COMPLETE CHAOS: War, Inflation, AI Slowdown, Fed Rate Hikes

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Michael Zuber (0:27)

The world is in complete chaos. Let's just run through some of the examples about what is going on this fine Monday morning. Well, we've got some pretty significant escalations in the war with Iran. We now have oil Brent at 110, seemingly screaming higher, and WTI back over 100, actually all the way up to 105 So again, we have an escalating war. And again, diesel is well over $6, likely going to 7 So again, we have inflation. We have inflation expectations at the consumer level back over 4%.

We have a Fed meeting this week where much of the financial institutions are now calling for a hike, with most of them calling for a series of hikes. More on that in a minute. And then, of course, we have this AI-doomerism, or P-Doom, or whatever you want to call it. We essentially have the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and yes, even XAI, Elon Musk, saying, AI must slow down.

I don't know how you feel about this, but I'll share you my jaded opinion. Again, one guy's opinion. It is mine. I do believe it. First and foremost, if these CEOs wanted to slow down, they absolutely could.

I believe what they are doing, because they're out on the bleeding edge, is they are trying to do government capture. They are trying to say, hey, let's pull up the ladder behind us, let's have a duopoly, let's control this thing, and let us win and everybody else lose. To me, this is very akin to what happened with COVID. What do I mean? Well, I don't know if you guys remember if you have blocked it out of your memory, but we had this guy named Anthony Fauci. He came out of nowhere and scared everybody. Scared everybody. And then his ego grew, as his Fauci letters or emails said later. He became the most famous person in the world and he loved it. And what did he do? He essentially shut the country down. He did so much damage to our economy, the world, the future, all because he was the expert. We had to trust the experts. And I think it was a complete failure. So again, what do I see? I see two companies running a advanced campaign to scare everybody, so that they can then be called the experts and save us. I don't buy it for a minute. I believe the answer at the end of the day will be proven to be open source, a la Nvidia and others. And again, I have said on record that OpenAI will go down as the company that burnt the most money ever. This is just their way of trying to protect that. Again, it's a jaded opinion. You may completely disagree with me. But hey, that's what I think is going on. I think both OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs are absolutely bond villains, and they only care about themselves, they only care about money, and they don't care about you or I at all. All right, let's get on to the Fed and what the financial institutions are expecting, because this was a lot of reading for me the last 48 hours. Let's just go through what financial institutions, of the top 20 in the world, are expecting no hike. So there's 20 top institutions, there is one, two, three, four. There are four institutions. What's that, 20%?

Yeah, 20%.

HSBC, indefinite hold. Jeffries, December cut. Yes, folks, for those out in real estate, you do have some people talking cut, and you got Jeffries in December. Morgan Stanley, there's a cut coming, but not until 2027 And finally, Oxford Economics cut in 2027

All other 16 firms, or 80%, expect a hike. Here are just some names, and again, most of them expect a series of hikes. How about one hike? Of the 20 institutions, only one expect a single hike. Kind of, you know, tweak and done, if you will. And that's Goldman, Goldman Sachs.

Two hikes. This is where the majority are. I didn't capture the entire list, but here is the big names. Barclays, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, UBS, TD Securities. Again, expecting two hikes. How about three? Yes, folks, there are people that expect three hikes in 2026