Read more

Everyone is now concerned about the unemployment rate, it would appear. The scribes are busily scribbling as to the possible causes of this economic debilitation.

Their list is long, creative, and clever. One explanation is that the quit rate has plummeted. People are sticking around in jobs they would have left in rosier markets. Well, yes, if this replacement source of new job openings is decreasing, that could well account for fewer new employment slots opening up. But this is a two-way street. Presumably, people are not downing tools for fear that new appointments will not be open to them, at least not on better terms, overall, than they now enjoy. So, it is likely that the unemployment rate is at least partially a cause of this phenomenon, not only a result. Further, this is a sign of economic health, rather than disarray. After all, if workers are satisfied with their lot in economic life, that is all to the good, not something about which we should complain.

Some say that unemployment is due to a “mismatch” between labor supply and demand. That hits the nail on the head, but in the view of Allysia Finley of the Wall Street Journal: “Government subsidies and public schools have funneled too many young people to credential mills, which churn out grads who lack the skills that employers demand. Many would be better off training in skilled trades, for which demand is enormous.”

This is not a simple supply and demand challenge, but a disparity between skills needed by employers and those taught in schools and colleges.

But the real gap between supply and demand is in minimum wage laws, something, curiously, not at all mentioned in the widespread analysis of the problem. As students of Microeconomics 101 are taught, when these laws are enforced, and set above the equilibrium point, the supply of labor is greater than the demand for it. QED. That gap is unemployment.

Suppose that the market-clearing wage for a certain type of labor is $20 per hour. This means that the productivity of a person with that skill tends to be that amount. Wages reflect additions to the bottom line supplied by the employee (“discounted marginal revenue product,” in technical terminology). The economy rarely if ever equates the two, but we are forever moving in that direction. Any gap between productivity and salary sets up market forces to quell it. Wages are not predicated upon employer generosity, but, rather, on how helpful the worker is to attaining the goals of the business.

Now stipulate that the level mandated by this pernicious legislation is $30 per hour. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani intends to raise it to that amount by 2030. He even bruits about a nice little jingle to that effect: “$30 in ’30.” Can’t beat that for brevity.

What, then, will happen to the worker whose ability implies that he can only produce at the $20 level? Any employer who hires him will lose $10 per hour on the deal, and will court bankruptcy if it continues. That is no way to run the railroad.

But, surely, a minimum wage law pegged far lower will do no such harm. Yes, if it is set at $5 per hour, the $20 per hour employee will be in no danger of losing his job. But what about the worker who can only add to the bottom line at, say, $2 hourly? Anyone hiring him at $5 will lose $3, not a paying proposition.

A common fallacy is the idea that without minimum wage laws, the prevailing wage would hover around the zero point. This legislation was not introduced until the 1930s, and wages were normal before that time. Indeed, the historical record shows that labor costs followed the law of supply and demand. In times of labor shortage (such as after the plague in Europe), the average worker’s income went up. Workers were able to advocate for higher wages as they were providing a needed resource.

It is distortions of the market, through price-fixing (minimum wage laws), central banks adjusting interest rates, and interventions to prop up unsustainable enterprises that cause unemployment.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Inflation remains stuck around 3.8% CPI, well above the Fed’s stated 2% target, and that number alone should theoretically eliminate any serious discussion of aggressive easing. Treasury yields are rising as bond investors demand compensation for persistent inflation, uncontrolled fiscal deficits, and the growing realization that Washington’s debt load is becoming increasingly unstable.

The American consumer, meanwhile, is clearly running on fumes. Credit card balances continue hitting records, delinquency rates are rising, savings buffers have been depleted, and wage growth is failing to keep pace with the real cost of living for millions of households. Yet despite all of this stress beneath the surface, equity markets continue trading as if rate cuts are inevitable, growth will remain strong, and the Fed will once again rescue investors the moment volatility appears.

It is a fantasy built on the assumption that policymakers can indefinitely suspend economic consequences.

As I’ve been writing about, the Fed’s dilemma is now impossible to ignore. Raising rates further would intensify pressure on households, corporations, regional banks, commercial real estate, and most importantly the federal government itself, which now faces massive refinancing needs at dramatically higher borrowing costs. Holding rates steady risks allowing weakness to spread until something in credit markets eventually breaks.

Cutting rates, however, presents its own disaster scenario because inflation remains far too elevated to justify meaningful monetary easing. The Fed spent years insisting inflation was transitory before being forced into the most aggressive tightening cycle in decades. Repeating that mistake while inflation remains nearly double target would destroy what little credibility remains. And yet that may not stop them if markets begin unraveling. Remember this Bloomberg Businessweek cover?

As we’re seeing last week, real danger starts in the bond market. Stocks may dominate headlines, but Treasury markets are where systemic pressure becomes impossible to hide. Washington’s fiscal position becomes increasingly unsustainable if yields continue climbing because deficits at current levels only function in a world where debt can be financed cheaply.

If bond investors continue pushing yields higher, policymakers will eventually be forced to intervene directly. As Michael Green noted during this recent interview, that intervention will almost certainly come in the form of yield curve control, where the Fed steps into the Treasury market and effectively caps long-term rates through direct bond purchases. In plain English: money printing returns under a more sophisticated label.

Once that happens, equities likely become the next casualty before ultimately becoming the next rescue target. If yields spike hard enough before intervention arrives, equity valuations face a brutal repricing. Those investors currently paying extreme multiples for growth stocks and not just participating in the massive ongoing gamma squeeze in markets are doing so partially because they assume lower rates are right around the corner. If that assumption fails, stocks can fall hard and fast. And once markets experience enough pain, political pressure on the Fed will become overwhelming. Policymakers will once again be told they must stabilize markets, protect pensions, preserve confidence, and prevent contagion.

That is where things move from reckless, to dangerous, to out of ideas.

If inflation remains stuck around 3.8% but the Fed still wants political cover to print money, suppress yields, and rescue markets, it needs a justification. The easiest way to create that justification is by changing how inflation is measured. A Reuters report recently highlighted comments from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh suggesting that one of his first initiatives could be a major “data project” aimed at better measuring what he called “underlying inflation.”

That sounds harmless until you understand what it really means. If inflation is running at a very real 3.8% and consumers are already being crushed by rising rent, food, insurance, healthcare, and utility costs, artificially lowering official inflation metrics to justify renewed money printing would be like pouring gasoline onto a house that is already on fire. It would take an inflation problem that is already eroding the middle and lower classes and deliberately intensify it in order to protect asset prices and government financing needs.

Wealthy asset holders may celebrate easier policy and rising stock prices, but ordinary households would be left paying the real cost through even higher living expenses. Their wages would lag further behind. Their savings would lose more purchasing power. Their path to home ownership would become even narrower. Their ability to absorb everyday price shocks would deteriorate further.

This is what makes the entire idea dangerous. Americans do not live in a world of “trimmed mean inflation.” They live in the real economy. They buy groceries at actual prices. They pay actual rent. They pay insurance premiums that have surged. They deal with medical bills, childcare expenses, utility costs, and tuition payments that continue rising faster than official narratives suggest. Reuters itself noted that similar inflation metrics helped policymakers underestimate the inflation surge in 2021 by filtering out warning signs until inflation became impossible to ignore. Now the same intellectual framework is reappearing at precisely the moment policymakers may need an excuse to restart intervention.

Kurt Altrichter on X noted the potential change: “The Fed has used Core PCE, which excludes food and energy, as its benchmark since 2000. Warsh favors Trimmed Mean PCE, which removes the most extreme price movements each month instead of excluding whole categories.”

He writes: “The practical difference: Trimmed Mean PCE currently reads 2.36%, well below the 3.20% reading on Core PCE. Depending on which measure the Fed follows, the case for rate cuts looks very different. This is not a minor procedural change. The metric the Fed uses to gauge inflation directly determines when it judges the economy to be at target.”

