India GDP Savings 20260911

India Insider: Leveraged FCNR Deposits Reliance and Remittances Masks Structural Vulnerabilities

by with No Comment AssetsBehavioral SentimentBen EzraCentral BanksEconomyExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsFinancial InstitutionsForexIndiaInvestingSpeculatorsUncategorizedWorld

Forging True External Strength Without Relying on the Crutch of Foreign Deposits

For the last few weeks, financial publications have applauded the news that India received around $127 billion USD via leveraged foreign NRI deposits (FCNR). Banks swapped these dollars for Rupees with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), securing cheap funding while ostensibly strengthening India’s external position. Analysts have calculated that while the hedging cost for the RBI is around $16.3 billion USD, the investment income generated by parking those funds in U.S Treasuries could reach $22.4 billion USD. On a net basis, this implies a $6.1 billion USD gain for the RBI over the next five years. However, while this may look like a tactical victory on a balance sheet, it ignores a fundamental macroeconomic contradiction: if the Indian economy is growing robustly, why isn’t its external position strengthening organically?

The Remittance Paradox

Indian rural towns and villages have long sent workers abroad to Singapore, Malaysia, the Gulf States and beyond. This migration has created a flush of dollar remittances, making India the world’s largest recipient in absolute terms. For instance, India has attracted around $135 billion USD in 2025, a figure that has been rising steadily. Yet, despite this massive nominal volume, remittances represent only about 3.6% of total GDP. 

This capital undeniably boosts domestic consumption, but it also exposes a structural gap between wages inside India and abroad. The fundamental characteristics of current account deficit countries is that they demonstrate low domestic savings, high investment needs, and persistent reliance on foreign capital to finance their deficits.

India GDP Savings 20260911

World Bank/CEIC for India and Global Average, and Wiemer EAI Brief for China’s 2008 Peak

In India’s case if the economy were truly expanding from within as said, domestic incomes would have risen proportionally with national growth, expanding the pool of internal capital. Instead with a vastly informal economy, India remains heavily dependent on its diaspora to fund its current account deficit.

The Domestic Savings Deficit

According to periodic labor force surveys, India is projected to have a working age population of around 900 million by 2030. To effectively employ this massive demographic dividend, the country urgently needs to raise its domestic savings rate. Currently clinging to roughly 31% of GDP, India lags far behind industrial powerhouses like China, which leveraged a domestic savings rate of around 45% to fuel its manufacturing ascent.

Policymakers should not rejoice over a capital account surplus funded by NRIs, especially when that surplus is leveraged over 7 to 10 times. It is this exact diaspora sending USD home that fuels India’s consumption, creating an illusion of self sustaining economic liftoff.

The “Dutch Disease” in Local Economies

The heavy reliance on remittances creates severe geographical distortions. Many towns possess high savings but they are incredibly unevenly distributed. These high savings are attributed to external capital rather than domestic productivity, while local employment remains trapped in informal service sectors or low productivity agriculture. Towns with high foreign remittances naturally develop immense asset bubbles in real estate and experience soaring rent and consumption costs. Because these economies do not export goods or services to other states or countries via production or services, they rely entirely on external capital inflows to generate internal demand. This reflects a localized variant of the “Dutch Disease”.

The labor market is extremely tight in these areas. Due to the high cost of living and limited wage growth, workers tend to migrate to other regions or overseas in search of better opportunities. This tight market further contributes to cost inflation in labor, food, and overall living expenses and increasing the cost structure for both households and businesses. This vicious cycle is primarily due to weak policy decisions from the government’s end, such as inadequate industrial infrastructure, poor urban planning, weak skills development, limited MSME financing, also insufficient connectivity.

A Structural Transformation is Required

This economic pattern is not unique to India, it also mirrors provincial towns in the Philippines, regions in Mexico and parts of the Balkans. While remittances support consumption and keep real estate elevated, they fail to translate into productive investment due to weak industrial bases and limited economic linkages. The result is seen vividly in the balance of payments clearly as India’s importing needs keep increasing, but the inability of Indian goods to compete globally results in persistent gaps in export volumes. 

With protectionist rhetoric vibrating in Washington and anti immigration protests rising from the U.S to Australia, this model is highly vulnerable. The Indian government must urgently pivot toward policies that empower Indian nationals to work in small and medium scale businesses (SMEs) domestically. By focusing on small scale manufacturing with high economic linkages and wage growth potential, domestic savings will naturally rise, eventually forging true external strength without relying on the crutch of foreign deposits.

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AMT Top 10

AMT Top Ten Miscellaneous Post-Labor Day Notes and Tantrums

by with No Comment AMT Top TenArtificial IntelligenceAssetsBehavioral SentimentBusinessCentral BanksCommoditiesEconomic CalendarEconomyEquitiesFeatured HighlightsFederal Reserve, Interest RatesFinancial InstitutionsFootballForexInvestingRisk ManagementSpeculatorsUncategorizedWorld

Higher Hopes and False Victories Welcome Nervous Investors Back After the Holiday

10. We Thought You Won – Part One: Apologies to Western Michigan University who had a victory stolen from them on Saturday in Ann Arbor. The Big Ten should not only be embarrassed, but they should be investigated. Big time college football suffered a black eye this past weekend. Folks wondering why WMU is not making a bigger stink regarding the added time and decision to repeat the last play of the game which ultimately cost WMU the contest against the Wolverines, should understand they will not. Because WMU needs to play against the University of Michigan to receive big pay days, which often are hard to find. WMU received 1.5 million USD for the game on Saturday and are scheduled to play against Big Blue again on the 1st of September, 2029.

9. Not Dead Yet: Bitcoin is trading near $78,800. After flirting with lows around the $58,100 vicinity in late June, BTC/USD has created momentum upwards. However, the elevator still can go down. Strategy via MSTR is near $142.00 per share. Michael Saylor survives and influencers are boisterous and breathing a bit easier – for now.

AMT Top 10

AMT Top 10 Miscellaneous Post-Labor Day Notes and Tantrums, 8th of Sept. 2026

8. Bad Brains: Tucker Carlson forayed into another absurd path when his recent guest, Jess Elofson, declared that Algebra is not needed and those who use it are ‘good little goy-slaves’. Carlson averages almost 57 million views to his podcast and social media outlets on a weekly basis.

7. NVDA: Nvidia is priced near $230.00 and the Nasdaq 100 finished Friday’s trading around 29,544. The Nasdaq 100 traded above 30,700 on the 3rd of June. Nvidia’s high touched the $236.00 level in the middle of May. Summer saw choppy reversals in the Nasdaq and S&P and values while elevated have run into cautious headwinds. Now that Labor Day is complete and summer ambivalence will be dusted off, where will the stock markets go? Iran lingers, inflation via higher energy costs looks problematic, mid-term election worries, AI infrastructure expenditures are concerning and bond yields all weigh on investment mindsets. Additional risk events are coming quickly down the road, Consumer Price Index data will be released this Friday and the Fed’s FOMC interest rate decision is next Wednesday on the 16th.

6. Reversal City: The USD/JPY is traversing below the 154.000 mark currently. The Bank of Japan and the U.S Treasury/Fed interaction regarding intervention and rhetoric about protecting the Yen’s value has apparently scared off buyers of the currency pair for the moment. Will bullish speculators now stay away from the USD/JPY for good? Doubtful.

5. Rhetoric Alone: Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has found it difficult to convince the investment community that his lack of interest rate guidance is a good idea. Instead, the lack of clarity delivered from the Fed has led to higher Treasury yields. While Scott Bessent tried to fight the higher yields a couple of weeks ago, Treasuries are still smoldering and threaten to become a more dangerous fire. Investors and traders want more tangible proof that interest rate and monetary policies are structurally solid.

4. September 11th: This Friday will mark the 25th anniversary of terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and plane crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 

3. Upwards: WTI Crude Oil price have shown plenty of nervous behavioral sentiment higher this past week. WTI Crude Oil is now over $94.00 in the cash market. Reports indicate that shipping via the Hormuz Strait has decreased again, this as military escalation appears ready to potentially increase as a reportedly desperate IRGC led Iran and frustrated U.S White House collide.

2. Post-Summer Guillotine: Danger lurks over the global marketplace, this as risk analysts, traders and investors appear to be converging into the same cautious direction. Forex, stock markets, bond yields, and key commodities are flashing bright yellow waring slow signals. Contrarian investors and speculators may be enjoying the current financial landscape. Value plays and volatile trading opportunities may feel appealing, but risk management is going to prove useful.

