For how a rural Georgia community cut its opioid death rate in half, see Sociology below.
The price of West Texas Intermediate is around $73 a barrel. WTI is the U.S. benchmark. Yes, oil prices have jumped because of the war between Israel and Iran, but $73 oil is not expensive on a historical basis.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/wti_crude_oil_spot_price
In fact, prices around $75 a barrel are the sweet spot for consumers and producers. Gasoline is reasonably priced with $75 oil, but prices are sufficiently high for companies to bring oil out of ground.
The Dallas Fed does quarterly surveys of the oil and gas sectors.
The data says when WTI is above $65 a barrel, it is profitable to drill new wells. Moreover, current production will only be shut in if prices drop below $40 a barrel.
https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/Documents/research/energy/energycharts.p
Today, gasoline costs about $3.13 a gallon on average. A year ago, a gallon cost $3.45. Admittedly, prices at the pump, as yet, do not reflect the recent pop in oil prices because of the war. But gasoline prices are highly unlikely to jump more than 5-10% over coming weeks. Prices below $3.75 a gallon will not impose a significant drag on the economy.
But the combination of Trump’s tariffs and higher gas prices are another hurdle for households and the economy.
On the other hand, Trump’s retreat on expelling illegals is positive for economic growth. See below.
The economy will slow but not slip into a recession.
Water resources are increasingly important for economic and national security. Both China and India face severe shortages of water in large areas of their respective countries.
Generally, the media hates AI because AI is energy intensive and because AI will dislocate employment markets.
But as with the mechanization of the U.S. agricultural sector around 1900, new jobs will replace old jobs as the AI revolution accelerates.
The Luddites were wrong in the early 1800s. Modern day Luddites are wrong today.
President Trump pauses immigration raids on farms, hotels and eateries.
The scale of President Trump’s mass deportations is hurting industries and constituents he does not want to lose. See DealBook, NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/us/politics/trump-immigration-raids-workers.html
Vaccine breakthrough targets pancreatic cancer. Scientists at Case Western Reserve University have come up with a promising new nano-vaccine that wiped out pancreatic cancer cells in preclinical tests.
It targets pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma—the most common and deadliest type of pancreatic cancer—by using tiny nanoparticles to trigger the immune system to go after the tumors. In over half the cases, the vaccine completely eliminated the cancer.
This major step could lead to both treatment and prevention for this tough-to-beat disease. With $3 million in funding, the team is now gearing up for more testing and, hopefully, human trials down the line.
https://newatlas.com/cancer/pancreatic-cancer-vaccine/ and from James Pethokoukis.
I wonder what Robert Kennedy thinks, actually I don’t give sweet FA about his views.
The New York Times is disseminating misinformation about power bills. The paper says that residents of Georgia pay among the highest electricity rates in the country. This is not true.
Hawaii, California, Alaska and Connecticut have among the country’s highest electricity rates.
Residents of Georgia do face slightly elevated electricity prices but that is a function of Georgia’s population distribution, highly rural outside of Greater Atlanta. It costs more to bring electricity to rural communities. Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, excluding inland lakes, think Michigan.
Markets and Stocks
I like the market. The war between Israel and Iran will not spin out of control. Israel approaches air supremacy over Iran. Israel will destroy Iran’s electricity infrastructure, no electricity no enriched uranium and no economy. Also it gets hot in large parts of Iran in the summer. Bummer about no electricity.
The leaders of Iran have sworn to exterminate the Jewish state and the Jewish people generally.
My year end target remains 6,300. I see this minor pullback as a great buying opportunity.
Demand for Nvidia’s highest performance semiconductor platforms is accelerating. See TSMC.
Micron is up 70% from the early April lows. I think MU goes a lot higher. MU is next generation AI memory chip, the HBM 4.
The AI revolution is in the first inning.
IBM, GLW, ORCL, CSCO, DELL and MU are all great investments, as are TSMC, ASML, AVGO, Nvidia and the hyper scalers. There are numerous ways to invest in AI.
Pepsi and KO are also great investments.
And I will keep banging the table on EQT.
This is a powerful market.
Bespoke Investment Group calculates that the S&P 500′s average performance on days after a daily decline is the highest in at least 33 years, narrowly surpassing the 2020 average. See CNBC
The pullback on Friday kept excessive exuberance in check, after all the market is not cheap at 21x forward earnings.
From here the S&P 500 will grind higher.
The Week Ahead
The Federal Open Market Committee meets tomorrow and Wednesday. The Fed won’t cut interest rates. What will be more important are Fed Chair Powell comments in his post meeting presentation.
On Tuesday we will get May retail sales.
U.S. financial markets are closed on Thursday.
IBM charts a bold quantum future. IBM has unveiled its ambitious roadmap to build the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer — IBM Quantum Starling — by 2029. IBM’s vice president of Quantum Jay Gambetta stated about production:
I feel more comfortable than ever that a fault-tolerant quantum computer will exist before the end of this decade. We are putting error-correction in detail on our roadmap because we believe now we’ve solved all the scientific challenges.
