finance

The economic ripple effects of the Iran conflict are pushing mortgage rates higher, adding new pressure to the U.S. housing market even as conditions tilt in favor of buyers, the Associated Press reported Saturday.

Rates on a typical 30-year mortgage

The Writers Guild of America and major entertainment companies have reached a provisional agreement on a new contract, easing fears of another industry-wide disruption, according to media reports.

The deal, which still requires ratification by union members, would run for four years, slightly

Anthropic (ANTHRO) has acquired Coefficient Bio, a biotech focused on developing AI models for biological research, for slightly more than $400M, according to The Information and a report from Eric Newcomer.

Coefficient Bio, comprising about 10 people, is set to join Anthropic’s (

Wall Street ended the trading week higher, as investors balanced a stronger-than-expected March jobs report with rising geopolitical tensions that pushed oil prices sharply higher. For the week, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite popped 4.4%, while the S&P jumped +3.3%, and the blue-chip Dow added +2.9%.

Nearly six years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the underlying inflation process in advanced economies has fundamentally shifted, even as headline consumer price inflation has declined substantially from its 2021–2022 peaks.

According to the Federal Reserve in a

On paper, the case is easy to make. The world’s largest proven oil reserves, a sector being reopened to private capital, sanctions that are no longer absolute but conditional, negotiable. There are new laws, new guarantees, new language around arbitration and contract security. For the first time in years, there is something that looks like a framework, perhaps even a government that exercises absolute power over the country while operating under US tutelage.

And yet, the expected cash tsunami remains elusive. This is because the people who would actually have to write the checks are not asking whether the opportunity is real, but whether it will still exist by the time it matters. No amount of lobbying or PR trips can compensate for almost 30 years of arbitrary abuses. After all, Delcy Rodríguez is not the first chavista “president” to court the private sector or offer guarantees.

The problem is not political risk in the abstract. It is that the legal environment investors are being asked to trust has not meaningfully changed. Judges remain largely unchecked, and contracts are still only as strong as the political relationships behind them. The closest thing to a guarantee is not an institution, but proximity: “I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows Delcy.”

That may be enough to get a deal signed. It is not enough to guarantee the kind of long-term, multibillion-dollar investment Delcy needs.

Retroactive illegitimacy

There is also the question of who is actually making those commitments. The current governing arrangement, even with partial recognition from Washington, remains the residue of a deeply contested and improvised system. Its authority may be tolerated, even engaged with, but it is not settled. That matters, because any agreement reached today carries the risk of being revisited tomorrow, not necessarily by a hostile regime, but by future jurists attempting to unwind the ambiguities of the present. In other words, the risk is not just expropriation, but retroactive illegitimacy.

And then there is the country itself. The initial shock of alignment with the United States has created a perception of stabilization, but that perception rests on thin ground. Discontent is not ideological, it is material. Power rationing continues to shape daily life. The bolívar remains structurally weak, its periodic stabilizations undone by recurring cycles of depreciation. For most Venezuelans, the promised improvement in living conditions, expected to follow from these inflows, has yet to materialize in any meaningful way.

What investors are being asked to underwrite, then, is not just a country in transition, but a society that has not yet felt that transition in any tangible sense. That gap matters, because it is in that gap where pressure builds.

Contingency is not change

And even if one is willing to accept all of that, there is the question few are prepared to answer directly: what happens in two years?

The current opening in Venezuela is not just tied to internal dynamics. It is deeply contingent on a specific political configuration in Washington. A different administration, with different priorities, could decide that Venezuela no longer warrants the same level of attention, resources, or political cover. The approach taken by Donald Trump has been unusually direct. There is no guarantee that what follows will resemble it.

That matters more than investors tend to admit. Because what is being built today is not a self-sustaining system, but a politically supported one.

Under those conditions, the risk is not simply policy reversal. It is systemic drift. The incentives that currently bind the government to external actors can weaken, and with them, the logic that sustains the present arrangement. That does not require a dramatic rupture. Only time.

There is a way to make sense of this, and it requires going back, not forward. In structural terms, Venezuela today resembles 2017. Not in its specifics, but in the nature of the moment. Back then, the country hovered between sustained pressure that could force an opening, and a system learning in real time how to absorb that pressure and consolidate power instead. For a time, it was not clear which way it would go.

Until it became clear that the system had adapted faster than the pressure could escalate. What looked like a moment of transition became, instead, a lesson in survival. That is the part of 2017 that tends to be forgotten, not the protests, but the outcome.