1. We Thought You Won – Part Two: After saying over the past handful of months that Iran had lost the war and just hadn’t surrendered yet, via Truth Social yesterday President Trump wrote that “when we WIN the war with Iran” that gasoline prices in the U.S would plummet. While observers are used to President Trump’s seemingly infinite capability to utter contradictory statements, yesterday’s appraisal of the current situation in the Middle East may be realistic, but it can also be observed as disquieting. There appears to be more trouble down the road.

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Power of Intelligence 20260906

The Great Compression Part 4: Sovereignty Franchise

by with No Comment Artificial IntelligenceAssetsBehavioral SentimentBusinessCorporateEconomyEquitiesExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsInvestingMajor Global Equity IndicesRisk ManagementTechnology & ScienceUncategorizedWorldYulia Viaman

The Power of Intelligence

The most valuable piece of real estate in the world is a fab complex on the western edge of the Pacific, a short flight from the coast of a huge country that claims the ground it sits on. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, aka TSMC, prints the chips that every frontier AI model on earth depends on – and nearly all of them are currently made on that shore in Taiwan. This is simply a given; geography, unlike software, doesn’t scale, doesn’t copy, and doesn’t move.

For a decade the industry treated intelligence as something borderless, a global utility that would flow to wherever demand called for it. That framing is way past obsolete in a world that is split, lost along with the old dream of an uncensored Internet and free information exchange. Now, the crack is widening along a new axis. Forty years ago, the division ran through Berlin, and it was drawn by ideology. Today it runs through a supply chain, and it is drawn by who can make, buy, and run the machines that think. The AI chips are only the part of the split you can see and touch.

Power of Intelligence 20260906

The Great Compression Part 4: Sovereignty Franchise

The Independence Chokepoint

Compute has already left the free market and entered the permitted layer of the economy. Advanced NVIDIA processors are no longer something a buyer simply purchases; they are something a government allows a buyer to receive. Export licenses now stand between the most capable silicon and any customer headquartered on the wrong side of the line. Washington has spent three years building this wall chip by chip – and the reshoring push, the fabs rising in Arizona, the equipment and materials supply chains being pulled back onto home turf, is the same impulse cast in concrete: move the chokepoint onto ground you control.

The scale of the gap explains the urgency. The U.S. holds a lead in AI compute capacity measured not in percentages but in multiples. China’s domestic production of the highest-end accelerators runs at a small fraction of American-equivalent scale. Its most advanced labs still lean on Western silicon to train their best models, whether the chips arrive through smuggling networks or through the gray route of renting restricted hardware inside third-country data centers.

Even when it’s leaking, the chokehold does its work. The controls slow every Chinese frontier effort, force it onto inferior domestic silicon, and keep it a step behind the labs it is chasing. But compute is only the first roadblock to independence: the next ones – on the intelligence itself – are only going up now.

The Gate to Intelligence

A wall around compute would be contained if compute were the end of the story, but it isn’t. The same logic that gates the chip is now reaching for what runs on it.

In June 2026, the U.S. Commerce Department required an export license for any foreign national to access a frontier AI model made by Anthropic – including the developer’s own non-citizen staff. Unable to verify the nationality of its users, the company withdrew the model entirely, and for the first time in this cycle a publicly available AI capability moved backward by government order. The controls were contested, the legal basis was unsettled, and access was restored within weeks. But the precedent was set: the authority to license the export of chips had been stretched to license access to an intelligence provider, and the mechanism worked before anyone had settled whether it lawfully could.

Beijing read the same lesson and moved to mirror it, drafting a regime to fence its own leading model weights behind national-security law rather than let them diffuse into the world. Two capitals, the same month, reaching the same conclusion from opposite sides: an AI model is not a product to be sold freely but a strategic asset released on terms. Intelligence has crossed into the permitted layer, and it crossed at both ends of the divide at once.

The Chained Brains

All of that is behind us; the interesting part is ahead.

Every ally now starting up its own sovereign AI is building it on a stack it doesn’t own – because the models, the chips, and the cloud beneath them are all American. What the ally holds is the building, the flag over the door, and the electricity bill. But the intelligence itself answers to another country’s export regime. This is sovereignty in name and franchise in fact.

The precedent for this arrangement already flies. Allied air forces buy the F-35 – the most expensive piece of weaponry in history – but they don’t thereby own it. The U.S. controls the source code and the mission-data files, and the aircraft’s full capability remains under American authority no matter how large the check. The buyer flies a plane whose brain is licensed, not sold, because withholding the core is the entire instrument of leverage. You can’t buy your way to control over a capability whose value to the seller depends on never fully handing it over.

While the F-35’s licensed brain governs a single platform, a national AI stack governs the layer through which a modern state thinks: its analysis, its logistics, its intelligence fusion, its administration. The fighter is a product on a leash, while the intelligence layer is the nervous system on a leash.

The Thinking Franchise

And the company installing that nervous system is already doing it. Palantir’s value was never the model but the trust above it and the data structure beneath it – the ontology layer that ingests a government’s data and turns it into decisions. In mid-2026 it began offering sovereign customers what they most wanted to have: full ownership of their model weights, retrainable, air-gapped, sealed behind their own walls. Still, the weights are the airframe that a buyer can own – but they will still have to run on NVIDIA silicon, inside an operating layer a U.S. company builds and controls, under the same export regime that pulled a frontier model offline in June.

Canada shows how thin the sovereignty can wear. Ottawa named itself the anchor customer of its own national AI strategy in mid-2026 while already running tens of millions of dollars in undisclosed Palantir contracts inside its defense and policing systems. The strategy announced sovereignty, but the procurement had already outsourced it. And by late summer, the two were trading tariffs and hard words, the closest alliance on the continent gone frosty, with the most sensitive systems of one side still running on the other’s stack. Nobody had to threaten anything. The dependency simply sat there, the way it was always going to.

Right in front of our eyes, the forward base of the last century gives way to the forward stack of this one. Instead of a U.S. army base near a European capital, a data-orchestration system running on NVIDIA chips, wired into the host government’s own operations, doing quietly what the garrison once did loudly. Land, power, and data can belong to Berlin or Paris, on paper – but the intelligence stack that holds the dependency will be American. It’s a cheaper umbrella, a deeper one, and a far harder one to ask to leave.

The End of Sovereignty

The immovable object was supposed to be the safe end of this story. Land, power, fabs, the heavy and hard-to-replicate assets that no software cycle can compress, the bedrock beneath the cloud. All of that still holds. But immovable is not the same as owned – and anyway, even the owner isn’t sovereign, because sovereignty itself is what’s being compressed at the top of the stack.

Every chokepoint described above rests on a fact that holds only for now: advanced compute is scarce, and what it produces can be walled. Practical quantum advantage dissolves both, and it is a contest between the same two powers that have run through every layer of this story. Perhaps one arrives first. Perhaps, if less likely, two arrive together. It changes little for everyone else. The machine owner reads what others hide and shields what it keeps. The only defense is a new cryptography built to withstand it, and it takes the same frontier compute and talent that only those two powers command. Even the lock is provisioned by the vendor.

It doesn’t matter who owns the oil or holds the warheads if the secrets around them can be opened at will and the means to reseal them belongs to someone else. The world is already two powers and their satellites, although most of them still speak as though sovereignty were something they possessed. The quantum edge is the point where the pretense ends.

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India Employment 20260904

India Insider: An Unfinished Economic Transformation

by with No Comment AssetsBen EzraCentral BanksCommoditiesExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsIndiaInvestingUncategorizedWorld

Improving India's Education Strategy to Help Prosperity

Indian government officials, policy makers and journalists have all applauded the GDP April-June quarter data that came in 7.8%, compared to last year’s 6.9% growth. Although, the growth metrics are essential for understanding the results achieved in the broad economy, improved metrics should be applied towards the quality and conditions of life for citizens throughout India while comparing prosperity inequality.

Reading economic statistics without political or sociological factors becomes irrelevant. International trade agreements are often examined between capital and trade statistics, but in reality they are dominated by corporate lobbying and geopolitical powers behind the scenes calling into question results and assumptions.

Economists frequently discuss marginal propensity and disposable income elasticity, but in reality labour laws, union suppression and offshore workforce capabilities determine the wages paid to local employees. India like other Western countries, judges economic growth via headline statistics, without explaining the qualitative factors that determine a nation’s prosperity.

