The Woke Street Journal
I will be at Inside ETFs Tuesday-Thursday so no note those days. Back Friday
We are ringing the closing bell on the CBOE on 5/23 for the Brendan Wood Top Gun ETF (BWTG) in Chicago. Cocktail reception to follow. If you are going to be in Chicago and would like to come let me know.
Market
Market’s feel a bit heavy here ahead of big inflation data this week—-PPI on Tuesday, CPI on Wednesday. The market is going to want to see cooler inflation and economic growth slowing (also a bunch of important economic releases). So unlike last week, with not much going on, this should be an important week as far as the data goes.
Path of least resistance is to re test the highs, but again feels heavy and going to be data dependent.
Can’t help but wonder if this is going to be one of “those” articles we look back on later and highlight for how awful the timing was. Wall Street Offloads Crash Insurance as Fear Fades Across Assets-Bloomberg
Appetite to hedge against a stock crash has hit a nine-year low by one measure with fear fading across the options landscape big and small, from equity to fixed income. All told, a Bank of America Corp. indicator of cross-asset stress is flashing benign signals.
Argentine stocks had a tough week as well. Will be looking to get back into a few on Monday. Names I am watching are CEPU, DESP, and YPF. Not a surprise the media is going after Milei. You don’t pull off the kind of transition he is trying to pull off without some pain.
Argentina’s President Pledged Fiscal Shock Therapy. So Far, He’s Delivering Economic Pain.-WSJ
Economy
I wonder why the economic reports all paint the picture of a strong economy yet Biden’s polling numbers on the economy suck. I think the economy is in much worse shape than the numbers suggest.
Are Shoppers Really Pulling Back? Retail Earnings Will Offer Clues.-Barron’s
I think they are. Personal debt is through the roof as is inflation, this can’t be good. I will also be looking for signs of stagflation this week. Powell says he doesn’t see it, he is wrong a lot.
Angry shoppers are fighting back against inflation — even the wealthy ones. Companies are feeling it.-MarketWatch
Low-income consumers are especially sensitive to high prices, but A&M’s latest consumer survey found that households across the income spectrum now intend to cut back on spending. Households earning $150,000 to $200,000 reported the highest rates of planning to pare back purchases.
As much as they want to try to tell you it’s come down or it’s because of shrinkflation you know what you are paying at the grocery store or the pump. Consumer sentiment tumbles as inflation fears surge-CNBC.com
Along with the downbeat sentiment measure, the outlook for inflation across the one- and five-year horizons increased.
The one-year outlook jumped to 3.5%, up 0.3 percentage point from a month ago to the highest level since November.
When you are clueless and the data you are looking at is bad, that’s a big problem. The Fed Depends on Increasingly Questionable Data. That’s a Problem.-Barron’s
While the revisions cooled concerns that the economy is overheating, dramatic changes to reported data make it more difficult to discern economic trends overall, including those in the U.S. labor market. And the recent revisions to the jobs data are hardly the only figures that have led economists and analysts to question the credibility of government statistics.
Woke Companies
There is a reason we created the Shareholder’s First Index and will be launching ESGX (if we can get through the censorship). We believe that companies that solely focus on making money should do better than those that don’t. Companies go un-woke in embarrassing U-turn telling their staff to 'be silent'-GB News
Firms including Unilever - owner of Dove, Vaseline and Hellmann's - have axed their new ESG initiatives and will instead "be silent versus to take a stance".
"Many executives have made the decision that it's sometimes safer to just be silent versus to take a stance, because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders and their bottom line and are very concerned about how this will be perceived," Naomi Wheeless, a board director for Eventbrite told Business Insider.
But there will always be companies to short. JESSE WATTERS: Wall Street liberals force companies to go woke to pay off the social justice gods-Fox News
A former sales chief is suing IBM's Red Hat for being sacked alongside 20 other white men during the software subsidiary's aggressive diversity push to hire more women and African Americans.
Woke
Shocking. Boy Scouts Want To Include Everyone, But Now No One Wants To Join-Daily Wire
Between 2019 and 2021, the Boy Scouts lost close to half its membership.
On Campus
Climate Change
Nevermind Those EVs — Oil Demand Keeps Growing-Bloomberg
Gasoline consumption is rising beyond what many had anticipated even as electric vehicles become more popular. Notwithstanding the increase in EV sales, there are now more cars than ever powered by internal-combustion engines. And pump prices are at levels that don’t discourage consumption, particularly in emerging markets.
Border
What took so long? A bunch of military aged Chinese men crossing the border doesn’t raise alarm bells somewhere? EXCLUSIVE: House Committee To Investigate Spike In Chinese Illegal Immigration Following DCNF Report-Daily Caller
The House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability will hold a hearing on Thursday concerning the roughly 8,000% increase in Chinese illegal immigration the U.S. has experienced since March 2021, as well as policies by border authorities that may have contributed to the spike, a committee spokesperson told the DCNF.
It was never about economic growth. Mass Immigration Has "Utterly Failed" Britain As New Report Debunks Myths Of Economic Growth & Fiscal Benefits-ZeroHedge
Mass immigration has not delivered the economic growth successive U.K. governments claimed it would and has contributed to rising pressure on public services, Britain’s former immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, has claimed in a report written in collaboration with a leading think tank.
Censorship
From Matt Taibbi’s newsletter about the Canadian Harms Act:
Trudeau was lying when he said C-63 was “very, very specifically focused on correcting kids.” The purview of the Online Harms Act extends far beyond speech, reimagining society as a mandated social engineering project, creating transformational new procedures that would:
enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system;
introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “will commit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
penalize past statements. The law gets around prohibitions against “retroactive” punishment by calling the offense “continuous communication” of hate, i.e. the crime is your failure to take down bad speech;
force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”
Politics
The DNC Is Preparing for the Worst in Chicago — Without the Help of the City’s Mayor-Politico
As Democrats plan their convention, they’ll have to address the elephant in the room: How to mitigate the threat of disruptions and work with a rookie mayor who unabashedly sympathizes with the protesters.
Self preservation > ideology? Vulnerable Senate Dems lukewarm on reported White House plan for Palestinian refugees-Politico
Electorally vulnerable Senate Democrats are in a tricky position over Biden administration plans to allow Palestinian refugees into the U.S. — a move that's becoming a political football in the party's toughest races.
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