Baltic Dry Index. 1950 -26 Brent Crude 64.33
Spot Gold 3978 US 2 Year Yield 3.47
US Federal Debt. 37.995 trillion
US GDP 31.539 trillion.
"We pay the debts of the last generation, by issuing bonds payable by the next generation."
Dr. Laurence J. Peter, author, The Peter Principal.
Due to continuing technical issues, the next few updates will be briefer than usual. Be sure to see today’s technical section.
Apart from the Great Stock Bubble, things are starting to get scary.
Japan’s Nikkei crosses 51,000 on Tokyo-Washington
trade optimism, Fed rate cut hopes
Published Tue, Oct 28 2025 7:44 PM EDT
Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped more than
1% to hit a record high above 51,000 for the first time Wednesday, lifted by
renewed optimism over U.S.-Japan trade ties and expectations of another Federal
Reserve rate cut.
The gains came after U.S. President Donald Trump and Japan’s Prime Minister
Sanae Takaichi signed a new rare earths framework on Tuesday. Markets also grew
more confident that the Fed would deliver a second straight 25 basis point cut
to support slowing growth.
Trump’s visit marked his first meeting
with Takaichi, who assumed office earlier this month. He also met Emperor
Naruhito at the Imperial Palace.
Takaichi’s premiership will shift the long-ruling
Liberal Democratic Party toward more economically liberal, socially
conservative, and hawkish security policies, FitchSolutions company GeoQuant
wrote in a note.
Markets are pricing in nearly
100% odds that the Federal Open Market Committee will deliver another
quarter-point reduction, on the heels of September’s cut, bringing the federal
funds rate to a range between 3.75%-4.00%.
“If [Fed chair Jerome Powell] comes off
dovish, bets for future Fed cuts will increase and provide more fuel to market
momentum,” veteran investor Louis Navellier wrote in a daily note.
The federal
funds rate, set by the Federal Open Market Committee, is the interest rate
banks charge each other for overnight loans. While it doesn’t directly affect
consumers, the Fed’s moves often influence borrowing costs for mortgages,
credit cards and other loans.
The Topix was flat. South Korea’s Kospi
rose 0.17%, while the small-cap Kosdaq lost 0.25%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.16%.
Australia’s consumer prices rose 3.2% in the third quarter, the strongest gain
in more than a year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday.
The increase exceeded the 2.1% rise seen in the second quarter and was above
the 3% forecast by economists polled by Reuters.
Mainland CSI 300 was up 0.37%.
Hong Kong markets are closed for the
holidays.
Overnight in the U.S., all three major
averages closed higher. The S&P
500 rose 0.23% to close at 6,890.89. It had surpassed
the 6,900 level for the first time on an intraday basis earlier in the
day.
The Nasdaq Composite advanced
0.80% to finish at 23,827.49, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained
161.78 points, or 0.34%, to settle at 47,706.37. In addition to their closing
highs, the tech-heavy Nasdaq and 30-stock Dow scored new all-time intraday
highs alongside the broad market S&P 500.
Japan's
Nikkei breaches 51,000 mark for the first time
Some US Consumers Say a Recession Is Here
October 28, 2025 at 10:04 PM GMT
US consumer confidence fell
in October for a third straight month on darkening views about
the future, given the one-two punch of a slowing economy and
weakening labor market. The Conference Board’s gauge fell to
its lowest point since April, data out Tuesday showed. A measure of expectations for
the next six months fell in October to 71.5, the lowest level since June, while
a metric of present conditions increased.
Confidence remains stuck below levels seen
last year as Americans worry about their jobs and making enough money to get
by. Job growth has significantly slowed and inflation has now risen to
3%. Meanwhile uncertainty is rampant due to President Donald Trump’s trade
war, his chaotic tariff threats and the fact most of them may
turn out to be illegal.
As for the horizon, expectations for
employment also softened. A greater share of consumers expect fewer
available jobs in the next six months and their outlook on income
prospects were less positive. Many, it turns out, say a recession has
already arrived.
