| | Good morning and happy Monday. Jerome Powell's term as Federal Reserve chair ends in May. His successor may want to ask for a raise. A new Financial Times analysis found that Christine Lagarde, Powell's European counterpart, made over 50% more than the European Central Bank disclosed in 2024. In addition to a €466,000 ($546,000) salary, the paper said she received €135,000 ($158,000) in fringe benefits and €125,000 ($146,000) for sitting on the Bank of International Settlements' board. All told, Lagarde's €726,000 ($850,000) earnings quadrupled Powell's $203,000. The Fed chair, who also sits on the BIS board, is barred by US law from earning a salary from foreign entities. On the bright side, the position's lower pay provides a strong incentive to be mindful of inflation. | | | | | | | | For most of the world, Wednesday marked the end of 2025. For Berkshire Hathaway, it was the end of an era. Warren Buffett, the Coca-Cola-chugging investing legend who built the once declining textile business into a $1 trillion juggernaut, stepped down as CEO, handing the top job to his handpicked successor, Greg Abel, 63, as of January 1. While Abel has earned the 95-year-old Oracle of Omaha's trust, he has yet to acquire his star power and remains a virtual blank slate in the public imagination. So who is he? The Oracle of Edmonton? Abel was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where he attended the University of Alberta. That's enough to tell you that he's a hockey guy. His uncle Sid, in fact, was a three-time Stanley Cup champion and Hall of Fame center for the Detroit Red Wings. In Des Moines, Iowa, where Abel now lives, he's known as a volunteer youth hockey coach who makes time for "pizza and beer with friends" when he's not working or trekking to tournaments with other hockey parents. An accountant by training, Abel was working at Des Moines-based MidAmerican Energy when Berkshire took over the company in 2000. He climbed to the top job eight years later, benefitting from Buffett's preference that subsidiaries reinvest earnings rather than pay out dividends. That allowed Abel to pursue acquisitions, among them Nevada-based utility NV Energy and electricity transmission company AltaLink in his home province of Alberta. In 2014, MidAmerican's holding company was renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and four years later, Abel assumed responsibility for all of Berkshire's non-insurance businesses, expanding his fiefdom to include BNSF railroad, chemical and industrial companies and retail producers like Fruit of the Loom. Taking over the CEO job means: - Abel will have ultimate responsibility for Berkshire's insurance operations and the company's mammoth $380 billion war chest, a cash pile Buffett has built up as a net seller of stocks for 12 straight quarters. He has limited experience in both areas.
- Abel can tap the expertise of Ajit Jain, Berkshire's insurance mastermind, whom Buffett said didn't want the top job but is sticking around. On the investment front, stockpicking guru Todd Combs recently decamped for JPMorgan, but Berkshire's other top stockpicker, Ted Weschler, remains.
  High Stakes: Buffett's idiosyncratic principles, such as shunning stock splits and dividends, emphasizing "value" investing and relying on decentralized management, have been tolerated, embraced even, in part because of his roughly $145 billion stake in the company. Abel, meanwhile, has just $170 million worth of stock. To assure investors of his faith in his successor — "a great manager, a tireless worker and an honest communicator" — Buffett has said he plans to keep a "significant" stake in the company. If Abel wants anything like the latitude investors gave the "Oracle of Omaha," he'll need to demonstrate he has skin in the game. Berkshire shares fell 1.4% on Friday, so he could even buy the mini-dip. Written by Sean Craig | | | | | | | | | Photo via Citizens | | | | | | 2025 was so not bitcoin's year. The No. 1 cryptocurrency by market cap never recovered from a flash crash in the fall, wiping out more than $1 trillion from the wider crypto sector's market value. Bitcoin was worth less than $88,000 on Dec. 31, a drop of more than 30% from its 2025 high above $126,000 in October. The coin closed out 2025 with an annual decline for the fourth time in its history. The other three times coincided with major events, like FTX's collapse in 2022. This time, the fall has left some scratching their heads. Feeling the Chill Crypto was set up for a huuuge year, with the Trump administration's backing (he's called himself the "crypto president"). Regulators under President Trump established pro-crypto guidelines, while financial institutions including Wells Fargo and Bank of America's Merrill Lynch created new crypto-based products and companies like GameStop took a page from Strategy's playbook and bought hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of bitcoin. But then came Red October, when several whales liquidated large sums of bitcoin after Trump announced 100% tariffs on China. While stocks recovered from the news, crypto continued to crumble. The loss forced the liquidation of leveraged positions, which spiraled into a vicious cycle. Bitcoin bottomed out at about $80,000 in November, and though it has swung back up since (topping $90,000 on Friday), the crash seems to have left a lasting dent in investors' confidence: - Investors have withdrawn more than $5 billion from US spot bitcoin ETFs since mid-October. The derivatives market, meanwhile, shows strong support to keep bitcoin above $85,000, but also resistance around $95,000; that could keep bitcoin stuck in this range for the short term.
