What does a NEET do in his free time?

I think one of my favourite things to do now is write.

It adds clarity of thought to my stream of consciousness. It also allows me to match reality and ensure that my viewpoints are aligned correctly with what I see today.

Looking at the Hormuz crisis and how agri/oil would eventually trend up — this was proven correct despite jawboning and volatility in oil futures. Despite oil futures and contracts going down, Asia is surely feeling the pinch. The key is watching for the price FLOOR of energy inputs to go up, and agricultural commodities follows this as second order. The food trade is going to be epic for my portfolio but will eventually lead to terrible social consequences down the line.

I was of the belief that as energy inputs go up, equities and the circular funding in semis/AI would be broken -> Trump jawboning oil futures and the rapid recovery in everything + semis bounce to ATHs proved me wrong...

QQQ, KOSPI, TAIEX, SPY, SMH are all pulling some of the greatest face-melting rallies I have seen despite none of the issues being truly solved.

But being a bull rather than a rationalizing bear, you would have made some insane money on INTC/SK Hynix and other segments of the memory and semis trade... so congratulations!

I believe the top is in right when the big 3 (Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX) IPO, and that would probably coincide with everyone euphoric + physical reality setting in.

The real bull-case is: what if everything melts up? What if all this doomerism on stonks is wrong? What if stonks print forever?

I think Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness thesis of 2024 already highlights the base case that most people speculating in the markets know of. Earnings and the adoption of AI and AGI (goalposts keep shifting on the definition of AGI, which just implies the cope is real) are nigh unstoppable at this point. If that is the case, then I guess being long all the bottlenecks (commodities, infra, HBM, optics, GPU/CPU, etc.) continues its dance. But consider this...

Goldman Sachs: by 2030, consumer and enterprise agents could push token consumption 24X above today's estimated global capacity
Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research
Scenario: Intelligence Explosion, from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness
Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational Awareness (2024)

If everything — stocks, food, inputs, energy, etc. — melts up, we enter what we call a crack-up boom situation... which by the way, is very bullish all assets... but let's see.

1920s inflation in Weimar was a great example of this, and what the Austrians called the crack-up boom. We will all get rich nominally, houses go to a few million, median salaries become 5-20k/mth, CPI and every hidden shrinkflation continues to hit... until every single government loses control of their currency (fiscal dominance) and, unable to sustain this ponzi, many things collapse in the opposite direction and hyperinflate.

The Destruction of the Middle Class — excerpt on Weimar inflation from Jens O. Parsson's Dying of Money
From Jens O. Parsson, Dying of Money (1974)

Zimbabwe stock market performances, basically.

Every arc of this is not pretty and eventually leads to some form of revolution when asset owners/equity owners and their value of capital keeps winning over labour.

All interventionist tactics into futures and roundabout ways of financial loosening via suppressing bond yields, jawboning of commodity prices lower, and nationalizing stocks while occurring in possibly the greatest supply chain shock in our lives is extremely dangerous. The Trump administration is playing a very dangerous game here in order to satisfy boomers for the midterms.

We are in VERY tough times ahead, and sounding the alarm here on how we face either the greatest deflationary bust/depression as route A or hyperinflation as route B doesn't sound good to the average normie.

I don't think people realize how dangerously linked every single issue is.

Every Western country is banking on the same nominal GDP growth and AI as one last-hurrah, and we see the same signs (low fertility rates, booming stocks, young people crashing out, massive housing price index increases, immigration to keep population from falling apart) everywhere. Nobody really wants to hit the Austerity button due to boomer welfare and a fattening welfare state reliant on tax revenue. Conservatives surely won't — too much in love with globalization and labor arbitrage. Liberals and socialists won't either, for their entire school of thought subsists on giant expansion of welfare states for the "good" of the people.

But by being afraid of deflation, they are risking the end-game for hyperinflation... I once wrote this:

The entire of civilization is currently short volatility and are all banking on the same correlated trade (globalism, neoliberalism, diversity, typical way of life, rat race, FIRE, real estate).

Long civilizational vol (collapse of systems, AI disruptors, more pandemics, more radicalization, degeneracy, loneliness, currency collapses, TFR going down).

Similar to financial markets, when volatility spikes in the markets, we often get crazy cascades/3-sigma events.

The same thing is happening in the world today. We are like on the small bumps of the Civilizational Volatility Index (CVI) right now, if there ever was a term for it. All the stuff you see on Nepal, Philippines, financial markets, the slop on social media, the debate over TFRs, every single social agitprop gender war, political extremism of the youth; they are all pretty much all manifestations of the same idea.

Who am I really writing this for?

-fin-