India Employment 20260904

Share of Informal Employment Comparison 2005 – 2025

Human development concerns via good housing, better roads, access to quality education for every child, and secure hospitalization in government run facilities are not covered in GDP data. India calculates GDP data with a production and expenditure approach. Meaning the production of goods and services in a given time must match the underlying expenditures of the overall economy. Since the Indian statistical office calculates expenditures from with a limited number of household surveys and proxies, it’s not prudent to conclude that all GDP data is correct.

Some analysts prefer to look at Gross Value Added, GVA, to determine the overall value created by the nation’s producers. However, this data observes the organized sector via corporate filings, GST (Good and Services Tax) data, industrial production indices, but leaves the contribution of India’s vast unorganized employment sector in the dark.

Informality in the Job Sector

Over the last few years, non-farm jobs which are crucial for diversifying the economy and providing stability are not growing as needed. The formal job sector which offers security, benefits and fair wages is also stagnant. This lack of job creation is pushing more people into unpaid or informal work (the latter constitutes around 90% of the work force) where people struggle to make ends meet.

India Rural 20260904

Kallakurichi District in Tamil Nadu State

The National Statistical Office ( NSO) under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), performs periodic labour force studies, including household consumption and annual questionnaires of the unorganized sector, but they are sample based surveys and taken only as a proxy due to a lack of available data.

However, these sample based household surveys allow observations of the unorganized sector via snap shots. The agricultural sector traditionally seen as a last resort for employment in rural areas, witnessed a resurgence after the Covid-19 pandemic. Unbelievably, about 80 million people rejoined this sector (including women in rural areas who had exited agriculture jobs after 2004, as a periodic labour force quarterly survey shows) between mid 2020 and mid 2024. This increase in employment continued into 2025, not because of farm growth and modernization, but due to stagnation in the industrial and services sectors.

India’s major challenge in the coming decade is to create enough adequate non-farm jobs in order to accommodate new entrants and for those who are want to leave agricultural employment. Meanwhile, India has one of the lowest rates of work participation of women in the world. Yet, some studies argue that there is a close link between the female labour force participation rate and manufacturing employment. To help GDP growth rates move qualitatively upwards, India must absorb more women from farm work and into manufacturing.

Population size matters and because of India’s large numbers if rising labour productivity is accomplished the nation will not only continue to become one of the largest economies, but will have the the capacity to influence the world’s GDP growth rate positively. The impact of one policy (for instance to promote economic growth) on another (i.e: income poverty reduction) crucially depends on the level of a third variable like the improvement of human capital via better skills, knowledge and health. In other words, growth will be more successful in reducing income poverty if economic value is well developed and more equitably distributed for individuals.

Increasing the capabilities for those who want to be employed and form the base of a country would facilitate the creation of improved formal jobs, labour productivity and real wages. However, the reality is complex. During the Covid-19 pandemic and in its aftermath workers who had earlier left agriculture for better earnings in the first half of the noughties shifted back to agriculture instead of moving to more productive or formal jobs in non-farm activities. In other words, India has seen an odd reversal of structured change that normally characterizes economic development.

Education for the Entire Population

The only upward mobility for Indians predominately is to educate their children, so that they can get comfortable jobs and lift their families out of poverty. For decades especially after the post independence period, India’s higher education remained an elusive dream for millions of historically marginalized people from Schedule Tribes, Schedule Castes and many struggling communities. 

Unfortunately, the gates of universities and colleges were mainly opened to only privileged students belonging to the upper caste elites. Young ST or Dalit students in remote villages faced layers of disadvantages regarding poor schooling – including financial strains, social stigmas, etc. This is in contrast to students from the privileged social groups who often inherited aspirations and the access to higher quality education that comes with an expensive price tag.

While the door for higher education opportunities has been opened for all, it was much wider for those privileged groups, and it remained relatively narrower for the marginalized communities. As the data suggests, In 2023-2024, only about 6.8% of STs and 8.6% of SCs aged 24 and above had attained education up to the graduation level and above, while 12.5% from the OBCs and a striking 23% “others category attained the same”. This hierarchy pattern suggests that STs are the most disadvantaged, followed by SCs, and then OBCs with others at the top, suggesting structural barriers based on caste and historical exclusion.

Aspirations and Sustainable Quality Growth

With a large segment of population stuck in informal or low skilled work, their purchasing power remains soft, weakening aggregate demand. India doesn’t value GDP using an income based approach, because of the same informality. Therefore the failure to ensure equitable access to higher education does not simply reflect social injustice, it also directly weakens India’s growth aspirations, inclusiveness and sustainability. 

Inequality in classrooms today becomes inequality in income tomorrow and eventually a drag on the nation’s economic growth. Instead of rejoicing over the quarter to quarter GDP growth comparing to last year, India must sincerely look into real problems that need to be solved and use its demographic dividend to create better results for all. A sociological and political lens is important to devise policies and strategies for next decade’s growth.

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Wars Against America 20260903a

The Wars Against America

by with No Comment EconomyExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsInvestingIra SlomowitzRisk ManagementUncategorizedWorld

Kicking the Can Down the Road is a Public Policy Alternative

Opinion: The following article is commentary and its views are solely those of the author. This article was first published the 2nd of September via The Angry Demagogue.

We recently met a young Russian citizen and when asked when the war with Ukraine will end, the response was “Ukraine is just a place, the war is against America”. This Russian citizen was from a city in Siberia, a “regular” Russian with no official contacts that we know of but who, it seems is a proud Russian who “understands” that her leader, Vladimir Putin, is at war with America, who wants to harm and destroy Russia and Russian religion and culture. This war of the West, now the United States, against Russia goes back centuries in the Russian mind.

Wars Against America 20260903a

The Wars Against America: Kicking the Can Down the Road is a Public Policy Alternative

For nearly five decades the Islamic Republic of Iran has planned and prepared to fight the Great Satan, the United States, with the Little Satan, Israel, just a place, a small one bomb country to destroy en-route to the greater, the greatest enemy. This is not speculation but is written into the DNA of the Islamic Republic of Iran in all their announcements and policies over the last, nearly, 50 years.

Way back in my college years in the late 1970’s in one of my first political science courses we learned of China’s desire for “hegemony” in their neighborhood. It was the first time I heard the word hegemony and have always associated it with the Chinese Communist Party and their desire to control the land masses and sea lanes that are near it – what we now call the Indo-Pacific. China to this day not only claims Taiwan as part of its rightful territory but of course Tibet, border areas with India and the entirety of the South China Sea including major U.S allies like Philippines. The CCP has also never given up its desire for revenge against Japanese atrocities of WWII and control of the Korean peninsula – or eastern Russia, for that matter.

And yet, irrespective of all the evidence gathered over the centuries and especially over the last decades since the cold war ended, there are still those in the American establishment, left and right, who feel that the United States can avoid what are naively called “foreign entanglements”. However, if America does not go “there”, the world will come to its shores. Even the Monroe Doctrine at its height did not keep non-Western hemisphere militaries away from the United States.

With the advent of drone warfare, hypersonic missiles, hacking of infrastructure and the battle over AI, there is no avoiding American involvement in global affairs unless it wants to be a nation subservient to China, Russia and Iran – and even then, subservient states rarely live in peace. Another lesson we learned in Political Science 101 was that “power abhors a vacuum”. An American retrenchment will not mean a world at peace. Much as Israel learned it cannot just “separate” from the Gazans, America will learn it can’t just ignore the world around it.

American governments have decided on a “kick the can down the road” organizing principle for nearly all domestic and foreign policy. There seems to be an assumption amongst American politicians and policy makers that American ingenuity can always solve the problem, no matter how late it gets. Social Security is in trouble, the deficit has reached a point where just the interest is $1 trillion, North Korea has multiple nuclear weapons, Iran is as close as it could get, Russia is waging (indirect) war in western Europe and the United States (see: Russian hacking), China is waging a propaganda campaign against American AI that AI executives seem overeager to support by their sci-fi fear mongering and there is no sense of urgency amongst American politicians.

The Vice President wonders aloud about the “harm” to America that the US Dollar as the reserve currency recieves, not thinking beyond the simplistic price of exports. The lower cost of energy and minerals due to their being priced in Dollars does not seem to be a net gain for the US in his eyes. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of course wants to bankrupt America and the Democratic party does not have the will to oppose them. The Michigan AG wants Jews to sacrifice themselves because otherwise the planet will be uninhabitable and the State of California can’t seem to build houses anymore.