- Bitcoin mining companies are pivoting to AI. Hut8 Mining's shares surged 36% in the past month after the company forged a 15-year, $7 billion deal to lease data centers to AI firm Fluidstack. Investors buy shares in companies like Hut8 to get indirect exposure to crypto, and now they can hedge their investment with AI. Coinbase also announced it's adding stocks to its traditionally crypto-only trading platform.
Better Luck Next Year: Crypto's correction is expected to slow, but not stop or reverse, the sector's long-term growth. Standard Chartered slashed its 2026 target price for bitcoin in half, from $300,000 to $150,000. While the bank still has high hopes for the coin, they're going to take longer to materialize than originally expected. Standard Chartered moved its $500,000 bitcoin target from 2028 to 2030. Written by Jamie Wilde | | | | | | | | Photo via The Pour Over | Kick-Start Your 2026 With Perspective. The Pour Over delivers straightforward headlines and thoughtful reporting, grounded in enduring values, to help readers stay informed without the noise or anxiety of the modern news cycle. Join more than 1.5 million readers heading into 2026 with a calmer, more focused way to keep up with what matters. Join now for free.  | | | | | Up, up and away? The companies expected to pour more than $500 billion into hyperscaling artificial intelligence this year (including Magnificent 7 members such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google) are still betting big on the technology following that trajectory. The less appealing alternative is up, up and pop, manifesting bubble fears that were inflamed when the Financial Times reported in December that Oracle had lost its "primary backer" for a $10 billion Michigan data center. Afterward, the cloud computing giant's shares sank 5.4% and are down 32% in the past three months, weighing on other AI-related stocks, including Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices. AI Heft v. Hype Are AI naysayers just being pessimistic? When Reuters asked tech leaders and investing analysts to look into their Magic 8 Balls in October, the resounding response was "Ask Again Later." What's clearer is that the data centers powering AI globally will need $6.7 trillion in cumulative capital investment by 2030 to keep pace with computing demand, with another $1.3 trillion for power generation and transmission, according to McKinsey & Co. With an estimated half a million skilled workers needed this year to fill the construction industry's intensifying labor shortages, AI visionaries could see their capital plans stalled while the labor resources required to build data centers catch up: - "I don't think there is a bubble, but we do see some constraints in terms of construction capacity not keeping up with all the new investments," ABB CEO Morten Wierod told Reuters. "There is not enough people and resources to build all this."
- Cue Wall Street's overvaluation fears, already heightened when Nvidia became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap in July, then $5 trillion in October.
Yet even with billions backing AI capital spending, the Magnificent 7 stocks, which focus heavily on AI and account for more than a third of the S&P 500's market value, will most likely be insulated if the market goes bust on profitability, said Andy Wu, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. 1 +1 = 1 trillion: "While generative AI can do amazing things, it is also perhaps the most wasteful use of a computer ever devised," Wu told the Harvard Gazette. "If you do 1+1 on a calculator, that's one calculation. If you do 1+1 in generative AI, that is potentially a trillion calculations to get an answer. That consumes a huge amount of chip capacity and electricity." Written by Emell Derra Adolphus | | | | | | | | | |
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