📈 Gold hits all-time highs

Today’s market performance 🏆️

S&P 500: +0.42% 📈
Nasdaq 100: +0.53% 📈
Dow 30: +0.14% 📈
Russell 2000: +1.27% 📈

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TOP STORY
📈 Gold hits all-time highs

Gold prices skyrocketed to new all-time highs on Tuesday, finally giving me a reason to use that secret bunk… actually, never mind.

Let’s get into why gold has been going up so much.

1) As always, war and geopolitical uncertainty are gold’s best friends.

As the saying goes, ‘When the world is falling apart, buy more gold.’ I think.

2) Another reason is the newly established BRICS alliance, which has invested heavily in gold over the past year.

BRICS, for the geopolitical noobs, is a coalition of five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

The group’s primary goal is to gain more power by challenging Western-led institutions like the IMF and World Bank. 

These institutions, or the immense power of Western countries, are why BRICS wants to create their own currency, ideally backed by gold instead of the U.S. dollar.

• Why? Because the U.S. can’t control gold the way it does the dollar, which has dominated global trade for over a century.

• If international trade stops relying on the U.S. dollar, it could be catastrophic for the West.

BRICS is bad news for the U.S. and the European Union, especially as they continue gaining more power and popularity.

Earlier this week, 47 new countries expressed their interest in joining the BRICS alliance.

Nearly all aspiring BRICS members are developing nations looking to end their dependence on the U.S. dollar—does this sound familiar?

Hating the U.S. dollar really seems to be a part of the application to join the alliance.

Joining BRICS makes sense for these countries as it can boost their struggling economies and businesses, but the de-dollarization initiative terrifies America and Europe.

POLITICS
🇺🇸 Donald Trump wants Elon Musk in his Presidential Cabinet

In a bizarre moment earlier this week, former President Donald Trump said he would offer Elon Musk a Cabinet position or an advisory role in his administration if he wins the election this November.

Strange, for sure, but I definitely see the vision.

First, Musk is loyal to Trump.

• Musk, with his over 195 million X followers, endorsed Trump just minutes after the infamous assassination attempt that came inches away from taking Trump's life.

• Second, as the CEO of multiple billion-dollar businesses, Musk knows a thing or two about leading and advising.

• This could be extremely valuable to Trump, who, as a savvy businessman himself, would likely prefer advice from a fellow entrepreneur over a run-of-the-mill political advisor.

Plus, having a man worth over $240 billion as an ally can’t hurt.

It comes at an awkward time, though: 

• In the same interview, Trump told reporters he’d love to have Musk; he also said he might eliminate the $7,500 EV tax credit for certain new electric vehicles, which could hurt Tesla, the largest U.S. EV maker.

• Trump still needs to win for any of this actually to happen, but it’s pretty cool to imagine a world where Elon Musk holds a freaking Cabinet position.

Is there anything this man won’t have accomplished when it’s all said and done?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🤳 The war on AI deepfakes

Last week, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced a fascinating lawsuit.

• Chiu is going after the owners of 16 of the most-visited nonconsensual deepfake porn websites. Talk about doing god’s work.

• The suit, which has been filed on behalf of the State of California, alleges that the unnamed companies involved violated state and federal laws prohibiting deepfake porn, revenge porn, and child porn.

Sickening, absolutely sickening.

Why haven’t these despicable sites been named so people can help take them down?

Well, that might be the craziest part: the names of these companies haven’t been revealed to prevent even more traffic to their sites.

Nuts!

Deepfakes have quickly become one of the biggest concerns for those against AI today, and understandably so.

Yes, AI might take some jobs from humans in the future, but the issue today is that the rise of image-generating AI models has enabled predators to exploit people at the touch of a few buttons.

• With image generators, anyone, anywhere, can create these horrific graphics using a picture or video of someone.

• Victims obviously cannot give consent to something they're unaware of, meaning they may not even know it’s happened until it’s already blasted on the internet.

• Only a couple of months ago, X-rated pictures of Taylor Swift were circulating on X before eventually being taken down.

And that’s just one of thousands of celebrities, not to mention the victims we don’t know about.

This war on deep fakes has only just begun, but it has already attracted the attention of major players who will (hopefully) stop at nothing to try to contain this phenomenon.