Pump-Pain Spreads: Retail Sales Soar To Record High, Sentiment Sits As Record Low

Situational Unawareness Via Rabobank, Markets have a habit of explaining every move with the most obvious narrative available. This week, that narrative was earnings. Investors spent days dissecting cloud growth, AI capex, free cash flows, and also Fed messaging, while some of the most dramatic price action of this summer was being driven by something else entirely.  That "something else" was Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund run by a 24-year-old whizz-kid, which reportedly had to offload most of its public equity book to Citadel following the recent tech rout. It turns...

Curious Timing: Ukraine Declares Druzhba Pipeline Repaired After New Hungarian PM Elected Ukraine announced Tuesday it completed repairs to the damaged Druzhba oil pipeline and stands ready to resume pumping Russian oil to Europe, a step Ukrainian officials expect will unlock a long-delayed EU aid package. The timing is quite interesting and surely not coincidental given that Hungary's newly elected PM Péter Magyar and his victorious Tisza party are now in Budapest rapidly preparing for the transfer of power in Hungary. Magyar just accomplished a dramatic landslide defeat of Viktor Orbán...

Closer Look Reveals April Jobs Report Was A Disaster, And AI Is Now Here To Take Your Job On the surface today's jobs report was very strong: headline payrolls came in nearly double the expected (115K vs 65K), with unemployment flat just so Trump's chief economist Kevin Hassett could push bullish taking points in today's TV circuit such as this one. *HASSETT: 'RIP-ROARING' JOBS MARKET Unfortunately, below the surface this was the ugliest jobs report in years, and one could say even more cooked than last month's laughable surge in jobs (which...