🇺🇸 Quarterly GDP Growth (Annualized) in America

We have good news and bad news. The bad news is people are still taking GDP seriously.

Now for the good news: gross domestic product came in higher than anticipated (4.3% rather than 3.3%).

🎉 Woohoo, more gross domestic product—oh boy. 🎉 Let's eat! 🎉

Now that we got that out of the way, it's a great time to tell Howard Lutnick: fuck no, that does not mean every American got a 4.3% raise. In fact, it's historically correlated with smaller & smaller pieces of the pie for the vast majority of society.

Lutnick is the example par excellence of the man who is offensively stupid or, alternatively, the man who thinks you're so stupid that his manipulations are offensive.

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🇺🇸 US Real GDP by Contribution

Let's take a closer look under the hood for the sake of Howard.

Exports are actually up—mostly pharmaceutical preparations. It isn't just movement in imports. In fact, the trade deficit is at 5-year low.

Obviously the government is blowing money into existence, as it does. Why we count that in a productivity measure will always be beyond me...

The rest, essentially, is personal consumption. That could just be the standard top decile blowing cash, but it can also be new credit card spending. It could be inflation chewing into savings.

But it's not a raise for all Americans, and you should be insulted Jeffrey Epstein's neighbor tried to pass that off on you...

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🇸🇴 In Somalia, we have the aspiring new nation of Somaliland.

No one has recognized it except for Israel, who I assume wants to export people there, among other nuisances.

That's a lot of turf for a random breakaway province though. It would be kind of impressive if it wasn't Somalia...

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🇺🇸 The Scale of U.S. Food Trade

Main food products exported and imported by America in 2024 (in billions of U.S. dollars)...

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🥈 Silver's had one hell of a week.

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🥇 Gold dropped about $200 overnight and through today, shedding about 4.75%.

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🛢 WTI Crude Oil saw one of the few green days today.

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🇺🇸 🇪🇺 In the European Union, a shift to value over growth materialized this year, while in America, the growth train can't be subjugated.

It really boils down to differences in the make-up of each economy. Europe has nothing like the Mag 7, and their regulatory noose strangles anything approaching an AI industry in the crib.

Therefore, their market is made up of more "old economy" firms in sectors like finance, energy (also benefiting from price spikes), industrials (where the EU hasn't eradicated them), or consumer staples—all classic sources of value plays.

And relative to the past few decades, interest rates have been up. This is a negative for growth spaces like tech, which are valued based on future cash flows that suffer a greater discount under higher rates.

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🥇 Tether isn't just stacking treasuries. It's piling up gold as well—faster than some central banks.

In Q3, it bought 26 tons of gold. That's 44% more than the next closest nation-state, Kazakhstan, which procured 18. Tether has also acquired substantial interests in gold royalties.

“Gold is nature’s bitcoin.”

~ Paolo Ardoino, Tether's CEO

Also, do note: this chart presumes China is telling the truth about their rapid hoarding of precious metals, and in particular, about their gold inflows. This is almost certainly not the case, and the estimates given are more likely understated.

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🥇 They bought 26 tons of gold last quarter. That brings Tether up to a grand total of 116 tons as the end of September.

They're converting their USDT transaction costs & the interest payments from their (now mandatory) U.S. treasury holdings into gold and royalty & streaming companies.

Tether is making shrewd moves.

They're also making themselves an eventual target for nationalization, but that's a topic for another day and probably another channel.

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💰 Bitcoin's Percentage of Supply in Loss

7 million BTC are beneath break even...

That's a third of the total supply underwater, which is a cycle high.

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💰 Bitcoin's Long-Term Holder Supply Change (30D Sum)

However, long-term $BTC holders (greater than 6 months) appear to easing off their distribution at these levels.

In fact, we recently had a net gain of 10,700 BTC. That's a humble sum, but it's a step in the right direction and an indication sell pressure is lightening up.

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🇺🇸 On July 8th, I noted the Solar ETF had broken out of a 2.5-year down trend.

Here on December 30th, $TAN is up 32% since July 8th. It's up 19.6% against the broader market ($SPY) over the same period.

It's also gained another 14% against $XLE since I identified that budding outperformance on August 18th.

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🇺🇸 Morning Consult's Consumer Sentiment Index just hit its highest level since June, reading just shy of 100.

This is the same range sentiment topped out at twice earlier this year and once in 2021.

Since the COVID drop in early 2020, we've yet to regain the sentiment levels of 2018-19, which peaked around 115 before plummeting to just above 80.

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🇺🇸 Some interesting prediction markets rolling out of late...

Another government shutdown for the end of January?

Yes please.

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🇺🇸 Here's the prediction market for a U.S. bank failure by January 31st.

Mostly it's been bouncing around between 5 and 15 percent for the past few weeks.

What's that spike to 74 percent a couple days ago though? Hm?

Who knows something?

Is this why not-QE QE has started up again?

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