The Morning Line
AI Story Gooses Stocks into the Ozone
Nvidia became the world’s first $4 trillion company last week, leapfrogging Microsoft, Tesla, Google and every other company struggling to stay in the AI game. Our money is on Musk to compete the hardest. He is Nvidia’s biggest customer for their most powerful chips, which sell for as much as $200,000. Musk has been buying them by the tens of thousands.
He recently converted a vacuum cleaner factory in Tennessee into a site for the world’s largest supercomputer. It draws so much power that the cooling plant alone cost will cost $80 million. The machine will be used to train Grok, Musk’s horse in an AI field crowded with corporate strivers. Grok reportedly overtook competitors recently with a demonstration that showed the app capable of thinking almost like a human. Even skeptics were impressed with the way Grok figured out a novel way for hospitals to save power. What startled them, however, was that Grok hadn’t even been asked about this; the AI assistant simply inferred and suggested it based on another, seemingly unrelated, energy solution it had worked on that even MIT-trained engineers hadn’t thought of.
But even if Nvidia has yet a few more prospective customers in Musk’s league, is the company worth $4 trillion? A physicist friend of mine who uses AI intensively in his business said the stock is only warming up and that NVDA’s current price is a certain bet to double yet again. But exactly what will their chip customers sell to the world that could possibly justify such astronomical valuations? It would have to be much more than mere gains in productivity — or even that old investible standby, a cure for cancer.
Monsters from the Id
In an earlier commentary, I suggested facetiously that Nvidia and companies immediately downstream of it were being priced as though AI had the potential to become all things to all people. How this could actually happen was vividly imagined in the 1950s sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet. The story, loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, concerned an advanced civilization called the Krell that had been destroyed by an unknown force. That force turned out to have been their own primitive subconscious — Monsters from the Id — conjured forth by a reactor they’d built to materialize all of their needs.
AI can practically do that now using a 3D printer and a storehouse of raw materials. “How about Fettucine Alfredo for dinner tonight, Grok? And while you’re at it, make me a three-carat engagement ring with some graphite I bought for the occasion.” This arrangement would not only cut out the middle man for all of our daily needs, it would also eliminate most jobs. Whether theoretically possible or not, no one believes that having our needs met in this way would make us happier. Concerning the insane bidding war for every investible tied to AI, we had better be careful what we wish for.
T-Bond Bottom Could Herald the Start of Trump’s ‘Golden Era’
We’re all waiting anxiously to see whether Trump’s bold initiatives usher in a golden economic era. If this is going to happen, we should see the Dow Industrial lurch toward 100,000 at any time. Just a few short weeks ago, you could have counted me among the skeptics. It is a habit that has become deeply ingrained in me after writing collapsitarian essays and editorials for the last 30 years. However, I have been so wrong about this for so many years that I would never, ever insist that such a seemingly outrageous rally is impossible. Skeptics aside, there are perhaps 80 to 100 million Americans rooting with all their might for the President to fall on his face. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome at its stupidest and most hateful, since a really bad year for the President could mean our children will have to suffer through a Second Great Depression.
The good/bad news is that we should know soon how things are likely to turn out. That’s because the stock market is in fly-or-die mode, so dangerously pumped with crazy, Wall Street hype and AI hubris that it cannot possibly sustain altitude unless investors decide to go all-in, and soon. It would be a peculiar time for stocks to take flight, since U.S. consumers are tapped out and falling increasingly behind on car and house payments, and GDP shrank by 0.4% in the first quarter. We may have entered a recession, and it has the potential to become a devastating one because, publicly and privately, the nation is so deep in hock. It is not yet so deep, however, that an adroitly engineered bear squeeze could not prevent a potentially fatal, contractionary mindset from taking root.
America Ascendant
The graph above holds the key to our best hopes and worst fears. It shows TLT, a proxy for Treasury bonds, in a so-far mild upturn within the context of a horrific bear market that began in March 2020. I’m convinced we are witnessing the start of a major bull-market in T-Bonds, and that this is a good time to start buying them hand-over-fist. Bonds are rising on investor perceptions that Trump is fully in charge of the nation’s fortunes. America is ascendant at a time when Europe, under feckless leadership, is circling down the toilet. This has begun to drive global capital into Treasury paper, lowering long-term rates. This dynamic can only feed on itself, and it is why a golden era, even if illusory and unable to outlast Trump’s leadership, is hardly unthinkable.
