind of special circumstances, such as being locked down with government stimulus checks burning a hole in their pockets, to spend willy-nilly.”

Further Reading

Europe must end its quest to grab a piece of London’s financial derivatives business. — Bloomberg’s editorial board

Between tariffs and the House budget bill, expectations of lower borrowing costs this year are rapidly diminishing. — Robert Burgess

Banning Bangladesh’s oldest party is not the step toward stable democracy investors were hoping for. — Mihir Sharma

Luxury shoppers want the classics when times are tough, which is great news for Cartier and Van Cleef. — Andrea Felsted

Hong Kong is getting back on its feet again — providing finance for Chinese businesses going global. — Shuli Ren

Markets may have snapped back, but Moody’s nailed a broader truth — that US debt has surged. — John Authers

ICYMI

Microsoft-backed Builder.ai filed for insolvency.

The UN is warning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza.

Representative LaMonica McIver was charged with assaulting ICE agents.

The hidden health risks of over-the-counter UTI drugs.

Louisiana is hunting down inmates after a massive jailbreak.

Kickers

Everything is slop. (h/t Beth Kowitt)

She makes $16 million a year selling sweatshirts.

Will the Knicks-Pacers rivalry top 1993?

Carrie Bradshaw’s favorite Choos are back.

Champagne is … healthy? Hmmmm.

Notes: Please send high heels and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net.

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