The Vance-Kushner-Qatar cabal control American policy in the Persian Gulf up to the point where President Trump gets too annoyed at Iranian duplicity and he sicks American airpower on them. Then it returns as the deals that this group want to do with Qatar (and Turkey) are too much for them to resist as they lead American deeper into subservient status. They don’t seem to realize that the Qatari-Turkish attempt to break the American-Israeli relationship is being done to weaken the American presence in the Middle East by making it dependent upon Qatar. 

Syria’s Islamist leader is still building his Islamist army while Turkey presents him to the world as the moderate who just wants to build a nice country. What is happening though, is that Qatar and Turkey are having America sponsor the Moslem Brotherhood. It is not the American war against Iran that has caused strategic overreach but the potential deals that have left the world’s greatest free power at the behest of a dessert kingdom with no people but lots of ready cash. Deals for pipelines and railways through the Middle Eastern desert are apparently more important for American success than the technology coming out of Israel.

America cannot avoid the world since the world will not avoid America. America is the main target of all revisionist States, whether it likes it or not.

Everyone is waiting until after the mid-terms for something to happen, but then the 2028 presidential campaign starts. The waiting needs to stop regarding Iran, Russia, China, defense manufacturing and the fiscal situation. As Yogi Berra brilliantly stated – “it gets late early out there”.

Disclaimer: the views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of the author, and not necessarily the opinions reflected by angrymetatraders.com or its associated parties.

Follow Ira Slomowitz via The Angry Demagogue on Substack https://iraslomowitz.substack.com/

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WTI CrudeOila 20260902

Bad Timing for President Trump May Equal Good Trading Opportunities

by with No Comment AMT MarketsAssetsBehavioral SentimentBusinessEconomyEquitiesExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsFederal Reserve, Interest RatesFinancial InstitutionsForexInvestingRisk ManagementRobert PetrucciSpeculatorsUncategorizedWorld

You Don't Have to be a Buyer in the Current Marketplace in Order to Profit

There are moments when the markets are calm and then there are these times. It is beginning to look like increasingly bad timing for President Trump and his administration’s hope to keep WTI Crude Oil prices in check and silence the chatter about inflation. 

Instead of a de-escalation based on tranquil conditions in the Middle East, investors were smacked in the face again last night. However, while this may be a bad time to be an investor unless they are looking for value plays, traders may actually have more opportunities in the current market circumstances as long as they manage their risks appropriately.

WTI Crude Oil jumped higher last night and while the commodity has outdone itself since late February regarding price velocity, last night’s performance likely felt volatile even for experienced large players who have solid intel on the ground regarding Middle East shipping and supplies. The energy sector has been more akin to the soft commodities regarding reversals the past handful of months, Coffee, Cocoa and Crude Oil have offered colorful price ranges. But that is not how WTI Crude Oil is supposed to work.

WTI CrudeOila 20260902

WTI Crude Oil 1 Year Chart as of 2 September 2026

Inflation concerns will not go away quietly as long as WTI Crude Oil remains highly valued. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh may in fact be putting on a show for the public – that he is his own man and can express his concerns regarding inflation no matter what President Trump thinks – when in fact he may simply be laying a framework to work in tandem with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and lower interest rates in order to create less pressure on Treasury yields. However, this planned (or conspiratorial) thinking may be hard to actually produce in reality on the 16th of September when the Fed’s FOMC has to show its cards once again. As long as WTI Crude Oil remains above $90.00, “Houston we have a problem,” murmurs may be heard loud and clear.

If Treasury yields remain tilted upwards because investors are refusing to buy them at cheaper rates, it will start to infect the Nasdaq 100, S&P 500 and the Dow 30 more and create cautionary skirmishes which may produce deeper downsides in stock markets.

Iran wouldn’t want to cause President Trump problems, correct? Why would Iran want higher Crude Oil prices to ensnarl President Trump into a morass of political battles in the U.S and make life difficult for the Republicans during the mid-term elections? Does the IRGC have folks who understand the dynamics of U.S politics? Yes they do and it is a 100% certainty they would like to be a pain in President’s Trump’s aspirations.

We are left to deal with the ever-changing events that seem to be quite good at repeating themselves. Financial institutions are not only nervous about their mid-term outlooks, they are wary about the near-term too. Forex, commodities, bond yields, Wall Street and other global stock markets will struggle to make solid gains until clarity develops.

What will clarity look like? It will be optimistic banter in which rhetoric from different mouths and geographies is actually believed by the adoring crowds. Results do not have to be good, but outcomes need to be able to be forecasted and planned, allowing investors to seek their cash preservation and fortunes in a variety of assets (and show their overseers that they used adequate risk management in case things go wrong). 

Gold has done well recently, although it seems to have hit some resistance lately. However, if inflation tranquility is not achieved and if President Trump’s circumstances grow more dire, the precious metal will continue to offer speculative plays upwards. 

Investors are restless. Making 6 to 8% profits a year looks rather boring after plenty of solid years of upwards traction. Folks aren’t used to powerful financial storms and they forget about lingering troubled periods in which simple profits can prove comforting as broad markets struggle. 

Day trading is dangerous. However, those with solid risk taking tactics and those who aren’t married to the notion that markets only go up, but are willing to bet that markets (assets of many classes) can go lower too – now have an opportunity to test their technical perspectives and understanding of behavioral sentiment. 

Realistic targets using take profits and making sure stop loss protection still allows for a trade to move until goals are met is important when volatility is ripping price realms to shreds. Forex instability appears to be increasing as USD centric attitudes remain convoluted. Does Fed Chair Kevin Warsh have enough power to fight against an interest rate hike on the 16th of September, will the price of WTI Crude Oil cooperate, will President Trump’s wishful thinking about Iran come true? Results may not match what is wanted by the guardians of the marketplace. Contrarians may see the current market and global political situation as a time to seek value and help inflate markets, but they might be spitting into the wind. 

Maybe the AI concerns about infrastructure costs and corporate cash needs are baseless. Perhaps the deficit being created by the U.S and many other nations is simply idle chatter by risk analysts who are too nervous. Maybe there is a secret pill for all of us to become optimistic about all things.

It is a good time for traders to remain realistic and target exaggerated price movements in assets that offer opportunities in distressed offerings. You do not have to buy the marketplace to profit ladies and gentlemen.

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Contraries 20260831

Why Some Traders Go Bust: What Medieval Logic Knew That Your Backtest Doesn’t

by with No Comment AssetsBehavioral SentimentFeatured HighlightsFinancial InstitutionsFundamentals & StatsInvestingRisk ManagementSpeculatorsTechnologyUncategorized

Aristotle's Square of Opposition and Why Traders Still Walk Off Cliffs

Somewhere in a 9th century Carolingian monastery a logician diagrammed four sentences into a square to help him distinguish whether a statement was universally true, or only partially so. A thousand years later and that square can explain why a trader with a positive-expectancy strategy and a spotless backtest can still walk off a cliff. The tool is Aristotle’s Square of Opposition. The victim is anyone who has confused what happens on average across many trades with what happens to one trader using the same strategy over time.

The Square

Aristotle’s Square of Opposition sorts any claim about “all,” “none,” “some,” and “some not” into four corners: A (universal affirmative — “all X are Y”), E (universal negative — “no X are Y”), I (particular affirmative — “some X are Y”), and O (particular negative — “some X are not Y”). The corners have relationships: A and E can’t both be true, but can both be false. I and O can’t both be false, but can both be true. And crucially, A and O are direct contradictories — exactly one of them holds. Medieval scholars used this to catch people smuggling a universal claim into an argument that had only earned them a particular one. It turns out finance does this constantly.

Contraries 20260831

Why Some Traders Go Bust: What Medieval Logic Knew That Your Backtest Doesn’t 

The Deception: Ensemble vs. Time

Imagine a bet: 50% chance of +50%, 50% chance of -40%. Average that across a thousand parallel traders taking the bet once, and the ensemble average is comfortably positive. Looks like a great trade. But average it across one trader taking that bet a thousand times in a row, and the time average growth rate is negative. Same bet, opposite verdict, because compounding is multiplicative, not additive. This is the ergodicity problem: the ensemble average and the time average only coincide if the process is ergodic, and most wealth processes — especially leveraged, compounding ones — are not.

