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Sunday, September 7, 2025

2025-09-07

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


Economic and Market Fare:

The US has been strong - but not as strong as the rest of the world. Will September surprises upset this apple cart?



  • the monthly birth-death adjustment has been out of sync with the accurate (but lagging) BLS Business Employment Dynamics (BDM) estimate of net new job creation from net new firm openings (Figure 2). The BDM numbers are based on the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) so they are considered definitive.
  • BDM data on jobs created by net new firm openings only go through end-2024, but historically they have tracked what is happening at continuously operating firms. Both have dropped sharply, which explains why there is such widespread expectation of a sharp downward benchmark revision based on QCEW on 9 September (Figure 3).   
  • It is possible to back out job creation from continuing firms in the monthly NFP survey. Continuing firms are those that appear in the BLS sample two months in a row; they drive the BLS sample estimates of employment growth, the birth-death adjustment is not based on any sample and is added to these sample-based estimates. Job growth at these firms has dropped sharply and has been close to zero or even negative in recent months (Figure 4). NFP growth from continuing firms dropped to a monthly average of 14k in the 12 months to July 2025 from more than 450k in the 12 months to early 2022, but the average birth-death adjustment only edged down to 94k from c.120k over the same period
Bottom line: sooner or later the BLS will have to come to terms with what are years of generously overestimated jobs numbers


The upcoming US recession

The first week of September brought a cluster of important U.S. releases that confirmed an economy heading towards a significant slowdown or an outright recession.



Bubble & AI Fare:


..... Based on valuations, there’s no denying we’re in a bubble. That’s noteworthy by itself, but it doesn’t tell us what will happen next. Tomorrow could be the day when valuations start returning to their historical norms. Or, valuations might become even more extreme, and the bull market could surpass all expectations before finally falling back to reality. 

We believe that in this kind of environment, an active investment approach is preferable. Such an approach recognizes that as valuations increase, the risk/reward ratio worsens for investors, making adherence to technical analysis, risk tolerances, investment rules, and trading signals increasingly important. With this understanding of the growing risks, along with the potential for high short-term returns and the tools to navigate and limit downturns, we can continue to realize gains during strong bull markets and shift to a protective mode when a bear market begins.

We start by warning you about today’s high valuations. Then, we take a U-turn and explain why selling now might not be the best move. ........................

..................................... In August 1997, the CAPE ratio reached 32.77, matching the previous record high set just before the Great Depression. While some experts at the time warned that the market would crash, as it did in 1929, the bull market largely ignored these fears. From August 1997 to the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the market increased by more than 50%. Moreover, the extremely high CAPE ratio soared past the former peak to 44.

Those who exited the market in 1997 were ultimately rewarded in 2003 when the S&P 500 traded at a price below their selling point. However, an investor with a strong set of trading tools could have participated in most of the 50% increase, mitigated a good portion of the ensuing decline, and ended up well ahead of those who moved to cash early.



............ An entire generation of wide-eyed investors and a string of clueless policy makers have conditioned themselves (and others) to assume there is no dip that the Fed can’t save, valuation be damned.

In such a seductively sunny backdrop, retail investors are increasingly jettisoning risk management (and risk managers) to passively ride this market wave on ETF-indexed surfboards with very little fear of drowning.

Meanwhile, a minority of market veterans (Grantham, Buffett, Dalio, etc.) bravely (but in vain?) continue to warn of historical market risk greater in scale than the Nikkei of ’89 or the DOW of ’29 as insiders (Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc) quietly dump billions in private shares in a topping market…

So, whose right or wrong in this bear-bull circus of hidden risks and open optimism?

In short, nothing seems to shake this S&P, which long ago divorced itself from the mean-reversion warnings of Bob Farrell, the valuation signals of Ben Graham or even the stubborn math of red financial statements and broken balance sheets.

.......................... Like so many current and past memes of market salvation (from electricity and railroads to dotcoms and mortgage-backed securities), the now omnipresent “AI” wave will eventually (and empirically) drown a large swath of trend-trusters and bubble victims who refuse to see the forest for the trees.

In line with the other oxymorons of late (from the not-so-patriotic Patriot Act to the not-so-genius GENIUS Act), Artificial Intelligence, by its very title, is a comical signal of ignored irony. ................





