Trump has said that he would pick the next Fed chair tomorrow. Odds rapidly jumped for Warsh.

No matter who it is, nothing stops this train.

So I watched The Rip. A Miami cop movie with Affleck and Damon.

I liked the first half quite a bit. Really intense opening scene, good mystery setup, high emotional stakes, etc. Always happy to see Affleck and Damon together.

The second half lost me a bit. Some aspects seemed unrealistic enough to distract me and pull me out of it. And I felt the heavy hand of the writers/director in terms of character choices not really making sense, convenient scene changes, etc.

But, all together a solid cop movie. Glad I watched it.

So far out of this recent run of movies, Sinners is comfortably my top choice even though I had some issues in the third act.

That move in DXY is nothing compared to the massive move in gold and precious metals. Precious metals are up vs everything, and by a massive magnitude.

Bull market in gold vs oil, gold vs houses, gold vs stocks, gold vs bitcoin, gold vs dollars, gold vs euro, gold vs yen, etc.

DXY is back down to the same level it was at during the 1990s when gold was like $300/oz. That just compares the dollar vs other fiat currencies, and it's like a 13% move this year vs 100% for gold and nearly 300% for silver.

It’s wrong when they say it for bitcoin, too.

I see some people saying, “it’s not gold going up, it’s the dollar going down” and things like that.

That’s not really the case, and there’s a simple test to see why.

When a currency crashes, it loses value relative to everything. Other currencies, real estate, stocks, precious metals, etc. Prices of normal goods and services skyrocket.

In this bull run, precious metals gained value vs other things. Gold vs oil. Gold vs stocks. Gold vs real estate. Silver vs oil, etc.

The dollar is rangebound vs other major currencies. The supply growth of the dollar this past year was 5%. It’s gold and other precious metals that went up vs everything. Partly based on fundamentals, and now seemingly due to momentum.

Now, where there is some truth to the statement: central banks in aggregate haven’t added to their holding of treasuries in ten years. The only foreign treasury purchases have been in the private sector, and at a rate lower than total US debt growth. But central banks have been buying gold. There is indeed a gradual shift toward neutral reserve assets afoot, ever since around 2009.

But that a very long process. That source of demand didn’t single-handedly drive the huge boom in precious metals over this past year. This was like a volleyball held under water and let go, soaring back up.

Yep it’s been disappointing lately. I expected $150k in 2025 but we only got to $126k.

That’s what diversification is for.

And it was $6.9k before that, when I first recommended it.

Bitcoin was $26k when Broken Money was published.

I saw The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and disliked both.

I liked this more than those two.

The number of people who spent the past decade complaining about the Fed's artificially low interest rates, only to turn around and constantly complain about their slowness of cutting rates lately (as if 3.75% is super high), is comical.

The premise of the movie Bugonia is that two conspiracy theorists (led by Jesse Plemons) kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO (Emma Stone) because they think she's an alien.

We watched it last night, and had mixed thoughts.

-It was notably darker than I thought, which is neither good nor bad but in kind of a "dark comedy" genre it was lower on comedy and higher on darkness than I would've guessed. Scenes were more violent and tense than I had expected them to be.

-I was entertained throughout, in the sense that I enjoyed watching it and was curious how it would end, if everyone would be alright or not, comedic or tragic ending, etc.

-The acting was great all around, and particularly from Plemons. No complaints about cinematography or the score.

-I felt the writing/dialogue could be a stronger. Much of it comes down to Stone's character debating with Plemon's character, the back-and-forth that they go through, and it wasn't super riveting imo.

-I have another criticism but it's a spoiler to talk about it. In general, I feel that the narrative kind of "cheats" in a sense, where details and plot points don't necessarily line up as well as they could.

Definitely glad I watched it. Was curious about this one.