🇺🇸 Payroll growth has sharply decreased since May (monthly change in thousands)…

🔺️ CHART WATCH 🔺️

🌎 Bitcoin is at a critical point in its price action. It’s re-testing the December-January resistance.

Is 108.5-109.5 now support? Or are we in for a spill? Either way, something significant is likely to occur.

In fact, there’s a number of assets with volatility that seems eerily low.

😰 CHART WATCH 😰

🇧🇷 Lula’s approval-disapproval has gone negative this August. The conflict with Trump over Bolsonaro’s prosecution and as a result trade temporarily buoyed Lula’s numbers, but that has since transitioned to a new low.

The same (first-rate) polling conducted research into potential outcomes in the 2026 presidential elections:

The survey found that Lula is behind the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, former minister of the Bolsonaro government, with 48.4% to 46.6% in a hypothetical second round.

The survey showed him tied at 48.3% with Bolsonaro, who is prevented from running. He is ahead of former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who is among the family members considered potential alternatives to the former president, with 48.8% to 47.9%.

✅ CHART WATCH ❌

🇺🇸 The PCE Chain Price Index:

The PCE Chain Price Index increased 0.2% (2.6% y/y) after rising an unrevised 0.3% in June and an unrevised 0.2% in May. The y/y gain steadied at 2.6%.

📈 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇸 Grok 4 Heavy continues winning the artificial intelligence tests. This one is Humanity’s Last Exam, a more advanced, expert-tier product developed by the Center for AI Safety & Scale AI when LLMs starting doing too well on their MMLUs:

“HLE aims to push the boundaries by featuring questions at the “frontier of human knowledge”—crowdsourced from nearly 1,000 subject-matter experts (mostly professors, researchers, and graduate degree holders) affiliated with over 500 institutions in 50 countries.”

“It consists of approximately 2,500 to 3,000 publicly released questions (with a private held-out set to prevent overfitting and data contamination) across over 100 subjects, including mathematics (about 41% of questions), physics, biology/medicine, humanities/social sciences, computer science/AI, engineering, chemistry, and more. Roughly 14% of questions are multi-modal.”

🎨 CHART WATCH 🎨

🇺🇸 Trump’s approval-disapproval index has fallen to -8.

He still has strong approval from a third of the country, but it seems capped there, likely by the trifecta that continues to bedevil him: Gaza, Ukraine, and the Epstein Cover-Up.

✅ CHART WATCH ❌

🇯🇵 🇩🇪 Government debt (lhs, % of GDP), serving costs thereof (rhs, %), and the rate of inflation (rhs, %) in two of the world’s most prominent developed economies, Japan & Germany.

You don’t have to grow to maintain a welfare state, but you may have to depreciate your currency.

📉 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇸🇨🇳 Don’t look now, but Alibaba Group is outperforming Nvidia Corp.

Most of $BABA’s outperformance was in Q1, and while $NVDA caught up in Q2, never completely. On Friday, $BABA gained 16.8% on $NVDA—will Q3 be like Q1?

📈 CHART WATCH 📉

🇩🇪 The German statistics office has made dramatic revisions to the GDP data. The updates revealed Germany had experienced a recession after all.

I, for one, thought the oscillation back & forth between positive & negative was slightly odd, but these are some monster changes.

📉 CHART WATCH 📉

🇺🇸 This is the nonfinancial market capitalization divided by the nonfinancial corporate gross-value added including estimated foreign revenues…

It’s basically the Buffett Indicator with some clever adjustments by Hussman Strategic Advisors.

It’s indicating the market is seriously overvalued. The levels reached in August are rivaled only by 1929; the Dotcom Crash & the Great Financial Crisis have been dwarfed by this modern Everything Bubble.

⚠️ CHART WATCH ⚠️

🇺🇸 The S&P Metals & Mining ETF has cleared the first major historical resistance from the 2011 high.

All that remains is the 2008 all-time high. $XME is up 75.5% since Liberation Day.

📈 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇸 On the other hand, the SPDR Technology Sector ETF is putting in what looks like an almost completed head & shoulders formation.

Simultaneously, the RSI has been in decline since the start of July. I would guess $XLK sees $242 sooner than later…

📉 CHART WATCH 📉

🌍 This is the global frequency for major hurricanes (lower line) and all hurricanes (upper line) going back to 1980.

Remember this next time they tell you “hurricanes are definitely increasing in strength & frequency,” because they aren’t.

Adapted from Maue (2011) GRL.

🌀 CHART WATCH 🌀

🇨🇳🇺🇸🇦🇺 The Top 10 Rare Earth Miners & Refiners by Market Capitalization

China has a competitive advantage in economy of scale: their mining & refining is often integrated with state subsidy undergirding the success of the operations.

There will likely be mergers in Western countries to enhance production, and failing that, look for Western governments to get involved…

📊 CHART WATCH 📊

🇪🇺 European Perception of Leaders' Respect for Democracy

Europeans were asked: to what extent do you consider these leaders to respect democratic principles?

Note: Two of these men were re-elected last year. The other has not faced election since 2019, in direct contravention of his nation’s constitution, and rules by fiat to this day (including recently ordering the neutering of their national anti-corruption institutions).

🇷🇺 CHART WATCH 🦅

🇺🇸 Goldman Sachs puts the AI adoption rate at 9.2% of economy wide. However, Stephen Byrd of Morgan Stanley reports that it may take significantly longer to see the dividends of the new technology:

"AI impacts may take longer to appear in economic data," with the first real signs not expected until "later this decade and into the next."

🎨 CHART WATCH 🎨

🇲🇽 🇺🇸🇨🇴🇨🇳 China is Mexico’s fastest growing immigration group. Americans still lead overall, followed by Colombians. Cuba lands 4th.

📈 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇳 NATO Defense Spending As A Percent of GDP

Poland and the Baltic states lead the way. Together with Norway, America, and Denmark, they make up the top seven above 3% of GDP (Poland is up to 4.5%).

Half of the countries are only meeting the original 2%, and eight of those just reached compliance with the old standard this year.

📊 CHART WATCH 📊