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Sunday, March 30, 2025

2025-03-30

 ***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

FRBoA: GDPNow
Latest estimate: -2.8 percent — March 28, 2025

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 28, down from -1.8 percent on March 26. The alternative model forecast, which adjusts for imports and exports of gold as described here, is -0.5 percent. After recent releases from the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the nowcast of the contribution of net exports to first-quarter real GDP growth declined from -3.95 percentage points to -4.79 percentage points in the standard model and from -1.92 percentage points to -2.53 percentage points in the alternative model.




Abstract
Why does the stock market rise and fall? From 1989 to 2017, the real per capita value of corporate equity increased at a 7.2% annual rate. We estimate that 40% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation. Economic growth accounted for just 25% of the increase, followed by a lower risk price (21%) and lower interest rates (14%). The period 1952–88 experienced only one-third as much growth in market equity, but economic growth accounted for more than 100% of it.


With little evidence that risk appetite is returning, the best thing for the bulls would be a return of quiet strength.

Bull markets bring quiet strength: little day-to-day movement, but lots of longer-term progress.
Bear markets bring noisy weakness: lots of day-to-day movement, but little longer-term progress



....................... JPMorgan strategist Bruch Kasman made some hay this week by calling out a 40% recession probability for this year. To my knowledge, this is the second-highest recession probability on the Street behind BCA Research's veteran forecaster Peter Berezin — he's at 75%.



As each year passes, we have come to appreciate Bob Farrell’s 10 Investment Rules.
  1. Markets tend to return to the mean over time.
  2. Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction.
  3. There are no new eras; excesses are never permanent.
  4. Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways.
  5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom.
  6. Fear and greed are stronger than long-term resolve.
  7. Markets are strongest when they are broad, and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue-chip names.
  8. Bear markets have three stages — sharp down, reflexive rebound, and a drawn-out fundamental downtrend.
  9. When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen.
  10. Bull markets are more fun than bear markets.
........... Excesses (new highs or lows) or a topping/bottoming process can go on for a lot longer than you could ever rationally comprehend… as you will see in the charts below. But eventually, these excesses do come to an end for reasons you probably didn’t think of at the time.  ...........

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Charts:
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X: 



(not just) for the ESG crowd:



......................................... Americans who are not fully brainwashed into the cult of Trumpism should be asking themselves if this is the kind of country they want to live in, though. Do you really want your government deciding what kind of political speech you are allowed to hear, and protecting your fragile little mind from wrongthink? Or do you want to decide such matters for yourself?



........................................... Too many people are reading into Trump want they want to see, not seeing what is actually there—and not there.



Geopolitical Fare:

Led by captains of London bankers, European leaders are leading us back to 1930s

......................... Zelensky’s t-shirt didn’t make itself: someone had to think up its message and they wanted us to see it. They took the trouble to design that t-shirt and made sure that Ukraine’s president wore it while addressing Western audiences. That message was somebody’s brainchild and it wasn’t a random choice, nor was it a joke. It was a disclosure of mission and intent and it should be taken seriously as such. Today we can see that Europe’s leading powers are following the call as they collectively and single-mindedly embrace militarization and earnest preparations for war.

.................................... But what is the point of all this busywork? Even European leaders are not so delusional as to think that they can reverse Ukraine’s defeat or vanquish Russia with their weak militaries. Instead, they simply want the war to continue, hoping to weaken and exhaust Russia with the view of toppling Vladimir Putin’s government. Well, let’s see how that’s going…......... 

....................... Of course, Eisenhower’s words fell on deaf ears and the disastrous rise of misplaced power ​h​as indeed displaced the democratic processes and liberties in the ​U​nited States, leading it into one war after another, everywhere around the world, creating misery at home and mayhem abroad. European leaders are now deliberately embarking on that same path.

.............. The very fact that all of a sudden, Britain, France, and Germany, together with the EU, are all on board with this “sharp U-turn,” toward militarization and war preparations, also rings familiar. It’s reminiscent of that pandemic we had back in 2020 when nearly all the governments in the world somehow came to adopt the same unscientific, incoherent and nonsensical countermeasures.



Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview that his job “is to keep the left pro-Israel,” which is just sad. Being a liberal Israel supporter these days probably feels like being a defense attorney for an accused murderer who won’t shut up about how much he loves murdering. ...............

.............. Liberal Zionists are having a hard time reconciling their positions of antiracism and social justice with their support for Israel because at the end of the day western liberalism is just as fraudulent and deceitful as Zionism is. We all watched them passively allow the Democratic president to turn Gaza into a pile of steaming blood-soaked wreckage and then demand everyone vote for his vice president. Democrats hold their worldview in place by psychologically compartmentalizing away from the atrocities their government commits in the here and now, while singing fondly about innocuous whitewashed historical revisionist versions of their civil rights heroes who died decades ago. .................



