Tim St. George

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@jimiuorio Yep

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@adamtaggart The U.S. government is spending $1 trillion?

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@wesbury Amen!

[UnveiledChina @Unveiled_ChinaX]

The veil of diplomatic politeness has completely dropped, exposing a raw, behind-the-closed-doors clash over the future of Asian security.

In a major diplomatic leak first revealed by Japanese media outlets Kyodo News and Yomiuri Shimbun, Chinese President Xi Jinping directly targeted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi during his private summit with Donald Trump in Beijing. Citing anonymous diplomatic sources, the bombshell report states that Xi explicitly condemned Takaichi’s defense policies, blasting her military buildup as a dangerous "revival of new militarism" that directly threatens regional peace.

Xi’s outburst was a blatant attempt to break the Western line of defense. The Chinese leader paired his attack on Takaichi with heavy criticism of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, explicitly pressuring Trump to abandon both leaders in a clear effort to drive a wedge between Washington and its closest Asian allies. However, the divide-and-conquer strategy backfired. Instead of capitulating, Trump defended Takaichi as a "great leader" and signaled that U.S. backing for Japan's security stance remains unshakeable.

Proving the strength of the alliance, Trump called Takaichi straight from Air Force One immediately after leaving Beijing to brief her in detail on the exchange. This unprecedented personal attack on a sitting Japanese Prime Minister shows just how deeply Takaichi's hawkish defensive posture—including her willingness to militarily support Taiwan in a crisis—has unnerved Beijing. By trying to isolate Tokyo and Taipei on the world stage, Xi's private maneuvering has achieved the exact opposite, demonstrating that the U.S.-Japan security alliance is more vital than ever.

#UnveiledChina #SanaeTakaichi #TrumpXiSummit #JapanDefense #USJapanAlliance #TaiwanStrait #Geopolitics #NationalSecurity

[Brett Caughran @FundamentEdge]

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI:

“Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.

And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.

These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society.

When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.”

This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@jimiuorio Are those net losses?

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@SwimCoachMarsh デイビット、おめでとう👍

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@jimiuorio @MarchMadnessMBB Yes!

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@TaviCosta And how can we consider Hong Kong, China and Korea as “emerging markets”?

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@profplum99 My son made NCAA’s his senior year at Duke in the 100 Back. People outside of swimming have NO clue how hard it is to get in. About 32 swimmers per event. Many are national champions/olympians from other countries.

Congrats and enjoy the ride!

[fred hickey @htsfhickey]

Just have to laugh at the headline. "Jensen Huang says $660 billion capex buildout is sustainable." As if he could or would say anything else. No one has benefitted more than Jensen from the massive malinvestment binge. Say anything else and the house of cards collapses.
https://t.co/lOsMFUA2cT

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@adamtaggart Crazy coincident but I just finished my first round of prep (but not my first colonoscopy). Second round tomorrow morning. Glad to have a bidet toilet seat 😎!

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@TaviCosta $109. Insane.

[Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ ل بن @elicalebon]

Chills all over my body. This is Tehran right now, the masses screaming “azadi azadi azadi” (freedom freedom freedom). For reference, 48 hours ago, @PahlaviReza issued a directive to take to the streets today at 8pm (it’s now around 11pm). The video was viewed almost 90 million times. The population of Iran is about 90 million. They heard his word and poured into the streets, unafraid.

To everybody that said the people of Iran don’t want regime change—echoing the regime’s propaganda that this was American imperialism or a “Zionist psy-op”—it’s time to disappear into the bushes like Homer.

The Iranian people have trampled every lie under foot. They are coming for the terrorists.

Stand back. It’s go time.

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

BREAKING:

The people of Tehran are burning down regime buildings right now. The crowd is MASSIVE.

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@jimiuorio The lack of relative performance by the miners tells me there is still a lot of skepticism in this bull run. Wall of worry.

[Danielle DiMartino Booth @DiMartinoBooth]

OPEN LETTER

Every Hardworking American Who Wakes Up in the
Morning Asking Themselves What Went Wrong

December 10, 2025

The Federal Open Market Committee
2051 Constitution Avenue
Washington, DC 20418

Dear Distinguished Members of the Federal Open Market Committee,

It’s time for a leadership change. Waiting for President Trump to force the stripping of the Fed’s independence is not an option. At stake is the salvation of the America envisioned by our founding fathers; you are the conduit for its deliverance this January.

American author Sherrilyn Kenyon wrote, “Redemption is never where you expect to find it.” The time is nigh to open your eyes; redemption sits before you. You are a body of 19 individuals, indemnified by legislated rights, with the power to reestablish and protect the independence of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Your vote this January to elect a Chair and Vice Chair of the FOMC is the key to your destinies and legacies, and of those who follow you in office.

Ten years ago, after leaving the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, I harnessed my energies to write Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America. It was, in the end, a blueprint to guide the 19 members of the FOMC to return the institution to its intended purpose – shepherding the U.S. dollar’s buying power and acting as lender of last resort in times of financial crises.

