Baltic
Dry Index. 1901 -08 Brent
Crude 64.53
Spot
Gold 3887 U S
2 Year Yield 3.58 +0.03
US
Federal Debt. 37.561 trillion
US
GDP 30.307 trillion
A
system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a
central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that
are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.
Ron Paul
The good news this
weekend, the Gaza atrocity may be ending. Hamas appears to be surrendering.
The bad news this
weekend, the GREAT AI bubble may be ending. Even Goldie is getting cold feet.
As the USA heads into
a Columbus holiday weekend, selling depressed some leading technology stocks. A
pause or the smart money trying to get out?
S&P
500 posts winning week, but Friday rally fizzles: Live updates
Updated
Fri, Oct 3 2025 4:25 PM EDT
The S&P 500 retreated from a
record on Friday but held on to solid weekly gains despite a U.S. government
shutdown dragging on for a third day.
The
broad market index closed little changed, ticking up just 0.01% at 6,715.79,
while the Nasdaq Composite declined
0.28% to settle at 22,780.51. The Dow Jones Industrial Average outperformed,
trading higher by 238.56 points, or 0.51%, to finish at 46,758.28. The Russell 2000 also popped
0.72% to close at 2,476.18. All four benchmarks had hit all-time highs earlier
in the session.
Stocks
were knocked down a bit in afternoon trading by declines in key technology
names like Palantir
Technologies, Tesla and Nvidia. Palantir led the S&P
500′s pullback, falling 7.5%, while Tesla and Nvidia dropped more than 1% and
almost 1%, respectively. The CBOE
Volatility Index spiked, signaling some investors were scrambling to
buy some protection against a future S&P 500 decline in the form of put
contracts.
Still,
the three leading indexes saw a positive weekly finish. The broad market
S&P 500 rose around 1.1% on the week, along with the 30-stock Dow, while
the tech-heavy Nasdaq increased 1.3%. The small-cap Russell has jumped nearly
2% in the period.
Investors
have been overlooking anxieties surrounding the government shutdown, which
entered its third day Friday. While the stoppage has exacerbated underlying
concerns this year about macroeconomic and policy headwinds, inflation risks
and a slowing labor market, investors expect it to be short-lived, thereby
limiting potential hits to the U.S. economy. Those on Wall Street also believe
that the shutdown won’t stop the momentum in the artificial intelligence trade.
Shutdowns have not been market-moving events in the past.
The
shutdown has led to an economic data blackout, and the Labor Department’s pause
on virtually all activity has blocked the Friday release of the September
nonfarm payrolls report. Although that removes
a factor that could lend pressure to stocks, it lessens the amount of
economic data the Federal Reserve can take into account for its interest rate
decision at its October meeting. Markets largely expect the central bank will
lower its key interest rate by a quarter percentage point then, per the CME FedWatch tool.
Adding
to ongoing concerns regarding the jobs market, President Donald Trump has
threatened massive layoffs and said Thursday that the Democrats have given him
an “unprecedented
opportunity” to cut federal agencies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
also told
CNBC Thursday that the current lapse in federal funding could lead to
“a hit to the GDP, a hit to growth and a hit to working America.” The
Congressional Budget Office estimates 750,000 federal workers will be furloughed each day.
Their
remarks come a day after private payrolls posted their biggest
decline since March 2023 in September, according to ADP. Wednesday’s
report serves as yet another sign that the labor market is weakening, and some
believe that the state of the labor market combined with the shutdown bolster
the case for the Fed to cut.
“We
view September’s mixed, private-sourced substitutes for the Labor Department’s
delayed jobs report as soft enough to justify another interest-rate cut by the
Federal Reserve at the October 29 FOMC meeting,” said Jennifer Timmerman,
senior investment strategy analyst at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
“Prospects for further rate cutting by the Fed, reinforced by the yellow flag
for the economy raised by the latest jobs data, has cemented a rally in stocks
and left the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note low enough, at 4.11%,
to lift the S&P 500 to a fresh all-time high.”
Stock
market today: Live updates
Goldman
boss David Solomon warns of a stock market drawdown: ‘People won’t feel good’
Published Fri, Oct 3 2025 8:01 AM EDT Updated Fri, Oct 3 2025 11:17 AM EDT
Stock markets are due a “drawdown” in the next year
or two after years of being propelled to record highs by an AI frenzy,
according to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
“Markets run in cycles, and whenever we’ve
historically had a significant acceleration in a new technology that creates a
lot of capital formation, and therefore lots of interesting new companies
around it, you generally see the market run ahead of the potential ... there
are going to be winners and losers,” he said at Italian Tech Week in Turin,
Italy, on Friday.
