Robert Parenteau, CFA

Renegade economist/investment strategist for large global Asset Mgr, Research Associate @ Levy Institute, GISP, Itinerant permaculturist

[Robert Parenteau, CFA @MacroEdge1]

1/n What else might you expect from someone who joined and advised a fascist Party in Austria? Mises wrote in the 1927 book:[43]

"It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions"

[Steve Hanke @steve_hanke]

“Socialism is an alternative to capitalism as potassium cyanide is an alternative to water.” --Ludwig von Mises

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

A look back at the stocks that traded above 10x sales at the dot-com peak.

What happened next:

– Cisco: ~25x sales, P/E above 200. Crashed -90%. Finally broke its 2000 peak in December 2025. 25 years and 8 months later.
– Intel: ~13x sales. Crashed -82%. Finally broke its 2000 peak in May 2026. Almost exactly 26 years later.
– Microsoft: ~25x sales. Crashed -65%. Took 16 years and 8 months to make a new high (October 2016).
– Qualcomm: ~30x sales. Crashed -88%. Took roughly 20 years to break even.
– Sun Microsystems: ~10x sales. Crashed -97%. Acquired by Oracle in 2009.
– JDSU: ~50x sales. Crashed -99%. Broken into pieces.
– Yahoo: ~50x sales. Crashed -97%. Sold to Verizon for a fraction.
– Lucent: ~10x sales. Crashed -99%. Eventually absorbed by Nokia.
– Nortel: ~15x sales. Bankrupt in 2009.

Then there's the famous mega survivor.

Amazon traded at ~30x sales at the peak. It still crashed -97%. The investor who bought at the top held through a 97% drawdown before eventually making money roughly a decade later.

The lesson isn't that every 10x sales stock ends in zero.

It's that even the eventual winners crash 90%+ first, and break even only after a generation.

Cisco. Intel. Microsoft. Amazon. The four greatest tech survivors of the dot-com era. Average time to break even on price alone: roughly 19 years. Inflation-adjusted, the math is uglier.

You have to be very right, very early, and willing to hold through unimaginable pain.

Most people aren't.

[kristen shaughnessy @kshaughnessy2]

Real Risk Comes With Weaker Bank Rules

“…Under the current trajectory, proposed rollbacks are projected to slash the aggregate capital requirements for the nation’s largest institutions by 6 percent.

Barr noted that this shift translates to "$60 billion less in capital to protect against bank failure and instability that could spread through the financial system."

The warning comes at a time when the eight largest global systemically important banks (GSIBs) command roughly 60 percent of all domestic banking assets….”

[Rosanna Prestia, MBA @RosannaInvests]

🚨 The “blowout” jobs report that just killed your rate cut? Misleading.

It was bartenders. 🍺

70K hospitality hires for the World Cup -> 5x normal. Wall Street saw a hot economy. It was a soccer tournament.

Back out the one-off and there’s NO blowout -> just trend. Yes, there’s a soccer tournament sitting on top of a trend-line economy. 🤯

Look under the hood. 🧵

[American Veteran @amvetsupport]

MAGA vets. Weigh in.

With the recent ICE funding, ICE now has more money that the entire United States Marine Corps. There are 204,000 marines and 28,000 ICE personnel. ICE now has 85 billion. The entire marine budget is 54 billion. This is absolutely insane.

What the holy hell is wrong with Congress. More importantly, what the hell did veterans vote for to give trump his own army?

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

It’s not “crazy,” it’s fraud.

Elon saw his deal was floundering, called up one of his biggest investors, and did a circular financing deal to paper over his lack of revenue. Google owns 5% of SpaceX.

This is just straight up crime.

[OddStats @OddStats]

If you're not watching SpaceX (already -29% from all time highs) crash on Hyperliquid before it even IPOs, I don't know what you're doing with your life.

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[jeffrey lee funk @jeffreyleefunk]

Internal messages show employees mocking AI tools, including the company’s own internal AI coding tool, Jetski, complaining they’re unreliable and make their jobs harder while CEO Sundar Pichai brags that 75% of company’s new code is AI-generated. https://t.co/mENX9u5BDA

[James Chanos @RealJimChanos]

This nine-month contract has more easy outs than a kid’s t-ball game. $GOOG $SPCX

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

Why did the market sell-off on Friday? Well it was kinda scripted.. This is from Monday…

[Robert Parenteau, CFA @MacroEdge1]

Liberal democratic capitalism has truly & royally f*cked itself. Begin reCommoning again.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

Jimmy Dore: "We preach democracy to China. But we don't have democracy here - the oligarchs run everything. The Princeton study proved 90% of people's wishes never become law. Only the top 10% of wealthy matter.

In China, the government sits above capital. The economy works for the people. Here, capital sits above government. The economy works for billionaires"

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Absolutely brutal day for AI fantasies:

Nvidia $NVDA: down 6.2%
Broadcom $AVGO: down 7.92%
Coreweave $CRWV: down 7.07%
Nebius $NBIS: down 12.27%
Oracle $ORCL: down 9.59%

Worst of all?

OpenAI is rumored to be looking for government to invest, a huge sign of weakness.

Less than 24 hours after the S&P said no to fast-tracking, things are looking very different.

[Robert Parenteau, CFA @MacroEdge1]

Pull on the threads, and you find they all lead back to the same spider web. Untangle yourself, help others cut free of this web of deceit, destruction, and extraction.

[Samantha LaDuc @SamanthaLaDuc]

Thiel, Milei, Netanyahu, Trump

They are all in cahoots to do no good.

[Peter Berezin @PeterBerezinBCA]

Open AI proposes a Public Wealth Fund. No details on whether such fund would be buying OpenAI shares at a $2 trillion valuation, or whether OpenAI would be magnanimously granting free shares to the public. I have my hunch on which one it is.

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be.

I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

[Polemic Paine @PolemicTMM]

Everest is turning into a cruise ship for egos.

[Jason Mikula @mikulaja]

Newly installed Fed Chair Warsh has brought on Paul Winfree as an advisor. Winfree was the key author of the "Project 2025" chapter on the Fed, where he describes the "most effective" reform as *abolishing* the Fed:

[Samantha LaDuc @SamanthaLaDuc]

Good article - food for thought.

The era of "Subsidized AI" may be coming to an end

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

More on this: 662 Billion Reasons To Worry: Moody's Raises AI Data-Center Funding Fears As Apollo Shops Huge Anthropic Debt Deal

https://t.co/vW8UE0LrnG