***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic Fare:
Peter Ireland · Stephen Miran · Nouriel Roubini
Executive Summary
Due to the instability of money demand, monetary policy implementation in the United States has held a smaller and smaller role for analysis of money, to the point that the Federal Reserve and therefore market participants rarely if ever mention it. However, new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has clearly indicated a view that money supply is relevant for monetary policy. Our contention is not that a return to targeting monetary aggregates is imminent or appropriate, but that monetary aggregates contain useful information for forecasting growth and inflation and this information should not be discarded, as it currently is.
Because they generally follow the Fed, financial markets are ill equipped to understand the return of monetary analysis. We aim to bring them up to speed. We first review monetarism and its rise and decline at the Fed. Next, we survey the state-of the-art in this unjustly neglected field of macroeconomics. There is significant evidence that Divisia monetary aggregates outperform simplesum aggregates. Finally, we extend the frontier of monetary analysis to current data through an application of the Greenspan-era P-star model.
Under benchmark assumptions for the supply side, most monetary aggregates indicate monetary policy is at present approximately neutral in its effect on inflation. ...........
A sustained oil price surge could drive inflation fears, or even spark a global recession, analysts say.
......................... The International Energy Agency agreed in March to make a record 400 million barrels of oil from strategic stockpiles available after a surge in global crude prices sparked by the Iran war. This week, the agency said that around 290 million barrels have already been released. Meanwhile, the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to around 310 million barrels last week (its lowest level since 1983) as the government continues a 172-million-barrel emergency release program.
“This brings us into a more dangerous phase versus March,” says Christopher Haines, global head of oil at Energy Aspects. “We have drawn down 300 mb [million barrels] of crude oil stock since March, including 170 mb of SPR [Strategic Petroleum Reserve], so global stock levels are far more constrained.”
............... “If there’s no de-escalation, if the conflict continues, if the Strait remains effectively closed, how does the world reach a balance in this new equilibrium? And the answer is very high prices, because you need to destroy demand,” says Alan Gelder, senior vice president of refining, chemicals, and oil markets at Wood Mackenzie. “That just drives the global economy off a cliff. So we go into this energy-induced global recession.”
Oil reserves "depleted" as the war with Iran intensifies
.......................................................................... But physical matter does not obey political communication indefinitely. One can influence the financial price of oil for a few weeks, perhaps a few months. One cannot create barrels that do not exist. If stocks fall, if refineries produce less, if refined products become scarcer, sooner or later the market must ration demand. And rationing takes place in two ways: through political decision-making, with conservation measures, or through price, by making fuel expensive enough to destroy demand.
The second scenario is the most brutal. If the system has to reduce consumption through price, then the current level might not be enough. Oil – or rather, refined products – would have to rise high enough to force households, businesses, airlines, hauliers and governments to cut back on their use. In that case, the crisis would no longer be hidden away in storage facilities, but would become visible in everyday life: reduced flights, more expensive fuel, higher freight costs, inflation, local shortages and emergency measures.
The geopolitical crux remains the Strait of Hormuz. As long as the strait remains closed or virtually closed, a return to normality is impossible. Even if a reopening were announced, a return to normality would take months. .......................
So, it seems that Ansar-Allah (the Houthis) struck an oil refinery in Jizan, Saudi Arabia. They also took a shot at a refinery in Yanbu, apparently intercepted by a battery the Greeks had there (what?)
Anyway, this is getting real. Between the Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, which have been very successful, Iranians hits, and now the Houthis, I don’t see how we avoid serious shortages. It’s the refineries that matter most: crude is worthless without refineries and they’re expensive, take a long time to build and aren’t always easy to repair, depending on what exactly got hit.
I also don’t see how we avoid massive famines and increased food prices in places that don’t have a formal famine. A lot of fertilizer runs from oil thru refineries. .............
I have been on record as "higher for longer" against the naysaying Team Transitory for a few years. Thus, I pushed back hard on the late-2025 expectation of three FED rate cuts.
To my chagrin, I was more right than anticipated, and I now offer that the FED should hike their rate by 50bps after tomorrow's meeting.
I will say I can offer no economic support for a 50bp hike, rather I am looking solely at market psychology and politics.
....................... Dr. Lacy Hunt is a living economist who has had a profound influence on me over the years, particularly as it pertains to the interaction of debt, money, savings, velocity, and economic growth. His understanding of how excessive government borrowing crowds out productive investment and stunts long-term economic growth is remarkable, and the work he has done, in my opinion, in this domain is unparalleled.
