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MacroVoices #394 Louis-Vincent Gave: China, Energy & More
01:11:35
MacroVoices Erik Townsend and Patrick Ceresna welcome back Gavekal co-founder, Louis-Vincent Gave to the show. Louis and Erik will discuss the economic situation in China, inflation, energy prices, and much more. https://bit.ly/3rlVliz Check out Energy Transition Crisis on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EnergyTransitionCrisis1 Download Big Picture Trading chartbook 📈📉 https://bit.ly/3sVfw7q ✅Sign up for a FREE 14-day trial at Big Picture Trading: https://bit.ly/2JjZR7J Please visit our website https://www.macrovoices.com to register your free account to gain access to supporting materials
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- [00:08]
A
This is Macro Voices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, high net worth individuals, family offices and other sophisticated investors. Macro Voices is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics, telling it like it is bullish or bearish. No holds barred. Now here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresn.
- [00:33]
B
Macro voices Episode 394 was produced on September 21, 2023. I'm Eric Townsend. Gavcal Co Founder Louis Vincent Gav returns as this week's feature interview. Guest Louis and I will discuss the economic situation in China, inflation, energy prices and much more. My new docu series Energy Transition Crisis has been well received thus far and you can watch it for free@energytransitioncrisis.com A few of you even subscribe to the Energy Transition Crisis yout Channel and boy, I'd sure appreciate it if more of you would do that, because it's going to be the one thing that makes a huge difference in terms of getting the word out about this new docu series. A few of you have asked if you can help in other ways and the answer is I would love any help that listeners can provide in promoting this series on social media, especially by viewers whose social media reach includes Generation Z and Millennials. So if you want to help, please post links to the trailer or to your favorite episode all over social media.
- [01:36]
C
And I'm Patrick Ceresna with the Macro Scoreboard Week over week as of the close of Wednesday, September 20, 2023, the S P 500 December futures were down 155 basis points, closing at 44.47. Some pretty decisive selling in the post FOMC period. We'll take a closer look at that chart and the key technical levels to watch in the post game segment. The US Dollar Index up 66 basis points to 105.44. The this continuing to trade along 2023 highs that November crude oil contract up 129 basis points to 89.66. We'll look at that chart in the post game and Eric will have the EIA inventory data. The December gold contract up 176 basis points in 1967. But it's a deceptive close as gold has decisively reversed in the post FOMC period. Copper down 53 basis points to 377. The breakdown started, but will it lead copper back to its 2023 lows? Uranium up 729 basis points to 6,695. A decisive breakout to multi year highs on Uranium, the US 10 year treasury yield up 16 basis points closing at 441. Material breakout in yields pushing many bonds below their 2022 lows as the relentless selling continues. The other key news to watch this week we have the global PMIs and next week we have consumer confidence and consumer sentiment numbers, the US Final GDP and the core PCE price index. This week's feature interview guest is Gavkao co founder Louis Vincent Gav Eric, why did we get Louis back on the show this week?
- [03:23]
B
Well, everybody's focused on the geopolitical situation in China and frankly I'm just going to say it. I think that all news media, including financial media just have a national patriotism bias where if our country is maybe getting ready to go with to war with China, well then China's bad and everything's wrong and everything China does is no good. And I think that a lot of what you hear about how bad the economic situation is in China in Western financial press is influenced by what I think is a misplaced form of patriotism. We need to look at the situation objectively. And one of the things I really like about Louis is he's a Frenchman who moved to Hong Kong at a fairly young age. He has no political stakes in the game. He can look at the situation. He's there in Hong Kong. He's very much in tune with what's going on in China, but he's not part of the culture. So he can look at it objectively and not be influenced by bias on either side. He's also a very smart guy who's very knowledgeable about energy policy and energy prices and that's definitely timely with the strength that we're seeing in crude oil prices. So it was time to get him back.
- [04:32]
C
Eric's interview with Louis Vincent Gav is coming up as Macro Voices continues right here@macrovoices.com.
- [04:48]
A
And now with this week's special guest, here's your host, Eric Townsend.
- [04:55]
B
Joining me now is Gavkal co founder Louis Vincent Gav Louie, it's great to get you back on the show. You having been a Frenchman who's lived in Hong Kong for much of your life, are very well known in finance as a China expert. So I want to start there and I think my real question is, okay, what actually is going on in China? Is this about we're waiting for the Chinese economy to recover like everybody was talking about, because that's going to bring back final demand into the global economy. Is that what we're waiting for or is it more that we're waiting to find out if we're starting a major global war with China that's going to completely change the nature of trade. I'm not sure which it is anymore.
- [05:34]
D
Well, first of all, thanks for having me again, Eric. It's a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to catch up with you guys always. So thanks again for having me. Look, yeah, I think the narrative around China this summer has been fascinating. You've had, I think, back to back covers of the Economist. You've had that meltdown cover on Business Week. Let's just say that the media narrative around China has been extremely, extremely dire. And to me, the first observation I have is that when it comes to China, I think people in the Western world always fall into one of two categories. It's either China's going to take over the world or China's about to implode in a blaze of glory. And we seem to be swinging always from, from one extreme to the next. And today, obviously, we're in the, oh, China's imploding category. And I think that this is for two reasons. First, of course, China's reopening has been disappointing. And here, you know, I'll put my hands up, I messed up on this. You know, I, and I think I messed up a little by laziness. When, you know, when China reopened, I thought, oh, I've seen this movie before. You know, I saw it in Europe and I saw it in the US And I saw it in Canada. And when economies reopen, you got all this pent up demand and you get, you get all this growth, and this is going to be awesome. And I think the reason this script didn't play out in China is the very difference in the labor market. You know, I think what happened in the Western world was people were told, you go home, you stay at home, and we'll pay you to stay at home. And then when we told people in the Western world, okay, you guys get back to work, you had a small minority of people that said, well, you know what, Actually I like working from home, or maybe I don't feel like going back to work. And this was especially true at the sort of lower jobs, you know, your McDonald's workers or your hotel cleaners or whatever else. And so all of a sudden we found we had a shortage of labor at the low end and that pushed wages up. That further fueled the consumption boom in the Western world. In China, meanwhile, the situation was completely different. In China, people were told, okay, go home. And going home in China meant Actually going back to the countryside. So you had literally tens of millions of people that left the cities, went back to the countryside. So when the government said, okay, you guys can come back to work now, you had tens of millions of people that swarmed back into the cities and actually depressed wages. And that's where we've been the past six months. You know, fairly, fairly weak wage growth in China. And with that, obviously bad consumption data, et cetera. Now combine that with the fact that you've had five years of real estate crackdown, that real estate prices have rolled over by 10, 20% in pretty much any city that you care to think of, that big property developers are going bust or have gone bust, and that at the same time, you're having all sorts of problem in the shadow banking system. And now I think you're seeing the other extreme, where people in the Western world are saying, aha, I've seen this movie before. This is 2008 all over again. Falling real estate, property developers in trouble, financial intermediaries in trouble. But the reality, of course, is that China's financial system is completely different than that of the Western world. And the whole, oh, China's going through its Lehman moment is completely misplaced. And you see this, frankly, in the data. Chinese bank shares aren't collapsing. They're not going up, but they're not collapsing. Iron ore prices are up 50% since China reopened in late October. LVMH sales are still cranking away. So China today, there is trouble on the real estate front. There is trouble in the local authority front. But if you take a step back, away from the hyperbole, what do you see? Well, you see an economy that has gone from a trade surplus of 30 billion a month to 80 billion a month. If you took all of China's annual trade surplus, it would be basically the 20th biggest economy in the world. You know, China's trade surplus of almost a trillion dollars a year now is roughly the size of the GDP of Switzerland or Argentina or any G20 country. And behind that is a simple reality. Behind the surge in China's trade surplus is the fact that China's massively moved up the value chain in a number of industries. Where this is the most visible is autos. You know, five years ago, China was, you know, didn't export any cars. In five years, China's become all of a sudden, the world's biggest car exporter. And you can replicate that to the earth. Moving equipment to the solar panels, to trains, to nuclear power plants. You name the industry, and China in The past five years has accomplished really pretty impressive things and become a genuine global player in pretty much any industry you care to name. And so to think that with all these strides, with an economy that's having a trade surplus of 80 billion a month, you're about to see an economic Armageddon and implosion, to me is a massive stretch.
