From the creators of The Daily Reckoning, I.O.U.S.A, Empire of Debt and The Daily Missive
From the creators of The Daily Reckoning, I.O.U.S.A, Empire of Debt and The Daily Missive
December 3, 2025 • Andrew Packer
A conversation with Dan Denning of Bonner Private Partners on the market’s year-end trends and what to watch in 2026.
December 9, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Here we sit — investors, analysts, retirees, accountants, even a few masochistic economists — gathered beneath the leafless monetary tree, rehearsing our lines as we wait for Jerome Powell to step onstage and tell us what the future means.
Spoiler: he can’t. But that does not stop us from waiting.
Tomorrow, he is expected to deliver the December rate cut. Polymarket odds sit at 96% for a dainty 25-point cut.
Trump, Navarro and Lutnick pine for 50 points.
And somewhere in the wings smiles Kevin Hassett — at 74% odds this morning, the presumed Powell successor — watching the last few snowflakes fall before his cue arrives.
December 8, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
December 5, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
December 9, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
With U.S. stocks trading at about 24 times forward earnings, plans for capital growth have to go off without a hitch. Given the billions of dollars in commitments by AI companies, financing to the hilt on debt, the most realistic outcome is a hitch.
On a valuation basis, global markets will likely show better returns than U.S. stocks in 2026.
America leads the world in innovation. A U.S. tech stock will naturally fetch a higher price than, say, a German brewery. But value matters, too.
December 8, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
December 5, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
December 10, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, it’s worth recalling that our first Revolution wasn’t waged to destroy an order — it was fought to preserve one.
Political philosopher Russell Kirk called it “a revolution not made but prevented.” The colonists sought not chaos but continuity — the defense of their “chartered rights as Englishmen,” not the birth of an entirely new world. Kirk wrote:
“The American Revolution was a preventive movement, intended to preserve an old constitutional structure. The French Revolution meant the destruction of the fabric of society.”
The difference, Kirk argued, was moral. The American Revolution was rooted in ordered liberty; the French in ideological frenzy. The first produced a Constitution; the second, a guillotine.
Two and a half centuries later, the argument continues — only now, the battlefield is financial. Who controls access to money? Who defines legitimacy? Can a citizen’s ability to transact depend on their politics?
December 9, 2025 • Lau Vegys
Trump and Powell are no buddies. They’ve been fighting over rate cuts all year—Trump demanding more, Powell holding back. Even after cutting twice, Trump called him “grossly incompetent” and said he’d “love to fire” him. The tension has been building for months.
And Trump now seems ready to install someone who shares his appetite for lower rates and easier money.
Trump has been dropping hints for weeks—saying on November 18, “I think I already know my choice,” and then doubling down last Sunday aboard Air Force One with, “I know who I am going to pick… we’ll be announcing it.”
He was referring to one Kevin Hassett, who—according to a recent Bloomberg report—has emerged as the overwhelming favorite to become the next Fed chair.
December 8, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.
The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.
The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.
December 5, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.
The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”
Not anymore.
On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.
The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.
Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.
What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?
The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.
December 4, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Wheelbarrows are not chickens. A chicken is a biological production unit. A wheelbarrow is a capital good. A wheelbarrow doesn’t produce work. But it CAN be a productivity multiplier.
And that’s how we have to think of all those GPUs the hyperscalers are spending money on. If their thesis is right, trillion in AI and data center spending now, will translate into a massive burst in productivity and new technologies in the next two decades. That is the only justification for the current valuations/multiples at which these stocks trade now.
The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “So much depends, upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.”
Today the wheelbarrow is Nvidia Green. And so much of the stock market depends on that wheelbarrow being a big enough productivity multiplier to offset $340 trillion in debt.
December 4, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Today, the top 10% of earners account for half of all U.S. consumer spending. Rate cuts that boost stock prices inflate the purchasing power of the wealthy while widening the gulf for everyone else.
How does fattening the brokerage accounts of the top decile fix affordability?
It doesn’t.
But the Fed must cut because the bottom half of America is already showing signs of breaking. If the Fed doesn’t relieve debt pressure, the consumer cracks. If it does relieve it, inflation cracks upward instead.
December 4, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Oracle shares managed to pop higher on their AI investment plans over the summer – but quickly gave back those gains as investors digested the total debt the company was taking on.
The AI buildout and its rising costs are raising more questions than answers right now. The CDS market is heating up as a sign of trouble ahead. Keep your eyes peeled!
December 3, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
Altman’s claim is that not only will people get more done with less with AI, they will be happier because their work is easier and…more fun. This follows a report from Anthropic, responsible for the Claude AI, that said AI increases productivity.
I will say I’m skeptical. But we’ve been told the nature of exponential change is that it comes at you faster than you can measure or observe. And if that is true, it will have consequences in 2026 for employees and investors. Big ones.
For employees–those who are not replaced by automated processes and robots–it will mean secure employment and higher wages. A small number of winners getting richer.
December 3, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
American consumers don’t feel – or are at least unaware of – monetary nuance. They’re just getting the bill.
Trump declared last night that “affordability doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” dismissing the term as a “Democrat scam”— this despite recently proclaiming
himself the “Affordability President” on Truth Social.
That’s the current state of political messaging on cost-of-living: part whiplash, part vaudeville. But voters aren’t confused. Grocery prices are still 30% higher than 2020. Tariffs add daily friction. Utilities, rent, houses, tuition, healthcare continue their daily grind upward.
December 3, 2025 • Addison Wiggin
During a Fed rate cut cycle, bond yields follow, which typically means bond prices tick higher. If you buy bonds now, you’ll be getting in ahead of the crowd.
And if this tech wreck shapes up anything like 2000-01, investors will want to get out fast. Despite the debt mess in Washington, bonds will again look “safe.”
One minor bonus: if you buy now, you’ll lock in higher yields before the next Fed rate cut, which is expected to come one week from today.