How will AI affect American workers? There are two major narratives floating around. The “techno-optimist” view is that AI will free humans from boring tasks and create new jobs, while the “techno-pessimist” view is that AI will lead to widespread unemployment.

As a sociologist who studies job insecurity, I’m among the pessimists. And that’s not just because of AI itself. It’s about something deeper – what scholars call “American exceptionalism.” While people commonly use this phrase to refer to anything that makes the U.S. unique, I use it narrowly to refer to the country’s approach to work and social welfare, which is quite different from the systems in other rich countries.

I suspect AI will “turbocharge” American exceptionalism in ways that make workers more afraid of losing their jobs. When fused with organizations’ adoption of new types of AI, workers’ fears may soon become reality, if they haven’t already. ...........






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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

But this time, it's the U.S. government pushing doubt

If you don’t follow climate policy closely, you may not know that the Trump administration is launching an effort to overturn one of the most fundamental pillars of American climate policy: the scientific finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare (the so-called “Endangerment Finding”). If successful, this move could unravel virtually every U.S. climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.

To support this effort, the Department of Energy hand-selected five climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science to write a report, which ended up saying exactly what you would expect it to say: climate science is too uncertain to justify policies to limit warming.

I’m guessing that the goal here is very much like what the tobacco companies did in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Their goal was not to win the debate that cigarettes were safe — they clearly understood they could not — but to muddy the waters enough to head off regulations on their business. ...................



Geopolitical Fare:

A festival of media concoctions.

The decades-long Ukraine crisis, since this current phase began with the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev eleven years ago, has occasioned more misinformation, disinformation, false-flag operations and propaganda than any other in our memories. This is inevitable, it seems to us as we survey the wreckage, if you have provoked a war while blaming the other side for starting it, if you are propping up a neo–Nazi regime in the name of liberty and democracy, if you are altogether destroying a nation—its people, its land, its resources—while claiming to save it. There is a lot of truth to obscure, to blur, to destroy. ..............



It should be that almost always they do what they promise, and they meet their goals. ..........

......... As a westerner this is mind boggling. My entire life rent prices have just increased and increased and increased. So have housing prices. One of my big criticisms of China for years was that they had overly-relied on housing bubbles to fund their growth and that it was causing significant discontent. Every young Chinese person mentioned it as a problem.

So then they just… went and fixed it? And yes, it’s been painful, and led to some softness in the economy, but when it’s done, the economy will be much stronger. 

China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. As this was happening, they realized housing was too expensive, so they made that part of the solution, they rotated investment out of real estate into industry.

To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” And when it decides to do things, it succeeds? It isn’t just bullshit? ..............



Other Fare:




During a recent family vacation over lobster, I watched my “vote blue no matter who” aunt, herself a paragon of New England liberal sensibilities from a leafy suburb outside Boston, argue with her Fox News–watching, burn-it-all-down brother about recent goings-on at HHS. “Just because Fauci lied about Covid,” she said, “doesn’t mean all science is fake; there’s something worth saving here.”

Meet J.Crew-Anon: affluent, educated, professional, skeptical but not nihilistic. They still read the Times and the Journal, but also subscribe to multiple Substacks and are daily imbibers of less “safe” publishers, like Brownstone.org. They triangulate. They parse information with friends and peers, seeing fact-checkers as either dangerous or useless or both. They are more interested in steelmanning the opposition than shouting it down. Having left one echo chamber—the legacy media consensus—they are wary of entering a new one. They know the dangers of epistemic bubbles, and they prize conversations that test their skepticism rather than simply confirm it. They can be angry, but not anarchic. They have mortgages, careers, kids, PTA meetings—and a deep distrust of institutions that used to feel unshakable.

If this archetype sounds unfamiliar, it may be because your friends and colleagues aren’t comfortable enough yet to reveal the depth of their own skepticism. J.Crew-Anon thrives quietly, often hidden in plain sight, surfacing only when the cost of dissent has fallen low enough to make honesty safe.

What J.Crew-Anon represents isn’t entirely new. Up until the early 2000s, the United States had a vibrant anticorporate, antiauthoritarian left that acted as a watchdog against pharmaceutical, corporate, and governmental overreach. Ralph Nader’s consumer rights campaigns, feminist health collectives publishing Our Bodies, Ourselves, and ACT UP confronting the FDA and NIH during the AIDS crisis all carried the same distrust of official reassurances, and the same heated insistence that ordinary people could see through corporate spin.

