🇺🇸 How those 2028 Polymarket odds have moved since mid-summer.

🇺🇸 CHART WATCH 🇺🇸

🇺🇸 Global Gold Reserves: the United States of America vs. the World

After the beginning of the end kicked off in 2008, many central banks (particularly in developing & emerging economies) began buying gold hand over fist, correctly anticipating devaluation in the Dollar & all other fiat currencies operating within its system.

The average total purchase from 2011-2021 was around 118 tons/year. In the year or so after the Russo-Ukrainian War began, they averaged 291 tons/year. Here in the second half of 2025, buying is picking up again (as is inflation) after a period of subdued buying (waiting to see if Trump would blow up the world economy & create a significant discount).

While Asia has added tons of gold to its reserves in the last decade & a half, the developed world has largely resisted this trend. Most Western central bankers either stood pat like the U.S. or sold off all of their gold like the U.K. Now during the Trump Administration, it appears America is embracing cryptocurrency.

The Administration has discussed revaluation of gold as one solvency strategy. With Asia’s buying spree & the U.S. share in gold reserves falling to 20% (from 53% in 1957), will D.C. decide to take up gold purchases? Or is it stablecoin hegemony & U.S. military dominance all the way?

🪙 CHART WATCH 🤑

The Debtors & Creditors of Europe (from largest to smallest):

Creditors: 🇩🇪🇱🇺🇳🇱

Debtors: 🇮🇹🇪🇸🇪🇺🇫🇷🇬🇷🇵🇹

See the problem?

France was a creditor nation briefly after the pandemic began but that soon reversed. Greece, Portugal, and the Netherlands are essentially neutral. Germany is loaning all the money, but their economy is seriously stagnating.

📈 CHART WATCH 📉

🇺🇸 Tesla is up 31.57% in the five weeks since I posted that developing triangle breakout. Just saying…

I’m shooting more from the hip on this one. Call it a hunch*, but I bet $TSLA ends up back in that $355-365 zone.

*Just don’t call it financial advice.

🚚 CHART WATCH 🚚

🌎 Bitcoin’s Realized Profit/Loss Ratio

This cycle has seen three distinct multi-month surges. The Realized Profit/Loss Ratio shows that each time profit-taking exceeded 90% of coins moved, marking cyclical peaks. Having just stepped away from the third such extreme, probabilities favour a cooling phase ahead.

🪙 CHART WATCH 🪙

🌎 Percent Change in Real GDP between Q4 2019 and Q2 2025

⬆️ 🇮🇳 India by far followed by 🇹🇷 Turkey, Taiwan, and 🇨🇳 China.

⬇️ 🇩🇪 Germany barely grew. 🇿🇦 South Africa & the 🇨🇿 Czech Republic grew slower than 🇯🇵 Japan & the 🇬🇧 U.K.

🔺️ CHART WATCH 🔺️

🇺🇸 With GDP on fire, new tariffs flying, and inflation measures seemingly bottoming around 3% (on the heels of a resumption in the Fed’s cutting cycle), we should likely be wary of both a short-term correction in markets (Bitcoin leading again here) and, moreover, a second large inflationary impulse this decade.

It will be worthwhile to keep an eye on $BTC, gold, energy, and other commodities.

📈 CHART WATCH 📈

🇺🇸 Performance of the S&P 500 ($SPX) during and after government shutdowns.

It tends to not matter very much so long as the economy is humming along pretty well at the time.

The U.S. federal government will shut down all nonessential functions (very liberal usage of “essential” here) at 12:01am on Wednesday, October 1st if a spending package or a temporary provision is not enacted by Congress beforehand.

🌐 CHART WATCH 🌐

🌎 The World’s Fastest Shrinking Countries — the 4 most negative population growth rates for 2024:

4️⃣ MOLDOVA contracted -2.83%

3️⃣ MARSHALL ISLANDS fell -3.35%

2️⃣ SAINT MARTIN is down -5.17%

1️⃣ KOSOVO dropped by -9.69%

🔺️ CHART WATCH 🔺️

🌏 Asia’s Billion-Dollar Power Map

These are the Asian representatives in the global top 150 listed public companies…

The top Japanese company is Toyota Motor (#8 overall). In South Korea, it’s Samsung (#4) of course. The biggest in India is Reliance Industries (#14). Now for the top 3 listed Asian companies:

3️⃣ Tencent 🇨🇳
($0.74T, China [PROC])

2️⃣ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. 🇹🇼
($1.15T, Taiwan [ROC])

1️⃣ Saudi Aramco 🇸🇦
($1.61T, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia)

🌏 CHART WATCH 🌏

🇺🇸 In America, the younger you are, the more likely you are to believe in political violence. That’s only natural given the political circumstances.

I would imagine all of these numbers would be lower 10 years ago. The Silent Generation wouldn’t dream of it! And that’s the problem.

Swearing off political violence, ruling it out of bounds completely, means necessitating it at some future point. This is the sad reality of human nature.

📊 CHART WATCH 📊

🌎 Returns Leaderboard for the week ending on September 26th (in USD)…

🥇 🛢 Crude Oil +5.4%
🥇 🪙 Gold +2.9%
🥇 💍 Commodities +2.1%

🔽 🪙 Bitcoin -5.2%

📊 CHART WATCH 📊

🇪🇺 Euros are still about 20% of global reserves.

I guess no one’s taking them up on replacement reserve currency yet.

💶 CHART WATCH 💶

🇺🇸 A rather benign week in the indices. The Dow Jones was best coming in almost flat (-0.05%), while the Russell 2K brought up the rear (-0.75%), as it does…

📉 CHART WATCH 📉

🌎 Central banks are cutting like we’ve had a crisis. We’ve had 168 rate cuts over the past 12 months.

📈 CHART WATCH 📈

🌐 The United States has become an increasingly expensive place to live relative to the world.

The Big Mac Index measures the cost of a Big Mac in USD in economies across the world.

👎 CHART WATCH 👎

🇺🇸 The ratio of the VanEck Junior Gold Miners ETF ($GDXJ) to the VanEck Gold Miners ETF ($GDX) stands at 1.29, up from a low of 1.11 in July 2022 and up 9.8% since the start of September 2024.

However, it’s been as high as 2.78 in 2010. Is this a catch-up play?* Hard to think so given $GDXJ has run further, but maybe it has further to run.

*Not even remotely financial advice.*

📈 CHART WATCH 📈