E137: Inflation cools, market rips, Ripple/MSFT beat regulators, NATO summit, cocktails of youth

but I'm really encouraged at the fact that the court system in the United States doesn't just kowtow to whatever administration is in power at that moment, that they do adjudicate by the law and ultimately provide greater clarity for business

Has this trend changed? I thought America always did that.

And my critique of what the SEC was doing is they were basically seizing power that they did not have.

now are we going to see like 10 counter lawsuits, and everybody is just going to sue the SEC and stand up for themselves? I think that's what's going to happen now.

And so I think right now in the next sort of like 12 to 18 months is really when the bottom is put into the market. It's before the Fed starts cutting.

I did J trading starting last summer and I'm up, whatever, 25%, something crazy like that because I picked all the big tech companies

So there is room for the software index to run up pretty nicely here. You could argue that it's undervalued or fairly valued.

Maybe Amazon should have to spin out AWS. Maybe Google should have to spin out YouTube. Because I do think they are abusive in the way they exercise their authority.

Look, I'm a free market guy, as you guys know. I think that consumers vote with their dollars and their eyeballs and their time.

And it really handcuffs the SEC. What are they going to do about Coinbase and every other exchange? I mean, if they're not selling securities, I think Coinbase and everybody else has always maintained they're selling tokens.

It's a judgment that seems to indicate for a lot of folks that these are not going to be treated as securities.

we could talk about the sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic that's likely going to drive the biggest hurricane season we've ever seen this coming season

But I think, again, what you're seeing over the last few weeks, it's just more and more evidence that it could be a soft landing, that we may not have a recession and we might even get rate cuts next year.

And the thing that's sort of surprising about what Larry Summers is saying is that if you believe that inflation is gonna come roaring back, that's certainly a contrarian bet. That's not what the market is saying right now.

But then Tesla also made the chess move of lowering their prices and having record sales. So their margin went down, but their sales went up.

And so they're actually interfering in a free market where Tesla is the big winner because they took a huge risk and created a product people wanted.

I do think that the solution is 10 more Palmer Luckeys. I mean, I think the Silicon Valley's anti-supporting the military is a crazy position that needs to change and we should make more weapons and have VC-backed companies making weapon systems

it's obviously going to require a significant influx of capital by some estimates up to $2 trillion to increase the security capacity of NATO

Now, you know who it's an asset for is the military industrial complex, because all these countries, when they join NATO, agree to spend 2% of their GDP on defense.

The BRICS countries are about to introduce an alternative currency that's based on gold.

but I would like the United States to be the place where we figured this out, not driving it overseas. So I'm happy that the judge found in favor of Ripple

It replaces all board meetings.

It will reconfigure a website in real time to increase sales. It will tell you why sales are falling off a cliff.

So I think that Larry is right. I think that I still believe what I've said for a while, which is rates will be higher for longer.

So I don't know who's gonna work in all these factories if we don't have an immigration policy.

if their rates go from, you know, eight bucks to 15 bucks to 25 bucks an hour, the cost of fast food goes up

But triage does not work in a bull market. You don't get rewarded for triage in a bull market.

At the end of the day, the market's probably going to impose discipline on us.

There's so few ways to have a good exit in the tech industry that when you take away M&A, it puts a damper on all risk-taking and the deployment of risk capital into the ecosystem.

Yeah, that's the common carrier argument. But my point is just they have tremendous market power that they abuse in arbitrary ways.

This specific thing is more because of the bureaucracy of the government not allowing these credits to basically work across all different kinds of cars.

I mean, the administration just gave all these subsidies and credits to big companies like Ford and GE to make EVs, but no one wants those cars.

Is this the last hurrah summer? People, consumers are going to need to get back to work in September because it seems like the credit card debt's going up

We're going to get people off the sidelines, into the labor market, and things will keep going

I've been surprised at just how resilient the economy has been.

And that's starting to translate through into what everyone's been worried about, which is the recessionary or declining effect on revenue, declining effect on profit of companies that are selling goods and services.

With this Ripple ruling, I think this becomes a boon for people to say, well, the scarcity of Bitcoin and Bitcoin's stability

Look, you obviously have a very zealous administration and a very zealous agency leader who is testing the boundaries.

it's basically that they view themselves as a hammer, and every deal, particularly if it's done by Big Tech, is a nail

They are giant monopolies and they do need to be restrained and controlled or they will basically consolidate the whole tech ecosystem and abuse their market power.

but I think she is absolutely doing Biden's bidding with an anti-tech, anti-wealth creation, anti-capitalism, frankly, pro-union punishment. I think this is punishment for tech being too successful.

the fact that Disney has been decaying for the past year is more emblematic of the fact that they've gotten into this social culture war and half the population of America said, we're not going to support your business like they did to Bud Light

I bought the stock, and it's the one thing in my JTrading portfolio I've gotten crushing on. That and Warner Brothers Discovery. I made two entertainment bets on what I think are the two best companies.

So the idea that software businesses generate long-term profits is so far unfortunately been a fallacy. So that chart, I think will stay exactly the same way it is. I think the bloom is off the road.

And not all those companies are losing money. A growing number of them are making money. I just think that's like a sweeping overgeneralization. So I still think software businesses are some of the best businesses.