Jim Bianco

2/5 As the table below shows, crude oil futures prices for delivery into 2027 are trading in extreme backwardation. https://t.co/DjwNeNCkB2 3/5 Below is the calendar spread between the first contract (now April) and the 6th contract (now September). As the bottom panel shows, this spread is -25%, a record since the mid-1990s when the contract specifications were last changed. https://t.co/GvxZTcBpWN 4/5 The next chart plots the deferred contracts. The March 2027 (green) contract is up “only” 9.99%, while the April 2026 contract (blue) is up 53%. https://t.co/fFtIfXC8lU 5/5 The charts and table above show the market is pricing a short …

The SPX has corrected 5% for the first time since November. https://t.co/xAeR8FIbvH

If the current prices hold until the close (Monday afternoon), today will be the biggest one-day rise in the history of crude oil futures trading (which began in the 1980s). (An argument could be made the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s produced larger one-day rises, but there was no listed futures back then.)

Translation ... no TACO (See the price chart reposted below.) https://t.co/iIkwRZJGs3

The national average of gasoline prices is up 45 cents since the war began last week, or a 15.12% increase. This is the second largest increase in the last two decades, depending on the measure you choose (dollar or percentage). All things equal, a 15% rise in gasoline prices adds about 0.45% to March headline CPI.

5th largest day since the Financial Crisis https://t.co/29D9wg2Tij

How long until this is applied to measuring the economy?

The national average of gasoline prices is now up 32 cents (13%) since last Friday (bottom panel). If these prices hold the rest of the month, the gasoline rise alone will now add 0.4% to headline CPI. Add the Cleveland Fed's estimate that CORE CPI would rise 0.25%, and that March CPI could be 0.6% of 0.7%. This could push March's Y/Y CPI to 3% (January was 2.4%), even higher for PCE.

Since the protests began in Iran in December, Brent Crude oil is up 43% (red). 22% (green) of this rise, or roughly half of this overall move, occurred BEFORE hostilities began this past weekend. https://t.co/2K5vDJ7QfA

The US 10-year yield is now up 20 bps since Friday's close. The biggest such rise in 11 months. Why? See the retweet below. https://t.co/mFCVHbpWo2

*CIRCUIT BREAKER TRIGGERED AFTER S. KOREA'S KOSPI PLUNGES 8% *KOREA'S KOSPI EXTENDS DROP TO 10% AFTER TRADING RESUMES The chart shows that the South Korean KOSPI stock index has doubled since last August (green) and has already corrected 17% from Friday's high (red), including a 10% correction today. This market is not for the faint of heart. South Korea's market is retail-dominated. It is estimated that up to 70% of its trading is retail, compared to about 20% for the NYSE. For years, South Korea was the world's largest equity options market by contract volume, even larger than the United States. This is a remarkable fact for a mid-sized…

A complementary explanation for the sudden mass cancellations lies in an under-appreciated regulatory dynamic: Solvency II, the European Union’s insurance capital framework. This regime was enacted in 2016, before Brexit; the United Kingdom effectively copied and retained it in full through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, so that Lloyd’s syndicates and the International Group P&I clubs continue to operate under functionally identical rules today. In plain terms, these rules mandate that insurers and reinsurers must at all times hold sufficient capital to withstand a “once-in-200-year” loss event. When conflict escalated in the Gul…

@DREZDNN Hope so

The SPX is now down ~2.5%. As the red annotations show, the 10-year yield is 5 bps lower to 4.06%. Bonds are being bought as crash insurance. This probably means stocks have to crash to keep bonds from trading back to 4.11%. https://t.co/Ks8NfeSfzT

Yesterday, the national average gasoline price jumped 11.2 cents (bottom panel). This exceeded the largest one-day jump after the start of the Russia-Ukraine War in March 2022 of 10.9 cents. Only the early September 20025 one-day jump of 19 cents was larger. This was when Category 5 Hurricane Katrina tore up oil infrastructure in the Gulf around New Orleans. --- Keep in mind, this is the beginning of the month. So starting the month with a big daily jump in gasoline prices could lead to a huge increase in Energy CPI for March. Will it be rationalized away? Yes. But if you want the Fed to cut rates, things just got a lot more complicated if…

