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Watch this….

Now roll the tape forward into 2026 and assume unemployment keeps inching higher. That alone starts to matter. The quality of borrowers banks want to lend to keeps slipping, credit standards tighten, and lending gets more selective even if rates are coming down.

Now think about what that does to people’s heads. Even folks making good money start feeling uneasy about job security. If John sees a couple of coworkers get laid off, is he really going to sign up for a 30 year mortgage knowing he could be next? Probably not. Then look at retirees. If home prices are sliding and they’re sitting on a lot of equity, and the stock market corrects at the same time, the instinct shifts to protecting capital like downsizing, selling, getting liquid. And let’s be honest when the 10 year yield and mortgage rates are falling, that’s not a sign housing is fixed. It’s the bond market telling you growth is slowing and risk is rising. That’s how you can end up with home prices falling even as rates drop. It’s not about affordability. It’s about psychology. @patrickbetdavid @m3_melody @DiMartinoBooth

“Pricing About To Go DOWN" - Housing Prices COLLAPSE As Delistings SKYROCKET Nationwide https://t.co/p5Sr0E6qMK
- PBD Podcast
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Quiver Quantitative
Representative Dan Goldman has proposed a bill that would put a 20% tax on loans secured by capital assets for high-income individuals.

It's called the ROBINHOOD Act. https://t.co/pa3yUaCC0F
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Oracle’s Future Is Big But The Bill Is Bigger

Cloud revenue is growing fast, up to about $8B this quarter from $6B a year ago, while traditional software is flat to down. Oracle is no longer just selling licenses; it’s increasingly running workloads.

The backlog is the headline number for a reason. RPO jumped to $523B, up from under $100B a year ago, driven by a handful of very large cloud contracts. These are signed commitments. The catch is timing, only about 10% converts to revenue in the next 12 months. Most of it lives years out.

Operating profitability is still solid. Core margins aren’t distressed, and the business is not falling apart operationally.

What looks strong but is partly cosmetic

Net income almost doubled, but that’s not because the business suddenly became far more profitable. A large portion came from non operating investment gains, not customers or pricing power.

The tax rate also flatters the quarter. Oracle explicitly tells you that once you strip out one offs, the real tax rate is closer to 21%. In other words…don’t extrapolate this quarter’s GAAP earnings too far.

Cash on hand went up, but mostly because Oracle issued debt and sold an investment, not because free cash flow suddenly surged. This wasn’t a cash harvesting quarter, it was a funding quarter.

Where the pressure is building

The strain isn’t on the revenue line. It’s on the cost of becoming a cloud infrastructure company at speed.

Cloud costs are rising fast. Data center capacity is expensive, and Oracle says directly that these costs will continue climbing as it expands footprint and geography. Segment margins are compressing, and restructuring charges are showing up as the company tries to keep that compression contained.

This is the classic transition risk where revenue can look fine for a while even as cash economics worsen, because spending happens up front and revenue arrives later.

Balance sheet and cash flow reality

Oracle is clearly in build mode.

Property, plant, and equipment jumped sharply in just 6 months. Total assets ballooned. Debt is higher, and recent issuance locked in long dated fixed coupons in the mid 4% to low 6% range, which tells you financing is no longer cheap.

The most important disclosure is off the balance sheet where Oracle has $248B in uncommitted future data center lease obligations, starting in FY26–FY28, with 15–19 year terms. These don’t fully show up yet, but they are real future costs.

Operating cash flow is positive, but free cash flow is deeply negative because capex is running far ahead of cash generation. Some of that spend hasn’t even hit cash yet and is sitting in unpaid capex.

Liquidity looks better, but it’s been engineered to support the buildout, not because the business is throwing off excess cash.

Why the stock is acting this way

The market isn’t confused about growth. It’s uneasy about timing and execution.

Oracle is being repriced like an infrastructure builder, not a pure software name. When long term rates are high and credit is less forgiving, investors get less patient with “we’ll earn it later” stories especially when the company has already committed to massive fixed costs.

That’s why even rumors about delays matter. It’s not about whether Oracle is lying. It’s about the fact that small timing slips matter a lot when spending is front loaded and margins are under pressure.

My Read

Oracle today is a company with real cloud demand and a massive long term opportunity, but also very real near term financial strain from building that future all at once.

Earnings optics look good, but cash flow tells a harder story. The balance sheet can handle it for now but the margin for execution error is thinner than the stock price was implying.

The market isn’t rejecting the growth story. It’s deciding how much it trusts Oracle to deliver it on time, at scale, and without letting cash flow and leverage become the story instead.