Solomon pointed to the mass adoption of the internet
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which led to the emergence of some of the
world’s largest companies — but also saw investors lose money to what became
known as the “dotcom bubble.”
“You’re going to see a similar phenomenon here,” he
said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next 12 to 24 months, we see a
drawdown with respect to equity markets ... I think that there will be a lot of
capital that’s deployed that will turn out to not deliver returns, and when
that happens, people won’t feel good.”
An AI boom has gripped global markets in recent
years, with a slew of new
technologies, multibillion-dollar
deals and the continued
rise of ChatGPT-developer OpenAI. It’s seen investors bet big on the tech
and pour capital into stocks such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Palantir and Nvidia
The buzz around AI has helped to push indexes on
Wall Street and beyond to record highs, even as the major U.S.
averages were dented
earlier this year by President Donald Trump’s trade policies. However,
as investors have continued to seek out opportunities in AI, concerns have been
raised about the possibility
of a bubble bursting somewhere down the line.
“I’m not going to use the word bubble, because I
don’t know, I don’t know what the path will be, but I do know people are out on
the risk curve because they’re excited,” Solomon said Friday.
“And when [investors are] excited, they tend to
think about the good things that can go right, and they diminish the things you
should be skeptical about that can go wrong ... There will be a reset, there
will be a check at some point, there will be a drawdown. The extent of that
will depend on how long this [bull run] goes,” he added.
More
Goldman
Sachs CEO David Solomon warns stock market drawdown is coming
1 big thing: A big sign of
an AI bubble starts to appear
October 03, 2025
Debt
is the canary in the coal mine for market bubbles. Housing
debt fueled the global financial crisis. Corporate debt led to dotcom bust.
Now, the tech companies driving today's bull market are quietly levering up, sometimes through
private lenders that make their debt less visible to shareholders.
Why
it matters: That debt — and how it is getting structured —
is "almost an acknowledgement that this is getting out of hand,"
Dario Perkins, managing director of global macro at TS Lombard, tells Axios.
What
they're saying: Regarding returns on AI expenditures, the Big Tech
firms "say they don't care whether the investment has any return, because
they're in a race…Surely that in itself is a red flag," Perkins says.
- He sees two major issues: increased leverage to fund costly AI
infrastructure and few opportunities to make money once that
infrastructure is built and paid for with debt.
Zoom
out: Big Tech is turning to private debt markets and
special purpose vehicles. The catch? That kind of borrowing doesn't have to be
reflected on balance sheets.
- "SPVs mean companies like Meta do not need to show the debt
as their debt," Perkins writes in a note to clients.
He likens today's financing tactics to the subprime era, when firms
shifted risk off their books to reassure investors.
- Meta is raising $29 billion via private
capital for its AI data center buildout.
- Other tech giants are tapping the public market for debt. Oracle
recently issued $18 billion in debt to fund
its AI and infrastructure expansion.
Yes,
but: Plenty of strategists have reminded Axios of the old
Keynesian adage that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can
stay solvent."
- In other words, this tech-driven bull market could still have legs
to create more wealth before the bubble bursts. Perkins, however, isn't
convinced.
- "I wouldn't touch this stuff now," Perkins says, adding
that comparing this market with the dotcom bubble, "we're much closer
to 2000 than 1995."
Between
the lines: Why are tech companies spending this much to win the
AI race if the bubble risk is so prescient?
- The market is rewarding them even if it "makes no economic
sense to spend at this level because there's no way they can recoup the
value of the capital spending," investor Paul Kedrosky explains on
the Plain English podcast.
- Kedrosky is also watching how companies are moving financing off the
balance sheet: "That for me is a reflection of not wanting the credit
rating agencies to look at what they're spending."
Axios MarketsMore
In other news, tariff
wars aren’t so easy to win after all. Who knew?
Trump
making plans to send billions in cash bailouts to farmers with taxpayer money
The president has
also said he wants to use direct tariff revenue for the payments, but that
could trigger a major fight in Congress.
