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EndGame Macro
The Media Isn’t Really Talking About This, But Farmers in Europe Are Revolting
What unfolded in Brussels wasn’t random or emotional noise. It was pressure applied at exactly the moment it mattered. Farmers showed up with tractors as EU leaders met to decide the fate of the Mercosur agreement, and only after streets were blocked and police clashed with protesters did the signing get pushed into January. That alone tells you this wasn’t just about procedure. It was about leverage on who has it, and who doesn’t.
Why Farmers See a Pattern, Not a Policy Error
From the farm gate, this deal doesn’t land in isolation. It lands after years of rising costs, tighter environmental rules, higher fuel and fertilizer prices, and thinner margins. Now layer on import quotas for beef, poultry, sugar, ethanol, and rice products where European farmers already operate on razor thin economics. Officials talk about caps and safeguards, but farmers know how markets work where prices move at the margin, and once cheaper supply enters, expectations reset quickly. That’s why the protests felt inevitable. Delay the signing to show you’re listening, add inspections and reciprocity language, then try again once attention fades. Over time, the structure still shifts.
What Brussels Is Optimizing For
Zoom out and the incentives line up. The big winners from Mercosur are Europe’s industrial exporters in autos, machinery, chemicals, pharmaceuticals where tariff savings and market access are meaningful. Agriculture becomes the bargaining chip that makes the rest of the deal work. On a spreadsheet, that trade off looks rational. On a farm, where income depends on prices that can’t absorb another hit, it feels like being volunteered to carry Europe’s geopolitical ambitions.
Why This Feels Like More Than Trade
This is where farmers’ suspicion hardens. They see strict rules at home paired with wider market access abroad, and a system that steadily favors scale, consolidation, and longer supply chains. Over time, smaller and mid sized farms struggle, land changes hands, and food production becomes more centralized, financialized and easier to manage from the center and harder to resist politically. You don’t need secret meetings for that outcome. You just need aligned incentives where retailers want cheaper supply, governments want lower headline food prices, industry wants market access, and farmers are left with assurances instead of pricing power.
My View
Farmers aren’t just fighting beef quotas. They’re pushing back against a direction of travel where food sovereignty erodes piece by piece while decisions that shape rural livelihoods are made far away. The delay into January buys time, not trust. Whether the EU recalibrates in a way that genuinely protects farmers or simply returns with better packaging will decide whether this cools off or becomes a lasting political fracture across Europe’s countryside.
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The Media Isn’t Really Talking About This, But Farmers in Europe Are Revolting
What unfolded in Brussels wasn’t random or emotional noise. It was pressure applied at exactly the moment it mattered. Farmers showed up with tractors as EU leaders met to decide the fate of the Mercosur agreement, and only after streets were blocked and police clashed with protesters did the signing get pushed into January. That alone tells you this wasn’t just about procedure. It was about leverage on who has it, and who doesn’t.
Why Farmers See a Pattern, Not a Policy Error
From the farm gate, this deal doesn’t land in isolation. It lands after years of rising costs, tighter environmental rules, higher fuel and fertilizer prices, and thinner margins. Now layer on import quotas for beef, poultry, sugar, ethanol, and rice products where European farmers already operate on razor thin economics. Officials talk about caps and safeguards, but farmers know how markets work where prices move at the margin, and once cheaper supply enters, expectations reset quickly. That’s why the protests felt inevitable. Delay the signing to show you’re listening, add inspections and reciprocity language, then try again once attention fades. Over time, the structure still shifts.
What Brussels Is Optimizing For
Zoom out and the incentives line up. The big winners from Mercosur are Europe’s industrial exporters in autos, machinery, chemicals, pharmaceuticals where tariff savings and market access are meaningful. Agriculture becomes the bargaining chip that makes the rest of the deal work. On a spreadsheet, that trade off looks rational. On a farm, where income depends on prices that can’t absorb another hit, it feels like being volunteered to carry Europe’s geopolitical ambitions.
Why This Feels Like More Than Trade
This is where farmers’ suspicion hardens. They see strict rules at home paired with wider market access abroad, and a system that steadily favors scale, consolidation, and longer supply chains. Over time, smaller and mid sized farms struggle, land changes hands, and food production becomes more centralized, financialized and easier to manage from the center and harder to resist politically. You don’t need secret meetings for that outcome. You just need aligned incentives where retailers want cheaper supply, governments want lower headline food prices, industry wants market access, and farmers are left with assurances instead of pricing power.
