Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Main Street and Wall Street are ignoring the Strait of Hormuz oil crisis. That complacency has a poor historical track record. According to the IEA’s oil market report of May 13, roughly 12.8 million barrels per day are missing from global supply, with Gulf countries shipping about 14.4 million barrels per day less than before […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - The stock market is about to face a $4 trillion test it has never seen before. Three companies — SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — are preparing to go public in the coming months, together seeking roughly $4 trillion in new capital from investors. To put that in perspective, the total of all U.S. IPOs from […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - When Xi Jinping invoked the Thucydides Trap at the Trump-Xi summit in May 2026, he was doing more than referencing ancient history. He was signaling something about the present. The Thucydides Trap theory comes from Graham Allison’s 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Allison, a professor at Harvard, draws on the […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - China’s long history of interest in Taiwan stems from its view that the island is part of a single Chinese nation, a belief rooted in centuries of cultural and political ties. That perspective has shaped Beijing’s policies since the mid twentieth century and continues to influence every diplomatic exchange today. It is against this backdrop […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Greg Abel stepped onto the Omaha stage last weekend facing a question that has lingered ever since Warren Buffett named him successor: can anyone really follow the Oracle? What struck me is that Abel didn’t try to mimic Buffett’s folksy charm or marathon‑style showmanship. Instead, he leaned into who he is — a measured operator […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - A number of clients have been asking the same question lately: What gives? Why does the stock market keep rising? It’s a fair question. The S&P 500 continues to levitate, seemingly indifferent to geopolitical tension, sticky inflation, and the growing possibility of a U.S. recession. And while it’s generally considered bad form in finance to invoke 1999—rather […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Some analysts argue that there may be an unexpected beneficiary of the U.S.–Iran conflict — and it may not be the United States. A number of geopolitical observers suggest that China could emerge from the crisis with strengthened economic, diplomatic, and strategic influence. The U.S., meanwhile, may face new constraints, while other major players such […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Remember the investors who saw what nobody else could see in 2007? There may be another moment like that unfolding right now — this time in Hong Kong. The Hang Seng Tech index is dirt cheap today and the companies leading it are doing well in their businesses even as they trade at extremely low […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Iran’s Peace Demands: A Long Road Ahead President Donald J. Trump announced that negotiations to end the war with Iran would be based on a 10-point proposal he described as “workable.” Within hours, Iranian state media outlet IRNA released Tehran’s own list of demands — and Trump erupted on Truth Social, calling the list “fake,” […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - SpaceX’s confidential IPO filing has jolted markets in a way few listings ever do. The scale, timing, and ambition of the deal signal not just a major capital‑markets event, but a test of how far public investors are willing to stretch for a company that has already outgrown the private sphere. Even with sparse disclosures, […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Canada’s Pipeline Gamble May Be Paying Off When Canada bought the Trans Mountain pipeline from U.S. giant Kinder Morgan in 2018 for $4.5 billion, skeptics were plentiful. Kinder Morgan had walked away from a planned expansion, unwilling to absorb the financial risk. Ottawa stepped in — and the expansion ultimately cost $34 billion, far above […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Canada has entered a new demographic and economic phase—one defined not by the rapid population expansion of the post‑pandemic years, but by a sharp and deliberate cooling. Statistics Canada’s latest estimates show the country’s population fell by more than 100,000 people in 2025, the first annual decline since records began in the 1940s. The drop […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Trump’s Iran Gamble Could Trigger an Oil Shock 20 percent. That is the share of global oil supply that normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow shipping channel between Iran and Oman. If Iran keeps that chokepoint blocked, the consequences for inflation, interest rates and the global economy could be severe. The recent […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Trump Heads to Beijing With a Weak Hand When Donald Trump meets Xi Jinping in Beijing later this month, the setting will look like a diplomatic summit. But the real story is leverage—and right now China appears to have more of it. The three-day meeting comes as tensions rise over U.S. military action in Iran. […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - War, What Is It Good For? “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” This 1970 lyric from The Temptations captured the anger of the Vietnam era. But in financial markets, war is good for one thing: inflation. A February 2026 academic study examining 300 years of U.S. and U.K. data reaches a blunt conclusion: government bonds […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - The United States is spending hundreds of billions to win the AI race. China is trying to win by spending far less. Nvidia’s high-performance chips and multi-billion-dollar data centers have become the foundation of America’s AI strategy. The largest U.S. technology companies are committing extraordinary capital — potentially as much as 500 billion dollars this […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - The Gordie Howe International Bridge isn’t even open yet, and it’s already stirring up political drama from Windsor to Washington. This week, President Donald Trump lashed out on Truth Social, threatening to block the bridge’s opening — even though he personally supported the project during his first term and once called for its speedy completion. So why […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Technology investors are discovering that nuance cuts both ways. Markets are no longer reacting simply to whether a company is “in AI” or “not in AI”, they’re reacting to how AI reshapes business models. And this week, that shift in mindset produced some of the sharpest rotations we’ve seen in years. Earnings season made the divide painfully […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Palantir Technologies is one of the most valuable companies in the U.S. stock market—and one of the least transparent. Investors are clearly smitten. The shares are up 133% in the past year, pushing Palantir’s market capitalization to roughly US$400 billion. Yet annual revenues are about US$4 billion. That implies a valuation of 100 times sales, a level rarely seen outside […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - High Risk, High Reward: Carney’s China Gamble Prime Minister Mark Carney has defied Washington by striking a sweeping trade deal with China—slashing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and dismantling long-standing barriers on agricultural exports. Under the agreement, China will cut import levies on Canadian canola, canola meal, lobster, crab, and peas. In return, Canada will sharply reduce […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Sunday night delivered an extraordinary development: the U.S. Federal Reserve was served grand jury subpoenas suggesting potential criminal charges against Chair Jerome Powell. The allegation is that Powell misled Congress last year regarding the refurbishment of Federal Reserve buildings. The reaction across the policy and financial community was swift. Former Fed governors, central bank leaders […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Venezuela, Trump, and the Oil Scare for Canada Venezuelans woke up Saturday to dramatic headlines stating that Nicolás Maduro had been removed and that the United States was now calling the shots in Caracas. President Trump justified the move on narcoterrorism charges, but his public remarks focused overwhelmingly on one thing: oil. Specifically, Trump argued […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - The Fed’s 2026 Outlook: Recessionary Signal or Inflationary Pause? The Federal Reserve recently cut the official interest rate by a modest 25 basis points. Faced with general economic weakness, rising unemployment, and the delayed inflationary impact of tariffs, the central bank is walking a tightrope. Will we see more aggressive cuts in 2026? That depends […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - The Shifting Dynamics of the Yen Carry Trade The central thesis is that the decades-long assumption of near-zero Japanese interest rates and a weak Japanese yen (JPY)—the two pillars of the yen carry trade—are now collapsing. 1. The Historical Carry Trade Setup Borrowing: Traders borrowed vast sums in Japanese yen at a near-zero interest rate. Investing: They converted the borrowed […]

Hilliard's Weekend Notebook - Alberta and Ottawa’s sweeping new energy accord, signed by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith, is being framed as a nation‑building effort Alberta and Ottawa’s sweeping new energy accord, signed by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith, is being framed as a nation‑building effort to position Canada as a global energy […]