Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes

— US Treasury doubles bond buyback program to $4 billion minimum (from $2 billion cap) as 30-year yields hit multi-decade highs; yields erase intervention gains within 24 hours, signaling more backstops to come.

— OpenAI pauses post-training of frontier models citing AI safety and cyber capability concerns, while Alibaba's open-source Qwen model reaches near-frontier performance and runs on a local laptop.

— Moderna and Merck's personalized cancer vaccine clears late-stage trial milestone for melanoma treatment, with both stocks rallying on results.

— New York City considers grants to local grocers to offset competition from Mayor Adams's government-run grocery stores, funded by tax dollars.

— Hosts discuss broken-window fallacy, unintended economic consequences, and pervasive policy distortions across Treasury markets, AI competition, and municipal governance.

— Monitor Treasury yield curve control as primary signal for systemic liquidity injection and further intervention; erasing of policy effects suggests larger bailouts are forthcoming.

— Track open-source AI model development (e.g., Qwen locally) as cost-reduction driver for frontier lab inference and token usage, potentially affecting AI firm valuations and capital structure.

— Be cautious of policy-driven market distortions (NYC grocery subsidies, CVS shrinkage, broken-window effects) that create cascading unintended consequences; these often precede broader fiscal dysfunction and currency devaluation at state and federal level.