Houthis seize 3 Bab-el-Mandeb points as 129 Saudi strikes hit Yemen

source:

[1] Yemen Situation Escalates Abruptly! Houthis and Saudi Arabia Exchange Attacks; Iran: We Are "Not in a State of War" with Saudi Arabia (https://wallstreetcn.com/articles/3781644 ...)[2] Iran-backed Houthis seize strategic Mayun Island: Can they hold it? (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran-bac ...)[3] Yemen Tilts Toward Full-Scale War as Saudi-Houthi Clashes Escalate (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/world/midd ...)[4] Yemen's Houthi Rebels Say Saudi-Backed Forces Launched Airstrikes, and Other Key Mideast News (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/20 ...)[5] Here's What We Know About the Houthi Drone and Missile Attacks on Saudi Arabia (https://townhall.com/news/amy-curtis/2026/09/ ...)

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Sep 13 2026, 10:02

Prudential targets $3B capital boost in insurance footprint overhaul

Prudential Financial plans to cut the number of insurance and retirement markets it operates in by roughly half, a retreat Chairman and CEO Andy Sullivan said will free "well north of $3 billion" in capital for global retirement, asset management and select protection businesses. "Our goal, as we've said, is to be category leaders in those businesses," Sullivan said at a company event, describing the geographic reduction as a way to concentrate talent, capital and investment rather than a simple cost exercise. The Newark, New Jersey-based insurer, which trades on the NYSE under PRU, currently operates in more than a dozen markets. Alongside the exits, it targets $750 million in cost reductions by the end of 2028, with a first $150 million tranche due by the end of 2027. The savings come from four buckets: fewer management layers, technology spending on infrastructure consolidation, automation and artificial intelligence, expanded global capability centers in Ireland and India, and operational changes across all businesses including Japan. The company also wants PGIM, its $1.3 trillion asset-management arm, to lift its share of Prudential's earnings from about 12% to 25% over roughly five years. Sullivan said about half of that gain should come organically, mainly in direct lending, asset-backed finance and other private-credit capabilities, with acquisitions supplying the rest. Asset-management margins are targeted at 30% and eventually above that level, while Prudential aims for a further 150-basis-point cut in insurance operating expense ratios over three years. ## Exits and deals run in parallel, not in sequence Sullivan said Prudential is pursuing divestitures and acquisitions at the same time. Beyond asset-sale proceeds, the company could use reinsurance — third-party arrangements or its affiliated Prismic platform — to generate capital for transactions. Suspending share repurchases and issuing equity remain available but face high thresholds, he said. The acquisition net has widened beyond small and mid-sized asset-management deals. Prudential is evaluating targets in asset management, group insurance and a selective build-out of U.K. retirement capabilities. Within asset management it is looking at specialized buys such as infrastructure equity and broader multi-asset platforms that could deliver revenue and expense savings, with private alternatives and private credit of particular interest. In group insurance, it sees room to add dental and vision products and to reach employers below its current 1,000-employee sweet spot. In the U.K., Prudential recently announced a partnership involving Standard Life and CVC to enter the bulk purchase annuity market. PGIM's shift from a multi-manager structure to a single integrated platform was driven by client demand for fewer, broader relationships, Sullivan said. Only about 10% of PGIM clients currently use more than one asset class, which he called a significant cross-selling opportunity. The integrated distribution operation has already sold cross-asset mandates, and Prudential has not lost distribution talent it wanted to keep. He expects more than $150 million of costs to come out of the asset-management business over time, as previously separate units had carried duplicative leadership and functional roles. Public equities remain a drag. Sullivan said PGIM's Jennison business has seen systemic outflows, though earnings have been supported by equity-market performance. Outside public equities, management is encouraged by flow opportunities and mandate wins. ## Japan remediation runs in phases over 12 to 18 months Prudential remains on track with remediation at Prudential of Japan after halting sales to address sales-practice and conduct issues, but the precise date for resuming sales depends partly on talks with regulators and other stakeholders. Sullivan said the reopening will happen in phases over 12 to 18 months to test new controls, and that the company believes it is performing better than the assumptions already baked into its outlook. At Gibraltar, Prudential's other major Japanese life operation, Sullivan said the company found no systemic issues. Prudential contacted more than 6 million customers in Japan during the review, and responses pointed to fewer problems than management had expected. He described Japan as a long-term retirement opportunity given the country's wealth, longevity and retirement-income needs, adding that higher interest rates are helping Prudential offer more attractive yen-denominated products and should provide a natural portfolio tailwind over time. The objective, Sullivan said, is top-quartile earnings growth over a five-year strategic period, excluding the runoff of variable annuities, driven by global retirement, global asset management and select protection. For holders, the plan's value hinges on whether the $3 billion in released capital is redeployed above Prudential's cost of capital rather than returned, since Sullivan said every dollar deployed must clear that bar. The $750 million savings target is the nearer-term proof point: the first $150 million tranche lands by the end of 2027, and the pace of divestiture announcements between now and then will show whether the footprint reduction is moving on schedule. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Sep 13 2026, 04:12

