Nothing wrong with having some oily divvys coming in. I don’t know what happens if it’s a deflation coming. Oil gets beaten up in a bad economy. Lots of other factors I guess, closure of the Straits of Hormuz a wild card.

I filled up at Costco for $1.69 a gallon yesterday. They must be fracking the HELL out of the USA to get these numbers. Cheap gas is all that matters…

I’ll have a friendly bet with you , that the S&P 500 is higher one year from todays price….6850

The Great Disconnect: A Record Stock Market Is Masking a Collapsing Real Economy

There is a ghost in the machine. On the surface, the American economy appears triumphant. The S&P 500 has added over $17 trillion in value since April, notching its 29th record high of 2025.

The financial media celebrates the resilience of the market, the power of the A.I. revolution, and the genius of a Federal Reserve that has seemingly engineered a perfect “soft landing.”

But beneath this shimmering surface of financial asset inflation, the real economy; the world of manufacturing, logistics, small businesses, and the American worker, is in a state of catastrophic collapse.

This is the great disconnect of our time. While a handful of mega-cap technology stocks party like it’s 1999, the vast majority of the country is experiencing a brutal, painful recession.

A stunning 68% of Americans believe the economy is in a recession (up from around 60% earlier this year), not because of a headline on the evening news, but because they are living it.

They see it in the rising cost of living, the dwindling job opportunities, and the quiet desperation of friends and family struggling to make ends meet.

This article pulls back the curtain on the official narrative. We will look at the hard data; the collapsing manufacturing sector, the tsunami of layoffs, the frozen hiring market, the plunging truck sales, and the record wave of bankruptcies.

We will show that the real economy is not just slowing down; it is sinking. And we will explain why this collapse makes the Federal Reserve’s return to Quantitative Easing (QE) an absolute inevitability, and why the inflationary firestorm that follows will make hard assets, particularly monetary metals, the only viable safe haven for your wealth and purchasing power protection.

The Illusion of the Official Numbers

Before we dive into the wreckage, it is crucial to understand why the official government statistics paint such a rosy picture. The headline unemployment rate (U-3) may appear low, but it is a masterclass in statistical deception.

It conveniently ignores the millions of Americans who have given up looking for work entirely and have dropped out of the labor force.

As the U.S. debt continues to explode, the budget deficit widens and the fiat dollar loses purchasing power, the impacts to the American worker couldn’t be more obvious. Companies are forced to do more with less and it is really showing up in the data.

The headline unemployment rate also fails to account for the explosion in part-time or multiple-job holders, where individuals are forced to string together several low-wage gigs to make ends meet.

The reality is that the labor force participation rate remains stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels, and the quality of jobs being created is deteriorating rapidly. The official numbers are not a reflection of reality; they are a tool of narrative control.

So, Let’s Dig Into:

1. The psychological recession.
2. Manufacturing in freefall, despite all of the talk of bringing home manufacturing. excerpt: “this was the fifth monthly decrease this year. Zoom out, and the picture gets even grimmer: manufacturing employment has now fallen in a staggering 25 of the last 35 months.”
3. The silent layoff tsunami happening right now!
4. The canary in the coal mine? excerpt: “U.S. heavy truck sales have plunged an astonishing 47% over the last three months, the lowest level since the 2020 pandemic. Such a rapid, cliff-dive drop has historically only been seen during deep recessions.”

5. The bankruptcy wave that looks like 2008.
6. The tapped out consumer! excerpt: “every single day more and more people move down from the top of the K-shaped economy to the bottom of it.”
7. And the great debasement 2.0 and the only escape hatch! excerpt: “If they do print, we will see inflation come roaring back, potentially much like what happened in the 1970s. We already experienced “9.9%” inflation (per their distorted way of calculation) a few years back, are we about to now experience 10% or even 15% inflation the way Americans did in the 1970s?”…

Our ELORO is up 15% today … on its way to $10 me thinks. (not advice)

Ride’em cowboy

Looks like resistance was just the ducks lining up I was wondering just before the move but thinking about Powell or does it matter much right now. I wonder if something up with Powell, is he gonna play Santa or the Grinch.

Great catch …suits my portfolio v well….v interesting takes,……he is dead right on Energy…..the charts look great.

SSSSSSHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!

Re didn’t expect to ever see $ 60 Ag etc….get ready for another digit and then expect to see $ 500….those charts are real and the move confirms them.

Meet the new boss…..

Just saw silver. This is another unexpected rally. I guess we don’t have to wait.

I honestly didn’t think I’d see $60 silver in my lifetime.

Who was it that had the rally monkey years back? Was that Wanka?

Someone needs to unlock that dude‘s cage and let him out!!!

he suffered enough, don’t you think?

Looks like we’re getting a follow through kinda cup and handle formation. 70s next?

trading economics shows $60.002 @ 10:40, a quick backtest to $59.78, then running up again…

ZUBAZOOM   !!!!!!

$60.25 and counting…

PS Eff the shorts!

$59 breached, backtested, running for new highs.  $60 by the end of the day???

before lunch ???

Everyone is a photographer with a smartphone. So we have thousands of planes that fly the sky everyday and now we have these sneaky guys that can’t be caught with a camera phone. Well smart guy, you can’t catch them because it’s being sprayed from the trailing edge of the wing. No wait, it’s mixed in the fuel and it’s burned. We’re not sure who’s doing it. We can’t get governments around the world to agree on jack crap but they’re definitely in on the chemtrails, pfft

Course gold not helping after being up earlier.

Never underestimate the ability of the shares to suck on any given day.

Hopefully this B.S. is over by the end of the week and we can rally for a while.

https://stockcharts.com/sc3/ui/?s=EMOTF

Otavio (Tavi) Costa
@TaviCosta
·
Dec 7
Energy stocks keep inching higher, quietly building the pressure for what I think could become a sharp, decisive breakout.

You can’t perfectly time these inflection points, but the macro pieces are falling into place:

▪️Positioning remains deeply bearish.
▪️U.S. oil and gas rigs are contracting meaningfully.
▪️Oil is trading near one of the cheapest levels in history relative to the money supply.
▪️Energy’s weight in the S&P 500 is hovering near record lows.

It reminds me of when people said I was crazy for buying mining stocks, insisting metals would never move.

While my conviction in miners hasn’t changed one bit, I also see energy equities as one of the most fundamentally attractive corners of the market right now.

https://x.com/TaviCosta/status/1997733219018670501

Otavio (Tavi) Costa
@TaviCosta
·
15h
Some argue that gold’s recent outperformance relative to the S&P 500 was a temporary anomaly.

I disagree.

This dynamic follows very long-term cycles, and I believe we’re likely only in the early stages of this one.

A key reminder:

Unlike past cycles, however, we now face a trifecta of macro imbalances:

▪️The Debt Problem of the 1940s
▪️Inflation Issues of the 1970s
▪️Asset Valuation Imbalance of the Late 1920s and 1990s

https://x.com/TaviCosta/status/1998154059585622368

That’s an incredible tragedy. It’s time for the US to pack up and leave the place entirely. No more troops in Europe, no intelligence sharing, no starlink, no nothing for the war.

I saw that and no surprise. He’s like in  checkmate but won’t concede and hope removing him is enough to stop the neocons in Europe even if they did after ruining their economies and country.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/zelensky-definitively-shuts-door-trump-peace-plan-wont-cede-territory

this will only end with the removal of the comedian. Or nuclear war.

Well there’s something we can agree on. Putin is the only wise adult in the group who’s looking at the welfare of millions of people not like the shady neocons looking at the millions dollars they can purloin from the  millions along with their lives.