That movement didn’t disappear, but it was blunted by the professionalization of NGOs, captured by the Democratic Party’s neoliberal consensus, and gradually domesticated into policy shops. But its sensibility never dissipated. What we are seeing now is its reemergence in unexpected form. J.Crew-Anon revives that watchdog instinct, this time distributed across suburbia, podcasts, Substack feeds, and social networks, rather than marches and union halls.

As of 2025, what was previously called the mainstream media is no longer mainstream. A growing swath of ordinary folks—educated, suburban, professional—have quietly lost confidence in legacy information outlets, and the institutions and industries they have long served.
...................................... They are educated, mid-career professionals—often suburban or urban upper-middle class. They still work demanding jobs, raise kids, join HOAs, shop at Costco, play pickleball. But they no longer believe that institutions have credibility. Instead, they filter information through group chats, endless online sources, and their own judgment. They are pragmatic, not utopian. Skeptical, not anomistic. They respect individual autonomy. They know institutions lie—but they also know truth exists and is worth salvaging. That balance—conditional trust, selective belief—makes them powerful.

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Monday, September 1, 2025

2025-09-01

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


Economic and Market Fare:


Over the past 24 hours, an idea from Barry Ritholtz’s latest blog post has been sitting with me restlessly:

“One of the challenges that comes from analyzing markets and the economy is just how much ‘gray’ there is. Most data points exist along a noisy continuum, subject to future revisions. The meanderings above or below the trend may be just noise, or the start of something more ominous. Key reversals occur rarely and are difficult to spot in real time.”

Wow, that pretty much sums up the challenges of investing in a nutshell.


The message in the front end (first two years) of the yield curve is powerful. Take a look

...............

In the chart Tom is showing what happens when two ratios derived from the front end of the yield curve reach certain extremes and then turn. He has listed key dates. And, using FRED data, he has also marked recession periods.

Do we always get a recession? No. Do we get a slowdown? Nearly always yes. Is that happening now (2025)? Slowdown for sure. Recession? Maybe.

Tom's chart covers the entire period of declining interest rates (starting from1980) and continues through the COVID period to present. During the period he examined, the federal budget was in deficit at times and in surplus at other points. Over the 45 years examined, inflation was sometimes near zero and sometimes in the very high single digits.

The present yield curve is flashing a yellow light and warning us.

No indicator has a perfect record, but this one deserves a lot of respect. 


Lack of newcomers keeps unemployment low for now but will undercut long-run growth if it persists



................................................. Central bank independence mushroomed not because it was more efficient in ‘controlling’ inflation or avoiding financial collapses, but because it fitted the neoliberal theory that freedom of markets and finance from government control was best for capitalism.  CBI allows the financial sector to look after its fictitious capital (bonds and stocks) and the profits gained at the expense of wages and real value without potential interference by any democratically elected (left?) government. Bailing out the banks in the global financial crash to preserve an independent financial sector was the Fed’s policy. ............ entral bank independence means independence from the demands of the many to protect the interests of the financial sector.

..................... Of course, none of this scepticism about the merits of CBI and the consequent lack of democratic control over the banking system in the major economies means supporting Trump’s autocratic attempt to control the Fed as the ‘lender of last resort’.  Replacing undemocratic central bank independence with Trumpist autocracy will do nothing for America’s working people; their mortgages, their loans, their savings, or their cost of living.


Pettifor: Technocrats as handmaidens to authoritarianism - Pt 1
Central bank technocrats are not ‘independent’

....................... That is why central banks cannot be divided from other public institutions, no matter how powerful the ideology of ‘independence’. For while the management of monetary policy is a challenging and difficult skill, requiring specialist economic and statistical expertise, nevertheless monetary and fiscal institutions must work in tandem to support the economy as a whole. ............


Tax rises will only accelerate its decline

.................. The problem the UK has today, which it did not have in 1976, is a structurally weak economy with low productivity growth. The UK’s economic model, that of a late-capitalist rentier society, is no longer working. Yet, unlike in the Seventies, the UK lacks a political majority sufficient to arrest the toxic dynamic between rising debt and low economic growth.

.............. If things in Britain are bad, though, they’re worse in France. 



Bubble Fare:


Financial markets have transformed; today, trading and speculation have merged into performance art. The “Meme Market” culture now permeates mainstream finance. ................

