Hello my friends, today is September 27th and this is markets weekly. Now this past week, the equity markets were kind of boring, you know, not much going on, but I think there was some real action in some quarters of the market in particular, looking at silver, absolutely surging, going parabolic. And we've talked about silver before. It is a very volatile meadow. In the past, we've seen it squeeze higher to $50 in the 1980s when the Hunts brothers were trying to corner the market. And of course, in the post GFC era, also had a huge surge, $50, it looks like we're going to try to hit that again. And before they was crypto, silver was basically the, I guess the asset that received a ton of speculative flows and retail interest. So that was pretty interesting and gold, of course, doing very well as well.
Now, what kind of caught my eye the past week and actually the past couple weeks is crypto, it doesn't seem to be trading very well. Now some people think about crypto as, you know, levered NASDAQ. Some people think of it as digital gold, but you know, it's, it's kind of doing much worse than gold and the NASDAQ. And I'm not sure what's going on there, but it doesn't look good. So today, let's talk about three things because we do have some interesting developments that's we first off. Let's talk about this new, I guess, line of thinking in the Fed where we have kind of a more coherent arguments from the Trump appointees, why the Fed should be cutting rates.
And secondly, something else that happened the past week was, see, many, the treasuries are going to throw a lifeline to help save Argentina. Seems like it's going to be some extension of the monoductrin as, as the president seems to be viewing the world in that way. And lastly, let's talk about some new developments in the ongoing AI bubble because I do believe it is a bubble. Okay, starting with the Fed. So this past week, we got the first speech from newly minted governor, Myron, and also a couple of speeches from governor Bowman, no, Myron and Bowman, along with Governor Waller, our Trump appointees, and they have been pretty vocal for lower rates in, in the past few months.
So when you think about monetary policy, there's actually a lot of ways you can think about it. Again, you got the employment mandate, you got inflation mandate, but you also have how restrictive the Fed is currently, and you also have basically how the Fed should approach the process of looking at the economy. So we have some interesting developments, both from Myron and Bowman, and what they're trying to argue right now is a shift away from data dependence in towards more forward looking views, basically a shift back to model dependency.
Now, if you recall a few years ago, the Fed usually is looking at the world with a forward looking stance, right? They have models to think, but you know, I'm doing this monetary policy acts with the lag, so how is the economy going to be affected? So that's how the Fed used to operate. But in 2021 and 2022, based on that framework, the Fed was telling everyone, relax, inflation is transitory, we don't need to hike rates. That turned out to be a total disaster. So from that point on, the Fed shifted to something, but they'd say data dependency. Basically, I have no idea what the future is going to be like, so I'm just going to look at the data as it comes in.
But of course, if you're looking at the data that comes in, you are basically looking in the past, you're driving looking at the rear view mirror. Now earlier this year, Ture Paul was giving speech, and he said that we have a lot of things happening in the economy. President Trump is doing all sorts of changes with regulatory policy, fiscal policy, immigration policy, trade policy, and so forth. And I just don't know what's going to happen. So I'm just going to stay and be data dependent in a sense, committing himself to being late.
So that was what he was thinking. Now, what now, Governor Mayeron and Governor Bowman are saying is something different. They're like, and Governor Bowman actually says this directly. If you're too dependent, we're going to be looking at the back rear view mirror. We're going to be too late. So let's look forward to seeing how the world is going to evolve. And so based on this, they're going to be looking at what's happening with the policy changes the president has, and they're saying that maybe we should be cutting rates.
Now first, from Governor Mayeron's perspective, he doesn't actually talk too much about so far, at least, about labor, inflation, and so forth. His focus really is what's called our star, the neutral rate. So his argument that he's making is that the neutral rate is actually pretty low. And because it's pretty low, rates where they currently are are super, super restrictive. So we got to get rates lower. That's why he voted for three 50 base point cuts this year. So this is kind of an angle that you don't see that many officials take because the neutral rate, basically the rate, so in central bank speak, if interest rates are above the neutral rate, you're being restrictive, slowing the economy down, if interest rates are below the neutral rate, you're being accommodative.
And people don't talk too much about the neutral rate because it's notoriously big, being that no one really knows where it is. And so Chirpau would say we wouldn't know it by its works. Again, just looking at the economy, don't want to have too much of a theoretical model. Now what Mayeron is saying, though, is that if you look at the policy changes that Trump has done, it's very clear the neutral rate is coming down. And he makes a few, I think pretty good points. One of course is immigration. Now one of the reasons why we've had high inflation over the past few years is that we've had tremendous, tremendous population growth. So under Biden, there has tremendous amounts of illegal immigration.
No one knows how many millions of people came in. But public sources say maybe two or three million people more than we did usually. Now a lot of people coming in millions at a time. Obviously we're not building houses as easily as quickly, right? So that puts upward pressure on sheltered inflation. And this is something people see all throughout the world in Canada, in the UK, in Australia. They have tremendous amounts of immigration. And Brent's just keep going higher and higher because they don't really build a lot of housing. Everyone has all these regulations that limit that.
And yet you have people who need to live somewhere. And that pushed up Brent a lot. But now that that's over and maybe we have some deportations, shelter inflation is going to come down, right? So maybe that means that we don't have to be as restrictive as it used to. And Mayeron also makes a couple other interesting points. So if you have the regulation and again, everyone can agree that President Trump is reducing regulations that essentially decreases the cost of businesses. And so if you decrease the cost of businesses, you know, maybe you have a higher productive capacity, increasing supply again, that puts down one pressure on the nutrient.
And the last thing that he suggests is that because we're collecting tariffs, maybe the deficit will be better lower in the future. And you have to lower deficit. The government is not competing as much as resources. Maybe that means we can have a lower nutrient as well. So he makes these R star arguments. Now again, these are pretty vague and I don't know if anyone takes them literally. He does have a table decomposing it. But I think it is useful to look at these big policy changes that Trump is doing. Again, these are huge changes and try to at least think about how they can affect the economy rather than just being the other dependent.
最后,他建议说,因为我们在征收关税,或许未来赤字会更低。我们需要降低赤字,这样政府对资源的竞争就没那么激烈了。也许这意味着我们可以有更低的营养需求。他提到了这些 R 星论点。不过,这些论点相对模糊,我不确定是否真的有人完全相信。他确实提供了一个表格来解构这些内容。但我认为重要的是,我们应该关注特朗普正在进行的这些重大政策变革。再次强调,这些是巨大的变革,我们应该至少考虑它们如何影响经济,而不是仅仅依赖于其他因素。
Because you are driving in the rear view mirror. Now Governor Bowman this past week also made similar arguments for low interest rates. And she sent a little bit panicky actually. She doesn't talk about the neutral rate at all. She's not a PhD economist and to be clear, neutral rate stuff is not super useful in real life. But she seems to pay a lot of attention to the labor market. And she's selling the alarm. The labor market really does seem to be cracking. And she really wants to get ahead of it. But in addition to that, again, if you follow Bowman for the past few years, you know that she is actually by nature a very hawkish person.
She's turned delves on rates. But when it comes to the other stuff, she's still quite hawkish. So she also wants to sell mortgage back securities, maybe shrink the feds balance sheet, maybe reduce some of these emergency facilities like the standing repo facility and so forth. So her views are basically things that would leave to a curve steepening. There were front end rates and higher longer the upgrades. So again, these are interesting developments mostly from my perspective, the focus on being more forward looking. And I'm not sure if anyone else is going to come along to that perspective, but it does make sense when you're having so many big policy changes.
All right. The second thing that I want to talk about is of course the Treasury's lifeline to Argentina. So President Milay and Argentina has really done revolutionary work. And Argentina has been a country that is mismanaged for some time. If you go back 100 years, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the entire world. There's a saying that you can be as wealthy as an Argentinian. However, things have not been going well. They have huge inflation and economic growth has not been doing well. So Milay really did something heroic. He massively, massively slashed government spending. Argentina actually has a fiscal surplus now. And that seems to have brought inflation down at least for Argentinian standards. It's much, much lower than before. And a lot of people were feeling a bit more positive on this turn, Argentina.
However, recently Milay's parties seem to have not done very well in a local election. And that suggests that maybe appetite for reform in Argentina is waning. Now, if the Milay revolution is just something that's going to end very quickly, then investors are thinking that maybe they'll go back to huge deficit spending and maybe things will go back to the way it was. And so they got to pull money out. And so you had a huge run on the currency. And of course, the bond youths began to spike. Obviously, doing lots of austerities is unpopular. So this is totally, I think, predictable thing that would happen.
However, thankfully, President Milay has built a pretty good relationships in Washington. I mean, if you watch TV, you'll see him over the past few months, every now and then popping up into events that are supportive of Republican Party. And so I'm hanging out with Elon a bit. So, and you know, it's actually a really, really long flight from Argentina to the US. So he's definitely been cultivating this relationship in today. It seems to pay off. Now, Argentina had already borrowed about 20 billion from the IMF. They probably have trouble repaying that and trying to support their currency and all that. It's been spending their farm reserves.