And the purpose of the change: “If Warsh moves the committee toward Trimmed Mean PCE, he is mathematically moving the Fed closer to a declared victory on inflation, which creates runway for rate cuts even as headline readings stay elevated.”

Altrichter concludes: “You’d think with 400+ Ph.D. economists and 500+ researchers on the payroll, the Fed would run the most sophisticated macro forecasting operation on the planet, leaving Bloomberg and every major hedge fund in the dust. Not even close. When the data doesn’t cooperate, just change the data. Same thing I saw in the Army when time or weather worked against higher leadership, and we would quietly move the goalposts rather than admit the standard couldn’t be met. Can you tell why I didn’t stick around for the full 20 years?”

And he’s right. This may be the real endgame. If bonds break, implement yield curve control. If stocks break, flood markets with liquidity. If inflation remains too high to justify either action, simply redefine inflation until the numbers say what policymakers need them to say. First it was hedonic adjustments. Then substitution effects. Then core inflation. Now “underlying inflation.” Every step moves further away from what ordinary people actually experience and closer to whatever statistic allows policymakers to keep the debt machine operating.

Maybe Wall Street celebrates another round of artificial stability. Maybe politicians claim inflation has been defeated because a revised formula says so. But if policymakers print aggressively into what is still a real inflationary environment, they are not solving the problem, they are accelerating it. They would be sacrificing the purchasing power of the middle and lower classes to preserve financial asset prices and government solvency.

And then they will likely stand at podiums explaining that inflation is under control while families wonder why groceries, rent, and insurance somehow keep rising faster than the official numbers suggest. At that point, the only thing more inflated than prices may be the credibility of the people reporting them.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

I always knew this is what was happening, but haven’t heard someone sum it up so succinctly or in such detailed fashion as this.

Read more

Warsh was narrowly confirmed this week in the most partisan Fed chair vote in modern history, inheriting a central bank that has spent years under political attack while gliding straight into a macroeconomic minefield. Inflation just accelerated to a three-year high. Oil is higher amid Middle East tensions. President Trump is openly demanding lower rates. And now the bond market appears to be losing patience, pushing yields dramatically higher to end the week last week.

Friday was a perfect preview of the mess waiting for him.

On Friday, most investors spent the day staring at falling tech stocks as the S&P 500 dropped 1.24% and the Nasdaq fell 1.54%, but that wasn’t the real story. The real story was happening in Treasuries, where the 30-year yield ripped above 5.1% as investors digested hotter inflation data from earlier in the week and the growing realization that rates may need to stay higher for longer than Wall Street has been pricing in.

That’s where things get dangerous. Stocks can correct 5% and CNBC can fill airtime with “buy the dip” segments. Bond markets are different. When yields rise this fast, they tighten financial conditions everywhere at once. Mortgage rates stay elevated, corporate borrowing costs rise, commercial real estate refinancing gets uglier, and the federal government’s own interest expense starts ballooning.

And this is happening while the consumer is already showing cracks. Auto loan delinquencies are sitting near 2008 levels. Credit card delinquencies are hovering around financial crisis highs. Consumers are increasingly relying on high-interest debt just as inflation continues squeezing real wages.

That inflation problem is exactly what makes Warsh’s situation so miserable. CPI is still running at 3.8%. PPI is at 6%. Oil just moved above $100. This is not an environment where the Fed can casually ride in with emergency rate cuts or restart quantitative easing without risking another inflation wave.

Which is particularly awkward because Kevin Warsh has spent years arguing that the Fed became far too involved in financial markets and should shrink its $6.7 trillion balance sheet faster. He’s repeatedly pushed the idea that the central bank should stop acting like a permanent market backstop and return to more traditional monetary policy tools.

Very noble. Very disciplined. Very “markets need to stand on their own two feet.” And now he may be taking over just as markets are testing whether he actually means any of that.

Because it’s easy to give speeches about moral hazard when stocks are ripping higher, volatility is low, and everyone is pretending the economy is fine. It’s a little harder when the bond market starts throwing furniture around, long-term yields keep climbing, and every corner of the economy begins feeling the pressure at once.

Again, higher Treasury yields don’t just hurt speculative tech names—they ripple through everything. Housing activity slows as mortgage rates remain elevated. Corporate refinancing becomes more expensive. Commercial real estate gets squeezed even harder. Private equity exits dry up. Government interest payments balloon. Suddenly everyone from first-time homebuyers to Treasury officials starts having a very bad week.

And then there’s the stock market, which continues behaving like none of this applies to it. The Shiller P/E ratio is sitting around 42x—deep into “what could possibly go wrong?” territory. That kind of valuation only works if inflation cools quickly, rates fall, earnings remain strong, and liquidity stays abundant. In other words, it requires basically everything to go right at the exact moment a lot of things are going wrong.

That’s what makes this such a brutal setup for Warsh.

If he lets yields continue climbing, he risks a broader market repricing, rising defaults, housing weakness, and credit stress that spills into the real economy. If he cuts rates too aggressively or restarts bond purchases, he risks pouring gasoline on inflation that is already running too hot. If he does nothing and tries to wait it out? Markets may decide for him.

That’s the problem with bond markets. They don’t care about academic framework. They don’t care about your carefully worded press conferences. And they definitely do not care about your long-term policy vision when they think inflation, deficits, and fiscal credibility are deteriorating in real time.

Just ask Liz Truss how quickly bond investors can humble policymakers.

So genuinely, good luck, Kevin. No sarcasm there. He’s walking into a non-enviable situation where inflation is sticky, consumers are weakening, stocks look euphoric, geopolitical tensions are driving oil prices higher, and the bond market may be on the verge of becoming the biggest source of instability in the entire financial system.

That’s not a soft landing, it’s a stress test disguised as a promotion. And while everyone else keeps obsessing over whether Nvidia is down 4% on a given day, Warsh should be staring directly at the Treasury marketl, because that’s where his real problems are about to begin.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Heading into Friday’s cash open, U.S. equity futures are under pressure, with S&P 500 futures down roughly 1% and Nasdaq futures off even more sharply as global bond markets sold off overnight.

CNBC reported that by Friday morning in London, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield had climbed nearly 9 basis points to 4.544%, marking its highest level in almost a year. The move wasn’t isolated to the U.S. U.K. 10-year gilt yields jumped another 15 basis points as investors continued digesting fiscal and political instability abroad, while Japan’s 2-year yield surged as much as 19 basis points before cooling modestly.

Government bonds, precious metals, and international equities all sold off simultaneously as investors began repricing inflation risks, geopolitical instability, and the growing realization that central banks may not be rushing to save markets anytime soon.

That matters because this is how stress sometimes tends to emerge in overextended markets. It rarely starts with equities themselves. It often begins in credit markets, rates markets, or funding markets before eventually spilling over into stocks.

Bond markets are significantly larger than equity markets and tend to be less interested in speculative narratives and far more focused on inflation, fiscal deficits, growth expectations, and the actual cost of money. When yields move this aggressively higher in such a short period of time, financial conditions tighten almost immediately. Mortgage rates remain elevated. Corporate borrowing costs rise. Refinancing becomes more expensive. Valuation models become less forgiving. Most importantly, the higher yields go, the less rational it becomes to pay extreme multiples for speculative growth stocks that have been pricing in a near-perfect future.

Yesterday I wrote that this market increasingly resembled a late-stage blowoff top fueled by “mechanical options activity, concentrated speculation, and a level of complacency that tends to emerge near the end of major asset bubbles.”

I also argued that this no longer resembled a traditional bull market built on broad participation, earnings growth, or healthy economic expansion. Instead, I described a market increasingly driven by narrow leadership, speculative options activity, and momentum chasing concentrated in a handful of names. Bloomberg’s Simon White’s observations reinforced that thesis. He highlighted the fastest rise in S&P gamma ever recorded, historically low correlation, and extreme dispersion beneath the surface.

