Jax Morning Brief

Jax Morning Brief — Trump Scraps AI Order, Senate Punts ICE Funding, Mortgage Rates at 6.51%

Good morning. It's Friday, May 22nd. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: The AI executive order we told you to watch yesterday? It didn't happen. Trump scrapped the signing at the last minute, telling reporters he didn't want to slow down American AI companies. ANDREW: And Senate Republicans abandoned a vote on ICE funding and sent themselves home for Memorial Day recess, blowing past the President's June 1 deadline. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: First, a quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed down about half a percent on Thursday. The Dow lost roughly half a percent as well, and the Nasdaq slipped half a percent. It was a quietly negative session as Treasury yields rose and Nvidia's blockbuster earnings somehow failed to lift the AI trade. The ten-year Treasury yield is sitting at 4.59 percent, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate jumped to 6.51 percent on Freddie Mac's weekly survey, up fifteen basis points from a week ago. Mortgage News Daily has its daily index a bit higher, around 6.63 percent. Jenny, on the AI story, this one really did come apart in front of the cameras. JENNY: It really did, Andrew. So just to recap where we were yesterday. The White House had invited CEOs from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft to a Thursday afternoon ceremony. Trump was expected to sign an executive order asking frontier AI labs to voluntarily share new models with the government 90 days before release, plus a Treasury-led cybersecurity clearinghouse for banks and other critical infrastructure to test those models. Then yesterday afternoon, hours before the ceremony, Trump pulled it. ANDREW: And what did he say? JENNY: His exact words to reporters were, quote, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead. He said he thought certain provisions, quote, could have been a blocker. CNBC, the Washington Post, and TechCrunch all reported the same reasoning. There's also a quieter explanation circulating, which is that not enough tech CEOs could actually make it to Washington on short notice. ANDREW: So who won this fight inside the White House? JENNY: The growth side beat the security side, at least for now. There has been an internal split for weeks. National security advisers wanted pre-release testing because they're worried about model misuse. The economic and tech advisers worried any government bottleneck would hand China an opening. Trump came down on the second side, and the cybersecurity hawks in his own base are not happy about it. Expect the order to come back in some softer form, but the political signal from yesterday is that this White House is not going to put any speed bumps in front of the labs. ANDREW: And on the other end of the AI spectrum, Nvidia reported a blowout quarter Wednesday night and the stock went down. JENNY: Yeah, this was strange. Nvidia delivered 81.6 billion dollars in revenue for Q1, beating the street by about three billion. Data center revenue alone was 75 billion, up 92 percent year over year. They guided next quarter to 91 billion, four billion above consensus. The board added 80 billion to the buyback and raised the dividend 25-fold, from a penny a share to 25 cents. And the stock closed down 1.8 percent. ANDREW: How does a company beat by that much and trade down? JENNY: One analyst at Capital.com called it, quote, a garden variety beat. At a four trillion dollar market cap, you have to wildly exceed not the published consensus but the so-called whisper number the buy side is actually trading. Nvidia merely crushed it. It didn't obliterate it. Andrew, over to you for the national desk. ANDREW: Thanks, Jenny. The big story on the Hill yesterday was the collapse of the Senate's plan to pass the reconciliation bill funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection. NPR, CBS News, and UPI all reported the same picture. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had hoped to get the bill on the floor Thursday night. Instead the Senate adjourned for a one-week recess. They will pick this back up June 1. JENNY: What blew it up? ANDREW: Two things. First, the package included a roughly 1.8 billion dollar Justice Department fund that several Republican senators called a slush fund. It is tied to a settlement involving President Trump and the IRS, and a handful of GOP senators just refused to sign off on it. Second, there is a one billion dollar line item for a Secret Service-protected ballroom at the White House. That also drew Republican opposition. Underneath the headline number, which is around 72 billion dollars for ICE and CBP over three years, the package became too much of a Christmas tree to hold the conference together. JENNY: And what does this mean for the President's June 1 deadline? ANDREW: They are going to miss it. Thune told reporters the Senate will, quote, pick up where we left off. The political read is that the President's leverage over his own party on a marquee priority is weaker than the White House would like, and Senate Republicans heading into a midterm year are not willing to absorb a billion dollar ballroom vote. JENNY: Anything else on the national side? ANDREW: Two more things. On Iran. We have been tracking the ceasefire that has been on, in Trump's words, life support all week. Reuters and Al Jazeera report Israel is still pushing to resume strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and Iran's Supreme Leader issued a directive yesterday that the country's near-weapons-grade uranium stays inside Iran. That hardens Tehran's position on the single thing the U.S. has been demanding in the talks. Brent crude climbed back above 104 dollars a barrel this morning, WTI around 101. Oil is still about 50 percent above its pre-war level from late February. JENNY: So we are not closer to a resolution. ANDREW: We are further away. Watch Brent. If we break 115, the market is telling you Israel has moved. The second item is Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. He was sworn in one week ago today. He has not made a single public statement since. The Marketplace reporting this week suggests he intends to dramatically cut back Fed communications, possibly ending the post-FOMC press conference altogether. His first meeting as chair is June 16th and 17th, and futures are pricing less than a one-in-three chance of a rate cut at that meeting. Speaking of rates, Jenny, the news on the mortgage side is not what buyers wanted to hear this week. JENNY: How bad? ANDREW: Freddie Mac's primary mortgage market survey came in at 6.51 percent yesterday on the 30-year fixed, up from 6.36 last week. That is the fourth consecutive week of increases. Mortgage News Daily's daily index has been even more volatile. They had it briefly at a nine-month high of 6.68 on Tuesday before pulling back into the mid 6.5s by Wednesday and bouncing again this morning. The driver is the same one we have been talking about all spring. Inflation expectations are stuck because of oil, and the ten-year Treasury is sitting near a year-to-date high. JENNY: What is that doing to demand? ANDREW: The Mortgage Bankers Association published its weekly applications survey yesterday for the week ending May 15. Total applications fell 2.3 percent. Purchase applications dropped 4 percent on the week, although they are still up year-over-year because last May was even worse. Refinances were basically flat, down a tenth of a percent. Interestingly, refis are still 35 percent above where they were a year ago, because last May the 30-year was running above 6.8. So even at 6.5, some borrowers from late 2024 are finding it worth refinancing. JENNY: So who is actually closing right now? ANDREW: It is mostly purchase-money buyers who simply cannot wait any longer, and a thin slice of refinancers who locked in above 7 in the fall of 2024. The bigger story for originators is the eight straight weeks now where the 30-year has held above 6.4 percent. The MBA's spring forecast assumed rates would be back in the high fives by Memorial Day. They are not. Production budgets for the second half of the year are getting rewritten. Jenny, speaking of weekends, sounds like you've got a busy one in Jacksonville. JENNY: We really do, Andrew. Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high of 92 today, low around 74, partly sunny with a 40 percent chance of afternoon showers. Classic late-May First Coast day. Now, the big local story is downtown. Whole Foods opened its first-ever downtown Jacksonville store yesterday morning at 8 a.m. on Riverside Avenue in Brooklyn. Thirty-eight thousand square feet, more than 800 local Florida items on the shelves. The first 300 customers got a limited-edition Jacksonville tote and a coupon worth up to 100 dollars. The Jacksonville Daily Record had reporters on site. ANDREW: Is this a one-off, or does it actually signal something about the urban core? JENNY: It's a real bet. Brooklyn was a working-class neighborhood basically until five years ago. The Whole Foods sits where the old Florida Times-Union building used to be, and the store's interior design actually pays homage to that building with vertical wood slat walls. The opening is one piece of a broader downtown thesis. Riverfront Park, Independent Living, the planned FIS headquarters expansion, and what's happening on Bay Street this weekend. ANDREW: Which is the Jazz Festival. JENNY: Which is the Jacksonville Jazz Festival. It kicked off last night at the Florida Theatre with the piano competition. The free outdoor stages at Ford on Bay run Friday, Saturday, and Sunday with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Andra Day, Nile Rodgers and Chic, Sheila E, Esperanza Spalding, and Kamasi Washington. There is also a new Jazz in the Plaza stage at Riverfront Plaza this year. If you are anywhere near downtown this weekend, this is the event. ANDREW: And there was a planning commission vote yesterday on the density bonus ordinance we talked about earlier in the week. JENNY: There was. The Planning Commission took up Ordinance 2026-0311 yesterday. This is the proposal that would create what the city is calling target growth areas along high-frequency transit corridors and the Emerald Trail, where developers could build up to 40 units per acre with smaller lots, more height, less parking, in exchange for either pledging 20 percent of units as affordable, or building to flood-resilient standards. Single-family neighborhoods are carved out. The next step is the Council Land Use and Zoning Committee public hearing on June 6. ANDREW: That's a big change in what's allowed near transit. JENNY: It is the most consequential land use change since consolidation in terms of what kind of housing actually gets built downtown. The carve-out for single-family is what keeps the politics manageable, and the resilience track is how the city's Office of Resilience has signed onto it. The fight in committee June 6 will be about how big the carve-outs actually are. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this week. Tuesday is the Texas Senate Republican primary runoff between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton. Trump endorsed Paxton. Cornyn is the institutional incumbent. The result will tell us how durable an institutional Republican is against a Trump-backed challenger in a state Trump won by 14 points. The same evening, the Jacksonville City Council holds its full vote on the 35 million dollar package to bring the Culinary Institute of America's Southeast campus downtown. The CIA board picks a city in June, and Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are also in the running. Two very different votes, both Tuesday, both worth watching. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Friday. Have a great weekend. ANDREW: We'll see you Monday.

Jax Morning Brief — Trump's AI Order, Anthropic Heads for First Profit, Dow Retakes 50,000

Good morning. It's Thursday, May 21st, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: President Trump is bringing the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to the White House today to sign an executive order that, for the first time, asks frontier AI labs to hand their models to the government before public release. ANDREW: And Anthropic, one of those labs, confirmed it's on track for its first-ever profitable quarter, just hours after disclosing a fifteen-billion-dollar-a-year compute deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed at 7,398, up about 1.1 percent. The Dow added 645 points to finish at 50,009, reclaiming the fifty-thousand mark for the first time in a week. The Nasdaq jumped 1.5 percent. It was the strongest session in days, snapping a three-day slide on better sentiment around Iran diplomacy and ahead of Nvidia's earnings. The ten-year Treasury yield eased to 4.63 percent, down a few basis points from Tuesday's year-high. And the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is hovering in the mid-six-percent range. Mortgage News Daily's index pulled back to roughly 6.54 percent after touching a nine-month high earlier this week. Freddie Mac's weekly survey lands at noon today and is expected to print near 6.4 percent. ANDREW: Jenny, you're up. The AI desk is leading us this morning. JENNY: It is. Three major AI stories are converging today, and they all matter for the same reason. The frontier labs are now operating at a scale that's pulling Washington in. JENNY: First, the executive order. According to reporting from CNN and Axios, Trump will sign an order this afternoon creating a voluntary framework asking AI developers to share frontier models with the federal government ninety days before public release, and to give similar early access to critical infrastructure operators like major banks. The order also sets up a Treasury-led clearinghouse for finding security flaws in unreleased models. ANDREW: Voluntary is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What's the actual enforcement here? JENNY: There isn't any. Labs can opt out. But the major frontier labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI, all already signed pre-release evaluation agreements with the federal AI Safety Institute earlier this spring. So today is less about creating a new requirement and more about codifying what's already happening, and putting the president's name on it. ANDREW: So the meaningful test isn't who signs today. It's who's the first lab to actually flag a model and delay a launch. JENNY: Exactly. That's the signal the framework has teeth. JENNY: Second story, and this is the headline of the day for anyone tracking AI economics. Anthropic disclosed to investors that it expects to generate ten point nine billion dollars in revenue this quarter. That's more than the company made in all of last year, and it would deliver Anthropic's first-ever profitable quarter, with operating profit projected at five hundred fifty-nine million dollars. CNBC and TechCrunch both confirmed the figures. ANDREW: And the context — last summer Anthropic was telling investors profitability wouldn't arrive until 2028. JENNY: Two years early. The growth is being driven almost