My View
Farmers aren’t just fighting beef quotas. They’re pushing back against a direction of travel where food sovereignty erodes piece by piece while decisions that shape rural livelihoods are made far away. The delay into January buys time, not trust. Whether the EU recalibrates in a way that genuinely protects farmers or simply returns with better packaging will decide whether this cools off or becomes a lasting political fracture across Europe’s countryside.
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EndGame Macro
Survival Economics And How Debt Systems Actually End
This idea is older than modern finance. Once a system piles up so much debt that the interest bill starts shaping politics, policy stops being about discipline and starts being about survival. You don’t get permanently high rates in that world. What you get first is pressure with slowing growth, asset stress, tighter credit. That’s deflationary, but not in the grocery store sense that people usually focus on. It shows up on balance sheets first where assets reprice, leverage stops working, cash flow can’t keep up with claims. When that kind of deflation starts threatening the system itself, policy pivots. Not because beliefs change, but because the math stops working.
Why Deflation Isn’t About Grocery Prices
This is where most people get misled. Deflation isn’t defined by whether eggs or tomatoes get cheaper. Consumer prices are a lagging, noisy signal. The real deflation shows up earlier and more clearly in things like collapsing demand, falling asset values, shrinking margins, layoffs, trade slowing, and defaults creeping higher. CPI can stay sticky or even rise in parts of the basket while the underlying economy is already breaking. Price declines are a consequence of deflation, not its essence and they don’t arrive evenly or all at once.
Why Deflation And A Debt Jubilee Go Together
Deflation comes first. Debt becomes too heavy, demand weakens, and the system starts eating itself. The response to that pressure is what looks like a debt jubilee, just not the biblical kind. Modern systems don’t do clean resets. They stretch them out. Bankruptcies, restructurings, regulatory forbearance, rates held below inflation, losses absorbed by balance sheets that can survive it. It’s debt relief through time rather than ceremony. Prices don’t need to collapse across the board for this to work. What’s being deflated is the real burden of debt, not necessarily the CPI print.
Why History Keeps Repeating Itself
That’s why the historical parallels matter. Every society that let compounding debt run unchecked eventually interfered. Some capped interest. Some banned compounding. Some wiped debts periodically. Modern systems do the same thing with better branding. Bankruptcy law, flexible regulation, central banks tolerating negative real rates, they all serve the same purpose of stopping debt from detonating the system in one violent move. The language has changed. The function hasn’t.
What Negative Rates Are Really Signaling
So when you hear that Switzerland may drift back toward negative rates, that’s not a quirky experiment. It’s a stress signal. It says growth is weak, capital is hiding, and policymakers would rather tax safety than let deflation deepen. Negative rates aren’t the reset itself. They’re a tool to slow the damage, keep refinancing alive, and buy time. They’re the system admitting that letting debt clear naturally would be far more destructive than bending the rules.
The Likely Path From Here
High debt systems don’t choose clean endings. They choose managed ones. That usually means a long stretch where deflationary pressure exists underneath in assets, credit, employment, and margins while policy quietly neutralizes debt through repression with capped yields, periodic restructurings, selective relief, and rules that spread losses over time. It isn’t elegant and it isn’t fair, but it’s politically survivable. And once debt reaches this scale, survivability almost always wins over purity.
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Survival Economics And How Debt Systems Actually End
This idea is older than modern finance. Once a system piles up so much debt that the interest bill starts shaping politics, policy stops being about discipline and starts being about survival. You don’t get permanently high rates in that world. What you get first is pressure with slowing growth, asset stress, tighter credit. That’s deflationary, but not in the grocery store sense that people usually focus on. It shows up on balance sheets first where assets reprice, leverage stops working, cash flow can’t keep up with claims. When that kind of deflation starts threatening the system itself, policy pivots. Not because beliefs change, but because the math stops working.
Why Deflation Isn’t About Grocery Prices
This is where most people get misled. Deflation isn’t defined by whether eggs or tomatoes get cheaper. Consumer prices are a lagging, noisy signal. The real deflation shows up earlier and more clearly in things like collapsing demand, falling asset values, shrinking margins, layoffs, trade slowing, and defaults creeping higher. CPI can stay sticky or even rise in parts of the basket while the underlying economy is already breaking. Price declines are a consequence of deflation, not its essence and they don’t arrive evenly or all at once.
Why Deflation And A Debt Jubilee Go Together
Deflation comes first. Debt becomes too heavy, demand weakens, and the system starts eating itself. The response to that pressure is what looks like a debt jubilee, just not the biblical kind. Modern systems don’t do clean resets. They stretch them out. Bankruptcies, restructurings, regulatory forbearance, rates held below inflation, losses absorbed by balance sheets that can survive it. It’s debt relief through time rather than ceremony. Prices don’t need to collapse across the board for this to work. What’s being deflated is the real burden of debt, not necessarily the CPI print.