............ The term, coined by Howard Lindzon, “degenerate economy,” captures this shift.
“A ‘degenerate economy,’ or ‘degen economy,’ refers to a speculative and high-risk financial environment where the lines between investing, trading, and gambling are blurred, often accelerated by mobile technology and social media.”
..................... “Meme Markets” is structured on entertainment psychology and can defy fundamentals for sustained periods. Retail-driven rallies lift meme-linked equities, and fans hold fast through volatility. The S&P 500 index, as discussed in “Buy Every Dip,” stays buoyed by passive flows that fuel the top-10 stocks in the index regardless of earnings growth.  .................



............  In this piece, I'm going to write out what conditions I believe will burst the bubble.  ............. I should also be clear, and I will get to after the premium break, that this will be a series of events rather than one big one, though there are big ones to look out for. ........................


The long shadow of crypto

...................................... There is a pervasive suspicion among A.I. skeptics (many of whom were and are also crypto skeptics) that the A.I. boom is a redux of the crypto boom--which is to say, effectively, a grift forced on consumers and abetted by unwitting journalists and other eager marks.



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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


............... A.I. tools like ChatGPT are powered by vast data centers — warehouses filled with power-hungry computer chips — which already consume 4.5 percent of the electricity used in the United States. Over the next three or four years, that number is expected to double or even triple, to as much as 12 percent of electric demand by 2028. At present, about a quarter of data centers’ throughput is for A.I., but that could jump to more than 90% by as soon as 2030. McKinsey projects a 441% global increase in world data-center loads envisaged by 2030. The International Energy Agency projects that by that year, 4.25 years hence, A.I. will use 62% of all global electric supply. 

........................... It takes about 10 tons of refined uranium to produce one ton of nuclear fuel. As uranium mining exhausts the easy pickings, finding that 10 tons may mean removing 1000 or more tons of overburden, and that amount is steadily rising. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. 



For more than two decades, governments, international agencies, and corporations have promoted the false hope of an “energy transition.” History shows otherwise. There are no examples of true transitions—only new energy sources added on top of old ones.

The theory was that if we replace fossil fuels with renewables, emissions will fall and the climate-change problem is solved. But the reality is that no credible outlook shows fossil fuel use falling enough to reduce emissions in a meaningful way ...................

.................. What we’re left with is more consumption, more debt, more ecological overshoot, and a political economy built on cheap energy that no longer exists. Prosperity is now out of reach for many households, businesses, and even nations. That collapse in affordability is the real fuel behind today’s populist revolt against the old order and its elites.

The energy transition bet everything on renewables replacing fossil fuels and on the promise that growth could continue without much disruption to ordinary life. If ever there were a too-good-to-be-true story, that was it. We should have seen the fallacy long ago—but we didn’t want to.




The Government of Norway made a tourism ad, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative!



U.S. B.S.:




............. the DNC’s leadership is determined to derail a resolution calling for “an arms embargo and suspension of military aid to Israel.”

Maneuvering to sidetrack that resolution, DNC Chair Ken Martin and all five vice chairs are sponsoring a counter-resolution that does little more than repeat the kind of hollow rhetoric that President Biden and Vice President Harris offered about Israel and Gaza last year. 

............................................. Those numbers show that, on the subject of Israel and Gaza, the DNC’s officers are guilty of political malpractice – and actively complicit with what most Democrats in the nation see as genocide. .................

Meanwhile, Israel continues with mass killing and genocide made possible by the U.S. government.





Geopolitical Fare:




After twenty-two months of unprecedented carnage, three things are clear: (1) the Israeli regime will not end the genocide in Palestine of its own will,  (2) the U.S. government, Israel’s principal collaborator, as well as the majority of Israelis, and the regime’s proxies and lobbies in the West, are fully committed to this genocide, and to the destruction and erasure of every remnant of Palestine from the river to the sea, and (3) other Western governments like the UK and Germany as well as far too many complicit Arab states in the region are fully dedicated to the cause of Israeli impunity.

That means that genocide (and apartheid) will only end through resistance against the Israeli regime, the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, the solidarity of the rest of the world, and the isolation, weakening, defeat, and dismantling of the Israeli regime. 