entirely by enterprise API revenue, businesses paying to embed Claude into their software. And the company says the profit window may not last past this quarter, because compute spending is about to ramp aggressively. ANDREW: Which gets us to the third story. JENNY: Right. Axios broke yesterday that Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX one point two five billion dollars a month, fifteen billion a year, through 2029 for access to Musk's Colossus supercomputing cluster in Memphis. That's a forty-billion-dollar contract for inference capacity alone. SpaceX, by the way, filed for an IPO yesterday, and that fifteen-billion-dollar recurring AI revenue line is now part of its prospectus. ANDREW: That's the entire AI economy in one transaction. Anthropic is profitable today, but only because it's signing forty-billion-dollar checks for compute tomorrow. And the money is flowing from one trillion-dollar private company straight to another. JENNY: One more quick AI note. OpenAI announced one of its reasoning models autonomously cracked a geometry problem that had stumped mathematicians for eighty years. The company is framing it as the first piece of real evidence that frontier models can produce original research, not just retrieve it. We'll see how the math community responds. ANDREW: And a quick add on the hardware side, because it ties the whole picture together. Nvidia reported first-quarter results after the close yesterday: 81.6 billion dollars in revenue, up 85 percent from a year ago. Data center revenue alone was 75.2 billion dollars, up 92 percent. The board added 80 billion dollars to the buyback authorization and lifted the quarterly dividend from a penny a share to 25 cents. JENNY: So the picture is: Anthropic and OpenAI and Google are competing for inference capacity, they're paying SpaceX and Microsoft and Oracle for data centers, and underneath every one of those data centers, the chips are Nvidia. ANDREW: One company sitting on top of a market with no real second source. That's a remarkable position to be in. JENNY: Andrew, over to you for the national desk. ANDREW: Thanks, Jenny. Two stories. First, the Iran war. ANDREW: The ceasefire that's been in place since April 8th is, in the president's own words, on life support. It came under fresh strain this week. Trump postponed a scheduled US strike on Monday at the request of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, then called Iran's counter-proposal, mediated by Pakistan, quote, "totally unacceptable" on Tuesday evening. Brent crude is sitting around 108 dollars a barrel. West Texas Intermediate just under 103. Iran is still refusing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and CNN reported Wednesday that Israel is now actively preparing to strike Iranian nuclear facilities alone, without US participation. JENNY: So we're back to the question of whether Israel goes by itself. ANDREW: That's the live question this morning. The signal to watch is Brent. If it breaks 115 dollars a barrel on a sudden move, that's the market telling you a strike happened before the headlines confirm it. ANDREW: Second story. The Justice Department is suing four states. Federal lawyers filed suit yesterday against New York, Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan over state laws that hold fossil-fuel companies financially accountable for climate damages. The federal argument is that climate is Washington's lane, and that states are interfering with foreign and interstate commerce. It's an aggressive use of federal supremacy doctrine, and it sets up a Supreme Court fight on a question that's mostly been litigated in state courts so far. JENNY: How quickly does that move? ANDREW: District court within weeks. If the administration wants Supreme Court review on its preferred timeline, before the midterms, they'll push for an expedited appeal. ANDREW: And one more political note from the national desk. The Texas Senate Republican runoff is Tuesday — John Cornyn versus state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Trump has endorsed Paxton. Cornyn is the longtime incumbent and effectively the institutional choice. Punchbowl is framing it as Cornyn fighting for political survival, and the winner is the heavy favorite in the general. The outcome reshapes the Senate Republican conference heading into the 2027 tax and budget fights, and it tells you whether MAGA-aligned challengers can still take down a sitting senator with the president's backing. JENNY: Latest public polling? ANDREW: Tight. And the recent AP-NORC poll has Trump's overall approval at 37 percent — up four points from last month, but still underwater. The GOP base is holding on the Iran war but slipping on economic confidence. Only about one in four Americans say the economy is in good shape. ANDREW: Jenny, before I hand back to you, one more on my beat. Let's do mortgages. JENNY: Go ahead. ANDREW: Rates are easing slightly but staying elevated. Mortgage News Daily's top-tier 30-year is around 6.5 percent this morning, off Tuesday's nine-month high near 6.68 percent. Freddie Mac's last weekly print was 6.36 percent for the week of May 14th, and the new print arrives at noon today. The Mortgage Bankers Association's most recent application survey, for the week ending May 8th, showed total applications up 1.7 percent. Purchase applications were up 4 percent week-over-week and 7 percent year-over-year. Refinance applications actually fell 1 percent, dragging the refi share to 40.8 percent. That's the lowest reading since last July. JENNY: So purchase demand is holding up better than refi at these rates. ANDREW: It is. The headline number every loan officer is watching is whether the daily index breaks 6.75 percent. If Israel strikes Iran and oil spikes, that becomes a real possibility within days. Lock advice across the industry is shifting more defensive than it was a month ago. ANDREW: Jenny, back to you. Jacksonville. JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at 90 degrees and mostly sunny today. Low around 75 tonight. JENNY: Three stories from the local desk. First, and the biggest item: the Jacksonville Planning Commission votes today on a comprehensive plan amendment that would reshape how affordable housing gets built in this city. Ordinance 2026-0311 would create what the city is calling target growth areas, corridors along high-frequency transit and the Emerald Trail, where developers could build denser, taller projects on smaller lots, with relaxed parking requirements, in exchange for committing twenty percent of rental units to households at or below area median income, or building to flood-resilience standards. ANDREW: And single-family neighborhoods? JENNY: Largely off the table. That's the political compromise that's kept the bill alive. The Jax Daily Record is reporting that maximum density in target areas could rise to 40 units per acre. Today's vote is the first formal step. If the Planning Commission approves it, the ordinance heads to the Land Use and Zoning Committee for a public hearing on June 6th. JENNY: Second, two big openings downtown today. Whole Foods opened its new 38-thousand-square-foot store on Riverside Avenue at 8 a.m. this morning. The first 300 customers got tote bags and discount coupons. And the Jacksonville Jazz Festival kicks off tonight at the Florida Theatre with the piano competition, running through Memorial Day weekend. ANDREW: Those two openings on the same day feel like a downtown thesis statement. JENNY: They do. The city has been arguing for years that downtown can sustain destination retail and weekend programming at the same time. Today is the proof point, or it isn't. JENNY: Third, a quick CIA campus update. The full City Council votes Tuesday, May 26th, on the 35-million-dollar incentive package to land the Culinary Institute of America's downtown campus. The Finance Committee already cleared it 6 to 1 this week, with Council member Diamond the lone no. Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are all still in the running, and the CIA board makes its final pick in June. ANDREW: 35 million dollars in incentives is real money. What does Jacksonville get back? JENNY: A 50-thousand-square-foot teaching campus downtown, a workforce pipeline of culinary professionals, and a credentialed national institution anchoring a block of east LaVilla that the city has been trying to activate for years. The skeptical question is the one Diamond is raising: whether the return on investment math actually pencils out at six years and 27 million dollars in non-workforce subsidies. JENNY: And one more from JEA, the investigation we've been tracking. The City Council subpoenas issued Tuesday are now formally scheduled. Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks testifies June 8th. CEO Vickie Cavey testifies June 22nd. Council's legislative counsel said on the record this week that the probe could ultimately lead to JEA charter changes. We're watching whether the Mayo Clinic capacity-fee dispute surfaces in those hearings. JENNY: Andrew, close us out. ANDREW: One thing to watch today: the AI executive order signing itself. The substantive question isn't whether Trump signs the order. That's happening. It's which CEOs actually show up in the East Room for the ceremony. OpenAI and Anthropic have been engaging with the White House on the text, according to Axios. But if Google's Sundar Pichai or xAI's Elon Musk skip the photo, that's a real signal about whether the frontier labs see this voluntary framework as cooperation, or as cover for the next round of regulation. The signing is scheduled for this afternoon. Watch the room. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Thursday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Israel Eyes Iran Strike, Mortgages at 9-Month High, JEA Brass Subpoenaed

Good morning. It's Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: CNN is reporting this morning that Israel is preparing to strike Iran's nuclear facilities on its own, a move that would mark a clean break with the president, who called off his own strike just forty-eight hours ago. ANDREW: And Anthropic just topped the CNBC Disruptor 50 list while closing in on a thirty billion dollar funding round at a nine hundred billion dollar valuation. On paper, that would put it ahead of OpenAI. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed at 7,353, down two-thirds of a percent. The Dow lost 322 points to finish at 49,363, off about the same amount. The Nasdaq fell eight-tenths of a percent to 25,870. That was the third straight losing session, with a jump in bond yields doing most of the damage. The ten-year Treasury yield is sitting at 4.62 percent, a new year-to-date high, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at 6.68 percent according to Mortgage News Daily — the highest reading in more than nine months. Brent crude settled near 108 dollars a barrel with the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed. ANDREW: Let's start there, because every wire in the market right now leads back to Iran. Jenny, you teased it at the top — let me unpack what's actually new this morning. JENNY: Please. ANDREW: To recap for anyone joining us, on Monday night the president called off a, quote, very major strike on Iran planned for Tuesday, after Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE asked him for a forty-eight to seventy-two hour pause to push diplomacy across the line. By Tuesday evening, Trump publicly called Iran's counter-proposal totally unacceptable. And now CNN is reporting that Israel is actively preparing to strike Iran's nuclear facilities on its own, with or without Washington's sign-off. JENNY: If Israel goes alone, what does that do to the ceasefire posture the White House has been trying to engineer? ANDREW: It essentially blows it up. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said yesterday that any negotiation is, in his words, not surrender or retreat — that's Tehran's way of giving its hardliners political cover to keep talking. But Tehran is also insisting the U.S. lift its naval blockade before the Strait of Hormuz reopens, and Washington isn't going to do that. So there is a diplomatic window, but it is narrow. An Israeli strike slams it shut. JENNY: And the domestic politics of all this? ANDREW: A new AP–NORC poll out yesterday has the president's overall approval at thirty-seven percent. That's actually up from thirty-three in April, even as Republican confidence on the economy slips. The war is not yet a political liability with his base. The other thing to keep on your radar: in Texas, the Senate Republican runoff between Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton is exactly six days away, on May 26th. Trump endorsed Paxton, and most operatives I read think Cornyn is fighting for his political life. JENNY: A Senate map question with real downstream effects on tax and budget policy next year. ANDREW: Right. Whichever Republican wins is the prohibitive favorite in the general, and either outcome reshapes the conference for 2027. The other piece worth noting from that AP–NORC poll: only about a quarter of Americans say the economy is in good shape, and that number has actually slipped among Republicans over the last two months. The president is holding his base on the war, but losing them slightly on prices. Those two trends are going to be in tension all summer. JENNY: That's a lot. And Andrew, this is rippling straight into the mortgage market. Walk us through what loan officers are seeing this morning. ANDREW: It really is, and that's where Iran is touching the real economy fastest. The thirty-year fixed sits at 6.68 percent on Mortgage News Daily's top-tier survey as of yesterday afternoon, up from 6.65 on Friday. Bankrate's national average is 6.58. Both are at their highest levels in more than nine months. The simple chain is this: higher oil from a closed Hormuz means stickier inflation, stickier inflation means a ten-year yield that won't come down, and that's the number the mortgage market actually trades off of. JENNY: So for someone trying to lock a rate this week, what's the advice? ANDREW: Two things from the desks I trust. One — lock now, because the spread between the ten-year and the thirty-year fixed has widened back above two hundred basis points. Lenders are pricing in headline risk on top of the underlying yield. Two — refis are essentially dead. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported refi share fell to 40.8 percent of total applications, the lowest since July of last year. The surprise is purchase activity. Purchase applications rose four percent week over week and are still seven percent ahead of last year's pace. Buyers are showing up even at these rates. JENNY: And the Fed transition behind all of this? ANDREW: That's the other story. Kevin Warsh has now been Fed chair for five business days and has not made a single public remark. Marketplace reported yesterday that he's expected to cut back significantly on Fed communications — fewer speeches, possibly no post-meeting press conferences. His first FOMC is June 16th and 17th. Futures are pricing less than a one-in-three chance of a rate cut. JENNY: A Fed that talks less while the bond market is on edge — that feels combustible. ANDREW: It is. And it's the reason every mortgage desk in the country will be parked on a Bloomberg terminal the first time Warsh opens his mouth in public. ANDREW: One quick item on the production side before I hand off. Rocket and United Wholesale finished the first quarter essentially tied — Rocket at 44.7 billion dollars in closed volume, UWM at 44.9 billion. The Rocket-Mr. Cooper integration is driving another round of layoffs, and loanDepot's lock volume came in fourteen percent higher year over year, partly on a new partnership with Figure to lower production costs. With the CFPB pulling back under this administration, more of the servicing risk is shifting onto FHA and state attorneys general, and state AGs are quietly becoming the new enforcement engine in this industry. JENNY: Worth watching, especially in Florida. ANDREW: Especially in Florida. Jenny, over to you for AI — your beat lit up overnight. JENNY: It did. Two big stories, both landing on the same day, both pointing at the same thing. Google's I/O keynote in Mountain View yesterday, and Anthropic taking the number-one slot on CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. JENNY: Start with Google. The company announced the Gemini 3.5 series of models and unveiled what it's calling Gemini Spark — billed as a twenty-four-seven AI agent that runs continuously on your behalf. Spark is gated behind a new tier called AI Ultra, which runs a hundred dollars a month and is targeted at developers, creators, and power users. Google also showed live demos of intelligent eyewear shipping this fall, with hardware partners including Samsung, Xreal, and Warby Parker. The much-rumored Googlebook laptop barely got any airtime. ANDREW: A hundred dollars a month is a real number. Are enterprises actually paying that? JENNY: They're paying more, and that's the bigger story. Anthropic disclosed earlier this month that Q1 revenue grew eighty times year over year. Annualized run rate is now above 44 billion dollars. Ramp's enterprise spending data shows Anthropic overtook OpenAI in business adoption for the first time in April — 34 percent of businesses using Claude for work versus 32 percent on ChatGPT. And Bloomberg confirmed last week that Anthropic is closing a thirty-billion-dollar round at a nine-hundred-billion-dollar valuation. That puts them ahead of OpenAI's last private mark of 852 billion. The round could close by the end of this month. ANDREW: Two of the largest private companies in the world flipping order in real time. JENNY: Right. And the thing tying it all together is enterprise. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are now launching joint ventures with alternative asset managers — Blackstone, Goldman, General Atlantic — specifically to plug into those firms' portfolio companies. That's the new go-to-market. Stop chasing individual logos. Just buy into the funds that own the logos. ANDREW: And the regulatory side of all this? Last we covered, the federal pre-release testing regime had just been formalized. JENNY: It has. Every major lab — Google DeepMind, Microsoft, xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic — has now signed pre-release evaluation agreements with the U.S. AI Safety Institute. Chris Fall is running it after Collin Burns was dismissed in late April. The open question is whether this becomes meaningful gate-keeping or a rubber stamp. The first model that gets actually flagged or delayed in that review will tell us. JENNY: Andrew, speaking of dollars — let's bring it home to Jacksonville. JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high near ninety today, sunny, with an overnight low around seventy-six. Standard May. JENNY: The big news from yesterday's City Council Finance Committee meeting: JEA's top leadership is officially under subpoena. The committee voted eight to zero to compel testimony from CEO Vickie Cavey, Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks, and former chief legal counsel Regina Ross. Cavey appears June 22nd. Brooks goes first, on June 8th. Ross is on the docket for both dates. ANDREW: This is the JEA workplace-culture investigation we've been tracking. What makes yesterday's vote different? JENNY: Two things. One, the unanimous vote — even council members who had been skeptical of the special committee's reach signed on. Two, and this is the bigger story: the council's own legislative counsel went on record yesterday saying the documents and testimony from these subpoenas could trigger changes to JEA's charter. That means the structure of how Jacksonville's public utility is actually governed could be on the table. This is no longer just a workplace probe. ANDREW: And the timing matters because the Mayo Clinic capacity-fee dispute is still hanging out there. JENNY: Exactly. Twelve million dollars in unpaid fees, with the Inspector General asking questions per the News4Jax I-Team. Don't be surprised if that surfaces in the June hearings. JENNY: One more from the same meeting. The Finance Committee voted six to one to recommend approval of the Culinary Institute of America incentive package — thirty-five million dollars over six years to land a 50,000-square-foot downtown campus. Council member Rory Diamond was the lone no. The full council takes it up next Tuesday, May 26th, with emergency passage requested ahead of the CIA's June board decision on its Southeast location. ANDREW: Jacksonville against Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville for that. JENNY: Right. Whoever offers the cleanest path wins it. And a separate item to flag for builders and lenders listening — the City Council is reviewing a comprehensive plan amendment that would give density bonuses to developers who commit affordable units or build for flood resilience. Planning Commission vote on that is tomorrow, May 21st. JENNY: Andrew, take us out. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this week — Brent crude. If Israel moves on Iran's nuclear sites and oil pushes back above one hundred fifteen dollars a barrel, the ten-year Treasury yield is almost certain to break 4.7 percent, and Mortgage News Daily's top-tier rate would print north of 6.75. That is the chain we are watching. Brent at one-oh-eight is the line of nervous calm. Brent above one-fifteen is the line of no return for mortgage rates this summer. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Wednesday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Trump Postpones Iran Strike, Google I/O Kicks Off, Mortgage Rates Hit 6.68%

