Like a Swiss watch that refuses to be late—or exciting—headline PCE inflation ticked along at a tidy 0.2% in both October and November. Core PCE, the Fed’s favourite toy, behaved nicely too, easing from 0.21% to 0.16% month-on-month and sitting stubbornly at 2.8% year-on-year. Short-term annualized measures cooled further, but don’t pop the champagne yet: “supercore” services inflation is still stretching its legs, while market-based prices stayed well-behaved, reminding us that inflation is calm… but not quite asleep.

Consumers kept spending like nothing’s wrong, with real outlays up a solid 0.3% in both October and November, led by a comeback in goods after September’s slump. Income, however, shuffled along more cautiously—just 0.1% in October and 0.3% in November—carried mostly by wages, with a cameo from government transfers and a few missing lines from dividends and business income.

The punchline writes itself: savings slid to 3.5%, as Americans continue to shop now and worry about the balance later. Income growth has been a rollercoaster through 2025, whipsawed by policy-driven swings in transfers and a midyear labour-market cooldown, before wages and hiring reclaimed centre stage in the fall. Looking ahead, a steadier labour market should keep unemployment stable—but without faster income growth, consumers may be forced to trade impulse buys for selectivity. With savings at a three-year low, spending can limp on for a while, but from here on out, credit conditions—not confidence—hold the remote.

In a nutshell, inflation is calm but wide awake, consumers are spending like it’s fine, incomes are limping, and with savings at a three-year low, the U.S. economy is increasingly running on credit rather than confidence.

On his flight back from the globalist mothership, Donald Copperfield apparently had time to sue JPMorgan, accusing it—via a Miami court filing—of failing to live up to its own lofty “we always do the right thing” code of conduct. According to his lawyer, the bank showed its zero tolerance for unethical behaviour by abruptly shutting down Trump-related accounts in 2021, with no warning, no appeal, and no exit ramp, despite having happily processed hundreds of millions before. The message, it seems, was simple: principles are sacred… until they’re inconvenient.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/22/trump-sues-jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-chase.html

JPMorgan responded to the lawsuit with a straight face and a regulator-shaped shield, explaining that it didn’t want to close the accounts—it was simply compelled by the mysterious forces of “rules and regulatory expectations,” which apparently make banks do regrettable things they totally disagree with. In the same breath, the bank lamented that regulations have become so awkward they’re now begging Washington to stop the “weaponization of banking,” ideally without changing anything about how banks behave.

The Macro Butler returned to the Piggo’s Trading Desk to decode the latest wisdom from the ‘World Entertainment Forum’ (WEF)’s finest globalists—confirming, once again, that wars and grand agendas aren’t just talking points, they hit everyone’s wallet.

The takeaway? If you don’t want your portfolio to be the next casualty of geopolitical chaos, it’s time to stop applauding the speeches and start positioning in energy and commodity producers.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-piggos-trading-desk-129

While two members of the self-styled “Board of Peace” pretended to court a ceasefire they don’t actually want, President “Macro-Leon” borrowed straight from the Don-Roe playbook and went full maritime sheriff. A Russia-linked tanker from the infamous “shadow fleet” was politely but firmly hijacked—sorry, diverted—in the Mediterranean, proving Europe will now enforce virtue anywhere there’s salt water. ‘Le Petit Napoleon’ thundered “we will let nothing pass,” just as European leaders briefly looked away from the Greenland drama, reminding us that piracy is unacceptable unless it’s done for the right values. The tanker—conveniently named Grinch, flying a fake Comoros flag with an Indian crew—was nabbed near Spain with UK intel, confirming that in today’s geopolitics, even the high seas aren’t neutral, just selectively moral.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-navy-intercepts-sanctioned-russian-tanker-mediterranean-macron-says-2026-01-22/

While Japan’s bond market quietly catches fire, the Bank of Japan struck its best this-is-fine pose—holding rates at 0.75% (a 30-year high) while upgrading inflation forecasts and hinting that the next hike may arrive sooner than summer. One lone hawk dissented, everyone else waited on elections and politics. Add a tax-cut pledge from Tokyo’s political class and you get the full BOJ routine: do nothing today, talk tough about tomorrow, and hope the bond market behaves in the meantime.