About the past week, Secretary Besson also suggested that the United States is going to step in and give Argentina maybe a swap line, some kind of currency swap and maybe even outright buy our $continient bonds. Now, this is an interesting thing because it seems like the swap agreement is not going to come from the Fed, but it's going to come from the Treasury. The Treasury itself has what you could think of as a really they've found a code like ESFR exchange, stabilization fund, something like that. It's something that actually they accumulated in the past beginning when during the gold standard, they try to manage the currency.
But more recently in the past decades, it was actually used to try to weaken the dollar. So sell dollars and buy foreign currency when the dollar was too strong. So that the ESFR has basically been ESFR has basically been kind of dormant for some time. At the moment, when I look at it, it has about 20 billion in Treasury, so 20 billion dollars that could be used to at the Treasury's discretion to try to do whatever they want with it. And it looks like they're going to use that to kind of shore up the Argentinian peso. Now technically speaking, I'm guessing that they could have forced the Fed to do something like that as well.
The Fed has independence when it comes to interest rate policy, so monetary policy. But it doesn't have independence when it comes to regulatory policy. And when you have these international diplomatic things like this, when there's a geopolitical strategic thing, I'm guessing they probably could have maybe had the Fed give them a line. Although of course, it would be a huge departure to Fed behavior. But at the moment, they're structuring this just using money that they have full control over and to give to Argentina.
I think, so broadly speaking, this seems to further present Trump's view of what happens in the Americas is strictly within the United States' geosstrategical region, and they're trying to store more support. Now, Argentina actually also has a swap line with China as well. That has been made present, Trump unhappy, and they don't want to have other countries come in and try to buy influence by being there as a last resort. China obviously has tremendous amounts of resources they could lend to Argentina. So it seems like the United States is trying to move in, short and ally, and cement their influence in this Western atmosphere.
You can also see President Trump acting similarly when it comes to Brazil, being very mean to President Lula, who was very mean to President Bolsonaro, who was President's friend, and also sending ships over to Venezuela kind of hanging out and it's kind of bombing ships that survive that seem to have drugs in them. So it seems like this is kind of a broader geostrategic push to cement power within the Americas. That's a kind of interesting development.
The last thing that I want to talk about is of course the ongoing AI bubble. We've talked about how basically all these companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out AI infrastructure, and that means building plants, spending a lot of money on ships and so forth. And at the end of the day, these AI so far, it isn't really profitable. There's a study suggesting that companies are trying to use them, trying to make a return, but just not being very successful at it.
An open AI, the star of the world has been doing interesting things, working with broad comps, developing new chips, promising Oracle that they will buy tens of billions of dollars worth of computing capacity. Then in all in the software, it has loved all this stuff. But ultimately the question was, where is open AI going to get all this money? Right now they make revenues of about 13 billion a year and that's not enough to cover the costs so they lose money.
For the 9.7s hyperscalers like Microsoft, Facebook, they've been financing their expansion through their capsules. They're still very successful companies making a lot of money, but they've been pulling that money into these GPUs that have high depreciation rates and don't seem to be at the minimum at least being very profitable. Actually, there's a store in the Wall Street Journal the past week where they suggest that the revenue gap to pay back all these air investments is in the several hundred billion category and there's really no indication that's going to be met.
Now, we figured out the past week with NVIDIA's 100 billion investment into open AI where the money's going to come from. This idea is basically round repeating is something we also saw during the .com boom. You had all these big fiber companies laying down fiber networks throughout the world, thinking that the internet would change the world. You got to lay down fiber and eventually you're going to have a return on all these investments.
What they realized was that laying down all this fiber, the demand actually wasn't there and so they weren't really making money. What they ended up doing was actually buying each other's capacity. Fiber company would buy capacity from another and in exchange they would sell their own capacity to the other company. So at the end of the day, there was no cash exchange but then they would report in their earnings that they had tremendous amounts of revenue even though they was basically fictional.
They're trying to, one company is buying stuff from another company and also selling their own products to the other company. This reminds me of that because at the end of the day, Nvidia is giving 100 billion, equity investment of 100 billion into open AI and open AI is then in turn buying ships from Nvidia. It seems kind of somewhat shady but the market did love it and things like this can go on much longer than anyone expects.
Again, when you're in a bubble, things go on, go double or triple but one day and you never know when they could also come crashing down. So continue to think that it is an interesting time and also a risky time. Alright, so that's all prepared. Thanks so much for tuning in. Talk to you guys next week.