Oracle's GPU fleet ran 97.9% full after adding 300,000 chips

Oracle installed more than 300,000 GPUs in the three months through August and still could not keep a spare one on the shelf. Fleet-wide utilization across its AI infrastructure ended the quarter at 97.9%, the company said on its fiscal first-quarter 2027 earnings call, a figure that describes demand outrunning supply rather than a business running out of customers. "Of all the GPUs that came up for renewal in Q1, that capacity was renewed or resold at a 20% premium to prior contracts," co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said on the call. "The majority of those GPUs are 4 years or older." That second sentence is the one that matters for Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Computing hardware depreciates. Four-year-old accelerators predate the Blackwell generation entirely, and in a market with adequate supply they would rent at a discount to new capacity. Oracle's fleet repriced 20% higher instead. ## 850 megawatts, and a fleet that stayed full Oracle delivered 850 megawatts of AI capacity in the quarter, containing more than 300,000 GPUs — nearly triple the prior quarter's total and 73% of everything it delivered across all of fiscal 2026. Its Abilene, Texas campus, which serves OpenAI, took delivery of 131,000 GPUs on its own. The utilization number is the one to hold onto because of what it survived. A fleet can run near-full for a trivial reason: its owner stopped buying. Oracle's ran at 97.9% while capacity arrived at a record pace, which means the hardware was absorbed as fast as it could be racked. Cloud infrastructure revenue rose 121% year over year to $7.4 billion, accelerating from 93% in the fiscal fourth quarter and 77% for fiscal 2026 as a whole — the ninth consecutive quarter of acceleration. Customers are also committing ahead of the hardware. Oracle booked more than $30 billion of new AI contracts in the quarter, and remaining performance obligations — contracted revenue not yet delivered — reached $664 billion, up $209 billion year over year. Most of that growth came through prepayments or bring-your-own-hardware arrangements, which shifts some of the capital burden onto customers while Oracle builds. The scale of the build is visible in the cash flow statement. Operating cash flow hit a record $23 billion, but capital expenditure of $28 billion left free cash flow at negative $5 billion. Oracle raised $20 billion in an at-the-market equity issuance during the quarter and maintained full-year capex guidance of $90 billion to $95 billion, with net cash capex expected to stay at or below $70 billion after customer prepayments and supplier financing. ## Nvidia's own numbers point the same way Oracle's disclosure is customer-side evidence, and it has limits. The 97.9% figure covers one operator's fleet, not the industry's, and Oracle does not break it out by chipmaker. Oracle also presells most of that capacity under long-term contracts, so a full fleet partly reflects commitments signed quarters earlier. The seller's numbers, though, run in the same direction. Nvidia reported revenue of $96.2 billion for its fiscal second quarter of 2027, up 106% year over year, with data center revenue accounting for $89 billion of that. Chief financial officer Colette Kress told analysts to expect roughly 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028 and said supply, not demand, would cap the figure. She also said Nvidia compute was running fully utilized across every cloud it serves. Kress put a number on what each gigawatt of installed capacity is worth to Nvidia. A gigawatt of Hopper systems represented about $18 billion of revenue opportunity, Blackwell runs about $25 billion, and the new Vera Rubin platform is about $40 billion. Customers paying a premium to keep four-year-old chips are unlikely to balk at those step-ups. The arithmetic also fits at the system level. Nvidia's $89 billion data center quarter works out to roughly 3.5 gigawatts of systems at Kress's figures. Oracle alone took delivery of 850 megawatts — about a quarter of that pace. The comparison is loose, since megawatts include power and cooling beyond the chips and Oracle buys from more than one vendor, but it shows how much of the build a single customer can absorb. ## What the market is paying for Nvidia shares traded around $218 as of Sept. 12, roughly 8% below their 52-week high of $236.54, at about 28 times earnings. Micron (NASDAQ: MU) fell 4.9% and Lam Research (NASDAQ: LRCX) dropped 5.7% in the same session, while CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) lost 6.1% — a reminder that the AI infrastructure trade is not moving in one direction on any given day even as the underlying capacity data stays tight. The bull case rests on a simple asymmetry. If Oracle's four-year-old GPUs keep repricing higher, the constraint on Nvidia is manufacturing capacity, not appetite, and the $40 billion-per-gigawatt Vera Rubin economics have room to run. If a future quarter shows that same vintage of hardware renewing at a discount, the shortage is easing — and that will show up in Oracle's renewal premium before it shows up in Nvidia's order book. Oracle holds its AI World event Oct. 25-28 in Las Vegas, with an investor day on Oct. 28, where management is expected to detail product strategy and long-term financial targets. The next utilization print is the one to watch. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Sep 13 2026, 04:10