The Huge AI Story May Not Be Quite Huge Enough
The S&Ps and Nasdaq hit record highs last week, a surreal milestone that only the Wall Street toadies at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal who fabricate the news could take seriously. These are the same folks who bestowed the name ‘Magnificent Seven’ on a bunch of high-flying stocks whose short-squeeze histrionics qualify them for membership in a stock-market Hall of Shame. Portfolio managers, who surely know better, are go-along buyers at these heights and will remain so until a tsunami of redemptions bends them to the impending reality of massive deflationary write-downs when the Everything Bubble bursts.
That reality darkened last week with news that the U.S. economy shrunk at an annualized rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter. Perennially giddy investors would seem to be betting either that the recession that probably already has begun will be short, or that the statistic itself is a meaningless outlier caused by the world-class uncertainties of Trump’s tariff policies.
A popular explanation for the staying power of the bull market against a backdrop of global storm clouds, geopolitical mayhem and economic sclerosis is that AI will save us from…everything. As the story has it, artificial intelligence will boost worker productivity, improve outcomes from brain surgery, make steering wheels obsolete, turn $20-an-hour paralegals into Clarence Darrows, and lay to rest the arguments of Talmudic scholars. In unfortunate reality, the driving force behind AI is its ability to put people out of work, particularly white-collar employees whose jobs have been untouched so far by robotics.
Can Joe Six-pack Deliver?
That raises the question of how lunatic-sector companies that have invested trillions of dollars in AI development, and who say they plan to invest much, much more, can ever hope to recoup their money, let alone multiply it voluminously as they seem to expect. To state the question another way, what additional goods and services can they possibly sell us to generate untold trillions of dollars in new revenues? Since houses and cars have gone out of reach for the broad middle class, and because AI will put enough people out of work to make the affordability problem even broader and deeper, you have to wonder how we consumers will be able to satisfy the insatiable greed of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page et al. The GDP pie is only so big, and if cutting into Taylor Swift’s share of it is part of their plan, they are in for the fight of their lives.
One could argue that healthcare is the most significant area of the economy where job cuts are unnecessary for AI to create value. Indeed, if AI provides an economical way to construct robust hearts, lungs and pancreas with a 3-D printer, or leads us to a cure for cancer, the economic benefits would be enormous. But they would come mostly in the form of savings, rather than from any vast new sales by providers. Unfortunately for the megacapitalists, any savings, no matter how large, would not remotely suffice to reward the lot of them together with a sustainable growth-stock multiple. But unsustainable growth that need only be imagined? We’ve got a cosmic surfeit of that now, so enjoy it while it lasts. [AI hubris was the focus of my recent interview with Howe Street’s Jim Goddard. Click here to access it.]
Wall Street’s Epic Bunco Game
Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble have nothing on the bunco game Wall Street has been running with Microsoft shares. I write on this subject often because the numbers are so huge, and because the game, which is intertwined with the biggest financial con-job in history, is not one you will ever read about in The Wall Street Journal or on Bloomberg.com. It thrives on the madness of crowds and grows bigger with every uptick in MSFT and the galaxy of stocks in its vortex. Microsoft’s share price has gone from 393 to 483 since April, adding roughly $687 billion to the macro ledger. That is twice the size of California’s budget for 2025. It would buy a Porsche 911 for every man, woman and child in New York and Chicago, or a super-deluxe Disney World vacation for every family in America.
A clue to how the game works lies in the relentless smoothness of MSFT’s ascent. You could comb through a thousand charts without finding one remotely like the one pictured above. You don’t have to be a technical analyst to see that the long rally has been tightly controlled every step of the way. This kind of price action is quite rare, but what makes it extraordinary is that it is not happening to just any stock, but rather to the most valuable stock in the world, a $3 trillion company with a lock on the operating systems of a billion-and-a-half desktop computers. The stock has been ratcheting higher on relatively thin volume and a dearth of bullish buying. Short-covering has done most of the lifting, with more urgency and power than merely optimistic investors could ever supply.
Ka-Ching!
MSFT’s manipulators knew what they were doing when they goosed the stock into a sensational short squeeze on April 30. On that day, after the close of business, Microsoft announced earnings of $3.48 per share on revenues of $70.07 billion, beating the consensus estimate by 24 cents a share. That might not sound like much, but it was enough to spook wrong-way bettors into gapping MSFT $48 higher on the opening bar the next day. Ka-ching! Another $366 billion worth of instant wealth-effect. Even Wall Street’s perpetually bullish analysts couldn’t have imagined the rally would add another $321 billion of unearned gains since then. And yet, here we are, with the stock in record territory and no top in sight. It doesn’t get any better than this, which is why MSFT cannot continue to climb. When it falls hard for no apparent reason, which it will, that will mark the end of the bull market and the hubris that has sustained it for 16 years.