“Consumers’ write-in responses were led by
references to prices and inflation, which continued to be the main topic,” said
Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at the Conference Board. “References to
US politics were up notably, with the ongoing government shutdown mentioned
multiple times as a key concern.” —Jordan
Parker Erb
US
Consumer Confidence Falls Again on Recession Fears: Evening Briefing -
Bloomberg
Trump administration posts notice that no federal
food aid will go out Nov. 1
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has
posted a notice on its website saying federal food aid will not go out Nov. 1
as the government shutdown drags on
By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON Associated Press October 26, 2025, 5:55 PM
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has
posted a notice on its website saying federal food aid will not go out Nov.
1, raising
the stakes for families nationwide as the government
shutdown drags on.
The new notice comes after the Trump
administration said it would not tap roughly $5 billion in contingency
funds to keep benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
commonly referred to as SNAP, flowing into November. That program helps about 1
in 8 Americans buy groceries.
“Bottom line, the well has run dry,”
the USDA notice says. “At this
time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an
inflection point for Senate Democrats.”
The shutdown, which began Oct. 1, is now
the second-longest on record. While the Republican administration took steps
leading up to the shutdown to ensure SNAP benefits were paid this month, the
cutoff would expand the impact of the impasse to a wider swath of Americans —
and some of those most in need — unless a political resolution is found in just
a few days.
More
Trump
administration posts notice that no federal food aid will go out Nov. 1 - ABC
News
Amazon to cut 10 per cent of workforce amid AI
pivot
Tuesday 28 October 2025 10:23 am
Amazon is preparing to axe as many as
30,000 corporate jobs worldwide this week, in what could mark its largest round
of layoffs since 2022.
The Seattle-based technology giant plans
to begin cuts as soon as Tuesday, according to Reuters, targeting around 10 per cent of its 350,000-strong
corporate workforce.
Amazon employs more than 1.5 million
people globally, including 75,000 in the UK.
The move is part of a cost-cutting drive
led by chief executive Andy Jassy, who has spent the past two years
streamlining operations following an aggressive hiring spree during the
pandemic.
The layoffs are expected to hit several
divisions, including human resources, operations, devices and services, and
Amazon Web Services (AWS).
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment
on the reports.
More
Amazon
to cut 10 per cent of workforce amid AI pivot
In other news, those noisy Yanks? The Arctic shipping
route.
Some say that Americans who pretend to be Canadian
abroad aren’t fooling anyone. Here’s what’s giving them away
October 28, 2025
Susanna Shankar was traveling solo around
Spain this summer, when she was confronted by a fellow traveler who refused to
believe she was Canadian.
Shankar was at her hotel when she got to
talking with an elderly gentleman with a British accent. As travelers often do,
he asked her where she was traveling from. But when she said she was from
Vancouver, the conversation took an unexpected turn.
Immediately, the man eyed her with
suspicion. He accused her of lying, to the horror of his daughter who urged him
to stop giving Shankar the third-degree.
“He just didn’t believe me when I said I
was traveling from Canada,” Shankar said. “So I was like, ‘Do you want to see
my passport? How do you want to do this?’”
Shankar, 37, is a dual US-Canadian
citizen, who runs websites about regenerative and sustainable
tourism.
Her father is Canadian, her mother American. She grew up in Alaska and lived in
the US until the age of 28, lived in Germany for six years, and then moved to
Vancouver where she has been living the last four years. For political reasons,
Shankar says she identifies less as American and has taken to introducing
herself as Canadian. But sometimes, her American West Coast accent can betray
her.
“I do think his doubt did stem a little
bit from a lot of Americans out there trying to pass themselves off as
Canadians,” she added.
Shankar is referring to a decades-old
practice known as “flag
jacking,” in
which some Americans pretend to be Canadian while traveling abroad to avoid
anti-American sentiment. Flag-jacking Americans sew the maple leaf flag on
their bags and lie about their nationality. It happened as far back as the
1960s and ‘70s during the unpopular Vietnam War, spiked again under George W.
Bush’s Iraq War in the early 2000s, and has been revived under the current
Trump administration.