Why History Keeps Repeating Itself
That’s why the historical parallels matter. Every society that let compounding debt run unchecked eventually interfered. Some capped interest. Some banned compounding. Some wiped debts periodically. Modern systems do the same thing with better branding. Bankruptcy law, flexible regulation, central banks tolerating negative real rates, they all serve the same purpose of stopping debt from detonating the system in one violent move. The language has changed. The function hasn’t.
What Negative Rates Are Really Signaling
So when you hear that Switzerland may drift back toward negative rates, that’s not a quirky experiment. It’s a stress signal. It says growth is weak, capital is hiding, and policymakers would rather tax safety than let deflation deepen. Negative rates aren’t the reset itself. They’re a tool to slow the damage, keep refinancing alive, and buy time. They’re the system admitting that letting debt clear naturally would be far more destructive than bending the rules.
The Likely Path From Here
High debt systems don’t choose clean endings. They choose managed ones. That usually means a long stretch where deflationary pressure exists underneath in assets, credit, employment, and margins while policy quietly neutralizes debt through repression with capped yields, periodic restructurings, selective relief, and rules that spread losses over time. It isn’t elegant and it isn’t fair, but it’s politically survivable. And once debt reaches this scale, survivability almost always wins over purity.
@jam_croissant @gecornelius @TopTradersLive Late stage debt system is not characterized by increasing rates in the face of exponentially-increasing debt, but transition to debt jubilee.
Swiss are about to NIRP again. https://t.co/HSxqdSJRV5 tweet
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Dimitry Nakhla | Babylon Capital®
$NVDA trades at a fairly attractive PEG
NTM P/E ~26x
2026 EPS➡️ $4.69 (+56%)
2027 EPS ➡️ $7.52 (+60%)
2028 EPS ➡️ $9.68 (+28%)
CAGR at various multiples assuming 2028 EPS of $9.68:
28x | 21%
27x | 19%
26x | 17%
25x | 15%
24x | 13%
23x | 10%
22x | 8% https://t.co/epaTYgcq8w
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$NVDA trades at a fairly attractive PEG
NTM P/E ~26x
2026 EPS➡️ $4.69 (+56%)
2027 EPS ➡️ $7.52 (+60%)
2028 EPS ➡️ $9.68 (+28%)
CAGR at various multiples assuming 2028 EPS of $9.68:
28x | 21%
27x | 19%
26x | 17%
25x | 15%
24x | 13%
23x | 10%
22x | 8% https://t.co/epaTYgcq8w
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Quiver Quantitative
🚨 We posted this report one year ago.
$HL has now risen 273% since Debbie Wasserman Schultz' purchase.
It's up another 7% today. https://t.co/lVGEanDVxC
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🚨 We posted this report one year ago.
$HL has now risen 273% since Debbie Wasserman Schultz' purchase.
It's up another 7% today. https://t.co/lVGEanDVxC
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EndGame Macro
When the Fourth Turning Begins, Markets Reprice Trust And Not Just Assets
The Dow to Gold ratio isn’t about calling the top in stocks or predicting a crash next week. It’s a long arc signal about confidence. When the ratio is high, it usually means investors are comfortable owning claims on future growth in stocks, earnings, promises. When it rolls over and trends lower for years, it’s usually because that confidence is fading and people start preferring assets that don’t depend on anyone else keeping their word. Gold doesn’t need earnings, policy support, or growth assumptions. It just sits there. A falling ratio is the market quietly saying that it trusts certainty more than optimism right now.
Why The Turning Matters
What stands out on this chart isn’t the volatility, it’s the duration. Every major decline in the ratio wasn’t a quick panic; it was a multi year repricing tied to a broader shift in the system. Stocks didn’t always implode overnight. Sometimes they went sideways for a decade while gold did the work. That’s the part people miss. You don’t need a dramatic crash for this ratio to fall hard. You just need an environment where real returns on financial assets are capped, diluted, or slowly eroded while uncertainty keeps rising.
How This Lines Up With A Fourth Turning Mindset
This is where the historical lens helps. Periods that later get described as crisis eras tend to share the same feel where institutions lose trust, policy becomes reactive instead of principled, and stability gets prioritized over efficiency. In those moments, markets stop rewarding growth narratives and start rewarding durability. That’s exactly the backdrop where the Dow to Gold ratio tends to compress. Not because people suddenly hate stocks, but because the system itself is being renegotiated on who pays, who’s protected, and what really counts as wealth.
