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@Camp4 Except 80s music

One of my contrarian takes: Society peaked in the 80s, and it’s been in slow decline ever since. It was the last era of widespread optimism. You can feel it in the music and movies. “Excess meets innocence.” The 80s also mark the end of the analog world—local economies, in-person everything, and a certain forced simplicity. Malls, movie theaters, magazines, and BMX. Then, beginning in the 90s, came the tidal wave of tech: Mobile phones The internet Social media AI All incredible innovations, with lots of positives. But on the whole I think they’re *net negatives* for society. We replaced a finite, real-world experience with an infinite, digital one. Infinite information. Infinite comparison. Infinite distraction. Human’s aren’t wired for that, and you can see the consequences all around us.

The bond market sees inflation rising above 5.3% YoY over the next twelve months.

Apollo down 41%. Blackstone down 46%. Blue Owl down 66%. $265 billion in PE market cap erased. Private credit was the "safe" alternative. Until it wasn't.

BREAKING: A top apollo executive just admitted that the $2 TRILLION private credit market is effectively built on fake valuations. John Zito, co president of the asset management arm at Apollo Global Management, said something rarely said publicly in private markets: “I literally think all the marks are wrong. I think private equity marks are wrong.” Here is what that means. Private equity firms buy companies using private credit loans. Unlike stocks, these companies do not trade on public markets every day. So the firms themselves decide what those companies are worth. When economic conditions weaken, there is no market forcing valuations to fall. Many firms simply keep reporting the same high valuations instead of marking assets down. Zito specifically pointed to software companies bought between 2018 and 2022, when private equity paid much higher prices than similar public companies were worth. If the economy slows, he estimates loans to a typical mid size software company could recover only 20 to 40 cents on the dollar. That implies potential losses of 60% to 80%. And the first signs of stress are already appearing. Funds linked to Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and Cliffwater LLC have recently limited investor withdrawals after redemption requests exceeded quarterly limits. Investors are trying to withdraw money faster than these funds can return it. Private credit has grown into a $2 Trillion market over the past decade as investors searched for higher yields outside traditional bonds. But the stability of this market depends heavily on how assets are valued. And as Zito’s comments suggest, those valuations may not reflect reality.

Soooo Battle of the LLMs in March madness brackets in determining which is best? I feel many brackets are duplicates this yr due to ppl asking AI to fill it out for them.

JUST IN: Elon Musk says AI will make jobs "optional" in the future due to "universal high income."

@APompliano For a time everyone on CNBC were like, "it won't take jobs, it'll empower existing jobs".... Bra. It's going to be havoc and all roads lead to UBI

Beginning of the destruction, and barely factoring AI about to EAT in coming years. All roads leading to universal basic income to keep the jobless consumer going directly from the AI overlords.

My iran/oil prediction... Trump reaches a pain point with oil prices and declares victory, halts attacks, and starts wrapping things up. Oil initially plummets bigly on the news. Iran realizes they now have a way to hurt Trump/USA and have no intent in letting bygones be bygones, so they ramp up attacks on Hurmuz and surrounding tankers/platforms/facilities. Oil shoots to new ath's on the realization Iran control the timeline, not Trump. In a rage Trump hits back with a fury that dwarfs the initial attacks and oil reaches prices once thought impossible. this is what I would call one of the better scenarios.

@Ross__Hendricks @Tryng2lookahead 💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯

15 years of an unrelenting bull market, where each and every dip was an automatic buying opportunity, and every macro crisis was immediately solved with money printing or some version of the Trump TACO, has conditioned an entire generation to be utterly unprepared for a true crisis

Trump has backed himself into a corner and there is no way for him to TACO out now! The only thing he had going for him was an inflated stock market that kept people reasonably happy because their 401k’s were still going up. But we all knew it was riding the AI bubble, but now with his new war that won’t end in weeks, but months (if he is lucky) the US economy is heading fast for a world of hurt! Gas prices will skyrocket across the US and even the hardcore MAGA followers will abandon him. You just couldn’t ask for a more incompetent and unprepared administration. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes 🤦🏻‍♂️

@SwingTraderQ Yup good fundamental backdrop not

49 DAYS of slow move. It's ready to squeeze higher. we should see 10-15% rally from now to April. $spy $spx

Update

I take immense comfort in the fact that every single person on CNBC today is agreed that this oil shock is temporary, won't affect the economy, and that stocks can only go up from here. Also the horrid jobs report and Blackrock killing redemptions on their private credit fund doesn't matter. Good news across the board.

