Meager Pickings for Shoppers

October 2, 2025 • 1 minute, 12 second read

Stocks and gold are at all-time highs. But the real economy is flashing crisis-level warnings.

One source of alternative data — cargo rates — shows that physical goods aren’t in demand.

Turn Your Images On

Cargo container rates from Asia to the U.S. are back near pandemic-era levels (Source: Zerohedge)

The cost to ship cars, refrigerators, and Christmas toys has fallen back to numbers we last saw when the economy was on lockdown.

For these rates to rise, demand for goods needs to rise…. unlikely as President Trump’s tariff strategy is intended to reshore domestic production of these goods in the U.S.

Until factories come online, there will be fewer goods on the shelves. Combined with declining jobs and stubborn inflation, however, that fact may go unnoticed this holiday season.

~ Addison

P.S. We’re going live with Mark Jeftovic shortly in Grey Swan Live! today at 2 p.m. ET. We’ve received a bevy of questions about Dollar 2.0 and the future of the world’s reserve currency. Mark, Andrew and I will field them all and review your options as the U.S. dollar enters the digital age with the Trump administration’s full support.

Your money is changing as we speak. You don’t want to miss today’s Grey Swan Live!, sign up now if you haven’t done so already.

If you have any questions for us about the market, send them our way now to: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com.

Ripple Effect

Meager Pickings for Shoppers

Addison Wiggin

October 2, 2025 • 1 minute, 12 second read

Shipping

Stocks and gold are at all-time highs. But the real economy is flashing crisis-level warnings.

One source of alternative data — cargo rates — shows that physical goods aren’t in demand.

Turn Your Images On

Cargo container rates from Asia to the U.S. are back near pandemic-era levels (Source: Zerohedge)

The cost to ship cars, refrigerators, and Christmas toys has fallen back to numbers we last saw when the economy was on lockdown.

For these rates to rise, demand for goods needs to rise…. unlikely as President Trump’s tariff strategy is intended to reshore domestic production of these goods in the U.S.

Until factories come online, there will be fewer goods on the shelves. Combined with declining jobs and stubborn inflation, however, that fact may go unnoticed this holiday season.

~ Addison

Your money is changing as we speak. You don’t want to miss today’s Grey Swan Live!, sign up now if you haven’t done so already.

If you have any questions for us about the market, send them our way now to: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com.

The Stablecoin Standard

October 2, 2025 • Mark Jeftovic

Stablecoins have proceeded rapidly from being a grey zone through which capital would traverse as it moved into or out of the crypto-economy, to becoming an extension, if not a nascent pillar, of the fiat money system itself.

Coinbase Head of Institutional Research David Duong sees the market cap for stables hitting $1/2 trillion by 2028 (which would be somewhere between a 4X and 5X from where we are now).

Demetri Kofinas recently interviewed Charles Calomiris, former Chief Economist at the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and it was eye-opening to hear someone of his stature speak so matter-of-factly about how the structure of the banking system is evolving in realtime.

Gold Goes Parabolic, Briefly

October 2, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

The NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index is up 123% this year, the best this century.

The last time gold ran this hot — 1979 — savers stood in lines that wrapped around city blocks, waiting hours for Krugerrands and Maple Leafs. Fathers pulled kids out of school to get in line before the shop sold out. Dealers locked their doors mid-afternoon, unable to meet the demand.

It was less of an investment than survival. Inflation made cash a wasting asset, and gold was the last refuge.

We don’t want to see that again.

Gold is best as ballast — steady, weighty, tethering a portfolio to something real. When it turns into the object of a mania, it means we’ve entered the debt crisis of which we’ve long been wary.

Here Comes Yield Control

October 1, 2025 • Mark Jeftovic

We’ve been saying for a long time that when it came time to rev up the money printer again, the Fed would do it under some other rubric than “Quantitative Easing” (QE), because by now, everybody knows what that is. YCC? Not so much.

What it means is that the Fed will buy unlimited bonds out at the long end of the yield curve in order to keep yields under some arbitrary line in the sand.

Warrior Ethos

October 1, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

Let’s see, now that the government is shut down, where are we?

Pretty much where we left off: Markets surging higher, backed by the weight of AI capex and gorging on debt; A Congress unable to pay for promises forged in the 20th century’s welfare bureaucracy; A currency bleeding purchasing power with each deficit skirmish; A nation where even butter, coffee, and bandwidth become weapons of policy.