Oracle Shares Rebou[...]
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EndGame Macro
🇯🇵 Japan’s Quiet Move With Loud Global Consequences

Japan raising rates is a global funding headline. For years, the yen has been the cheapest place on earth to borrow. That’s how a huge amount of global risk taking was financed…borrow yen, buy higher yielding assets elsewhere. As long as markets were calm and yield gaps stayed wide, being short yen paid well and felt safe.

That’s why the yen kept weakening. Not because Japan was collapsing, but because the world was rewarding leverage.

When Japan nudges rates higher and hints it may stop protecting its bond market as aggressively, that cheap funding starts to disappear enough to change behavior.

And the timing couldn’t be worse. If the global economy is already slowing…Japan, the U.S., the U.K., all at once then investors aren’t looking to add risk. They’re looking for exits at the same time.

The yen is the transmission channel

The real danger is what happens if the yen stops falling and starts rising in a global downturn.

Carry trades don’t unwind politely. They unwind when FX moves against them. Once the yen strengthens, funding costs jump, losses pile up, and positions get cut. That selling pushes the yen higher, forcing more selling. It’s a feedback loop.

Up to now, the lack of sustained stress let this trade persist. In a synchronized recession, volatility rises everywhere at once. That’s when the yen flips from funding currency to pressure valve.

Japan is also one of the world’s largest exporters of capital. If domestic yields become more attractive and FX risk feels less one sided, Japanese institutions don’t need to reach as far abroad, exactly when everyone else is trying to derisk too.

What this does to U.S. and U.K. bonds

People assume recession means yields fall. Often true…until the plumbing gets stressed.

If Japan normalizes while the U.S. and U.K. slide into recession, you can get weaker growth expectations but less reliable foreign buying of long dated bonds. That’s how term premium creeps back in even as growth fades.

In a more disorderly scenario, it’s worse. When leverage comes off quickly across regions, markets sell what’s liquid, not what’s risky. Treasuries and Gilts are liquid and they’re collateral. In a scramble for cash, even safe bonds can sell off temporarily because they’re used to meet margin calls elsewhere.

That’s how you get recession and stubbornly high long end yields for a time.

The trade and tariff backdrop makes this harder

Japan can’t lean on exports the way it used to. Tariffs, weaker global demand, and China’s competitiveness are already pressuring its export model. That pressure helped weaken the yen during the carry phase but it also leaves Japan more exposed if conditions tighten suddenly.

In a global recession, export weakness feeds directly into profits and confidence. A stronger yen in that environment tightens real conditions fast.

That’s why Japan’s policy path is fragile. Hiking supports the currency, but tightens into a synchronized slowdown. That tension is what turns Japan into a transmission hub.

What to watch for and the real breakpoints

This doesn’t break gradually. It breaks when things move too fast.

A sharp yen rally matters more than levels. JGB volatility matters more than yields. FX hedging stress matters more than central bank words. And if U.S. or U.K. bond volatility feeds on itself during recession, policymakers get dragged back in whether they want to or not.

The big risk people are missing

Japan’s hike is about tightening the world’s funding system at the worst possible moment.

The underappreciated risk is a yen led deleveraging wave during a synchronized recession forcing selling of U.S. Treasuries and U.K. Gilts for collateral reasons, pushing yields higher right when recession logic says they should fall.

That’s how market stress comes first and policy response second.

That’s the setup Japan is quietly reintroducing.

“The Bank of Japan is moving[...]
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EndGame Macro 🇯🇵 Japan’s Quiet Move With Loud Global Consequences Japan raising rates is a global funding headline. For years, the yen has been the cheapest place on earth to borrow. That’s how a huge amount of global risk taking was financed…borrow yen,…
to raise its policy rate at the Dec. 18-19 monetary policy meeting with a 25-basis-point increase from 0.5% to 0.75% emerging as the leading option, Nikkei has learned.” 👇🏼 https://t.co/qWtkjhfk5s - Kalani o Māui tweet
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The Few Bets That Matter
I just published my review of $LULU quarter, a name I flagged as a potential good position a few days ago for subscribers.

There’s a lot of optimism in this report and I broke down exactly what I’m thinking about the stock from here.

Link’s in the bio. https://t.co/SNd5CkgDwl
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The Few Bets That Matter
I finally sold out off $PYPL today.

The company has potential but the execution just hasn’t kept up. What was supposed to be a fast-pace rollout turned into a constant “in the next few quarters”.

