The Money Spigots

QUESTION: What do you think of the closure of the ports due to the strike?

MY RESPONSE: I’ve been following it closely. In case you missed the news, the giant union that controls port workers on the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, Canada, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, major rivers and the Great Lakes — with over 85,000 members — has gone on strike. They are demanding an increase to their wages of $5/hr every year for the next six years, and an air-tight guarantee that shipping lines will stop all efforts to automate the ports.

This concerns us for two reasons. First, because we added container shipping line, Zim Integrated Shipping [ZIM] to the Official List a month ago. Zim is in the business of transporting containers, and many of its containers move through ports affected by the strike.

Whenever something disrupts the flow of containers around the world, shipping rates soar. We saw this with Covid and then with the Red Sea closure. This strike is just another potential bonanza for shipping lines like Zim.

This likely explains why Zim was the best performing shipping stock in September, rising 40.4%.

Our thesis for buying Zim had nothing to do with strikes or other disruptions. Zim’s stock looked mispriced relative to the profits it is making, and the giant pile of cash it holds on the balance sheet. If rates could stay high for another two months, we said, Zim would likely pay out a 30%-plus dividend early next year, based on our cost basis for the stock.

So a strike significantly improves the odds of us receiving a large dividend from Zim early next year…

Our strategy remains the same. We’re holding out for a 50% gain here, which based on our official entry price equates to a sell price of $27.89. If Zim’s stock touches $27.89, I’ll issue a sell alert and take the 50% gain. In the meantime, I’m moving ZIM to ‘HOLD’ and keeping ZIM marked “Sell at a 50% gain.”

The second reason the strike concerns us is because of our Big Picture view. In short, the longshoremen are at risk of becoming the next victims of globalization. If the shipping lines get their way, the ports will be automated, as they are in other countries, and the longshoremen will eventually lose their jobs.

But if the longshoremen get their way, US ports will become even more inefficient and expensive to operate, and ultimately US consumers will pay higher prices for the imported goods they buy.

In other words, this is a fight between globalization and onshoring. Cheaper consumer goods or protected US jobs. Political unrest or a weak dollar.

Our position is simple. They’re going to let the dollar go against gold. It’s already started. We call this the “synchronized global currency devaluation.” They’ll water down the real value of the debt. They’ll choose onshoring… and inflation… and protectionism.

The other aspect of the ports issue — which catches my attention — is whether supply chain bottlenecks ever did, or ever will again, cause inflation. Our argument is that the 20% expansion in the money supply from 2020 to 2022 resulted in the 25% shift higher in the entire price level. It wasn’t the lockdown policies that produced inflation. And it wasn’t corporate greed. It was the huge gusher of money spewing out of Washington.

However, if there WAS any truth that it was the supply chain that caused inflation — constrained supply meeting pent up demand — well then we ought to see that again in a prolonged port strike. In fact, that wouldn’t surprise us at all.

Any higher inflation numbers between now and the election, which is just now just 34 days away, will be blamed on the union’s strike. In the big picture, we know that inflation is now the deliberate policy in DC. The soaring national debt requires it. ~~ Tom Dyson, Bonner Private Research

Tom Dyson, Bonner Private Research

QUESTION: What do you think of the closure of the ports due to the strike?

This likely explains why Zim was the best performing shipping stock in September, rising 40.4%.

So a strike significantly improves the odds of us receiving a large dividend from Zim early next year…

But if the longshoremen get their way, US ports will become even more inefficient and expensive to operate, and ultimately US consumers will pay higher prices for the imported goods they buy.

In other words, this is a fight between globalization and onshoring. Cheaper consumer goods or protected US jobs. Political unrest or a weak dollar.

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.

The rate cut narrative is calcifying into gospel: the Fed must cut to save the consumer.

Bankrate reports that 59% of Americans cannot cover a $1,000 emergency without debt or selling something. And yet stocks are roaring, liquidity junkies are celebrating, and the top 10% now account for half of all consumer spending.

Here’s the plot twist: before 2020, consumer confidence faithfully tracked equity markets. After 2020, that relationship broke. As one analyst put it, “The poor don’t hate stocks going up. They just don’t feel it anymore.”

So when the Fed cuts rates in one of the hottest stock markets in history, who exactly benefits? Not the 59%. Not the middle. Certainly not anyone renting and watching shelter inflation devour their paycheck.

Only the late-stage dot-com fever dreams did better in recent memory — back when analysts were valuing companies by the number of mammals breathing inside the office.

For the moment, stocks appear unsinkable, unslappable, and perhaps uninsurable. But this is what generational technology shifts do: they take a kernel of genuine innovation and inflate a decade of growth into a 36-month highlight reel. We’ve seen this movie. It premiered in 1999 and closed with adults crying into their PalmPilots.

And just as the internet continued reshaping the world long after Pets.com curled up and died, AI will keep marching on whether or not today’s multiples survive a stiff breeze. The technology is real. The valuations, however, will eventually need to stop hyperventilating and sit down with a glass of water.

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.