By Meredith Lee Hill 10/02/2025 03:00 PM EDT
The Trump administration is planning to roll out the
first tranche of bailout payments for farmers in the coming weeks, likely using
billions of dollars in funding from an internal USDA account, according to
three people with direct knowledge of the matter.
But it won’t be enough: USDA’s Commodity Credit
Corporation fund — which President Donald Trump previously tapped to provide
$28 billion in farm aid during his first-term trade war with China — has just $4 billion left in the account. Trump
officials, including those at the Treasury Department, are looking at how to
tap tariff receipts or other funding to supplement the payments without
triggering a messy fight in Congress.
The timing of the actual aid rollout is also tricky
given that it’s unlikely to happen or even be possible during the ongoing
government shutdown that’s shuttered vast swaths of the Agriculture Department.
Trump officials are still working on estimates of
how big the first tranche of aid will be, according to the three people, who
were granted anonymity to share private details. But the president has been
posting his promises to aid American soybean farmers on social media in recent
days.
Hill Republicans have been
pushing Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and other Trump
officials for weeks to do something to aid farmers reeling from
high input costs and the president’s tariffs, which have cut off American soybean farmers’ key markets in China as Beijing retaliates.
Trump has said he would use tariff revenue to provide
cash bailouts to farmers, but Congress would likely need to vote to authorize
such a move, triggering a major fight between Republicans and Democrats amid
already dire government spending conversations.
GOP lawmakers could also move to refill the internal
USDA fund in their government funding fight later this fall, but that too will
be a battle with Democrats.
Hill Republicans have been quietly working on their
own proposal to find additional funding for the farm bailouts, according to
four other people with direct knowledge of the matter. Some Republicans
estimate they will eventually need to provide $35 billion to $50 billion in aid
to farmers hit by Trump’s tariffs.
More
Trump making plans to send billions in cash bailouts to farmers with
taxpayer money - POLITICO
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.
OBR
hands Rachel Reeves first damning pre-Budget report on UK economy
Friday
03 October 2025 8:00 am | Updated: Friday
03 October 2025 10:27 am
The
Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has handed Chancellor Rachel Reeves its
first evaluation of the state of the UK economy and crippled public finances,
setting policy discussions about likely £30bn tax rises and possible savings in
motion.
The
OBR’s Budget Responsibility Committee, which consists of the economists Richard
Hughes, David Miles and Tom Josephs, are expected to warn the Chancellor that
the UK’s outlook is significantly worse than assumed in March.
Its
downgrades for productivity and revisions on calculations for supply-side
effects of policy are expected to contribute to a £30bn hole in
public finances.
Higher debt
interest payments –
due to 30-year gilt yields rising by over 40 basis points since the last Autumn
Budget – and U-turns on welfare savings made at the Spring Statement are
likely to add to costs faced by Reeves.
In
a report published in
July, the OBR said it had overestimated growth forecasts by 0.7 percentage
points over a five-year horizon and underestimated borrowing by as much as 3.1
per cent of GDP.
It
said turbulence in the global economy in the last few years had added greater
uncertainty to its forecasts but the signs suggest the OBR will take a harsher
view of the future of UK growth.
Labour
MPs criticise OBR
In
previous years, the OBR has re-evaluated its inflation measurements and
considered changes to the effect of public investment on output in the
economy.
But
Labour MPs have now widely
decried the
fiscal watchdog’s decision to alter modelling of its productivity
forecasts.
Labour
Growth Group’s Chris Curtis suggested at a fringe event at the Labour Party
conference that the OBR had chosen to do productivity changes now, as opposed
to doing them when Jeremy Hunt was Chancellor, for “political reasons”.
The
sense of angst felt across the Labour Party – whether it is due to what some
perceive to be the OBR’s outsized powers or whether politicians hold some
grievances against its procedural approach – is partly shared by Reeves and
Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
In
an interview with The Times last week, Reeves said: “They are choosing this
moment to make those revisions. That’s a challenge for me.
“But
I’m not going to duck that challenge. I will respond to it because it is
important that I can give that confidence that we’ll continue to provide
economic stability.”
OBR hands Rachel
Reeves first pre-Budget report on UK economy
Bosses’
inflation expectations highest in two years amid employment freeze
Thursday
02 October 2025 5:43 pm
Fears
that inflation will remain well above the Bank of England’s two per cent target
intensified on Thursday, after a closely watched survey of businesses revealed
bosses plan to raise prices at their fastest rate since the height of the
cost-of-living crisis.
