What is happening in South Korea increasingly resembles a more extreme version of something already visible in India: foreign capital exits while domestic money keeps the market levitating.

Former Indonesian Deputy Labor Minister Emmanuel Ebenezer Gerungan, facing 5 years in prison for stealing $170K, says his biggest regret is stealing too little. After discovering that one of his former colleagues allegedly stole 25x more and received only a 6-year sentence, he apparently realized corruption has economies of scale.

S&P 500 at extreme valuations: • Price/Sales: 3.5x (all-time high, above 2000 peak) • Price/Book: 5.5x (record) • Forward P/E: 26x (dotcom bubble levels) • Dividend yield: ~1% (record low) AI concentration driving the rally 👀

Nearly two-thirds of global stablecoin payment volume now comes from Asia, led by Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. The center of financial experimentation is shifting east. While the West debates regulation and capital controls, Asia is building the settlement layer of the next monetary system.

The next battle over capital will happen between private savings and states searching for financing. Europe, East Asia and the Middle East accumulated enormous surpluses over decades while the United States absorbed them through deficits, debt issuance and asset markets. That system kept yields low, inflated financial assets and created the illusion that global liquidity would remain endless. Now the same surplus regions are moving into an era of rearmament, energy insecurity, geopolitical fragmentation and rising fiscal pressure at the same time welfare systems are already consuming historic shares of national income. This changes the political logic around savings completely. Governments facing military expansion and weak growth cannot easily solve the problem through taxation because voters revolt quickly against visible sacrifice. They cannot fully rely on central banks either because inflation already damaged trust in currencies and purchasing power. The remaining option lies in domestic balance sheets. History shows very clearly what states do once financing needs collide with political limits: they start guiding, trapping and absorbing private savings while avoiding the language of confiscation. Britain during the WWII offers the clearest example. Savings collapsed, debt exploded and yet rates remained artificially suppressed because the state imposed capital controls, restricted consumption, forced domestic financing and redirected private savings into government needs. The market signal itself became politically unacceptable. Once survival and strategic priorities dominate policy, free capital markets quickly lose importance. That pattern matters now because modern democracies already prepare the language needed for a softer version of the same process. Citizens hear constant appeals to resilience, strategic autonomy, national preparedness and fair burden sharing. Behind those words sits a simple fiscal reality: states need access to savings pools far larger than current tax revenues can provide. Financial repression works precisely because most people fail to recognize it while it develops. Nobody needs soldiers knocking on doors. Pension funds increase sovereign bond exposure. Banks face regulations favoring government debt. Inflation stays above deposit yields for years. Capital movement becomes harder through reporting rules and compliance burdens. Offshore diversification starts attracting political suspicion. The saver still sees assets on paper while the state slowly gains influence over how those assets behave, where they remain and what purpose they ultimately serve. The deeper danger lies in the psychological shift accompanying this process. In periods of geopolitical tension, mobility itself starts looking suspicious. Investors diversifying abroad appear insufficiently loyal. Citizens protecting wealth internationally begin looking detached from collective sacrifice. The state no longer views private savings purely as personal property resting outside politics, but increasingly as dormant national capacity available in times of pressure. That is why the real risk for investors over the coming decade may not come from market crashes alone, but from the narrowing distance between nominal ownership and actual control. Wealth matters far less once governments decide that domestic capital must serve national objectives before private ones.

The expected capex growth of hyperscalers from 2025 to 2028 is c. 29% per year. Never in the history of the US has tech investment growth exceeded 21% on a rolling three-year basis.

What’s going wrong in Germany? Guess…

The market has become a one-sector casino. If you are not building AI chips, renting out data centers or selling the fantasy of infinite automation, Wall Street treats you like a dying business. Meanwhile some of the strongest cash-flow machines in the real economy are trading like unwanted leftovers because investors became addicted to hype instead of valuation. Look at the absurdity. Danaher is getting punished because biotech growth slowed after years of excess optimism, even though the company sits at the center of diagnostics, lab equipment and healthcare infrastructure the modern medical system cannot function without. Zoetis collapsed because pet spending cooled after the pandemic boom, as if people suddenly stopped caring about animal healthcare permanently. The stock market always extrapolates temporary trends into eternity - on the way up and on the way down. McDonald’s is being hit because lower-income consumers are getting crushed by inflation and fuel prices. But that says less about the strength of McDonald’s business than about the condition of the economy itself. When even fast food starts reflecting consumer exhaustion, the problem is purchasing power destruction, not burgers. Yet the company still controls one of the most powerful franchise and real-estate systems ever created. Then there is Abbott Laboratories - a global healthcare giant selling diagnostics, cardiovascular products, nutrition and medical devices, suddenly treated like a broken company because of temporary weakness in infant formula and acquisition fears. Or Republic Services, which owns scarce landfill infrastructure with recurring revenue and near-irreplaceable assets. Nobody gets excited about garbage collection during a tech mania, even though civilization literally stops functioning without it. This is how late-stage bull markets always behave. Investors stop pricing businesses and start pricing narratives. In 1999 everything outside dot-coms looked obsolete. In 2007 old-economy cash flow was boring compared to leverage and housing speculation. Today capital behaves as if AI alone will replace the real economy, while healthcare infrastructure, waste management, food networks and defensive cash-flow businesses trade near recession multiples.