Some Canadians, incensed at the trade war
that just
intensified with
President Trump’s 10% tariff
increase on Canada and his earlier threats to annex the country,
have been calling out the Americans who make light of pretending to be Canadian
abroad, posting online comments calling it cowardly, entitled, and a form of
cultural appropriation.
Moreover, one of the most common arguments
online against flag jacking is that they’re not fooling anyone: Americans are
easily distinguishable from Canadians, many say, no matter how many maple leaf
flags they’re wearing.
But are they?
Aside from how people measure temperature
(Celsius or Fahrenheit), heavy regional accents (French-Canadian or American
Southern, for example), and answers to a flash quiz asking “What’s the capital
city of Canada?” (answer: Ottawa) and “How do you pronounce Toronto?”
(Torontonians don’t pronounce the second ‘t’) — can the world really tell
Americans and Canadians apart?
Canadians are ‘more subtle,’ says one
travel pro
Several European tour guides who work with
Americans and Canadians responded with a resounding “yes.”
“Stereotypes exist for a reason,” says
Londoner Denisa Podhrazska, who founded Let
Me Show You London, which has been organizing private tours for affluent
tourists since 2014.
“We use them because many of them are
true. And it’s not just Americans, it’s for everybody. Every nation has its own
little quirks, that’s how we recognize each other.”
And when it comes to Americans, one of the
easiest ways to spot an American abroad is that you hear them before you see
them, she says.
“You always hear Americans because they
are loud. Really nice, and loud,” she says.
“Canadians don’t stand out as much as
Americans. In conversation, they’re more subtle, you don’t hear them from two
tables down.”
Are American
tourists easily distinguishable from Canadians? Let the debate begin | CNN
Container ship arrives in Felixstowe after Arctic world first
27th October Port of Felixstowe
A container ship arrived in Suffolk in record time after being the
first to take a route across the Arctic as climate change melts sea ice.
The Istanbul Bridge container ship arrived at the Port of
Felixstowe after travelling from Ningbo in China.
It made the 7,850-mile Arctic journey in just under 21 days, which
is twice as quick compared to if it had taken the southern route through the
Suez Canal, which typically takes 40 to 50 days.
This marked the first time a container ship had travelled from
China to Europe across the Arctic Ocean.
Speaking to Chinese official state news, Xinhua, Li Xiaobin, chief
operating officer of Sea Legend Line Limited, the route's operator, said sea
and temperature conditions along the Arctic route are ideal for transporting
temperature-sensitive and time-critical goods.
The route has been used before with ships travelling between the
western and eastern parts of Russia and Asian countries, such as China.
The Centre for High North Logistics at Nord University said that
there was enough open water when the Istanbul Bridge passed through the East
Siberian Sea between October 2 and 4, although ships experienced difficulty due
to ice in September.
Container ship
arrives in Felixstowe after Arctic world first | East Anglian Daily Times
Global Inflation/Stagflation/Recession
Watch.
Given
our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians,
inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
We see that past inflation in food prices has been a better
forecaster of future inflation than has the popular core measure [CPI and
PCE]…Comparing the past year’s inflation in food prices to the prices of other
components that comprise the PCEPI (as in Table 1), we find that the food
component still ranks the best among them all…
Source: St Louis Fed.
Graham Summers, MBA | Chief Market Strategist, Gains, Pains, &
Capital.
It's
not your imagination, these products are shrinking
28
October 2025
As
families struggle with the cost of a trip to the supermarket, a survey of
shoppers revealed how many products are getting smaller - while others are
being downgraded with cheaper ingredients.
Among
the examples are:
•
Aquafresh complete care original toothpaste - from £1.30 for 100ml to £2 for
75ml at Tesco, Sainsbury's and Ocado
•
Gaviscon heartburn and indigestion liquid - from £14 for 600ml to £14 for 500ml
at Sainsbury's
•
Sainsbury's Scottish oats - from £1.25 for 1kg to £2.10 for 500g
•
KitKat two-finger multipacks - from £3.60 for 21 bars to £5.50 for 18 bars at
Ocado
•
Quality Street tubs - from £6 for 600g to £7 for 550g at Morrisons
•
Freddo multipacks - from £1.40 for five bars to £1.40 for four bars at
Morrisons, Ocado and Tesco
Which?
also received reports of popular treats missing key ingredients, as
manufacturers seek to cut costs.