My View
The chart is whispering regime change. It’s telling you that the next decade may look less like the last one, less about compounding returns and more about protecting purchasing power through uncertainty. Whether that plays out through lower stock prices, higher gold prices, or a long stretch of frustration in between, the message is the same that when confidence becomes scarce, collateral starts to matter more than stories.
If you want more information on The Fourth Turning this was @HoweGeneration interview with @adamtaggart on his podcast @thoughtfulmoney back in May.
tweet
When the Fourth Turning Begins, Markets Reprice Trust And Not Just Assets
The Dow to Gold ratio isn’t about calling the top in stocks or predicting a crash next week. It’s a long arc signal about confidence. When the ratio is high, it usually means investors are comfortable owning claims on future growth in stocks, earnings, promises. When it rolls over and trends lower for years, it’s usually because that confidence is fading and people start preferring assets that don’t depend on anyone else keeping their word. Gold doesn’t need earnings, policy support, or growth assumptions. It just sits there. A falling ratio is the market quietly saying that it trusts certainty more than optimism right now.
Why The Turning Matters
What stands out on this chart isn’t the volatility, it’s the duration. Every major decline in the ratio wasn’t a quick panic; it was a multi year repricing tied to a broader shift in the system. Stocks didn’t always implode overnight. Sometimes they went sideways for a decade while gold did the work. That’s the part people miss. You don’t need a dramatic crash for this ratio to fall hard. You just need an environment where real returns on financial assets are capped, diluted, or slowly eroded while uncertainty keeps rising.
How This Lines Up With A Fourth Turning Mindset
This is where the historical lens helps. Periods that later get described as crisis eras tend to share the same feel where institutions lose trust, policy becomes reactive instead of principled, and stability gets prioritized over efficiency. In those moments, markets stop rewarding growth narratives and start rewarding durability. That’s exactly the backdrop where the Dow to Gold ratio tends to compress. Not because people suddenly hate stocks, but because the system itself is being renegotiated on who pays, who’s protected, and what really counts as wealth.
My View
The chart is whispering regime change. It’s telling you that the next decade may look less like the last one, less about compounding returns and more about protecting purchasing power through uncertainty. Whether that plays out through lower stock prices, higher gold prices, or a long stretch of frustration in between, the message is the same that when confidence becomes scarce, collateral starts to matter more than stories.
If you want more information on The Fourth Turning this was @HoweGeneration interview with @adamtaggart on his podcast @thoughtfulmoney back in May.
Dow to Gold Ratio -- the 4th turning is upon us -- choose your next moves wisely... https://t.co/dyOuxCedUM tweet
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EndGame Macro
Japan Is Letting Rates Rise for One Reason…To Fight What Comes Next
For most of the 2000s and 2010s, Japan’s bond market was saying we don’t believe in growth, we don’t believe in inflation, and we don’t believe the future will look much different from the past. You can see it in the way the 10 year, 20 year, and 40 year yields sink and then sit near zero for years. That wasn’t just pessimism. It was the Bank of Japan actively trying to stop the country from sliding into a permanent debt deflation loop with weak demand, falling prices, cash hoarding, and even weaker demand.
Then the picture changes. From around 2023 onward, yields rise across the curve, with the long end leading. Today the curve is clearly steeper…roughly 2% on the 10 year, around 3% on the 20 year, and high 3s on the 40 year. In Japan, that’s not noise. It’s a regime shift both in policy and in mindset.
What Japan Has Really Been Fighting
Japan’s deflation problem is about behavior. Businesses didn’t invest because they didn’t expect demand. Workers didn’t get sustained wage growth. Households hoarded cash because tomorrow was expected to be cheaper than today. The price level was the symptom; the belief system was the disease.
So the goal was never simply make prices go up. It was to break the expectation that nothing ever improves.
The Plumbing Behind The Fight
Japan’s strategy has been straightforward, even if extreme…
First, suppress yields and expand the balance sheet. When the BOJ buys bonds, it removes duration from the market and floods the system with liquidity, pushing capital out of safe assets and into risk, lending, and spending.
Second, anchor expectations with tools like Yield Curve Control. Capping the 10 year wasn’t just about rates, it was a signal that financial conditions would not be allowed to tighten enough to restart deflation.
Third, accept currency weakness as a feature, not a bug. A softer yen imports inflation and reminds households that holding cash isn’t risk free.
