@Jeff

Every condition Paul Tudor Jones identified as present going into the Black Monday weekend is present today. The regime configuration, meaning the cluster of overvaluation, yield shock, constrained Fed, mechanical selling overhang, and geopolitical stress, is more completely assembled than nearly any point since October 1987. Individual conditions vary in magnitude relative to their 1987 levels; the analog is about the regime, not about matching historical levels precisely. The valuation overhang is more extreme. The geopolitical catalyst is more intense. The Fed is more constrained. The yield rate-of-change shock is operationally analogous. The mechanical selling amplifier, though structurally different, shares the same feedback architecture as portfolio insurance. The one structural difference that cuts both ways: circuit breakers exist now that did not in 1987. They prevent a single-session 22% waterfall. They also compress volatility into shorter windows post-open and can generate false stabilization signals that attract buyers before the next leg lower. The analog should be read as a regime characterization, not a level forecast. The claim is not that the S&P 500 falls 22% on Monday. The claim is that the configuration of conditions, overvaluation at historically extreme multiples, a yield shock eliminating the equity risk premium, a Fed with no capacity to respond, mechanical selling amplifiers ready to cascade, and an unresolved geopolitical trigger entering the weekend, is structurally identical to the regime that produced Black Monday. That regime produced a 22% single-session crash in 1987 partly because circuit breakers did not exist. In 2026, the same regime is more likely to produce a sustained repricing over days to weeks, with elevated risk of a disorderly session if any weekend catalyst compounds the existing damage. Near-term: Monday is a live risk. The specific risks are a gap down that triggers systematic selling, a VIX spike above 30 that inverts the term structure, and a 10-year yield that fails to rally on equity weakness, removing the last potential hedge. Medium-term: Even without a disorderly Monday, the structural case for a poor risk-reward skew over the next one to three months is independent of the near-term event risk. A negative equity risk premium at a CAPE of near 40, with the Fed on hold and yields rising, is not a setup that resolves with a single session of selling. It is a setup that requires either a material decline in yields, a material decline in equity prices, or a material upward revision to earnings. None of those three conditions is likely to emerge quickly. Monday is a live risk. The next three months carry poor skew regardless of what Monday brings.

Cooper: So my opponent, Michael Whatley, will be nothing but a rubber stamp for Trump. He says what Trump says. He does what Trump wants him to do. So if Trump is in this foreign war—even though he said he wasn’t going to enter such wars—then Michael Whatley is going to be for it. He’s also in North Carolina trying to convince people that prices are down, that we’ve defeated inflation, and that our economy is great. The people of North Carolina know that’s not true. Michael Whatley has been a partisan Republican Party leader for years. He has spent a lot of time in Washington. He became a big oil lobbyist and made a lot of money doing that. He was the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party and recruited right-wing candidates like Mark Robinson—the self-described ‘Black Nazi.’ This is the kind of candidate he supports, and in fact, he is also an election denier. He still insists that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. We do not need that kind of person representing North Carolina.