Nassim Taleb gave us the gut feeling for this in Fooled by Randomness. As an Options trader he was intimately familiar with the notion of skewed distributions and how these can impact wealth in terminal ways. In FX (my world) the carry strategy buying high yielding currencies and selling them against low yielding currencies has an asymmetric payoff, similar to picking up pennies on the tracks in front of an oncoming train. The formal model of ergodicity as applied to economics was developed later by physicist Ole Peters in a great paper “The Ergodicity Problem in Economics”( 2019) building explicitly on the Kelly criterion. He demonstrates why time averages diverge from ensemble averages in multiplicative systems, and showed the divergence isn’t a glitch,  it is structural.

Putting a Strategy on the Square

It is tempting when reviewing  a backtest with a fat positive Sharpe ratio, to leap straight to A: “this strategy is profitable” — full stop, universal, works everywhere, always. Let’s gear it up. But probably the more honest claim your data has actually earned is closer to I: “some paths through this strategy are profitable” — a particular, not a universal. The Square’s discipline is to check category before you trust quantity. Before asking “how profitable?” ask “profitable for whom, under what — the ensemble of possible paths, or the one path you’ll actually live through?” A strategy can be I-true (some simulated paths win handsomely) while quietly also being O-true (some paths,  including, possibly, yours; go to zero). I and O aren’t contradictions; they’re subcontraries, and they can both hold simultaneously. That’s precisely the shape of a fat-tailed strategy: mostly fine, occasionally ruinous.

Why Expectancy Lies by Omission

Expectancy (“average win × win rate minus average loss × loss rate”) isn’t itself a universal claim. The mistake comes when we quietly promote an ensemble average into one by letting  an I-shaped number pretend to answer an A-shaped question. Positive expectancy tells you the average across scenarios is favourable; it says nothing about whether your single compounding sequence survives long enough to enjoy it. One of the questions that expectancy cannot answer, but survival requires us to ask, is the probability of ruin. Given position sizing and volatility, what fraction of paths hit zero before they hit target? Monte Carlo simulation offers one way to estimate this but it should be used with extreme caution. Feed a Monte Carlo engine the wrong return distribution such as  thin tails in place of  real world fat ones and it will confidently hand you a beautifully wrong answer. A mis-specified Monte Carlo is just a very fast way to fool yourself with more decimal places.

The Habit Worth Keeping

The practical takeaway isn’t a formula, it’s a reflex. Before trusting any metric — a Sharpe ratio, an expectancy figure, a backtested drawdown — ask the medieval logician’s question: is this claim universal, or is it merely particular? Most of what a backtest can honestly give you lives at I and O, not A. The traders who go bust aren’t usually wrong about the arithmetic. They’re wrong about the quantifier — mistaking “true for the ensemble” for “true for me, through time.” Aristotle can’t size your position for you. But he can stop you asking the wrong question about it.

The deeper point of the monastery image we opened with echoes a point Jeremy Naydler makes “In the Shadow of the Machine – a pre history of the computer”.  The instruments we reason with don’t just extend the mind, they reshape it: what counts as thinkable changes with what’s sitting on the desk. The Square of Opposition is one of the earliest such instruments, a piece of technology built to discipline inference. The backtest, the Sharpe ratio, the Monte Carlo engine are its modern descendants — and like any tool, they don’t just answer questions, they quietly decide which questions get asked at all. The trader who never learns to ask “universal or particular?” isn’t missing a fact. He’s missing a habit of mind his tools may not have taught him to have. A framework is most powerful not when it gives us the wrong answer, but when it prevents us from noticing that we have asked the wrong question.

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Indian Rupee 20260826

India Insider: Rupee’s Prolonged Weakness Remains Unresolved

by with No Comment Behavioral SentimentBen EzraCentral BanksCommoditiesEconomyExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsFinancial InstitutionsForexIndiaInvestingSpeculatorsUncategorizedWorld

Better Streamlined Government Policy Needed for the Rupee

In July of this year Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra talked to Business Line magazine and argued that recent Rupee depreciation does not reflect any weakness in the country’s economic fundamentals. According to him, pressure on the currency has largely stemmed from geopolitical tensions, USD strength  and broader volatility across emerging markets.

However, the USD which strengthened during the outset of the US-Iran war has been losing value in large chunks in the broad Forex market the past month. The U.S Federal Reserve remains neutral regarding its interest rate guidance and U.S labor market data has emerged weaker. On top of that, the U.S Treasury’s decision to intervene in U.S long-term bonds via buybacks in order to cool yields has hastened another USD path lower, while igniting buying in many other currencies and gold.

Indian Rupee 20260826

USD/INR Five Year Chart as of 26 August 2026

Despite the Foreign Currency Non-Resident (Bank) deposits coming from overseas investors increasing, which are leveraged products structured by banks and helped to attract more than $50 Billion USD since June, the Rupee’s reaction to this set of recent inflows has been muted. The Indian Rupee is traversing near 95.55 levels as of this writing, notably as other Asian currencies like Korean Won and Singapore Dollar are trading at stronger levels.

India’s Forex reserves climbed to $716.9 billion boosted by these inflows, along with USD related external borrowings by corporate and commercial banks. Nevertheless, the fundamental problems for the Rupee’s prolonged weakness remains unresolved.

Reasons for Rupee’s Weakness Structurally

The Indian Rupee has depreciated around 28% against USD since 2022. Irrespective of this, the merchandise tradable exports have been stagnant, rising a mere 5.7% – from $417 billion to $441.8 billion USD. While on the other hand, merchandise imports have risen 26% from $610 billion to $774.80 billion USD in the period between 2021-2025.

However, India’s balance of payments is not at immediate risk, because even as higher importing needs (especially with Crude Oil and LNG) and lower tradable exports, the total merchandise deficit of around $350 billion USD as of 2025 is being offset by healthy IT exports and foreign remittances.

The fundamental question is why hasn’t the Indian Rupee depreciation expanded merchandise exports in the last few years? As Carlos Dias Alejandro depicts in his seminal work Exchange-rates Devaluations in a Semi-industrialized Country: The Experience of Argentina 1955-1961, throughout Argentina’s history rural producers who supplied most of the exported commodities traditionally advocated a policy of devaluation.

Argentine exporters expected Peso prices for their outputs to rise faster than the Peso prices for their imports, including the wages that they paid for their employees in current prices. In other words, exporters stand to gain from a currency devaluation because it can make their products more competitive in global markets and encourage resources to move towards export production.

Argentina’s experience after Juan Peron who was overthrown in 1955 provides an important context to this argument. The economic policies pursued during the Peron years had already left Argentina with serious inflation , weak agricultural incentives, low investment and balance of payments pressures. The devaluation and stabilization policies that followed were therefore part of a broader attempt to correct the distortions that had built up during the previous period.

Interestingly, the Rupee depreciation has so far not shifted resources from producing goods for foreign products as it is apparently clear via merchandise trade data. The IT sector has been one of the few sectors that has been able to use this shift positively.

It is also important to understand that devaluation does not produce only positive outcomes. A devaluation that increases the overall level of prices can cause a redistribution of income among different social groups, in much the same way as inflation does in a closed economy. Unwieldy redistribution becomes inevitable when the prices of outputs and inputs do not change proportionally.

For instance, wages are central to this process. If prices of food, fuel and other essential goods rise quickly after a devaluation, but nominal wages adjust slowly, workers experience a decline in real wages and purchasing power. Their incomes may remain unchanged in Rupee terms, yet they can afford fewer goods and services. This effectively transfers income from wage earners to firms and producers whose prices or profits adjust more rapidly.

The impact can also differ across workers. Employees in organized sectors may negotiate higher wages or receive inflation linked adjustments, while informal workers, agricultural laborers and those dependent on fixed incomes often have less bargaining power and face a sharper fall in real earnings. At the same time, exporters may benefit if the prices of their products rise faster than their wage and other input costs.

However, if workers eventually demand compensation for the higher cost of living, wage increases can raise production costs and reduce part of the initial competitiveness gained through devaluation. Thus the effect of devaluation depends not only on the exchange rate, bit also on how quickly wages, prices and productivity respond.

In that sense, Argentina’s experience in the 1950s offers a warning for semi industrialized countries like India. A devaluation of the Rupee can make some exports competitive, but it cannot create more productive capacity on its own. Without addressing deeper structural problems, a weaker currency can instead push up prices and reduce households real purchasing power.