Wall Street Too Stupid to Worry
There were few headlines out of the Middle East over the weekend, mainly because only Israel and Iran are capable of judging the damage, and neither is saying much. Wall Street, on the other hand, seems quite confident that whatever is happening, and irrespective of the outcome, it will be quite bullish for stocks. As much was evident on Friday, when the lunatic sector (aka ‘the Magnificent Seven’) bounced back from heavy losses early in the session, then spent the remainder of the day building a plateau from which stocks can launch anew when the all-clear signal comes. This would be appallingly reckless behavior, but we have become used to it as the stock market has increasingly decoupled from geopolitical and even economic reality over the last decade or so.
It’s possible investors are simply envisioning a brighter tomorrow, with Iran no longer able to export terror to the world. China and North Korea will continue to threaten, of course. But their ability to spread malice and death will be significantly impaired once Israel has cut off the arms and legs of their Iranian proxies. Jihadism will still be with us, and active to the extent its chief sponsor, Qatar, has plenty of crude oil to sell. But perhaps with the inspiration of nuclear terror in remission for a few years, and an entire generation of jihadi leaders rubbed out by Israel, the world might enjoy a period of relative peacefulness. How odd would that be? [Check out my latest interview on This Week in Money. It delves into the mania that has seized investors in stock and real estate assets.]
Summer Topping Process Could Get Messy
The stock market is in a topping process, brazenly manipulated by white-collar carnies who cut their teeth at Sloan, Wharton and Stanford. These newly trained ass-bandits have been working Microsoft shares to hold the broad averages aloft while they offload inventory to widows, pensioners and assorted other bag holders. I described in detail how this game works in a previous commentary. Even though Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, has a $3 trillion capitalization, it costs the perpetrators almost nothing to drive the stock vertically higher, adding hundreds of billions of dollars of gaseous asset inflation (aka ‘wealth effect’) to the global ledger.
Flimsy Reasons
When last week ended, the world’s largest-cap stock was poking its greasy little snout marginally above the previous all-time high at 468.35 recorded last July. This breakout will not have gone unnoticed by a million dip-buying homunculi, since it is no longer a dip they are buying, but the latest move into thin air. Although MSFT will continue to outperform all other stocks for reasons implied above, I doubt it’s short-squeeze histrionics can drag the lumpen mass of securities significantly higher. At best, the also-rans will make marginal new highs until the last buyer runs out of flimsy reasons later this summer.
It has never been clearer that mass mental-illness, far more than invented ‘fundamentals’, is what drives stocks higher in the late stages of a bull market. If news mattered, the 1914-ish darkness of today’s headlines would have crushed the Dow six months ago.
Watch this Latest Bitcoin Crime Start a Wave!
The internet has evolved into the perfect medium for spreading crime into every household and every age group, and now Bitcoin is fast becoming the perfect medium for pushing a more violent kind of crime out into the streets. There was a time when one could avoid getting mugged simply by not wearing Italian shoes, a Burberry coat or a Rolex watch in certain neighborhoods. Nowadays, though, any schlepper in a hoodie could be carrying a password in his head with access to Bitcoin enough to buy two-dozen solid-gold Rolexes. The assailant wouldn’t even have to risk carrying a gun, since a small pair of pliers to yank out the schlepper‘s fingernails would be the only tool a thief who uses unfriendly persuasion in its most recently popularized way would need. Don’t laugh, because you damned well know this is going to happen in some alley somewhere: a schmuck who wouldn’t give up an alphanumeric key stored in his head will lie disfigured in a pool of blood, and the story will instantly be at the top of the news across America.
It’s impossible to know whether Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is feeling remorseful over the current blizzard of headlines concerning the New York crypto investor held captive, tortured, peed on, beaten and threatened with death by two or more young men sadistically determined to pry a bitcoin account password out of him. If Satoshi has any humanity, he is asking himself ‘What have I wrought?’ Hadn’t he simply wanted to invent a mathematically perfect money that would allow people to spend without being watched by the banks and the shadowy regulators who watch them? How ironic, then, that bitcoin has instead turned out to be an all but unusable medium for ordinary transactions while filling the heads of ten-year-old boys with the enticing idea that crime can pay much, much better than honest toil.