- [10:42]
B
I want to focus on this idea of trade surplus in China, and particularly with respect to how sustainable that is in changing geopolitical times. Now, obviously, we don't know what's going to happen, but there's lots of reason to be concerned that we may be headed toward a direct conflict, military conflict, between the United States and China. Now, if that happens, I think that there is a very widespread complacency and belief system, which I'm not so sure it's. It's right. And that belief system is okay, look, everybody knows China's completely dependent on the US as their biggest customer. You know, if we stop buying stuff for Walmart, China's going to go broke overnight. So they can't mess with us because their whole economy is going to collapse if they ever try to go to war with us and they're going to lose our business. Is it really the case that China is at risk of losing our business, or is it more that we're at risk of ending up with no supplier for essential products and that China maybe is more survivable than some people think?
- [11:46]
D
Look, war is always terrible for anybody involved, right? And let me just first state that I actually don't think that China and the US Will go to war. And it's very much in everything China does policy wise, is to avoid a war with the US Because I think if you're the Chinese Communist Party and you think as to how you can possibly lose power, that's basically the scenario you fall back on. That's really the only way, I think, that the Chinese Communist Party potentially loses power as a direct war with the US So I really think everything China does will always try to avoid this war, unless the U.S. you know, crosses some massive red lines, like deploying missiles in Taiwan, like nuclear missiles in Taiwan or something like that. Failing that, you know, China will avoid a war at all cost. Now to your second point. You know, this belief that, oh, well, China is 100% dependent on the US et cetera. I think that was definitely true 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It's definitely not true today. When you look at the evolution of China's growth, I mentioned China being the world's largest car exporter or exporter of machine tools or nuclear power plants or whatever else. All this massive growth in trade is occurring from China to emerging markets. And in fact, I think that perhaps is one of the most important macro trends out there that people that aren't spending that much time in emerging markets or studying emerging markets are missing today is that what's happening right now is that China is basically allowing emerging markets to industrialize on the cheap and on credit. You know, countries like Indonesia, countries like Peru or Colombia, you go there now and you find Chinese earth moving equipment in the mines, you find Chinese cars in the streets, you go to Africa and you find Chinese railways. So it's, you know, a lot of the, the growth in the Chinese exports. When you look at the growth in global trade over the past five years, all the growth in global trade, pretty much all of it has come from emerging market to emerging market trade. And here's a couple fascinating. And a lot of that is really China to emerging markets. And here's the interesting bit is that's a part of the trade that is increasingly no longer denominated in US dollars because China realizes full well that the US wants to contain China, China. And this is something that you and I have discussed in the past. But China really has no choice but to do everything it can, everything she can to de dollarize her trade. Now, of course, you can't de dollarize your trade with the US but you can de dollarize your trade with Indonesia, you can de dollarize your trade with Brazil, with Colombia, with whoever else. And so all of the growth impetus of Chinese trade in the past five, 10 years has been towards these emerging markets. So the dependency of China on the US is no longer what it was. Now at the same time you could say, well, what about the dependency of the US on China? And here again, look, I think the big key trend of recent years, of course, for all the talk about deglobalization, deglobalization is a massive misnomer. We're not seeing de globalization from the Western world. We're seeing designification, you know, the attempt to move factories from China to Vietnam, from China to Indonesia, from China to India or Mexico. And you know, I'm sure you saw all the charts that went around showing that Mexican exports to the US are now bigger than Chinese exports. And you know, that's the structural trends of the world. We live in a Western world that imports less from China and more from everywhere else across the emerging markets and emerging markets that import a whole lot more from China. And both of these trends are very bullish. Emerging markets ex China.
- [15:41]
B
Let's stay on the de dollarization topic, specifically with respect to the BRICS alliance. When that acronym BRICS was first coined 15 years ago, I started writing articles about Sergei Glazyev, the Russian scholar who is pushing this de dollarization campaign. And everybody laughed at me. They just said, you know, it's just people talking. It's a propaganda. They can't do anything. The US dollar will reign supreme forever. That was 15 years ago. Now it seems like people are still mostly complacent and laughing this off. But the BRICS alliance, which was originally Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is now growing. They're adding more countries. Saudi Arabia is considering membership and it is growing more and more and it's still being ignored. Nobody is taking it seriously. It seems to me that we have a new competitor both to NATO and also to to Western finance. In the sense it's both a financial and I think it will eventually be a military alliance between these countries. Nobody seems to take it seriously. Am I the crazy person who thinks there's something to it or what?
