Video & Podcast Of The Week
Trumpcoin And The Inauguration, Ceasefire In Gaza & Two Videos To Watch This Week
It’s been an interesting week and things are definitely speeding up. I still have this gut feeling that we could get some fireworks in 2025. You have Biden & Co. continuing to stir things up (or trying to amend the Constitution via Twitter), Europe continuing to be a political dumpster fire, and Trump’s inauguration tomorrow. You have a ceasefire in Gaza, a 100 year partnership between the Ukraine and the UK, and rumblings that Israel is planning an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Don’t forget the Trump meme coin launched on Friday night (Strategic Trumpcoin Reserve incoming). My podcast that I will be putting up on Tuesday should be a timely one.
I try to stay up to date as much as possible, but it looks like Trump will have his hands full with everything going on. We will see what his first 100 days look like, but I’m hoping he can get things moving quickly after the inauguration. I would like to point people to Mark Wauck’s recent updates, which are must reads, as always. He has been all over what is going on with the Gaza ceasefire, Ukraine, Trump’s designs on Greenland, and everything else happening on the geopolitical stage.
Wall Street For Main Street w/ Mayhem
This video is the perfect follow up to my section on AI from my post last week. They weren’t just focused on AI, but the broader market as well. They covered geopolitics and the impact of weaponizing the dollar, quantum computing, and euphoria in certain segments of the market. They both agreed that duration risk in bonds doesn’t make sense here, and Mayhem said he might be more interested at 5.5-6% on the 10 year. He also thinks that the market will see different leadership in 2025 than 2024, and the rotation into commodities could be picking up. For 2025, he views AI as a “show me” story.
He walks through some of the questions he had on CAPEX spend, grid capacity, and chip quality. In its current form, AI is unreliable, and it doesn’t know if the data produced is accurate. He talked about retrieval augmented generation, which is a fancy way of saying that AI searches Google to double check the output. They also talked about the bias and guardrails on how models are trained, and why the models stopped using data newer than 2021 or 2022. Huge parts of the web have been contaminated by AI generated content, and that polluted content feeds into AI models, making it harder to train new models than it was a couple years ago. If you want to watch a video on AI, markets, commodities, and everything in between, this one’s for you.
Gold Goats n’ Guns w/ Vince Lanci
If you’re interested in what might happen on the geopolitical stage in 2025 after Trump is inaugurated tomorrow, this is the podcast for you. They talked about the method to Trump’s madness with his Cabinet and social media use, the economic pickle Europe is in, and the impact of Bessent (who knows his way around Foreign Exchange markets) at the Treasury, with Powell at the Fed. We will see pretty quickly once Trump is in what parts of the agenda will be put in place, but there are a ton of moving pieces and this podcast will help breakdown at least a couple for listeners.
One of the other things that Tom brought up (he has been banging the drum on this for a while) is the impact of RINS, and the potential economic boost the US would get from getting rid of ethanol. Gasoline that’s 40-50 cents cheaper per gallon, better engine efficiency, and fewer long-term engine issues that come from ethanol. As an aside, this was an interesting topic because I have looked into trying to find ethanol free gas here Boise. In short, it’s a pain in the ass. Overall, this podcast was entertaining and definitely will be food for thought if you have the time to listen to it.
Ethanol as a gasoline oxygenate is farm subsidy policy masquerading as energy policy. From farm to tank it's barely net positive on a BTU basis. That said, I own a late model GTDI vehicle and love the detonation resistance and charge cooling affect afforded by ethanol blends.