As was the case in apartheid South Africa, this is a long-term struggle. But even in the face of Western government obstruction, there are things that can be done right now. Things like boycott, divestment, sanctions, demonstrations, disruption, civil disobedience, education, prosecutions under universal jurisdiction, and civil cases against Israeli perpetrators and complicit actors in our own societies. And yes, we can also demand intervention and protection for the Palestinian people.

Established by a Cold War-era resolution adopted in 1950, the Uniting for Peace mechanism authorizes the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to act when the Security Council is blocked by the veto of one of its permanent members. Under this mechanism, the UNGA could mandate a UN protection force to deploy to Palestine, protect civilians, ensure humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and assist in recovery and reconstruction.  ............


The Trump administration and international partners are discussing proposals to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” on the rubble of Gaza. One would establish U.S. control and pay Palestinians to leave.



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Western leaders who say they’ll recognize a Palestinian state while feebly calling on Both Sides to reach a ceasefire deal are just cuter, more photogenic versions of Netanyahu. They’re making empty noises to appear as though they’re doing something while refusing to actually lift a finger to stop the genocide.

They know Israel’s not going to make a permanent ceasefire deal because Netanyahu has explicitly stated that the slaughter won’t end until the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is complete. That’s why Tel Aviv is just ignoring the fact that Hamas agreed to a ceasefire a week and a half ago; there is absolutely nothing Hamas could agree to which would stop Israel from doing everything it needs to do to steal a Palestinian territory from the Palestinians who live there. The assault on Gaza has never been about removing Hamas; it has always been about removing the Palestinians.

Western leaders are pretending not to know this and promoting the false notion that Israel is basically acting in good faith in these negotiations, and that the only obstacle is Israel and Hamas being unable to successfully agree to terms. Participating in this mass deception while refusing to take any concrete actions to end the genocide is participating in the genocide. They’re not dropping the bombs or firing the bullets, but they’re helping to make sure they keep raining death and destruction on Palestinians.

They are Netanyahu with a nice guy smile. They are good cop Netanyahu.


Swedish activist on board largest Gaza-bound flotilla yet



For those who may have forgotten, it was earlier this year that Donald Trump sent around a video of economist Jeffrey Sachs at Cambridge Union giving a lengthy and cogent explanation of how the American war against Russia in Ukraine began, when it began, and why it is unjust, without legitimate purpose, destructive to US interests, and gratuitously murderous and destructive. The point: Donald Trump has had the information that he needs to end the American war in Ukraine. He is now playing the ugly American with people’s lives by pretending otherwise.

The received wisdom amongst military analysts this week is that the US ‘plan’ for Ukraine is to hand the conflict off to the least capable people on the planet--- the European political leadership, handpicked by the CIA for their prostrate demeanor and ability to not see what is in front of their eyes. With Germany’s Merz proclaiming cuts to the social safety net in Germany in order to pay government salaries and pensions in Ukraine (as the US has been doing), it seems that we in the West are all Americans now. And just added, France is doing the same.

The alleged next step in Donald Trump’s ‘peace’ (piece) plan is to have Russian President Vladimir Putin meet with Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Zelensky, presumably to maintain the State Department – CIA fiction that Ukraine has anything to do with the US war against Russia in Ukraine--- other than providing the 1.7 million Ukrainian youth to do the dying. While 100% of the CIA-linked sources on the internet claim that the number (1.7 million) is ‘Russian disinformation,’ over the last 75 years, the CIA’s record of truthful emanations is vanishingly small.

For those who missed it, the only official role that Volodymyr Zelensky has in Ukraine is as the West’s ‘boy in Ukraine.’ Reports have it that he is still alive due to the permanent presence of MI6 guards around him. He hasn’t held elected office for over a year, and therefore is incapable of legally negotiating on behalf of Ukraine. But again, the American purpose in maintaining the fiction that Zelensky does have an official role in Ukraine is to maintain the fiction that Ukraine--- other than supplying the war dead, is an actual participant in the conflict.

If Donald Trump weren’t so relishing his role as Master of Plantation Earth, the West’s utter contempt for the people of Ukraine would be widely understood. A large majority in Ukraine want the war ended. ..................

...................... While Donald Trump appears to his supporters to be something different, his actual policies are the same old same old, but packaged differently. As noxious and toxic as Joe Biden was to the Russians, the sad bet here is that, should we survive the next three years, the Russian assessment of Trump will be about the same as that of Biden. The purpose in making this point is to save on future heartache and possible nuclear annihilation. ..................