@cryptopunk7213 @CryptoInsider23 - SAFEST jobs are... bartenders, dishwashers and lifeguards - any manual labour that AI can't automate (yet) this accounts for 30% of the job market. Oh thank God?

wow Anthropic just published a crazy report on AI replacing your job and er... you might want to look at this: - #1 most at-risk jobs are computer programmers, financial analysts (rip excel bros) and customer service - most at-risk workers are female, white, older and higher paid. - BUT high-risk jobs *aren't* firing employees... they've STOPPED HIRING. biggest victims: college graduates (4X more likely to be fucked) - entry-level hiring has dropped 14% since chatgpt launched (for highest risk jobs) - SAFEST jobs are... bartenders, dishwashers and lifeguards - any manual labour that AI can't automate (yet) this accounts for 30% of the job market. - this was the scariest part: AI models are capable of automating most work TODAY but are prevented because of law and slow company adoption. so its not even a fucking skill issue its an ADOPTION issue. - now its important to understand that the study is based on real world data but also 'theoretical' intelligence. so take it with a pinch of salt. some jobs (manual labor) didn't even meet min. data reqs i applaud anthropic on being so damn transparent - they're literally the company behind claude who will be responsible for these impacts studies like this will help us figure it the hell out. LOT of change coming this year.

We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds. We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers. We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate. The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best. That's not education. That's sabotage. The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying. Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.

Highly recommend listening to Stan Druckenmiller's latest interview with Morgan Stanley. Some of my favourite thoughts: - Contrarianism is overrated. The crowd is right 80% of the time - just don't get caught in the other 20% - Your edge isn't being right, it's sizing when you're right and cutting when you're wrong. Soros playbook. - You don't need to understand everything. He couldn't spell Nvidia. He trusted people smarter than him on the details, then made the call - Volatility isn't the enemy. It's your entry point if you have conviction - TA and price/news signals worked until everyone learned them. Edge dies when it becomes consensus - Courage (Balls) matters more than wisdom. He's smarter now than in his 30s and was a better PM then. He had more nerve - Scars don't go away - and they shouldn't. But mistakes are a moment in time. Get over it and move on - Growth investors didn't want Teva, value investors didn't want it either. That's exactly where the opportunity was - stocks stuck in no man's land between investor bases - Where the smartest young people are going is a leading indicator. He tracked Stanford kids shifting from crypto to AI before the trade was obvious - Knowing when something is big doesn't mean you'll hold it perfectly. He sold Nvidia at 800, it went to 1400. Even with the right thesis you'll still screw up the execution - Pattern recognition compounds over decades. There's no silver bullet, just 40 years of seeing things before

Word of the century... DISINTERMEDIATION

The Bureau of Labor Statistics admitted something they can't take back. The US didn't add 584,000 jobs last year. It added only 181,000. They were off by 69 percent and this wasn't a one-time miss. 2024 was revised down by 818,000 jobs. 2023 down by 306,000. Over 2.1 million jobs erased from the record in three years. The combined revisions from the Great Recession were roughly half that. Take healthcare out of the picture and the rest of the economy didn't just slow down. It went backwards. Every industry outside of healthcare collectively lost 210,000 jobs in 2025. Now layer this on top. Goldman Sachs says AI is already killing 5,000 to 10,000 jobs per month in the most exposed industries. Forrester says 10.4 million jobs vanish by 2030. They don't come back after a rate cut. Anthropic's own CEO says AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs. A book chapter called "AI and Bitcoin" published a timeline. Coders replaced by 2028, teachers by 2029, doctors by 2030, lawyers by 2031. Bold claims and a very aggressive timeline. But Salesforce just replaced 4,000 support workers with AI agents. Block fired 40 percent of its staff and the stock jumped 20 percent. The market is now rewarding job cuts. Citrini Research published a scenario last week that went viral and rattled Wall Street. Their thesis is simple and terrifying. AI gets better, companies fire workers. Fired workers stop spending, companies lose revenue. They fire more workers and buy more AI. A feedback loop with no natural brake. The top 1 percent of firms already capture 93 percent of corporate profits in America. AI doesn't flatten that curve but instead steepens it. The IMF director called it a tsunami. She said most nations aren't ready. We're watching the labor market weaken in real time while the technology accelerating the damage gets cheaper every quarter. And the technology capable of replacing millions of workers is moving faster than any retraining program, policy proposal, or safety net being discussed in Washington. Bookmark and share this.