- [16:53]
D
No, no, look, I don't think you're the crazy, crazy person at all. The first point I'd make is of course, de dollarization is a very charged word and it's a word that means different things to different people. But for me, what I'd highlight is de dollarization isn't as much a specific date. Let recent Cape Town meeting or the recent G20 meeting in India. It's not as much a date per se as an overall process, a process that slowly takes time. But amidst all the talk about brics and what happens to emerging market trade and how it gets funded, et cetera, for me, amidst all this, there's a couple key dates. The first was of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the decision by the Western world to kick Russia out of the dollar system. Now, Russia's obviously pick any commodity you care to think of and Russia's either the number one, two, or at worst, third biggest exporter of that commodity. And so kicking one of the biggest commodity exporters in the world out of the dollar system in essence accelerated the de dollarization of a lot of the commodity markets. And this matters tremendously because if you're India, if you're Indonesia, if you're Brazil, if you're any large emerging market, one of your biggest constraint to growth was typically being able to access the dollars you needed to fund the infrastructure spending needs that is Your commodity needs. So imagine if you're India, you've always run big trade deficits, you've always run budget deficits and you have basically unlimited infrastructure spending needs. You know, you need ports, power plants, railways, airports. You name it, India needs it. And your challenge was always that if and when US dollars got scarce or if and when commodity prices went up, you got squeezed and your economy imploded. And now here comes Russia telling you, hey, I'll sell you oil in rupees, I'll sell you coal in rupees, I'll do a five year deal on, you know, copper exports. So now all of a sudden, if you're India, you've removed your single biggest constraint to growth. So that just there, that's already a massive game changer. And I think it explains why. If you look today at Europe, you've got ISM surveys in Europe that are at post German reunification lows. You've got ISM surveys in the US that are below 50. You've got ISM surveys in China that are below 50. So your big three economic zones both seem to be heading or pointing towards potential recessions. Meanwhile, China ISM surveys are at record highs. You know, Indonesia, booming, Middle east booming. Brazil, Mexico, all of Latin America booming. So you look at this and you think, well, you know, what's going on here? Why is our emerging markets booming? And while the rest of the world is slowing down, I mean, don't these guys know that China is set to implode? Can they afford a copy of the Economist or Business Week? And the answer is pretty simple. You've removed the biggest constraint to their growth. Their biggest constraint to their growth was the fact that they needed to pay dollars for commodities. And now they don't. Now you're India, you can pay in rupees. Now you're China, you pay in renminbi, You're Thailand, you pay in Thai baht. This is an absolute game changer. Now coming back to your question on the brics, I think the BRICS summit really sort of, it's not that it promotes this, but it, it sort of crystallizes it all. Because what did you know, what did you see with the expansion of, you know, the BRICS from the initial five and adding Saudi Arabia and adding Iran and adding Argentina. Now I know it's easy to look at this and say, oh great, you're in a club with Iran. Who wants that? You're in a club with Argentina. Talk about deadbeats. You know, who, who wants to be in a club with these Guys, but here's the simple reality is you now have, you know, amongst those eight BRICS countries, you have five of the top eight oil producers in the world. The ones that are missing are the U.S. canada and Iraq. But the other five are in there that the other top five oil producers and you have the top two oil importers, most notably China and India. And together these basically these eight guys are openly saying we want to move the energy trade away from dollars into something else. We haven't quite figured out what the something else is, but we know we don't want it to be in dollars anymore. And for now what we'll do is we'll do a lot more trade in our own local currencies and perhaps we'll do like China and settle it with gold. But you know, by and large, you know, we're looking to change the very structure of the energy settlements and the energy trade. Now I think this is game changing. And to be honest, this is as an investor, for anybody listening this is, to be fair, the only question they should ask themselves is, look, for the past 50 years we've lived in a world where US treasuries were at the heart of the financial system and where oil was always priced in dollars. And the big question is, are we moving now into a different world where at least for some important countries, for the Chinas, the Indias of this world, where a lot of the marginal growth is still happening, Are these guys moving to a world where all of a sudden US Treasuries are not at the heart of their financial system and where oil and energy is no longer priced in dollars? Because if, if a whole part of the world is moving in a different direction, then our whole global financial architecture gets upended and people say, oh, the BRICS summit, what a joke, et cetera. Since that BRICS summit, U.S. treasuries have been falling every day. And they haven't been falling every day because US growth is ripping higher. And they haven't been falling every day because US inflation is ripping higher. Quite the contrary. A lot of the data has been rolling over. I think US Treasuries are falling every day partly because more and more people are realizing, hold on, there is a possibility that the world of tomorrow actually looks extremely different than the world that we've known for the past 50 years.
- [23:16]
B
What is your take on that possibility? Because something that I'm kind of perplexed by, frankly, is I agree with you that most of the world is saying, oh my gosh, there's a chance that the world could look very different in the next 50 years than the last 50 years. I think that decision's already made. I think it's crystal clear that we're down a path beyond a point of return that we're not going to return from. I think the world is changing very dramatically. I think that we're headed toward some kind of conflict between the global superpowers. Whether It's World War 3 per se, or some other shaped thing, I'm not exactly sure. It depends on how you define World War Three. But it's a really big moment of change, I think, in the world. Do you see it that way or, or how do you look at the world and what's happening now?