That combination matters because it tells you this rally has been heavily dependent on a shrinking number of stocks doing most of the work while market structure becomes increasingly fragile underneath.

And that fragility becomes far more dangerous when interest rates begin moving against speculative positioning.

Read more

General health checks, called annual physicals in the United States, are sold to the public under false pretenses with claims that aren’t true.

This also applies to targeted health checks, and mammography screening is a good example. Women have been told for 40 years in invitations to screening that by detecting breast cancers early, screening saves lives and leads to less invasive surgery. The truth is that breast screening detects cancers very late, it doesn’t save lives, and more women lose a breast.¹

Mammography screening is harmful and general health checks are also harmful. Like breast screening, they detect many things that should not have been treated because they are either insignificant or will disappear again. In contrast to cars, our body has a remarkable capacity for self-healing.

Our Review of General Health Checks

Health checks can result in large bills for no gain just like car checks can. I never send my car to the annual car check, which has saved me an enormous amount of money. I only see a mechanic when there is something wrong with my car or for simple issues such as changing oil. I have the same relationship with my doctor.

Once, when I was on holiday on Maui, I passed a booth where people could have their blood pressure checked. Just for the fun of it, I stretched my arm out. “What is your usual blood pressure,” a woman asked. “I have no idea,” I replied, which made her laugh in disbelief. I was 58 years old and fit, and the few times in my life that someone had taken my blood pressure during a hospital admission, it had been low, so why should I bother about that? I couldn’t help provoking her a little and therefore told her I had no idea either of what my cholesterol was. At that point, she asked me which country I came from!

In Denmark, the doctors were sceptical towards general health checks, but in 2007, the Danish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry convinced the politicians to introduce them, even though an industry spokesperson admitted that their goal was to sell more drugs.²

Nothing happened, however. But in 2011, our new government wanted to introduce general health checks. I asked to have a meeting with the Minister of Health, Astrid Krag, because our review of the randomised trials, which we had just completed but not yet published, had found no effect on mortality. I brought a colleague to the meeting who had just finished a large trial in Denmark, which had also failed to find an effect.

We told Krag that health checks are probably harmful, leading to more diagnoses, more drugs, and psychological problems because people are told they are less healthy than they think. She aborted her plans on the spot and said it was the first time the new government had broken a pre-election promise in an evidence-based manner.

We had included 14 trials in adults unselected for diseases or risk factors. We published our review in 2012³ and updated it in 2019.⁴ There was no reduction in total mortality (risk ratio 1.00), cardiovascular mortality (risk ratio 1.05), or cancer mortality (risk ratio 1.01), and with 21,535 deaths, our results were very convincing.

There were no benefits either for clinical events, hospital admissions, or other measures of morbidity, but there were harms. More people got a disease label and more became treated with antihypertensive drugs. We concluded cautiously that general health checks are unlikely to be beneficial, but in fact they are harmful.

We had also studied 56 Danish websites selling health checks and found that 17 of the 21 most-used tests were unjustified or there was evidence against using them for screening purposes.⁵ None of the websites mentioned any harms of health checks and they presented a median of only one of the 15 information items recommended by the WHO and the Danish Board of Health when screening healthy people. Thus, there was no informed consent.

Our review saved billions of crowns for Danish taxpayers. Amusingly, statistician Bjørn Lomborg, who denied the existence of climate change in his book, The Sceptical Environmentalist, arranged the 2011 Copenhagen Consensus Conference where three health economists concluded that health checks would give the most health for the investment, 26 crowns for every crown invested.⁶

Quite an impressive gain for something that doesn’t work. We explained what was wrong with the methods.⁷ The estimate was based on the smallest trial we had included in our review, the Danish Ebeltoft study, which contributed only 0.4% of the weight in our updated meta-analysis of mortality.⁴ It is very bad science to cherry-pick a single, tiny trial. Moreover, the economists calculated life years gained based on an extrapolation from changes in risk factors, which was wishful thinking. In fact, a review of 55 trials with interventions against elevated risk factors in healthy people had not found less morbidity or mortality.⁸

The UK “Yes Minister” Farce

In the UK, the reactions to our review were so laughable that they could have been an episode in the BBC’s Yes Minister satire series.

The predicament was that the National Health Service already offered universal health checks for people between 40 and 74 years of age who were tested for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. A slide show claimed that annual health checks would prevent at least 9,500 heart attacks and strokes, 2,000 deaths and 4,000 people from developing diabetes. A slide with a graveyard ensured that no one would miss what would happen if they didn’t attend health checks:

Once something has been introduced as a national priority, it is very difficult to stop it. When our review came out, a Department of Health representative told the BBC that the NHS Health Check programme was based on “expert guidance.” This was even better magic than what Lomborg’s health economists had invented in Denmark. The programme was based on evidence until our review showed it didn’t work. Then, all of a sudden, it was based on “expert guidance” instead.

A year later, we had had enough of all the tricks and published a letter in The Times, with the funny title, “Health check check,”⁹ which resulted in a front-page interview next to a large photo of Prince William, his wife and child, and a royal dog:

Ministers now insisted that 650 lives a year could be saved¹⁰ – a sharp retreat from the previous claim of 2,000. But the chief executive of Diabetes UK, Barbara Young, continued undeterred. She said that routine checks could uncover 850,000 people with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. However, labelling almost a million healthy people as diseased has no value in itself, and we had found that screening for diabetes is not helpful.

After repeated calls from politicians for the programme to be scrapped, Public Health England needed to do something. They announced that an expert panel would be established to review the effectiveness and value-for-money of NHS Health Checks.¹¹

The attempts at finding a fig leaf and continue with the programme were now so bizarre that I came to think of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.¹² I decided to add to the amusement in the BMJ, with a quote from the Yes Minister series as my title: “I don’t want the truth, I want something I can tell Parliament!”:¹³

Public Health England will establish an expert panel to review the effectiveness and value for money of NHS Health Checks, and it will refresh the economic modelling behind the programme. We are furthermore told that “although we recognise that the programme is not supported by direct randomised controlled trial evidence, there is nonetheless an urgent need to tackle the growing burden of disease which is associated with lifestyle behaviours and choices.” The truth, that health checks don’t work and are likely harmful, is too much to bear for Public Health England, it seems. An expert panel is the modern version of the Oracle in Delphi, and statistical modelling is like whispering in a wizard’s ear which result you would like to hear. Saying that there is an urgent need to tackle the growing burden of disease as an excuse for going against clear evidence from randomised trials reminds me of another episode of Yes, (sic) Minister where it was skilfully argued why a huge number of administrators were needed for a hospital that had no patients…Like health checks, mammography screening is harmful, but such trifles don’t affect the leaders of the NHS or the UK Government.

There was also censorship.¹⁴ The website for the NHS Health Check programme published a criticism of our review, which appeared to be serious but was unfounded and highly misleading.¹⁵ We asked for our reply to be published on the website, which was declined with the argument that the government had already decided that health checks were a national priority and that the website was not a forum for debating their merits.

This was hypocritical because the NHS had done exactly that but denied us the opportunity to respond. It would have been appropriate for the NHS programme to publish its criticism in the BMJ, where we had published our review,³ so we could respond to it. The NHS preferred censorship for an enriching debate, which they knew they would lose.

The absolute low point was yet to come, however. In 2014, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), supposedly an independent institution, behaved as the lapdog for the NHS and the drug industry in a press release:¹⁶

“Helping local authorities to encourage people to attend NHS Health Checks and support them in making changes needed to improve their health, is the focus of a new NICE briefing…providing the best value for money…A report from Public Health England found that checking blood pressure, cholesterol, weight and lifestyle of people in this age group could identify problems earlier and prevent 650 deaths, 1600 heart attacks and 4000 diagnoses of diabetes a year…The NHS Health Check programme is currently part of the health delivery infrastructure in England, so NICE seeks to support its effective delivery.”