So Why Are Yields Rising Now?
Because Japan is stuck between two dangers…deflation returning, and the bond market losing all credibility. Holding yields at zero forever distorts the financial system, breaks price discovery, and turns the BOJ into the entire market. At some point, that becomes its own instability.
Letting yields rise carefully is an attempt to normalize without losing control. The fact that the long end is rising faster matters. It shows the market repricing time risk and fiscal risk again, especially with Japan’s massive debt load.
What Happens When The Global Downturn Hits
If a real global slowdown takes hold, Japanese yields fall again. Even from these higher levels.
A downturn pulls capital into safe assets, drags down inflation expectations, and strengthens the yen. And a stronger yen is imported disinflation, exactly what Japan fears most. Exports weaken, prices cool, wages lose momentum, and the old deflationary loop tries to reassert itself.
Why This Chart Is A Warning And A Setup
If that happens, Japan won’t stay normalized. It will pause, then ease through rate cuts, renewed purchases, or some form of volatility control. They may not call it YCC again, but the behavior will rhyme.
The key insight is this…Japan is lifting yields now to rebuild policy room. Zero forever leaves you powerless when the cycle turns. A controlled rise today gives them something to cut tomorrow.
That’s what this chart is really predicting. Japan is trying to escape deflation, but it’s doing so with one eye firmly on the next global downturn because Japan knows better than anyone that deflation never disappears. It just waits.
tweet
Japan Is Letting Rates Rise for One Reason…To Fight What Comes Next
For most of the 2000s and 2010s, Japan’s bond market was saying we don’t believe in growth, we don’t believe in inflation, and we don’t believe the future will look much different from the past. You can see it in the way the 10 year, 20 year, and 40 year yields sink and then sit near zero for years. That wasn’t just pessimism. It was the Bank of Japan actively trying to stop the country from sliding into a permanent debt deflation loop with weak demand, falling prices, cash hoarding, and even weaker demand.
Then the picture changes. From around 2023 onward, yields rise across the curve, with the long end leading. Today the curve is clearly steeper…roughly 2% on the 10 year, around 3% on the 20 year, and high 3s on the 40 year. In Japan, that’s not noise. It’s a regime shift both in policy and in mindset.
What Japan Has Really Been Fighting
Japan’s deflation problem is about behavior. Businesses didn’t invest because they didn’t expect demand. Workers didn’t get sustained wage growth. Households hoarded cash because tomorrow was expected to be cheaper than today. The price level was the symptom; the belief system was the disease.
So the goal was never simply make prices go up. It was to break the expectation that nothing ever improves.
The Plumbing Behind The Fight
Japan’s strategy has been straightforward, even if extreme…
First, suppress yields and expand the balance sheet. When the BOJ buys bonds, it removes duration from the market and floods the system with liquidity, pushing capital out of safe assets and into risk, lending, and spending.
Second, anchor expectations with tools like Yield Curve Control. Capping the 10 year wasn’t just about rates, it was a signal that financial conditions would not be allowed to tighten enough to restart deflation.
Third, accept currency weakness as a feature, not a bug. A softer yen imports inflation and reminds households that holding cash isn’t risk free.
So Why Are Yields Rising Now?
Because Japan is stuck between two dangers…deflation returning, and the bond market losing all credibility. Holding yields at zero forever distorts the financial system, breaks price discovery, and turns the BOJ into the entire market. At some point, that becomes its own instability.
Letting yields rise carefully is an attempt to normalize without losing control. The fact that the long end is rising faster matters. It shows the market repricing time risk and fiscal risk again, especially with Japan’s massive debt load.
What Happens When The Global Downturn Hits
If a real global slowdown takes hold, Japanese yields fall again. Even from these higher levels.
A downturn pulls capital into safe assets, drags down inflation expectations, and strengthens the yen. And a stronger yen is imported disinflation, exactly what Japan fears most. Exports weaken, prices cool, wages lose momentum, and the old deflationary loop tries to reassert itself.
Why This Chart Is A Warning And A Setup
If that happens, Japan won’t stay normalized. It will pause, then ease through rate cuts, renewed purchases, or some form of volatility control. They may not call it YCC again, but the behavior will rhyme.
The key insight is this…Japan is lifting yields now to rebuild policy room. Zero forever leaves you powerless when the cycle turns. A controlled rise today gives them something to cut tomorrow.
That’s what this chart is really predicting. Japan is trying to escape deflation, but it’s doing so with one eye firmly on the next global downturn because Japan knows better than anyone that deflation never disappears. It just waits.
tweet