BREWED BEHAVIOUR
Lifestyle, Fitness, Health, and more.
The Denial and the Shuttle Ran at the Same Time
On Monday night Trump posted on Truth Social that reports he had proposed lifting sanctions and releasing frozen Iranian funds were untrue, and that he had offered them nothing. The reports, from Axios and CNN, had cited unnamed US officials saying he was willing to do exactly that in exchange for concrete progress on the nuclear question. On Tuesday, Qatar said it still hoped shuttle diplomacy could produce a breakthrough. US and Iranian...
The Hedge That Does Not Pay You to Wait
Gold fell nearly 6 per cent in September. It dropped below 4,140 dollars an ounce on 28 September alone, a fall of close to 4 per cent in a session, taking the decline from its August peak past 10 per cent. By the end of the month it was sitting near 4,150, having briefly recovered toward 4,200 when softer than expected PCE inflation data arrived. All of this happened during an inflation scare. That is the part worth pausing on, because gold's...
Two Customers Pulling in Opposite Directions
Platinum fell to 1,676 dollars an ounce on 29 September, the lowest since August and an eight-week low. The immediate cause was familiar by then: elevated oil prices pushed up expectations of higher-for-longer interest rates, which raised the opportunity cost of holding a metal that pays nothing, which thinned investment flows. The longer story is more interesting and has nothing to do with rates. The World Platinum Investment Council expects...
You Cannot Grow Out of a Rate You Did Not Set
Trump told TIME that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates again this year, arguing that higher rates make the federal debt harder to reduce and that the way out is growth. He said the United States had never had growth like the current period, and that it was not only artificial intelligence driving it. The next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled for 27 and 28 October, and softer than expected August...
The Chokepoint That Works Less the Harder You Squeeze
Before the war began on 28 February, the Strait of Hormuz carried roughly a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas. It has been the central pressure point of the conflict ever since, and the question now being asked in the analysis is whether it still works as leverage. The numbers underneath the question are strange and instructive. Windward recorded 55 transits in the week of 16 to 23 September, about 94 per cent below pre-war...