Something to Keep the Kids Busy
And anyone can do it! If not in a dark alley, then online in the virtual company of complicit friends. That is the power of social media, and even now, the New York abduction will already have energized the imaginations of enough copycats to unleash a crime wave such as none of us, not even the most inspired MAGA do-gooder, could have imagined just six months ago. Before long, a cottage industry will spring up on the dark web to provide the purloined names and local addresses of millions of Bitcoin and Ethereum hoarders. What’s surely coming as a result will make us nostalgic for a bygone era of pickpockets, three-card Monte grifters and charming bank robbers like Willie Sutton.
Why the ‘Wealth Effect’ Is a Giant Crock of Shit
Of all the nutty ideas in investors’ heads these days, none is crazier or more pernicious than the mass delusion that grotesquely inflated asset prices have made tens of millions of us rich. As equity shares and residential real estate prices have risen higher and higher due to Fed stimulus with money conjured from nowhere, Americans have basked in the so-called wealth effect. ‘Easy Al’ Greenspan could be their patron saint. An egghead with a PhD in economics, he often spoke of inflated home values as ‘wealth’ — i.e. money in the bank. He should have known better. Investors paying homage to Greenspan would have been at their giddiest recently when Microsoft shares opened $31 above the previous day’s close. Because the software giant is a $3 trillion company, the biggest in the world by capitalization, this added about $273 billion to investment accounts holding Microsoft shares. The total amount of bullshit wealth produced by the price gap has climbed much higher since, because the short-squeeze that goosed MSFT initially has continued to this day. At last week’s $460 high, the tally of vaporous ‘wealth’ injected into the system by MSFT’s scripted explosion was $492 billion. The actual figure is probably at least five times that, or $2.4 trillion, since Microsoft’s steep run-up has dragged the entire stock market along with it. The effect was most pronounced in the lunatic sector, which is sometimes referred to as the Magnificent Seven by the clowns who invent the news each day. The group includes Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla, and the orgiastic performance of their shares, far from being ‘magnificent’, should be a source of embarrassment to civilization itself.
Surfing Sea Waves
You don’t have to be a chartist to see that this won’t end well. Stocks tend to fill gaps on charts eventually, and this one, a vast helium bagful of unearned wealth, cries out for a rebuke. It’s not just Microsoft, either. If you deconstructed the bull market since 2009, you would find that most shares achieved their biggest leaps almost solely on opening-bar gaps. As I have pointed out here many times before, it is short-covering by bears that accomplishes the heavy lifting needed to power stocks through previous peaks and thick layers of supply. Just look at the chart above. The sea waves between early 2024 and April represent enormous quantities of shares changing hands. Anyone who bought MSFT during that period was underwater when the stock broke down in early March. Lo, on May 1, most of them awoke with their losses canceled or even reversed. Nice work if you can get it. This happened on a gap that started and ended in literally no time, with almost no actual shares changing hands. It occurred faster than the blink of an eye as the stock effortlessly leapt above the offers of millions of sellers seeking only to exit losing positions for ‘even’. If you think this shell game is a sound model for growing a society’s wealth, or that any of it will endure when the fever breaks, you are in for quite a shock.
Time for a Little Skepticism
I’ve supported Trump since his first term, but my hopes for his success peaked a month ago when a panic-induced plunge in the S&P 500 reversed almost precisely from a 4820 target I’d sent out to subscribers. I saw this as the surprisingly quick end to a bear market that had only just begun in February. If my hunch turned out to be correct, this meant America would experience no recession, and the tariff wars would blow over without causing any lasting harm to the global economy.
So far, the prediction — still an outlier, for sure — looks good, at least on paper. The chart shows how the S&Ps have rallied a Krakatoa-like 1089 points since trampolining in April from within a hair of 4820. The powerful move has somewhat muffled the clamor of TDS sufferers, even if it seems clear by now that nothing will ever bring them around. Meanwhile, dare we hope the radical changes that have set Trump’s agenda will extricate America from a debt trap with no apparent exit? A debt deflation has long seemed inevitable because public and private debts have grown far too large to repay.
DOGE Gains Up in Smoke
If Trump initially offered a possible way out and seemed enthusiastic about pulling off the impossible, he may have lost too much momentum already to succeed. The DOGE cuts that fired up so many supporters have been voted down by Congress, including by some Republicans, and it took quiet help from the Fed last week to bolster the appearance of strong demand for long-term Treasury paper. Now, if the Supreme Court fails to put the kibosh on birthright citizenship and nationwide injunctions by woke judges, Trump may need a hat-trick of successes in Ukraine, the Middle East and China to rally the troops.
