Swan Dive â June 18, 2025 đ§š The Evacuation Doctrine Addison Wiggin The President has posted his foreign policy intentions â again. He canât seem to help himself.
This time, demanding the âunconditional surrenderâ of Iranâs Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, while U.S. officials leak whispers of a potential strike on Tehran.
Stocks, predictably, recoiled.
Investors hoping the Israel-Iran conflict would fizzle into diplomatic theater instead watched oil spike and equities slump.
Policy by post is, apparently, still a puzzling phenomenon for most people.
Safe to say, this doesnât feel like the prelude to peace. The only winners yesterday were war profiteers and Verve Therapeutics, the latter snatched up by Eli Lilly for $1.3 billion â a rare bloom in a wilting field.
As for Tehranâs fate, if weâre measuring by the Presidentâs Truth Social feed, it's already been evacuated twice this week. Weâre entering dangerous territory where national security doubles as a branding exercise.
At this rate, who needs a super-intelligent AI to destroy the human race? đ Bonds Rally, Sales Stumble⊠sort of. Headline retail sales disappointed yesterday, pushing yields lower and renewed speculation that the Fed will cut rates sooner. That said, we donât expect Jerome Powell to announce a rate cut this afternoon at 2 p.m.
Hereâs why: âWith the hype about the tariffs,â writes Martin Wolf, âsome people might have tried to speed up their purchases and bring them into March to front-run any effects from the tariff.â
But so far, those tariff effects on prices have remained elusive. The data reveals that the mighty consumer has continued to spend, spend, spend. If you remove seasonal adjustments, retail sales are at record highs.
Never mind that consumer credit balances â and personal bankruptcies â are also at record highs. Or that unrealized losses at regional banks are at 2023 crisis lows.
The pressure for rate cuts is political as Trump insists the Fed get in line with his Great Reset plan. JPow and associates have to be the adults in the room on rate policy. đŠ Gold: The Central Bank Exit Strategy In a survey of 72 central banks, 43% say they plan to increase gold reserves over the next year. Not one plans to sell. Gold has doubled since late 2022, and itâs not retail investors driving the rally. The worldâs monetary authorities â particularly those in emerging markets â
arenât buying gold for speculative gain. Theyâre hedging against Washington. Inflation, fiscal deficits, seizure risk, dollar devaluation... these are not fringe worries anymore. They have become the new orthodoxy, globally. If you think President Trump, Wall Street or the Federal Reserve have the economy under control ⊠you really need to see this eye-opening video⊠A $36 trillion ticking time bomb is about to explode and take the U.S. economy and stock market down with it. This story is unraveling quicklyâyet no one is talking aboutâthough they should be, and they soon will be. WATCH NOW. đž OpenAIâs Civil War As you might have anticipated, the AI revolution is turning on itself.
OpenAI is reportedly weighing antitrust accusations against Microsoft, its largest investor, over control of its corporate structure. Sam Altman is doing what he can to keep control of the firm he founded. And Meta Platforms is offering $100 million signing bonuses for OpenAI employees, although nobody has taken up the offer, Bloomberg reports. Thereâs apparently not enough AI coding talent to go around.
Elonâs xAI startup, not to be outdone, is torching $1 billion a month on infrastructure⊠and chasing the same engineers. Somewhere between these GPU bonfires and the Pentagonâs $200 million AI contract awarded Monday, you start to understand why the dollarâs purchasing power feels more like a rumor than a reality. đšâđŒ The Infinite Workday, or Death by Calendar Invite Microsoft, fresh off parsing trillions of data points, has confirmed what most retirees suspected all along: the modern workplace is a prison with no doors.
40% of users check their email by 6 a.m. Meetings have bled into nights and weekends. Interruptions come every two minutes.
No wonder the percentage of employees with a positive outlook on their employer hit a record low of 44% last month. Not to fear. Our Mark Jeftovic believes in the very near future, there will be no âjobsâ in the traditional middle-class sense. Our daily tasks will be managed by bespoke AI⊠robots, taxis, traders. The only job most people will have is managing the wealth bequeathed to them from their parents. Yes, that is a striking image. But itâs not as striking as our Zoltan Istvanâs fear that AI will develop super-intelligence and logically conclude that the health of the planet would be more easily preserved if human beings werenât on it.