Generations of mission creep had led the Committee, not the Board, astray. No longer was monetary policy conducted “to promote the effective operation of the U.S. economy and, more generally, the public interest.” That guiding principle was cut short in August 2007, in an empty conference room at the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole Symposium. Then-Chair Ben Bernanke convened a coterie of his closest Committee confidantes to draft a response to a financial system under siege. In what few to this day refer to as, “The Bernanke Doctrine,” the precondition of taking interest rates to the zero bound before launching large-scale asset purchases was decided.

That Doctrine dictated the actions of December 2008, when Operations ZIRP and LSAP were launched. Four years on, to the cheers of Wall Street, a rookie on the Board warned: “We are at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.”

Jerome Powell, who’d occupied his seat around that oval table for all of four months when he made the warning at the October 24, 2012, FOMC, added that the Fed’s foray into credit easing by crowding out natural buyers of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) could be disruptive should the position be sold, as contemplated at the time: “It’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position. When you turn and say to the market, ‘I’ve got $1.2 trillion of these things,’ it’s not just $20 billion a month — it’s the sight of the whole thing coming.”

Then New York Fed President and FOMC Vice Chair William Dudley quickly quashed Powell’s qualms: “It was well understood by market participants and the press why the additional QE took place in the agency MBS market. Providing support for housing is viewed as a credible means of supporting economic activity more generally.” Few plagued with unaffordability today concur.

Another voice of reason, who recently passed and is missed, was Charles Plosser, a friend and the former president of the Philadelphia Fed. He reiterated his opposition to the third round of QE undertaken at the September 12, 2012, FOMC: “My view on that really hasn’t changed. I see the costs of the program as exceeding the benefits. I think the nature of the program makes it particularly important that we think hard about our stopping rule for our open-ended purchases.”

In an October 2014 speech, Plosser quoted Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman’s 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association: “We are in danger of assigning to monetary policy a larger role than it can perform, in danger of asking it to accomplish tasks that it cannot achieve, and as a result, in danger of preventing it from making the contribution that it is capable of making.”

The years that followed 2008’s actions were stained by a corrosively quiet and deep politicization of the Fed; its role expanded to backstopping not just the housing market, but financial assets in the broadest sense. Outright monetization of the federal debt was also undertaken to address the financial trauma inflicted by the manmade shuttering of the economy when COVID washed ashore. After subsequently tacking nearly 40% of the MBS market onto its balance sheet, the upshot today is that market participants not only assume credit easing is a permanent tool to be deployed, but that ZIRP and QE all the way to U.S. stocks will be pursued if market participants demand it.

In a June 2021 Bloomberg TV interview with Kathleen Hays, then Board Governor Christopher Waller advocated prioritizing MBS roll-off on the Fed’s balance sheet. As he calmly explained, “I think it’s an easy sell to the public. The housing market is on fire. We should think carefully about doing MBS purchases, and if we were to taper those first, that wouldn’t necessarily be a big issue.”

There are many voices of reason among the 19 who will be sitting members on the FOMC January 27th and 28th, its first meeting of the new year, all of whom have a say on making monetary policy in 2026. As dictated by law, “At its first regularly scheduled meeting on or after January 1 of each year, the Committee elects a Chair and a Vice Chair from among its membership. The Chair presides at all meetings of the Committee and performs such other duties as the Committee may require.”

There’s never been a departure from the norm, as the Fed explains: “By law, the FOMC determines its own internal organization and, by tradition, the FOMC elects the Chair of the Board of Governors as its chair and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as its vice chair.”

Equally, nothing precludes a break with convention. At its first 2026 FOMC, only a sitting member of the FOMC is eligible to be elected chair. Stephen Miran, whose term expires January 31st, would happily vacate his seat to allow President Trump to fill his position before that first FOMC. In his most recent interview, frontrunner to replace Miran, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said, “The Fed chair’s job is to watch the data and to adjust and to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. And so to say, ‘I’m going to do this over the next six months’ would be irresponsible, really.” Would one characterize that as fostering solidarity with his boss?

The bigger picture entails the entirety of the Committee, all 19 of its members. Should Powell decide to step back from the podium after today’s meeting, he could still opt to finish out his term, which ends January 2028. His continued presence alone would indemnify independence by virtue of not vacating his seat. The Senate, for its part, would struggle to replace Miran should a quick shuffle be pursued by the administration; it is in session from January 5th to January 16th before breaking and returning January 26th. Eleven days could be sufficient time to deliberate and confirm a Fed chair.

On January 21st, the Supreme Court hears arguments in Trump v. Cook. The median time Justices take to decide a case is 10-21 weeks hinging on how divided the Court is and the case’s complexity. The Court’s May 2025 carveout for Fed officials promises to lengthen the debate.

The bottom line is both Powell and Cook will be among the voters on January 28th, the day the FOMC concludes its meeting, by which time the votes for the next FOMC chair and vice chair will have been cast for calendar year 2026. Should Powell stay on, and Cook prevail, this same exercise could be repeated in January 2027, regardless of who is chair of the Federal Reserve Board.

