NVDANVIDIANeutralNVIDIA

Yesterday on

Musings of the Day, 11/9/26 I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t think it was a good idea to allow $NVDA to sell to China. The best counter I’ve heard was: if we at least sell them older tech, it keeps them sucking at the teat of US tech versus trying to develop their own stack. Idk about that. China’s historical modus operandi has been to steal US IP and then use it in direct competition to the US. Hoping this scandal results in smarter policy around Export Controls especially around tech to China. Nvidia’s spy scandal hands Hill hawks fresh ammo on China chips https://t.co/uY3mOfic91

UVXYProShares Ultra VIX Short TermNeutralProShares Ultra VIX Short TermCRWVCoreWeave, Inc.BearishCoreWeave, Inc.

1w ago on

Weekly KAOS - The Bullwhip & The Canary A small wobble in end demand snaps hardest UPSTREAM where the chips, data centers and power sit, and because that upstream now runs on Debt rather than Equity, Credit is the Canary in the Coalmine. Welcome to the Weekly KAOS — UrbanKaoboy’s end-of-week roundup covering Macro and Geopolitics, where I try and tease out the most impactful bits of the week. Themes of the Week The AI trade finally cracked this week, tech tumbled and bonds rallied into the growth scare, which is the Bullwhip snapping upstream and the Credit Canary singing louder. Anyone who has studied supply chains knows the Bullwhip Effect, where a modest wiggle in end demand gets amplified as it travels upstream, so that a 5% bump at the retailer can balloon into a 40% swing at the factory. As I posted this week, I am not nearly smart enough to know how the AI/Anthropic story ends, but the Bullwhip Effect really concerns me. Everyone is frothing over that parabolic ARR and forgetting that Anthropic sits near the FRONT of the Bullwhip, while the truly capital-hungry links, the chips, the servers, the gigawatts, sit far UPSTREAM. That is exactly where a small crack at the handle becomes a violent snap at the tip. What makes the Bullwhip dangerous rather than merely interesting is how that upstream is now financed. The buildout has shifted from Equity “funny money” to Debt, so the first place a slowdown shows up is not the stock tape but Credit. I laid out the mechanics in my Wile E. Coyote piece. If Equity is a Long Call on the Firm’s Assets, then Debt is a Short Put on those same Assets, which is why CREDIT is a far better canary than the VIX, because Short Puts feel deteriorating Asset Value before anyone else does. That canary has been singing since last week’s Weekly KAOS, when CoreWeave’s CDS implied better-than-even odds of default while its stock still carried a roughly $35B price tag. This week it sang louder, with CoreWeave bonds north of 15% and the long end rallying hard as the growth scare took hold. The same physics runs under my Wile E. Coyote Equity market, and it ran through nearly every thread this week, even as Oil ripped to six-month highs on Gulf escalation and China kept probing on chips and minerals. This is a longer and deeper dive issue of Weekly KAOS given the events of the Week. Read on for paid content. Paid subscribers get the full Archive, the Daily Chats, and free access to UrbanKaoberg’s Closed Beta, so please spread the word! https://t.co/QU4vJHlNd7

CRWVCoreWeave, Inc.NeutralCoreWeave, Inc.

2w ago on

Weekly KAOS - The AI Crack, the Hot Print, and the Debt Governor The AI trade finally cracked and bonds rallied into a hot CPI, which reads to me as a growth scare with the Debt Governor on the throttle Welcome to the Weekly KAOS — UrbanKaoboy’s end-of-week roundup covering Macro and Geopolitics, where I try and tease out the most impactful bits of the week. Themes of the Week The AI trade finally started cracking, and what gave it away was the Bond market rallying straight into a hot CPI, which reads to me as a growth scare more than Inflation, with the Debt Governor and not a Fiscal reckoning on the throttle. This week the Credit market and the Equity market looked at the same company and could not agree on whether it was still breathing. CoreWeave’s five-year CDS blew out to levels implying better-than-even odds of default, while its stock still carries a roughly $35B price tag. That gap is a microcosmic look at the whole AI story, because the buildout has shifted from running on Equity “funny money” to running on Debt, and Debt comes with a governor of real cash interest payments and refinancing risks that Equity does not have. The rest of the tape rhymed. Semiconductors fell for eight straight sessions, https://t.co/C4BWYsJAb9 filed for bankruptcy, and a line of data-center IPOs got pulled, even as September CPI ran hot at 3.7% and the 10-year yield still FELL on the week. TLT turned without anyone needing to intervene, and as I posted, that worries me far more about growth than it reassures me about rates. I read this the way I have since last December. It is the Debt Governor at work, the AI buildout saturating the capital markets with paper and competing ferociously for capital, and it is the single biggest threat to my hoped-for Goldilocks denouement of Disinflationary Growth. None of it is a verdict on AI’s long-run Deflationary productivity, which I still believe in. Oil presented a renewed Macro wildcard, ripping to five-month highs as Houthi strikes hit Saudi Aramco and Washington drew up fresh plans for Iran, French yields blew out to their widest spread over Bunds since the 2011 Eurozone crisis. If it’s not evident already, this global yield repricing is hardly idiosyncratic to America. It’s also worth remembering that this repricing, however painful the adjustment, is restoring us to the long-term normal and that it was the extended period of ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) that was the true aberration. https://t.co/PWC7C7N8ET