- [24:05]
D
Look, I agree with you that we are in the midst of this change. And you're always tempted to quote Oscar Wilde about going bankrupt very slowly and then very quickly. Look, I think, to be honest, when I look at things like the finances of governments in Europe, the finances of government in the United States, and I look at the behavior of bond markets, in a sense, you could say it's completely new. But then again, if you've been an emerging market investor, and as you know, I've been in Asia for 25 years, so I've done emerging markets for 25 years. It's also something that's very familiar. It's the time of the cycle where you see interest expands, go parabolic, and you're seeing this in the US and as you do, you start to see the bond market sell off. And really, the bond market sell off only stops once you get a massive, massive tightening of fiscal policy. Now across the Western world, we're very far from that. For me, I have found this past summer absolutely fascinating because I've had dozens and dozens of phone calls from clients asking me about what was happening in China. And I would always ask, why do you care so much? What's the trade with what's unfolding in China? And then I would also add the big story that's unfolding across our eyes right now is that OECD bond markets are going down every day. Forget China at this point, it's a sideshow. You have the very asset at the heart of our financial system, the OECD government bonds that are going down every day and where even beyond US Treasuries, where for me this was the most visible, was German bonds. If you told me that ISM surveys would hit record lows post reunification lows in Germany, that everything you care to look at in Germany looks horrible, the Chemical industry is imploding, their auto industry is imploding. Everything looks super ugly. And against that backdrop, German bond yields go up every single day. To me, it tells you that we are moving to your point. The change is already here. It's already happening. Now, I still don't think it's reflected in 95% of people's portfolios. You know, most people you talk to still have a 60, 40. You know, they have their 60 equities and their 40% bond. You know, if tomorrow, Eric, you go to either UBS or BNP or Morgan Stanley and you go to their private wealth, they're going to give you a nice questionnaire, and you're going to fill out the question. You're going to spend an hour filling out the questionnaire, and then they're going to decide, oh, Eric, you're an aggressive investor. We're going to put you 60% in equity and 40% in bonds. Or, or alternatively, they're going to say, oh, Eric, you're a very conservative investor. We're going to put you 60% in bonds and 40% in equities. And then when you're going to say, well, hold on. Your aggressive portfolio has actually done better than your conservative portfolio for the past three years, even though markets have gone down because bonds have actually done worse than equities. So your correlation make no sense. They would say, well, yeah, but they made sense for 30 years. So we're hoping it goes back to making sense. And so most people's portfolios out there are still managed on the premise that bonds and equities have a negative correlation and that if you get a hit on equity, your bonds will save you. Well, this didn't work in 2022. It didn't work in August. In August of this year, equities went down and bonds went down. And you would think that that should be the big story of the summer, not whether, you know, Chinese real estate is going down. That is really the big story. But it's a story that everybody does its best to ignore, because to confront it basically means completely upending the way you do your portfolio allocation, the way you build your portfolios, et cetera. But the reality is we're moving. If, like me, you believe that, you know what? We're moving to a very different, different financial superstructure where a lot of the relationships that I've worked for 30 years no longer work, then you have no choice but to put your thinking cap on and think, okay, how do I rebuild a portfolio in this world? Now, few people want to do this because the 6040 was so great for so long. You know, it was. It was like having Michael Jordan on your team, you know, and you're the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan leaves. It's pretty hard to rebuild. Nobody wants to confront the reality that the 6040 no longer works, but yet it's a reality that's now, you know, staring at you right in the eye.
- [28:49]
B
Let's move on to energy. We've got WTI crude oil just flirting with $90. We've been about half of our interview so far has been a below 90 and half of it's been above. So we're right on the edge there. Clearly, we've seen at least a change in the market. I don't want to declare it's a definitive upside trend change, although that's sure what it looks like. Is this related to China reopening? Is this related to. I think maybe it just has to do with seasonality from the standpoint that if you're going to use energy prices as a tool of economic warfare, you want to do that in the wintertime, when Europe is most vulnerable, if you're Russia. So seems like we're kind of coming into the season. So I think about that. What do you think the driver is for the recent strength and is it set to continue?
- [29:37]
D
So I don't know if you remember this, Eric, but you and I did a chat like this when energy was negative in the dark days.
- [29:45]
B
I do remember that day in the.
- [29:47]
D
Dark days of COVID and you kept telling me we were talking and say, I've got to interrupt, it's minus 20. I got interrupt, it's minus 25. But yeah, so look, I think many things on energy like you just mentioned, I think that the massive risk for the Western world is that we come into this winter and that Putin decides to weaponize energy. And that's a Damocles sword hanging over our heads for a number of reasons. But the reason he would do it is fairly obvious. I think if you're Putin, forget Zelensky, your real enemies are Biden and to a lesser extent, Rishi Sunak, and it's the US And Britain. Those are really the enemies you're trying to confront. And the reality is both of these countries have an election coming up this year. And if you're an incumbent, the last thing you want is higher energy prices. It's like having an advertisement against your policies at every street corner. If gasoline prices are at six bucks, seven bucks, eight bucks, it basically becomes impossible for you to get reelected. So I think if you're Putin at this point, you think, well, I shut down all the pipelines this winter for maintenance, and I shut down the Sebastopol and in St. Petersburg and Vladivostok for maintenance as well. I shut down the ports for three months. Now, the reason I think this might be his thinking is, I'm sure you've noticed that China's been importing oil like there's no tomorrow. China's oil imports have gone through the roof over the past six months, and China's oil inventories have never been this high. Now, I think when you look at China's oil inventories, there's three possible explanations. The first, which is the one that the American neocons fall back on, is, oh, my God, China's preparing to invade Taiwan, so they're stocking up on oil for a number of reasons. I don't buy that for a second. The second, which to me makes perhaps the most sense, is that China's decided. We mentioned China's record trade surpluses. China might have decided that it doesn't want to recycle those trade surpluses in US Treasuries, because what's the point? US Treasuries keep losing money. We're looking at a third negative year in a row, plus they can get confiscated at a moment's notice. So why would you buy U.S. treasuries? Better buy oil. You could always use oil. So, yeah, that makes sense. Alternatively, you could come to a third explanation that Putin whispered in the ear of his best friend forever, Xi Jinping, that it might make sense to be long oil this winter and to have some inventories. And so I think if you're Putin, why would you do that? Well, first, of course, you throw a massive amount of pain on Europe and you throw a massive amount of pain on Joe Biden, who then has a simple choice. If oil prices and gasoline prices go through the roof and he's already emptied out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, what can you do about it? One option, you can wear the political pain and probably gets obliterated in the election. The second is he bows out. He deposited Lyndon Johnson and says, well, you know, somebody else runs and carries. Carries the can. Or the third option, which is perhaps the option Putin is gunning for, is he decides, you know what, given the high gasoline prices, we're going to keep our domestic gasoline, keep our domestic diesel, keep all of our products, and stop exporting petroleum products to the rest of the world. Basically screwing over the Japanese, screwing over the Koreans. Screwing over the Europeans. And my guess is that's what Putin is trying to achieve. Because if the US does this, then Putin can say, oh, you guys have the allies you deserve. At the first sign of trouble, they desert you. And Kissinger's words that to be a US Enemy is very dangerous, but to be a US friend is fatal, will once again have been proven true. So my guess is that possibility, the lower the strategic petroleum reserves go, the more that possibility of Russia weaponizing oil against the Western alliance increases. That to me is the biggest risk on markets today. So why wouldn't you be long oil if that's the biggest risk? It's a risk that's easy enough to hedge. You go long oil, you go long the energy stocks and you protect yourself against that Damocles sword over your head. And I'll just finish with that quick. Point is, if you look at the past couple years I mentioned earlier how bonds no longer provided any diversification for portfolios, that bonds were no longer the anti fragile asset of choice, the new antifragile asset of choice. The one thing that does protect your equities. Maybe you like Microsoft, maybe you like LVMH, maybe you like Alibaba. The one risk you're running is that all prices go to $150. So it makes sense in that context to have energy in your portfolios, because that is the one diversification you can have. And you saw this through 2022. You saw it again in August when bonds and equities went down. Energy was up. Energy is now the ultimate diversification for portfolios.