Prevent 4,000 diagnoses of diabetes a year? Diabetes UK had claimed that routine checks could uncover an estimated 850,000 people with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. Are we supposed to find 850,000 or to avoid finding 4,000?

One of my UK colleagues talked about “Stalinism in the NHS” because members of Parliament were highly critical and had noted that health professionals had been pressured to refrain from criticising the project in public.¹⁷ Only about 50% attended health checks and Public Health England said its aim was to drive the acceptance rate up to 70-75%. That would not be possible without deceiving the public even more than before.

Despite all the Yes Minister manoeuvres, people paid attention to our review and the media interest was phenomenal. Many websites, also in the United States, where overdiagnosis, overtreatment, and waste of money is far greater than anywhere else, questioned health checks.

The Danish Farce

Denmark was a great contributor to the farce and, like in the UK, it was not intended by those who made themselves laughable.

One of the poorest tricks I have been exposed to when my systematic reviews showed that something doesn’t work, e.g. also in relation to mammography screening,¹⁸ is to criticise the included trials or the methods of the review, as if this would by some magic render a negative result positive. This was also the case for health checks.¹⁹

The key spokesperson for the tiny Ebeltoft study, Torsten Lauritzen, wouldn’t give up. He was amazingly stubborn, but all his arguments were false, e.g. that our screening tests and treatments were outdated and that the trials were old (we included all trials, also the newest ones).²⁰ He referred to a meta-analysis of surrogate outcomes, to retrospective non-randomised comparisons, and to modelling studies, which are the standard “rescues” when results from randomised trials are too painful to accept.

Lauritzen carried on with his wishful thinking that health checks reduce mortality using modelling based on risk factors.²¹ He mentioned a systematic review of trials in general practice showing an effect of screening on risk factors for cardiovascular disease but failed to note that it also showed that 30% more people died from cardiovascular disease in the screened group than in the control group. As this difference was statistically significant, Lauritzen was scientifically dishonest.

Lauritzen continued propagating misinformation about our research and published a “State-of-the-Art” article in our medical journal, which was cherry-picking in the extreme.²² He only mentioned his own study and an irrelevant diabetes trial that was not about health checks.

Torturing Your Data in Secrecy Till They Confess

Lauritzen had a contender to the Fool’s Prize in this area, our new Minister of Health, Nick Hækkerup, who had replaced Astrid Krag and had different ideas than hers. He admitted to a speaker on health in Parliament that our review had not found any effect of health checks but added that the Board of Health had stated that this did not rule out that other forms of health checks could have an effect.

I referred to philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had pointed out how meaningless such statements are.²³ He said we cannot rule out that there is a porcelain tea set in orbit circulating around the Earth. Scientifically, we cannot rule out that something might exist. But is it likely that there are UFOs or Martians, or a tea set in orbit?

There was a cartoon in my article that was spot on. The man with the phone is from the European Space Agency:

The Board of Health gave the minister a counterfactual fig leaf, which, according to my dictionary, belongs to the “department for nonsense.” It rings hollow when the Board calls itself the country’s supreme authority on health while it engages in politicisation at a nonsense level.

I asked the Board for access to the documents, 30 in all, which was refused.²⁴ At the same time, a feature article in a newspaper criticised that civil servants did not hold on to “legality, matter-of-factness, professionalism and truth,” but manipulated the evidence to embellish the government’s image and advance its interests.

I complained to the ministry and got access to 14 documents, including a smoking gun. It was about screening for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. The document stated that early detection can lead to fewer disease complications, reduce mortality, reduce healthcare costs, and provide opportunities for a better life, improve the quality of life, and even stop the development of the disease.

This mendacious information came from our Board of Health!

Next, I asked for access to the remaining 16 documents, which should not be a problem according to our law because the case was now closed.

But the Board’s reply was another smoking gun. Access to the documents would mean that the Board’s professional advice could limit the minister’s political range of manoeuvres. It could also limit the civil service’s freedom in relation to professional advice, which could lead to deterioration of the professional advice the minister receives from civil service. Thus, there are very special needs for confidentiality, the Board argued.

What an impressive load of pompous bullshit! I had never seen such an admission from a health authority that the “professional advice” is totally unprofessional. If the professional advice had been okay, the Board should have been proud of it and have nothing against putting it on public display. If you have nothing to hide, then hide nothing.

And yet, there was a third smoking gun: The ministry referred to a document which “was exchanged between the ministry and the Board of Health in several different versions, which reflected the ongoing development in the work with qualifying the initiative to introduce health checks.”

What? This is what the Americans call torturing your data till they confess.²⁵

I complained to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, who supported me. After a year, I got access to the document, which was the fourth smoking gun. It referred to the Ebeltoft study and stated that health checks had a positive effect for men with a short education. This was a lie. In our review, we had included a WHO study with 60,000 male factory workers and 2,511 deaths, and there was no effect. In the Ebeltoft study, there were only 92 deaths, and those with short education made up a minor part of these.

Then came smoking gun number five. The Board of Health discussed our review in a very cursory, almost condescending way: “Various studies show that general health checks have no effect on health (among them studies from Glostrup Hospital and the Nordic Cochrane Centre).” Various studies? We had included all the studies in our review!

The government had announced that it would cooperate with “central actors in the health service” to clarify who would benefit from health checks. I strongly doubted that those of us who knew most about the matter and had provided the most reliable evidence would be consulted, and I was right. The Board only asked the Ebeltoft people for advice. This was like asking a radio amateur for advice about how to launch a Moon rocket.

I wondered what the documents I had not seen contained. Were they even worse? Would that be possible considering the Machiavellian process I had uncovered?

Hækkerup was very pleased that the Danish Society for General Practice had offered to assist with the work, but this was also incorrect. Only the chairman had announced this and several of the members called for his resignation because of it.

The Danish Society of Public Health wrote to the Parliament that they wondered why the government, despite massive knowledge of the lack of effect of health checks, had made a decision that was very costly and would mean that cuts had to be made elsewhere.

Hækkerup was grilled in the media. He declared he was convinced that people would live longer. When a journalist pointed out that there was no evidence for this, Hækkerup replied that he was not a scientist but a politician. The journalist then said that he must rely on science: “Nah, I am an opinionated person,” he replied. Imagine if the Minister of Transport was fond of bamboo and decided that the Fehmarn Bridge to Germany should be built of bamboo, with a remark that he was an opinionated person, not an engineer.

What should we do when ministers of health and civil servants conspire to deceive the public and harm our citizens and our economy? I noted that the new law about reduced public access to government documents introduced in Denmark in 2014 was heavily criticised for undermining democracy and increasing the risk of abuse of power in the public administration.²⁴ When our authorities comply with the whims and gut feelings ministers and conflicted experts have, instead of being truthful to science, we must change our laws about openness in public administration and introduce stiff penalties for those who abuse their power, including ministers.

Hækkerup had talked to three renovation workers and asked them if they thought health checks would be a good idea. That was the positive evidence he had. When he announced this, he also said the men could pleasure their wives. Indeed, a minister for the people.

Hækkerup, a social democrat, succeeded to convince the government about introducing health checks to “vulnerable citizens.” Luckily, we got a liberal government in 2015, which cancelled his foolish plan.²⁶ We still don’t have general health checks in Denmark, and of course they still have them in the UK.²⁷ And they are also recommended in the US by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.²⁸ Yes Minister!

Why Don’t Health Checks Work?

In 2014, the BMJ asked us to write an editorial about health checks.¹⁹ It is counter-intuitive that they don’t work, and there are two likely explanations for it. Many physicians already advise their patients and test for cardiovascular risk factors or diseases in patients whom they judge to be at risk when they see them for other reasons. It has been documented that even brief counselling about smoking will make some people quit, and several of the trials we included advised the participants about this and other unhealthy lifestyles.

