Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

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Weekly Market Pulse: An Energetic Market

2025-09-18

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2025-09-18

Quite the turnaround from February–March. Back then, tariff chaos sank the dollar 10% in March, volatility spiked, correlations went quickly toward +1, markets cracked, and only currency havens like the euro, yen, and gold found love.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Big Rate Cuts? Not Right Now

2025-08-18

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2025-08-18

“I think we could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis-point rate cut in September”. “If you look at any model” it suggests that “we should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a Bloomberg interview, 8/13/25 President Trump and others in his administration have been pushing for lower interest rates for months – one wonders what they’re worried about – and are doing and saying...

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AI for Dummies: AI Turns Us Into Dummies

2025-07-30

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2025-07-30

Given that AI is fundamentally incapable of performing the tasks required for authentic innovation, we're de-learning how to innovate. EDITOR's NOTE: I just got called out by a programmer who uses AI who was furious and wrote "students cheat, always have, tell us something we don't already know". I responded: "did you read the MIT paper or the other link?" Of course he didn't: TL/DR, which proves my point. Even the programmer...

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Hollowed Out

2025-06-26

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2025-06-26

The status quo has pushed everything to an extreme of hollowed-out instability to maintain a superficial appearance of normalcy and stability. But it's all fake. The phrase that best describes the present era is hollowed out. By hollowed out I mean the exterior facade still looks pretty much the same as it did in the past, but the internal structure has corroded / eroded to the point that little remains of what provided strength and...

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Meta-Thoughts on the War

2025-06-23

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2025-06-23

Decades of 'The Fog Machine of War' have jaded the public's appetite for 'Narrative Control'. The Fog of War is perhaps better described as The Fog Machine of War, for everything presented to the public is some version of Narrative Control, the purpose of which is to establish a context and story that's beneficial to whomever is presenting "facts," "news," "information" and "commentary."

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Weekly Market Pulse: The Turkey Leg

2025-06-23

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2025-06-23

Note: I wrote most of this commentary prior to the US strike on Iran and I decided to go ahead with it anyway. I don’t know any more than you do about what is going on in the Middle East and trying to predict what will happen in the coming days and weeks is a fool’s errand. We have a strategic allocation to commodities in our portfolios exactly because we can’t predict things like this.

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Weekly Market Pulse: No Free Lunches

2025-05-19

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2025-05-19

Moody’s Ratings downgrades United States ratings to Aa1 from Aaa; changes outlook to stable New York, May 16, 2025 — Moody’s Ratings (Moody’s) has downgraded the Government of United States of America’s (US) long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings to Aa1 from Aaa and changed the outlook to stable from negative.

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Living on Meds, Vitamin C and Ibogaine: American Precarity

2025-05-14

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2025-05-14

Favoring capital over wage earners is the long-established policy of both political parties. Cribbing a line from a Grateful Dead song ("ain't it a shame") seems appropriate when discussing the prospects of America's burgeoning Precariat Class who are increasingly depending on tips, side hustles, credit cards and buy now, pay later schemes to survive in a stupidly high-cost economy where all the media-hyped "GDP growth" benefits the few at the...

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The One Real Economic Indicator: "Upgrade to Premium"

2025-05-12

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2025-05-12

If you want to escape immiseration, that option is available--upgrade to Premium. I propose we set aside the conventional economic measures (GDP, unemployment, corporate profits, etc.) in favor of a more real-world metric: how many times we're hectored to "upgrade to Premium" to regain services that were once part of what we already paid for.

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Weekly Market Pulse: On The Road Again

2025-05-12

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2025-05-12

“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy.

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Tariffs Are Not Enough

2025-05-08

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2025-05-08

The tariff sledgehammer has a role, but it's a limited one. There's an inherent tension in State-Corporate Capitalism. Proponents of the free market hold that any state Industrial Policy will fail because the State cannot pick the winners and losers as effectively as The Market.

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The Terminal Rot in Corporate America

2025-05-05

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2025-05-05

Corporate America took advantage of the Covid shortages and fiscal largesse to profiteer on a scale criminals could only dream of.

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The Wile E. Coyote Recession

2025-04-24

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2025-04-24

So where are corporate profits going to come from as globalization, price-gouging, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation and immiseration run out of rope?

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What’s "Normal" in a Hyper-Normalized World?

2025-04-21

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2025-04-21

Now that the entire economy depends on these hyper-normalized speculative bubbles for its "growth" and "wealth," there is a profound fear of a future based not on artifice but on the real world.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Peak America?

2025-04-21

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2025-04-21

The US economy has been the envy of the world for a long time, especially after the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. Our economy has grown faster than just about any other in the developed world thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of our technology sector. Our markets for debt and equity are the largest and most liquid on the planet. The US economy represents roughly 25% of global GDP but our stocks make up over 50%...

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This Nails It: The Doom Loop of Housing Construction Quality

2025-04-16

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2025-04-16

Add in the doom loop of an unprecedented credit-asset bubble and housing as a sector is in trouble.

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Three Ways to Restore Housing Affordability

2025-02-28

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2025-02-28

The choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it's just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can't be both.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Tune Out The Noise

2025-02-24

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2025-02-24

Okay, I confess. It was my fault. I decided to take a couple of days off. I took my eye off the ball and the stock market fell a quick 2% while I was relaxing, eating too much, and seeing some great art in the Holy City, Charleston, SC. I promise it won’t happen again, at least until my wife tells me where we’re going next. It is a running joke within Alhambra that every time I go away for a few days the market takes a hit. Of course, that isn’t...

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The Tax Benefits of Self-Employment

2025-02-20

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2025-02-20

Lowering one's tax burden is not the reason to pursue self-employment, but it is something worth understanding if you're exploring self-employment.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Is The Honeymoon Over Already?

2025-01-27

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2025-01-27

President Trump’s first week on the job was a good one for markets. The S&P 500 was up 1.75%, with tech stocks taking the lead as the President welcomed a group of leading technology CEOs to D.C. to announce big investments in AI.

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