Stan Rykowski @StanRykowski

zerohedge.com/markets/everyo…

@SlawomirDebski Trump is "transactional" in what he says and does meaning he will act only if the expectation is that he/his will get properly remunerated. It is not complicated.

The Failure of Bessent's 3 3 3 Plan: myrmikan.com/pub/Myrmikan_R…

The Mechanics of Financial Repression | Russell Napier youtu.be/hF9tWw1gj3A?si… via @YouTube

BREAKING: Spot gold falls below $4,500/oz as Fed Chair Warsh says price stability is now the Fed's "predominant focus." 5 years later, and inflation is still not back below 2%. Inflation is the new normal.

Lacy Hunt & Brent Johnson: The US Has Entered A New Inflationary Era Tha... youtube.com/live/Scr5YXYJG… via @YouTube

NEW: Preseason AP Top 25 Poll ‼️🏈 Is your team ranked to start the season?

The cost of servicing US debt is the highest in decades: On Thursday, the US government sold $25 billion of 30Y Treasury bonds at a 5.216% yield, the highest auction yield since 2001. This follows a $42 billion auction of 10Y Treasury notes on Wednesday that resulted in a 4.683% yield, the highest since 2007. Previously, on July 9th, the government sold 30Y Treasury bonds at a 5.058% yield, the highest since 2007, highlighting the worsening trend in US debt financing costs. By comparison, yields on the same-maturity Treasury auctions were below 2.00% during the 2020 pandemic. This comes as investors are demanding more compensation to finance the US government's ever-growing deficit. In July, the US Treasury’s budget deficit surged +$141 billion YoY, to $432 billion, the largest July total in history. The US debt crisis is entering uncharted territory.

The Fed Is Quietly Suppressing Interest Rates | Michael Howell youtu.be/YIixALMWGkQ?si… via @YouTube

Centralization is Reversion to the Soviet Model. This is not a Democratic set-up, says Richard Werner youtu.be/LF4R6u9kYJs?si… via @YouTube

Fireside Chat with Felix Zulauf & Jeffrey Gundlach, Moderated by Grant W... youtu.be/N0C3oJ90ZwA?si… via @YouTube

FUN FACT: The US, China and UK hold 580,000 BTC between them and bought exactly zero of it. Every coin was confiscated.

Crypto treasuries turn to risky equity in drive to raise cash ft.com/content/0c91bb… via @FT

zerohedge.com/political/why-…

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Thanks @tomkeene. So why did Rockefeller stop vertically integrating at the gas pump and never build the car? I knew you would come back on this... Rockefeller followed one rule: never put a dollar where you're a price-taker. Only own the bottleneck where you set the price. It's the same rule the hyperscalers are breaking. He stopped integrating beyond the pump, as owning Detroit would have meant pouring capital into a competitive, capital-intensive, price-taking manufacturing business. Gasoline and cars are complements, not substitutes, and you want your complement industry fragmented and competitive. Cheap, abundant cars from Ford and GM meant more fuel sold at higher margin. The artificial muscle (AM) revolution was ultimately about oil, not the cars planes and trucks that did the heavy lifting. Decades ago, Buffet called them the worst kinds of businesses: ones that grow fast, devour capital and earn little on it. He said if he would have been at Kitty Hawk he would have shot Orville down because "Karl Marx couldn't have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did." This is exactly the charge now being levelled at the hyperscalers: rapid growth, insatiable demand for capital, and returns that don't clear the cost of it. But the key here is that Rockefeller wanted the cheap abundant trains, planes and automobiles as he controlled the choke point. The ability to turn crude into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels. Similarly, the AI revolution will likely be about atoms, not bits, as that’s where the choke point ultimately is. Chips, turbines, transformers – hence critical minerals. In the new AI race the actual chokepoint has moved off bits entirely, onto atoms: silicon, where Nvidia sets the price, and the commodity complex underneath it: copper, steel, gas, uranium, the metals and molecules. With the exception Google’s TPU, they own very little of this. Think of Google with its TPU as the Gulf Oil/Mellons that became Chevron. So who is the Standard Oil of the AI story: Its Nvidia. Both with c.85% market share. I am sure Jensen keeps a copy of Dan Yergin's The Prize for nighttime reading as he has played it to the tee. But unlike Standard Oil, Nvidia doesn’t control its crude supply. It has TSMC and ASML to contend with. So what does the AM revolution tell you about what could happen to Nvidia, TSMC and ASML in the AI revolution?

tom keene @tomkeene

5 months ago

‘Why did Rockefeller stop at the gas station and not vertically integrate into cars?’ CURRIE. Read the HedgieMarkets piece; read and re-read Currie.

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The purest worship comes from the tiniest hearts. ✨ This is what joy looks like at a Compassion center.

The passive investing "everything bubble" could end up fueling a bigger crash than the AI boom. Veteran strategist Mike Green (@profplum99) joined me for the debut episode of FULL SIGNAL to discuss how inflated asset prices are masking risks in the economy, AI versus dot-com, criticisms of bitcoin and more. 0:00 - Intro 0:27 - Biggest risks in markets 1:17 - Passive investing inflating asset prices 3:34 - Tipping point to passive bubble? 8:50 - Rising earnings mask weakness 13:30 - AI vs. dot-com 15:03 - Role of 401(k)s in the "everything bubble" 25:46 - Bitcoin 30:35 - Conclusion

Examining history can help predict the future: myrmikan.com/pub/Myrmikan_R…

"The only other time this ever happened was between 1929 & 1930" Lacy Hunt sees a deflationary debt spiral unfolding now caused by tariffs & lack of liquidity in international markets. This is how the Federal Reserve & President Hoover intentionally collapsed the system in 1929

Financelot @FinanceLancelot

a year ago

Dow Jones to Gold Ratio is about to cross a level only seen 3 times in history. 2008, 1973 and 1929

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