E110: 2023 Bestie Predictions!
2023-01-06 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E109 all episodes E111 →
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 97 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
Kill dates that landed since E109
3 hit · 2 partial · 2 miss — windows that closed after 2022-12-24 and up to 2023-01-06, auto-scored against price data and never hand-set. verdict · R · α
| idea | verdict | R | α | closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🏛️ California wealth tax fails to pass — but the proposal alone drives the exodus | PARTIAL | +6.8% | +8.8 | 2023-01-01 |
| 🌍 American exceptionalism soars and the economy booms in 2022 | MISS | -33.2% | -14.8 | 2022-12-29 |
| 🛢️ Battery metals are the best-performing asset of 2022 | MISS | -29.2% | -10.8 | 2022-12-29 |
| 🪙 Crypto bubble bursts in 2022 — 90% of projects blow up | HIT | +64.2% | +82.6 | 2022-12-29 |
| 🌍 Fed ending QE drains liquidity-dependent assets in 2022 | HIT | +66.8% | +85.2 | 2022-12-29 |
| ⚡ Global conflict era begins — energy and defense outperform | HIT | +62.7% | +81.1 | 2022-12-29 |
| 📈 Visa/Mastercard at peak market cap — Web3 rails eat the 2-3% tax | PARTIAL | +3.9% | +22.3 | 2022-12-29 |
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (14 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
Record credit-card debt at ~20% rates, 7% mortgages, falling savings and spreading layoffs finally break the consumer; a 2023 recession is unavoidable and consumer credit hits a wall.
my biggest loser for business in 23 is the consumer. I just don't understand how the consumer isn't going to finally tap out ... don't understand how we're going to avoid a recession. ... I think the recession is here. It's just very unequally...
With chop and uncertainty everywhere, T-bills through 2-year notes yielding ~5% 'risk free' beat trying to pick the bottom — stay resilient, collect the coupon, keep powder dry.
ChatGPT-class models converge on the same training data, so high-quality answers become available in many places; Google loses 10-15% of search usage and takes a material, measurable hit to profitability and engagement in 2023.
the biggest potential business loser this year is Google Search as measured by pure profitability and engagement. ... will end up being able to get high-quality search results from many places ... Google could lose 10% or 15% of usage to all these other sites,
27%+ vacancy, remote work, layoffs and variable-rate debt push office towers (San Francisco worst) into bank ownership and fire sales; B-REIT redemption gates are the canary — the CRE reckoning begins in 2023.
Everybody rushed into energy in 2022; with recession lowering consumption, energy has a poor 2023.
As layoffs pile up, supply-constrained gig and entrepreneur platforms (Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Etsy) finally get the workers/hosts they always lacked while cutting their own costs — big beneficiaries of the downturn.
I think the door dashes, Airbnbs, Ubers, Etsy's of the world who need entrepreneurs, they need workers, they need supply. They've always been supply constrained. As unemployment becomes, let's call it what it is, sticky, you're going to see a lot more people participating in gig platforms or entrepreneurial platforms that enable them to make money. So I think they will be huge beneficiaries, especially if they continue to lay off employees like door dash and Airbnb did to right size their businesses.
Europe permanently replaced Russian pipeline gas with US LNG (terminals fast-tracked, Nord Stream gone); America's natural gas industry is the big business winner of 2023.
My answer for the big business winner of the year is America's natural gas industry... Europe rapidly built terminals to receive liquefied gas... Europe is now completely dependent on American natural gas... a pretty impressive win for the American natural gas industry.
Variable-rate loans repricing from 5-6% coupons to 11-14% mean a wave of restructurings and filings — high-yield credit is the biggest pressured asset class of 2023.
probably the biggest asset class that is going to get pressured is going to be junk debt. ... variable rate loans, when rates are at five and six percent, ... 11, 12, 13, 14 percent, coupons, a bunch of companies will have trouble meeting their debt obligations and
Inflation's third chapter is wage inflation (unionization, minimum-wage hikes, low labor participation): it does not fall off a cliff the way consensus expects, keeping rates higher for longer — bearish long-duration bonds.
Inflation, which people expect to fall off a cliff, doesn't fall off a cliff as fast or as meaningfully as people want... the pendulum is swinging very markedly away from capital and towards labor... my big contrarian wager for this year is wage inflation that keeps inflation not going down as much as people want.
Security-driven reshoring in semis, energy and pharma means multi-year capex flows to semicap equipment (KLA/Lam/AMAT), oil services (SLB/Baker Hughes), Deere/CAT, and pharma infrastructure (Thermo Fisher/Danaher/Honeywell) — cash-flowing compounders with high-teens ROIC beat 5% T-bills.
I'll say what's an important trend I've seen across these companies, Danaher, Honeywell, Thermo Fisher, they buy small companies, they pay very little, and they immediately get massive return on invested capital, like they're in the high teens. So why get 5% on T-bills when you can get high teens, ROIC, on the management teams running these incredible platforms? So that's where I'm most excited for this year.
With $235T of global debt, slowing growth and rising rates, emerging-market sovereign debt starts to unwind in 2023 and the IMF becomes the (blamed) firefighter.
OpenAI becomes the AWS of AI or lands a massive Microsoft deal ('a billion dollar plus investment this year is inevitable', AI-powered Bing) and exits 2023 as one of the valley's top companies; at the $29B tender it 'could be a $300 billion company'. OpenAI is private — MSFT is the tradeable expression.
Markets pay for over-earning, not value to society; tech under-earns and has a tough 2023.
Petro-yuan trades (Saudi-China), a coalescing non-dollar bloc and US debt loads make the dollar start trading like a risk asset rather than the risk-free reserve — the erosion begins in 2023.
it could be that the US dollar coming out of 2023 starts to trade more like a risk asset and less like a risk-free asset. ... maybe this year marks the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the kind of global de facto reserve currency based on some of these big trades
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep110.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
The 2023 predictions episode, taped days after ChatGPT's $29B tender broke — the besties are maximally bearish at what proves to be the bottom. Consensus calls: consumer taps out/recession unavoidable (Sacks, Jason, Friedberg all in), T-bills as the asset of the year (Chamath + Sacks), CRE office reckoning (Sacks's SF-towers-to-the-banks + Chamath's B-REIT canary). Chamath fades tech, energy and junk debt and makes his contrarian wage-inflation-stays-sticky wager; Jason and Chamath both call energy overheated (fading Friedberg's 2022 winner); Friedberg's OpenAI-is-obvious call (MSFT-deal-inevitable) draws opposes from Jason ('sued into oblivion') and Chamath (training-data convergence kills the moat) — while Chamath separately names Google Search the year's biggest loser to AI answers. Friedberg's dollar-erosion contrarian bet is opposed by both Jason and Sacks ('America is on turbo'). Skipped as untradeable: Chamath's Relativity Space book-talk and Starlink-IPO-at-$75B deal prediction, Friedberg's Apple-buys-Disney/car-company wildcard and MBS/petro-yuan geopolitics, Jason's Amazon-health-pillar and TikTok-divestiture M&A calls, Sacks's Putin-Xi trillion-dollar deal, California/SF budget crisis, Trump-influence-wanes and Biden-Zelensky-rift politics, and Friedberg's cell/gene-therapy trend (no instrument named). Label quality: all four besties individually labeled and accurate; two trivial intra-turn merges in banter (a question stitched into the answerer's turn), no capture-worthy content affected.