British
businesses also have the weakest hiring intentions since 2020 with firms
expecting to keep employment steady over the next 12 months, the first time
since the three months to November 2020 that they had not expected to increase
staffing.
Finance
chiefs polled by the
Bank of England said
they expect to hike their prices by 3.7 per cent over the coming year, up from
3.5 per cent in August, in a move that could quash any remaining chance of
there being another cut to Bank Rate in 2025.
Inflation
expectations also remained elevated, with bosses on the Bank’s Decision Maker
Panel (DMP) predicting prices to rise across the UK economy by 3.4 per cent,
the highest reading since December 2023.
The
findings mirror the results of the central bank’s recent survey of households’
inflation expectations, which, driven by recent price spikes in groceries and
regulated industries, is now at its highest rate in several years.
Both
surveys will add credence to recent arguments made by some of the Monetary
Policy Committee’s more hawkish members, who have warned that the inflation
outlook looks stickier than officials had previously anticipated.
Inflation
fears stalk UK
This
week, external member Catherine Mann cited household expectations for
inflation hitting 3.8 per cent when she called for interest rates to remain at
four per cent for longer, before eventually making a larger cut to reboot the
sluggish economy when the time was right.
“I
prefer a longer hold… and make a bigger cut when you do to make it very clear
that this is not in response to the financial markets or other things,” she
told a Bloomberg event. “This is really about the UK economy.”
More
Bosses' inflation
expectations highest in two years amid employment freeze
China
Goes on Offense
Beijing’s Plans to Exploit American Retreat
Jeffrey Prescott and Julian Gewirtz September
29, 2025
A great unanswered question of the second Trump
administration has been how its outright rejection of the existing global order
would affect China’s international strategy. U.S. Secretary of State Marco
Rubio has called this order both “obsolete” and “a weapon being used against”
the United States, and in his speech at the United Nations on September 23,
President Donald Trump pilloried the “globalist” institution for “creating new
problems for us to solve.” In the early months of this year, Beijing’s response
to Washington’s attacks on the international order seemed mostly cautious and
measured. China traded tit-for-tat tariffs with the United States, but it
otherwise remained content to sit back and accrue benefits from Trump’s
alienation of U.S. allies and withdrawal from international institutions.
That period of caution is now over. Beijing has
decided on a much more ambitious course, putting its plans on vivid display at
a September meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Hosting the once
sleepy regional economic and security body, Chinese leader Xi
Jinping clasped hands with Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and met with 18 other leaders
from across the Eurasian continent. A few days later, flanked by Putin and
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Xi presided over a massive military parade in
Beijing to show off China’s fast-growing arsenal. Trump’s comment about seeing
the summitry on TV—“They were hoping I was watching, and I was
watching”—inadvertently revealed the precise position in which China hoped to
place the United States: the American president, so often the prime mover of
global politics, had become a spectator on the sidelines of a changing world.
Xi aims to establish China as the fulcrum of an emerging multipolar world, and he is
advancing a new, more active diplomatic strategy to realize that goal. Rather
than force the United States out of its leading position in the international
system or overturn the existing order, China is exploiting Trump’s rapid,
willing abdication of Washington’s role. And China is building up its own power
and prestige within existing institutions, seeking to shift their centers of
gravity irrevocably toward Beijing. If this gambit succeeds, it will transform
the international order from the inside out, placing China at center stage and
undermining U.S. influence in ways that future American administrations may
find difficult to reverse.
WORLD BUILDING
Not too long ago, foreign policy analysts might
have shrugged off the pageantry of the China summit. After all, meetings of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization are often heavy on optics and light on
substance. Disagreements among the group’s key members, such as a long-running
border dispute between China and India, have tended to outweigh their areas of commonality. Indeed, some
commentators and U.S. officials dismissed the recent Chinese-hosted events as
“performative,” “for show,” and merely a “photo op.”
Eight months into Trump’s second term, this reading
is optimistic at best. It discounts the extent to which global reactions to
Trump’s actions are reshaping the world. The international order that the
United States built and maintained for decades is coming to an end, and what
follows is up for grabs. Many countries are competing for influence, and
short-term, transactional dealmaking rather than long-term cooperation is
becoming the new norm, ushering in a phase that one of us called “mercenary
multipolarity” in Foreign Affairs. The United States and China remain the two most powerful
countries, but others, such as India and Russia, as well as the European Union,
are significant players with their own agendas. And as U.S. alliances fracture
under Trump, rivals of the United States are collaborating in increasingly
meaningful ways.
