To The Moon

News and my thoughts from last week (28Oct24)

• Should we treat this as a concern for Bank of America and the bigger banking sector after Berkshire dumps $10 Billion worth of shares? - DaiyHODL

• Credit ratings agency Moody's revised France's outlook to "negative" from "stable" on Friday, over mounting uncertainty that the country will be able to curb widening budget deficits, but maintained its rating on French debt at Aa2. - Reuters

• In the first nine months of this year, 60 non-standard products tied to LGFVs have defaulted or warned of repayment risks, up 20% from the same period last year, according to data compiled by Financial China Information & Technology. - Business Times

• AWS CEO on AI & Energy: "If you think about these generative AI models... estimates suggest that in two to three models' time, an individual model may require somewhere between one to 5GW of power, which is equivalent to powering a small to medium, or even a large city" - X user The Transcript

   

  Will energy beat the bottleneck in the future? Will they take from the poor?

• Cargo-ship owner to pay US $102 million over Baltimore bridge collapse, DOJ says - Reuters

   

  Do we have any estimates for business interruption insurance claims related to this accident?

• Chairman and CEO of Marathon Asset Management said a ‘no recession’ scenario unlocks new opportunities, including CRE and asset-based financing, for private credit. - WSJ

   

  Isn't this good news?

This is not Apple, Tesla or even Nvidia. This are interest payments on the US national debt of $36 trillion. We now pay nearly $1.2 trillion per year in interest on the debt, and about 23% of all taxes, tariffs and fees collected by the US govt goes to paying interest on the debt. -X user Wall Street Silver

• An outer dome was installed in a small modular Chinese nuclear reactor. The Changjiang ACP100 reactor - will be capable of producing 1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, enough to meet the needs of 526,000 households. - World Nuclear News

• The market swings from oversold to overbought. Once fear enters the market, the panic and volatility are not incremental. Sustained fear is crippling. The impact would be mental.

• Weaker-than-expected oil consumption in China and rising electric vehicle sales will continue to weigh on the world’s oil demand growth going forward. - Oil Price

• Spanish energy giant Repsol has decided to pause green hydrogen development projects in its home country - Oil Price

The trailing 12-month P/E ratio for $SPX of 27.4 is above the 5-year average (23.9) and above the 10-year average (21.8). - FactSet

Is the market overvalued?

From X user The Kobeissi Letter

For the first time since August 8th, the average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage is back above 7%. Since the Fed cut rates, mortgage rates have risen over 50 BASIS POINTS. Such extreme moves have rarely ever occurred during interest rate-cutting cycles.

The Fed has cut rates by 50 basis points and now the advantage interest rate for a 30-year mortgage is higher, above 7%. What is the market telling us? A surge in demand for homes?

You can't make this up: Total US debt has jumped by $473 BILLION over the last 3 weeks alone, to a record $35.8 trillion. This means the US has taken on $1,450 of debt for EVERY American over the last 3 weeks alone. It also means that the US now holds a record $103,700 of debt for every American. In 2024, the US paid a total of $1.16 trillion of interest on this debt in its first year above the $1 trillion mark. In interest alone, the US paid $3,360 for every American during fiscal year 2024. What is the long-term plan here?

Is there the will and intent to repay? Money printing is a way but could not be the only way. Fiscal responsibility is needed especially when USD is the global reserve currency.

All the young citizens need to band together to contain this. Spending money from the future and leaving a burden of debt is fiscal mismanagement. This is not a party issue. This is an American issue. There is still time to address this.

US net interest costs as a share of GDP are set to reach 6.3% by 2054, the highest on record. This will be more than DOUBLE the 3.1% projected for the Fiscal Year 2024. To put this into perspective, interest costs will nearly triple the government's average historical spending on R&D, infrastructure, and education COMBINED. Interest payments have reached $1.1 trillion over the last 12 months, exceeding defence spending for the first time. At the current pace, interest will soon be the largest expense in the Federal budget, surpassing Social Security. We are on an unsustainable fiscal path.

It is not far away but it can be worse too. According to Milton Friedman, it is the government that drives the inflation.

@TigerStars

$.SPX(.SPX)$

$SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust(SPY)$