China has reportedly ordered its airlines not to take any further deliveries of Boeing jets, the latest move in its tit-for-tat trade war with the US. The Chinese government has asked carriers to stop purchases of aircraft-related equipment and parts from American companies, according to a Bloomberg News article, which cited people familiar with the matter.
The order was reported to have come after the country raised its retaliatory tariffs on US goods to 125% on Friday in response to Donald Trump’s levies on Chinese imports totaling 145%. Beijing was also said to be considering ways to support airlines that lease Boeing jets and are facing higher costs.
About 10 Boeing 737 Max jets are being prepared to join Chinese airlines, and if delivery paperwork and payment on some of them were completed before Chinese ”reciprocal” tariffs came into effect, the planes may be allowed to enter the country, sources told Bloomberg.
The restriction marks a serious blow for Boeing and other manufacturers trying to navigate the escalating trade war between the world’s two biggest economies.
The group chief executive of the budget airline Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, has said his company could delay taking deliveries of Boeing aircraft if they become more expensive. He told the Financial Times that Ryanair was due to receive a further 25 aircraft from Boeing from August but would not need the planes until around March or April 2026. “We might delay them and hope that common sense will prevail,” O’Leary said.
Shares in Boeing have been buffeted by worries about the impact of trade tariffs, as well as complaints from some shareholders that the company has underinvested in its engineering. The company has lost 7% of its market value since the start of the year, and in March its chief financial officer, Brian West, said tariffs could hit availability of parts from its suppliers.
The rival European plane manufacturer Airbus said on Tuesday that it was watching the evolving situation on trade tariffs. Its chief executive, Guillaume Faury, told shareholders the company was having problems receiving components from the American supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which was weighing on the production of its A350 and A220 jetliners.
Boeing was approached for comment.

A Boeing jet intended for a Chinese airline landed back at the planemaker’s US production hub on Sunday, a victim of the tit-for-tat bilateral tariffs launched by Donald Trump. The 737 MAX, which was meant for China’s Xiamen Airlines, landed at Seattle’s Boeing Field at 6.11pm, according to a Reuters witness. It was painted with Xiamen livery.
The jet, which made refuelling stops in Guam and Hawaii on its 5,000-mile (8,000-km) return journey, was one of several 737 MAX jets – Boeing’s bestselling model – that had been waiting at Boeing’s Zhoushan completion centre for final work and delivery.Trump this month raised baseline tariffs on Chinese imports to 145%. In retaliation, China imposed a 125% tariff on US goods.
A Chinese airline taking delivery of a Boeing jet could be crippled by the tariffs, given that a new 737 MAX has a market value of around $55m, according to IBA, an aviation consultancy. It was not clear which party made the decision for the aircraft to return to the US. Boeing and Xiamen had not responded to Reuters requests for comment at time of publication.
Confusion over changing tariffs could leave many aircraft deliveries in limbo, with some airline CEOs saying they would defer delivery of planes rather than pay duties, analysts say.

Here's the best bond article I read this weekend.
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/high-yield-junk-bonds-9ed6141e?mod=search_headline
Excerpt:
The higher spreads split investors “into two camps—head for the hills or this is an incredible buying opportunity,” Fridson tells Barron’s. This “could be the most bifurcated decision many investors will ever face.”
As noted on other threads we "headed for the hills" a coupla years ago.

Microsoft made a significant statement by entering a twenty-year agreement with Constellation Energy, which plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown. Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6 billion to refurbish and restart the reactor by 2028 with an estimated 835 MW of capacity. Microsoft entered the agreement to provide the energy demands for its AI data centers.

There is one problem with this: we cannot continue to scale energy usage like this without making the Earth inhospitable to organic life.

we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.

"But for bond investors, starting yields matter much more than historical returns—and the higher the yield,
the better. Current yields are higher today than they have been for most of the past 15 years."
"Investors can capture a 6% yield on a mix of taxable bonds, including preferred stock.
That could provide a nice compliment to stocks, particularly in tax-advantaged accounts such as 401(k)s
and individual retirement accounts. ......

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m7EJGXa-5Rc

On Friday, the New York Times reported that two Trump administration sources said an April 11 letter signed by three federal officials to Harvard president Alan Garber was “unauthorized” and should not have been sent. The letter demanded the Massachusetts university come under government oversight and make changes related to student and faculty conduct, admissions, alleged antisemitism on campus and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Harvard on Saturday pushed back on the assertion that the letter was sent in error, pointing out that the Trump administration had “doubled down” on its threats. After Harvard refused to comply with the letter’s demands, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in federal funding to the university and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.
“It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say,” the university said Saturday in a statement to The Washington Post. “But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences on students, patients, employees, and the standing of American higher education in the world.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment, but a senior official there told the Times that the administration stood by the letter. White House senior policy strategist May Mailman said the turmoil over Harvard publicly rejecting the administration’s demands was overblown, and she faulted university leaders for not continuing discussions they had been having for weeks with the White House’s antisemitism task force.