Yet with the ultimate shape of this new order still
undefined, Xi sees a window of opportunity to forge a China-centric world
without directly taking on the United States by moving assertively into areas
where Trump’s “America first” policies leave openings. This project extends
well beyond the optics of gathering global leaders in Chinese cities. While the
U.S. president feuded with the leaders of Brazil and India, Xi addressed a
virtual BRICS meeting hosted by Brasilia on the topic of “resisting protectionism”
and welcomed Modi to China to shore up ties with these two key powers. While
Trump imposes tariffs on much of the world and eliminates U.S. foreign
assistance, Xi is courting the leaders of the developing world: Beijing
announced cuts to Chinese tariffs on African goods in June and claimed in
September that it would bolster efforts to reform the World Trade Organization
to benefit developing countries’ economic growth.
More
China Goes on Offense: Beijing’s Plans to Exploit American Retreat
Technology
Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
A Trillion-Ton Threat Hangs Over Critical Minerals
September 30, 2025 at 10:00 PM GMT+1
You might think the business of mining is digging up valuable
minerals. In fact, it’s almost the opposite.
Most of the rock that miners blast, shovel and truck out of the
ground is useless waste — first the overburden of worthless material that has
to be dug away to get to the ore body, then the tailings left over when the ore
has been ground up and processed to extract its useful elements. To produce a
teaspoonful of gold these days, you often need to remove an Eiffel
Tower’s-worth of material from the earth.
Managing that growing mountain of dross — likely more than a
trillion metric tons at present, and forecast to double by
2050 — is one of the biggest obstacles to getting our hands on the critical
minerals the world will need over the coming decades. The collapse of mine
walls and waste heaps can bury or trap workers, send toxic minerals into
waterways, and block access to precious deposits. A warming planet is bringing
heavier downpours, along with more volatile cycles of dry and wet spells,
further destabilizing the fragile equilibrium that holds such piles of rock
together.
The world’s second-biggest copper mine saw a brutal illustration
of this reality recently. At Grasberg, a vast pit atop a mountain in the
Indonesian half of New Guinea island, 800,000 tons of mud and rock swept
through underground tunnels on Sept. 8, killing two people and leaving five
missing. Activity at the mine, which produced about 3.5% of the world’s copper
and 1.8% of its gold last year, has been halted and won’t be back to normal
until 2027, operator Freeport McMoRan Inc. said last week.
It’s still far too early to understand the exact causes of this
disaster, but one culprit is clear: water. Grasberg is one of the wettest spots on
the planet, with one access road near the mine sometimes receiving more than 12 meters of rainfall a
year. Though the underground cavern where the flow of wet material happened is
well below the bottom of the 550-meter-deep open pit, rain inevitably permeates
far below the surface. Once there, it can force open microscopic cracks,
fracturing the rock. The process is only accentuated by the often freezing
temperatures of the Papuan highlands.
Miners aren’t ignorant of this process. Because it’s such a
high-risk activity, vast ingenuity and expense is spent on understanding and
monitoring the slopes that hold waste rock and mine walls in place. Looked at
one way, the 45 failures of tailings dams during the 2010s — the largest number
of such accidents in any decade since the 1970s — are testament to the
inadequacy of our safety systems. When you consider the vastly greater volumes
of material getting discarded now, however, it’s a miracle the figure isn’t any
worse.
More
A Trillion-Ton
Threat Hangs Over Critical Minerals - Bloomberg
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
Exponent
Calculator
Enter
values into any two of the input fields to solve for the third.
This
weekend’s music diversion. Boccherini’s famous fandango. Approx. 9 minutes.
Boccherini-Quintetto
n. 4 G 448 - Fandango (III-parte II)
Boccherini-Quintetto
n. 4 G 448 - Fandango (III-parte II)
Next, how to beat the stock casinos. Approx. 30
minutes.
What
Happens If Someone Solves the Trillion Dollar Equation
What Happens If
Someone Solves the Trillion Dollar Equation | Watch
Finally,
that US Federal government shutdown. Approx. 3 minutes.
Government
shutdown: Trump says thousands of workers from “Democrat agencies” may be fired
Government
shutdown: Trump says thousands of workers from “Democrat agencies” may be fired
It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're
doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.
Ray Dalio
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