Global Macro Monitor

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This may be the most important and timely video you may very well ever watch.

 If you want to understand today’s markets and economy, it’s your must view, folks. 

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Seriously doubt this QB is ever going to win the NFL’s Walter Payton Award, He just doesn’t have the character. Follow the thread, the woman fractured her spine.

 
Disgusting, what a _________!  You can fill in the blanks. 

The True Champion

But, this guy?  Ab-so-fricking-lutely!  Why isn’t this Saint playing for the Saints? 

We know who the real World Champion is.  

A classic example of the two conflicting kingdoms at war in our world today, folks.  

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Here’s a GMM chart blast from the past.  

Still very relevant, especially as the government is considering reducing the gas tax to reduce inflation.  Not a lot of blood in that turnip and the focus should be on short-term energy policy to bring the price of oil down.  

Also note refiners have relatively small and thin margins- think crack spread.  

In most cases, oil prices drive the price of gasoline. 

The Politics Of Gas Prices

Not certain of the following relationship, could be real, could be spurious. The politics of the past may not be the politics of the future.

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It’s always a mug’s game attributing short-term market moves to any one factor but we drink from many different mugs, so here it goes. 

We sent this out to some of our subscribers over the weekend:

If no Ukraine invasion today and Bullard tones it down a bit in his CNBC 8:30 ET interview tomorrow, given how offside the fast money is 👇🏽, it should result in a nice short-term pop to buy time to get more defensive.

Human nature never changes… pic.twitter.com/5Iydty9Bg1

— Macro Charts (@MacroCharts) February 12, 2022

Mega volatility until the Fed begins to turn the screws. 

The Fed is still pumping liquidity into the markets albeit at a much slower clip until it ends next month. 

The real market test begins on March 16th, when the Fed announces and begins its tightening cyle.  Until then, as we wrote at the beginning of the year,

We have no idea where the market is headed tomorrow but shorts should beware.  There is just too much liquidity and wealth in the global economy.  Earnings for Q4 are going to come in very hot. Moreover, stocks seem the place to be with the new inflation regime and extremely low and negative real interest rates.   

It’s extremely difficult to submerge a beach ball and hold it underwater for any significant time.

To go lower on sustained basis, we suspect the Fed will have to drain a lot of liquidity and destroy mucho wealth before they are done.   

Asset Inflation And Price Inflation Are “Cousins”

Volcker recognized that when he was fighting inflation, he was actually fighting two kinds: asset inflation and price inflation. He called them “cousins,” and acknowledged that they had been created by the Fed. – Politico

GMM, January 6th

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AI has the power to transform health care. From more efficient diagnoses to safer treatments, it could remedy some of the ills suffered by patients. – Economist

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If crypto and NFTs are considered “investments,” I certainly have the liberty to call the following an “investment.”  One of the unintended consequences of our speculative culture: everything and all things morph into an “investment.”

My 30-something in-house nurses after surgery were all long Bitcoin and had no idea what it was.

Shorting Matt Damon and Tom Brady’s cred as they have become shills. They should be asked what are the three main functions that define a currency. I am willing to bet…err…invest they have no clue.

No, I didn’t make the investment but wish I knew one of their friends that knew. Kicking myself.

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TOTD = Tweet of the Day

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The cost of a 30-second Super Bowl LVI is up over 16 percent year-on-year after being flat to down for the past several years.   Blame it on the supply chain?  What supply chain? 

Why is the Super Bowl charging more for ads this year?  Because they can.   

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Remember the 2000 Super Bowl at the peak of the dot.com mania, where newly minted dot.com companies spent most of their entire IPO proceeds to buy Super Bowl commercials to generate “eyeballs” to their websites to drive their stock price higher?  

Super Bowl XXXIV (played in January 2000) featured 14 advertisements from 14 different dot-com companies, each of which paid an average of $2.2 million per spot.[1][note 1] In addition, five companies that were founded before the dot-com bubble also ran tech-related ads, and 2 before game ads, for a total of 21 different dot-com ads. These ads amounted to nearly 20 percent of the 61 spots available,[1] and $44 million in advertising. In addition to ads which ran during the game, several companies also purchased pre-game ads, most of which are lesser known. All of the publicly held companies which advertised saw their stocks slump after the game as the dot-com bubble began to rapidly deflate.  

The sheer amount of dot-com-related ads was so unusual that Super Bowl XXXIV has been widely been referred to as the “Dot-Com Super Bowl”, and it is often used as a high-water mark for the dot-com bubble. Of these companies, 4 are still active, 5 were bought by other companies, and the remaining 5 are defunct or of unknown status.[when?] – Wikipedia

The Super Bowl commercials were clearly a signal that marked the top of dot.com mania, which crashed a few months later in March.  

Fast forward to the 2022 Super Bowl. 

Cryptocurrency’s biggest boosters would do well to remember tech’s most infamous sock puppet. The year was 2000; it was what would later be known as the “Dot-Com Super Bowl,” an NFL face-off during which tech companies bought up some 20 percent of the advertising real estate during the Big Game. A few years later, many of the companies that bought those ads were defunct or swallowed up by other firms—including Pets.com, which had run a commercial featuring a singing puppet made from a sock.

This warning comes not because crypto companies are looking to turn stockings into mascots (at least, not that we know of), but because they are currently pumping millions of dollars into buying up ad space during Super Bowl LVI. Crypto.com, which has been flooding the market with its Matt Damon-starring commercials lately, has a big spot running; cryptocurrency exchange FTX plans to give away bitcoin during its Super Bowl spot. Coinbase is also reportedly running an ad. The companies are playing coy about who will appear in them. Regardless, the message seems to be that crypto is hot and everyone should get on board. But as multiplearticleshave pointed out in the past week, the Crypto Bowl has echoes of those ill-fated tech-company ads of the past. – Wired

The dot.coms needed more eyeballs and the ads were generated to lure in more  “greater fools” to keep buying their worthless stocks to remain viable.  Ditto for crypto. 

We don’t know how this all ends but know thy history, folks.   Just sayin’.

The winner of the 2000 Super Bowl?  The Rams, gulp!