LB #1 Jim Jordan has tried but could not get enough votes this week to become speaker of the house. He was a little too Trump-ish of a firebrand by all accounts. Its been a couple weeks since Matt Gaetz forced a motion to vacate and we still have no speaker and boy are the politicians mad. Matt Gaetz rose to speak at a closed door meeting this week and was told to “sit your ass down” by the former speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Mike Bost cursed and lunged at Gaetz. It turns out that the government isn’t spending any money. Joe Biden went on TV and begged the country for over $100 billion dollars to flow out of their broke ass country and go to Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan. I do not like my allies on this, but if Matt Gaetz’s little vacate trick stops our foolish group of Congressmen and women from spending money we don’t have, then Matt- the first beer is on me. I might not stick around for the second with you coming from one of the first families of Florida politics and nothing sickens me more than lifetime politicians, but in this case I believe he might be right. Stop spending money. If you don’t believe Matt or me maybe you will when the bond market decides for you. Government fools are wrecking this country with their spending and while they paint Gaetz as the fool, and he might be, on this issue he isn’t. He just took away the credit card for awhile and nothing infuriates politicians more than not being able to spend other people’s money.
LB#2 More strikes from Detroit this week, but this time it is the casino workers. The MGM Grand Detroit, MotorCity Casino, and Hollywood Casino Greektown are all expected to stop most operations this week. 3700 workers are demanding more pay since their last contract included 3% cost of living escalators, but inflation has went up over 20% according to the union. The union can do better math than the government considering the government said inflation peaked at 9.1% but we who follow John William’s work at Shadow Stats know better. Inflation has taken casino revenues to records above the pre-pandemic levels and the workers aren’t seeing much of it. According to the Detroit Casino Council via CNBC “The three Detroit casinos collectively reported $813 million more in total gaming revenues in 2022 than in 2019, but total wages paid to workers represented by the DCC were $34 million less when comparing those same years.” Ouch, I don’t see this one resolving itself anytime soon either. The public are pissed. Wait until they get their tax bill, “each day of a strike could put approximately $738,000 in city and state tax revenues and $3.4 million in casino operator revenues at risk.” Who will fill the city and state tax coffers? You know who…
LB#3-
Last week it was off shore wind farms that were hemorrhaging money and now solar projects are seemingly going south economically. What happened to the economic sensibility of going green? I said to watch out in the future for eyesores like non-moving wind turbines and we can add fields of solar panels. Let this serve as a reminder, when governments falsely told you to “follow the science.” They should have said follow the economics, but governments are stupid. Please see US debt clock at $33.658 trillion with a lot of useless green energy money in that shit heep.
This reminds me of the story of the flat rock in a cow pasture. A cow comes along and takes a big old crap on the flat rock and the cow said “oh look it’s raining ice cream.” The rock, understandably feeling a little shocked and shitty, asks “Are you from the government?” The cow says “No, why?” the first rock responds “I can’t imagine anyone else being dumb enough to shit on my head and tell me it’s raining ice cream.”
LF#1 AI is saving the stock market and it largely has this summer as after the boom the magnificent 7 stocks of the large tech stocks ran to mostly all time highs and Nvidia the darling maker of AI chips saw its stock triple. This was after the public introduction to the large language models like ChatGPT, which Google and Microsoft both presented in public forums. They also both had AI commit mistakes during the presentations, but don’t ruin a good story with facts C Thomas. AI has been around for some time before ChatGPT and the necessary AI hype that requires every stock investor call to mention AI at least 31 times lest the stock price fall. There have been a series of funds that have traded based on AI recommendations. One is AIEQ, AI Powered Equity, another is Kensho New Economies Composite (KOMP) and another is Merlyn.AI Bull Rider Bear Fighter ETF with the appropriately named (Wiz). AI powered equity has a 3 year return of -1.5%, while Kensho has a decline of 4.3%, and, wait I want to say this again because of its unbelievable stupidity, Merlyn.AI Bull Rider Bear Fighter the WIZ is down 3.0% over the last three years. THE triple QQQ Invesco trust is up 9.3% over that time and the SPY SPDR S&P 500 tracking ETF is up 9.5%. We might need to pump the brakes on AI, which is the exact thing it can’t do well enough to deploy AI self driving cars as we were promised by Musk and other grifters.
LF#2 Tesla announced earnings and their 3rd quarter wasn’t a good one. It turns out that despite big price cuts that people aren’t buying as many EVs as companies can produce. We have seen this with the days on lot of EV inventory being much higher than ICE inventory. Tesla’s stock was down 15% this week. GM also announced that they would delay building a plant in Michigan while “aligning with evolving EV demand.” Even Musk himself said that they are slowing work on a new factory in Mexico. They seem confused but I am not on why. The Wall Street Journal printed it in black and white this week for us: EV buyers have a median household income of $186,000, the median household income of new car buyers is $122,000, and the median household income for the average American is $75,000. 50% of the country can’t afford a new car, much less an EV. Remember that next time someone that owns an EV tells you that everyone should own one. Then show them pictures of kids digging the cobalt for their EV and they won’t talk to you anymore about EVs. Win. Win.
EV demand is slowing noticeably
LF#3 The Japanese Yen is a powder keg. The Journal had a nice editorial this weekend where
“The foreign-exchange market for the Japanese yen is working fine, the International Monetary Fund declared last weekend. No it’s not, Japan’s finance ministry shot back on Thursday”
“An excessive volatility in foreign exchange rates can cause harm to the real economy,” the vice finance minister for international affairs Masato Kanda said Thursday. “It is globally recognized that countries are allowed to take appropriate action in such a situation. If no action is taken, regular people and businesses will suffer.”
The Yen has weakened to 150 against the dollar this week. This seems to be the hard line in the sand and a level that the Bank of Japan will defend. How will they defend? They are the largest holders of US treasuries with over $1.1 trillion. Should they start selling bonds into the market if they haven’t already, I ask you again, Who will buy the bonds, and at what price? You see, all markets are linked and we have our own problems here at home considering the long term treasury bond is hitting 16 year highs.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com. Remember this: your retirement is largely in paper dollars in a ledger somewhere. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.