🥇 Gold Prices Hit a Record $4,673 per Ounce

That's an 8.3% gain year-to-date.

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🌍 Wikipedia English-language articles with the most visits* in 2025 (in millions)

*The most visited through December 2nd

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🌍 1 Year Change in American Treasury Holdings

The BRICS are unloading their U.S. Treasury exposure.

Everyone else is adding to it...

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🇺🇸 Lower-income households face higher inflation...

Inflation continues to hit the lowest incomes hardest as essentials & necessities see the biggest price increases.

That means an already regressive tax has been even more regressive in practice for the bottom 40% of earners.

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🌍 The G20 Growth Outlook for 2026 – Projected Annual Real GDP Growth Rate

Exceeding the world average of 3.1% will be India (+6.2%), Indonesia (+4.9%), China (+4.2%), Argentina (+4%), and Saudi Arabia (+4%).

The United States of America (+2.1%), Australia (2.1%), Brazil (+1.9%), and South Korea (+1.8%) will lead the developed world.

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🇺🇸 The 16-Week Stress Window

These are the key dates where bank reserve stress could materialize, starting with the 29th since we seem to have made it through quarterly taxes:

🛑 January 29th - FOMC Meeting
The core risk here would be Powell changing the Fed's guidance to a more hawkish disposition, though the risk level is relatively low all the same.

🛑 February 15th - Refunding Announcement
This is the quarterly announcement of the sizes & types of bonds that will be issued by the Feds. The risk is that it could surprise the market and thereby produce a supply shock. A high volume announcement is likely to push yields upward.

🛑 March 15th - Debt Ceiling Deadline
This is the most risky period in Q1. Knowing Congress, it's unlikely they won't just expand the limit when push comes to shove, but we saw last autumn how far desperate parties are willing to push it with this political football. I, for one, think this government could use a good default.

🛑 March 31st - The End of Q1
The Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR) is a rule that requires large banks to hold a certain amount of capital against their total assets. At the end of a quarter, banks are often incentivized to bullshit their balance sheets for regulatory reporting. This means they can sometimes back out of short-term lending markets to appear less leveraged, and that can cause borrowing costs to spike around this date.

🛑 April 15th - Tax Day
This is the day when the Treasury General Account (TGA) sucks trillions of dollars out of the private economy (bank accounts) and into its stash. This too can stress short-term funding markets. This is almost certainly the riskiest period in the stress window.

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🇺🇸 Will there be a recession in America by the end of 2026? [Polymarket]

The prediction market chances of a recession for the USA in 2026 have dropped to 22%.

They were at 46% on Halloween.

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🇬🇧 Prime Minister Approval Ratings By Days in Office

Net approval ratings for May, Johnson, Sunak and Starmer.

It's actually remarkable how quickly Starmer has matched Macron's 11% approval from last autumn.

You get a uniquely evil government in London because the political system is so boxed in by the shadow government. It will be quite a surprise if Reform pursues any sort of real change.

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🇺🇸 The reason this 16-Week Stress Window is particularly perilous is the bank reserves are already run down from absorbing the massive pool of treasuries that's out there these days.

We are definitely at risk of liquidity hording. We're only $79 billion above the Lowest Comfortable Level of Reserves delineated on the chart.

Think September 2019...

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🪙 Bitcoin's Whales & Sharks Still Adding to Their Bags, While Retails Jump Out

🐋 Wallets with 10-10K $BTC: Accumulated +36,322 tokens in the past 9 days (+0.27%)

🦐 Wallets with under 0.01 $BTC: Dumped -132 tokens in the past 9 days (-0.28%)

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🇺🇸 Yesterday was the worst cross-asset decline across $SPX, $TLT (20+ Year Treasuries), $LQD (Corporate Investment Grade Bonds), $HYG (Corporate High Yield Bonds), and $IBIT (Bitcoin) since Liberation Day.

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🇺🇸 The Russell 2K opened +0.45% or so. So far it's holding.

If it closes positive today, the 2008 record for consecutive trading sessions in which $IWM beats the S&P 500 ($SPY) in percentage terms will be in play.

Today would be the 13th straight session, so we're going for an opportunity at the record tomorrow...

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🇨🇳 China's economy grew 4.5% in the fourth quarter of last year. (At least if you take their claims at face value 🧂.)

Indeed, China's growth trajectory has emerged from the pandemic on a more downward slope. The era of outlandish growth is likely over.

Can we stop pretending they aren't a developed nation yet?

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🇺🇸 The 10-Year Treasury Note Yield ($TNX) has broken free from the declining trend it was in for the past year.

It currently reads 4.26%, which is up 2.77% since the breakout this month. It's also now above the VWAP that it's been responding to, anchored to the October 2022 high.

Will it drift to the top of the triangle as the Fed stands pat?

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🇺🇸 Wow! I was going to point this out over the weekend but I decided to give it a day or two. Big mistake. Natural gas has had a huge first two days this week.

On Friday, it closed at $3.103/MMBtu. Yesterday, it was +25.91% to $3.907, and today it jumped another +28.95% to $5.038.

This is largely tied to the Arctic weather patterns sweeping North America, which on top being cold threaten "freeze-offs" of production and pipeline flows. It certainly helped that many people were caught short at the bottom when the forecast shifted.

Arctic air minus steady supply plus aggressive short sellers equals the largest two-day gain since 1990 for Henry Hub: 54%.

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🇺🇸 After a -6.8% reading in Q1, the S&P Energy Sector is expected to see positive earnings growth for the rest of the year.

In Q2, analysts expect +6.6%, undoing almost the entirety of Q1's contraction. Q3 is more modest at 1.4% growth, but in Q4 analysts anticipate a double digit expansion of 10.8%.

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🌎 The global bull market is officially as strong as 2021 was.

The 200-day moving averages of all of the countries are rising...

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🇺🇸 The evolution of the realized tariff rate from January to October of 2025...

The last recorded effective tariff rate was 10.9%, though it's constantly in flux given the nature of tariff use in this Administration.

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🇺🇸 America's effective tariff rate sits around 10.9%. However, if the Supreme Court tosses Trump's IEEPA tariff authority, it could drop to 5.7% quite suddenly.

That would undoubtedly not be the end of it...

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