The Banks Are Booming. Dimon Is Watching the Fault Lines.

Zero Hedge published a useful checklist before this week's bank earnings: ignore the headline beat and watch charge-offs, delinquencies, reserves, deposits, loan growth, and net interest margins.

The first wave of reports does not show a consumer credit crack.

JPMorgan reported $21.2 billion of net income. That figure included a $4.6 billion gain related to Visa shares and another $1 billion of gains on certain equity investments. Excluding those items, the bank earned approximately $16.9 billion.

Credit metrics remained firm. JPMorgan's provision for credit losses fell 12% from a year ago to $2.5 billion. Its card charge-off rate declined to 3.34% from 3.40%. Thirty-day card delinquencies fell to 1.91% from 2.06%. Average loans rose 10% and average deposits rose 7%.

Bank of America reported $9.1 billion of net income. Its credit-loss provision fell to $1.4 billion. Net charge-offs declined. Its card charge-off rate improved to 3.55% from 3.82%, and management says early and late-stage card delinquencies improved for a fifth consecutive quarter. Average deposits exceeded $2 trillion and average loans rose 8%.

Wells Fargo reported $6.4 billion of net income. Net charge-offs fell 11% from a year ago. Average deposits rose 10%. Average loans rose 12%.

The major banks look healthy. Credit quality is holding. Deposits are growing. Trading and investment-banking desks are producing enormous revenue.

Jamie Dimon still sees the fault lines moving below the surface.

“Several risks are shifting below the surface like tectonic plates, including geopolitical tensions and wars, sticky inflation, large global fiscal deficits and elevated asset prices,” he wrote in JPMorgan's release.

The patient looks healthy on the table. The building is sitting on a fault line.

AI Is Hitting the Power Wall and the Capital Wall

New York became the first state to impose a statewide moratorium on large new data centers. Reuters reports that the one-year pause applies to projects requiring 50 megawatts or more. State environmental regulators will stop issuing discretionary permits that have not already been deemed complete while New York develops consistent standards for environmental impact, power use, water use, and local costs.

The New York Public News Network says hospitals, research centers, and educational facilities are exempt. Governor Kathy Hochul also wants large operators to pay more for energy or provide their own generation.

This is where the AI boom stops looking like a software story. Fifty megawatts is a physical footprint. It touches land, water, substations, transmission lines, local ratepayers, and tax subsidies. Once a governor decides which computational loads deserve access to power, grid allocation becomes political.

Bitcoin miners should pay close attention. The precedent will not stay neatly confined to AI.

The capital wall is showing up too. In a letter to investors, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said clients shifted quarterly capital spending toward servers, storage, and memory to secure supply-constrained hardware before expected price increases. That reprioritization delayed software deals. IBM also admitted that its own execution failures contributed to the shortfall.

The company reported $17.2 billion of preliminary quarterly revenue, up 1%. Software revenue rose 5%. Infrastructure revenue fell 7%.

The message is bigger than IBM. AI-era hardware scarcity is forcing enterprises to choose. Secure the physical capacity now. Buy more software later.

Then there is Reflection. Reuters reports that the open-model startup signed a deal worth more than $1 billion for Nebius compute capacity and access to Nvidia's latest chips. That follows another large compute agreement with SpaceX.

Open intelligence may eventually be distributed widely. Producing frontier intelligence is becoming one of the most expensive industrial projects on earth.

We wrote last week that AI's power appetite would squeeze bitcoin miners and rewrite grid economics. New York just turned that constraint into statewide policy.

The Tariff State Refunded More Than It Collected

The June Monthly Treasury Statement is a reminder that one soft CPI report does nothing to fix the federal balance sheet.

Treasury reported:

• $495.8 billion of June receipts.
• $616.1 billion of June outlays.
• A $120.3 billion June deficit.
• A $1.367 trillion fiscal-year deficit through June.
• $827 billion of fiscal-year net interest expense.
• $713 billion of national-defense outlays.

Gross interest on Treasury securities has already exceeded $1 trillion this fiscal year.

The customs line is even more absurd. June produced $23.6 billion of gross customs collections and $49.2 billion of customs refunds. Net customs receipts were negative $25.6 billion.

Tariff revenue reversed. Interest kept compounding.

A monetary system built on debt needs tomorrow to be larger than today. Larger tax receipts. Larger labor forces. Larger asset values. Larger nominal output. The interest bill does not care whether those assumptions survive.

Strategy Sold Stock and Bought Cash

Strategy's July 13 filing says the company sold 4,818,781 common shares between July 6 and July 12, generating approximately $466.7 million of net proceeds.

It acquired zero bitcoin during the week.

Strategy still holds 843,775 BTC acquired for an aggregate purchase cost of $63.69 billion, or $75,476 per bitcoin. It also increased its dollar reserve to $3 billion.

The reserve supports preferred-stock dividends and interest payments. That is the part of the treasury-company model that gets less attention. Bitcoin sits on the asset side. Preferred dividends and debt interest arrive as dollar obligations on a schedule.

The bigger the capital stack becomes, the more cash the machine needs to service itself through volatile markets.

Strategy did not abandon its bitcoin thesis. It built a larger servicing layer around it.

Most of America Is Pittsburgh Now

Aaron Renn's essay “Most of America Is Pittsburgh Now” gives the fiscal story a human foundation.

Renn argues that demographic decline has moved from a regional anomaly to a national condition. More than 2,000 U.S. counties now record more deaths than births, according to his analysis of recent Census estimates. Falling births and the aging of the Baby Boom generation are turning a distant forecast into something communities can see in school enrollment, churches, housing demand, labor markets, and local identity.

The consequences reach far beyond fertility statistics.

Fewer children become fewer workers. Fewer workers support more retirees. A smaller productive base inherits larger entitlement promises and a larger federal debt. Institutions built for expansion have to learn how to operate through contraction.

Renn also raises harder cultural questions. Can communities reproduce the habits, beliefs, and bonds that made them coherent? Can a country preserve a shared identity through generational turnover and population change? Can families recover the confidence to build for a future they expect to inhabit?

The monetary system assumes perpetual growth. Demographic inversion makes that assumption harder to maintain.

256 Foundation Is Breaking the Whole-Miner Upgrade Cycle

On July 13, Michael Schmid showed a mixed-hashboard bitcoin miner running S19j and S19k boards on one controller. Schmid calls it the world's first mixed-hashboard miner. Treat that as the team's claim, not a settled industry fact.

The demonstrated machine used one control board, three hashboards, two chip generations, approximately 280 chips, and roughly 110 TH/s. The boards hashed simultaneously at their own frequencies on Mujina, the foundation's public open-source mining firmware.

The important part is not the prototype photo. It is the hardware lifecycle it points toward. A miner should not become trash because one board fails or because one board generation is no longer the most efficient. Upgrade one board. Salvage the working boards from a dead unit. Keep efficient boards running as baseload and bring older boards online only when surplus power makes sense.

That is a real break from the manufacturer upgrade cycle. Traditional ASICs force miners to buy, service, and retire a three-board appliance as one closed unit. A mixed-hashboard machine turns the ASIC into a repairable system with different break-even prices inside the same chassis.

The 256 Foundation's own project page lists both Mujina and Libre Board, its open-source control board, as active parts of an open mining stack. Its public code base is active. This is not a PowerPoint promise.

It is still a prototype, not a broadly available retail product or a guarantee that home mining becomes easy. But it is exactly the type of work that makes bitcoin mining more repairable, modular, and accessible over time. The next fight for bitcoin decentralization is not just about hashrate. It is also about who controls the machines that produce it.