What makes the current moment difficult to read is that it carries a similar ambiguity. There is an opening, but it is partial. There is pressure, but it is uneven. There are signals that point in different directions at once. Engagement with external actors, selective liberalization, a degree of flexibility that did not exist a few years ago. But none of that resolves the underlying question.

Is this the beginning of a transition, or another iteration of adaptation?

For investors, that distinction is more than academic. It determines whether the current opening represents a structural shift, or simply a temporary configuration that will be absorbed, reworked, and eventually reversed. Venezuela has already shown that it can look like it is about to change, while in fact learning how not to. Ultimately, this question is likely to be the one that holds meaningful investment back.

Unchecked power

There is, underlying many of these conversations, a quieter assumption that rarely gets stated outright. That under the right conditions, a system like Venezuela’s can be made to work. That a centralized authority, aligned with external actors and supported by technocratic management, can deliver stability without resolving deeper political contradictions. The long-held fantasy of the benevolent strongman.

It is an attractive idea. It is also one that Venezuela has consistently disproven.

The problem is not simply that power is concentrated, but that it is unconstrained. In such a system, predictability does not come from strength, but from rules. When those rules are absent, even proximity to power stops being a reliable safeguard.

The recent arrest of Wilmer Ruperti is a reminder of that. Ruperti was not an outsider testing the limits of the system. He was deeply embedded within it. If anything, he represents the kind of relationship many investors assume can mitigate risk.

And yet, under conditions of unchecked authority, those relationships can be redefined overnight.

In practice, this often produces the opposite of what investors expect, a system where decisions are centralized but not necessarily stable, and where alliances are strong until they are not.

Under these conditions, Venezuela does not favor all investors equally. It favors those who can operate within political constraints, tolerate legal ambiguity, and adjust quickly if those constraints shift. It is less hospitable to actors whose models depend on enforceable contracts, long time horizons, and institutional continuity.

Venezuela is not uninvestable, but it is not becoming normal either.

What is taking shape is something more ambiguous. It is open enough to transact and stable enough to operate in the short term, but uncertain in ways that are harder to measure. The legal framework remains contingent, the political authority behind it is still contested, and the external backing that sustains it is, by definition, temporary.

That does not eliminate opportunity, it defines it. Under those conditions, the question is not whether Venezuela works, but for whom, for how long, and under what assumptions about continuity that may not survive the life of the investment.

In that sense, the risk is not only that things go wrong, but that the terms under which they work are never fully settled.

A SpaceX IPO promises to be one of the biggest Wall Street events of the year, with several investment banks lining up to help raise tens of billions to fund Musk’s ambitions to establish a base on the Moon, place data centres the size of several football pitches into orbit, and possibly one day send a human to Mars.

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The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the confidential registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission publicly.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Exactly how much SpaceX plans to raise has not been disclosed, but the figure is reportedly as high as $75bn (€65bn). At that level, the offering would easily surpass the $29bn (€25bn) raised by Saudi Aramco in its 2019 IPO.

The offering, which could come as early as June, may value SpaceX at around $1.5 trillion — nearly double its valuation in December, when some minority shareholders sold their stakes, according to research firm PitchBook, prior to an acquisition that increased the company’s size.

Musk currently owns about 42% of SpaceX, according to PitchBook, although that figure will change after the IPO as new shares are issued. In any case, he is likely to surpass the trillion-dollar mark, as he is already close. Forbes estimates Musk’s net worth at roughly $823 billion.

In addition to building reusable rockets to launch astronauts and equipment into orbit, SpaceX owns Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company. The company has also recently brought under its umbrella two other Musk businesses: social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and artificial intelligence firm xAI, in a controversial transaction, as both the buyer and seller were controlled by him.

SpaceX has become the leading commercial launch company in its industry, sending payloads into orbit for customers worldwide. However, it has also benefited from significant public funding, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest, given that Musk was a major donor to President Donald Trump’s campaign and remains a strong supporter.

Over the past five years, SpaceX has secured $6bn (€5.2bn) in contracts from NASA, the Department of Defense and other US government agencies, according to USAspending.gov.

Among current SpaceX investors is Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son, who owns shares through 1789 Capital. The venture capital firm made him a partner shortly after his father won a second term and has since invested in federal contractors seeking government business.

The White House and Trump have repeatedly denied any conflicts of interest between his role as president and his family’s business dealings.