DKI has been warning about a weak private sector for more than a year, but consumers kept spending down their savings and taking on more debt. Recent data indicates we might be reaching the end-point of that practice as debt peaks and sales are weak. The Federal Housing Administration appears to be paying the mortgages … Read more
The Federal Reserve concluded its March meeting and surprised no one by keeping the fed funds rate unchanged. Let’s go through the details: As I type this, Jerome Powell is delivering his prepared remarks at his press conference and reiterated his typical language of being “data driven”. He’s also talking about a higher-than-usual level … Read more
One month after the market worried about an increase in the CPI, it celebrated a slightly lower reading. That seems great until you look at the chart and see that there’s been no real progress on inflation in months. In order to get inflation down, the government could cut wasteful spending. DKI likes that option … Read more
I think the primary reason the market was up big on Friday was Senate Democrats caved and agreed to the Republican spending bill. This avoided a pending government shutdown. Even though Democrats wanted more spending, the stated reason for agreeing to the bill was that if Democrats didn’t, they feared that during the ensuing government … Read more
Overview: Today, we got the February Consumer Price Index (CPI) report which showed an overall increase of 2.8% for the last year and 0.2% for the month (annualizes to 2.4%). That’s below last month’s 3.0% and above the prior month’s 2.9%. Both the annual number and the monthly were 0.1% below expectations. The monthly was … Read more
This week, we got news on the new national crypto strategic reserve that first spiked the dollar price of some coins, then crashed them. The details now indicate the Bitcoin can only be bought if it doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything. It’s not clear what those circumstances might be. As DKI wrote in January, it’s … Read more
Nvidia $NVDA has a great quarter, but the stock was priced for perfection. Still, Jensen Huang had some interesting comments on DeepSeek. There are rumors that Microsoft $MSFT is cancelling data center leases…but the big tech firms all just confirmed higher AI spending for 2025. The January PCE falls, but it won’t be enough to … Read more