The US launched 65 airstrikes in 24 hours in Yemen, and then Trump’s intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard tweeted, “President Trump IS the President of Peace. He is ending bloodshed across the world and will deliver lasting peace in the Middle East.”

These freaks have no connection with reality. ...........................

❖

Trump is as evil as Biden. Biden was as evil as Trump. If you can’t see this by looking at the raw data of the behavior of their administrations, it’s either because you’re looking at incomplete data or because you’re letting your political biases do your thinking for you.

Both presidents are guilty of extreme evils, and you can’t separate the evils of one from the evils of the other. Biden spent the latter part of his term incinerating Gaza, and then Trump began working to clear it of Palestinians. Trump managed to secure the Gaza ceasefire that Biden spent 15 months avoiding, but then he immediately began sabotaging that very ceasefire as soon as he took office. Biden has been waging a dangerous proxy war in Ukraine that Trump helped provoke in his first term, and now that he’s back in office Trump is tasked with winding that war down to focus on new wars.

The crimes of the Republican and Democratic parties are inseparably intertwined with each other. It’s not that they’re the same — there are some differences — it’s that they work in conjunction to advance the same evil agendas. Saying the Democrats are better than Republicans or vice versa is like saying the top teeth of the shark are nicer than the bottom teeth; they might look and function a bit differently, but they’re used toward the same deadly end. .......................

❖

Democrats pretended to support justice and oppose racism, then Biden exposed them all as frauds in Gaza. Republicans pretended to support free speech and oppose war, then Trump exposed them as frauds with his Israel policy. US politics is just empty noise draped over an empire. ...............



Sci Fare:


I have been warning you all since 2021 about the fact that the current vaccines have the effect of making it impossible to genuinely achieve herd immunity. That’s what evolutionary biology suggested and that’s what the facts on the ground increasingly began to suggest after a while, with higher SARS2 mRNA in sewage in more highly vaccinated places and the curves began to deviate between highly vaccinated and unvaccinated parts of the world.

Most of the population now has brain damage from the constant COVID reinfections. The first infection robs you of three IQ points, assuming it’s mild enough to mean you don’t need to go to the hospital. The second reduces your IQ by two more points on average. Well, we can ignore all the excess deaths we’ve suffered for a moment. But the brain damage we all suffered, that’s harder to ignore. 

If there is some sort of mechanism related to mass vaccination that subsequently led to an increase in the total number of SARS-COV-2 infections, wouldn’t we want to know about it? If we made the whole situation worse by vaccinating, wouldn’t we want to know? Well, if you wait long enough, you find out this is what actually happened. We caused ourselves a massive self-inflicted wound. ..................



............................. To any of you who thought this virus should now just be like the other corona viruses, let me just remind you, that things take time to go wrong. It takes time to evolve a second cleavage site. Five years into the pandemic, it now happened. The first known SARS-type virus with a furin cleavage site, just added a second overlapping one.

Previous versions commonly depended on the lungs or the gut. You constantly get new versions of this virus, that focus on different organs. And importantly, those different versions don’t just compete, they mostly cooperate. Their internal genes are often identical, so with different Spikes they can enter different tissues. Some versions will benefit from the fever induced by the other version. That’s why it gets worse over time, as the genetic diversity of the virus expands. ...................

My position is simple: Our immune systems have ways of responding to viruses of this nature, that serve to keep our population healthy. With vaccination you can change the sort of response in an individual, but that change in the response then has the effect of spreading the virus and thereby making the ultimate long term outcome of the pandemic worse. .....................

But equally important to note, is that people end up with immune system damage. It’s gradual damage, it takes months to reveal itself. Ten months after infection, you see a reduction in T cells, as well as innate immune cells. The average American caught it 3.7 times so far. So you’re dealing with a population where practically everyone has an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome by now. That’s what all the studies suggest. It’s also what the excess mortality, along with the strange spikes in unrelated respiratory viruses suggest.

So we’re in big trouble. All the evidence points in the same direction: A population that’s developing brain damage and immune system damage. ..............



Out There Fare:

The left is treating a Netflix drama like it’s real life, marking a turning point in mass liberal psychosis.

............................................. I have no idea how to deal with that problem. You can’t have rational discussions with people who are locked out of reality, whose information diet is composed entirely of self-generated fictions, and who – like that pronouned grad student – will simply terminate any interaction that threatens their psychic parasite with toxic facts. You can’t convince them of things, because their psyche is completely walled off.

This is why psychiatric hospitals just throw psychotic patients in padded rooms, restrain them so they can’t injure themselves or others, chemically sedate them, and then gradually try to talk them back to something approaching sanity. That’s a long, labour-intensive process. What do you do when it’s tens of millions of people all across the Western world, all hooked together into one vast, all-encompassing, self-reinforcing, epistemically closed collective hallucination? There aren’t enough padded cells; there aren’t enough psychiatrists. ..................................

................. things might get weird for a while.



Fun Fare / Vid Fare:




Pics of the Week:



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