- [35:05]
B
Let's talk a little bit more about the weaponization scenario. Because if you had asked me five years ago, tell me how this finance industry works, what if there's a war and there's an expectation that we're headed back to the Soviet E, there's going to be an Eastern bloc and a Western bloc, and some countries just don't do business with each other all around the world. I would have said, okay, if that was even on the table. The very first thing that would happen is all the finance guys would scramble and they'd be looking at, if this goes back to a bifurcated world, what are the sides? What is the supply of oil to each side? What's the supply of uranium to each side? What's the supply of copper to each side? You do that analysis and say, when this geopolitical event starts to go down, where are all of the hot points? What are the things to invest in? You know, what's going to happen. I don't see anybody doing any of that, or if they are doing it, they're being absolutely secretive about it. I don't see anybody talking about it. I don't see anybody taking seriously the possibility that we could get into a war with both Russia and China at the same time, where the other side controls most of the natural resources in the world. Am I missing something, or is there a bigger risk than most of the Western Finance Committee is willing to face?
- [36:28]
D
First, I agree entirely with the way you lay it out. I'll add just one thing. I think in 2018, the US basically did launch the new Cold War when it decided to ban the export of semiconductors to Huawei. And when the US Came out and said, look, it is now our policy to make sure that China can no longer grow technologically and develop technologically. So I think what happened at that moment is the US Signaled to the broader market. Look, we're starting a Cold War. And the front on the Cold War is semiconductors. And that's where the battle will be fought, on the battlefront of semiconductors, because we in the Western world have a huge comparative advantage on that. And so you did see in the following years, the likes of asml, the likes of tsmc, the likes of Nvidia, et cetera, go absolutely parabolic, because that was now the focus of government policy. That's where the battle would be fought and capital spending would increase dramatically in that area, et cetera. So I think that was one element. And so anybody who thought like you did and think, okay, we're in a cold war. Where should I invest? Ended up falling back on semiconductors because governments guided us that way. Now, you and I have discussed this many times in the past, but one of my starting points when I do my research is economic activity is energy transformed. And I think along with the view, like, oh, we're starting a new Cold War, we also said one war at a time isn't enough. We're also going to have a war on climate change. And so we're going to spend a ton of money on alternative energy, and we're going to spend a ton of money on solar, we're going to spend a ton of money on wind. And this will be money well spent anyway as part of this geopolitical conflict because it will allow us to isolate Russia and basically make it irrelevant. And I think this vision was especially strong in Europe. Combine that with all the ESG constraints that we decided to put on ourselves, and a ton of capital went into that Space. I think over 10 years we invested more than US$4 trillion trillion with a T in wind and solar. And with that we managed to move from 83 being carbon based to 81% being carbon based, which to me speaks to the failure of those investments. Now, we talked earlier about energy prices grinding up. I think one of the reason oil prices are grinding up and energy prices grinding up in general is that people are realizing are waking up to the fact that wind and solar have been a capital misallocation on a grand scale, that they haven't delivered a quarter of what we'd hoped they would deliver. And this realization is, I think, leading to a number of things. First, of course, energy prices are grinding higher, which is both a cause and a consequence of the realization of this failure. And at the same time, we're seeing a shift in the zeitgeist around everything linked to nuclear. Nuclear two years ago was a very dirty word. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And today, all of a sudden, across the Western world, there's a realization that, hold on, if we want to be serious about the carbon and if we want to be serious about climate change and if we want energy independence, then we've had that solution in front of our eyes the whole time. And even people like Macron, who did his very best for his first 10 years in power, first as Finance Minister and then as president to dismantle France's massive comparative advantage in the nuclear industry, is now starting to backtrack. So one of my favorite charts in my slide deck, which people can easily reproduce, you take the MSCI Alternative Energy Index and you take the MSCI Traditional Energy Index, just Energy Index, and you see that for 10 years the two go hand in hand. And they go hand in hand because at the end of the day they both sell energy. And then in the past three years, you have a massive crocodile mouth that opens up like a huge gap. Alternative energy goes through the roof and normal energy goes nowhere. And now this crocodile gap mouth has shut back down very violently in the past six months, where alternative energy plays are tanking and traditional energy plays are moving up. And all of the outperformance of alternative energy previous five years has just been taken out in the past six months. So long. Would an answer to your question, I think there was, as we entered into a cold war thinking, I think there was massive wishful thinking in the West. It's like, oh, well, we'll solve our energy needs with alternative energy and that's been a huge fail. And oh, we'll have massive advantage on semiconductors. And I think that's an advantage that's being eroded as we speak.
- [41:40]
B
Let's come back to the scenario that you suggested, where maybe this is the year that Putin decides that this is the winter he's going to weaponize energy prices for the sake of advancing Russia's war interests. What does that look like to you? What steps would be taken?
- [41:57]
D
Well, I think, to be honest, we got to preview a little bit of it this summer. I think this summer, Putin sort of weaponized wheat. You know, he tore off the Black Sea agreement, he bombed the silos in Ukraine, he bombed the Danube ports, and at the same time, he invited all of the African nations to a summit in Moscow and told them, guys, don't worry. Whatever happens, I'll have wheat for you guys and I'll even give you wheat for free. So there was a clear attempt because wheat prices were going up into that African summit. And then he told all the Africans, look, I'll give you wheat for free. And then the wheat prices came back down. Now, when it comes to energy, I'm sure you saw recently that Russia announced that they were going to sell their natural gas to China for half the cost, and they're going to sell oil at big discounts, and you're going to continue doing that for India as well. So what does it look like? I think, to be honest, the writing's on the wall. They've waited for inventories to be very low, and then you just basically stop exporting for three or four months in a tight market where you no longer have a strategic petroleum reserve and where the ability to crank up production in places like the US Or Brazil or wherever else is very limited by the fact that, a, you no longer have any oil engineers because for the past 10 years, you've told everybody that oil was a dying business. And you'd have to be an idiot to become an oil engineer. You no longer have spare oil rigs. You no longer have boats cranking up the production. If you just shut down production in Russia for three, or shut down exports in Russia for three, four months now, you could say, well, Saudi Arabia could crank it back on, the UAE could crank it back on. But here you get into the whole personal politics of it all. It's, does Saudi Arabia want to do Joe Biden a favor? It's pretty obvious that MBS has a very strong and deep personal relationship with President Trump, and he doesn't have one with President Biden. And so it's, will Saudi Arabia help the US in the past they would have, because the US Always was a guarantor of Saudi Arabian safety and security. And this brings me to the other massive geopolitical developments that nobody talks about in the west, but forget the Russia, Ukraine war. The other massive development of the past year is the Iran Saudi peace deal. The fact that China basically did its own little Camp David accord and got Saudi and Iran around the table to shake hands and to agree to stop fighting each other through all these proxy conflicts in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and Lebanon and wherever else is an absolute game changer. Because if you're now Saudi Arabia and you think, okay, Iran isn't going to attack me anytime soon, you're much more relaxed about, excuse my French, but showing the middle finger to the United States. And I think that's what's happening right now.