................................................... This bullshit has got to end before it ends us.



................. Jones could have stopped at “communist” and “oil reserves”. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves of any country on the planet, and is not aligned with the capitalist western empire that is loosely centralized around Washington DC. Any reasons given for US regime change intervention beyond this should be read as excuses.

Whenever the US war machine moves its crosshairs to a different target I always get people telling me “No no Caitlin, THIS time the Evil Bad Guy really DOES need to be regime changed! THIS time our government and media are telling us the TRUTH!”

And it’s always so stupid, because it’s just the same rehashed lies over and over again. The empire takes whatever actions will help it to dominate our planet and its resources to a greater extent than it already does, and then it makes up justifications for those actions. ...............


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Book Fare:

In a his new book Breakneck, Dan Wang argues that if the US really wants to compete with China, it needs to focus more on engineering and less on litigating.


From megastructures in the Arabian Desert to urban decay close to home, we are pulled between utopian and dystopian visions of the modern city. Sci-fi novelist William Gibson offers a more likely scenario.

.......................... Widely acknowledged as the originator of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction and inventor of the term “cyberspace,” the novelist William Gibson writes of future cities as working out the consequences of this paradox. Many of Gibson’s science fiction novels start with serious destruction through war, natural disasters, climate change, or global ecological collapse. And his cities of the future are the stage where he plays out stories about virtual realities, brain–machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology — the very constellation of technologies that some anticipate will allow, and in Gibson’s work have allowed, humans to interact in all kinds of new, non-physical ways that will both obviate the need for physical cities and create posthuman forms of intelligence far exceeding our own, calling into question the primacy of our creative efforts.

What makes Gibson’s portrait of great cities thought-provoking is that, despite all this change, he imagines them persisting at all, in some ways operating no worse than the worst that can be found today. This situation becomes all the more thought-provoking when we see how he links the fate of his cities to the fate of the modern project itself, whose deep impact on making cities what they are today will persist into the future.

The modern project — meaning here not just scientific and technological progress, but also liberal democratic politics, free market economics, and social egalitarianism — promised to alleviate many of the historical givens of the human condition, like material scarcity, rampant disease, inequality, and social and political oppression. And it absolutely has expanded the possibilities of human life for vast numbers of people over the course of time. Yet for Gibson, the modern project is also in some ways responsible for, or at least unable to prevent, the civilizational crashes his stories anticipate. Modernity does not survive unaltered in his stories. The technological center no longer holds, and we see increased social stratification and the rise of oligarchic political and economic arrangements of a sort that some will say are quite familiar today. .....................................



................................ Whenever you’re looking into fixing or changing a society you’ve got a problem at three levels. Individual, group, society. No solution will work at the society level if it isn’t supported by how things are done at the group or individual level. Our society, for example, is organized around corporations whose primary motive is greed. People are rewarded for making more money, with very few limits on how much they are allowed to hurt other people along the way.

Capitalism  is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all .....................



................ Finally, Rowling struck at the broader political consequences of these ideas, asserting that “said ideology, and the privileged, blinkered fools pushing it because they suffer zero consequences themselves, have done more damage to the political left’s credibility than Trump and Farage could have achieved in a century.” 

She’s right. Chris Columbus and the parade of Hollywood elites rushing to condemn Rowling reveal less about her supposedly “controversial views” and more about their own cowardice. They aren’t guided by principle—they’re driven by fear: fear of social media mobs, fear of losing roles, fear of being canceled. Columbus, Radcliffe, Watson, and the rest have chosen the path of convenience over courage, prioritizing their reputations over common sense, fairness, and even basic reality. 

Rowling’s positions—protecting women’s spaces, defending free speech, supporting vulnerable minors, and calling out ideological exploitation—are neither radical nor hateful. Yet, in an era where ideological conformity is more important than truth, she is vilified simply for speaking the truth. The real scandal isn’t Rowling’s beliefs; it’s the craven complicity of those too timid to defend reason, morality, and decency.

The fake outrage over J.K. Rowling exposes the media’s true agenda: silencing dissent and forcing ideological conformity.



