Fiscal.ai
Amazon currently trades at a cheaper multiple than both Walmart and Costco.

Forward EV/EBIT:
$COST 34.6x
$WMT 27.4x
$AMZN 26.8x

Which would you rather own over the next 5 years? https://t.co/i9PdJoOP4W
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EndGame Macro
A lot of companies gorged on cheap debt in 2020–2021, built cost structures on stimulus level demand, and then walked straight into a world of 5%+ rates, sticky input costs, and a consumer who’s finally running out of cushion. Now those loans are rolling over at double or triple the old interest cost, while revenue growth is slowing. For big, leveraged firms in cyclical sectors, that math just doesn’t work so you get exactly what we’re seeing which is the highest number of large bankruptcies in 15 years, even before the NBER calls an official recession.

What makes this cycle tricky is the split screen. The index level and a handful of mega caps still look fine, so people assume the system is strong. But underneath, industrials, over expanded consumer names, PE owned roll‑ups, and pandemic winners that never had real pricing power are quietly getting wiped out. This is how late cycle tightening usually shows up…not with one giant explosion at the center, but with a steady drumbeat of failures at the edges telling you financial conditions have already turned recessionary for a big chunk of corporate America

US BANKRUPTCIES ARE RUNNING AT RECESSION LEVELS

LARGE BANKRUPTCIES AT 655 YTD — MOST IN 15 YEARS

HIGHER THAN FULL YEARS 2020, 2021, 2022, AND 202 - First Squawk
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EndGame Macro
Germany’s Factory Engine Is Hitting a Wall

Germany’s manufacturing slump is what happens when the pillars that supported an entire economic model all weaken at the same time. Cheap Russian gas is gone, and the replacement is permanently more expensive, a huge problem for a country built on energy intensive industries like chemicals and metals. Meanwhile global demand for German machinery and autos has softened, trade is getting more fragmented, and China has shifted from being Germany’s biggest customer to a direct competitor in EVs, solar, and industrial equipment. Add in an auto sector struggling to reinvent itself, an aging workforce, heavy bureaucracy, and years of underinvestment in infrastructure and digital capacity, and you get a picture that’s much deeper than a noisy PMI print. Germany hasn’t lost its engineering talent, the world around it changed faster than it did, and the manufacturing numbers are just the scoreboard reflecting that shift.

‼️Germany's manufacturing RECESSION has been absolutely historic:

German Manufacturing PMI fell to 48.4 points in November, the lowest in 6 months.

The German Manufacturing sector has been in CONTRACTION (below 50) for 41 months STRAIGHT, the longest streak in history.

Wild. https://t.co/J73GoIPnmE - Global Markets Investor
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AkhenOsiris
$DKNG $FLUT $SRAD $GENI

@DustinGouker:

Sports betting handle hits new highs in a lot of states, online casino sets records, and Kalshi trading volume continues to trend down.

https://t.co/7UWSp5XH5T
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EndGame Macro
The 10 Year Is Doing Exactly What a Late Cycle Bond Market Does

What the 10 year is reacting to now is completely different from what it was reacting to back in 2024, and that’s the part people keep missing. When the Fed first started cutting in September 2024, it happened right after the Sahm Rule tripped recession, but policymakers hesitated because the headline payroll numbers still looked fine. The problem is that those numbers were never telling the truth. BLS spent months tinkering with the Birth/Death model, then switched back to the old pre pandemic version in November 2024, the same one that reliably overstates job creation at turning points. Add in the immigration surge that was swelling the labor force and making payrolls look steadier than they really were, and you get a completely distorted picture that gave the Fed just enough cover to pause even as the slowdown was already unfolding underneath.

By the time we got into 2025, that illusion had fully cracked. The February benchmark revision based on QCEW tax records erased 589,000 jobs for the year ending March 2024. And the knockout blow came from the preliminary benchmark revision released on September 9th, 2025 which stripped out another 911,000 jobs for the 12 months ending March 2025, the largest downward revision in U.S. history. Suddenly the resilience the Fed thought it was seeing in late 2024 looks exactly like what it was…statistical noise and demographic distortions masking real weakness.

