Does Erika Kirk know where a tear duct is?

🇺🇸 Central banks re-accelerated their gold purchases every time price fell a bit. They've been at it for some time now. This is a preparation for the financial system to come. As I noted in September, the gold representation in the asset mix of Americans (and several other key populations) is woefully low. Now, finally, we're seeing broad interest in the concept of debasement in Google searches in the United States of America. Consciousness about the loss of purchasing power for the Dollar, the Euro, and virtually every other fiat currency in concert is permeating the Wall of Sleep. [Originally published to INTELRUNNER on Telegram on October 14th]

The AI Bubble Blows Astronomically Well, if you were wondering where we were in the AI "Dotcom Redux" Bubble... Welcome to the "dATa CeNTeRs IN sPAcE" phase. We are here because we've reached the point where nothing but hype can push these stocks further. OpenAI is one big hype machine, but they all do it. (They're spending something like $2.60 per $1 of revenue now, and that's going in the wrong direction.) Hype, hype, hype. And what's the hype tied to? What's the construct on which these equities permanently pump? Data centers! More data centers. Infinite data centers, all subsidized by your power bills. But they take up a lot of space—increasing amounts of it, in fact. So what better way to solve this little obstacle than to fill space itself with big, solar-powered space computers?!? That should be cost effective, no? Jeff Bezos is in a unique position. Everyone knows he has tons of money, but Amazon is lagging in the AI race against OpenAI, xAI, Google, AliBaba, etc. and Blue Origin is lagging in the space (and moreover, federal contract) race against SpaceX. What better way to generate fanfare for all of the above than bunkum about Data Death Stars? He's not alone. Elon Musk is known for this sort of thing. Take Tesla's eternally imminent truly autonomous cars and the endless cascade of announcements to that effect. Or that time he said AI would excel humans by...this year. Dario Amodei has been projecting superhuman intelligence in 2-3 years for 2-3 years (not to mention 90% of all coding being done by AI by...this past September). Demis Hassabis of Google is not one to be outdone; he promised "curing all diseases, solving climate and energy issues, and ushering in “radical abundance," thereby reducing human selfishness & ending global conflict. Altman was doing hype cycle after hype cycle all the time before he & Huang figured out their little shares-for-chips shell game. Remember his crackpot manifestos? And his babbling about "superhuman reasoning" and "solving physics" for good? Only to have his fundraising machine upended by an open-source LLM like DeepSeek focused on efficiency & efficacy instead of grandiosity & the next sucker.  Sam's going to need still more money soon; look for his upcoming white paper on the intergalactic eradication of want & suffering by ChatGPT. They all have at least a little Elizabeth Holmes in them. Most of them have more than a little. That's a symptom of the financial circuitry of the system, but that's a story for another day. It's the audience that tells you what's driving the AI train at this point. The host seems a sensible individual, and you can see the bafflement in his visage both times they show it. But the crowd! Oh, the crowd. That they don't burst into laughter on the spot says a whole lot about where we are & where we're going. Hold on to your ass. [Originally published on Telegram on October 7th]

🇺🇸 Trump wants 600,000 children of wealthy CCP functionaries to be students at top institutions in order to bail out the broken, misaligned university system (that he was supposed to fix). MAGA apparatchiks rushed to his defense, citing silly post-pandemic, post-migration numbers about educational ability. Here's one example by way of utter clown Bill Mitchell: "Folks may want not want to hear that, but our education system has gotten so bad that we just don't have as much elite educated talent as we need, especially in technology. It's just a fact." In 2019, a study by Loyalka, Liu, Li, et al found that STEM student "seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia by 0.76-0.88 SDs and score comparably with seniors in elite institutions in these countries." You don't say? An update study focused on computer science & electrical engineering in 2021 conducted by a similar crew of authors concluded that there were "stark differences in skill levels and gains among countries and by institutional selectivity. Compared with the United States, students in China, India and Russia do not gain critical thinking skills over four years." It's a bunch of nonsense designed to exclude native Americans, and I won't countenance any other conclusion. It's Howard Lutnick's speciality: making America great again by replacing Americans. Hey, wait! Wasn't that also Biden's policy? 📊 INTELRUNNER 📊

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Intel & data mostly via charts in economics, markets, politics, war, business, trade, international relations, etc. Generally 🇺🇸 but I do ge...

🇬🇷🇨🇾🇵🇹 Greece & Cyprus have orchestrated an excellent display of fiscal responsibility in the years since their sovereign debt & banking crises respectively, and the dividends have really rolled in over the past five years. Portugal, on the other hand, has been consistently prudent since its 2011 debt crisis. The success reminds one of Ireland last decade. As a result, we've seen outstanding reductions in all 3 debt-to-GDP ratios. Greece has reduced by 56.1% over the period but still has some work to do with a total of 150.3% remaining. Cyprus has reduced by 43.5% to a very healthy 71.1%! And Portugal has reduced by 37.5% for a final ratio of 97.4%. All three turned their GDP growth exceptionally positive by 2021. There were enormous gains in 2021-2022, with readings between 5.7% & 8.4%. Portugal & Cyprus achieved primary account surpluses in 2021, Greece in 2022, and all three ever since—an encouraging pattern that will serve these nations well if they can maintain it. These three along with Denmark are fiscally some of the best situated in Europe. Meanwhile, many EU nations that weren't in dire straits a decade ago have fallen apart economically for various reasons...looking at you, France, Romania, Czechia, et cetera.

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Well, I predicted that this morning. Didn’t think we’d get there so soon. If they Jack “Ruby” Rubenstein him… (Yeah that’s his name—what mob did you think he ran with? Besides pedophiles like John David Norman. You see how far back this kid-fucker mafia goes? How did you think they get a guy to throw his life away shooting a patsy?) If they Rubenstein him, then we can feel pretty confident that a vigorous & vehement suspicion is the most appropriate course.

The Fed Chair race is on.

I’m, not an OBBB guy. Believe me. But this consternation over Medicaid is overblown. They’re trying to return to the pre-Biden trend line of Medicaid not now, but by 2030. So it’s still going to drive us bankrupt, but slower… It’s a bit dishonest to act like there are some draconian cuts in the law, so I imagine that’s what we’ll hear every day multiple times per day next year.

🇪🇺 The decline in the purchasing power of the Euro since 2001…. 📉 CHART WATCH 📉

This isn’t going away. Nor should it. It’s a microcosm of many much larger evils afflicting America all tied up into one. For that reason, it’s an opportunity for massive positive reform. Not just for the sake of justice, but also for the sake of the nation & its future inhabitants. For the sake of a sound foreign policy and to improve the probability of decent, honest representation. We let them squash it at our peril.