Pics of the Week:

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Monday, August 25, 2025

2025-08-25

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


Economic and Market Fare:


........... And Powell probably knows that massive jobs data revisions are coming: on 9 September, the Bureau of Labor will release its preliminary benchmark revision to net jobs increases for the year to last March 

............. The irony is that the Fed, like other central banks, has little effect on the economy through monetary measures.  So the Fed has been reconsidering its monetary policy ‘framework’.  It still holds to the view: that “the inflation rate over the longer run is primarily determined by monetary policy,” but it has to say that, because otherwise there is no need for ‘monetary policy’! Yet in 2010s, the US inflation rate dropped below the 2% target even though the Fed cut rates to zero, and after the COVID pandemic ended, inflation rocketed despite sharp rate hikes by the Fed and has remained stubbornly above the 2% rate. Indeed, US inflation has remained above ‘target’ for more than four years. And now both inflation and unemployment are likely to rise from here, whatever the Fed does.  Monetary policy does not work. ............

................................. In summary, what do all these papers at the Jackson Hole symposium tell you?  First, it is the value created by human labour that is key to economic growth and living standards, not changes in the cost of borrowing or lending money and the decisions of central bankers on interest rates.  The ‘supply side’ of an economy is what matters.  All the papers implied that. ..............



............... we are sticking with our associated targets for the S&P 500 of 6600 by year-end 2025 and 7700 at the end of next year.

........ We expect that the bull market will be increasingly earnings-led rather than valuation-led through 2026. Both Q1-2025 and Q2-2025 S&P 500 earnings were much better than expected (chart).


Mega-caps churn but bull market behavior persists

The S&P 500 is dominated by just a handful of mega-cap companies. The seven largest companies account for more than a third of the total market cap of the entire index (equivalent to the smallest 440 companies in the index). Half of the market cap of the index is in the largest 23 companies. The S&P 500 did NOT make a new high last week.

However, the equal-weight S&P 500 did manage to make a new high last, with a (hopefully) decisive move above the December peak that has been repeatedly challenged in recent weeks.

More than 70% of the companies within the S&P 500 are now trading above their 200-day averages.  ................



It’s a Bull Market.
We know that from risk-on metrics.
We know that from breadth.
We know that from sector positioning.
It might seem redundant at this point, but after a decade of studying markets, one lesson always comes back to me:
Once you have a solid foundation, you need to be reminded more than you need to be taught.
Yes, there are new lessons every day. 
But the truths that build prosperity are usually the simple, foundational ones.
Repetition is underrated, while novelty is overly celebrated.  ...........



........... Current earnings projections for 2025 suggest a nearly 20% increase, well above historical growth trends. While such detachments of the market from earnings are not uncommon, they tend not to be sustainable over more extended periods. We suspect that the risk to stocks in 2025 will be a failure of earnings to meet optimistic expectations.

..... It is worth repeating that valuations are unreliable market-timing tools. Elevated valuations reflect heightened investor optimism and expectations of robust earnings growth in bull markets and can remain that way for extended periods.

However, excess market valuations leave investors vulnerable to unexpected, exogenous events. Those “events,” when they occur, lead to sharp sentiment reversals. What would cause such a sentiment reversal? No one knows. This is why when the “unexpected” happens, Wall Street’s immediate response is to suggest that “no one could have seen that coming.”

As such, investors must continue managing risk into 2025 and navigate the markets accordingly.


PIMCO Macro Signposts | The Economy Isn’t the Stock Market (and Vice Versa) (via the Bond Beat)

… Consider the U.S. stock market. The S&P 500 Index is up almost 10% year to date (a significant rise but a bumpy ride, given the roughly 20% drawdown in April). Yet this performance may obscure important realities about the broader U.S. economic situation. Real consumer spending grew at a 1% annualized pace in the first half of 2025, down sharply from the 4% annualized pace in the second half of 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Real GDP growth has been slowing – it grew at a 1.2% annualized pace in the first half of 2025 – down from the 2.7% in the second half of 2024, the BEA reported. U.S. employment growth has decelerated to below 1% so far in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a threshold that has historically preceded recessions…


Surviving the New Age of Economic Coercion



Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Geopolitical Fare:



....... It’s 2025. There’s an Internet. Who can now pretend they have no idea what Israel has done, is doing, aims to do?

It’s obvious to the entire world that the Biden and Trump administrations have run cover for Israel while enabling the horrors before us.