The other explanation is that beneficial effects of screening could be outweighed by harmful ones, and type 2 diabetes is a good example. Our drug regulators approve diabetes drugs based on their glucose-lowering effect without knowing what they do to patients, although several drugs in widespread use, e.g. tolbutamide and rosiglitazone, increase cardiovascular mortality.²⁹

Our review did not include trials of geriatric screening, as they evaluated many other interventions in addition to screening, such as falls prevention and specialist drug review. A large meta-analysis showed that community-based multifactorial interventions significantly increased the chance of living at home and reduced falls and hospital admissions.³⁰

Thus, there might be niches where interventions could work, but these interventions are not general health checks, which we recommended be stopped.

The UFO Trick Is Very Common in Public Health

Many people who view themselves as scientists behave as pseudoscientists or cheats when they try to reject strong evidence with weak evidence, which is usually about not losing power or face.

The research literature and the media are full of what I call UFO tricks. If you use a fuzzy photo to “prove” you have seen a UFO when a photo taken with a strong lens has clearly shown that the object is an airplane or a bird, you are a cheat. Many people believe in such UFO tricks because they don’t have a science education, and most of those that have one are unable to distinguish between good and bad science.

Observational studies are the most common raw material for such deceptions. When randomised trials have shown something with great certainty that people with vested interests don’t like but cannot refute, they often say that observational studies have arrived at the opposite result and then discard the trial evidence.^18,29,31-33

References

1 Gøtzsche PC. The Three Big Lies about Mammography Screening. Brownstone Journal 2026; March 6.

2 Andersen NV. Medicinalindustrien skruer op for lobbyismen. Mandag Morgen 2007; Sep 3:20–3.

3 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Larsen CG, Gøtzsche PC. General health checks in adults for reducing morbidity and mortality from disease: Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ 2012;345:e7191.

4 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. General health checks in adults for reducing morbidity and mortality from disease. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2019;1:CD009009.

5 Larsen CG, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Regular health checks: cross-sectional survey. PLoS One 2012;7:e33694.

6 Andersen TK. 10 forslag til mere sundhed for pengene. Mandag Morgen 2011; Feb 21.

7 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Skal befolkningen tilbydes generelle helbredsundersøgelser? Ugeskr Læger 2011;173:1671.

8 Ebrahim S, Taylor F, Ward K, et al. Multiple risk factor interventions for primary prevention of coronary heart disease. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2011;1: CD001561.

9 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Health check check. The Times 2013; Aug 20:25.

10 Hope J. Are NHS over-40s health checks a waste of time? Critics say they’re useless but ministers insist 650 lives a year could be saved. Daily Mail 2013; Aug 20.

11 Gould M. Expert panel will assess cost effectiveness of health checks. BMJ 2013;347:f5222.

12 Ministry of Silly Walks. Monty Python.

13 Gøtzsche PC. “I don’t want the truth, I want something I can tell Parliament!” BMJ 2013;347:f5222.

14 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Universal health checks should be abandoned. BMJ 2013;347:f5227.

15 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. Re: Government’s plans for universal health checks for people aged 40-75. BMJ 2013; Aug 12.

16 NICE support for local government to encourage people to attend NHS Health Checks and make changes for better health. Press release 2014; Feb 26.

17 Price C. NHS Health Checks programme stalling amid poor uptake and critical MPs’ report. Pulse 2014; Feb 28.

18 Gøtzsche PC. Mammography screening: truth, lies and controversy. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2012.

19 Gøtzsche PC, Jørgensen KJ, Krogsbøll LT. General health checks don’t work. BMJ 2014;348:g3680.

20 Gøtzsche PC, Jørgensen KJ, Krogsbøll LT. Authors’ reply to Lauritzen and colleagues, Newton and colleagues, and Mangin. BMJ 2014;349:g4790.

21 Jørgensen KJ, Krogsbøll LT, Pisinger C, Jørgensen T, Gøtzsche PC. Upålidelige metoder kan ikke berettige helbredstjek. Ugeskr Læger 2014;176:2004-5.

22 Krogsbøll LT, Jørgensen KJ, Gøtzsche PC. ”Statusartikel” om helbredstjek var et subjektivt partsindlæg. Ugeskr Læger 2014;176:1505.

23 Gøtzsche PC. Den politiserende Sundhedsstyrelse. Dagens Medicin 2014; Oct 10.

24 Gøtzsche PC. Fakta om sundhedstjek er mørkelagt. Politikens kronik 2016; Jan 14.

25 Mills JL. Data torturing. N Engl J Med 1993;329:1196-9.

26 Ringgaard A. Ny forskning slår fast: Helbredstjek virker ikke. Videnskab.dk 2017; March 28.

27 NHS Health Check. 2023; Aug 14.

28 Are You Up to Date on Your Preventive Care? CDC 2024; May 15.

29 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly medicines and organised crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care. London: Radcliffe Publishing; 2013, pages 125 and 176.

30 Beswick AD, Rees K, Dieppe P, et al. Complex interventions to improve physical function and maintain independent living in elderly people: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet 2008;371:725-35.

31 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly psychiatry and organised denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015.

32 Gøtzsche PC. Critical psychiatry textbook. Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2022, page 55 (freely available).

33 Gøtzsche PC. Whistleblower in healthcare (autobiography). Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2025 (freely available).

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

I wrote earlier this week that this obviously no longer resembles a traditional bull market fueled by earnings growth, broad economic expansion, or rational price discovery. Rather, this rally — with the NASDAQ tripling off Covid lows and rallying 37% in the last twelve months — feels like a frat guy bumping lines and ripping shots of Jagermeister on a 3rd story frat house roof while screaming gravity is “FUD” and a myth invented by bears and naked short sellers. What could go wrong?

Read more

While constantly predicting the inevitable decline of the dollar and the governmentally-entwined systems of commerce that our society is centered around is not often a joyful job, there are still some things that should give you hope for the state of our country and the world.

SchiffGold is so often focused on the negatives because they are truly more urgent, there are still some glimmers of hope on the horizon that could become extremely relevant at any point. Yes, the dollar will most likely devalue. Yes, the American people will continue to degrade the institutions that protect them. Yes, the federal government seems to show a little intention of ever returning to a manageable size, but a few tectonic plates are beginning to shift.

Most people have begun to seriously suggest things about the Fed that would not have been possible even three years ago. The Fed’s inherent institutional instability is now plastered on the morning news anytime Trump and a governor go head to head. People no longer trust the Federal government at a higher rate than ever, and the impulse from both left and right to return power to more local sources has an appeal that will overcome the most centralized power structures.

Finally, huge technological breakthroughs, and a growing rejection of pointless consumerism have the potential to put a new level of resources in the hands of people who can actually enjoy them.

When Trump began to question whether the Fed could deny his commands, he said something that, while legally untrue, recognized a hidden truth. The Fed has never been independent, and it is a good thing that Trump is calling attention to that, whether he means to or not.

The uneasiness that everyone feels about having one individual in control of monetary policy will make it easier for people to see through the illusion of the Fed. Whether it’s Trump or the Board of governors, letting humans through coercion control the very currency in which all transactions are made simply gives them too much power. Those on the libertarian right have always known this, and now people on the left can see it too.

Even people on the right now have precedent to worry that a president ideologically opposed to them can abuse the Fed, as Trump has been attempting to do. Only time will tell whether this will actually cause the Fed to restructure, but it has not faced more skepticism about a strength as an institution since its inception.

People on the left are fed up with military spending, and people in the right are fed up with fraud. Everyone can see the truth that consolidated power has extreme risks. Whether it is liberal states fighting against Trump‘s mandates or conservative states fighting to stay open during Covid, state power has begun to be exercised in novel ways.

Most people who live in these states are happy about this, as they should be. Allowing the states to have more control over their own governance makes it far more likely that government power will be held in check. As hard as it was for the founders to resist Britain, it would be far harder for any state to resist the overbuilt federal government in a war, so the best thing that can happen is state power growing in time of peace.

