🎵 Blue Ridge Mountains, Secondary Sanctions🎵

A gaggle of bureaucrats can rarely manage to agree on saying anything in unison even once, let alone 34 times, so when the world’s top finance ministers concluded their G20 Asheville retreat with a short statement highlighting the phrase “economic growth” with that frequency, we’d suggest there may be some value in taking them at their word. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summarized quite bluntly for the group in the room: the world is awash in debt, Plan A is to grow our way out, and there is no Plan B. Growth on this scale has to come from somewhere, and as we’ve noted in prior weeks, the Trump administration seems to have decided it will come from compute, hence a new DOJ brief supporting OpenAI’s training pipeline as a matter of national security and President Trump’s warning that towns opposing data centers will end up “backwards and poor.” In turn, compute on that scale needs credit, hence Secretary Bessent’s G20 comments about Dodd-Frank strangling Main Street and the need for an uptick in private credit creation (accompanied by vigorous nods from the CEOs of Goldman and JPMorgan, invited to a seat next to Bessent at the G20 Big Kids’ Table for the first time), as well as another vintage Truth Social rant arguing for the US to have the lowest interest rates in the world. And both compute and credit need cheap energy, hence the Venezuela deal that reportedly gives the US a guaranteed fifth of the country’s production at cost and a ROFR on the rest through a private company partially owned by the Department of War, the kind of industrial policy that the US hasn’t run in over a century.

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