The debt ceiling can is now all but certain to get kicked another two years down the road.

• But, but, but: The underlying idiocy remains, Felix writes.

The big picture: The budget deal announced with great fanfare this past weekend could and should have been achieved at much lower political temperatures.

• Over the past few weeks, the full faith and credit of the United States of America was put at risk.
• The president's top priority became high-stakes negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the House — whose own job was in peril if he couldn't deliver something his fellow House Republicans considered a good deal.

Between the lines: When a politician puts his political career and the economic well-being of the country at risk, the natural assumption is that a bedrock and inviolable principle must be at stake. In reality, however, the stakes here turn out to have been downright picayune.

• What they're saying: "It’s like if a guy walked into a restaurant with a ticking bomb demanding to blow everyone up if he didn’t get a free peppermint," writes economics commentator Noah Smith.

Be smart: By its nature, the debt ceiling encourages disingenuous posturing by members of Congress who claim to hate the very government spending they themselves voted for.

• Most politics is disingenuous posturing, of course — but the debt ceiling needlessly weaponizes such rhetoric and wastes an outsize quantity of political capital.

The bottom line: The sensible and technocratic solution would be to abolish the debt ceiling entirely. But doing so would require the votes of politicians, who have become addicted to its ultra-high-stakes thrills.

💰 Company insiders made billions before SPAC bust. (WSJ)

🛢️ Oil falls 2% on U.S. debt deal and OPEC+ talks. (Reuters)

🤖 Global AI rules seem unlikely as tech policymakers meet in Sweden. (Axios)

Over the last 10 years, Nvidia's shares have risen more than 10,000%, the best performance of any company in the S&P 500 over that period, Matt writes.

• Huge numbers from its AI-centric data center unit last week catapulted the stock, which has trounced both the overall market and the largest names in corporate America.

The big picture: Nvidia's remarkable rise may represent the emergence of a new American corporate giant.

• With a market value now more than $950 billion, it may soon join the trillion-dollar-market-cap club — the current members are just Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Reality check: That sounds incredible. And it is. But it's worth noting we may be catching the company's performance at some sort of sugar-rush peak.

• For example, Tesla — at its peak in November 2021 — was up 19,000% over the previous decade. (About 10,000 percentage points have subsequently disappeared as the shine rubbed off the shares.)

State of play: Nvidia and some other semiconductor firms occupy a remarkably lucrative spot in the American technology ecosystem.

• Their silicon serves as the picks and shovels of every high-tech gold rush that comes along, whether it's cloud computing, crypto, or the AI hype that seems to be proliferating by the hour.
• In other words, Nvidia benefits from the lofty investor expectations about the future, while simultaneously seeing growth in profits and sales today.

The bottom line: As Nvidia shareholders can tell you, that's a very good place to be.

Speaking of AI ... every tech revolution starts with a better way for normal humans to access computing power — from punch cards to the mouse to touchscreens. Chatbots are the next leap, Axios' Ina Fried and Scott Rosenberg write.

• Why it matters: A big reason the tech world is so giddy over generative AI is that ChatGPT's conversational fluency helps bring digital powers to everyday users.

What's happening: You'll be able to tell your chatbot to clean up your inbox, change your system settings or connect to a printer.

• You won't have to know how to do those things yourself. But that also means individual users may end up with less skill and less direct control.

Zoom in: A number of big players are already using the power of large language models to allow chat-style interaction with their software...

• Microsoft last week unveiled a Windows Copilot, which adds a side pane where users can both summon the AI-powered Bing search engine.
• Adobe announced a generative fill tool for Photoshop that lets people give "descriptive commands:" Put a mountain here or remove this object.

Context: Tech companies have talked for years about natural-language interfaces. Back in the late 1990s, Clippy used to pop up in Word when it looked like you were writing a letter or resume and might need help.

• It's only now that computers seem poised to speak our language, rather than humans having to "speak computer."

What's next: Expect to see chatbot-like interfaces show up all over the place. Once the tech industry gloms on to a trend, it tends to happen everywhere, for better and worse.

Go deeper

Real personal spending — that is, adjusted for inflation — hit another new record in April, Axios' Kate Marino writes.

• The month's spending growth bested economists’ expectations, coming in 0.5% higher than in March, according to government data out Friday.

Why it matters: That looming recession? Forecasts for when it could hit keep getting pushed back. We’re definitely not in a recession with spending this strong (and unemployment this low).

What they’re saying: “The consumer is doing their part to keep the economy afloat,” wrote Ryan Sweet, Oxford Economics’ chief U.S. economist, in a research note.

• "The odds of a recession dropped again, as Americans made more and spent more even adjusted for inflation in March,” says Robert Frick, corporate economist with Navy Federal Credit Union. “The combination of more jobs and more wages, with some stimulus savings mixed in, keeps Americans consuming at a high level even in the face of high prices.”

The impact: Up until a few weeks ago, market consensus had been strongly tilted toward the Fed pausing its rate hikes when it meets in June. Not so much anymore. (Our colleague Courtenay Brown has more.)