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On today’s show, we discuss:
- At $2M per minute, treasuries mint cash like never before
- Cost of capital and capital allocation
- The new math of driving your car till the wheels fall off
- Consumers fed up with food costs are ditching big brands
- Long-predicted consumer pullback finally hits restaurants like Starbucks, KFC, and McDonalds
- US spending and incomes continue to grow a bit faster than before the pandemic – and that’s okay
- The US economy is already in a recession, and it’s following the same path as China by becoming reliant on debt, veteran forecaster says
- Young American’s wealth has soared since the pandemic
- BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF posts first day of outflows, leading record $563M exit from US spot products
- National home price growth this decade has already surpassed that of the entire 1990s and 2010s
- The bear case for housing
Listen here:
Recommendations:
- The Godfather of American Economy
- Rotten Tomatoes 300 best movies of all time
- Fallout
- Sugar
- The Great Wall
- Once Upon a Time
- Late Night with the Devil
- Hereditary
Charts:
Tweets:
"Fast food restaurants are expensive" are a sign of a *good* economy, not a bad one.
We want labor to be expensive! Fast food was inexpensive in the 2010s because of a slack labor market. https://t.co/abAIZ0dHX2
— Matt Darling 🌐🏗️ (@besttrousers) May 2, 2024
Auto insurers are crushing the S&P. I would fade this.
Yes, there is more to auto insurance than the value of the car (bodily injury, etc.)
But KBB says new car prices are near a 2-year low, used cars down 4% from last year. Tesla cutting prices. pic.twitter.com/39ZxZ57ibN
— Jeff Weniger (@JeffWeniger) May 1, 2024
Encouraging news on the auto insurance inflation front from Allstate — higher premiums and slowing cost growth have improved profitability, making future large premium increases less likely: @TheStalwart @IrvingSwisher @carlquintanilla @talmonsmith pic.twitter.com/PsOqL8zQ3a
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) May 3, 2024
This is amazing. pic.twitter.com/5BPsCo8rlY
— Car Dealership Guy (@GuyDealership) May 2, 2024
Wow – Lumber is all the way back to 2019 levels pic.twitter.com/rSbhISNIQi
— Tom Hearden (@followtheh) May 4, 2024
Torsten Slok with some more cool weekend charts:
Inflation adjusted pandemic savings are up big time for the upper middle class. in % terms these folks that didnt get the 20% raises $15/hr folks did. but btwn savings and smaller % bumps on MUCH bigger base salaries? theyre fine pic.twitter.com/vy9ZfxJaTH
— talmon joseph smith (@talmonsmith) May 5, 2024
What just happened to construction jobs? pic.twitter.com/IbPxaAJffy
— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) May 1, 2024
Feel free to push back on this, but going back 50 years most US recessions played out as an energy price shock followed by an investment collapse. We had the setup for that in Q2 2022 but that’s long gone, so what’s the thing going to be now?
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) May 5, 2024
1/11
The more data we get, the more I worry about the risks involved with Spot ETF.
🧵to update
—
Investment Advisors hold about 35% of all ETFs. However, they hold less than 1% of the new Spot BTC ETF."Here come the boomers" was/is a myth. https://t.co/H5CQev7BBR
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) April 28, 2024
Wow. Grayscale. pic.twitter.com/DRoZ4sGZVU
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) May 4, 2024
Whatever one insists crypto is – store of value, a claim on scarce digital real estate, a fun spec, a scam – since mid-2023 it's traded purely as "The Next Big Thing" along with AI plays.
Bitcoin in lockstep with $NVDA, with $MSTR and $SMCI acting as leveraged versions of same. pic.twitter.com/XAdZjasrdc
— Michael Santoli (@michaelsantoli) May 1, 2024
Interesting stat from Freddie Mac. Even with higher rates and sticky prices, first-time homebuyers remain the dominant force in the for-sale housing market, representing 58.2% of all home sales.
This is a deflating stat for the conspiracy theorists who continue to falsely claim… pic.twitter.com/LoYJKtkhWn
— Jay Parsons (@jayparsons) May 3, 2024
‼️NEW DCG POLL‼️ released today reveals 1 in 5 battleground state voters consider crypto a key issue in 2024 U.S. elections. In a survey conducted with @HarrisPoll, swing state voters call for greater discourse on digital assets from political candidates. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/wdfWOePuUw
— DCG (@DCGco) May 7, 2024
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