Shares of Palantir rose about 20% the day President Trump was elected president. The stock hasn’t looked back, more than tripling since election day. Palantir has been a big winner under the Trump administration. This past weekend, the Washington Post highlighted some of the big government contract wins for Palantir as shown below: Palantir’s sales […]
President Trump has been incessantly pressuring Jerome Powell to cut rates ever since he took office. To wit, check out Trump’s latest post on Truth Social below. The Fed cut rates in late 2024 but stopped when Trump took office. Some claim the pause is political. Conversely, the Fed primarily supports its case with fears […]
The BEA reported that real GDP grew by 3.0% in the second quarter. Such is almost a percent better than the longer run trend growth rate, and is a cause for optimism for some. However, first quarter GDP was -0.5%, well below trend growth, and worthy of pessimism. The problem with being optimistic about the second […]
December 2024 marked the second-to-last time there was a dissent by an FOMC voting member. The dissent, at the time, was a sole vote by Jefferey Schmid against cutting rates. The last dissent was yesterday. While the Fed voted to maintain the Fed Funds rate at 4.25-4.50%, Michelle Bowman and Christopher Wallace cast dissenting votes […]
The graph below, from Michael Green (@profplum99), is the best way to show the logic that drives a Ponzi scheme in Bitcoin. The Ponzi scheme graph illustrates that there is a robust correlation between changes in the amount of Bitcoin held in funds (ETFs) and the price change. Simply, as new capital is used to […]
Construction of AI data centers can take anywhere from six months to multiple years to complete. Accordingly, they can’t build data centers quickly enough to keep up with the demand. Accordingly, we will need new, innovative solutions to meet the demand. For example, a startup private company named Armada makes portable AI data centers for […]
Typically, in Monday’s Commentaries, we share a few paragraphs titled “The Week Ahead’ in a lower section. This week, the amount and importance of the data could have a meaningful impact on markets and the Fed. Thus, this week’s’ “The Week Ahead’ gets top billing. Let’s review the calendar: Between this week’s labor and inflation […]
Recent surges in speculative stocks are among several indicators that retail traders are introducing a bit of euphoria to the stock market. In an interesting article, MarketWatch notes that Wall Street is paying close attention to speculative trading behavior among retail traders. The following is from the article: Barclays strategists led by Venu Krishna have […]
Japan and the US appear to have finalized a trade agreement that reduces the threatened 25% tariffs on Japan to 15%. Beyond the tariff rate, the deal has several important facets, including opening Japanese markets to US goods. However, most intriguing is that Japan will be financing the US with a $550 billion investment fund. […]