I wrote this before the Big Game was played, so apologies in advance if I missed any amazing memes that could have been included in XTOD’s today.
Still recovering from your Super Bowl-induced haze? Well, nothing cures a hangover like thinking about bond yields. (Okay, maybe that’s not true, but stick with me.)
Fresh off Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments about the Trump Administration’s focus on lower 10-year yields, let’s take a quick market temperature check. Do you think the 10-year yield will be above or below 4.50% on March 31, 2025? Vote below and let’s see if our collective wisdom—or Monday morning grogginess—has any predictive power.
Friday’s Jobs Report could have come across as disappointing, if you stopped at the headline of only +143K jobs added vs. expectations for +170K. However, if you looked just an inch below the surface you would have seen solid upward revisions in the prior months readings, the unemployment rate falling to 4.0%, even while the participation rate was rising, and observed a strong increase in average hourly earnings. Overall this report is considered strong.
Given the attention to the Jobs report, you might have missed some pretty interesting results in the preliminary results of the UofM Consumer Sentiment Survey. Directly from the release:
A 5% decline in the overall sentiment measure, reaching its lowest level in 14 months.
Year-ahead inflation expectations jumped up from 3.3% last month to 4.3% this month, the highest reading since November 2023 and marking two consecutive months of unusually large increases.
This is only the fifth time in 14 years we have seen such a large one-month rise (one percentage point or more) in year-ahead inflation expectations.
Why is confidence deteriorating and inflation expectations rising, it seems like the reason might be found in this statement: “Many consumers appear worried that high inflation will return within the next year.”
The tariff topic doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon as Trump discussed adding reciprocal tariffs on trading partners. The week starts with the S&P 500 at 6,205, the 2Y yield at 4.30% and the 10Y yield at 4.50%. We’ll see what CPI has to offer this week and whether Powell offers up anything interesting in his semi-annual testimony to Congress.
Like inflation itself, the topic of how investors should invest to insulate their portfolio from the negative impacts of inflation is persistent. In a recent blog post titled “Did Real Assets Provide an Inflation Hedge When Investors Needed it Most? Marc Fandetti, CFA explored the role of real assets as go-to inflation hedge. If real assets are supposed to be our inflation buddy, it turns out they were a bad friend during the 2021-2023 inflation search. Despite the hype, broad-market data reveals that real assets mostly moved in the wrong direction when inflation spiked. Only natural resources managed to barely outpace the headline CPI, but commodities were the real winners. The bottom line is real assets largely failed to protect against inflation when it mattered most.
Look, we can talk all we want about inflation and macro topics, but the real news of Friday was the return of Hawk Tuah girl Hailey Welch. After investors took a $430 million bath on her memecoin, she emerges from whatever hole she was hiding in to say, "Thanks to my true fans... we're trying to, like, sort things out and make everything right... Oh my God, I'm gonna cry". So much to read into there, but we’ll save analyzing that statement for another day. Nonetheless, This whole Hawk Tuah coin saga is a microcosm of the degenerate meme coin casino.
Speaking of meme coin casino’s, it’s a good thing that reputable professional organizations like the CFA are doing their part to embrace crypto and tokens. I can picture Ben Graham throwing his life’s work that was the foundation of the CFA program in the trash now. In fairness, a recent CFA Research Policy Report titled “An Investment Perspective on Tokenization” states their report “explicitly excludes unbacked tokens native to the blockchain (e.g., cryptocurrencies) from its discussion of tokenization, focusing instead on tokens representing real-world and financial assets.“ The report focuses on the boring stuff: tokenizing real-world and financial assets. They're all excited about fractionalizing assets and opening up private markets to the masses, while I am concerned about a wider range of less sophisticated investors losing their shirts. This all sounds great in theory, but let's not forget the Hawk Tuah investors, who clearly needed a crash course in "what is a business" before throwing their money at digital trading cards. As the CFA notes investors may have a limited understanding of tokenized products and the report stresses the importance of investor education as financial innovation continues to flourish. At least the CFA acknowledges we're likely handing rubes a loaded weapon and should probably teach them how to aim before they blow their faces off. I don’t know about you, but I’m waiting for part 2 of CFA’s report.
While I may remain skeptical and wonder if tokenization is a solution in search of a problem, the report does highlight the potential for real benefits of tokenization. These benefits generally fall into the category of efficiency and reduction in cost and complexity in our current intermediated processes for clearing, settlement, reconciliation and other areas throughout the investment life cycle. Specific benefits could arise in automating verification of ownership, trade matching, and recording of transactions, making them continuous, transparent, immutable, and nearly immediate. Tokenization could also be beneficial in reducing operational complexities, such as middle- and back-office costs, data discrepancies and reconciliation, risk controls, and compliance. Whether or not blockchain technology can deliver all these benefits without creating other costs and risks is still to be determined. I often find these reports tend to offer little in the cost of economic incentives required to maintain proof of work or proof of stake permissionless ledgers. And if the answer is “permissioned” or private ledgers, it starts to feel a lot more like the current system than anything new. In the meantime, I have a sneaky suspicion that the most immediate tokenized assets are likely to remain in the Meme Coin sector.
XTOD: I remember when the “Wassup” Super Bowl commercial first aired, it became a global phenomenon. https://x.com/i/status/1887685039216902502
XTOD: We are in the part of the cycle where Dave Portnoy can make a 2,500,000% return on a memecoin about him going to jail for pumping another memecoin. The Big Short 2 is writing itself as we speak
XTOD: The best test is simply, does it solve real world novel problems? If not then it's not intelligent.
XTOD: In my view, the “white collar workers will be out of a job” doesn’t quite capture it. Instead, benefits will disproportionately accrue to the most skilled and talented who will do 99% of the value delivery. In other words, AI is/will be a 1-100 amplifier, not a 0-1 creator.
The rest will be left in an awkward position where a 10x engineer becomes a 1000x engineer and a 1x engineer becomes a 3x engineer, and 1x engineer isn’t economically viable to hire.
XTOD: Maintaining passionate love forever is not only an unrealistic goal, but one that wouldn’t make you happy even if it were possible. On the contrary, the most joyful, enduring romances are those that are able to evolve from passionate to companionate love—which still has plenty of passion, but is fundamentally based in deep friendship.
To increase the odds of success, as your romance progresses, don’t ask yourself, 'Is our passion as high as it was?' but rather, 'Is our friendship deepening?'
Work deliberately to make sure that your romance grows beyond the white-hot flame that characterizes new love.
https://x.com/litcapital/status/1888642272104779993
https://x.com/nut_history/status/1887685039216902502
https://x.com/ChombaBupe/status/1887782452325716271
https://x.com/Jeyffre/status/1887821492597215292
https://x.com/arthurbrooks/status/1887523867985412303