“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)
The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.
October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets. Why? Harvest. Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025. Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.
Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.
Who can say?
But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill. The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours). The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?
If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?
It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby. Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers. I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.
I think the big thing that’s different is Trump. Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight. Why? Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice: Interest Rate Edition.
But here’s the punchline: Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease? It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine. Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.
What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub? Add laundry.
Big banks love lower interest rates. It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank. Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.
The result? Bankers win. Again. At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.
But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States. Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world. Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?
China will not be left out. They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us. That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.
And the United States? Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.
You know what chicks love? Sweeping generalizations.
Where does all this money go?
Apple®. Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons. And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.
And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up. Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.
It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme. Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.
As found. 90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.
And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up. Why?
I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers. So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?
Don’t know. I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash. Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run. To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.
This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.
Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial. It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.
To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.
Disclaimer: I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday. However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures. If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.
The “economy” is real just like your wife’s feelings are real. What does her ass look like in those jeans? Irrelevant if you like your wife you get to keep your wife, but you better know the answer to such questions. Everybody with a pinky in the economic pie plays the game because they want a slice now and again.
The fickle universe that animates those feelings? Some data? A bunch of old-timey accounting practices that push out metrics? Steaks out of a bulls ass. But boy are they juicy if you like to gamble and then pat yerself on the back for turning profit while the whole world burns down.
We love money. Its our faith. The death cult has theirs. They love money too. But they know we will put some wall-eyed fleshtrader hard-6 on the three-dollar bill just because she looks better in globo-corp sweatshop jeans than some hambeast blixen with angryface. Winning.
Just stay in the casino. Rake those profits. Eat the buffet. Drink the free dranks.
Clearly they can’t let any part of the charade correct toward even some approximation of reality without the whole thing going tits up. So who cares? We are going to mars anyhow. If you are too stupid to make money in the forever gains market thats your fault.
Now, why are we losing again? I dunno. I’m doing fine.
We are halfway through the human centipede economy. Wait till the great reveal.
Spoiler. Technically, those people are still alive. Like our economy.
We are all in this together, after all. So you gotta keep eating what I serve up and I will keep eating what Roger serves up and we can dream of Elysian together.
My economic theory is a little bit different than yours……I will know the economy is on the mend when tattoos and body piercings go out of fashion.
Back in the 90’s, there was an anthropologist (can’t recall name) who commented how the number of tattoos/piercings on display seemed to directly correlate with the primitiveness of the tribe. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but I watched this over the years and the “tattoo index” seems to be a better predictor of our societal and economic decline than anything else I’ve run across.
JB
Sounds legit. Though I believe I’d refer to it as “The Road Warrior Economic Theorem”
FYI, you’re probably referencing Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay “Ornament And Crime”.
https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf
Sure, the world ended, but we had record third quarter profits!
A huge chunk of economic activity in this country is just toll collecting. It isn’t adding value, it is siphoning off the value created by a diminishing number of producers. The whole thing is fake and ghey.
Yes. It’s a casino, and more money is made off of betting on wheat than growing it.
It’s always the “next big thing”. AI/Data Centers this time, which might be the final big thing. There’s not enough watts or water to sustain the hype.
There are 7 tech stocks supporting the S&P 500. Pretty thin, to say the least. Beginning to crack? And everyone wants to start a war. Excepting China.
Our formerly hot residential market has listings with considerable price reductions daily. A year ago, it was cash sales 5% minimum above listing.
I can’t remember when Black Friday started two weeks early? Do you?
Face it…it’s a Fake & Gay Economy that’s about to tank.
Buddy mentioned that his local electric rate is going up – to support the buildout for . . . .
a data center.
Jeez, what happened to that infectious Wilder optimism? I used to stop by here for sunshine on a cloudy day, but it appears that you’ve joined the doom ‘n gloom crowd, JW*.
Oh well. At least the jokes are still Dad-friendly, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
*Says the guy with user handle ‘Harbinger’.
Fridays. Fridays are cheerful. And I really like tomorrow’s post.
Nvidia!F’n Hilarious!! That one hit my funny bone…Thanks, John. I needed a healthy laugh.
General ramblings about the market.
For both Don 1 and Joe 1, the market went up considerable for about the 1 year before it asked does this make sense, and sobered up.
Now on Don 2, the market seems to have started it’s sobered after 9 months, so a bit earlier. Russ 2k has been on slide since 10/27 with the S&P500 started a couple of days later. The RSP EFT started downward with the Russ 2k but interestingly leveled out ~11/5. None are down dramatically (Russ ~-7%); so not a correction.
Hard to say really if the drop is due to a sobering so just another panic over Trump adjusting tariffs again.
GDPNow is currently saying this quarter’s GDP is 4% which is amazing considering HomeDepot and Target are saying that sells are off. Hence the observation by Cranston of the early Black Friday; early on everything including guns and ammo!!???
Of course this ignores the panic of last April over Trump putting a stop to foreign countries abusing US free trade polices. He has publicly demonstrated finally that unilateral no-tariffs policy will destroy a country.
Sorry, I don’t work in meme or comics.
But working in memes is how our great-grandchildren will read Shakespeare.
My pleasure! I had to use that one.
If you are ignoring the 17 to 1 rule and not buying silver….you need counseling
But is it silver is too cheap or gold is over priced at a ratio of 80 (by 4x)? Crude is only $60 for a crude to gold ratio of 67. Over the last decade, the average (eye-balled) is under 30. So 2 metrics indicate gold is highly inflated (by 2.5x).
https://www.macrotrends.net/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historical-chart
I suspect part of the price distortion is: Fort Knox was empty and someone has been scrambling to refill it before Trump opens the doors to show an empty vault. Lots of reports of filling cargo planes with gold and landing near Fort Knox.
Although, it is really hard to imagine flying that much gold and not have a squadron of jets escorting it.
And could someone explain why China all of a sudden starting buying gold and concealing the amount by 10x?
I had 400 words on that, but the post was too long.
You think Nvidia and AI are Peak Economic Clown World? Just wait til Elon rolls out his Optimus robots…
“Minutes earlier, the crowd cheered and broke out into chants of “Elon, Elon!” as shareholders approved Musk’s $1 trillion pay package…. lofty targets, including selling one million Optimus robots in the next decade….An Optimus robot will have 5x the productivity of a human per year, Musk predicted, because it would be able to operate 24/7….The robots would increase the global economy by a factor of 10, Musk said, or possibly even 100…Robots like Optimus will make working “optional” in the future, Musk said….Musk later doubled down: Optimus will actually eliminate poverty….Instead of physically jailing prisoners, Optimus could follow you around and stop you from doing crime…We’ll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income, Musk said. Anyone can have any products or services that they want. But there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way…The capitalist implementation of AI and robotics, assuming it goes down the good path, is actually what results in the communist utopia, he said.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-optimus-eliminate-poverty-2025-11
Peak Economic Clown World is yet to come…
So what is the mean time between failures (MTBF) on such a complex machineS? Jet fighters costing 1000x run about 5 hours. Where is the assessment of that on productivity? And where do you find that mountain of Swiss watch makers willing to switch to robot repairs?
The ride never ends . . . 🙂