IWMRussell 2000NeutralRussell 2000

10/9/2026 on

Weekly KAOS - The Vanishing Bond Floor, the Jobs Miss, and the Hormuz Spigot Welcome to the Weekly KAOS — UrbanKaoboy’s end-of-week roundup covering Macro and Geopolitics, where I try and tease out the most impactful bits of the week. Themes of the Week The long end ripped to levels last seen before the Global Financial Crisis and the S&P still printed a record, because with the Bond Floor gone the only thing holding the longest-duration names over the canyon is Growth, while a soft jobs print kept Goldilocks on its feet, Oil stayed two-sided, and China pressed on every front at once. Anyone who grew up on Saturday-morning cartoons knows the moment: Wile E. Coyote sprints off the edge of the mesa, legs still churning, and stays aloft right up until the instant he looks down. That is exactly how the longest-duration corners of this Equity market feel to me as the 30-year grinds toward yields it last touched in 2002 and the 10-year pushes past 5.2 percent, which is the whole argument of the piece I put out last week, Wile E. Coyote Equities and the Vanishing Bond Floor. The backup in long rates has quietly pulled the implicit Bond Floor out from under valuations, and the only thing keeping the Mag-7 complex suspended over the canyon is the Growth story. Meanwhile, our untrusty seismograph needle kept jumping all week, with Bessent conceding to the Bond market that the house does not always win, French and Japanese yields punching through multi-decade highs alongside ours, and the S&P closing green at a record on breadth so narrow that the top four names now outweigh the entire Russell 2000. I keep coming back to the read I have held since last December: this is the Debt Governor at work, the AI Buildout saturating the capital markets with paper and competing ferociously for capital, not a Fiscal reckoning finally arriving. Friday's jobs miss then did Warsh a favor even as the FOMC minutes and Waller leaned the other way, while Oil refused to break either way and China kept probing. Read on for paid content. Paid subscribers get the full Archive, the Daily Chats, and free access to UrbanKaoberg’s Closed Beta, so please spread the word! https://t.co/WCa63T7s5y

Weekly KAOS - Northern Lights Edition: The Hike, the Chokepoints, and Xi in Washington This is a special edition: I have been traveling last several weeks exploring Norway, so this issue covers everything that mattered since my last post on September 4. Themes of the Week Three weeks of headlines lit up the sky, a Warsh Fed hike, two chokepoints and Xi in Washington, but the physics underlying the light show remain the same: the Debt Governor, the Benign Gravity of Disinflationary Growth and the Energy Achilles’ Heel The photo at the top is the aurora borealis, which did not disappoint on my trip, and fittingly it was a Norwegian physicist, Kristian Birkeland, who worked out over a century ago what it actually is: the visible edge of a storm that starts ninety-three million miles away, when the sun hurls a cloud of charged particles at us. The sky glows green instead of the planet getting scorched because Earth’s magnetic field catches the blast, bends most of it away and funnels the rest toward the poles, where it spends itself in a spectacular show high in the atmosphere while the ground underneath carries on untouched. The more violent the storm, the brighter the show, and the harder the field is quietly working. In the world of Macro and Geopolitics, the storms all hit on schedule: Scott Bessent declared himself “the house” against the bond vigilantes, the Warsh Fed hiked, a second chokepoint cracked open in the Red Sea and Brent ripped through $108 before giving most of it back, and Xi Jinping came to Washington for the first time in over a decade for a state dinner long on pomp and short on substance. Watched one flare at a time, each looked like the reckoning somebody had promised, but read against the field that absorbed them, the picture is the one I left behind on September 4: the back-up in the long end is the Debt Governor of a debt-funded AI Buildout plus a long-overdue normalization, not a Fiscal crisis; Goldilocks is still achievable in my opinion, despite a war-driven Inflation pulse leaking in through diesel at the moment; Oil remains a Supply Shock story instead of a Demand-Driven Inflation canary; and the contest that decides King Dollar’s crown is being fought Geopolitically at the chokepoints and across Xi’s agenda, not at the auction desk. https://t.co/BjbtIWSf6f