US sellers outnumber buyers by record 57.9% as rates freeze demand

America's housing market has never been this lopsided. Sellers outnumbered buyers by 57.9% nationally in August, the widest gap in Redfin records dating to 2013 and up from 52.1% a month earlier, which itself was the second-strongest buyer's market ever measured. "With sellers piling into the market and demand falling flat, today's house hunters can afford to be choosy," Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin, said. "Even during a time when housing costs are elevated, the surplus of sellers over buyers makes it a good time to be a house hunter, in some respects." The mechanics behind the record are a supply surge meeting frozen demand. Redfin counted 1,534,918 active sellers in August, the most since the start of 2020 and a 3.9% month-over-month jump — the largest single-month increase in the series. Buyers totaled 972,300, up just 0.1% from July, when their number hit the lowest level Redfin has recorded. The average 30-year mortgage rate sits at 6.76%, and with Fed rate-hike odds near 90%, borrowing costs are still moving the wrong way for anyone trying to qualify. That is the paradox at the center of the August report: the strongest buyer's market on record is not producing a buying boom. Leverage that cannot be financed is not leverage. Price growth tells the same story — homes in the five remaining seller's markets appreciated 5.5% year over year, while the 36 buyer's markets managed 1.6%. ## The Sun Belt is where the gap is widest The imbalance is not evenly distributed. All 10 of the strongest buyer's markets sit in the Sun Belt, and four are in Texas. Nashville posted 139.3% more sellers than buyers, the widest gap of any metro Redfin tracks, followed by Miami at 138% and Houston at 131%. Orlando (122%), Las Vegas (117%), San Antonio (116%), Austin (115%) and Dallas (108%) all cleared the two-to-one threshold. Houston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Dallas and Nashville each set metro records in August. The driver is a construction pipeline that kept running after demand cooled. Texas, Florida and Tennessee have some of the most active homebuilding programs in the country, so newly built homes keep reaching the market even as local buyers get priced out — in Miami's case by rising insurance costs, higher HOA fees and climate risk. The mirror image is a short list of five seller's markets concentrated where building has been constrained for years: Nassau County, NY (-28%), Newark (-21%), Montgomery County, PA (-20%), Milwaukee (-18%) and San Francisco (-12%). San Francisco has now been classified as a seller's market twice in four years, helped by wealth created in the AI boom. ## From housing activity to Treasury yields Housing is the most rate-sensitive sector in the US economy, which is why the August reading matters beyond real estate agents. Weak transaction volume feeds through to construction payrolls, furniture and appliance spending, and eventually to corporate earnings — the channel through which monetary tightening has historically reached the broader economy. Home prices do not need to fall for that pressure to register; activity simply needs to stay weak long enough. The cross-asset read is two-sided. Higher Treasury yields restrict liquidity and make risk assets less attractive, a drag that has historically hit Bitcoin and the S&P 500 together — IMF research has found tighter US monetary policy tends to hurt crypto alongside equities. But sustained housing weakness is also the kind of evidence that pushes yields lower and strengthens the case for easier policy, which would improve the liquidity backdrop for both. Lenders are already repricing around the stalemate rather than waiting for the Fed. Rocket Pro raised its conforming loan limit to $845,000 for one-unit properties, ahead of the Federal Housing Finance Agency's annual adjustment, targeting borrowers who sit just above the conforming threshold. United Wholesale Mortgage extended its Bullseye 90 pricing incentive and removed high-balance loan-level price adjustments through October 30. "In a challenging market, it really requires a lot of the lenders to be creative with the solutions that they're providing," Kyle Schoenmaker, senior vice president of sales at Rocket Pro, said. "If I had to offer one piece of advice for all of the brokers out there, it would be to stay curious." The next test is the FHFA's conforming loan limit announcement and the Fed's September decision, where futures currently price a hike rather than a cut. If mortgage rates break below 6.5% and buyer counts start rising off July's record low, the seller surplus should compress quickly — the inventory is already there. If rates hold near 6.76% or climb, expect the gap to widen again in September, with the Sun Belt metros leading and homebuilder order books absorbing the difference. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.