Weâve been investigating AI themes with Mark and Zoltan daily. More to come as our thesis develops.
In the meantime, Microsoft concludes, thereâs fatigue â digital, cultural, spiritual. đ Revenge of the Memes Regencell Bioscience â a company that makes Chinese herbal remedies for ADHD and has no revenue â is now worth $30 billion. Thanks to a 38-for-1 stock split and a float that would fit in your glove compartment, the stock is up over 46,000% this year.
There are 12 employees. No sales. Cayman Islands registry. And yes, this is a real company.
No, you should not buy it. Unless, of course, you miss the thrill of 2000 dotcoms or have missed the court proceedings of Sam Bankman-Fried and judgments against Tom Brady, Giselle Bundchen and Snoop Dogg. âïž Solar Stocks Scorched Speaking of stocks you should not buy: solar. The GOP tax billâs latest draft slashed solar and wind credits into near oblivion. Residential solar, the darling of ESG portfolios everywhere, is in freefall. SunRun down 40%. Enphase off 24%. SolarEdge shedding 33%.
Even First Solar, the last man standing, is running on fumes. The energy policy whiplash is brutal â but instructive. Electric vehicle startups beware, when your business model depends on the whims of Congress, you're one mid-term away from insolvency. đź Seeds of (Virtual) Wealth And now for something completely surreal: Grow a Garden, a Roblox game about pixelated plants, just set a new record with 16 million concurrent players. Think FarmVille for the screen-glued Gen Alpha set.
The in-game currency, Sheckles, can be traded for exotic vegetables and digital livestock. On the black market â yes, thereâs a black market â rare digital fruit can sell for thousands of dollars. If your grandson is âworking on his crops,â he may be farming more than carrots.
Call it absurd. But in a world where AI engineers make $100 million, and central banks hoard gold, maybe a $3,000 turnip isnât so crazy. đ History Repeats in Verse, Sometimes in Flames When the War of 1812 began â on this very day, 213 years ago â muckety-mucks in Washington were confident a quick victory would turn Canada into the 19th state. (Yep, we did the math⊠at the start of the war, there were 18 states in the Union.)
The parallels to todayâs confident declarations and thinly veiled provocations are too surreal to ignore. As is the coalition of acronyms â Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (OAC) and Marjorie Tayler Green (MTG) and a handful of MAGA Republicans â who oppose any U.S. involvement in Israelâs current beef with Iran.
Empires rise with gumption and certainty over their exceptionalism. They fall into confusion⊠and debt.
âThe only thing more dangerous than believing your own propaganda,â we wrote in Empire of Debt, âis letting the rest of the world believe it too.â Weâre flirting with both. Today, we just do it on social media platforms.
~ Addison P.S. Paid-up fraternity members: remember, weâre still hosting Grey Swan Live! tomorrow, Thursday, Juneteenth, at 11 a.m. ET. Chris Mayer joins us to explain how Buy Right, Sit Tight is at the heart of his generational wealth strategy.
Youâll enjoy hearing from Chris. He provides a little sanity in a world chasing meme stocks and militarized chatbots.
Mayerâs Woodlock House strategy focuses on real businesses with real cash flows run by intelligent insiders whoâve got âskin in the game.â Make a note on your calendar.
P.P.S. Back in February, I visited my friend Ronan McMahon at Playa Del Carmen in Mexico. Ronan is the founder of Real Estate Trend Alert â RETA â a group that finds the best investment opportunities in international real estate, from city living to beachfront condos in the Caribbean. Ronan has put together another world-class deal in the Dominican Republic's Cap Cana region, called Azul Garden. Ronanâs deal goes live today, but you can review the Cap Cana deal early here. It may be just the kind of overseas dream home youâve envisioned for your retirement â or for your next real estate investment.
Your thoughts? Please send them here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
How did we get here? Find out in these riveting reads: Demise of the Dollar, Financial Reckoning Day, and Empire of Debt â all three books are now available in their third post-pandemic editions. You might enjoy one or all three.  (Or⊠simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites: Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million or Target.)
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com |
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar