Hello my friends, today is June 14th and this is markets weekly. So this past week was an action-packed week in markets, basically how it's been every week in the Trump era and looks like it's going to continue to be like this for the foreseeable future. So today let's talk about three things. First off, we got a whole bunch of data on inflation and employment the past week and it's looking increasingly to me that the Fed is late to the rate-cutting party.
Secondly, of course we have to talk about the topic du jour, war in the Middle East. So let's talk a little bit about how the conflict between Israel and Iran could impact markets. And lastly let's talk a little bit about the dollar, which is really not looking too good. And also we should have a small update on the trade situation. So this week actually began you know with a positive note as President Trump declared a deal with China on trade coming out of discussions from London. But really reading the articles I'm not really sure what happened.
It really seemed like China was slow walking rare earth exports to the US causing pain to US companies and Washington asked for a meeting and now those rare earth exports are resuming. So what this whole thing tells me is that in the US-China trade war China has a clear upper hand. Whereas the US is the world's largest consumer and normally the client has enormous amounts of leverage and it will continue to have with negotiations say with Mexico or with the European Union and Japan and so forth.
But with China, China has a lock on global rare earth production and much higher pain tolerance as well. So it seems like whenever a person she wants he can just turn the screws on by limiting rare earth exports. So it looks like the US-China trade war continues to go very poorly. All right now let's turn to the data of the past week. So from the Fed's perspective they've been you know kind of really worried about inflation as part of their mandate.
So for good reason of course we just had a big inflationary surge for the past few years but now what they're concerned about is that there are all these big policy changes and they're kind of frozen in place. They're saying that we have changes in immigration policy, regulatory policy, fiscal policy, trade policy and so forth and they're not quite sure how to react and also they've been looking at surveys that suggest that consumer inflation expectations have been surging out of control and that's making them concerned as well.
So what they've been doing is standing pat and continuing to tell everyone that they're just going to stand pat and wait until the data decisively turns the market. As of today, the market is just pricing in two cuts this year. So this past week we got a bunch of inflation data both hard data and data on inflation expectations. Now we got CPI which to the surprise of the market printed in much lower than expected at just 0.1% month over month.
Looking at the CPI broadly it seems like what's happening is that year over year headline CPI is just about 2.5% with core CPI printing a little bit under 3% year over year. Now headline is lower than core because there's been deflation in energy of course oil prices have gone down a lot until the past week. So you know just looking at these numbers it seems like inflation is really just a bit above the fixed target. So it doesn't seem like the inflation is as a problem anymore. Now taking a step back looking at just the trend of inflation it's really clear that inflation is decisively trending downwards.
Now even in places like say shelter rent that has been sticky is also gradually trending lower. Now many people have been worried about how tariffs can impact inflation and we've discussed how businesses look like they're going to pass generally going to pass some of it on to consumers. Well that really is kind of showing up but really it is not that important because when you're looking at the inflation indexes the most of it is services inflation because the US is a services driven economy.
The goods part of it is a smaller part. Now it seems like there is some upward inflation in goods obviously that's the stuff we import from China but goods inflation is being overwhelmed by disinflation in services. So as the labor market weakens you know wages don't grow as quickly and so that puts down pressure on service inflation and so services disinflation is overwhelming goods inflation and that's leading to an overall I think disinflationary trend according to the inflation indexes.
But again that's just CPI the Fed doesn't look at CPI it looks at PCE. Now after CPI we also got the PPI print that's basically a measure of prices paid by producers say companies and PPI also came in lower than expected so when you have CPI and you have PPI you can have a pretty good estimate as to what PCE will be. Now based on the Fed's estimate Cleveland Fed's estimate PCE is going to print at a pretty tame level. Again it looks like it's going to be about 2.5% in year over year just a little bit above the Fed's target.
Now as tariffs have kind of been walked back it seems like it's also had a big impact on consumer inflation expectations. Now we've all seen that University of Michigan survey where say Democrats have very very high inflation expectations you know approaching 10% and Republicans have pretty low inflation expectations approaching zero but overall though it seems like according to these Michigan inflation surveys the median inflation expectation one year forward has been coming down and when you look at inflation expectation surveys from the New York Fed which is I think not as politically biased it seems it's also been coming down still above 3% but still trending lower.
Now looking at market-based measures of inflation expectations so one year inflation swaps it seems like inflation anticipated by the market for one year forward has also been coming down. It's spiked a whole lot after liberation day but as the tariffs have been walked back inflation expectations have been coming down. So all in all it seems like both realized inflation is trending lower and printing a lower than expected and also inflation expectations have been coming down. So whereas the Fed has been very worried about these things it seems like that should be moderating.
Now Fed is a two-man-day bank you got inflation and you also have employment. Now what's the employment picture it looked like? So we had a pretty good jobs print for last month again comfortably over 100,000 jobs created but there are also some signs that there are cracks in the labor market. Every week we get the unemployment claims and it looks like continuing unemployment claims is surging to multi-year highs. So still it's not super high but it is a very steady trend that suggests that the labor market is weakening.
So continuing unemployment claims is basically the stock of people who are unemployed and continue to file unemployment claims. So that tells me that people who have lost their jobs are having trouble finding new jobs and so over time the pull of the unemployment unemployment people is rising. So again it suggests weakness in the labor market. So all in all with just two rate cuts priced into the market and the Fed of course is expected to not do anything at their meeting the next week. It seems like they really are just going to commit to being a bit late.
So I think eventually though when the data does more decisively turn we could have more rate cuts than expected and probably on a more expedited time frame. So I guess we'll find out more this coming week as we also have an SAP dot plot and hopefully in that dot plot the Fed will acknowledge that things are deteriorating. Now one more thing on this note is that as we think about the Fed I think it's important to realize that you know next year we're going to have a new Fed chair and President Trump is already talking about who he might appoint.
Now there's whispers of course in the market that no President Trump is going to get an easy money guy and so rates are going to go much lower next year. I have no idea. Remember this also has to pass the Senate. So some possible candidates for Fed chair of course are Kevin Walsh, Governor Waller and this past week Secretary Besson was also floated out as well. You know President Trump always likes drama. He likes to have his apprentice style tournament system so I have no idea who's actually going to be Fed chair but you know as we've talked about before Kevin Walsh would be a mega hawk consistently hawkish throughout his career and oftentimes quite wrong on his policy views.
Don't understand why President Trump keeps walking him out. Waller of course has been much better on policy. The past cycle is bio-accounts is you know a good guy I've met him before but seems to be lacking a bit on the Trump loyalty metric right. He's not strongly part of mega although recent communication is suggesting that he is trying to signal that he is sympathetic to mega but let's see how that happens and of course Besson't you know I'm not really sure why he would want to be Fed chair.
It seems Treasury Secretary isn't much more important job these days as the federal government becomes more and more powerful. Definitely has expertise in markets being part of the Trump cabinet probably has loyalty towards Trump as well so not sure why he wanted but it seemed like if he did want it would be a good candidate but anyway these are all the people we're thinking about. Now could be someone that we don't even have in mind at the moment so also something to keep in mind if it's someone uber dovish you know that hopefully now the market usually is not super forward looking but hopefully that will have some impact on the markets.
All right the second thing we have to talk about is the war in the Middle East now kind of picking back on the thought that the market is not really forward looking that really has been my experience now a lot of people say that market is a discounting mechanism is already you know looking at what happened but that in my experience is just not true so you can see this in many ways right I think about COVID that was kind of the big event of our time but really it wasn't it wasn't a black swan at all you had this huge huge pandemic happening in China going out of control everyone saw clips of it on Twitter then you have it coming out spreading the Italy and so forth so totally totally foreseeable and yet the market really didn't react until the very very end or you can look at the liberation day tariffs right now President Trump had tariffs his first term been talking about tariffs for 40 years been telegraphing it over and over again in his campaign saying you know 10 20% on the rest of the world maybe 50% on China and that's basically where we are today and still the market you know just didn't seem to get it.
Now that brings us to this war in in the Middle East you know this is actually widely telegraphed as well so earlier in the week so the president you know just chilling and kept David with his advisors talking about the Iran situation then again this is all public on Monday heavy on call with President Nishin Yahoo again then on Wednesday you know just uh withdrawing embassy staff from Iraq then of course in a press conference saying that you know something might happen in the Middle East and then boom the war happens on Thursday evening so the stuff was kind of all in your face so again the market is not forward looking in honestly in my life all the great trades I've made have been in these situations where it's just kind of so obvious that what's coming.
Now in any case this uh from and I've been listening to all sorts of uh experts on this now to extend their our experts in geopolitics probably no more than I do but anyway I've listened to many of them from all sorts of uh perspectives and it seems like the very clear consensus is what that this was a very successful and well executed attack on Iran and Iran is you know really in a bad situation and there aren't no good options so I'll sensibly this is about say Israel going forward and trying to take out all the nuclear facilities in Iran so that they cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Now the White House initially claimed that they had you know no involvement in this but of course subsequently we all know now that of course of course they were involved of course they knew about it and even President Trump is posting on truth social seemingly to express support or even take some credit for it and now that it's gone well now the immediate reaction to this of course is a huge spike in oil prices now interestingly if you think back the past few months we've had opaque gradually increased the supply of oil and we also have found out through reporting that this attack was originally planned for April so it looks like this is something that has been in the works for some time just as we have more geopolitical risk premium oil prices and so many big oil producers have been flooding the market now the really smart oil guys are saying that you know this this oil price thing is not is going to fade because at the end of the day there is just a lot of oil in the world opaque is pumping a lot.
And also it seems like China has enormous amount of oil reserves that they can just release or use if they want so from a supply and demand perspective there really is no point in having really high oil prices all this is geopolitical premium. Now the people who are really it's worried about this could say that you know maybe Iran can close the streets of Harmoos that would really impact global shipping maybe they can go and just destroy oil production facilities throughout the Gulf region maybe their own oil production facilities can destroy it and so forth but that all seems to be kind of a low probability scenario since if they were to do that you know that would make their allies very upset and that would also invite the United States to participate which of course they don't want so right now it seems like this is going to go on for some time.
Prime Minister Nathanyahu was suggested this could go on for weeks that they're just going to keep doing this until they accomplish the destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities so it seems like they have decapitated the air defenses over Iran so they can just keep flying bombing missions until they get they want now Iranian facilities are buried deep within the ground and you know normally people would not expect this to be successful without USAID because you need a lot of refueling Iran and Israel actually quite far apart and also much bigger bunker bombs or bombs that the US has and you usually need big planes like B2 bombs to carry but it seems like Israel is able to accomplish this just by you know flying sorties over and over again so that seems to be what's happening and of course Iran is flying missiles and counter attacking looks like this is not something that's going to end soon and now there are no good options for Iran seems like also that what's happening is that there are mentions of regime change one of that could be a potential goal I feel like that story has been told over and over again and has never ended well though so this is something that's going to weigh on markets probably for the foreseeable future.
Now one thing to keep in mind is that we have options quarterly options expere this Friday and also of course the huge gpm trade on the end of the month so that's a lot of gamma that will keep the market supported so but in any case something to definitely keep in mind and usually historically speaking that geopolitical events are something that people would fade but of course you have to know when to fade it because you fade it too early you know it could get a much much worse before it gets better all right now the last thing that I want to talk about is the US dollar now what's been really striking to me is that the US dollar has not been getting a big safe haven bid from geopolitics and you can say similarly to the treasury market as well know a lot of things drive the dollar you have rate different interests as well and the past week we did have a softer than expected inflation print and that's leading the market to maybe price a little bit more rate cuts and that could be weighing on the dollar as well but if you look at this DXY chart it looks like the dollar really is deteriorating and this is something that I've been writing about for for for a few months actually and I think this is going to be the core macro trend I think for the next couple years and understanding this and how this feeds into the financial system is going to be key to understanding asset prices and of course I've written extensively about that as well.
Now one thing I thought was really interesting is what is this chart from Bloomberg is showing CDS now sovereign CDS is and how the US compares to other nations now CDS is just insurance people pay to insure against the fault from sovereign debt or debt in general now sovereign CDS is usually somewhat nonsensical because obviously the United States is going to pay its bills honestly any fiat country really is not going to default so this is going to be a very small market very niche market it's not going to be super meaningful but I think it's interesting though it's at least compare what CDS pricing is for the US compared to other countries and what this chart from Bloomberg is showing is that since liberation day you know the US CDS has risen and it's now trading comparable to countries say like Greece and Italy so countries that are you know not developing countries but also not what you would expect from a reserve currency top tier first world country and I think that it reflects the broader theme that we see in a weakening dollar foreigner rebalancing out of churches and just the overall governance of the United States.
So things are changing the future will not look like the past and I think this emification of the US is going to be a trend that's that's going to continue for the foreseeable future so I would expect the dollar continue to weaken and that is going to cause problems for all sorts of US assets from.
surgeries to equities and of course it's also getting a big boost from say neutral assets like gold which is continues to surge and from latest data suggests it's actually the second largest reserve asset held by central banks right now even more than the euro so that's an interesting trend and to my subscribers if you look at my markets portfolio gold has been my talk for the entire year and it continues to do quite well.
all right so that's all I prepared for this week and I will be back in the middle of next week after the FMC to offer my thoughts all right talk to you all then