Dr. Hunt has been a long-time proponent of the view (which I share) that the long-term inflation range has been compressed by the twin effects of fiscal and monetary policy interventions. I refer to this dynamic as “Japanification” and argue both from history and economic theory that excessive government indebtedness, followed by the elixir they use to treat it all (fiscal and monetary interventions), puts downward pressure on economic growth, and in that sense is either disinflationary (best case) or deflationary (Japan’s generational experience). Regardless of the outcome to the price level, the impact on both nominal and real growth is erosive, and undermines the economic potential of a country (such as ours).
Lacy has recently argued that the structural range of U.S. inflation is likely to move higher after 30+ years of this lower equilibrium range due to a “steady erosion of the disinflationary architecture that dominated the 1990-2020 period.” He frames his argument for a new inflation range around the death of globalization. Essentially, the argument is that:
- Globalization accounted for the prior period’s disinflation
- Globalization is dying
- Therefore, the prior period’s disinflation will be gone
.............. I want to suggest to Dividend Cafe readers that we can agree globalization contributed to disinflation (it is undeniable), and we can even agree that globalization has seen its peak (though I need to comment more on this shakier premise in a moment). But what I believe warrants further scrutiny is whether or not globalization explains all disinflation of the prior generation, and if it doesn’t, whether or not the other contributing factors are also seeing a paradigm shift.
I want to suggest that old deflationary factors still exist in spades, and that new deflationary factors may very well be coming – for good or for bad. .....................................
Market Fare:
......................................... Another pivot is underway, in the stock market’s attitude to the capital expenditures building out artificial intelligence. The hyperscalers — Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. — that are trying to build a dominant position in the new technology saw their shares rally for years after the launch of ChatGPT. That is over. Their share prices have gone nowhere for the last 12 months as the excitement moved to chip manufacturers, the suppliers that stand to benefit most.
Last week, there appeared to be a further pivot, when Alphabet announced revenues and earnings ahead of expectations but also said that it would be further stepping up capex. Both the hyperscalers and their suppliers are falling. All the constituents are still sitting on huge gains for the ChatGPT era, but at least implicitly the market is now asking whether the hyperscalers will really go through with their capex plans, and are cutting back on the chipmakers accordingly ........
It’s way too early to say that the AI trade has peaked, and this week’s results from Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft should shed further light. But note that the nerves over AI are happening even as overall earnings remain remarkably strong.
Diverging internals, widening credit spread, rising inflation vol…
Summary: Internals, credit, and short-term breadth are all deteriorating. Add rising inflation volatility and a run of news failures, where earnings beats are getting sold in names like MU, INTC, GOOG, and ASML. That’s enough to stay defensive into this week’s FOMC, where the market may be underpricing a surprise 50bp hike. .......................
13. We’re not bearish but we are increasingly cautious. Add the deterioration in credit to the list (chart from Jason Goepfert / SentimenTrader).
14. Internals continue to deteriorate. We still haven’t seen enough in the weight of the evidence to call a major trend change, but the backdrop points to more near-term weakness and volatility. If Bassman is right and the Fed hikes this week, let alone 50bps, we could be in for a volatility pocket.
15. Our preferred short-term breadth measure, the McClellan Summation and Oscillator, have both rolled over. That confirms what internals and credit are telling us. Be defensive and wait for clarity or a positive catalyst. We’re comfortable holding high cash and will reassess post-FOMC.
The S&P 500 spent most of the year riding above its 50-day moving average, and we have warned for the last couple of weeks that a break lower would be worth paying attention to. That break occurred on Thursday, as the index closed the week at 7,411.98, roughly 0.8% below the 50-DMA at 7,467, marking its first decisive break below that line in months.
Momentum has clearly rolled over. The 14-day RSI sits in the mid-40s, below the neutral 50 line but not yet oversold, suggesting there is room for further downside before the tape gets stretched. The MACD agrees with the signal line crossing bearish about a week ago, and the histogram keeps widening to the downside. This is what the early innings of a pullback look like, not the middle or the end.
............. The bigger trend is still intact. The 200-day moving average sits at 7,001, and the index remains almost 6% above it. A slide to the 50-DMA or even the July closing low near 7,354 would be entirely normal inside an ongoing uptrend. The line that matters is the 200-DMA. Lose that, and the conversation changes.
............... Be honest about the near-term risk first. Valuations are not cheap. The broad market still trades well above its long-term average multiple, and the megacaps carry a premium on top of that. Free cash flow is under real pressure, and Alphabet just posted negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion and paused buybacks to fund the buildout. Capex guidance keeps getting revised higher, not lower, which means the deferred depreciation bill I described earlier is still growing. Add a tape below its 50-day average and the worst three-month stretch of the calendar dead ahead. More downside over the next quarter or two would not surprise me.