But for those seeking a deeper understanding, or perhaps sources to encourage others to understand what is taking place, many important documentaries stand ready to enlighten. .................





................. And that brings me to the last reason I will mention in this piece, one that has been made many times before, but is not mentioned often enough. The American-led post-World War II order made much in its propaganda and even in reality of a commitment to universal human rights that organically included at a least highly publicized prohibition of genocide or ethnic cleansing as an integral part. That an American-sponsored state created–in however a haphazard way–precisely in response to a genocide can participate, in anything that smacks of ethnically-based mass violence, speaks of a moral or civilizational rot of a special kind. Only a much more vigorous resistance can deliver us from its seemingly inevitable spread.



......... Brandishing their warped logic, they cannot possibly understand that if Ukraine is instrumentalized – actually since before Maidan in 2014 – to harass and destabilize Russia in its western borders, Russia will forcefully counter-attack.

That’s at the heart of the Russian concept of “underlying causes” of the Ukraine tragedy, which must be thoroughly addressed if there is any real shot at Trumpian or not Trumpian “peace”. .............


Nothing Has Changed in the War in Ukraine ........

....... The two sides (Russia vs. USA/EU/NATO/Ukraine) continue to talk past one another, with the main actor on the side, the USA, hilariously positioning itself as a mediator. The fact of the matter is that there are two wars being fought simultaneously, and the USA is the main actor in the more important one (USA vs. Russia). A belligerent USA managed to position itself as a mediator in the conflict between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, but trying to pull the same trick with Russia is too tall an order to fulfill.

At the same time, Russia has to humour to the USA as a recognition of its unrivaled power. This was the reason for the recent summit in Alaska, one which ended quickly and served only to remind Trump and his team that the Russian position has not fundamentally changed. Russia came away from this summit with a small victory in which US demands for an immediate ceasefire were dropped.

Fast forward to this past Monday where Ukrainian President Zelensky arrived in Washington with the cream of the crop of the European National Branch Managers of USA Inc. (including EU VP of USA Inc. Ursula von der Leyen) to reiterate Ukraine’s position, one that is effectively unchanged from the time of Boris Johnson parachuting into Kiev in 2022 to urge Ukraine to keep fighting. The only thing of note to occur during that meeting was that Trump informed the world that the EU would buy weapons from the USA to continue to arm Ukraine so that it can defend itself against Russia. ............

............ 
This is just NATO. These people are shameless.

Left outside of my commentary is what has been agreed to in back channels between the relevant parties. There is a growing sense that Kiev is willing to accept territorial losses in return for strong security guarantees, but Russia will not accept security guarantees such as those that have been floated.

This war is far from over.


Anatomy of a propaganda op.

preamble:
“The information age is actually a media age,” the late John Pilger once remarked. “We have war by media, censorship by media, demonology by media, retribution by media, diversion by media—a Surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”

I have quoted John to this effect numerous times since he offered these observations. The occasion of his speech was the coup in Kiev the United States cultivated in February 2014. And how right he has since proven. As John also noted at the time, not in his lifetime (and, so, not in mine) have we been subjected to so pervasive an onslaught of media-driven propaganda in the service of another of America’s imperial adventures.

There is propaganda by way of omission, an insidious and highly effective technique, and propaganda by way of disinformation—the less subtle strategy. The Ukraine crisis has precipitated numerous examples of both. In the latter line we have had some notable cases. There was the mass grave outside Mariupol, where the Russians allegedly buried hundreds of civilians but which turned out to be an ordinary cemetery. There was the massacre at Bucha, supposedly conducted by Russian units as they withdrew; that turned out to be the work of Ukrainian soldiers taking revenge against townspeople who did not resist the Russian presence.

With this piece The Floutist begins a two-part series dedicated to exploding various of these lies. Both pieces come to us from German-speaking writers.

In this investigation Helmut Scheben, a Swiss correspondent of long experience, takes on the extended and unfortunately effective propaganda operation concerning the removal of Ukrainian children from war zones after the Russian intervention began in February 2022. In a brilliant bit of lateral thinking, Scheben deploys history to unmask hypocrisy. As he points out, the United States has evacuated thousands of children in every war from Vietnam to Afghanistan, always declaring this a humanitarian mission. When Russia removes orphans from combat zones in Ukraine, an overwhelming Western propaganda apparatus portrays this as child abduction and a crime. ..............


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