That’s why the 10 year is behaving the way it is now. Last year, rate cuts looked optional, maybe even premature, so the long end pushed higher. This year, cuts look like the Fed finally admitting where the cycle actually is. QT ends December 1st, layoffs and bankruptcies are running at recession levels, Europe and China are slowing, and the data revisions show the labor market was softer all along. And because the market is now trading growth expectations and not just the Fed’s policy rate, the long end doesn’t fight the Fed anymore; it starts to price the slowdown the Fed missed. Yields drift lower not because everything is fixed, but because the bond market is finally reacting to the economy we actually have, not the one the flawed data pretended we had a year ago.

Unlike 2024 Sep, when the Fed began cutting rates and the 10y yield rose sharply casting doubt on the decision, this past Sep, when the Fed resumed cutting rates, the 10y move has been muted and edged slightly lower. https://t.co/rx03vZLO6h - Steve Hou
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Fiscal.ai
Remember when one of the most powerful network effect businesses in the world traded at a mid-single digit earnings multiple?

Nov. 2022 EV/EBIT: 6.26x

$META https://t.co/8EpBQql6Gt
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Fiscal.ai
Pepsi v. Coca-Cola

Pepsi has now reported 12 consecutive quarters of beverage volume declines. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola continues to grow.

Why is Pepsi struggling so much?

$KO $PEP https://t.co/VeyawEXDqk
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EndGame Macro
The DOGE Disappearance: What Washington Didn’t End But Just Buried Deeper

This is a 3 part thread…

What’s happening around Musk isn’t just a billionaire with big toys. It’s a quiet redesign of how U.S. power is projected.

Instead of the old model with big federal agencies, clear lines of command, public budgets, you’re getting a privatized stack of critical infrastructure, all sitting inside one man’s corporate empire.
•SpaceX / Starlink are now the backbone of Western space logistics and battlefield comms. Starlink isn’t just Wi‑Fi for rural areas; it’s a front line asset in Ukraine and is already modeled in war gaming as a redundant command and control grid for a Taiwan scenario if traditional infrastructure gets knocked out in a first strike.
•Starshield, the classified arm, is deeply wired into U.S. orbital surveillance and targeting. De facto, Musk is logistics commander for large parts of American space warfare without holding a rank or requiring a vote in Congress.
•Tesla And Dojo started as self driving infrastructure, but the same hardware and training pipelines map cleanly onto military AI…drone swarms, ISR pattern recognition, convoy routing, autonomy at the edge. That’s a ready made substrate for battlefield AI, years ahead of the normal Pentagon procurement cycle.
•Tesla’s supply chain…lithium, nickel, cobalt, refining and batteries inside the U.S. looks a lot like a strategic energy reserve. In a resource or shipping shock, that can pivot from EVs to prioritized military energy logistics.
•X (and now xAI) is information warfare plus cognition. X is a real time narrative router. xAI is being plugged into government and financial institutions via partnerships with Palantir and TWG Global, and through a GSA framework that gives federal agencies cheap access to Musk’s models.

Put those pieces together and you effectively have a Private Pentagon…space, comms, energy, AI, and narrative control owned by a civilian, increasingly treated as national infrastructure.

This didn’t happen by accident. It’s a response to collapsing trust in institutions and sclerotic bureaucracy. Instead of rebuilding state capacity the hard way, Washington has been leaning on hyper centralized entrepreneurs to bolt a new, agile layer on top of a decaying state. The bet is simple…privatize the critical functions, keep the sovereign branding.

The upside is speed. The downside is obvious: structural dependence on a single actor whose incentives, creditors, or personal safety you don’t fully control.
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EndGame Macro
The Circus Is the Signal: What William Cooper Saw Before Everyone Else

William Cooper is one of those figures who doesn’t fit into a neat box. He served in Naval intelligence, hosted late night broadcasts, and ultimately wrote Behold a Pale Horse, a book that became an underground classic long before the internet amplified voices like his. For decades it’s been one of the most requested and most circulated non religious books in the U.S. prison system, sitting next to the Bible, Malcolm X, and 48 Laws of Power. That alone says something. Prison libraries aren’t filled with trend chasing readers; they’re filled with people trying to understand systems of power, manipulation, control. When thousands of inmates reach for the same book year after year, it’s because it’s touching something they instinctively recognize.

