Let's start with a recent survey. Two out of three Americans now say it's a bad time to buy a house, the most negative reading Gallup has ever recorded.1 Another study showed that a record 25.2 million adults under 35 are living with their parents.
Just over a year ago, I made the case that the deficit narrative would find its cure in artificial intelligence. Goldman Sachs has since published research that, on first reading, appears to refute. It isn't. But after more than thirty years of watching capex cycles play out, I've learned the right move when new data lands is to test the original argument against it.
Headline CPI just printed 4.2% year-over-year for May. The highest reading since April 2023. The 10-year Treasury punched above 4.6% on the back of it, then pulled back recently. Energy ran +23.5% over the past twelve months on the Iran war, accounting for roughly 60% of the monthly all-items gain, and the doom crowd keeps pushing this is 1979 all over again with rate hikes ahead,
Milton Friedman's famous one-liner that anchors half the inflation debates on financial television leaves out the part where the actual economics live. Once you put it back in, the doomist case gets a lot smaller.
The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index just printed 44.8 in May. That’s the worst reading since the survey began in 1952. That print was lower than in 2008 and the 1980 inflation panic. It was also worse than the COVID lockdowns, yet the S&P 500 continues to climb higher, Q1 corporate earnings posted 27% […]
The K-shaped economy has become shorthand for a tidy story. The rich pull away while everyone else falls behind. It fits the mood, and it makes for a sharp headline. The problem is that it's mostly wrong. When you pull the actual Census data, the dominant move of the last half-century isn't down.
Wall Street has piled into the dollar debasement story; however, as is always the case, when everyone is on one side of the trade, the other side becomes more compelling. In Part 1, we explored why Dollar Dominance Remains Alive and Well. Today, we will explore the stronger-dollar trade, the one macro trade that nobody […]
The dollar is supposed to be dying. We’ve heard that argument for the better part of a decade, and it’s getting louder, not quieter. The narrative goes that BRICS countries are building an alternative, that China is dumping Treasuries, that gold is replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve asset, and that Washington is so […]
Last Friday closed with the 10-year Treasury yield at 4.60%, a one-year high, and the doom commentary about rising interest rates was waiting before the bell even rang. Hyperinflation. Bond market breakdown.