Comments on mega-cap stocks and artificial intelligence. Then, it’s time for some of my unsolicited letters to Barron’s, MSNBC, “No Labels”, FHFA and more.

Time to retire the US/Emerging Markets barbell for a while

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Before getting into the US$ discussion, three quick things. First, despite strong US data in Q1 and Q2, the US still appears headed for a slowdown later this year. As shown below, many longer-horizon leading indicators point in that direction. Excess household savings are also being run down and should be 60%-70% depleted by the end of the year. Stable copper prices are one exception but its usefulness as a business cycle indicator is affected by China’s reopening and the copper intensity of the energy transition. Click here for a chart collection on these leading indicators.

Frankenstein’s Monster: banking system deposits and the unintended fallout from the Fed’s monetary experiment; commercial real estate, regional banks and the COVID occupancy shock; the wipeout of Credit Suisse contingent capital securities; a market and economic update; and an update on San Francisco, which has experienced the weakest post-COVID recovery of any major city in North America.

Renewables are growing but don’t always behave the way you want them to.  This year’s topics include the impact of rising clean energy investment and new energy bills, how grid decarbonization is outpacing electrification, the long-term oil demand outlook, the flawed concept of levelized cost when applied to wind and solar power, the scramble for critical minerals, the improving economics of energy storage and heat pumps, the transmission quagmire, energy from municipal waste, carbon sequestration, a whydrogen update, the Russia-China energy partnership, methane tracking and some futuristic energy ideas that you can just ignore, for now.

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The large language model battles begin: a look at the future of web search, conventional wisdom machines, hallucinating bears in space, some early application successes and how far they still are from humans.

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The Federal debt and how the Visigoths may try to break the system if no one fixes it

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The affair with the market catalysts of the last decade is over now, and a new era of investing begins

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Holiday Eye on the Market: the YUCs, the MUCs, FTX, the Gensler Rule and the Summers Rule

In the October Eye on the Market I wrote about how in 6 of 7 post-war recessions, equity markets preceded the decline in profits, employment and GDP by several months at least. I also mentioned that the best indicator to follow was the ISM survey, which tends to coincide with the equity market bottom +/- 2 months. So, in the interest of thinking about when equities could bottom, the first chart below projects the ISM survey by looking at new orders and inventories. Using this crude approach, the ISM would bottom in the mid-40’s in December. If so, 3570 on the S&P 500 Index reached in mid-October could actually mark the low for the cycle; such a scenario should not be discounted entirely, and would be consistent with market history.