There’s almost no expansionary action that the Federal government can take without an associated large reduction in the satisfaction of the citizens. While states fighting for more power might seem to be empty posturing, growing national tensions seem to be evidence that this will be the only way that the nation can stay together. A decentralization of functions from the Federal government to the state and local governments will allow a far wider range of ideologies to function within the same governing system effectively.

Even if an increase in the power of state or local government ends poorly in some places, it presents a limited risk that people can move away from, rather than the practically unbounded risk of the federal government’s constant expansion.

While many people are still engaging in constant consumption like they did in 2015, the COVID-19 crisis and further societal stratification let people wake up to the downsides of the default culture they grew up with. At the same time, numerous technologies that have potential to boost productivity emerged in recent years, from artificial intelligence to a wider range of alternative energy sources.

For some people who are still mindlessly consuming as they once were, these technologies will result in no increased welfare as they will simply raise their consumption expectations to their higher level of possibilities. However, for those who can reduce their expectations or at least slow their ascent, this technological increase allows for a lifestyle margin that has been previously unseen.

While these three examples are only parts of a much larger story, they are things that are undeniably good and should balance out your nihilism.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Read more

He has a knack for finding opportunities where others aren’t looking, blending a sharp macro perspective with a pragmatic investor’s mindset.

In his latest, he makes his case for why he doesn’t invest in tech. I know my subscribers will benefit from his perspective and wanted to share it with you all this morning.

Why I Avoid Tech…

Every time tech has one of its periodic moonshots, the same email shows up in my inbox from one of my investors. Some version of: “Kuppy, why don’t we own any of this stuff?” I’ve been mulling this over for almost three decades now, and somehow have never gotten around to writing it down. Tech just went on another legendary run, so I feel like now is the time to detail my thinking on why I’ve avoided tech over the years.

To start with, tech is a monolithic term that is used to describe all sorts of businesses that want higher multiples—yet may not have much to do with technology. WeWork was seen as a tech disruptor, while in reality, it was a prosaic leasing company that happened to utilize technology to track its tenants. I assume most multi-tenant firms also use some sort of tech to track tenants. This is neither special nor unique—though WeWork did have free kombucha. For the sake of this piece, I’m going to allow any business that wants to self-identify as ‘tech’ to exist as a ‘tech’ company.

Now that we have a definitional qualifier out of the way, why don’t I invest in tech? Put simply, they tend to be absolutely terrible businesses. While everyone looks at the success of Microsoft (MSFT – USA) or Apple (AAPL -USA), they forget about all the businesses that guessed wrong on an evolutionary fork, and became roadkill. They forget about all the tech businesses that toil away in obscurity, barely keeping their heads above water, while endlessly diluting investors. They forget about all the supposed winners, that have barely even won anything.

Let’s briefly look at Uber (UBER – USA) a business that’s clearly at scale and dominant in an oligopolistic market. In 2025, they had $5.6 billion of operating income on an invested capital base of $29.5 billion ($40.8 billion of net tangible assets – $11.3 billion of tangible current liabilities), leading to a pre-tax return of 19% on capital deployed. That’s a decent rate of return on capital, though clearly nothing special for such a dominant business.

Read more

Read more

This could be a little repetitive for regular readers, but I wanted to put together a quick roundup of names that weren’t included in my 26 Stocks To Watch For 2026 list that have recently moved onto my radar and that I’ve discussed this year.

As I wrote this weekend, as of market close on Thursday, the blog’s 26 Stocks To Watch For 2026 are still beating the S&P 500 by more than 10% on an average, equal weighted basis. These names are up more than 17% for the year on the same basis. This comes after the blog’s 25 Stocks To Watch For 2025 absolutely smashed the S&P 500, beating the index by more than 50% last year.

My 26 for 26 list has quietly been doing exactly what I hoped it would do, but markets evolve quickly and new opportunities constantly emerge as sentiment shifts, narratives break down, and valuations reset.

That’s what this list is. These are not necessarily my highest conviction ideas but ideas nonetheless I’ve discussed, for you to examine and investigate on your own. Some are deep value plays where expectations have collapsed. Others are more speculative momentum driven situations where psychology may matter just as much as fundamentals. But all of them have recently caught my attention for one reason or another.

Read more

The chart below was posted by economist Julia R. Cartwright. It shows that the top five percent of income earners paid about 60 percent of the total taxes collected by the federal government in 2023 while the bottom 50 percent made 3.3 percent of total tax payments in that year.

Excluding income earned in the form of unrealized capital gains, which are not taxed, the average effective tax rate of the highest 5 percent was 23.1 percent compared to the 3.7 percent average effective tax rate levied on the lowest 50 percent. As you can see the tax rates are progressive, increasing as incomes increase.

Now many conservatives consider the progressive rate structure of the income tax grossly unfair and maintain that it distorts consumption, investment, and production and is therefore “nonneutral” to the market. They argue that a “flat tax,” which involves taxing everyone’s income at exactly the same rate, is fair, efficient, and neutral. But this is completely false.

On the market, people do not pay prices for goods in proportion to their incomes. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are not charged $2,000 for a loaf of bread or $20,000 for a pound of ribeye steak. They pay the same price as everyone else who purchases these items at a supermarket. (Imagine if every individual paid a price for every good in proportion to his or her incomes! There would be no incentive to earn a higher income and the entire economy would break down).

As economist Murray Rothbard pointed out, for a tax to approximate neutrality to the market, it must be a true flat tax, or what is called a “poll tax,” in which every citizen pays the same absolute sum of dollars for government services. Of course, because the lowest income earners would be unable to afford very much, the tax would have to be very low indeed, say $500 or $1,000 per year.

Thus, in one fell swoop, the imposition of a real flat-tax regime would cut the federal government down to size. But even this type of tax is inefficient, distortive, and nonneutral to the market because it does not give individuals the freedom to choose whether or not to purchase specific services the government offers.

If we uphold voluntary exchange on the market as the standard of fairness, then the only neutral tax is one that is flattened to zero percent for everyone.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Good. Now let me offer up a reminder of another sector of the market that’s also still imploding behind the surface.

Read more

In South Asia, gold isn’t just a popular ornament for jewelry, and as a display of status. It plays a central role in weddings, not merely as a decoration, but as a transactional component that crystalizes arranged unions, confirms economic compatibility, and protects brides with real wealth in a culture where marital value can take a more overtly literal, physical form than it does in the West. The holding and exchange of gold before a marriage (and its inclusion in the marriage itself) helps solidify a bride’s acceptance from the family of her husband-to-be, securing her honor and ensuring she has wealth of her own.

While official dowries were banned in India decades ago, a bride’s gold transcends the transactional, taking a spiritual and emotional power that has been a component of weddings for many centuries.

Now, with gold recovering from its correction and settling in for another run to $5,000 per ounce and beyond as an economic crisis takes shape, the unaffordability of retail gold is straining long-standing cultural norms surrounding marriage and familial ties in the region. In countries like India, the next major bull season for gold will threaten a forced readjustment of expectations for brides, grooms, and their families, as fewer people are able to afford the golden nuptials they envisioned and expected, and parents are no longer able to save up enough gold to pass on to their daughters.

Gold’s rise back above $5k is inevitable, and as it pushes even higher, it may force a cultural restructuring in countries where marital expectations come with a financial expectation and lifeline in the form of history’s hardest money. De-dollarization, stagflation, spending, and money printing will cause the bull run to resume, with unique social consequences in South Asia.

As Peter Schiff recently said on X:

Silver is back above $80. It won’t be long before gold is back above $5,000. The dollar has already lost all of its Iran war gains. Soon gold will recover all of its Iran war losses. Buy before it does.