............ Those are not the numbers of a dying business. They are the numbers of businesses that cannot build capacity fast enough to meet demand.
This is where Howard Marks and his second-level thinking earn their keep. The easy call is to sell what just went down. The harder and usually more profitable call is to buy durable franchises when the crowd has decided the story is over. The hyperscalers are not dead. They are expensive, early in the payback, and briefly out of favor, which is a very different thing. We’d use this weakness to build positions in the names where cloud growth and backlog clearly justify the spend. And we’d do it in pieces rather than all at once.
I. On Industrials
Investors are suffering from AI fatigue. They’ve concluded that there is no way to estimate whether all the capital spending on AI infrastructure will generate good ROIs in the coming years. What they do know is that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on AI capex in the here and now. That explains why S&P 500 Industrials is the second-best-performing of the 11 S&P 500 sectors with a gain of 17.7% ytd (chart). That’s ahead of the 15.4% gain for the S&P 500 Information Technology sector…. Within the S&P 500 Industrials sector, several of the industries have benefited from the AI capex boom, especially Construction Machinery, Electric Equipment, and Industrial Conglomerates (chart). They should continue to do so, and we continue to recommend overweighting the sector.
Big Tech Debt Flood Is Taking Over Risk In Market: Credit Weekly
- Big Tech's appetite for AI investment is driving a wave of bond sales, having a bigger impact on the US corporate bond market than might be obvious.
- Debt from the six biggest tech companies represents 8.6% of the duration times spread for the US high-grade corporate market, more than the 7.3% for the six largest banks.
- The biggest tech companies are expected to issue around $285 billion of investment grade debt globally this year, with some investors welcoming the tech-led issuance wave and others expressing concerns over concentration and potential risks.
Bubble Fare:
One day the bust will be the big one, but for now the pullback in AI-related stocks has been almost completely offset by gains elsewhere
..................... My best guess on the reason for all these bubbles is a mix of easy money, the gambling instinct and hopes for new technology. These are the standard ingredients of bubbles from canals and railroads to the Great British Bicycle Bubble. But they’ve been on steroids since the 2007-09 financial crisis.
............ “The banking system is in rude health,” says Russell Napier, a global macro strategist and keeper of the Library of Mistakes, an Edinburgh-based collection of books on financial history. “That means there’s always more credit to do the next bubble.”
A.I. Fare:
The AI “bear case” isn’t one argument; it’s three. Burry on earnings. Bernstein on circular financing. MIT on revenue. Two are half right. One falls apart on the data.
Recently I saw a piece from popular AI Boom commentator Ed Zitron entitled “The Subprime Data Center Crisis”. I’ve long been critical of how often the topic du jour is analogized to the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 so I knew I would read the piece critically and likely feel the pull to write about it. I did, hence the piece you’re reading right now. .................
Nvidia is falling. The mood has changed.
CDS spreads have started to widen out for names in AI, and the market is asking three fundamental questions:
1) Will the AI capex pay off, and how quickly? With trillions committed to data centers, chips and power up front, the question is whether AI monetization ramps fast enough to clear the cost of capital before the assets depreciate, or whether it’s an overbuild whose ROIC never catches up to its WACC on a massive, front-loaded outlay. For more, see also here.
2) How is all of this being financed, and at what spread? .............
How China is trying to be the Android to America's Apple
Crypto Fare:
The Bitcoin forecast a pension actuary is obliged to make
...................... For a decade the question was whether serious institutions would ever put Bitcoin on the list. They are on the verge of something stranger: putting a number next to it, in a document with an audit trail, that binds them for three years at a time. When that number appears, it will not be the market’s best estimate of what Bitcoin is worth. It will be one profession’s most defensible estimate of what it can be blamed for. How much of the price should be set by a figure chosen for its defensibility?
Vid Fare:
Quotes of the Week:
Rabo: Markets have a habit of explaining every move with the most obvious narrative available. This week, that narrative was earnings. Investors spent days dissecting cloud growth, AI capex, free cash flows, and also Fed messaging, while some of the most dramatic price action of this summer was being driven by something else entirely.
I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
How the many converging crises lowered the prospect of keeping all 8.3 billion of us alive
Happy Earth Overshoot Day Everyone!
