rogermunibond

Surprised no one posted about the Artemis II launch. Amazing to watch. Some great shots from spectators at the Cape and aloft.

Physical Brent crude hitting $141.37 highest price since 2008

Read the article please. Pipelines don't get built in 1-2 years.

Everyone wants a pipeline now https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/60af63aa-e4e5-44ee-ac7f-572b49411f42

Blue Owl Corporation and Tech Fund bonds aren't selling off, so it's probably money good if you can stomach the volatility.

GS Oil baseline forecast for Q2 is now 4.4 Mb/day short with SoH open and Gulf states paying toll, 8 Mb/day short if Gulf states reject transit toll

CGB ETFs doing good. https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/7e4c4249-23b1-4f90-8d5c-e7d2be08f765

Developed market central banks have diversified from the dollar. Emerging CBs are a lot more dependent on USD reserves iirc

@Spooky my comment on stagflation was only about the US economy. Yes, oil intensity of growth has lowered but that's mostly developed economies. there's going to be real chances of stagflation in emerging and frontier economies - Egypt, Pakistan, India, SE Asia etc. very good chances (if the oil price stays high for 1 year) that we could see geopolitical tensions rise and govts overthrown. many of the emerging economies are burning through USD currency reserves to keep gasoline/diesel/kerosene costs contained and then they may have to do the same for grains and seed oils very soon.

I don't think we're looking at a stagflation scenario. The 70s scenario was GDP contraction, high unemployment AND high inflation. 2026 scenario looks like positive GDP growth, low unemployment, AND possibly rising inflation. Bigger drivers of growth like federal budget, OBBB tax refunds, and AI capex will likely keep driving GDP growth.

Polymarket update - SOH Opening down 8%, US forces enter Iran down 4%, US recession end of 2026 down 6%

@Mephistopheles seems like the trade is supply destruction > demand destruction regardless of Iran War ending or SoH opening today so long dated Brent is the way to play it.

Guess we know Andurand's position

I remember Sokol being slippery but not Lubriderm slippery. LOL

$GOOG Quantum AI team with a new paper on much lower resources needed to break ECC-256 https://quantumai.google/static/site-assets/downloads/cryptocurrency-whitepaper.pdf Followed by another team from Oratomic, Caltech, and UC Berkeley show quantum computers can break crypto with just 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits.

GEICO is pretty representative of a huge deterioration in the moat due to lack of investment in technology and systems to better underwrite and process P/C risk. The algorithm built by Tony Nicely probably started to deteriorate even with Nicely was CEO but it didn't become truly apparent until 2019 and then 2020 brought out huge problems with GEICO underwriting.

@Viking other signals besides Truth Social. Pakistan and China foreign ministers meeting in Beijing. Iran saying in order to negotiate it needs guarantees against attacks etc. Iran War ending without a US negotiated disposition for SoH seems more and more likely.

Interesting breakdown of Brattle Group, FERC, and Thunder Said Energy reports on how US grid can be used to accomodate the huge data center electricity demand forecasted. "Three reports dropped in the last two weeks. All three land on the same thesis - the U.S. grid problem is partly a utilization and orchestration problem vs. purely a buildout problem. Brattle calcs that better use of existing infrastructure could unlock the equivalent of 100 GW of capacity (per the podcast's characterization of the findings) and save consumers $110-170B over a decade (similar to reports by Duke, Camus, etc.). FERC's 2025 State of the Markets shows scarcity already clearing in prices. PJM capacity auctions hit the cap twice and still fell 6.5 GW short of reliability requirements. Wholesale electricity prices rose 25% YoY. 50 GW of data centers now in service. Thunder Said Energy quantifies the operator side. A 2-3 year grid delay halves (-50%!) a data center's NPV. Flexible operation during the top 1% of grid-stress hours costs only ~6% of NPV. The math strongly favors accepting curtail-ability over sitting in the interconnection queue.

As per Bob Brackett from Bernstein, WTI+crack spread over $180 leads to recession.

Could be Bell's palsy or other non-stroke neurologic event.

Why would Latam countries want to align with the US when we specifically want to keep them from emigrating to the US? From the GOP white nationalist perspective, why would the US de-align with NATO when you actually want more emigration from European countries? Or is the GOP white nationalist/nativist perspective, that white women will raise their TFR above 2.1? Why would the true blue MAGA/GenZ GOP segment want to align with Zionist Israel?

Jim Bianco sums up the NACHO trade pretty well here

There's a Reuters article that says oil traders are looking at $150 end of April or $70-80 end of May/June, which kinda implies that it's all about SoH opening (binary outcome) and a straddle trade is the way to go.

I get a feeling that the inflation/supply shock from the SoH shutdown is going to be much bigger than many in the West are predicting. The US has largely not paid attention to what is going on with basic petrochemical feedstocks and chemical derivatives in Asia. True there was oversupply in chemical producers (Japan, SK producers getting pushed out by China), but the overall effect of polyester, PET, nylon, PVC costs jumping 200-400% will start to hit in the next six months. I'm still not sure, for example, what % of COGS is made up of petrochemicals for say a polyester/nylon sweater? The materials may just be 2-3% so that a 400% increase may end up with $3 of final product inflation. Also, looking for signs that diesel, gasoline, kerosene shortages are hitting Asia. Bangladesh, Philippines, Japan, SK, all have reports of shortages. Or agricultural co-ops, municipal fleets etc having fuel tenders for fleet fuel supply go unfilled due to shortage or high prices. http://archive.today/M8YWK https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/beer-cosmetics-asia-feels-full-force-war-fuelled-energy-crisis-2026-03-26/ The flip side of this is that perhaps the supply shock in petrochemicals puts a bid on the plastics recyclables business which has been clearly destroyed from low petrochemical prices. Anyone seeing increases or have insight into prices for recycled plastics?

How does Indian solar power contribute to overall Indian grid production?