Amounts of gold once considered the minimum standard for an Indian wedding is becoming an impossible burden. A middle-class family that budgeted a certain amount for their daughter’s gold just two years ago now faces double or triple that cost. Parents who scrimped and saved through years of high inflation discover that their rupees have melted away while the gold they hoped to give their daughters has soared out of reach. Weddings are a huge driver of spending in South Asia, and the role of gold is being reconsidered as smaller quantities and alternative metals become more common.

Some are ironically going into debt to buy more nuptial gold, locking them exactly into the kinds of financial arrangements that gold is supposed to protect you from. Many wedding events are being postponed and downsized, and couples are waiting longer before tying the knot. In rural areas, where gold has historically been the only inheritance a daughter receives, the shortfall threatens to widen gender inequities that no government program can paper over. The very institution that gold once reinforced of stable, economically compatible marriages is being stressed by the very monetary inflation governments claim to fight.

In this way, fiat money distorts every aspect of human life, from the price of bread to the price of love. While Western couples fret over venue costs and honeymoon packages denominated in depreciating dollars, South Asian families confront a more primal truth. Their marriage market is being repriced in real terms, set by the immutable laws of supply and demand for honest money.

Gold vs USD, 6-Month

The same de-dollarization wave that has central banks from Beijing to New Delhi stacking physical gold reserves is now reaching street-level weddings. India’s own central bank has dramatically increased its gold holdings precisely because it no longer trusts the dollar as the ultimate reserve asset. BRICS nations are accelerating settlements in local currencies and gold precisely to escape the inflationary tax Washington exports to the world. Every ounce that central banks buy is an ounce no longer available for brides and grooms.

Politicians in New Delhi rail against “speculative” gold demand and occasionally tighten import duties, yet they continue the same fiscal profligacy and rupee debasement that drive that demand higher. The Reserve Bank of India prints rupees to buy gold while simultaneously lecturing citizens about saving in government bonds. Meanwhile, the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, architects of the global dollar system, flood the world with new liquidity to finance trillion-dollar deficits.

Rather than the “gold bubble” referenced by Keynesian pundits, the gold bull market is the market’s verdict on decades of monetary mismanagement (and micromanagement). South Asia is simply feeling the consequences earlier and more viscerally because its culture never fully abandoned sound money.

Families may shift toward cash dowries (futile in an inflationary spiral), or governments may attempt price controls and gold confiscation…policies that have failed spectacularly throughout history.

We do not wrap our brides in sovereigns and tolas, but we have entrusted our retirements, our children’s education funds, and our national wealth to the same broken system now pricing Indian weddings out of reach. When the dollar’s “Iran war gains” evaporate and gold reclaims every lost ounce (and more), the pain will not be limited to South Asian dowries. It will manifest in collapsing 401(k) values, unaffordable housing, and a retiree class forced to sell assets into a bidless market.

The cultural dislocation happening today in Delhi and Bangalore is tomorrow’s retirement crisis in Dallas and Fort Lauderdale. Stagflation is the inevitable outcome of trillion-dollar deficits financed by printing presses. South Asia’s wedding altars are simply the canary in the gold mine.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

I’ve been writing about this part of the market for years, but new data has emerged that wants me to put it front and center again.

Read more

There’s a certain amount of kayfabe (hereinafter referred to as “lying to the public”) that makes up the top layer of public discourse about markets. It’s slick talk used to give the poors and commonfolk the impression things are operating totally normally even when they aren’t and when the aberrations have not shown up in the form of an easily identifiable shit show (i.e. massive crash) that everyone in the world is forced to acknowledge yet.

As I have started to pierce the veil about, this is obviously no longer a normal bull market driven by earnings growth, healthy economic expansion, or rational price discovery. We now have proof it is a market being mechanically forced higher by options flows, dealer hedging activity, and an AI-driven speculative frenzy that is beginning to resemble the most extreme periods of financial excess in modern history.

ZeroHedge highlighted the latest example after yesterday’s session, writing:

“Another massive gamma squeeze day as ‘spot up, vol up’: VIX soars on call buying as everyone rushes into the AI mania. Not even during the ‘Summer of 2020 SoftBank squeeze’ did we see such moves.”

“Thanks for the complex looking chart used by people smarter than me, Chris,” you’ll say to me. “I definitely, totally know what it means, but let me make sure that you do, too.”

Sure. What is means is this. Normally when stocks go up, the VIX (fear/volatility gauge) falls. This chart shows the unusual opposite—stocks are rising and VIX is staying high/rising because traders are aggressively buying call options on AI stocks, forcing market makers to buy more shares and helping drive a gamma squeeze higher.

In a normal market environment, rising stock prices tend to coincide with falling volatility. The rising VIX here likely suggests traders are also paying up for protection (or pricing in bigger future swings), which means the rally is being driven by speculative momentum but the market still sees elevated risk beneath the surface.

The VIX calculation — calculated from S&P 500 index option prices, specifically a wide range of out-of-the-money calls and puts that expire in roughly 23–37 days — uses both puts and calls, but historically VIX often rises when investors aggressively buy puts for downside protection.

As investors grow more confident (different from as stock prices move higher), demand for downside protection typically falls and the VIX moves lower. That relationship has historically been one of the market’s most reliable signals.

But that relationship is breaking down.

Stocks are surging higher while volatility is rising alongside them, a sign that speculative call buying has become so aggressive that market makers are being forced to hedge at increasingly higher prices. When traders aggressively buy calls, dealers often take the opposite side of those trades and are then forced to buy the underlying stocks or index futures to remain hedged. That hedging activity pushes prices even higher, which triggers even more call buying, creating a reflexive feedback loop that can become self-reinforcing.

Earlier this week, ZeroHedge pointed to another remarkable statistic:

That number is staggering. It reflects a market increasingly dominated by derivatives activity rather than traditional investment behavior. This is no longer just retail traders gambling on weekly call options. Institutional investors, systematic funds, momentum traders, passive flows, and speculative retail capital all appear to be crowding into the same trade: mega-cap tech and AI.

That concentration has become increasingly dangerous because valuations are now reaching levels that are historically difficult to justify.

The Buffett Indicator, which compares total U.S. stock market capitalization to GDP, now sits at 229.9% as of May 5, 2026. That means the total value of the U.S. stock market is now more than double the size of the entire U.S. economy. Historically, readings above 100% have often suggested overvaluation. Readings above 150% have signaled extreme excess. At nearly 230%, this market is operating in territory that would have seemed unimaginable in previous cycles.

Investors may argue that today’s economy is more asset-light, more globalized, and more technology-driven than in prior decades. There is some truth to that. But even those structural changes do not fully explain why equity valuations continue pushing to such extraordinary levels.

The Shiller CAPE ratio tells a similar story. The current reading stands at 42.05, compared with a long-term average of 17.36 and a median of 16.07. The highest reading in history occurred during the peak of the dot-com bubble in December 1999, when the ratio reached 44.19. We are now approaching those same levels once again.

That comparison should make investors uncomfortable. The internet fundamentally changed the world. AI may do the same. But transformative technologies do not protect investors from overpaying. In fact, some of history’s greatest technological breakthroughs have coincided with some of history’s worst speculative bubbles because investors become convinced that traditional valuation frameworks no longer matter. Here’s Michael Burry offering up a stark analogue between the AI buildout and the 2000s tech bubble build out:

Every cycle eventually develops a narrative explaining why “this time is different.” In the late 1990s, it was the internet. In 2021, it was zero interest rates and infinite liquidity. Today, it is AI. Hell, even I have speculated as to whether or not the market is now permanently distorted:

As I noted in my piece “The Permanent Distortion Theory”, perhaps the biggest question is whether central banks have permanently changed market behavior.

After years of quantitative easing, repeated interventions, and a widespread belief that policymakers will always step in during periods of instability, investors may have been conditioned to treat every correction as temporary and every bubble as sustainable.