- [45:06]
B
Let's go a little bit deeper on what could happen with respect to Russia weaponizing prices, because I really think this is important for people to understand. In my analysis, if Russia took half of its oil exports off the market, just said we're not interested in selling at any price. We export 8 million barrels per day today. Starting next week, it's only going to be 4 million. That's it. Most people say, well, they would never do that because they could never afford the loss of revenue. And I say, wait a minute. Why do you assume that there's a loss of revenue if you took 4 million barrels a day off the market? First of all, don't assume that Saudi Arabia even wants to make up that difference, because I think it's more likely that Saudi Arabia and Russia would be working together in that scenario. But if Saudi Arabia wanted to help you and UAE wanted to help you, between UAE and Saudi Arabia combined, they might have 4 million barrels of spare capacity after the June cuts, but just barely, and they couldn't sustain it long term. So there's no way to make that up. And my contention is if you took that much oil off the market, prices would double. Well, if prices double, Russia's not losing any revenue, are they? I mean, obviously it piss everybody off, but it seems like we're headed toward that level of escalation. And something I see completely missing from any discussion in the west is, wait a minute. If they took half their oil off the market, they could shut down the global economy.
- [46:33]
D
Look, I'll take you back to. I don't know if you read Hank Poulsen's book Collapse, and in his book, Hank Poulsen, where he reviews the dark days of the 2008 crisis, et cetera. And in his book, he says that in the darkest days of the complete meltdown in US mortgage markets, the Russians called the Chinese and said, hey, guys, it's time. We can break the dollar system. Sell all your Treasuries, sell all your mortgages, and the system will implode. And China's answer was, basically, why would we want to do that? We've benefited massively from the system so far. We have every interest in keeping the system stable. We don't want to make the system more unstable. Now, I highlight this because I think it's a very different vision of policies between China and India. Fundamentally, China's always about promoting stability. They're always trying to keep things stable. I think Russia is far more, as we've seen this past couple of years, it's far more of a loose cannon. And. And Russia doesn't feel like it's benefited tremendously from the system over the past 20 years. It feels like it's been hard done by the system in the past 20 years. I think there's a big element amongst Russian policymakers of let's tear this thing down. And yes, to your point, today, I think we've given them a golden opportunity to do precisely that. And so to just assume that, oh, my God, yeah, it would be terrible, but don't worry, they're not going to do it. It's like, you know, what in Putin's track record makes you believe he's not going to play that card? You know, to me, everything in his track record makes me believe that there's at least a 50, 50 chance of him playing that card, if not higher.
- [48:32]
B
My take is there was 100% chance of him playing that card last year until he astutely observed that the time to play that card is not in an unseasonably mild winter. I think he's waiting for an unseasonably cold winter.
- [48:48]
D
I think there were a couple factors. The US still had a pretty large strategic petroleum reserve a year ago. So you had a mild winter, you had a US with a large SPR that the US decided to empty, but it was also not really a presidential election year. Now you have a window of opportunity, if you're Russia, where you can have a direct, very strong impact on both a British election and a U.S. election. And I think if you're Russia, those are your two genuine enemies because you didn't want Britain and the US at your doorstep. And so you now have a chance to take the government of Rishi Sunak down and the government of Biden down. Why wouldn't you have a go? Because to your point, because maybe you make less money if you cut back your production and you export less and the prices don't go up all that much, so you end up with less money. Do we think Putin really cares about the money? I mean, if he cared about the money, he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine in the first place. I don't think what makes you believe in his track record of recent years that his decisions have been motivated by revenue maximizing? I don't think it's. I don't think that is even in his top three considerations.
- [50:07]
B
And while we're on this topic of energy, and particularly the geopolitical risks that could occur with energy, I just want to point out for any newer listeners who may not be aware that I recently published Energy Transition Crisis, a documentary series where episode three is entirely about all of the reasons that I am predicting an oil and gas energy crisis in the late 2000s. It's very consistent with Louis views here. Louis, I can't thank you enough for a terrific interview, but before I let you go, I want to ask you a little bit more about what you do at Gavcal. And for people who are not familiar with your work, it's mostly institutional. So both tell our institutional listeners how they can contact your institutional sales team for coverage. And for the retail guys who are not eligible for your institutional coverage, how can they follow your work both through the books you've written and also on social media and elsewhere?
- [50:58]
D
Great. Well, look, Eric, again, super, super happy to be here. Thanks for plugging my book. My last book that I wrote was called Avoiding the Punch. I think it's a fun read. You can get on our website, www.gafkal.com G-A V K A L yeah, as a firm, we publish research for institutional investors. We also have a private wealth arm called the Evergreen Gafcal for US Clients, called Gafcal wealth, based in Mauritius for non US Clients and we will say manage various funds, mostly in Asia out of our Hong Kong office. If people are ever in Hong Kong, they should definitely feel free to look me up. Before I go, I'd just like to conclude with just one quick idea for you, is that look, I think we're staying on the topic very briefly of energy. We're now in the phase of the cycle where energy prices, gasoline prices, are creeping higher at a time when mortgage rates are also creeping higher. You've been around the block a few times. That's rarely a super happy combination, right? Rising mortgage rates, rising energy prices. So it seems likely to me that things are going to get tougher as we move forward and portfolio construction is going to be more important than ever. And in this world of portfolio construction, you have to look at every one of your assets and think, okay, what job is this particular asset doing in my portfolio? And the reality is bonds haven't done their job for three years. So you need to whatever you have in bonds, you need to rethink and put somewhere else.