Still more daunting is the challenge of postponing a long-overdue recession. A radical re-shaping of the U.S. and global economies such as Trump is attempting could conceivably accomplish this, but it no longer looks like a good bet. Mainly, it’s a matter of timing. Trump evidently thinks tax cuts, the reopening of factories, and some MAGA ray-rah will keep America’s economy humming. This now looks doubtful, if for no other reason than that 7% mortgages are about to push residential real estate into the same deep hole that has buried commercial real estate. There is also fatal hubris in the stock market’s climb. Although it has provided spectacular returns for the most affluent Americans, the broad middle class has been beggared by inflation. Trump would have us believe he offers an easy and painless way out, but a bear market in stocks will end that delusion.
I said I would continue to publish my ‘insanely bullish forecast’ until such time as the S&Ps fell decisively below 4820. I am retiring the commentary from the front page, however, because I believe the so-far 1089-point rally is near an end. Powerful as it looks on a chart, I doubt that it will achieve new record highs. Stocks look poised to fall hard, a development bound to take many investors by surprise.
Trump Magic Losing Its Hold on Investors
[The S&Ps are losing steam after recouping two-thirds of their 1400-point loss in March/April. The stall near 5700 has left them hovering in the danger zone, just like the U.S. economy. Will it skirt recession? I have my doubts, even if price action on the S&P chart on April 7 led me to speculate that business would continue to hum along. The index had bottomed slightly above an important Hidden Pivot target at 4820, and so it was no stretch to infer that this may have marked the end of the bear market. Without the chart, though, it’s hard for me to imagine that America will skate past recession. A real estate crash is coming, and it’s only a matter of time before its mounting weight overwhelms whatever miracles people expect from Trump. His tariff announcements, to the extent they can be construed as bullish for stocks, have lost their ability to affect securities markets for more than an hour or two. He did a deal with Great Britain last week, spinning it as the first of many. That story will not distract anyone from the only deal that matters, however — with China. No one could be optimistic that President Xi Jinping will be an easy touch, so don’t be surprised if stocks take a header this week. Meanwhile, the commentary below will continue to run until an S&P breach of 4820 proves my bullish thesis wrong. RA ]
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A word of advice if you’re looking for bankable information on the direction of the economy: tune out the mainstream media’s cavalcade of Trump-deranged bozos and focus on the 4820 target in the SPX chart above. Think of it as Trump’s lucky number, but also a very good place for these all-too-interesting times to find temporary equilibrium. That is my worst-case target for a bear market that many believe is only just getting started. As a die-hard permabear myself, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the Mother of All Bears since, like, 2010. The global economy was badly in need of a reset and still is. It will happen, but not now. Instead, it looks like Trump is about to achieve the impossible, averting a catastrophic debt deflation while also staving off recession. Even the already certain collapse of commercial real estate will have to wait.
You cannot get to this happy place, psychologically speaking. if you stay tuned to the MSM morons who invent the news. You might as well listen to Whoopi Goldberg as to the “experts” who cover tariff news for MSNBC, The New York P.O.S. Times and Bloomberg. Bloomberg is probably the worst offender, since they literally live to kick Trump in the balls at every opportunity. (Don’t they know he’s wearing a Kevlar cup?) The latest Bloomberg teaser headline sums up the mainstream media’s knee-jerk reaction to the Orange Man: Trump’s Bear Market. Leave it to Bloomberg’s sniveling lightweights to discover and attempt to exploit a bear market just as it’s ending. Indeed, the storm surge is due to blow out to sea before the news editors at Bloomberg, the Times and WAPO have reached the Kleenex phase of their long-running circle jerk.
Christmas Glide Path
Tune them out and trust my 4820 target as a worst-case low for the bear market. To borrow Vizzini’s line, it is ‘INCONCEIVABLE!’ that the S&Ps will fall significantly below it, if at all. And that means Trump, Musk and their intrepid band of budget vigilantes will have put America back on a glide path just in time for Christmas. In other words: no recession, no harmful fallout from the tariffs, and no serious disruptions from lawfare shit-stain Norm Eisen and other treasonous actors hell-bent on destroying the U.S. through the courts. Far from a tariff-induced recession, watch for felicitous stirrings in the Rust Belt, where union workers will be telling a very different story compared to the ‘Orange Man BAD!‘ narrative on MSNBC and CNN.
If you’re interested in precise bear market targets for the ‘lunatic-sector’ stocks, take a free trial to Rick’s Picks and see my post on this in the chat room, or find them in my latest interview on Howe Street. Prepare to have your mind blown three months from now by the precise accuracy of my forecasts for climactic declines in NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, NFLX, CMG, META and AMZN.