Rupee Effects Absorbed and Felt by Those Who Earn Low Wages

Prices of goods and services have increased in the last few years due to the depreciation of the Rupee, especially for imported goods. Since India not only imports oil and gas for consumption, but also imports machinery and intermediate goods for production it has forced households to spend a higher share of their income on the consumption of needed goods.

When households do not earn they need to borrow or hope that their wages increase. In India real wages don’t always go up with inflation. This is due to India having a higher supply of available labor which makes negotiating for higher wages difficult for workers. If employers can find another worker relatively easily as a replacement, the employed worker has limited power.

The ILO (International Labor Organization) notes that India remains characterized by extensive informality and low pay employment, it also estimates that 62 million workers earn below the minimum wage. India’s workers are not necessarily competing in the global market. Manufacturing as a percent of GDP has stayed around 15% over a decade. And irrespective of the fact that India is a major agricultural producer and exporting nation and over 46% of its labor force engages in the sector, total Agri-Exports stayed within a band of $48-$53 billion for the last few years.

The government says that India is growing because services as a percent of GDP is 55%, but the nation employs around one-third of the labor force in the informal economy. While IT employees earn higher wages comparatively because their wages are connected with global demand and have an advantage because they are export services, those who work in construction, domestic help, shops, agriculture and the service sector are earning substantially less. The wages of these people won’t go up until changes are made. 

The vast numbers and informality of employment within a significant amount of India’s labor force prevents low wage costs from translating into solid competitiveness, particularly as inflation is seen and depreciation of the INR continues. Economies like China, Vietnam and Korea have created industrial strength by transferring household savings through lower costs for goods and subsidizing businesses.

India’s decade long reluctance to invest in necessary infrastructure, not preventing or fixing regulatory problems, a lack of commitment to invest in skill based education, and not creating conditions for businesses to compete with overseas markets have created conditions that result in low consumption and low wages. The devaluation of the INR hits households who are acting as shock absorbers in the absence of streamlined government policy.

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30Y Treausry Yields 20260826

How Warsh Can Solve the US Debt Crisis With Just a Few Words at Jackson Hole!

by with No Comment AssetsBehavioral SentimentCentral BanksCharles NajjarCorporateEconomyEquitiesExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsFinancial InstitutionsForexInvestingRisk ManagementUncategorized

A Roadmap for Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh to Rescue U.S Debt

Many think the market decides interest rates.

Wrong!

The Fed – and only the Fed – has full control over interest rates, all over the curve!

We just need to have the right person on board.

During the European crisis in 2011, speculators all around the world were betting that the Eurozone would explode and that the EUR would collapse under the weight of government debt that had started with Greece and spread to other countries that were shamelessly labelled “PIGS,” adding insult to the speculative attack.

Trichet, at that time chair of the ECB, seemed totally clueless, afraid to take any “unconventional” step, even at the risk of seeing the entire European financial system go bust.

The crisis seemed unstoppable… until Mario Draghi stepped in, replacing Trichet.

With just one magical statement (“the ECB will do whatever it takes to save the Euro. And believe me, it will be enough”) Draghi implied that he was ready to buy government bonds from European countries, even though such action was considered at the time to be “against the ECB’s statutes” and outside its mandate.

By going against the prevailing market narrative, and knowing very well the economic strength of the Eurozone, Draghi forced the market to follow him.

The speculation against the Eurozone stopped almost instantly, and European government bond prices recovered without the ECB even being forced to intervene!

30Y Treausry Yields 20260826

U.S 30-Year Treasury Yields Chart From 1988 until 26 August 2026

Today, the U.S is in exactly the same position!

A massive speculative attack is being waged against U.S debt (probably led in part by the crypto industry in an attempt to justify the “value” of its virtual tokens), with “inflation” suddenly becoming the ultimate beast.

Like Trichet at the time, the weak Powell got driven into the trap of raising rates abruptly on his own government, forcing it to pay more than $1 trillion in yearly interest, a massive and unnecessary injection of liquidity that is itself… inflationary!

In today’s world, driven by massive debt, raising interest rates on governments is INFLATIONARY!

Now that Powell is almost gone, all hopes lie on Warsh’s shoulders.

He can save the U.S from the current debt crisis with just a few words, exactly as Draghi did for Europe.

Warsh completely missed his first intervention a month ago. Instead of showing the market who’s boss, he showed total febrility.

Fearing being labelled a “Trump puppet,” he insisted on the 2% inflation target – an absurd threshold that nobody really knows where it came from – and claimed that “the economy is robust”… while we all know it is not!

Then he totally capitulated to the market by saying that he would “listen to the market” to determine where rates should go. The worst thing any Governor could ever say!

That’s how long-term yields exploded to levels not seen since 2007, and forcing Bessent to intervene to limit the damage.

We are now just one day away from the Jackson Hole Symposium.

Warsh can now either save the U.S or send it into Armageddon!

Every word he says could change the entire picture.

He simply has to focus on the right narrative:

  • Current inflation is geopolitical and driven by supply shocks. Raising interest rates has zero impact on such inflation.
  • The 2% inflation target is NOT an absolute figure. A 3% inflation rate should be acceptable when the economy is at risk.
  • Signs of recession are looming, with the labor market under pressure, rising bankruptcies, and record rates of defaults on credit cards and car loans.
  • Forcing the government to inject more than $1 trillion through interest payments is itself inflationary. Raising interest rates to fight inflation is counterproductive at such a high level of government debt.

If Warsh is capable of highlighting these arguments, yields will drop instantly without any intervention from Bessent.

Then the Fed can start decreasing interest rates gradually, with the market accepting whatever rate it sets.

What if Warsh deliberately gave a disastrous speech a month ago, taking a tough position against what Trump appointed him to do and allowing the market to drive rates to extreme levels… only to radically change his position following the recommendations of the task force he appointed?

This way, he would have absolved himself from being labelled Trump’s puppet while executing exactly the plan of reducing interest rates.

We can therefore suspect that he will take the opportunity at Jackson Hole to present the first findings of this task force, which could include, among other things:

  • A questioning of the 2% inflation threshold, especially when the economy is at risk of entering a deep recession.
  • Stressing that inflation comes mainly from geopolitical issues and supply shock. Fighting such inflation with high interest rates is totally inefficient.
  • A highlight of the absurdity of raising interest rates on the U.S government and forcing it to inject $1 trillion in interest payments – an unnecessary injection of liquidity that is itself inflationary.
  • The necessity of coordinating with the Treasury Department to fight inflation where it hurts the most, through subsidies, tax relief, and other targeted measures, while primarily fighting “greedflation” through higher profit taxes on specific industries.
  • A warning about the increasing risk of recession, with record numbers of corporate bankruptcies, credit-card defaults, and a deteriorating job market.

Warsh has a unique chance to prove that he is the right person for the job by rescuing the U.S from the massive speculation against its debt, exactly like “Super Mario” did when he saved Europe from collapse in 2012.

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Singapore Dollar 20260818

Forex: Compressed Tight Realms Signaling Nervous Reactions

by with No Comment Behavioral SentimentCentral BanksCommoditiesEconomic CalendarEquitiesFeatured HighlightsFederal Reserve, Interest RatesFinancial InstitutionsForexInvestingRisk ManagementSpeculatorsUncategorized

Sentiment Storms as Financial Institutions Remain Unsure about Outlooks

Price action in the USD/SGD has continued to demonstrate a rather significant turn downwards since the last week of June. The price of the currency pair is near 1.27800 as of this writing and is traversing near values seen the 1st of June and towards the end of the first week of March. Importantly, the USD/SGD has also seen recent lower depths and was below 1.27000 in the second week of May.

The USD/SGD traversed deeper ratios in late January when the 1.26000 vicinity was challenged and these levels were sustained until the middle of February. On the 26th of February the USD/SGD was near the 1.26500 mark. Now that the above numbers have been established, let’s discuss why this is potentially important for Forex traders as developing trends surface.

The past few years of trading have seen a compression of Forex deviations, in other words the FX market has grown more tame. However, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) now reports that over 9.6 trillion USD in value is traded daily. This is a stark increase compared to 2022 when Forex saw an average daily market around 7.5 trillion – meaning there has been a 28% increase over the past four years.

Singapore Dollar 20260818

USD/SGD One Year Chart as of 18 August 2026

The scope of volume is presented not to cause fear, but to show Forex traders what is at stake and the size of the marketplace and its potential for sudden jolts of volatility if it is established. 

