jessxbt

interested in consumer finance and business fraud

[*Walter Bloomberg @DeItaone]

KLARNA REPORTS 45% BLACK FRIDAY GROWTH

Klarna saw a 45% year-over-year increase in U.S. sales from November 1 through Black Friday. Footwear, tech, beauty, and home goods all performed strongly.

Birkenstock led footwear, Apple AirPods 4 topped tech, PS5 models led gaming, and Baccarat Rouge 540 ranked first in beauty. Ninja products dominated home goods, with mattresses jumping to second place.

Klarna’s data is based on online and in-app activity during Black Friday weekend. The company serves 114 million users and 850,000 retailers globally.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

Rural home affordability has collapsed:

US homebuyers in rural areas need to earn $74,508/year to afford a typical home.

The required amount has surged +105.8% over the last 6 years.

By comparison, the income needed to afford a home has risen +90.9% in suburban counties, to $102,120, while urban counties have seen a +87.5% increase, to $118,300.

In other words, housing affordability has deteriorated the fastest in rural areas.

This has been driven by home sale prices, which have soared +60.5% in rural areas since Q3 2019, far above the increases of +48.9% and +46.2% in suburban and urban counties, respectively.

During the same period, median household income in rural counties has improved the least, rising +33.3%, compared with +36.8% and +39.3% in suburban and urban areas.

Affordability in rural America is horrible at best.

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

Breakdown of the Black Friday data tells us:

-Consumer is weakening.

-95% of sales volume was financed.

-67% of that intends not to pay off within 30 days.

-Roughly $1B was spent using BNPL models which are the worst debt.

This points to a *really* unhealthy economy.

[bubble boi @bubbleboi]

7 Predictions for the Next 3 Years

- Intel becomes a trillion dollar company as it takes away half of TSMC’s market cap as well as cutting out Broadcom Marvell & MediaTek as middle men

- Nvidia loses pricing power and margins as all big tech companies come together and invest in their own ASIC stack & maybe collaborate on things like XLA & PyTorch support.

- Google with Gemini becomes the defacto standard LLM for most applications and Google dominates the application layer (Windsurf acquisition was just a hint of that)

- HBM becomes much less important as models scale to hundreds of trillions of parameters. Having fast dense flash memory on boards with a small amount of DDR memory in between as a buffer becomes the right architecture hiding any bandwidth or latency issues.

- China created a 5 nm equivalent node and makes HBM, DDR, NAND that is competitive on the global scale.

- Taiwan gets either a blockade or an invasion leading to chips and defense stocks with mainly U.S. production spiking to the stratosphere expect Micron, Dell, & Intel Ofc to become trillion dollar companies during this brief period.

- Bubble Boi gets a six pack and a sharp jaw line as he engages in a looksmaxxing transformation by following Clavicular’s routine.

[jessxbt @jessXBT]

@OriginalStacia @thejesonlee Statistically speaking too, if unwed, the man is highly likely to leave the woman whom had worked with him to build up the company/project once they reach success. There’s significant psychology work done on this phenomenon too. The OG Bezos are a fine example as well

[QE Infinity @StealthQE4]

Missed this one today:

Norwegian missed on revenues and lowered forward guidance.

When the cruise lines start missing earnings it’s a direct reflection of consumer weakness.

[Lisa Abramowicz @lisaabramowicz1]

"We continue to remain cautious about the health of the consumer in the US and our top international markets, and believe the pressures will continue well into 2026:" Chris Kempczinski in today's earnings call

[Ross Hendricks @Ross__Hendricks]

This is why consumer discretionary stocks are getting whacked across the board... the American consumer is tapped out.

[MartyParty @martypartymusic]

Yes! The Market Structure Bill will SLASH crypto manipulation by 70-90 % overnight.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the biggest anti-manipulation hammer Congress has ever swung at crypto.

What Bill Are We Talking About?The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 (“CLARITY Act”)

Trump White House says “we will sign before Christmas”

Same DNA as 2024’s FIT21, but tougher on fraud.

It Kills Manipulation

- Bans Wash Trading (fake volume) 40 % of Bitcoin volume on Binance, Bybit, OKX is wash trading to liquidate leverage traders.
(illegal in stocks since 1936).
- CFTC gets real-time surveillance + auto-flags 90 %+ order cancellation. Offenders delisted in 48 h.
- Spoofing / Layering (ghost orders) 1 in 5 large trades CFTC mandates order-book transparency + proof-of-reserves.
- Front-running = felony.
- SEC keeps kill-switch on security tokens.

Remember CFTC already fined Binance $4.3b for wash trading in 2024.

Post-CLARITY: every U.S.-facing exchange must register as Digital Commodity Exchange → monthly audits or instant ban.

Offshore manipulators? Blocked at the ISP level for U.S. users.

It is coming. The market will change entirely.

[jessxbt @jessXBT]

@HeroDividend Yes, households that earn less than $100k annually are no longer eating out or have reduced spending in that category significantly

[Uncle Milty’s Ghost @his_eminence_j]

You’re quite literally looking at a K shaped economy in this chart.

[Bob Elliott @BobEUnlimited]

AI mania is the only game in town as the real economy sinks. Great chart from @WarrenPies highlighting the recent divergence.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The CEO of Kraft Heinz says: “We now have one of the worst consumer sentiments we have seen in decades."

[𝐓𝐗𝐌𝐂 @TXMCtrades]

My partner works for a fortune 100 company and they're pushing AI internally bigtime to try and reduce costs, but so far no one has gotten it to do more than low level research and pumping out error-filled slide decks. Meanwhile the C suite is constantly demanding their people use AI because they're hearing about how great it is on the news and seeing all this capex spend, so surely it must be useful!

We are nowhere close to the tech being a viable replacement for most jobs.

However that isn't stopping management from shoving it down their people's throats and ginning up a ton of drama and internal strife as worker bees scramble to explain why this tech isn't a golden goose.

This is happening all over the country right now.

[TradeButWhy @tradebutwhy]

my first thought after the 10/10 flashcrash was that a total leverage wipeout was probably bullish, but after giving it a couple more weeks and seeing price development it's starting to dawn on me it might have been more of a "emperor has no clothes" event which exposed the lack of bids/demand for 98% of tokens and the bounce being more of a adl/trader mean reversion recovery

basically it's showing us there are no marginal buyers left as virtually no one is interested in owning these coins and prices being where they are today (highish but flirting with floors) could initiate the next round of switching hands / repricing

if true today could still be a 2nd blessing of being offered a decent exit before it all starts falling apart again

tldr secure your freedom if you've won it

[Morning Brew ☕️ @MorningBrew]

Chipotle: "A particularly challenged cohort is the 25-35 age group...This group is facing several headwinds."

Kraft Heinz: "The operating environment remains challenging...The reality is we're seeing some inventory pullback from customers."

Consumer alarm bells keep ringing.

[Kat Bites @DiningbitesKat]

Nearly 60% of restaurant companies reported negative same-store sales this year, and 51% were negative on a two-year stack.

Operators launched more than 40,000 limited-time offers, the highest on record, chasing visits that are not returning.

Check growth can’t fix traffic, and 62% of consumers still expect prices to rise.

[Amanda Goodall @thejobchick]

“A particularly challenged cohort is the 25 to 35-year-old age group.”

This is not your average college student living in ramen being unable to afford Chipotle.

This is sooooo not good.

[craigscoinpurse @craigscoinpurse]

Does make you think.

[Barchart @Barchart]

Serious Credit Card Delinquencies (unpaid balances for at least 90 days) hit their highest level in 14 years 🚨🚨🚨