Manche Dinge ändern sich nicht.

Europe is the same as the S&P 493. Chart: Duncan Lamont

A guy slipped a prompt injection into his LinkedIn bio, and now recruiters address him as “Lord” and write to him in Old English. Peak AI-era absurdity: HR departments feeding resumes straight into LLM pipelines without even realizing candidates have started optimizing for the machine reading before the human ever does.

India looks like a good buying opportunity now.

Some thoughts of caution on bottom-fishing in bombed-out names like Nike and Adobe: - You might need to be patient. Very patient. - You need a plan beyond buying what's gone down in price. What's the company worth? Maybe it's down for good reason. - Unless you get extremely lucky you're never going to time the bottom perfectly. Plan accordingly. - Being a contrarian investor can be lonely because other investors love piling on the worst names and telling you why it's dead money. - Not all individual stocks come back. In fact, most stocks aren't great over the long run. - Trends can last much longer in both directions than most investors assume possible. Jeff Bezos once said, "Contrarians are usually wrong." That's not a bad baseline.

On small caps:

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S Q1 STOCK DISCLOSURE COVERS 3,800+ TRANSACTIONS. THE LARGEST: $5M-$25M SALES EACH OF META, AMAZON, AND MICROSOFT ON 2/10. The OGE 278-T was filed May 8 and certified by the Office of Government Ethics on May 13. The largest disclosed sales ($5M-$25M each): - Meta Platforms $META (2/10/2026) - Amazon $AMZN (2/10/2026) - Microsoft $MSFT (2/10/2026) - Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (1/12/2026) Additional $1M-$5M sales: - Netflix $NFLX (2/10/2026) - Palantir $PLTR (2/10/2026) - Vanguard S&P 500 ETF $VOO (1/6/2026 and 3/19/2026) - iShares Core S&P 500 ETF $IVV (1/23/2026) - State Street SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF $SPY (1/29/2026) The largest disclosed purchases ($1M-$5M each, 15+ names): - NVIDIA $NVDA (2/10/2026) - Apple $AAPL (3/2/2026) - Oracle $ORCL (3/17/2026) - Broadcom $AVGO (2/10/2026) - Adobe $ADBE (2/10/2026) - ServiceNow $NOW (2/10/2026) - Workday $WDAY (2/10/2026) - Synopsys $SNPS (2/10/2026) - Cadence Design $CDNS (3/17/2026) - Microsoft $MSFT (3/19/2026, after the 2/10 sale) - Amazon $AMZN (3/19/2026, after the 2/10 sale) - Vanguard S&P 500 ETF $VOO (multiple) - iShares Russell 1000 ETF (3/27/2026) Important context per the OGE form itself: - The 278-T discloses transactions over $1,000 made by the filer, spouse, or dependent child - Many entries are flagged "Discretion Exercised" or "Your Broker Acted As Agent," indicating a managed brokerage account placed the trades - Some are "Unsolicited" (filer initiated) and others "Solicited" (broker recommended) - All amounts are disclosed in ranges, not exact figures - The reporting period covers January through March 2026

no comment.

Historically, whenever credit growth starts shifting from traditional banks toward shadow lenders, from the US before 2008 to China’s shadow-banking boom, it initially looks like economic strength, but often signals that risk is quietly migrating outside the safest part of the system. India’s banks slowing to 11% growth while NBFCs surge above 20% suggests the same pattern: formal banks are becoming more cautious while higher-risk credit creation moves into the shadows. That can fuel growth and asset prices for years, until liquidity tightens and the weaker parts of the credit chain are tested. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/indian-banks-navigating-through-the-turbulence

Rate hikes are absolutely not priced into the stock market and that will be the shock that pushes overvalued growth stocks down by 20% or more.

Germany once sold the world cars. Now it is preparing to survive by selling war. A struggling Volkswagen plant in Osnabrück, built for civilian industry, jobs, mobility and exports, may soon be repurposed to produce components for the Israeli “Iron Dome” missile defense system together with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Think about the symbolism: Europe’s industrial heartland no longer sees enough future in middle-class consumers buying German cars, but suddenly discovers “growth” again when missiles, air defense systems and military contracts enter the equation. History shows that when civilian industry loses profitability, governments increasingly turn toward militarization to absorb industrial overcapacity, preserve employment and justify massive public spending. Tanks replace sedans. Missile systems replace family cars. And citizens should ask themselves one question: if war preparation becomes one of the few remaining profitable industries capable of keeping Germany’s industrial machine alive, what incentive does the political system have to pursue de-escalation? The danger is that once an economy becomes dependent on fear, conflict, and defense spending, peace itself starts looking economically inconvenient.