Yesterday, on July 30, we humans have consumed the last bit of ecological resources what Earth had the capacity to regenerate within our current calendar year of 2026. From yesterday on we are living on borrowed time—as we have been doing so every single year since 1971—drawing down the last remaining stocks of fisheries, top soils, forests, you name it in the process. At the same time we were merrily burdening the biosphere with an ever increasing amount of pollution as if there’s no tomorrow, overloading Nature’s capacity to cope. How bad could it be? Well, in case you were wondering: climate change, biodiversity loss, and extreme weather events (just to name a few symptoms of this planetary scale overshoot) are not a result of CO2 emissions alone but a direct consequence of the sum of our agricultural, mining, industrial etc. practices we call ‘modernity.’ And even if all 8.3 billion of us lived like an average Honduran or Cambodian we would still live up a year’s worth of natural resources in eleven months. Sounds sustainable? Not to me.
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............ And you have to keep in mind, we’re not done yet. The big jump in food prices still has to happen. The Strait of Hormuz, is shut down again right now. This results in higher fertilizer prices, which results in higher food prices. The Bab El Mandeb is now also shut down.
Since my last post on the topic, it has become clear that we’re now facing a bigger El Nino than anything ever seen before. The median forecast is 0.8 degree Celsius above the previous worst El Nino we’ve ever had.
..................... Described by NASA as a “fire-breathing dragon of clouds,” fire clouds are created by the intense heat of wildfires, generating an updraft of superheated, fast-rising air that can trigger powerful storms. Jean-Baptiste Filippi, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), tells TIME that the clouds fall into two categories: pyrocumulus and pyrocumulonimbus (also known as pyroCb). He explains that pyrocumulus is the first stage of a fire cloud. As the wildfire releases large amounts of heat, the air near the ground heats up and rises rapidly, generating a strong upward current.
.................................. Pyrocumulus and pyrocumulonimbus remain relatively rare in Europe. Further afield, fire clouds were observed during Australia's 2019-20 bushfires and in California's 2020 wildfire season. Filippi warns, however, that climate change could make these events more common in Europe. "You need stormy conditions, and then you need fire. We are going to have more stormy conditions, and we are going to have more fire. So the probability of having both together, at the same place and at the same time, is higher," he says. ...............
Sci Fare:
Sleep disturbances are far more common among workers in mid-later life than previously believed, according to a study that links work-related stress to a range of wellbeing issues.
U.S. B.S.:
There’s a powerful new documentary out called
Earth’s Greatest Enemy by Abby Martin about the ecocidal abuses of the US war machine, and it addresses the most pressing existential hurdles we face as a species like nothing I’ve seen before.
The film breaks down how the US military has become the single most environmentally destructive institution on our planet by an extremely massive margin, walking the audience through the many ways the Pentagon and its global metastases have been churning out carbon emissions, pouring toxins into the air and water, wiping out precious ecosystems for gratuitous military bases, and pummeling our sea life with sonar and noise pollution, all while gleefully salivating at the prospect of plundering the resources which lay hidden beneath our planet’s rapidly thawing polar ice caps.
Martin skillfully ties the planet-devouring behavior of the US military to the global systems of capitalism and imperialism it was built to uphold. The viewer is left with a crystal clear picture of the ways ecocide, militarism and capitalism are inseparably intertwined, and an understanding that meaningfully opposing any of these malignancies necessarily entails opposing them all. The liberal fiction that one can be pro-environment while also supporting the US military is forcefully exposed for the absurdity that it is.
It’s a jarring film with extremely dark subject matter, but it also manages to be a work of transcendent beauty and optimism. A deep love of humans and all of earth’s creatures shines through in shot after shot, while slick editing and an inspired soundtrack allow the movie to zip along at a lively and entertaining pace. Martin concludes with a galvanizing call to use our outrage to loosen the empire’s already weakening grip on humanity’s collective consciousness, because our entire world depends on it. ..............
War Fare:
Trump ordered the US military not to carry out new strikes on Iran Friday night, despite approving earlier a "Gates of Hell massive attack" on Iran. The US has now requested a new temporary ceasefire with Iran and is seeking a return to the collapsed and suspended MoU, with discussions to include Yemen, and with Trump seeking to make AnsarAllah a party to the negotiations.
Clearly Trump is angry, and fears that that the war is consuming his Presidency (and his legacy). Iran comprehensively rejected all negotiations throughout this last week and confirmed it will not start negotiations under any circumstances. Put simply, why would Iran consent to give the US time to regroup and rearm before launching another round of strikes on Iran when it has the US “on the run.”
A return to the MoU whose credibility Trump repeatedly has shredded? Unlikely.
Will Schryver notes that rumors are swirling that the Pentagon is pressuring Trump to call off the war with Iran because the US has nearly exhausted its stockpiles of air-defence interceptors and stand-off strike missiles. ...........
