🇺🇸 The U.S. Freeway System

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🇺🇸🇯🇵 Japanese debt rises in yield, causing the yen carry trade to unwind & exacerbating the decline in risk assets.

People traditionally borrow more cheaply in yen when it's weak & stable to trade in assets that are dollar- or otherwise denominated. When the yen stops being so weak, it forces selling within this trade.

Historically, a 10% rally in the yen tends to knock the S&P 500 down 2-3% and Bitcoin down 15%.

There's far more to what's going on, but this never helps...

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🇺🇸 Target ($TGT) is down 67% off its all-time high and still falling.

In what is a relatively common mistake, Target's evil leadership presumed the "New Normal" of 2021 was actually the new normal. Not unlike the automakers with lots full of unsold electric vehicles, they bet on a new political reality surviving long-term because their favorite globalists said so.

Alas, what they got instead was a (not) prompt (enough) return to the old normal in about a year. Except this version of the old normal includes balance sheets with a total economic shutdown on them and a money supply that had to be expanded by 25% to pay for all the sacrificed productivity.

The result was serious inflation and economic stagnation, and in turn, the consumer got picky. No longer did they feel like being ripped off by Target, and they were mostly spending on essentials, which are not the high-margin items Target prefers to sell. Their typical middle-class customer base is now much more concerned with high interest rates, low savings, and the resumption of student loan payments.

Target still hasn't given up on its cap ex expansion from the New Normal, and I haven't even mentioned the beating they've taken for their psychopathic and near-relentless support for homosexuality in children.

Do you understand why these multinational corporations hate competition and pursue concepts like corporate welfare and an imported slave class?

Because they're bad at their jobs. And if the last 30 years of American economic policy wasn't 100% oriented toward never again having a recession and bailing anyone and everyone out, then we wouldn't have so many failure companies sucking up resources suboptimally for eternity. Companies that were once high quality lose all of the talent that put them there, develop counterproductive administrations, and ruin their products and services. It's doubly bad when it goes political.

Target has two or three years to figure out how to cut prices & improve service or Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Dollar Tree are going to continue consuming Target's market share. Twenty-first century retail is a dog-eat-dog world.

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🌍 The World's Most Powerful Rivers

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🌍 The World's Greatest Meat Eaters (Per Capita)

5️⃣ 🇦🇷Argentina (113 kilograms)
3️⃣ 🇻🇨St. Vincent & the Grenadines (123 kilograms)
3️⃣ 🇺🇸United States of America (123 kilograms)
2️⃣ 🇲🇳Mongolia (132 kilograms)

👑 🇹🇴Tonga (148 kilograms)

Honorable Mention:
🇭🇰 Hong Kong (123kg, but not a country)

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🇺🇸 Target Rate Probabilities for the December 10th, 2025 Meeting of the Federal Reserve.

The market expects a quarter point cut in 2.5 weeks.

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🇺🇸 MTG surged to 5% in the biggest prediction market for the 2028 Republican Presidential Nomination.

That's third most likely, after JD Vance (55%) and Marco Rubio 🤮(8%)...

🇺🇸 INTELRUNNER 🇺🇸

🇺🇸 We just had the worst five day period for market breadth in the last two years.

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🇺🇸 Initial claims are alright.

Continuing claims, not so hot: a new high.

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🌍 Weighted Average Import Tariffs Around the World

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🇮🇳 The American dollar traded for 8 Indian rupees in 1980. Today, it fetches 89 rupees...

They were really mouthy with Trump (admittedly foolish strategy on his part, but they were obnoxious about it), but now their exports & foreign investment are down.

Obviously the Reserve Bank of India was resolved to some depreciation given the disparity in policy rates & inflation. It may be a strategy toward relieving some of the tariff pressure on exporters, but since September, they've been trying and failing to arrest the fall.

Renewed strength in the dollar over the past two months has not helped.

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🇯🇵🇨🇳🇬🇧 Japanese & Chinese shares in total U.S. treasuries are falling; the British share is rising.

I see this as a fantastic development. Now we can default as a repayment for LIBOR...

The Caribbean islands hold a lot too and you know those don't all belong to them. Strong odds those are European holdings as well.

🇺🇸 INTELRUNNER 🇺🇸

🟠 Bitcoin Entity-Adjusted Realized Loss (30d Moving Average)

This shows confidence in the trend has evaporated, as the spike well exceeds the prior few in the run-up.

In fact, it's mirroring the spike in Q1 of 2022, when there was a two-month, 40% recovery full of chop before much deeper realized losses...maybe it's not even quite there yet.

Not financial advice, never financial advice.

📈 INTELRUNNER 📈

🇫🇮 🇦🇫 The Scandinavians are as satisfied with their lives as always, led by Finland. Afghanistan comes in at "least satisfied" this time.

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🇺🇸 Job Openings vs. the S&P 500

Another K-shaped recovery since the launch of ChatGPT...

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🌍 Copper is up 27% this year.

I had been noting bullishness in copper in early July, and price delivered on that trade rather promptly. Then came Trump's 50% tariff on semi-finished copper goods (excluding refined cathodes).

As an unusually large arbitrage deflated, we saw a record-setting one-day collapse of 21%. Front-loaded imports amplified the sell-off. But now copper is up 20.5% from that July 31st low...

Some of it is mean reversion from the mid-summer puke, but there are fundamentals in play as well. The demand for copper continues to grow as data centers boom & states pursue electrification at all costs. Bank of America expects global demand to expand by about 10% in the next five years.

However, the supply continues to constrain, with labor strikes in Peru, permitting delays, and general underinvestment in green-field projects in places like the DRC and Chile have pushed 2025 output back roughly 2%. Simply put, physical offtake is outstripping mining flows, pushing the market toward a deficit.

That said, technically speaking, I don't love it*. It seems momentum is a little lackluster, and with all of these recessionary signals hanging over it, the continuation of Dr. Copper's resuscitation may not be in the cards...

Related: Copper Price 1850-2025

* Not financial advice.

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🌍 The UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index

Real estate bubble risk scores are calculated using a range of indicators, including price-to-income ratios, price-to-rent ratios, and trends in mortgage lending & construction activity.

Each city is classified into one of three categories based on the risk score assigned: fairly valued (-0.5–0.5), overvalued (0.5–1.5), or bubble risk (>1.5).

Miami came in first with a score of 1.73 (good, they have it coming). In second with a score of 1.5, both Zurich & Tokyo.

The largest year-over-year declines in housing prices and thus bubble risk occurred in Hong Kong & Toronto. Real house prices rose the most in Madrid (+13.6%) and Dubai (+11.1%).

🗺 INTELRUNNER 🗺

🇷🇺 🇺🇦 What does Russia's progress in Ukraine look like? Let's take an eagle-eyed view:

The Lugansk Narodnaya Republic is almost wholly taken; it is 99.77% controlled. And 78.86% of the Donetsk Folk Republic is conquered. These are two provinces that first abandoned Kiev and that make up the LDNR that Kiev has been fighting since 2014. That final fifth of Donetsk is what Ukraine is clinging to for dear life.

77.34% of the Zaporizhzhia oblast is now occupied by Russia, as well as 72.57% of the Kherson oblast in the south. Of these four provinces, which are the same four in question during all discussions of territorial concessions, Russia has now liberated 81.96% of the total land area (as of November 28th).

Russia also holds 3.92% of the Kharkiv oblast, 1.16% of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast, and 0.84% of the Sumy oblast. These extra possessions may hint at Ukraine's future should they elect to bet on the war-rabid & impotent Europeans instead of a peace deal...

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