The US isn’t fighting a war, a crisis or a recession. Yet the federal government is borrowing as if it were. Not including interest, the U.S. government will spend $1.21 for every $1.00 it collects in revenue this year. Add interest and that climbs to $1.39.      -WSJ, 9/16/24 Both Harris and Trump have promised to protect the biggest drivers of rising spending—Social Security and Medicare. And both want to extend trillions of dollars in tax

If you study Occidental, what you’ll find is they don’t really have exploration going on … Oxy [Occidental] basically has no speculative drilling going on. So, in effect, it looks like a CD. They’re clipping coupons.  What Oxy is doing is they have a huge gusher of cash flows coming out and that huge gusher of cash flows is only going into buybacks and dividends. It’s all being pumped out to shareholders – and Warren

Last August, the four very destabilizing things we highlighted above kicked off a 1-month period of elevated volatility where only the USD rose; 2.5 months later, the only asset classes up v. 8/2/23 levels were the USD, gold, and oil; critically, new versions of the four highly destabilizing things above have just happened: Oil prices rose sharply in June into the “danger zone” (>$80); USDJPY fell sharply in 2q24 & 10y JGB yields broke out