The
amount of cocoa butter in white KitKats has fallen below 20%, meaning they can
no longer actually be sold as white chocolate.
It
comes after Penguin and Club bars lost their legal status as a chocolate
biscuit, as they now contain more palm oil and shea oil than cocoa - as
reported in the Sky
News Money blog.
Which?
retail editor Reena Sewraz called on supermarkets to be "more
upfront" about price changes to help households "already under
immense financial pressure" get better value.
More
It's not your
imagination, these products are shrinking
A
top economist says these 2 states could determine whether the US enters a
recession
October
27, 2025
Mark
Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, says he's closely watching the
trajectory of those two states in particular as a bellwether.
The
economist has been sounding the alarm on the US inching closer to a recession
for months. After saying the US was on
the precipice of
a downturn in August, he updated his
prediction a month later to note that he believed the conditions had
deteriorated further.
Zandi
said last week that he saw many states as already being in a recession, but he
highlighted that New York and California, the two states he's most closely
watching, are both in the "treading water" category. He went on to
say that their fortunes could ultimately tip the balance for the whole US.
"California
and New York are struggling with the headwinds created by the higher tariffs
and highly restrictive immigration policy, and de-globalization more
broadly," Zandi told Business Insider following his latest posts.
"But are benefiting from the AI boom via the surge in investment and the
impact of surging stock prices on consumer spending by the well-to-do in those
wealthy states."
He
also said that both New York and California are economies that rely heavily on
globalization and unrestricted trade, and trends around re-shoring and tariff
policies could generate headwinds.
Zandi
added that while the US government shutdown has
delayed some
key economic data reports, he's using various state-level labor indicators and
survey data to continue his analysis.
"I'll
look at everything from net, gross migration flows, regional Fed surveys,
household delinquency data from Equifax, credit growth from Equifax, house
prices, and commercial real estate values," Zandi said.
He
acknowledged that the trend of tech sector layoffs may pose a threat to
California's growth, but added that so far, it hasn't been a problem, as
sectors such as healthcare and education are adding jobs.
"They
have pretty powerful headwinds to growth, but they also have some powerful
tailwinds, and those things, those two are kind of battling to a draw at this
point," he said of the two states.
A top economist
says these 2 states could determine whether the US enters a recession
Inflation
is quietly chipping away at most Americans’ main source of wealth
Last
Updated: Oct. 28, 2025 at 9:21 p.m. ET
First Published: Oct. 28, 2025 at 1:17 p.m. ET
Home
prices are growing at the slowest pace in over two years as the housing market
remains stagnant. That may be bad news for many homeowners across America — if
the trend persists.
As home sales stalled at the end of the summer, home
prices reflected the market’s slow environment. Nationally, home prices grew
just 1.5% in August from a year ago, according to the S&P Cotality
Case-Shiller Index released Tuesday.
It
was the weakest annual increase in over two years, and was below the current rate of inflation, which is at 3%. Home prices grew
at a slightly faster rate than the previous month, by 1.6%.
Home
prices in the 20 biggest metro areas in the U.S. also slowed significantly as
home-buying demand sagged, rising just 1.6% year-over-year, as compared with a
1.8% increase the previous month.
Slow
home-price growth will likely come as good news to aspiring home buyers, who’ve
been contending with swiftly rising home prices in recent years.
It’s
also bad news for homeowners.
For
most homeowners across the nation, their home is their biggest financial asset
and their main source of wealth. Despite record-high stock-market gains this
year, many Americans are not reaping the rewards. Only 43% of U.S. adults
reported personally owning stocks, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Consumer Finance Institute.
On
the other hand, the national homeownership rate was 65% as of the second
quarter of 2025, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau. In other words, more people own homes than stocks.
With
the rate of inflation exceeding the rate of increase of home prices,
homeowners’ housing wealth is being eroded in real terms, the S&P Cotality
Case-Shiller index makers said.