- [52:32]
B
Patrick Saresna and I will be back as Macro Voices continues right here@macrovoices.com. My new free documentary series Energy Transition Energy Transition Crisis is live on YouTube. You can watch all eight episodes for free at energytransitioncrisis.org and on the Energy Transition Crisis YouTube channel. Macro Voices has been commercial free since July 1, thanks to donations covering our production budget. We don't normally ask for anything in return for bringing you Macro Voices for free every week, but I'd consider it a personal favor if everyone listening could take just a minute to subscribe to the energy transition crisis YouTube channel. And like all the EP, even if you're not going to watch the series yourself, that one act will make a profound difference in how many people this message reaches, because YouTube's trending algorithms are all about the momentum of likes, subscriptions, and most importantly, viewer comments. If you're inspired by the message of this docuseries, please engage with other viewers in the YouTube comments. And if you really want to help, there's even a donations page@energytransitioncrisis.org where you can make a donation to help promote Energy transition crisis through YouTube and social media advertising. This is a passion project for me and I have no profit motive. I just want the millions of young people around the world who've become passionate about climate change to understand how badly they've been lied to and how little progress has really been made on Energy Transition. So if you've enjoyed this free podcast for the last seven years, I'd really appreciate the personal favor of your help making the launch of Energy Transition Crisis a success. The more help we can get promoting Energy Transition Crisis on social media, adding subscribers and comments to the energy transition crisis YouTube channel, and requesting me as a guest on big audience podcasts like Joe Rogan the Better. Now let's get back to the show and Patrick's postgame chart deck.
- [54:44]
A
Now back to your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna.
- [54:49]
C
Eric, it was so great to have Louis back on the show now. Nick Galarnik remains on vacation but will be back next week. So Eric, let's talk some charts listeners. You're going to find the download link for the Post game Chart deck in your Research Roundup email. If you don't have a Research Roundup email, that means you have not yet registered@macrovoices.com just go to our homepage macrovoices.com and click on the red button over Louis picture saying Looking for the downloads now. Eric let's cover crude oil starting with the EIA inventory.
- [55:20]
B
EIA printed a drawdown of 2.1 million barrels nationally and also another draw of 2.1 million barrels in Cushing, Oklahoma. Now I can make an absolutely certain guaranteed prediction that we are not going to see another 10 weeks of Cushing drawdowns of this magnitude because there's not enough oil in Cushing to have that many more drawdowns and it can't go negative. They are not actually at tank bottoms in Cushing, but they're down to about 22, 23 million barrels. That's basically the absolute bottom of the safe operating level. They haven't run out of oil, but they're at the bare minimum that they need in order to keep all of their operations running. So we've got a real situation. I'm pretty sure that's the reason that we had an explosion in the WTI time spreads earlier this week that's coming back under control now, but they're still very high and I expect them them to continue to blow out. Gasoline drawing down 831,000 barrels, distillates drawing down 2.9 million barrels. So we've got drawdowns across the board. US production holding steady at 12.9 million barrels. As I said last week, the market was already overbought then and overdue for a pullback. It just kept powering higher as we've seen so much physical market stress and people are starting to finally focus on supply, which is where the story is really going to be. Looks like this correction has finally started now. But hey, look at how shallow the last couple of corrections have been. You know, I'm already starting to buy the dip here. I hope it dips further. I'd love to see at least back down to some of the lower moving averages down around 84, $85. But I'm going to be buying all the way down. I do think the move higher is on and I don't mind admitting that I've missed some of this move because I was holding out for a deeper Correction and didn't get it. So I'm not going to repeat that mistake a second time. Now, our good friend Dr. Anas Alhaji has been predicting all year that oil prices would be strong this time of year. Well, he got that one right. But then he said, be careful, don't expect $100 oil prices because he predicted that China, once we got oil prices back up to a reasonable level, Honest predicted that China would begin drawing down its SPR and selling into that strength. Just this week, Honest has a research note out to his paying subscribers confirming that that's exactly what's happened, that China has begun to draw down only in a small way so far, but it is a drawdown on the SPR in China that they had been building until now. So it looks like maybe Honest is starting to be proven right. That's only a couple of weeks. Let's wait and see how the data shapes up. But there's reason to think that we may be nearing the end of the move up in price that honest predicted in 2023. Maybe we're going to have a little bit of a reprieve here. Maybe prices will come back down for a while and then we don't see them move over $100 until 2024. That was certainly Dr. Anas El Haji's outlook. Look, I'm going to say he's a very smart guy, been around the oil business a lot longer than I have. But I still see plenty of reason for China's strategy to change based on geopolitical developments and to get right back to $120 per barrel oil before this year is out. I'm not predicting that that's going to happen, but certainly it wouldn't take much of a geopolitical escalation for that to happen. And who knows when that's coming.
- [58:53]
C
Yeah, Eric, when we just look at oil technically on page two, we had a really solid advance that approached the 2000 September and November 2022 highs. And so we now have traded to some overhead resistance. It's a very typical place where a rally can get checked. I mean, there's plenty of room for a five dollar pullback in crude oil. It may approach its 50 day moving average. But my position is that there's a primary new bull trend and old dips should be bought. So I'm not looking at shorting oil in any way. It's likely to pause, but it should be bought on dip. And I still think we could see $100 even this calendar year. So Eric, I wanted to move on to page three and just touch on this S&P 500. And more importantly, for the entire period since Labor Day, up until this FOMC more or less the market's been pinned in about a 50 point range, give or take. I mean we had a couple little swings, but more or less we had the option expiration gamma pins driving deeper or sideways consolidation. And really there was no reason for market volatility return until we were in this post FOMC period. But what we had here was Powell came out with a bit with the hockey tilt and the market just didn't like it at all. And we've seen now a very decisive breakdown below 4,500, which was for my line in the sand at this moment, the path of least resistance is for this to drop even a hundred further points down to around 4300. Now is this that scary, ominous market crash kind of scenario where we head right back down to 2022 lows? I think it's a little premature to, to be talking that, but the way I look at it is I'm going to look for this drop toward 4300, gonna see how the price action stabilizes there. And if we see that a negative feedback loop starts perpetuating some liquidation and volatility starts causing more and more traders to unwind some of that heavy leverage and maybe some of the short gamma positioning that might be out there that could lead to some more selling. But right now 4300 is my short term target. Let's move on though to the dollar. What are you thinking here?
- [61:14]
B
Well, we're just barely holding under 105, which is an important resistance level as you've pointed out Patrick, in previous weeks. So we need to watch that closely. If it breaks above 105, then of course the question becomes what's the next level above that? What we know from talking to Brent Johnson that he thinks a retest of 115 may be in the cards. I can tell you if that happens, it's going to break a whole bunch of other things. But I'm not going to tell you it's not going to happen right now though until we get above 105. I think it's hurry up in wait mode. But boy, just looking at the chart, it looks like it's trying to break out of that 105 level.