Turning our attention to the new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh and his preference to not give concrete forward guidance is important. U.S Treasury yields are dangerously high (the 30-Y yield is near 5.31%), and the military conflict between Iran and the U.S  continues to fester. Threats remain on the horizon which need observation, insights that prove correct regarding how these bits of information will influence the Fed Chair and the impact on the USD could prove significant for financial institutions.

Large players have reasons to be critical about a lack of clarity and this might spark more choppiness in Forex – even though value realms are said to be in a compressed state. This opens the door for technical traders who may have a better gauge on existing behavioral sentiment of the Forex markets compared to fundamental traders who have too many tea leaves to interpret which are moving rapidly as the cup gets shifted. Technical traders may have a good sense of where algo trading is directing its velocity per current Forex sentiment. 

While some analysts make a case for an increase to the Federal Funds Rate because of inflation concerns, what happens if they are wrong? And what if large players are now discounting their initial fears regarding higher interest rates and are actually starting to position themselves for the Fed Funds Rate to remain the same or be lowered in the mid-term? Is this one of the reasons why the USD has become weaker recently?

What if the new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh proves stronger than people believe and has the ability to talk lower interest rates into reality? The U.S Treasury faces a huge and expensive task trying to pay off the yields of the high flying 10-Year and 30-Year bonds. What if Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who has a solid relationship with Fed Chair Warsh proves influential? Read AMT’s Charles Najjar’s article on his thoughts about why the Fed should aim for a 2% Fund Rate: https://www.angrymetatraders.com/why-the-us-fed-should-lower-interest-rates-to-2/

Yes, the Middle East situation remains troubling from a mid-term economic viewpoint regarding the implications on WTI Crude Oil prices and ancillary energy costs globally. Inflation must be battled, but is raising the Federal Funds Rate going to help decrease the cost of energy or lessen its demand? Mostly likely no.

US Dollar Index 20260818

U.S Dollar Index One Year Chart as of 18 August 2026

The gold market has started to show signs of price velocity the past couple of weeks. The precious metal is trading near $4,395.00 as of this writing. Investors with a long-term window and troubled perspectives about the health of the USD have plenty of reasons to be more comfortable holding gold compared to staying in cash. 

U.S equities have been doing well via indices, but nervous shadows are hovering (maybe they always are). And this is why diversification is always important via long-term investment. Equities, bonds, gold and a small proportion for speculative purposes – this for those who want to try and increase their wealth while maintaining a status quo regarding preservation of wealth.

However, from a speculative standpoint, the Forex market is starting to show signs of alarming behavior, some may even call it a lack of correlation caused by storms forming. Yes, we know the USD/JPY is within its own environment as the BoJ and U.S Treasury/Fed play tag team trying to scare folks away from buying the currency pair. However, putting the JPY to the side for the moment, USD centric weaker positions are showing ability to sustain trends. 

The USD/SGD is a prime example of this momentum. The Fed’s Jackson Hole Symposium begins on the 27th of August and ends on the 29th  and all the major central banks will be attendance. Financial institutions will be keen to hear discussions about U.S bond yields, U.S and Japan currency interventions, but importantly will also want to monitor what Kevin Warsh and his cast of FOMC officers have to say about U.S interest rates. And it has to be known given the past two months from the new Fed Chair, he may remain rather quiet regarding outlook. 

And that might be good for the Forex market and spark some opportunities for traders to find an advantage. Because if nothing new or convincing comes out of the Jackson Hole meetings that financial institutions can decipher regarding their mid-term outlooks, perhaps the near-term will produce more volatility.  The next Federal Reserve FOMC meeting decision will be on the 16th of September. Do not expect interest rates to be raised.

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USDJPY 20260813

Sentiment Matters: Speculative Narrative and the False Promise of Data

by with No Comment AssetsBehavioral SentimentCentral BanksCommoditiesCryptocurrenciesEconomyEquitiesExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsFederal Reserve, Interest RatesFinancial InstitutionsForexInvestingRisk ManagementRobert PetrucciSpeculatorsUncategorized

Do Retail Traders Understand They Are Being Misled?

As day traders ponder what they should do next via their speculative wagers in the broad marketplace, now is a good time to remind small speculators stepping into the casino of global assets that a lot of the production value they are offered is part of a show. Entertainment is literally being produced to entice people to trade. A large amount of retail traders are constantly being misled. Your adrenaline high is being counted upon to keep you a participant. The thrill you get when you are trading should not be more important than the outcome of your trade.

Large money machines like the Nasdaq 100, S&P 500, U.S Treasury yields, Forex, commodities and even the cryptocurrencies have plenty of descriptive words and definitions trying to interpret and predict values, trends and outlook, but quite frankly a lot of the words are nonsense created to entice and fool. Making retail traders willing participants in the circus is important because it keeps a lot of the the entertainers employed. 

It should be remembered that a lot of the folks on the institutional side of financial markets do not care about day traders except as an example of what not to do. They use day traders as a touchstone to point to failures and convince you why you are out of your element, while hoping you will stick around to create volumes that are often needed in some speculative assets. Are you being taken advantage of as a small speculator? 

USDJPY 20260813

USD/JPY Long-Term Charts as of 13 August 2026

It is Much Better to be the Bank

A lot of people in the institutional financial industry know one thing for certain, while some make money investing by themselves or produce outstanding results for funds, many do not. There is an old saying among veterans in the arena, “it is much better to be the bank”. Transactional costs from commissions, carrying charges, exchange fees and taxes make money for the institutions and government regulators.

Many folks are involved in the financial markets because it provides a solid pay check, it remains a good career path for those who want the comforts of modern society. However, being a day trader while working another job as a blue collar employee, or business owner, or while being a professional in another endeavor and dreaming about wealth creation via speculation is alluring, but it frequently does not produce steady profits like it does for the people working in financial institutions collecting a paycheck. 

Confirmation Bias and Investment Outcomes

Economists for instance are relied upon to decipher inflation and decode data for devoted audiences. The believers are told why certain assets are reacting and what might happen in the future by the influencers. But this also can manifest into self-fulfilling prophesy that may not actually be connected to real economic outcomes, except that outlooks get fulfilled because of emerging behavioral sentiment.

For instance when yesterday’s U.S Core CPI was released and hit its expectation, what did markets do exactly, what were investors reacting to? The markets reacted to what the perception of mid-term outlooks will now do, based on how they think the Federal Reserve will act in September and the coming months. Reactions to anticipated results are a key factor in market dynamics. Large positions are shifted by financial institutions which have the ability to to absorb short and near-term losses of capital while they wait for their mid-term outlooks to be confirmed. Confirmation bias remains important in the marketplace as results get generated via intraday results as big players thrash violently with massive piles of cash causing technical perspectives to drive algo trading.

Inflation is Not a Joke

Btw, why did god create economists? To make weathermen look good. While that may fray the feelings of economists, the joke holds water. Because observable data and printed results often do not correlate. Just ask global consumers in various nations what they think about their government’s stated inflation data compared to what they are spending on a monthly basis and rising costs. People on the street often feel their national currencies feel like they are losing money no matter what central banks are proclaiming.

Inflation is an important measurement for consumers and investors. But real inflation is often not a desirable talking point for many governments. Often excluded data includes products like food, energy, and mandated medical and pension costs via payments to government social programs. Increasing rent or mortgages via rising interest rates inside of certain government inflation reports are frequently avoided too and would look atrocious. Central banks are supposed to fight inflation, but which inflation exactly? I am digressing I know, this may have nothing to do supposedly with everyday speculating in the marketplace, but actually it does.

Because the Forex market, gold, equity indices are reacting to sentiment generated by the second based on what outlooks will be in vogue in a few months and inflation effects. Our age of social media and fast communication makes the markets vulnerable to fear and optimism equally. Speed matters even if it sometimes causes pain for day traders via lightning quick results in the marketplace as outlooks change constantly.

Make no mistake, market forces are always in play as investors look for value. Sentiment caused by folks like central banks and their policies play consistently important and volatile roles as large players and financial institutions react to tea leaves being read. The USD/JPY is a case in point, the Japanese Yen has been dramatically weak and losing value long-term. 

The intervention by the BoJ and U.S Treasury which was coordinated a couple of weeks ago didn’t fix the problem that Japan has poor monetary and fiscal policy. What it did was serve as a warning to day traders and large players (including banks) not to bet too strongly against the JPY too consistently even if their perceptions tell them otherwise, because the Japanese and U.S government can wreck havoc and create unforgiving momentum which can kill the infectious trend upwards when they desire. 