The BOJ added a few more hawkish winks to ‘its nothing-to-see-here act’, softening its risk assessment, trimming cautionary language, and quietly floating the idea that an April rate hike is very much on the table. Governor Ueda promised to be “nimble” in smoothing bond-market volatility—right after a long-bond meltdown sent yields to multi-decade highs—while reminding everyone that April price hikes by Japanese firms will be carefully watched.

In short, in the country of the rising sun, inflation forecasts are up, confidence is rising, the yen is sinking—and the BOJ is still hoping words will do the heavy lifting.

Welcome to the great U.S. “buyer’s market,” where investors quietly snapped up about one in three single-family homes in Q2 2025 and Washington is now arguing over the dictionary definition of “institutional investor.” The Interventionist-in-Chief wants to ban them to appease an angry electorate priced out of the American Dream—but blaming Wall Street for housing unaffordability is easier than admitting policy vaporized purchasing power, jacked up living costs, and now offers… more regulation as the cure. In short, when government breaks affordability, it sues the mirror.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/stopping-wall-street-from-competing-with-main-street-homebuyers/

Institutional investors didn’t wake up one morning twirling their mustaches and plotting the death of homeownership—they simply followed the incentives policymakers left lying around. The real villains are supply bottlenecks, soaring building and ownership costs, and mortgage rates that have turned homeowners into hostages, leaving a market with 37% more sellers than buyers.

Slapping a fuzzy ban on “institutional investors” won’t fix affordability—it’ll just kneecap small landlords and builders, solve nothing, and let policymakers declare victory before lunch.

https://t.me/TheMacroButlerSubstack/1286

Another reassuring reminder that everything is absolutely fine—at least if you’re watching from a White House cocktail party. U.S. business activity limped into the new year with a microscopic improvement, as the S&P Global January composite index edged up a heroic 0.1 point to 52.8, still signalling expansion but with all the enthusiasm of a Monday morning. New business remains sluggish, hiring is barely breathing, and firms are reluctant to add staff amid weak demand, high costs, and chronic uncertainty. Manufacturing showed a faint pulse, services moved at their slowest pace since spring, and while orders improved, they remain uninspiring. Inflation pressures eased just enough to change nothing, keeping the Fed comfortably on hold. Optimism ticked up among manufacturers, while service firms stayed cautious—proof that the economy is growing, just not enough for anyone outside the plutocracy to notice.

In a nutshell, the U.S. economy is technically expanding, but only in the way a patient “improves” by blinking—too weak to hire, too sticky on inflation to cut rates, and just strong enough to keep policymakers congratulating themselves.

To end a week that felt like a geopolitical marathon run in flip-flops, U.S. consumer sentiment staged a modest comeback, climbing to a five-month high in January as Americans collectively decided things are not getting worse fast enough to panic today. The University of Michigan’s index jumped to 56.4, its biggest monthly gain since June, with optimism spreading across incomes, ages, education levels, and political tribes—suggesting hope is once again bipartisan.

Tariffs, once a favorite dinner-table anxiety, have quietly exited the chat for five straight months, while inflation expectations cooled just enough to let consumers breathe without actually relaxing. That said, sentiment remains more than 20% below last year’s level, because high prices, fragile purchasing power, and whispers of labor-market softening still loom in the background like unpaid bills on the kitchen counter. Consumers expect prices to rise 4% over the next year and 3.3% longer term—hardly a victory lap—but spending continues anyway, helped by improved buying conditions for big-ticket items and the seasonal placebo effect of tax refunds.

In a nutshell, U.S. consumers feel better than they did a month ago, but beneath the optimism lies the familiar reality of high prices, fragile purchasing power, and confidence doing most of the heavy lifting.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 Natural gas’s “told-you-so” moment is here: physics wins, geopolitics adapts, and power will get cheaper. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-natural-gas-moment

Freshly returned from the capital of globalism—where he delivered a masterclass on the sacred Don Roe Doctrine—Donald Copperfield unveiled what may go down as the most inspired act of his first White House year. On January 23, the United States formally exited the ‘World Holocaust Organization’, better known in Newspeak as the WHO—proving once again that in an age of perpetual emergencies, the boldest move is to unplug from the Ministry of Health, where ignorance is strength and vaccine is heresy.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-officially-exits-world-health-organization-accusing-agency/story?id=129455089