Trump: Powell Can Do What He Wants

On May 19, stablecoin infrastructure startup Checker announced it has closed an $8 million financing round focused on driving broader stablecoin adoption through institutional-grade tools. Co-founder and CEO Jack Chong confirmed the capital came from a late 2025 pre-seed and seed round. Major investors in the deal include Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures, and Framework Ventures. Additional participants backing the raise are partners like Latin America’s Bitso, Africa’s DFS Lab, and Asia’s Onigiri Capital, SNZ Capital, and Velocity. Several angel investors also joined the round, including Bam Azizi, Shivani Siroya, and Reid Cuming. However, Chong did not disclose details about the funding round’s structure, the company’s valuation, or whether any investors secured board seats or observer positions.

May 20 — According to market sources, the mediator working with Samsung and its union has stated that the two sides have not yet reached an agreement on an issue. (FX Street)

May 19, Bitget market data shows that Situational Awareness LP — the investment vehicle owned by 25-year-old Wall Street AI stock guru Leopold Aschenbrenner — conducted its first net dip-buying activity for its holdings during Q1 2026, acquiring shares in two companies: T1 Energy (TE), which fell 11.86% to $6.17, and HIVE Digital (HIVE), which declined 6.5% to $3.235. Both companies are currently unprofitable, carrying negative price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios — calculated as total market value divided by the sum of their net earnings over the most recent four quarters.

On May 19th, Andrej Karpathy—OpenAI co-founder and former Director of AI at Tesla—announced he’s joining Anthropic. In a statement, he noted, “I believe the next few years will be a particularly critical stretch for advancing Large Language Models (LLMs). I’m really excited to join this team and get back to R&D work. I still hold a deep passion for education and plan to keep pushing related work forward at the right time down the line.”

On May 19, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a proposal to expand disclosure rules for public companies and broaden the scope of "shelf offerings" — moves aimed at encouraging more firms to go public via initial public offerings (IPOs). Note: A shelf offering lets a company register a large batch of planned securities (such as stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments) with the SEC upfront, without needing to sell all of them right away. Instead, the securities can be “put on the shelf” for a period of time and issued in batches whenever market conditions are favorable.

Per monitoring from Dynamic Beating, Reuters reported that Europe’s leading AI firm Mistral AI announced Tuesday it has acquired Emmi AI—an Austria-based company located in Linz—with the transaction’s value undisclosed. The acquisition aims to enhance the company’s AI solution capabilities for European industrial clients. In 2025, Emmi AI closed Austria’s largest funding round on record, raising €15 million. The company focuses on developing AI models that address complex physical challenges in industrial scenarios, including issues like airflow, heat conduction, and material stress. Mistral AI stated that this acquisition will strengthen its core strategy around serving European clients, with a particular focus on engineering design and manufacturing tasks that have so far been relatively overlooked by the broader AI industry. The firm noted its solutions will be customized to customer needs, integrating multiple AI tools to operate in harmony. For example, one AI model handles prod