Can We Grow Out of This? Imagine you’re in charge of America’s money. Now What? You just became U.S. Treasury Secretary. The Fed isn’t lowering rates for you. The government spends more than it collects, debt keeps growing, and borrowing is expensive. Your job: make the math work. So, what do you do? Raise taxes? Cut spending? Change how the government borrows? Hope inflation cools? Or simply wait …? There are plenty of levers to pull. But underneath almost all of them sits one surprisingly simple piece of math. So, let’s see .⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by Brownstone* Trump Takes on Foreign...

A Very Good Monday… Well, That Was An Interesting Monday. AI spent the weekend talking about the dangers of AI. By Monday morning, Wall Street had apparently picked a side. → CrowdStrike jumped 15%. → Palo Alto Networks gained 11%. → Okta climbed nearly 10%. Meanwhile, → Nvidia fell 3%, while → SanDisk dropped 5% in premarket trading. The catalyst came over the weekend, when the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI separately raised concerns about AI development moving faster than the safeguards around it. That produced a rather unusual market reaction. Investors sold some of the companies helping...

Gold vs. 5%… Gold has had quite the run. The metal is hovering around $4,400 an ounce, while the 10-year Treasury yield came within a whisker of 5% this week. Put those two numbers next to each other and things get interesting. Historically, higher yields have tended to make life harder for gold. Not every time, and certainly not in a straight line — but the relationship has been one of the more useful ways to understand the metal. Right now? Gold doesn’t seem particularly bothered. So we went looking for what else might be keeping it up. The trail leads from interest rates… to central...

A Small Win From Inflation? ✱ This is an explainer, not a recommendation — here’s the mechanism, the math, and the real tradeoffs… Hot inflation doesn’t leave many winners. Prices rise, purchasing power shrinks, and suddenly the same grocery cart costs a little more. But there is one rather unusual exception. I Bonds. These U.S. government savings bonds are built to move with inflation — which makes this week’s 3.4% CPI reading particularly interesting. While most savers would prefer inflation to head in the opposite direction, higher inflation can eventually mean a higher rate on...

Four Years Later… Elon Musk has Tesla. SpaceX. xAI. And then there’s The Boring Company. The less-famous member of the Musk collection has spent the past few years digging tunnels beneath Las Vegas. This week, it made considerably more noise above ground. The company raised $3 billion in a new Series D, giving it a $23 billion valuation— roughly four times what it was worth in 2022. Let’s see what $23 billion is betting on.⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by DealMaker* The Brains Behind Colombia’s Iconic Coffee Two entrepreneurs from Wall Street came to Colombia, and discovered a coffee sector...

Pretty, Pretty Bullish… A new $220 price target is bullish. The five-year math gets considerably more ambitious. SpaceX got another vote of confidence from Wall Street this week. Pivotal Research slapped a $220 price target on the stock — roughly 50% above where shares had been trading. Pretty bullish. Then we stretched the timeline to 2031. That’s where the numbers start to spread out — a lot. Depending on how fast SpaceX grows — and what investors are willing to pay for that growth — the five-year picture can look remarkably different. So, we ran the numbers. ⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented...

The Most Expensive 1%. SpaceX has spent the past month doing very little. Shares have bounced between $133 and $150, with no major catalyst pushing them decisively in either direction. But on September 21, that could change. JPMorgan thinks SpaceX could suddenly find itself on the receiving end of roughly $15.5 billion in buying. And the reason has surprisingly little to do with the company’s business at all. It starts with 1%… and $15.5 billion in passive buying. So, let’s see where all that money is coming from. ⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by BanyanHill* What’s Inside Elon Musk’s...

The Most Expensive 1%. SpaceX has spent the past month doing very little. Shares have bounced between $133 and $150, with no major catalyst pushing them decisively in either direction. But on September 21, that could change. JPMorgan thinks SpaceX could suddenly find itself on the receiving end of roughly $15.5 billion in buying. And the reason has surprisingly little to do with the company’s business at all. It starts with 1%… and $15.5 billion in passive buying. So, let’s see where all that money is coming from. ⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by BanyanHill* What’s Inside Elon Musk’s...

A Rate-Cut Catch-22. Friday morning gave the Fed another reason not to cut rates. The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, nearly three times what economists expected, unemployment held at 4.1%, and traders quickly pushed the odds of another rate hike higher. Then, a few hours later, came a rather different idea for getting rates lower. A trade embargo. President Trump threatened to stop trading with countries where the U.S. runs a trade deficit if interest rates don’t come down — describing the move as potentially more powerful than tariffs. Which raises a pretty unusual economics question: Could...

This story starts at $4,373… Gold has had quite the run this year. But this week, it was the pullback that caught traders’ attention. After rallying from $4,048.70 in July to $4,755 in August, gold futures started giving some of it back. And apparently, half was enough. Gold fell to $4,369.70 before buyers stepped in. The level traders were watching? $4,373.30 — the 50% retracement of that July-to-August rally. Which got us wondering: Why does halfway matter so much to traders? Especially when gold has now turned there twice. So, we took a look.⇩ SPONSOR BREAK presented by DealMaker* An...

Out With The Old. Stanley Druckenmiller has never been particularly sentimental about stocks. His latest 13F is a pretty good reminder. The legendary investor spent Q2 reshuffling his portfolio — opening dozens of new positions, walking away from nearly two dozen others, and making some surprisingly big changes along the way. For someone who averaged roughly 30% a year over three decades without a losing year, it’s a lot of changing his mind in three months. And buried inside all that buying and selling is a pretty interesting picture of where Druckenmiller sees opportunity now. So, we went...