In AI jobs shock 1.0 (China into the WTO), US manufacturing employment fell 30% & basically never came back👇 Markets are still sure AI 2.0 won't do this to white collar Almost every price on our screens is wrong if AI 2.0 is only 1/5 as disruptive to white collar as AI 1.0 was

Microsoft laying off 27% of employees

We’re on a cusp of a generational run. I don’t make the rules, I just play the game.

The "slop" is evolving. This is my favorite music video so far. Grok + Suno + Runway

$234M of outside money is pushing Ken Paxton, more than any candidate in America this year. A third of it is one man. A sixth of it is from donors nobody is allowed to see.

An often overlooked aspect of the Dot Com Crash is that stocks not tied to the Internet and mobile buildout did quite well for a long stretch. From the end of 1999 to the end of 2001, the S&P 500 Equal Weight index not only didn’t fall, it was up 5%. $SPY $RSP

With the action this week, which Nomura's McElligott said resulted in a "traumatic risk-management unwind" that saw 124 pair trades stop out on the firm's Long/Short monitor including 47 greater than three standard deviations, 26 greater than four and 6 greater than five. As ZH notes "a 5-sigma move is supposed to happen roughly once every few thousand years in a normal distribution." McElligott: To me, a lot of this "Stop-Out / Capitulation" is about Crowding in what had been an unusual year of widespread "High Sharpe Winners" as the "Gifts That Kept Giving" in both -Carry and -Trend....but now, particularly with the abject "Performance Pain" now occuring late in the year during Q4... Traders are now simply forced or incentivized to "Survive Drawdowns" and avoid having their Capital culled ahead of the new year PNL turn...so it's "De-risking and Shut-It-Down" -mode even if some juicy looking trades are there. ZH: as McElligott shows, the "Reversing" flag is now lit up across nearly every asset class on Nomura's trend monitor: Treasuries across the curve, EUR rates, JGBs, SOFR futures, the S&P, the Nasdaq 100, copper, cocoa, sugar and half the G10 FX board. zerohedge.com/markets/glass-…

Copper: a 4th failed attempt at the 6.80 resistance. Speculative positioning hit a record and is now reversing. We expect a washout into deeper Q4, possibly a longer correction into Q1, inside a secular bull with new highs into 2027.

The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

Holy fucking shit

With the 3-2-1 crack spread falling off a cliff, refiners are extremely vulnerable to a rug pull.