Good morning. It's Tuesday, May 19th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: Overnight, President Trump called off what he described as a very major attack on Iran that was scheduled for today, after Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE asked him to wait. We'll get to what changed and what's still on the table. ANDREW: And Google's annual developer keynote starts at one o'clock Eastern this afternoon. A new Gemini model, a new laptop category, and a serious push on AI glasses. We'll walk through what's coming. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed essentially flat Monday at 7,403, down less than a tenth of a percent. The Dow climbed about a third of a percent to 49,686, helped by defensives. The Nasdaq dropped half a percent to 26,091 on a second straight day of tech selling. The ten-year Treasury yield is sitting at 4.60 percent, which is the highest level in a year, and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at 6.68 percent according to Mortgage News Daily. Oil whipsawed on Iran headlines and settled around 107 dollars a barrel after Trump's postponement. ANDREW: Let's start with what nearly happened overnight. Jenny, the headline going into Sunday was that the White House was deep into options on Iran. Last night, Trump announced he was calling off a, quote, very major attack that had been planned for today. According to NPR and Bloomberg, the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE asked him to wait two to three days to let what they're calling serious negotiations run. Trump posted that the military stands ready on a moment's notice if those talks fail. JENNY: So this is a pause, not a deal. ANDREW: That's exactly right. Trump's own words were that the delay could be, quote, a little while, hopefully, maybe forever. The National Security Council convenes today in the Situation Room to discuss what comes next. Iran's foreign ministry has confirmed Tehran responded to the latest U.S. proposal through Pakistani mediation. President Pezeshkian said dialogue does not mean surrender. JENNY: What is actually on the table in those talks? ANDREW: The big sticking point is the length of an enrichment moratorium. The U.S. is asking for 20 years. Iran is offering something shorter. And the Hormuz blockade is still in place — Central Command says transit through the strait was running at about 42 percent of normal as of Friday. So even with the pause, the supply chain through the Gulf is still degraded. JENNY: Does the bond market believe in the pause? ANDREW: Partially. WTI crude gave back about two dollars on the postponement headline, but the ten-year yield held above 4.6 percent. Traders are treating this as a tail risk that did not get cut, only deferred. Brent could still push past 110 if the talks collapse. ANDREW: One more national note worth flagging. Kevin Warsh, who took the Fed chair Friday from Jay Powell, still has not made any public remarks since being sworn in. His first FOMC meeting is June 16th and 17th. Bond futures are now pricing well under a one in three chance of a June rate cut. The market has effectively re-rated the Fed before hearing a single word from the new chair. Watch for any unscripted appearance this week — a single sentence on inflation or balance-sheet policy will move the ten-year more than yesterday's Iran headlines did. JENNY: And on the trade front — anything from the Trump-Xi summit that wrapped Friday? ANDREW: A few of the deliverables are starting to firm up. China is reportedly working through the 200-plane Boeing order Trump announced, and beef market access has reopened for U.S. exporters. The harder question — whether Beijing actually pressures Tehran to stop buying military equipment — is still unanswered. Xi is expected back in Washington in late September, so we will have a sharper read by then. ANDREW: That's the national desk. Jenny, Google I/O is in a few hours. JENNY: Thanks, Andrew. Google's annual developer keynote begins at one Eastern out of Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, and this is shaping up to be the most consequential I/O in several years. The headline reveal is expected to be a new top-tier Gemini model — the successor to Gemini 3.1 Pro — positioned head-to-head against OpenAI's Mythos and GPT-5.5. ANDREW: What's actually changing for an enterprise buyer this time? JENNY: Two big things. First, a new category Google is calling Googlebook — premium AI-native laptops built around Gemini, with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo as launch hardware partners. Those ship in the fall. The pitch is that the device is designed around the model from the silicon up, not bolted on. Second, an Android XR glasses preview with Samsung, XREAL, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster as partners. Paired-phone model, cameras, microphones, an optional in-lens display, and Gemini doing the work of translation, navigation, and visual understanding. ANDREW: Glasses again. Why is this attempt different from the last few? JENNY: Two reasons. The model is finally good enough — real-time multilingual translation and visual understanding actually work now in a way they did not in 2014 or 2023. And the fashion partnerships matter. The Warby Parker and Gentle Monster deals are about getting these on faces. Whether it ships at scale is a separate question, but the demo bar is much higher than the last cycle. JENNY: Related funding news from the AI desk. Bloomberg is reporting that Anthropic is in talks for a round of 30 billion dollars or more at a 900 billion dollar valuation. TechCrunch put the upper bound at 50 billion. A board decision is expected this month. Either number would push Anthropic past OpenAI, which set its last mark at 852 billion in March. ANDREW: That's an enormous figure for a company that did not exist five years ago. JENNY: It is. Their annualized revenue is reportedly on track to clear 45 billion this year, up from about 9 billion at the end of 2025. That's the number that gets you to that valuation — Claude Code and the Cowork product on the enterprise side. ANDREW: And on the regulation side? JENNY: A real shift. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation has now finalized pre-deployment testing agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI. OpenAI and Anthropic renegotiated existing partnerships to fit the Trump AI Action Plan framework. Practically, that means every new frontier model from the major labs gets reviewed by federal evaluators before release. Whether that becomes a meaningful gate or a rubber stamp is what to watch this summer — but it is now standard operating procedure, and that is a real change from where the policy conversation was a year ago. JENNY: Andrew, that's the AI side. What's the home lending picture this morning? ANDREW: Thanks, Jenny. Rates pushed higher again overnight. Mortgage News Daily has the 30-year fixed for top-tier borrowers at 6.68 percent this morning, up from 6.65 on Friday. Bankrate's national average is 6.58. Both are five-week highs. The story behind the number is the ten-year Treasury at 4.6 percent, which is the highest yield we've seen in over a year, and a widening spread between the ten-year and the mortgage rate that is now back above two full percentage points. JENNY: For someone trying to lock a rate this week, what does that move actually cost? ANDREW: On a 400,000 dollar loan, going from 6.5 percent three weeks ago to 6.68 today adds roughly 50 dollars to the monthly payment. Over the life of the loan, you're talking about 18,000 dollars. It's enough to push some borrowers back into a longer rate-watch posture. The refinance share of applications is at its lowest level since last summer for exactly that reason. ANDREW: A couple of industry notes. Rocket reported 44.7 billion dollars in first-quarter closed volume, just behind United Wholesale Mortgage at 44.9 billion. Two of the largest lenders in the country are essentially tied in market share, and the Rocket-Mister Cooper integration is continuing to drive layoffs as the combined servicer rationalizes its technology stack. loanDepot's first-quarter lock volume was up 14 percent, and they just announced a new partnership with Figure Technology Solutions aimed at lowering loan-production costs through a more automated underwriting stack. JENNY: And on the regulatory side? ANDREW: The trend National Mortgage News flagged last week is holding — with the CFPB pulling back under the new administration, more servicing oversight is shifting to the FHA and to state regulators. For lenders that built their compliance programs around federal CFPB enforcement, that's a meaningful operational change. The MBA's weekly applications print comes Wednesday morning. Watch the purchase index — last week it was up 7 percent year over year despite the rate move, which suggests buyer demand is still there if rates cooperate. ANDREW: Jenny, what's Jacksonville looking at today? JENNY: Thanks, Andrew. Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at a high near 87 today with a 30 percent chance of an afternoon shower and a breeze from the east-southeast around 12 miles per hour. Warm and mostly fair. JENNY: The big local story is the JEA investigation. The City Council Finance Committee takes a final vote today on subpoenas for CEO Vickie Cavey, Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks, and former general counsel Regina Ross. The Special Investigative Committee already approved those three to nothing on May 11th. Brooks is scheduled to appear June 8th. Cavey is on the calendar for June 22nd, after she told the council she could not make an earlier date because of her schedule and hurricane prep. ANDREW: What is the council actually trying to learn here? JENNY: This is the workplace culture investigation that started last winter — questions about how senior-level decisions were made, who knew what, and when. Today's Finance Committee vote is procedural, but it is the green light to start putting people under oath. The committee chair, Ron Salem, has signaled he wants to move quickly. So watch his comments after the vote for the tempo on the rest of this. JENNY: One other local development worth flagging. The ordinance for a Culinary Institute of America campus downtown comes up for a vote next Tuesday, May 26th. The package is 35 million dollars in city incentives over six years, plus another million pledged by the Tourist Development Council, for a 50,000 square foot campus on the riverfront. Council President Kevin Carrico is pushing for emergency passage before the CIA board meets in June to pick between Jacksonville and the other finalist cities. ANDREW: That is a fast move for a deal that size. JENNY: It is, and the pitch is that the workforce is the linchpin for the downtown hospitality plays the city is trying to land. Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are all reportedly in the running. ANDREW: Anything else on the downtown story? JENNY: Two quick items. The University of Florida released its first rendering of the new downtown Jacksonville campus last week — that is the graduate-focused campus that anchors the eastern side of the LaVilla redevelopment. And the dispute between JEA and the Mayo Clinic over roughly 12 million dollars in unpaid capacity fees is still unresolved. The News4Jax I-Team is reporting the inspector general's office is asking questions about how the gap got that large. That one will likely surface again as the JEA hearings get going. ANDREW: Before we let you go — one thing to watch today: the National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room. Specifically, watch for whether the White House comes out with a clock on those Gulf-mediated talks. A public 48-hour or 72-hour deadline tells oil traders the shape of the week and likely sends Brent right back above 110. No clock, and crude probably retraces another couple of dollars on the assumption that everyone wants to keep talking. Either signal will move the ten-year yield, and through it, your mortgage rate. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Tuesday. Have a great day. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.

Jax Morning Brief — Warsh Takes Fed Gavel Into Selloff, Trump-Xi Summit Wraps Thin, 10Y at 4.59%

Good morning, and welcome back from the weekend. It's Monday, May 18th, 2026. This is The Morning Brief. I'm Jenny. ANDREW: And I'm Andrew. JENNY: A new Fed chair took the gavel Friday into a market that did not love what it saw. Kevin Warsh's first hours on the job came as the ten-year Treasury yield punched to a fifteen-month high and Wall Street sold off hard. ANDREW: And President Trump wrapped two days in Beijing with Xi Jinping with a Boeing order, a soybean deal, and a vague handshake on Iran — but no joint statement. We'll get to what traders made of all of that, and what to watch this week. JENNY: Let's get into it. ANDREW: A quick look at the markets. The S and P 500 closed Friday at 7,408, down 1.24 percent. The Dow shed 537 points, or 1.07 percent, to finish at 49,526. The Nasdaq fell 1.54 percent to 26,225. It was the worst session in weeks, with tech leading the slide. The ten-year Treasury yield settled at 4.59 percent — the highest since February of last year — and the thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is tracking at 6.36 percent according to Freddie Mac's weekly survey. The proximate cause was a messy week of inflation data, a new Fed chair, and a China summit that delivered atmospherics rather than deliverables. ANDREW: A quick weekend at a glance. Warsh formally took the Fed chair from Jerome Powell Friday at noon. Trump and Xi closed their Beijing meetings the same morning. And on Sunday, the President said he will convene his national security team Tuesday to talk Iran options. We start there. ANDREW: So Jenny, the big handoff. Friday at noon, Kevin Warsh became the eleventh chair of the Federal Reserve. Powell handed him the gavel after the slimmest confirmation margin for any Fed chair in modern history — 54 to 45 — and Warsh walks in with two problems on his desk. The first is a ten-year Treasury yield at 4.59 percent. The second is producer-price inflation that ran way hot the week before. JENNY: And the market read on Warsh seems to be skeptical? ANDREW: That's the right word. Bond traders spent the week pricing out rate cuts. Futures had a June cut as a coin flip ten days ago. After Friday they are well under thirty percent. Warsh has not said a word publicly since being sworn in, but during his confirmation hearing he told the Senate the Fed needs, quote, a new framework, new tools, and new communications. Markets are reading that as: don't expect easy cuts. His first FOMC meeting is June 16th and 17th. JENNY: So whatever Warsh says first — wherever he says it — that's the print of the week? ANDREW: Bigger than any data release this month. Powell, by the way, is staying on as a board governor. Which is unusual and worth watching. ANDREW: The second weekend story — President Trump wrapped his Beijing summit with Xi Jinping on Friday. Trump called it, quote, fantastic trade deals. The actual deliverables: China committed to buying 200 Boeing aircraft, agreed to resume purchases of American soybeans, oil, and liquefied natural gas, and reopened access for U.S. beef. On Taiwan, the two sides agreed to disagree. There was no joint statement, which by summit standards is a real tell. JENNY: And on Iran? That's what everyone was watching. ANDREW: On Iran, Trump said Xi agreed not to send military equipment to Tehran and would, in his words, pressure Iran on the Strait of Hormuz. That is vague, and the markets read it as vague. By Sunday, Trump told reporters there, quote, will not be anything left of Iran if they don't move, and Axios is reporting he's meeting with the national security team Tuesday to weigh military options. Brent crude is back trading north of 107 dollars. JENNY: A nine-week-old war that the White House still officially calls a ceasefire. ANDREW: That's the surreal part. We are in day fifty-something of a ceasefire that has had two missile and drone attacks on the United Arab Emirates in the last week alone. Watch Tuesday's meeting closely. ANDREW: That's the national desk. Jenny, over to home lending — though it's basically the same story, told through rate sheets. JENNY: Andrew, the mortgage story this morning really is the same story. Walk us through where rates actually landed. ANDREW: Sure. Freddie Mac's weekly survey out Thursday showed the thirty-year fixed at 6.36 percent. Bankrate's daily had it slightly higher around 6.43, and the top-tier rate at Mortgage News Daily came in closer to 6.5. So depending on which dashboard you read, the headline rate is somewhere between 6.36 and 6.5 percent. Either way, it is sitting at or near a five-week high, and the cause is the bond market — the ten-year jumped fourteen basis points Friday alone. JENNY: So what does that actually mean for someone trying to close on a house this week? ANDREW: Real money. On a 400,000 dollar loan, the difference between the early-April rate of about 6.2 and Friday's 6.5 is roughly 80 dollars a month — almost a thousand a year. For a buyer trying to qualify by debt-to-income, that's the difference between an approval and a no. JENNY: And applications? Are buyers blinking? ANDREW: Not yet, actually. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported purchase applications up four percent week-over-week for the week ending May 8th, and up seven percent year-over-year. Refis up 28 percent year-over-year. The market is still functional — it is just functional at a higher rate. The risk is what happens if the ten-year stays above 4.5 percent into June. That's when purchase volume actually starts to slow. JENNY: And the FHA share? ANDREW: Ticked up to 17.9 percent, which tells you first-time buyers are stretching. Watch the next MBA print Wednesday morning. JENNY: Speaking of this week — let's pivot to AI. Andrew, the tech calendar is dominated by one event. Google I/O kicks off Tuesday in Mountain View, and Google is expected to put Gemini at the center of essentially everything they own. ANDREW: Bigger than usual? JENNY: Significantly. The keynote drops Tuesday at one p.m. Eastern. Expectations include a new Gemini model — possibly called Gemini 4.0 — agentic AI features baked into Android, the public preview of Android XR glasses built with Samsung and Warby Parker, and the unveiling of a new laptop category called Googlebooks from Acer, ASUS, and Lenovo. CNBC's framing is the sharpest: Google is racing to rewire Android around Gemini before Apple's AI reboot at the developer conference next month. ANDREW: So this is a competitive shot, not just a developer conference. JENNY: It's a shot at Apple, and a shot at OpenAI's super app play. OpenAI confirmed last week it's merging ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent, the developer API, and the Atlas browser into a single product team. So Google, OpenAI, and Apple are all converging on the same idea — your phone, your computer, and your browser should be one continuous agent. JENNY: Meanwhile Anthropic had a remarkable week of its own. Bloomberg reports Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise as much as fifty billion dollars at a valuation between 850 billion and 900 billion. That would make it the most valuable AI startup in the world, leapfrogging OpenAI's 852 billion. CEO Dario Amodei told staff the company could grow 80 times this year. ANDREW: 80 times. From what base? JENNY: From a revenue base already in the billions. Worth keeping in perspective how fast this has happened — Anthropic was valued at 61 billion fourteen months ago. It is now flirting with a trillion. And separately, the company closed a 1.5 billion dollar joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman and Friedman, and General Atlantic to push Claude into private-equity portfolio companies. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman each put in roughly 300 million. Goldman about 150. ANDREW: That's a financial services beachhead. JENNY: It's the financial services beachhead. And one quick policy note — the federal Center for AI Standards and Innovation announced agreements this month with Google, Microsoft, and xAI to test their frontier models before public release. OpenAI and Anthropic renegotiated their existing partnerships to align with the Trump administration's AI Action Plan. Pre-release government testing of frontier models is now effectively table stakes. JENNY: That's the AI desk. Let me bring it home to Jacksonville — and first the weather. JENNY: Weather-wise, Jacksonville is looking at 87 degrees and mostly sunny today, with a low around 70. Light easterly winds picking up to about 14 miles an hour in the afternoon. And the burn ban remains in effect across Duval County — smoke from wildfires in surrounding counties is keeping particulate levels elevated for sensitive groups. JENNY: On the city front — Tuesday is the day for JEA. The City Council Finance Committee meets tomorrow and is expected to vote on whether to issue subpoenas to JEA CEO Vickie Cavey, Chief Administrative Officer Jody Brooks, and former chief legal counsel Regina Ross. Under council rules the Finance Committee can finalize the subpoena power without a full council vote. That makes Tuesday the decision day in a four-month-long workplace-culture and oversight fight. ANDREW: And remind me — what's Cavey's response been? JENNY: She's pushed back on the timing. In emails to council members earlier this month she said she could not appear before June 22nd, citing schedule conflicts and hurricane-season preparation. The committee is unlikely to be moved by that. ANDREW: Story two? JENNY: Story two is a big economic-development play. Council President Kevin Carrico filed Ordinance 2026-0419 last week — a 35 million dollar incentive package to land a Culinary Institute of America campus downtown. The Jax Daily Record has the financial breakdown: 8 million in workforce development funding, 27 million in other appropriations, paid out over six years. The campus would sit on the long-vacant waterfront site of the old county courthouse, inside a Corner Lot Development tower with a hotel and restaurants. Carrico is asking for emergency passage at the May 26th council meeting because the CIA board is meeting in June to pick its Southeast campus city. ANDREW: Jacksonville against who? JENNY: The city is not naming competitors publicly, but Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville are the obvious ones. This would be the CIA's first new American campus in years. JENNY: And the Jaguars released their 2026 schedule Thursday night. Browns at home Week 1, September 13th. Bye is Week 7, October 25th — and that placement is deliberate. The Jax Daily Record reports the team and city are using the bye to push stadium construction. Three prime-time games this year: at Baltimore November 5th on Amazon, home against Pittsburgh December 14th on ESPN Monday night, and at Dallas December 27th on NBC. Two London games early — Eagles October 11th, Texans October 18th. ANDREW: So a brutal travel stretch up front and then a working-class Sunday-afternoon schedule. JENNY: Pretty much. ANDREW: Before we let you go, one thing to watch this week: Tuesday has the loaded calendar. Trump's national security meeting on Iran. The Google I/O keynote at one p.m. Eastern. The JEA Finance Committee vote in Jacksonville. And in the background, every bond trader on Wall Street is going to be listening for the first public sound from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. The signal to watch: whether the ten-year Treasury yield closes above 4.6 percent. That is the threshold where economists at Goldman and JPMorgan have said mortgage rates start moving meaningfully toward 6.75 percent — and where the housing market begins to feel it. JENNY: That's your Morning Brief for Monday. Have a great week. ANDREW: We'll see you tomorrow.