Beige Book inflation mentions

The average Russell 1,000 stock is now 23% below its 52-week high. Consumer Discretionary, Industrials, and Technology are even weaker at -26% or worse.

The semis are now in their 4th 10%+ correction since early June. That's the most corrections inside a window that small since late 2002. $SOXX $SMH

Banks trailing S&P 500 by 11 percentage points in month leading up to earnings season. Since 2001, the only earnings seasons when they lagged by a wider margin were Q1 2023 (-25.5 ppts) and Q4 08 (-15.8 ppts).

AI demand is driving significant inflation pressure in consumer tech, as evidenced by the computers & peripherals category in today's CPI release:

Despite a 2% drop today, the Nasdaq 100 $QQQ managed to just barely hang onto its 50-DMA:

Cool chart showing the fastest sector rallies to 50%+ YTD since 1990. Energy's 50%+ YTD move through yesterday was the 5th fastest to up 50%+ in any year for any sector since 1990. Energy did it in less than half the t

NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline? Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling si

Every three years the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. Anyone who cares about the young of today should be alarmed at thi

AI is getting cheaper more quickly than any other transformative tech in history. At a given level of performance, cost has fallen ~47%/quarter since 2023. That’s 4× faster than DNA sequencing, 6× faster than compute, 1

Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results: 1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline. Those falls in reading and m

NEW: Progressives have a birth rate problem For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids. By ceding the topic of family and children to the rig

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany: The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall populatio