In the interim, 2026 is an election year. The Fed could easily be called upon in the next year to monetize any debt created to buy votes, to take the Fed funds rate back to the zero bound, and relaunch QE. These are all decisions that can only be undertaken by the FOMC. The Board alone sets the rate paid to banks on reserves they keep at the Fed. It also has purview over the “discount window,” which can provide liquidity to banks. These limitations express the good that can come of a break with tradition. Save a macroeconomic miracle, few sitting members of the FOMC advocate for what they will, no doubt, be prompted to do by the administration.

Not everyone in the administration would, however, be on board. This past spring, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote that, “The Fed’s adoption of large-scale asset purchases as a tool of monetary policy when its traditional instrument—the overnight interest rate—was at the zero lower
barrier created severe distortions in the market, with unintended consequences. And it has disturbed the Fed’s unique independent role in the U.S. political system. Central bank independence is fundamental to the economic success of the United States. The Fed must change course. Its standard monetary policy toolkit has become too complex to manage, with uncertain theoretical underpinnings and problematic economic consequences.”

A simple visual captures those “problematic economic circumstances.” After years of wishing away the damage wrought by income inequality and the direct role the Fed has played in widening the divide, the debate has exploded onto the public stage and enflamed the masses as never before. As Michael Green has demonstrated, the income divide has opened a chasm between the have-nots, who’ve benefitted greatly from overly accommodative fiscal policy, and middle-income earners, who make too much to qualify for welfare, but too little to escape effective poverty: “Our entire safety net is designed to catch people at the very bottom, but it sets a trap for anyone trying to climb out. As income rises from $40,000 to $100,000, benefits disappear faster than wages increase.”

It's time for a leadership change. Today’s rising level of dissent amongst the Committee is endemic of a growing leadership vacuum. Members of the FOMC, hear the American people and break with tradition to protect Fed independence. As you look to the January FOMC, trust in your power as the Committee to effectuate a change in leadership ahead of it being imposed by the Executive Branch. Elect a chair and vice chair who will fulfill your sworn duty to serve the “public interest.” Make the Federal Reserve good for America and we’ll no longer be Fed Up.

Sincerely,

Danielle DiMartino Booth, on behalf of Every Hardworking American Who Wakes Up in the Morning Asking Themselves What Went Wrong

https://t.co/TDILUK2hjg

[Gold Grump Granpa @GoldGrumpGranpa]

Cute timing and location for technical issues on #silver and #gold futures. 😅

#Comex #CME

[Tim St. George @SwimdaddyTim]

@adamtaggart @biancoresearch Jim Bianco @fleckcap Bill Fleckenstein

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

"My name's Raymond. I'm 73. I work the parking lot at St. Joseph's Hospital. Minimum wage, orange vest, a whistle I barely use. Most people don't even look at me. I'm just the old man waving cars into spaces.
But I see everything.

Like the black sedan that circled the lot every morning at 6 a.m. for three weeks. Young man driving, grandmother in the passenger seat. Chemotherapy, I figured. He'd drop her at the entrance, then spend 20 minutes hunting for parking, missing her appointments.

One morning, I stopped him. "What time tomorrow?"
"6:15," he said, confused.
"Space A-7 will be empty. I'll save it."
He blinked. "You... you can do that?"
"I can now," I said.

Next morning, I stood in A-7, holding my ground as cars circled angrily. When his sedan pulled up, I moved. He rolled down his window, speechless. "Why?"
"Because she needs you in there with her," I said. "Not out here stressing."
He cried. Right there in the parking lot.

Word spread quietly. A father with a sick baby asked if I could help. A woman visiting her dying husband. I started arriving at 5 a.m., notebook in hand, tracking who needed what. Saved spots became sacred. People stopped honking. They waited. Because they knew someone else was fighting something bigger than traffic.
But here's what changed everything, A businessman in a Mercedes screamed at me one morning. "I'm not sick! I need that spot for a meeting!"

"Then walk," I said calmly. "That space is for someone whose hands are shaking too hard to grip a steering wheel."

He sped off, furious. But a woman behind him got out of her car and hugged me. "My son has leukemia," she sobbed. "Thank you for seeing us."

The hospital tried to stop me. "Liability issues," they said. But then families started writing letters. Dozens. "Raymond made the worst days bearable." "He gave us one less thing to break over."

Last month, they made it official. "Reserved Parking for Families in Crisis." Ten spots, marked with blue signs. And they asked me to manage it.

But the best part? A man I'd helped two years ago, his mother survived, came back. He's a carpenter. Built a small wooden box, mounted it by the reserved spaces. Inside? Prayer cards, tissues, breath mints, and a note,

"Take what you need. You're not alone. -Raymond & Friends"
People leave things now. Granola bars. Phone chargers. Yesterday, someone left a hand-knitted blanket.
I'm 73. I direct traffic in a hospital parking lot. But I've learned this: Healing doesn't just happen in operating rooms. Sometimes it starts in a parking space. When someone says, "I see your crisis. Let me carry this one small piece."

So pay attention. At the grocery checkout, the coffee line, wherever you are. Someone's drowning in the little things while fighting the big ones.

Hold a door. Save a spot. Carry the weight no one else sees.
It's not glamorous. But it's everything."

Let this story reach more hearts....

Credit: Mary Nelson