The new checkout experience was built over a year ago and is rolled out to 20% of clients. No real updates on PayPal World, and management keeps pointing to weak consumers, delays and 2026 as another “investment year.”

There are positives, sure. Branded is growing and Braintree has been purged, the agentic payment service is out and this could drive engagement but those were only secondary bull cases to my opinion.

There are better names with fewer headaches and more upside elsewhere. Cheap is cheap for a reason.

And I'd sign in a heartbeat if my post could sign the bottom, for the sanity of those who still hold and the peace of mind for those who come after.
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Ripple’s Path From Pushback to Plumbing

A conditional trust bank charter is permission to build, not a free pass to operate. It means Ripple is being judged as infrastructure, not as a speculative crypto company. The focus isn’t deposits or lending; it’s custody, control of reserves, and compliance. Ripple is being allowed to handle sensitive plumbing, but only under tight supervision and with clear guardrails.

That distinction matters. A national trust bank is boring by design. And boring is exactly what institutions want. This is about making RLUSD legible to regulators and usable by banks, not about hype. The conditional part is the system keeping leverage, Ripple still has to prove it can meet operational, risk, and governance standards before anything goes fully live.

From Resistance To Absorption

The bigger arc here is familiar if you’ve watched how the U.S. system deals with disruption. First comes resistance, then containment, then absorption. The SEC lawsuit looked existential at the time, but in hindsight it forced Ripple to clean up its legal edges and commit fully to building inside the system rather than around it. While most of crypto was arguing about price, Ripple was quietly assembling the boring pieces institutions actually need including custody, risk management, prime brokerage, stablecoin infrastructure.

That’s why this moment matters. Ripple isn’t positioning itself as a bank killer. It’s positioning itself as connective tissue and the rails banks can use to move value faster across fiat, stablecoins, and tokenized assets without rewriting the rules every time. XRP sits in the middle as the bridge asset, not the headline. When you zoom out, this doesn’t look like chaos or a sudden win. It looked choreographed with years of friction followed by a controlled entry into the system. That’s how financial plumbing gets built…slowly, quietly, and under supervision.

HUGE news! @Ripple just received conditional approval from the @USOCC to charter Ripple National Trust Bank. This is a massive step forward - first for $RLUSD, setting the highest standard for stablecoin compliance with both federal (OCC) & state (NYDFS) oversight.

To the banking lobbyists – your anti-competitive tactics are transparent. You’ve complained that crypto isn’t playing by the same rules, but here’s the crypto industry – directly under the OCC's supervision and standards – prioritizing compliance, trust and innovation to the benefit of consumers. What are you so afraid of?
- Brad Garlinghouse
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Democratizing Access Or Socializing Exit Risk?

If this gets approved, the real risk is that a massive, steady pool of retirement money becomes a new, permanent buyer for assets that usually rely on institutions. 401K flows are predictable and sticky. Once alternatives are allowed in the wrapper, they don’t show up as flashy picks they get folded quietly into target date funds, managed portfolios, and diversification sleeves. That’s how these things always enter the system…calmly, professionally, and with just enough structure to pass oversight.

On its own, that’s not inherently bad. But it matters when this happens. If the economy were accelerating and liquidity were abundant, it would look like natural evolution. Doing it as growth is slowing and credit stress is rising changes the character of the move.

Where the risk really sits

The risk is liquidity and timing. Alternatives don’t reprice smoothly. They look stable until they don’t, because prices are model based and exits are limited. Retirement accounts feel liquid; private assets aren’t. That mismatch only becomes obvious when people want their money at the same time.

Layer on fees, complexity, and discretion, and you get a system where returns can look fine on paper long after the underlying reality has shifted. That’s manageable for pensions and endowments who know what they’re holding. It’s a different story for households who assume their retirement savings behave like public markets.

The uncomfortable incentive question

This wouldn’t be used as some cartoonish dump on retail moment. But incentives matter. When private markets tighten, everyone wants new capital and orderly exits. Opening the 401K channel creates a slow, reliable bid and exactly the kind that helps absorb aging assets, smooth valuations, and extend cycles. That’s not malicious; it’s how capital markets work.

The danger is that households end up funding assets late in the cycle, when returns are harder and risks are more asymmetric. Not because anyone lied, but because distribution widened at the wrong moment.

My View

This is about where risk lands when the cycle turns. Expanding access to alternatives during economic deterioration doesn’t just spread opportunity, it spreads fragility. The biggest threat isn’t the first loss. It’s the plumbing stress that shows up later, when liquidity, pricing, and expectations stop lining up.
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