If liquidity backstops continue to distort risk pricing, it raises an uncomfortable question: are bubbles no longer rare events? Have they become the default state of modern financial markets? That may ultimately be the most important debate of this cycle.

But investors should not confuse structural changes with the elimination of risk. Even in an era of endless liquidity support, valuation still matters eventually. Excess still unwinds eventually. Speculative manias still break eventually. The further we push this market-wide gamma squeeze higher, the further back it has to snap and crash…and the quicker it will happen. This means even if the Fed says same day they’re bailing out the market, it still won’t be quick enough. A chain reaction of margin calls, put gamma, deleveraging and other market events that make retail puke up pieces of their own colons will have already taken place.

So yes, this is a bubble. The only real question is how much longer it can continue inflating before reality reasserts itself.

Pardon this broken record but for investors, that should be a signal to exercise caution. Chasing parabolic moves fueled by leverage and options momentum may feel safe while prices are rising, but history repeatedly shows that the final stages of a bubble are often the most dangerous. Protect capital, stay disciplined, and remember that preserving wealth matters far more than squeezing out the last few percentage points of upside before the cycle turns.

To quote the sign above the cash register at my favorite Korean deli in Philadelphia: “You never need patience more than when you are about to lose it.”

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

This is a transcript clip from the below interview — well worth watching in my opinion.

RYAN MCMAKEN: Following the financial crisis of 2008, there never was any sort of real reckoning for mainstream economists, who had totally failed to see the crisis coming or understand its origins. The Austrian School economists, though, immediately understood the problem. What is different about the Austrian School, and how does it give us a little bit of an edge in understanding things better?

JOSEPH SALERNO: Let me just go back for a moment to the financial crisis. In an interview on The Charlie Rose Show in December of 2005—that was right before the financial crisis began to hit and right before people were seeing a financial bubble, and Austrians were already calling what we had a housing bubble—Milton Friedman, who was a leading empirical economist and a leader of the school that believes that you can create economic theory by testing it against the data, claimed that we were in the most productive and the best period of the American economy in his lifetime. He praised in glowing terms Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed at the time.

And here we were on the precipice of the explosion of a housing bubble that was going to turn into a financial crisis two years later. Friedman had no clue that that was the case. But people like Peter Schiff, our own Mark Thornton, and a number of others already in 2003 and 2004 were pointing to the fact that we had a growing housing bubble.

Now, they were able to do that because they understood Austrian economics, which begins with human action and deduces a lot of theorems. Way down this chain of deduction is business cycle theory. Business cycle theory comes out of those theorems that are developed from the human action axiom. So, it’s grounded in reality and it explains reality. If the logic is correct (and it’s not always correct, and people have to go back and check the theorems and so on), then we have real things to say about what’s going on in the real economy.

So the condition for a boom-bust cycle according to Austrian business cycle theory is that there has to be an increase of the money supply that drives down the interest rate below the rate of profit that businesses are earning.

So you’ll have excess borrowing of this newly created money, and that will bring about a disproportion in the production processes: Some will grow more than others, inconsistently with human wants and desires.

MCMAKEN: There seems to be a lot of confusion about what Austrian business cycle theory actually is, though. Paul Krugman for example, throws out all sorts of bizarre theories like the “hangover theory” of recessions, and he’ll accuse Austrians of basing business cycle theory on some sort of moral theory that if you “party” too much, you have to have a recession to correct things afterward. Others claim that the Austrian theory is something simplistic like “What goes up must come down.”

SALERNO: The Austrians don’t say that at all. The Austrian theory states that if you create new money, you’re going to distort the interest rate and mislead entrepreneurs into producing things that are not as urgently demanded by consumers. That is, you’re going to be fooled into thinking that people want to save more for the future, and therefore want to invest more in capital goods today, and that they’re willing to postpone some of their consumption into the future. That’s not “What comes up must come down,” the notion that we splurge too much in investment spontaneously.

No, entrepreneurs generally do not make mistakes. A small minority of them do, and they go out of business. There’s a selective process in which entrepreneurs who are bad—who do not forecast the future accurately—are driven out of business. So why suddenly do we have what Murray Rothbard called a cluster of entrepreneurial errors? Why suddenly do almost all entrepreneurs make mistakes and have their businesses going bankrupt?

That question is not answered by the mainstream, by the Keynesians, by the monetarists, by the neoclassicals, by anybody besides the Austrians. The Austrians explain why entrepreneurs can all be misled at the same time, and that it is something external that distorts their calculations. That external thing is the manipulation of the interest rate by the Fed.

MCMAKEN: That’s an important point, because a lot of the time the explanation for speculation in the marketplace or price inflation is “greed” or “animal spirits,” which are not explained by something external to our mental activity. We’re told there were “animal spirits” that caused us all to be greedy all of a sudden, so a bubble resulted. But the Austrian School doesn’t say this, right?

SALERNO: “Animal spirits” was an infelicitous term—not a very good term—coined by Keynes and applied to businesspeople. It means that business decision makers all become very optimistic—like a horse that’s kind of calm and standing around, and then suddenly he’ll take off and run. That’s “animal spirits.”

Suddenly businesspeople become so optimistic that they’re willing to forget all their calculations and all their experience and invest wildly in projects that that are going to fail. And then, of course, others pick up these spirits and then jump on the bandwagon. That’s nonsense. It’s not an explanation at all. That’s a deus ex machina, that’s the god coming out of the machine and saying, “Okay, this is what caused all that.” The Austrians, on the other hand, have a worked-out explanation for the cause.

[This article is a selection from the 30-minute interview with Dr. Salerno.]

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Meanwhile, I was just thinking to myself what U.S. markets desperately needed was less transparency. That’s sarcasm, of course. The idea that we are going to remove transparency in a day and age where securities basically trade 24/7 is counterintuitive to the direction public markets and public company investing is going. We should be going the way of having AI produce monthly earnings KPIs instead of spacing out disclosures with enough time in between them to complete medical school.

Look, public companies already have no shortage of ways to bury bad news, massage earnings narratives, and drag out accountability when things go sideways. I’ve written about this dozens of times. So why would we give them even more time between mandatory disclosures? Yes, it costs money to put out earnings quarterly, but that is the cost that comes with the ridiculous privilege of being a public company and having a main vein of access to trillions of dollars in global liquidity.

Let’s be honest: companies already commit fraud that is often blatant, well-documented, and obvious in hindsight, and many executives still walk away untouched. Enron imploded after years of deception. Wirecard somehow convinced markets that billions in missing cash were real until the whole thing collapsed. Nikola Corporation rolled a truck downhill and called it innovation. Luckin Coffee fabricated hundreds of millions in sales out of thin air. And that’s just the headline-grabbing stuff people remember. The best headlines haven’t even been written yet.

If you ask me, it feels like so many of the executives who are party to misconduct are just never held accountable and people can already say and do whatever they want. Here’s Jim Chanos pointing out CEO commentary from earnings yesterday that, on its face, appears to just be outright false.

This happens every quarter, every call, every day on public markets already. And we can’t wrangle control of it with the amount of transparency we already have. Why would we cut reporting frequency in half and make detection even harder?

This proposal feels like a setup for ordinary investors to get crushed. Retail investors, pension funds, retirement accounts, and public-worker funds depend on timely disclosures because they don’t have private backchannels with CEOs, hedge funds, or Wall Street insiders. When information gets delayed, insiders still find ways to protect themselves…everyone else gets left holding the bag when the truth finally drops six months later.

Being a public company is supposed to come with annoying obligations because you are taking money from the public. If executives think filing regular disclosures is too much work, they are welcome to stay private.

Before we start making it easier for companies to hide problems longer, maybe we should first figure out how to hold companies accountable for the fraud that is already happening in broad daylight. Until then, this looks less like reform and more like an engraved invitation for more opacity, more misconduct, and bigger losses for everyday investors saving for retirement.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.