Once CPI and PPI are released, the street is VERY ACCURATE at taking that raw data and re-weighting it for PCE. PCE uses the same raw inputs as CPI and PPI (some PPI categories are included in PCE), but with different weightings. I plugged in 3.1% for January YoY core PCE into the chart below (from the table in the repost), and it shows YoY core PCE is now running 0.6% ABOVE YoY Core CPI. It is very close to a 40+ year extreme. --- The joke for decades was that the Fed preferred PCE over CPI simply because PCE was typically a lower inflation measure (red bars, bottom panel). The only time this spread flipped to positive (green bars, bottom …

When a market is opened up to “mom-and-pop investors,” that previously wasn’t, what’s your guess the next move will be? Now they are letting "Mom-and-Pop" in to buy data centers. (amazing chart) https://t.co/TkAGie36YG

Many look at public figure statements or magazine covers and declare that they are contrarian or signal a reversal in a recent financial market trend. Often they are merely statements noting past market moves. Such statements are of limited value to the contrarian. But when they give truly “forward-looking predictions” about the NEXT move in financial markets, contrarians jump on them as a signal of an impending trend reversal. Trump statements today about mortgage rates are exactly the type of forward-looking predictions that contrarian looks for. He so sure about the FUTURE move in mortgage rates (or bond yields in general) that he’s ad…

An Alternate View of the Post-AI Labor Market AI collapses software costs and automates database drudgery. This newly affordable efficiency makes demand explode, creating new complex problems that future companies with human employees will solve. Yet if job destruction outpaces creation, we risk a historical societal revolt instead of a technological breakthrough. ---- The fear echoed in the Citrini Research report that AI will usher in a doomsday labor market fundamentally misunderstands the nature of business. At its core, every business exists to solve a human problem. A hospital treats illness, automakers create affordable transportatio…

@wgm5239 https://t.co/jefYAItyJu

@calvinfroedge https://t.co/vRGIlAsL1L

We need to rule the database — and end its rule over us. Citrini assumes AI will destroy thousands of high-paying jobs and create none in return. He’s missing the real story. The modern job has become soul-draining, mind-numbing database slavery. Millions of talented, ambitious people spend hours of their lives chained to a screen: fixing other people’s mistakes, chasing missing fields, reformatting decks for the tenth time, and babysitting bloated spreadsheets no one will ever read. Our entire existence is ruled by the database. You can’t board a plane, clear security, close a mortgage, pay taxes, or resolve a customer issue unless the sy…

As of Fri's close, the SPX sat just 0.99% below its Jan 28 all-time high (~6,978.6). Yet everyone's screaming "chaos & uncertainty"? Blue = mkt-cap wgted avg "VIX" of the 500 constituents (now 38) Orange = standard 30-day VIX (17.6) Green = spread at a record +20 pts (back to 2014). Individual stock volatility is exploding vs the index.

@DREZDNN Promise me you did this and it's not a troll

This took $BTC down 5% in an hour, now under $65k https://t.co/QcxVGcKj9m

I like this thinking... SCOTUS sits in the Front Row for the SOTU. If they rule against tariffs, and markets "wobble" in any way." Trump will look SCOTUS in the eye and tell the world they wrecked the economy. Better to wait until the State of the Union passes.

Below I mentioned that the “permission” bitcoin summer (bull market) is over. Bloomberg posted a story that effectively said the same thing. https://t.co/7el4V8Uu0G

@Cato_184_CENSOR The same chart is above, going back to April 30th, 2020, the end of the COVID recession. Yes, all correlations end eventually. Why will this one end now? And if software stocks were to recover, do you want it to end now? https://t.co/WK0gEmnGQF

Software stocks are struggling again today. $IGV (iShares Software ETF) is essentially back to last week's panic lows. Don't forget there's another type of software, "programmable money," crypto. Bitcoin (blue) with the software index (orange). They are the same thing. https://t.co/tLEELqcWcJ

Correct! https://t.co/pcf8siIbTP