Listen to The Month That It Was in September 2026 from The Macro Butler.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-month-that-it-was-september-2026

The Conference Board's confidence index crashed to 81.9 in September — down 6.7 points, the fourth consecutive miss, and the lowest since April 2014. Both the Present Situation and Expectations indices deteriorated, and consumer appraisals of current business conditions turned negative for the first time since September 2024. This is no longer anxiety about the future; it is a verdict on the present. The labour differential — jobs plentiful minus jobs hard to get — fell to its weakest since February 2021, which is an odd companion to a 162,000-payroll print.

Twelve-month inflation expectations jumped to 6.1% on the average measure and 5.1% on the median, while 68.4% now expect higher interest rates, up 5.2 points. Fuel costs, prices and geopolitics were the stated worries.

In a nutshell, the booming economy is visible in the data and nowhere else.

September delivered China's long-promised fiscal awakening, or at least a plausible impression of one. The official manufacturing PMI crept back into expansion at 50.1 from 49.8, the non-manufacturing gauge leapt to 50.2 from 49.0, and the star turn was construction at 50.3 from 46.9 — growth for the first time this year. Services returned above 50, and the export-facing RatingDog manufacturing index rose to 52.1. Behind it: capped mortgage subsidies, cheaper financing, expanded quotas for directed investment, with more to come as Beijing defends its 4.5-5% target. Note the mechanism, though. Construction jumped 3.4 points because the state ordered it to, not because anyone wants another apartment — households are still repaying mortgages early and declining 40-year loans. This is the old playbook: when the consumer will not spend, the government builds. It works, in the sense that the index crosses 50. Exports, helped by the tariff truce extension, remain the genuine engine.

Beijing has proved once more that it can manufacture a 50.3 — the harder trick is manufacturing a buyer.

In a world of Trump Stagflation, 5+% Treasury yields, and a Fed hiking while it pretends to worry about jobs, “buy and hope” has become “buy and cope.”
So The Macro Butler extends its Long/Short Portfolio offering.

🐉 Long/Short HK & China Equities
The world’s most misunderstood market, traded on what price does, not what Beijing says.

🛢 Long/Short Commodities
Scarcity pays, gluts punish, but momentum decides the timing.

💱 Long/Short Currencies
Every currency is a promise. The chart shows which ones are being broken first.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-butler-has-set-the-table-three

X Money has arrived, and it is not a payments app pretending to be a bank — it is a bank pretending to be an app. The offer: 6% APY on savings, 3% cash back on a rewards card, faster pay check deposits than the incumbents, free peer-to-peer transfers, and eventual crypto plumbing. Banking infrastructure comes from Cross River, FDIC-insured and fintech-friendly, with full KYC and tax reporting, so the regulators are satisfied. Rollout is quiet — premium members first, no advertising, just in-app education. Consider what 6% does to a deposit base currently paying depositors rather less while 5-year Treasuries yield 5.03%. Every dollar that migrates is a dollar of cheap funding leaving a regional bank's balance sheet at precisely the moment its bond portfolio is underwater.

https://yourmileagemayvary.com/2026/09/29/what-is-x-money/

Behind the announcement there are two readings: a new form of money, or a new layer of the financial control grid. They are not mutually exclusive — one platform holding your speech, your payments and your savings is convenient in exactly the way that should worry you.

🤵 The Macro Butler’s Monthly Meditation 🤵

🌐 From shaman's hut to shareholder's register — it's shroom time for gloom. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butlers-monthly-meditation-28e

Core PCE came in at 3.0% year-on-year against 3.3% expected, and 0.2% on the month — a splendid miss, achieved largely by spreadsheet. The BEA has retroactively revised its methodology back to Q1 2021, shaving roughly 18 basis points off the annual pace via three changes: portfolio management services switched to a quantity-based series, computer software to a new composite deflator, and legal services to a revised measure after the old CPI approach proved unreliable. Inflation did not fall; the ruler shortened. Headline PCE printed 0.3% monthly and 3.4% annually against 3.7% expected. Now the part nobody revised: personal spending surged 0.9% while income rose just 0.2%, the slowest since April 2022, and the savings rate collapsed to 4.1% from 4.6% — the lowest since November 2022. Americans are funding record spending out of a shrinking cushion.

US inflation did not slow— the government propaganda changed the deflator, and the savings rate quietly paid the difference.

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler IG Portfolio as of end of September 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-ig-portfolio-september-cd0

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Strategic Portfolio as of end of September 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-strategic-portfolio-cdf

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Long/Short Portfolio as of end of September 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-longshort-portfolio-6c7

The Fed's Inspector General has examined the renovation of the Eccles Building and found no criminal violation and no administrative misconduct — merely everything else. The budget rose from $1.3 billion in 2020 to $2.4 billion, an 80% overrun. The Board ignored earlier recommendations to set a cost ceiling, never requested construction cost estimates, and four years in — after contracts were awarded — had still not established a guaranteed maximum price. Some work went out with insufficient bidding. Governance was, in the IG's assessment, inadequate for a project of this scale. Savour the irony: the institution charged with managing the price level of the world's reserve currency could not manage the price of its own building, and the explanation offered includes "inflationary pressures." Powell's June 2025 testimony denied the VIP dining room, the new marble, the beehives and the roof terrace gardens; the IG says those items didn't materially drive costs, which is a narrower vindication than it sounds.

Minutes after the Fed's own inspector general cleared the Eccles renovation of criminality - and of administrative misconduct – Donald Copperfield made clear he is not treating the Horowitz report as the last word. The FED cannot forecast inflation, and now we know it cannot budget for it either — in its own lobby.

The Ministry of Fiscal Responsibility has an accounting note it would rather you not read alongside its demands for higher taxes: the government's own watchdog, the GAO, estimates that Washington loses between $233 billion and $521 billion every single year to outright fraud — not waste, not bloat, not interest on the debt, but theft — which at the upper end is $1.4 billion a day, or roughly 10% of an entire year's federal revenue simply vanishing into criminal pockets. The range is a quarter-trillion dollars wide because the government cannot even determine how much it is being robbed, a confession that in any private company would see the board defenestrated before lunch; in Washington, they simply raise the debt ceiling.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/nine-ways-congress-can-combat-fraud-federal-government

Before Washington demands another dollar in tax to service $40 trillion in debt, perhaps it should first explain where the last half-trillion went — because a government that cannot say whether it was robbed of $233 billion or $521 billion has not earned the right to audit your wallet.