Ideas worth pausing for. Investors, independent thinkers and world affairs.
“In addition to a forecast, you also need a good sense for the probability your forecast is correct, since not all forecasts are created equal.”
Howard Marks · Apr 9, 2025
Marks discusses the uncertainty surrounding tariffs and a potential trade war in his memo Nobody Knows (Yet Again).
Read original sourceUS Government Sold $907 Billion of Treasury Securities this Week. That’s a Lot of Paper. Yields Pulled Back
Most of these huge T-bill sales replaced maturing T-bills as T-bills are short-term in nature and need to be rolled over all the time. But not all.
T-bill yields eased across the board this week. They largely reflect the Fed’s policy rates (no rate-hike meeting) and market expectations of the Fed’s future policy rates. They can also reflect big shifts in demand. There was some of that, as the market shifted from the “AI trade” to the “safe-haven trade” with AI and chip stocks tanking left and right – oh poor Intel.
The Everything Bubble Is Bursting, in Real Time
The process begins when cheap and elevated liquidity, which is the assumption underpinning inflated valuations, suddenly evaporates. Fiscal deterioration pushes up sovereign borrowing costs, the energy shock squeezes purchasing power, and monetary tightening exacerbates both. Tech stocks are the high-profile victims. However, the deeper danger lies in the repricing of the entire financial system’s foundation.
For years, extraordinary money supply growth and negative real rates have pushed asset prices to unwarranted levels. The resulting “everything bubble” spread across real estate, private equity, bonds, and stocks. Now, it is bursting.
America’s Deadly Addiction to War
The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. The framers deliberately withheld from the president the unilateral authority to plunge the nation into war because they understood the danger of concentrating the power to initiate hostilities in one person’s hands.
And the constitutional order has been systematically circumvented.
Treasury I Bond “Fixed Rate” Raised to 1.40%, Highest since 2006, for 5.51% Annual Combined Rate for Next 6 Months
I-bonds are an inflation-protected savings product that the Treasury Department offers exclusively on its website TreasuryDirect.gov. They’re not a speculative instrument. They’re not traded in the market, and they cannot be sold or bought through a broker. Purchases are limited to $10,000 per year per person or entity.
With both the interest and inflation protection added to the principal, the value of the bond grows with compounding. The fixed rate and the inflation compensation rate are figured on the accumulated value. So if this new bond purchased for $10,000 grows in x number of years to $15,000, that 1.4% fixed rate and the new inflation compensation rate at the time will be figured on the $15,000.
Whole World Can See Lula And Moraes, By Forcing Bolsonaro Into Exile, Are Turning Brazil Into A Banana Republic
Meanwhile, the fake news bill Lula’s government backed has been stalled since April 2024, right around when David Ágape and Eli Vieira, both exiled, and I published the Twitter Files - Brazil.
Meanwhile, Lula has little in the way of an agenda beyond the censorship he promised more of in his victory speech, which could further corrode his legitimacy. He won 51.8% of valid votes after losing the first round 47% to 45%. Datafolha’s last pre-runoff reading had 41% of voters rating his government bad or terrible against 35% good or great; 50% disapproved of him.
Doug Casey on How Artificial Intelligence Will Radically Transform the World
AI is going to be huge. No, strike that gross understatement—it’s already huge. It will change everything. There’s no question the abilities of technology are increasing exponentially, at the rate of Moore’s Law. In other words, computing power is still doubling roughly every 18 to 24 months while the cost halves. This is also true in the areas of biotech, nanotech, robotics, 3D printing, and genetic engineering. These technologies are going to fundamentally transform the very nature of life itself. AI will accelerate their progress by an order of magnitude.
What is your take on AI advancements, and how do you see it evolving in the future?
The Growth of the Vacant Housing Stock in the US, Q3 2026
Amid the current difficulties in selling a home (because prices are too high, and sellers loathe to cut them), homeowners have been shifting for-sale units to the for-rent market.
Over the past five years, vacant-year-round units for rent and for sale surged by 1.48 million units.
We’re Happy To Announce “The Left’s War on Reality”
The Left dominates major societal institutions from the media to law to medicine to academia. If we are to prevent the harm it seeks to enact on nations, communities, and individual lives, we must understand how and why it wages war on reality. Please go to Amazon now to pre-order your copy of our book.
The damage is a feature, not a bug. The borders weren’t left open by accident. Doctors knew that their “care” could sterilize confused adolescents. And blue states openly boast of spending billions of dollars to maintain a population of street addicts.
What the “Housing Shortage” of New Single-Family Homes Looks Like: Ballooning Inventories, Falling Prices, So-So Sales
Big homebuilders have to build homes because that’s their business, they cannot just pack up and leave when the market turns against them, they have to keep their businesses intact, they have stockholders and bondholders they need to make happy, they have to protect their credit ratings, and they have to work with prices and incentives to keep their sales volume up. And they’ve been doing that, even as sales of existing homes have collapsed.
This is the “Housing Shortage” that the housing industry ceaselessly promotes to create a fake sense of scarcity to manipulate up prices.
Lula’s Historic Victory in Brazil — and What It Means
The Supreme Court — not Lula or the elected Congress — has been the dominant political force over the last four years, censoring and even imprisoning their critics in ways that even their defenders now acknowledge are endangering Brazilian democracy. And all of that is independent of the grotesque abuses of power and scandals of Brazil’s most destructive force, Alexandre de Moraes (I have reported on these developments with great alarm and detail in countless venues in both Brazil and in the U.S. and will not re-review them here).
Now the opposite is true. Brazil’s Supreme Court is an international joke and disgrace, and the fault lies largely with Lula. Rather than appointing well-regarded legal specialists to the courts, he has appointed lackeys, political allies and friends. He filled one Supreme Court opening with one of his closest political allies, Flavio Dino, and another with his personal lawyer who represented him in the corruption cases he faced: Cristiano Zanin.
Who is Making Billions from the Iran War?
Endless war produces more corporatism, where the private sector does not exist to provide goods to compete in the free market, but to serve political power and strengthen governmental control over the population. Think of it as welfare for the rich at the expense of the poor. The result is tyranny.
And if you don’t support the wars? You get the Thomas Massie treatment.
Mega and Large Investors Pull Back from Housing Market, Become Net Sellers, Small Investors Continue to Pile In
Clearly, small investors still think that buying rental properties after the home-price explosion from mid-2020 to mid-2022 is the eldorado, while the smart money has stepped back?
Small investors have been, and continued to be, the driving force. There are millions of them, each buying a home every now and then, but together buying up large numbers of homes and putting them on the rental market. But the figures here exclude small investors that do not use a corporate entity for their purchases, such as many mom-and-pop investors.
The archive preserves what people said at the time. Older views and forecasts are not presented as current statements. Context provides supporting details; Read opens the source.