Cooper’s book is sprawling and controversial. Some claims are unverifiable, some documents questionable, some conclusions dramatic. But the reason the book survives, the reason it keeps passing from hand to hand is because Cooper captures something people feel but rarely articulate…the sense that the official story is almost never the real story, and that powerful institutions shape what the public pays attention to.

That’s the same energy in this clip.

Cooper is talking about the operating logic of empire. When a society becomes unstable…politically, economically, spiritually the people running it don’t solve the rot. They manage perception. Rome had its bread and circuses. We have billion dollar stadiums, celebrity athletes, sports networks, betting apps, endless controversy cycles. Keep people emotionally invested in games and rivalries, and they have less energy to question who’s steering the system or where the money goes.

For Cooper, entertainment isn’t just entertainment, it’s strategy. Spectacle becomes a pressure valve. It absorbs public frustration, keeps people distracted, prevents them from asking harder questions about war, debt, corruption, surveillance, or the financial plumbing that determines who thrives and who never gets a chance. In Rome, the circus wasn’t just a show; it was a governance tool. Cooper’s argument is that modern culture runs on a more sophisticated version of the same template.

This is why his work still hits a nerve. You don’t have to believe every claim in Behold a Pale Horse to feel the weight of the pattern he’s describing. He warned about surveillance long before digital tracking became normal. He warned about manufactured crises before crisis driven governance became a daily reality. He warned about media distraction before social feeds turned into a constant dopamine drip. The specifics may be debatable, but the direction of the trend has aged with uncomfortable accuracy.

And that’s why this clip feels so relevant now. We live in a moment where global systems are strained, governments are buried in debt, conflicts are spreading, and ordinary people feel like something is off even if they can’t name it. And whenever societies reach that point, the distractions grow louder and more immersive. The circus expands.

Cooper’s point wasn’t that sports are bad. It was that the biggest shows in a declining society usually serve a purpose. They fill the mental space where awareness and skepticism used to live. They keep people entertained while deeper decisions happen out of sight.

That’s why Behold a Pale Horse still circulates so widely in the places society ignores. People who’ve been crushed by the system often see its architecture more clearly than the people still mesmerized by the spectacle. You don’t read Cooper for comfort. You read him because he forces you to look past the circus and toward whatever the circus is meant to hide.
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EndGame Macro
These Copper Peaks Come Once a Decade… and They Don’t Last.

Every time the U.S. hits a major copper inventory spike, it’s because policy jolted the timeline. Tariffs make everyone panic buy at once. Importers pull months of future orders forward, ships rush in early, and warehouses swell. It feels like a glut, but it’s really a distortion.

And the U.S. has only seen this kind of distortion a few times in the last 30 years. The dot com era surge, the first round of Trump tariffs, and now this second round. Three spikes, three moments where copper stockpiles shot to the very top of the historical range and in each case, the buildup didn’t last.

The Historical Echo

During the dot com spike, inventories jumped to levels roughly four times the prior baseline. Once the tariff and supply chain panic faded, those stocks were eaten through fast. The drawdown erased most of the spike in short order. Tariff 1.0 played out the same way…a big, sudden rise followed by a near straight line collapse in visible inventories. Not because demand exploded, but because the front loaded imports created an artificial quiet period afterward where consumption outpaced shipments.

You’re seeing the same setup now. The scale of the move. basically matching the dot com era extreme tells you this isn’t about some slow structural oversupply. It’s a tariff window getting slammed shut and everyone trying to beat the deadline.

The Forward Look

What the chart hints at, without screaming it, is that big copper inventory spikes tend to reverse the same way they build…fast. Once the tariff pull forward effect washes out and imports settle down, the metal starts disappearing out of warehouses at a speed that surprises people who only looked at the top line number. Historically, those peaks give way to 70–90% drawdowns as the balance normalizes.

So this is a temporary buildup created by policy and the past tells you the comedown can be just as dramatic as the climb.

Now this is interesting

US copper stockpiles just hit dot-com-glut levels

Tariff 2.0 pulls imports forward and stuffs warehouses.

When the window closes, those tons get consumed. Violent drawdowns can follow https://t.co/lHSYTEqPfQ - Katusa Research
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