“[W]ith
price growth running at half the rate of inflation and several major markets in
decline, the rapid appreciation of recent years has clearly ended,” said
Nicholas Godec, head of fixed-income tradables and commodities at S&P.
More
Inflation
is quietly chipping away at most Americans’ main source of wealth - MarketWatch
UK
food bills fell by
the most in nearly five years in October as a global easing in sugar prices cut
the cost of chocolate and
confectionery, the British Retail Consortium said. Check out our Markets Today live
blog for
all the latest news and analysis relevant to UK assets.
Car sales in Europe rose 11% from a year earlier for a third monthly gain in September, with EVs and plug-hybrids jumping by a third. The broader availability of mass-market options helped local manufacturers keep pace with Chinese rivals that are expanding in the region.
Europe’s
imports of
diesel and jet fuel are on course for a record-breaking
month as traders gear up for the winter and a clampdown on petroleum
products made with Russian crude.
Covid-19
Corner
This
section will continue only occasionally when something of interest occurs.
Technology
Update.
With events happening fast in the
development of solar power and graphene, among other things, I’ve added this
section. Updates as they get reported.
Could the
internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world
together
Behind
every meme and message is creaking, decades-old infrastructure. Internet
experts can think of scenarios that could bring it all crashing down …
Sun 26 Oct 2025 15.00 GMT
It is the morning after the internet
went offline and, as much as you would like to think you would be delighted,
you are likely to be wondering what to do.
You could buy groceries with a
chequebook, if you have one. Call into work with the landline – if yours is
still connected. After that, you could drive to the shop, as long as you still
know how to navigate without 5G.
A glitch at a datacentre in the US state
of Virginia this week reminded us that the unlikely is not impossible. The
internet may have become an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life, but it is
also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure, leading
some to wonder what it would take to bring it all down.
The answer could be as simple as some
acute bad luck, a few targeted attacks, or both. Extreme weather takes out a
few key datacentres. A line of AI-written code deep in a major provider – such
as Amazon, Google or Microsoft – is triggered unexpectedly and causes a
cascading software crash. An armed group or intelligence agency snips a couple
of undersea cables.
These would be bad. But the real
doomsday event, the kind that the world’s few internet experts still worry
about in private Slack groups, is slightly different – a sudden, snowballing
error in the creaky, decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet.
Think of the plumbing that directs the flow of connection, or the address books
that allow one machine to locate another.
We’ll call it “the big one” and if it
were to happen then at the very least, you would need your chequebook.
The big one could start when
a summertime tornado cruises through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, laying
waste to a low-slung cluster of datacentres that are an integral part of
Google’s offering.
This area, called us-central1, is a
Google datacentre cluster, critical to its Cloud Platform as well as YouTube
and Gmail – a 2019 outage here downed these services across the US and
Europe.
Dinners burn as YouTube cooking videos
sputter to a halt. Workers across the world furiously refresh their suddenly
inaccessible emails, then resign themselves to interacting in person. Senior US
officials notice some government services have slowed, before returning to
planning a new blitz over Signal.
All this is inconvenient, but nowhere
near the end of the internet. “Technically, if we have two networked devices
and a router between them, the internet is running,” says Michał “rysiek”
Woźniak, who works in DNS, the system involved in this week’s outage.
But there is “absolutely a lot of
concentration happening on the internet”, says Steven Murdoch, a professor of
computer science at University College London. “This happens with economics.
It’s just cheaper to run all things in the same place.”
But what if then a heatwave in the
eastern US takes out US East-1, part of a Virginia complex that hosts
“datacenter alley”, a key hub for Amazon Web Services (AWS), the focus of this
week’s outage – among a handful of its neighbours. Meanwhile, a cyberattack
hits a major European cluster, say in Frankfurt or London. In the wake of this,
networks redirect traffic to secondary hubs, lesser-used datacentres, which
like frontage roads in a Los Angeles traffic jam become quickly unusable.
More
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks
(usdebtclock.org)
"To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into
$110 million is inevitable”.
Edgar Bronfman, Chairman, Seagrams
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