- [61:48]
C
Yeah, the US dollar index is trading right up along the 2023 highs. But this is a real big tell for me. We had a couple little pullbacks over the last couple weeks. And each time the dollar got bought on diploma dip. And so now almost all the major central banks have spoken. And so it's going to be really interesting to see if we see risk off. Perpetuating a risk off scenario of a strong dollar and weak risk assets really feels like the likely scenario at least in the first day after the fomc. And so let's see whether this causes a breakout on this. A dollar, you know, trading above 106 really at that moment you got some fib retracement zones in that 107 to 109 zone. But really it could start a process where the dollar could go back to retesting some of those 2022 highs. Now I'm not calling for that yet but we're at a very critical overhead resistance and we'll see whether or not dollar strength can continue. Moving on though, Eric, on page five I have the gold futures of December contract. What are you thinking here on gold?
- [62:57]
B
Well last week I said 1926 on the December contract is the critical price to watch on the gold chart and I did not expect it to hold. Well, I got that one wrong. It did hold but I'm not convinced it's anything more than just a dead cat bounce. And I also want to point out that Wednesday's closing print, I put closing print and air quotes there above the 100 day moving average is an illusion. That's like a funky contract gold for some reason it has a closing hour of 11 o'. Clock. I believe it's not, not the 230 that most of the other futures contracts expire at. The point is the close on gold on Wednesday. That really high print that you see 1962 or whatever, that's not what the price of gold was after Jay Powell spoke in the afternoon. That's what the price was in the morning when Jay Powell spoke in the afternoon or after Powell's speech is what matters as far as I'm concerned. And we're right back down to where we started before that rally began. So don't be duped by that signal. I think we're probably headed down for another test of the 200 day moving average. That's 1927 or so. I won't be surprised if that's tested again. So let's wait till next week and see if we're above it or below it. But so far I don't think the bounce that we've seen necessarily has legs. If it gets above the 100 day moving average and really and truly closes there. That would definitely be an indication but so far it's been rejected and rejected pretty firmly.
- [64:28]
C
There's all these little bounces in here Eric, but every rally's been failing. Gold has not been able to show any accumulation. Every time gold pops it's sold in its distributive price action. And it's not typical for gold to be doing well in this period. So at this juncture with us in tight liquidity conditions, higher interest rates in a dollar strength, really hard to make a case that there's at least any immediate reason to be bullish Gold if we see in any breakdown towards 1900 it could really make a spill down to 1850 and if the selling is intense enough maybe we go back to 2022 lows. Now I'm not that bearish but right now there's nothing bullish to say about this chart. Continues to trade below that 50 day moving average. It it's very distributive price action. I think in the bigger picture, especially when we're in the next phase of the monetary cycle with some sort of easing, maybe in 2024 we could see a environment where gold could have some bullishness then. But on the short term anyway, this trend of weak gold is likely to persist. What I wanted to just touch on finally though, Eric is looking at page six. I have the volatility index VIX and I was really surprised that going into the FOMC and going into that seasonality of, of high volatility October that the VIX was trading in the low teens. We talked about in last week's post game and here we got that spike. We're at the 16 level on the Vix now that's not really danger zone. I mean we have to see up in the mid-20s in order for it to really be advertising that some some bigger risk off impulses underway. But what will be interesting at least this week is will we get back toward 20 and start consolidating in higher levels of volatility. At this moment we definitely have a one day breakout. So let's see whether what develops from here. Moving on though, I wanted to just touch on the two charts of copper and uranium starting with copper on page seven, a very distinction breakdown back to the August low. We were talking about this four or five month trade range that's been forming. But the rallies very similar to gold have more or less continuously failed rolling over. There's an immediate downside risk of a breakdown if copper can't hold these lows right in here. It could really start a breakdown that could send us down to the three and a quarter level later this year though. I wanted to wrap things up on page eight with with the Sprott Uranium Trust chart now. We talked at the beginning that the uranium is now at multi year highs on the U308 and this Sprott Uranium Trust as well breaking out multi year highs on the upside. And so we have uranium one of the only real places that has got some genuine bullishness and it continues to work. It'll be interesting to see whether this can continue. There is nothing bearish to say. Obviously a little bit overbought. There's always room for, you know, one or two dollars pullback on the Sprott Uranium Trust to just do a little bit of profit taking. But a old dip should be bought and this trend is going to continue. Likely to be strong here at least there's no reason to believe that we've seen a major topping formation, folks.
- [67:51]
B
If you enjoy Patrick's chart decks, you can get them every single day of the week with a free trial of big picture trading. The details are on the last pages of the slide deck or just go to bigpicturetrading.com Patrick tell them what they can expect to find in this week's Research Roundup.
- [68:06]
C
Well, in this week's Research Roundup, you're going to find the transcript for today's interview and the chart book we just discussed here in the post game, including a number of links to interesting articles that we found. You'll find this and so much more in this week's Research Roundup. So that does it for this week's episode. We appreciate all the feedback and support we get from our listeners, and we're always looking for suggestions on how we can make the program even better. Now, for those of our listeners that write or blog about the markets and would like to share that content with our listeners, send us an email@research roundupacrovoices.com and we will consider it for our weekly distributions. If you have not already, follow our main Twitter account Acro Voices for all the most recent updates and releases. You can also follow Eric on Twitter at ericsstownson. That's Eric spelled with a kid. You could also follow me at Patrick Ceresna on behalf of Eric Townsend and myself, thank you for listening and we'll see you all next week.
- [69:11]
A
That concludes this edition of Macro Voices. Be sure to tune in each week to hear feature interviews with the brightest minds in finance and macroeconomic. Macro Voices is made possible by sponsorship from BigPicture Trading.com, the Internet's premier source of online education for traders. Please visit bigpicturetrading.com for more information. Please register your free account@macrovoices.com Once registered, you'll receive our free weekly Research Roundup email containing links to supporting documents from our featured guests and the very best free financial content our volunteer research team could find on the Internet each week. You'll also gain access to our free listener discussion forums and research library. And the more registered users we have, the more we'll be able to recruit high profile feature interview guests for future programs. So please register your free account today@macrovoices.com if you haven't already. You can subscribe to Macro Voices on itunes to have Macro Voices automatically delivered to your mobile device each week, free of charge. You can email questions for the program to mailbagrovoices.com and we'll answer your questions on the air from time to time in our Mailbag segment. Macro Voices is presented for informational and entertainment purposes only. The information presentation presented on Macro Voices should not be construed as investment advice. Always consult a licensed investment professional before making investment decisions. The views and opinions expressed on Macro Voices are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect those of the show's hosts or sponsors. Macro Voices, its producers, sponsors and hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna, shall not be lying for losses resulting from investment decisions based on information or viewpoints presented on Macro Voices. Macro Voices is made possible by sponsorship from BigPicture Trading.com and by funding from Fourth Turning Capital Management, LLC. For more information, visit macrovoices.com.
- [71:28]
D
Ra.