Goldman: "The underperformance likely reflects pressures on lower-income consumers—including more limited borrowing capacity and weaker income growth—as well as the slowdown in immigration. Our distributional income growth forecasts suggest a continued underperformance of low-end spending in 2026 ."

Goldman: "for retailers whose stores are generally located in lower-income zip codes, sentiment around the consumer turned negative on net and nominal same store sales have grown only 0.2% over the last year (vs. 2.5% for companies exposed to middle- and higher-income zip codes)." 1/2

If the Dem keeps it to mid single digits in TN-07 tomorrow it’d be reasonable for conventional wisdom to shift to House odds being more like 85-90%. Curious what bitcoin and similar assets would do in response:

ICE raids are cruel, inhumane, and do nothing to serve public safety. My responsibility is to be the mayor to each and every person that calls this city their home. That includes millions of immigrants— of which I am one.

They have learned to BTFD. What happens when that stops working? Aw heck, it never will because, apparently we are in a permanant state of BTFD. 😄

Seems like a pretty big limitation on a paper modeling out Gen Z homeownership rates at retirement!

A reminder for those who are not aware: "remigration" is the process of deporting all non-white people from a country. It includes citizens and is, by definition, ethnic cleansing. And to be clear: this is not fake. I just screenshot it myself.

Remember when Black Friday was a thing?

November Forecast: Vehicle Sales Down Year-over-year www.calculatedriskblog.com/2025/11/nove...

Cool new thing I have seen at COST. Waiting on checkout line a COST person comes to you, scans your card & everything in your cart. When you get to the cashier (or self checkout) you just flash your card & you're good to go.

It ties Biden’s low in July 2024.

This is at the 9th percentile of all approval ratings since Gallup started asking the question in 1941. It’s the second-lowest (after Nixon) of any pres 11 months into his second term. Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low news.gallup.com/poll/699221/...

All that "post-neoliberalism" has accomplished so far is to make tradable sectors less efficient and more expensive, while doing nothing to curb the costs of non-tradable services. 🙃

Please stop blaming on trade the things (or putative things like the $140k number) that are pretty much entirely the fault of America’s terrible nontradeable sectors. www.wsj.com/opinion/trum...

By this I mean -- I doubt real-world actual humans are going to say "The labor market is getting worse and I dislike Trump more, but I'm noticing inflation is cooling off so I'll give Trump credit for that." Orange Man Bad is going to have a high correlation to all the issues.

The approval ratings of Trump going down at the same time that his approval on both the economy and inflation are going down makes it tough to tease on what's the driving force -- not really a nitpick, just something I'm thinking about:

COST is a great one to watch in part because they do monthly sales reports.

Make of this what you will but with WMT comps up mid-single-digit the odds consumer spending is slowing rapidly are negligible.

WMT beat and raise...hard to be too worried about the consumer with this result. *WALMART 3Q ADJ EPS 62C, EST. 60C *WALMART 3Q TOTAL US COMP SALES EX-GAS +4.4%, EST. +4% *WMT SEES FY SALES EX-FX +4.8% TO +5.1%, SAW +3.75% TO +4.75% *WALMART SEES FY ADJ EPS $2.58 TO $2.63, SAW $2.52 TO $2.62

MONETARY MALPRACTICE A great guest contrib from Neil Dutta in today's newsletter, where he calls out the Fed's reluctance to cut rates. You can read the full thing here www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Here's the counter-argument to my view expressed above (which has puts and takes). I've disagreed with Dutta most of this year, and so far things have not deteriorated as much as he thought they would, but that could change.

All together, mixed bag. Market added 10% to the pricing of a December cut on this report (now 35%, up from 25% earlier this AM), but given the strength in payrolls and the underlying details that feels like the wrong price action to me.

No sign of weak labor demand in wages. Line worker avg hourly earnings looks like it's stabilizing around 2% ann., which means 2-3% inflation and 1-2% productivity growth...pretty reasonable. Total line worker payroll disbursals grew 4.2% ann. in nominal terms in Q3, plenty to sustain spending.

Significant underperformance among college educated unemployment rates and younger worker unemployment rates.

On the one hand, unemployment due to job loss is trending rapidly higher. On the other, the typical duration of unemployment is declining. Part-time work for economic reasons also declining gently. And unemployment for high school grads no college is low + stable.

Some jobs day observations Pick your indicator: is the labor market deteriorating measurably and weaker than 2018? Unemployment rate says yes. Or is the jobs market stronger than 2016-2019 and stable? Prime-age emp-pop says yes.

Mister Softee amirite

it really is notable how a) the Bitcoin bounce was meh ish b) it led the rollover again

the quantum shit* is getting pummeled *technical term

$MSTR is ten buck lower than the open

sad trombone for store of value

<---flipped out remaining longs and looking to put out shorts

Got suspended yesterday on Twitter for “violent speech”, but I really think I’m getting woke-policed for content Twitter doesn’t like. I appealed, but haven’t heard back yet. Twitter keeps reminding me that if I remove the tweet, I can be fully reinstated immediately.

Page One in Iowa.

Newsletter: NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.10 million SAAR in October calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/nar-existi... Sales are essentially unchanged year-to-date. Will this be the lowest level of annual sales in 30 years?

NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increased to 4.10 million SAAR in October www.calculatedriskblog.com/2025/11/nar-...

Today there was an attempted ICE raid in Bensonhurst & community members showed up. Even though NYPD collaborated with ICE by trying to disburse the crowd; community members stood their ground & ICE left without kidnapping a single person per the rapid response groups I'm on. We protect us!

Here's my two pesos on NVDA earnings: They can't say anything credible about what really matters to its valuation, which is what's going to happen in 2027+.

Bad business stays bad: *TARGET 3Q COMP SALES -2.7%, EST. -2.06%

Investment in tech equip & software rivals the 90s in growth rates but accounted for 2/3 of all growth in H1 vs only ~15% in the late 90s. Other things going on in the 90s--broad based boom in the labor market/GDP, globalization, peace dividend, consumer optimism, labor force growth & immigration

Who?

absolutely no one: Tom Steyer: *TOM STEYER ENTERS CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S RACE: POLITICO

Fresh 52-week low for $OWL.

Fun, I win a cookie

Figure it’s upsized to $15 billion: *AMAZON SEEKS TO RAISE ABOUT $12 BILLION FROM US BOND OFFERING

It's Liberation Day for the homebuilder supply chain -- they're being liberated of their profits and gross margins:

Contrast with small caps which broke below their 50-DMA and trend channel on Thursday, but are now >2 std dev oversold and getting into similar territory on their 14d RSI. Could run lower but look much more extended than large caps.

S&P 500 set to close both below its 50-DMA for the first time since April and below the May-current trend channel for the first time since it was established. Momentum starting to set up pretty consistently negative and index way short of being significantly oversold by any measure.

It only took 7 months, but my “why tariff banana?” crusade has FINALLY been vindicated: the White House has exempted bananas (and a bunch of other tropical fruits) from the tariffs today Now if they could just realize this whole trade war is stupid and counterproductive…

This is funny.