That's one way to deal with data centers.
Geopolitical Fare:
An aspect of the current clash of civilizations that goes largely unnoticed in the US is that there is only one civilization, if we can call it that, doing the clashing. That would be the US and its arrangement of vassals that emerged from WWII. As if participating in an exploitation video called good vassals gone bad, the former liberal governments of Europe have moved hard to the foreign policy right. Through near complete reversal of the Western liberal order, the West is back to fighting WWII. Only without any defensive missiles. Or competent leaders. ...............
............ That US military planners didn’t foresee this suggests that competence isn’t their strength.
Not that Americans would know anything about it. No news or low-quality propaganda are what we are fed. For one-and-one-half-trillion-dollars-per-year (Pentagon budget), higher quality propaganda should be the least that we get. ........................
Why western leaders refuse dialogue with their adversaries while pursuing unwinnable wars
................................................................................... George Orwell used the phrase “History is written by the winners” in a 1944 essay. And yet modern conflict defies outright victory. It seems unlikely that any side will claim outright victory in either Ukraine or in Iran.
Few believe the USA will conquer Iran and by the same token Iran can only inflict severe damage on America’s standing in the world and its alliances in the Gulf, without undermining its position, for now, as the preeminent military power.
Britain and Europe’s attempts to defeat Russia in Ukraine will ultimately prove to be unsuccessful and also self-defeating, as Ukraine is turned into an angry failed state on its periphery. Nevertheless, Russia simply doesn’t have the means either fully to conquer Ukraine or indeed, Europe, an even more fantastical idea.
But herein the central truth of the western post-diplomacy model.
The US, Britain and Europe refuse diplomacy because this would require an admission of failure to their publics who they have repeatedly assured of victory.
When a clear victory appears unachievable, they settle for ongoing war and media manipulation to ensure that their voting publics maintain their support.
By claiming stalemate as success, they can position Russia and Iran as both losing, even if western powers aren’t winning.
History, however, will likely record the wars in Ukraine and Iran as catastrophic for western powers in terms of their global standing and credibility. ................
History has cycles. When dealing with ideas about how to organize societies there are ideological and sub-ideological cycles. Various nations have been capitalist since the 16th century, but what the means kept changing, usually every 50 to 80 years. Britain started very protectionist. It had periods where imperialism and capitalism were very intertwined. It had laissez faire periods. All of these were forms of capitalism, but they were quite different from each other. The Roman Empire is an empire from Augustus to the end, but the Rome of Augustus is very different from future Romes, with their serfs (something Augustinian Rome didn’t have), their German legionnaires, and so on.
In our times there are people alive who remember two and a half transitions:
- The transition from laissez-faire (in America) to New Deal.
- The transition of New Deal to Neoliberalism.
- The transition of neoliberalism to whatever the new system will be called. (This is not the old system, Trump’s crazed tariffs, export controls to major buyers, the severe cutting of research, etc… all show that.)
In China they remember:
- The change from warlordism and Republicanism to Maoism.
- The change from Maoism to Dengism.
- The recent change from Dengism to Xiism.
Globally we remember multiple transitions as well
- The transition from the multi-great power world centered on America/Europe to the Cold War world dominated by the USSR and US. (Note this transition involved two world wars.)
- The transition from the cold war world to the unipolar superpower world with the US the world hegemonic power.
- The current transition from the American hegeomonic world to whatever will replace it.
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..................... Things are happening. Big things. If you want the official “big collapse” well, it’s not here yet for the first world, but the death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds continues. As much as I admire what China has done, and as impressed as I am by solar and so on, they are still an industrial society based on planned obsolescence and over-production and are about to hit a demographic cliff (good in the long run, but it will cause issues.) The only escape from much of the resource trap would be large scale off world mining. Musk isn’t going to manage it. The Chinese are taking a shot, we’ll see. That wouldn’t, by itself, fix ecological collapse, however and won’t supply all necessary resources. It’s also unlikely to come on line in time, if at all.
You’re living thru an epochal period, similar to the WWI thru WWII period: everything is changing, but this time including serious environmental issues. There’s also all the social issues related to AI, phones, the collapse of reading and reasoning ability in some societies, mass surveillance and the rise of authoritarianism, even as civil liberties are contracting in almost every country in the world.
The post-war and post-cold war orders are dying or dead. The negative consequences of the industrial revolution are hitting home after we got the goodies for a couple centuries.
Things are happening. More things will happen over the next couple decades. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.
Vids:
Other Fare:
How the US's long push to deregulate outer space led to SpaceX's dominance of the skies
