Notes
Essays and short notes on the macro board: what's shifting, what confirms a thesis, and what would flip it.
High long-term Treasury yields can make bonds look attractive, but they still hurt TLT while they are rising. The real setup begins when those yields peak and start falling. Japan and the yen can either help trigger that turn or delay it.
High long-term yields may eventually pressure expensive stocks. But that does not tell us what wins next. The real question is what happens to inflation, long-term yields, credit, the dollar, and global capital flows after the break.
Why should a move in the Japanese yen matter to someone holding the Nasdaq, Treasuries, or gold? Because decades of cheap yen funding have connected Japan's currency to global asset markets in ways that can become unstable when the trade reverses.
A private software loan can look isolated from the stock market. But insurers, leveraged funds, banks, and private lenders increasingly connect those two financial systems.
AI spending is moving beyond chips and software into debt-heavy infrastructure. The bond market may be the pressure point that shows which projects can survive expensive capital.
AI is creating real revenue, but the infrastructure boom around it is growing even faster. The real question is who will generate enough cash flow to pay for the chips, data centers, power, and debt.
AI data centers are being financed like stable infrastructure, but their cash flows can depend on concentrated customers, construction deadlines, and rapidly changing hardware.
Private credit has become a major source of financing for risky companies. Here is how losses, redemption pressure, opaque valuations, and tighter lending could turn a private credit slowdown into a broader credit crunch.
Rate hikes change the cost of short-term borrowing. Quantitative tightening changes the Fed's balance sheet, bank reserves, and the amount of government debt private investors must absorb.
Government bonds can produce large gains when yields fall—and painful losses when they rise. Here is how bond prices, Treasury yields, and TLT actually work.
Inflation and deflation damage the economy in different ways. Learn which is usually more dangerous, how one can lead to the other, and what signals matter most.
The S&P 500 divided by the Federal Reserve's balance sheet has returned to its historical middle. Here is what the ratio shows, what it misses, and what it may say about the next macro phase.
Stock market crashes are rarely caused by one headline. They happen when leverage, concentration, weak liquidity, and forced selling create a feedback loop.
The AI bubble is not one single bet. It spans stocks, private funding, data centers, chips, debt, and expectations about future profits.