The BoJ and U.S Treasury definitively put on a show for traders to watch and contemplate before they consider stepping into the casino again. Sometimes it is better to watch the entertainment instead of being an actor within the drama.

Thrill of Risks and Solid Tactical Strategy 

Why do speculators insists on chasing markets without having proper guidance? Why don’t these same smaller traders just let professionals manage their assets and put some money away when they can and accept the returns? Maybe because many speculators are skeptical about the real returns and know they are being made to endure a magic show of sorts. 

Day traders should only risk what they can afford to lose via a speculative allotment of cash. Fund managers for financial institutions, pension funds for example, are often mandated to put 2 to 3% of holdings into speculative assets in order to seek bolder returns. This is one of the reasons why hedge funds and speculative assets flourish in a cyclical manner. Large financial institutions allow for wagering on asset classes they know are dangerous in an extremely limited manner, but with a huge amount of money. Can you say Bitcoin? And it is widely accepted that these speculative positions can be wiped out and destroy capital. Institutions often do not mind losing on limited speculative positions, the same cannot be said for retail traders.

Smaller retail traders should not view themselves engaged in a battle against financial institutions which are filled to the rim with employees who are often unsympathetic about the outcomes produced. The world of speculative betting by retail traders is not about to change. Day traders should study momentum and behavioral sentiment.

Traders need to understand how to manage risks and emotions. While speculators can dream about making illustrious profits to impress friends and partners, if they do not take into the consideration the costs of the risks they are likely going to fall into a deep hole. Strategic tactics are necessary. Retail trading doesn’t have to be a game if it is conducted wisely.

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AI Economic Flywheel 20260811

Anatomy of the AI Economy: Mapping Capital, Infrastructure and Value

by with No Comment AI & Machine LearningAI, Quantum & MetaverseAMT MarketsArtificial IntelligenceAssetsEconomyEquitiesExclusive ContentFeatured HighlightsInvestingSameer BhosleTechnologyUncategorized

Interlocking Parts of the AI Flywheel and Understanding the Multi-Trillion Dollar Engine

We are living through the largest, most aggressive capital deployment cycle in technological history. What began as a gold rush for silicon chips has rapidly evolved into a multi-trillion-dollar macroeconomic engine. 

The AI Economy operates as a tightly integrated flywheel: hyperscale physical capital flows directly into compute infrastructure, which powers foundation models, which are then distributed via cloud platforms to power end-user productivity. 

For investors navigating this shift, capturing durable value requires looking past individual stock picks and understanding this multi-trillion-dollar supply chain requires examining how capital moves across hardware, cloud orchestration, model intelligence, and commercial monetization.

AI Economic Flywheel 20260811

Anatomy of the AI Economy: Mapping Capital, Infrastructure and Value 

A: Data Center & Physical Infrastructure Layer

The physical foundation represents the largest capital expenditure cycle in tech history, with combined hyperscaler CapEx projected to exceed $700 billion annually.

  • Space & Power Real Estate: AI workloads demand unprecedented power density (scaling from 10–15 kW/rack up to 100+ kW/rack).
    • Key Metrics: Global hyperscaler CapEx allocation to AI infrastructure is ~75%.
    • Key Players: Digital Realty, Equinix, CyrusOne, Compass Datacenters.
  • Machines & Systems: Custom server racks engineered for intense compute densities.
    • Key Players: Supermicro, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Foxconn, Wiwynn.
  • GPUs & Accelerators: The core engine of AI compute, transitioning from pure GPU training dominance to custom inference ASICs.
    • Key Players: Nvidia (80%+ market share), AMD, Intel, Google (TPU), Amazon (Trainium/Inferentia), Meta (MTIA).
  • Networking & Interconnects: High-speed fabric connecting tens of thousands of clustered GPUs, required to prevent bandwidth bottlenecks.
    • Key Metrics: Rapid transition to 800G and 1.6T optical transceivers and Ultra Ethernet Consortium standards.
    • Key Players: Broadcom, Arista Networks, Cisco, Marvell, Nvidia (Mellanox InfiniBand/Spectrum-X).
  • Memory & Storage: Ultra-fast memory architectures and storage required for multi-terabyte dataset ingestion during training runs.
    • Key Metrics: High Bandwidth Memory (HBM3e/HBM4) consumes over 20% of global DRAM wafer capacity.
    • Key Players: SK Hynix, Micron Technology, Samsung, Western Digital (Solidigm), Seagate.
  • Liquid & Advanced Cooling: Air cooling reaches physical constraints past 40 kW per rack, making liquid cooling mandatory for next-gen clusters.
    • Key Players: Vertiv, Schneider Electric, CoolIT Systems, Submer.

B: Cloud & Model Software Layer

Cloud providers act as the primary monetization pipeline, renting the underlying physical infrastructure as a service (IaaS/PaaS) and serve as primary distributors for top-tier foundation models.

  • Cloud Providers (Hyperscalers & AI Cloud Specialists):
    • Overview: Hyperscalers host foundation models and partner directly with AI labs. The Big Three manage over 65% of global cloud infrastructure, with AI workloads serving as their fastest-growing revenue driver.
    • Key Players: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure (OpenAI host), Google Cloud (multi-model distribution), Oracle Cloud (OCI), CoreWeave, Lambda Labs.

Cloud Provider

Market Share

YoY Growth (Q1)

Key AI Advantage / Differentiation

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

~31%

+28%

Scale lead, custom Trainium chips, Bedrock multi-model ecosystem.

Microsoft Azure

~23–25%

+40%

Strategic OpenAI integration, deep enterprise software lock-in.

Google Cloud (GCP)

~11–12%

+63%

First-party TPU infrastructure, native Gemini model integration.

Neoclouds / GPU Cloud

< 5%

100%+

Specialized bare-metal GPU clusters (e.g., CoreWeave, Lambda) renting raw compute to AI labs.

  • AI Models (Foundation & Frontier): High-cost capital investments in model weights that serve as the operating system for generative AI application buildouts.
    • Key Players: OpenAI (Chat GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), Meta (LLaMA – open source), Mistral, xAI.
  • Software Platforms & Tools: Application layers that wrap foundation models into enterprise workflows via Agentic frameworks and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
    • Key Players: Microsoft (Copilot), Salesforce (Agentforce), Databricks, Snowflake, ServiceNow, Palantir, GitHub.

C: End Users & Value Capture

The ultimate ROI of the entire $700B+ infrastructure buildout hinges on end-user monetization and operational productivity gains across three core tiers:

  • Commercial Users (Enterprise): Corporations deploying AI for automated software engineering, compliance auditing, automated customer operations, real-time analytics, and supply chain optimization.
    • Investor Value Capture: Margin expansion and labor productivity leverage (e.g., JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, Klarna, Walmart, Pfizer, Bridgewater Associates).
  • Government & Sovereign AI: Nation-states building localized cloud capacity and defense/intelligence models to secure technological sovereignty and data residency.
    • Key Initiatives: US Department of Defense contracts, sovereign AI funds in the UAE/Saudi Arabia, and regional EU sovereign clouds.
  • Retail Users (Consumers): Individual subscribers paying recurring SaaS fees for conversational AI, real-time search, personal assistants, and creative media generation.
    • Key Players: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT Plus), Google (Gemini Advanced), Perplexity, Apple (Apple Intelligence), Midjourney.

The Macro Narrative: How the Flywheel Interlocks

  1. User Demand Drives Cloud Revenue: Retail subscriptions, enterprise API calls, and government deployments generate recurring revenue for cloud providers and software vendors.
  2. Cloud Revenues Fund CapEx Expansion: Hyperscalers reinvest cloud cash flows back into physical infrastructure, purchasing GPUs, high-speed networking, and custom data center real estate.
  3. Hardware Scale Lowers Inference Costs: Manufacturing efficiencies in silicon/chip, cooling, and memory drive down the compute cost per token, making high-reasoning workloads economically viable.
  4. Lower Token Costs Unlock Mass Adoption: Cheaper, faster compute enables software providers to build more complex AI agent workflows, driving deeper enterprise adoption and restarting the economic cycle.

The Bottom Line: The AI economy is not a series of isolated technology bets; it is a self-reinforcing flywheel where raw compute and commercial utility endlessly feed each other. For investors, the winning strategy isn’t simply picking a single winner in hardware, cloud, or models but it’s identifying the key bottlenecks and value capture points as this multi-trillion-dollar cycle continues to accelerate.

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