By tackling the long-standing challenge of quantum error correction, IBM aims to deliver a machine with 20,000 times the power of today’s quantum systems. While other tech players, like Microsoft and Google, are also racing toward fault-tolerance, IBM’s detailed plan hopes to spark developer interest in quantum algorithms. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-has-a-roadmap-to-a-fault-tolerant-quantum-computer-by-2029-91645d73 and from James Pethokoukis
A critical shortage of skilled engineers is creating major bottlenecks in electrification projects across developed countries. Aging workforces, low birth rates, restrictive immigration policies, and rising retirements have left the US, UK, and Europe struggling to fill millions of new engineering roles. To adapt, companies are retraining workers from unrelated industries and investing in training academies. See James Pethokoukis.
Sociology
From the Wall Street Journal.
When Officer Chelsea Johnston came across a wanted felon one evening in May, Johnston jerked her cruiser in front of him, sprinted after him and tackled him to the ground. Still catching her breath, Johnston motioned for someone to step out of the cruiser: Joy Bogese.
“Thank God,” the man said. “It’s you.”
Bogese, who served time for financial crimes that fed a heroin addiction, now spends many of her evenings in a police cruiser as a recovery specialist helping people with addiction get into treatment. The man asked Bogese to help him get into a drug-treatment program at the local jail, where Bogese occasionally facilitates groups.
She is part of a growing effort in Chesterfield County’s fight against addiction. In this county of nearly 400,000, overdose deaths have dropped by half in a single year—about double the decline of the rest of the country—to levels seen before the crisis began in 2015.
The precipitous drops have astounded public officials and health-policy experts, who have traveled across the country in an attempt to learn the formula and replicate it. Governors, members of Congress and sheriffs from as far away as Alaska have all come through, along with an acting U.S. drug czar.
Local law enforcement hired people such as Bogese to ride along on calls. A new high school opened for students recovering from drug use. The library became a major distributor of Narcan to reverse overdoses. Emergency-medical-services workers began providing treatment drugs to overdose victims right in the ambulance. And the county jail offered to become a default treatment center, even for people who haven’t committed a crime.
Leonard once thought his job was to keep drugs out of the jail. But that started to change in 2016, when he saw an increase in incarcerated people with addiction problems.
The jail had no way to treat them, and inmates would end up getting released back into the community. They would use, overdose and die.
“I realized I was part of the problem,” Leonard said. He googled “addiction treatment” and found John Shinholser, an ex-Marine who runs a recovery center 45 minutes from the jail. Leonard asked how he could get a treatment program at his jail.
“If you’re serious, you’ll be in my office in an hour,” Shinholser said and hung up.
Leonard got in his cruiser and sped to Shinholser’s office. Shinholser rattled off all the things he thought Leonard could be doing at the jail.
They started the program that evening.
“Helping Addicts Recover Progressively,” or HARP, started with people in recovery visiting the jail a few hours a day, offering educational information to inmates on the recovery process and potential treatments. They called it a “hope shot.”
Then the jail began to offer vivitrol and naltrexone, two drug treatments that block opioid receptors in the brain to prevent the high associated with opioids. But people were still dying. Two years later, suboxone and Sublocade—a long-acting injectable medication—were introduced to treat opioid-use disorder. Both drugs tamp down cravings while protecting against overdose.
The program evolved well beyond anything Leonard could have imagined. Around 4,000 people have been in the program. But the results didn’t happen right away. It took years of sustained cooperation among all the community stakeholders to finally effect a reversal in deaths—something some communities might struggle to pull off.
Part of the problem for communities trying to replicate Chesterfield’s success is that it is hard to know what is helping. Epidemiologists say some of the reduction in overdose deaths is a natural progression of fentanyl being a part of the drug supply long enough to increase people’s tolerance to it. The most vulnerable people have already died. The ones who remain are doing a better job figuring out how to survive.
At the same time, funding from Medicaid expansion, county government and opioid abatement dollars is difficult to replicate in many states. President Trump has proposed slashing funding for Narcan distribution and training.
The HARP program isn’t a traditional 12-step program. When they gather in circles in designated cell blocks for HARP, each person introduces themselves as “in recovery,” not as addicts. Some inmates are on medication. Some aren’t. Some are tapping into their higher power. Others aren’t.
Grown men cry in front of each other and offer support. Women who spent more than two decades in and out of jail learn the neuroscience of addiction. The inmates lead the program and create their own rules. But the program is supplemented by counselors and outside programming.
When Kerri Rhodes walked into the men’s cell block, she was received with cheers and applause. The clinical director of the behavioral and mental health division at the Chesterfield County sheriff’s office has been instrumental in offering interventions that tackle a key part of recovery: trauma.
When detoxed inmates are released and start using again, they are 40 times as likely as the general population to die of an overdose, according to a 2018 study in the American Journal of Public Health.
This is another stage where Chesterfield’s communitywide approach kicks in, helping Leake pull together a transition plan. She would be picked up by an outside recovery-housing agency. Leake had been given a dose of Sublocade and appointments to receive two more. She would meet with other HARP alumni every Tuesday.
“This is life-changing for me,” Leake said into Rhodes’s ear.
Within 24 hours of leaving jail, Leake said she had everything she needed. HARP staff check on her every day. Leake has kept up with the gratitude journaling and other tools she learned in HARP to stay on track.
https://www.wsj.com/health/drug-overdose-dropping-virginia-411f9397