***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
The incoming economic data remains strong. But we are starting to worry about the downside risks to the economy and markets from: 1) the impact of DOGE layoffs and contract cuts on jobless claims and 2) persistently elevated policy uncertainty weighing on capex spending decisions and hiring decisions. .............
Bassman: Got Duration?
............................................. This opinion does not contradict the prior 7 pages, rather I will say the Bond Bull is simply a more efficient manner to access Duration.
Bubble Fare:
............................................. This opinion does not contradict the prior 7 pages, rather I will say the Bond Bull is simply a more efficient manner to access Duration.
The Bond Bull is the “151 proof” of duration assets; a 15%-dollar allocation will match the duration of the Aggregate Bond Index.
Instead of the standard 60%/40% portfolio, consider 70% stock, 10% Credit, 10% Commodities, and 10% the Bond Bull.
For Hedgers, one should use the Bond Bull not because you know rates will decline, but rather because you are bearish, and might be wrong.
Remember: For most investments, sizing is more important than entry level.
Bubble Fare:
Forget the damage to markets when the passive bid dries up and the Fed is stuck cutting rates into stagflation. The psychological damage will be worse.
............... It’s difficult to ignore that Tom Lee has “nailed it” on markets over the last decade, and I need to give credit where it’s due. Holding your nose and buying stocks without giving a single solitary fuck about valuations or the macroeconomy has sadly been the most effective way to generate returns over the last decade or two. But as every piece of financial literature you’ve ever read says somewhere on it: past performance is not indicative of future results.
And people that don’t make daily appearances on CNBC — like, oh, say, Warren Buffett, for instance — are taking another road: getting into cash.
Maybe it’s a just a coincidence?
Though the tune of buying the dip has hardly changed, the environment it’s being sung in has. Stocks now trade at a Shiller PE that’s approaching 40x, a level only eclipsed once in history during the 2000s dot-com bubble.
But if the market’s price-to-earnings ratio and the macroeconomy didn’t matter when stocks were trading at 30x earnings, why should they matter with stocks trading at 40x earnings?
This indifference to valuations—helped along by the “passive bid” of 401(k)s and ETFs consistently buying the market at any given price (well explained by Bill Fleckenstein here on Julia LaRoche’s podcast, and then updated here during his appearance last week), combined with what is widely perceived to be an unlimited Fed put, combined with the unprecedented amount of liquidity doled out as a result of COVID, combined with the stock market becoming accessible to literally any human being on earth that wants to take their shot thanks to the advent of retail trading apps—has distorted expectations and psychology not just about the stock market, but also about the basic fundamentals of economics and finance, in a way that many of us probably would not have even thought fathomable 50 years ago.
Modern monetary theory has acted like a risk-hunger marijuana edible that all traders and investors have been forced to swallow, resulting in an insatiable, decades long case of the market munchies.
In fact, liquidity has been so ubiquitous and markets have been so rigged that people are speculating upwards of $3 trillion in an asset class — crypto — that, to the best of my understanding, offers very little product or service and exists almost entirely digitally.
If you want to try to make the argument that overvalued equities can sometimes be hard to recognize, especially when they only seem to continue to go up and valuations only seem to continue to expand, that’s one thing. But how, with a straight face, can anyone argue that $3 trillion worth of crypto is in some way “undervalued,” let alone serves a purpose at all? ............
Vid Fare:
Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
Charts:
1:
BofA: Is the S&P 500 expensive? $SPY
— Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 (@MikeZaccardi) February 20, 2025
Statistically speaking, 19 of 20 metrics give an emphatic affirmative response pic.twitter.com/xIvVAOaoCp
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
That’s the assumption underlying the decision to keep capitalism in place even as we watch our biosphere disappear before our eyes, and it’s pure fantasy. As long as mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, you’re going to see the interests of humanity and the ecosystem subverted by that pursuit. .................
U.S. B.S.:
........ And the thing about this genre of tweet is that they’re kind of right — Obama didn’t have any “scandals” of the level we see from Trump. But the fact that the evil things Obama did weren’t considered scandalous says profoundly ugly things about the kind of society we are living in.
Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president that would be considered scandalous if we lived in a world that is even remotely sane. Destroying Libya and leaving it a smoldering crater of humanitarian disaster. Tearing apart Syria with the dirty war that featured pouring weapons into the arms of al-Qaeda affiliates. Initiating the US-backed incineration of Yemen. Lighting the fuse for the ruination of Ukraine with the US-backed regime change op in 2014. His notorious drone program. The list goes on. .................
Lawrence: “Trump crosses the Atlantic.”
Eight years ago, at precisely this moment in Donald’s Trump’s first term, the new president was pushing his case for a restored détente with Russia. Trump went on to summit with Vladimir Putin five times and conducted at least 16 telephone exchanges with the Russian president.
This was the count by mid–2019. After that and until the end of his term, the Deep State—notably the intelligence apparatus, the Democratic National Committee, and the mass media—had Trump bound in the rope of subterfuge so thoroughly that the relationship developed no further.
The neo-détente Trump favored—that Trump was correct to favor, better put—never came to be. Joe Biden and his people, to state the obvious, were by contrast neo–Cold Warriors—mere ideologues, neoliberals wholly incapable of autonomous thought, initiative, imagination, or anything else that sophisticated statecraft requires of its practitioners.
................. In this context, extricating the U.S. from the Ukraine quagmire is more than a footnote but nothing like the main attraction. Assuming all goes to Trump’s apparent plan—and we must make this assumption with unsparing caution—the center-stage attraction is discarding what has passed for a world order since the 1945 victories ................
...................... The panic easily detected among the Continent’s besieged elites, whose leaders have convened twice this week for emergency summits in Paris, has also been legible, pitifully enough, in the press coverage of Munich and Trump’s various demarches. All I have read in corporate and state-sponsored media on both sides of the Atlantic has been shockingly distorted, featuring more than the usual measure of outright lies.
Vance spoke in favor of neo–Nazi and “far-right” parties. (He went nowhere near the topic.) The Trump–Putin telephone call was all about the Russian leader’s cynical manipulations and Trump’s appeasement. (It was about the restoration of workable bilateral relations.) Trump has opened the door for “Putin” to advance through Europe. (He entertains no such ambition.) “Putin’s” objective is to destroy the European Union and NATO. (Ditto.) ..................
The End may be further away than you think.
............... As I write, the ground in Europe is still vibrating from the shock, and the political and media classes are still trapped between incredulous disbelief and barely-concealed anger that any such thing could have happened. They are still trapped in Cliché Land (“abandoning Ukraine”) and it may be some time before anything resembling reality actually penetrates their skulls. But in the meantime, and while we wait for some kind of rationality to gain a limited purchase, there are a couple of general points to make, and then I will get more deeply into the question of “talks.”
The first is the belief that the apparent disengagement of the US from Ukraine will actually make much difference. The only way in which this would be true is if a Ukrainian victory (generously defined) would be possible with further US assistance, but not without it. ................................
.......... The anger now arises from the fact that the pretence and discourse of eventual western victory have been officially undermined by the US, and so cannot be sustained any longer. ................................
Yascha Mounk and Wolfgang Münchau discuss the failure of the German model.
***** Israel And Its Apologists Weaponize Sympathy In Order To Facilitate Genocide
Sci Fare:
Evolution itself can evolve, new study argues
A new computer model suggests that the process of evolution can get better at evolving in the face of environmental change
Activist and author Yves Engler has been jailed by Montreal police for criticizing media figure Dahlia Kurtz and her support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza, after Kurtz said Engler’s comments made her feel “afraid for my safety”.
After Engler wrote about the charges against him, he reported that he was subsequently charged for “harassing the police” by drawing public attention to his case.
It’s fascinating how everyone who supports Israel always collapses into playing the victim at the earliest opportunity—even western police forces tasked with persecuting Israel’s critics. Israel models this victim-LARPing behavior, and its entire goon squad follows its example. ............
........................ The real currency of our world is not money or resources, nor gold, nor even weapons. The real currency of our world is narrative and the ability to control it, because if you can control the narrative, you can control everyone.
The average human life is dominated by mental stories, so if you can control the stories that humans are telling each other about their world, you can control the humans. ....................
Sci Fare:
A new computer model suggests that the process of evolution can get better at evolving in the face of environmental change
Other Fare:
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