Hello my friends, today is November 15th and this is markets weekly. So this past week was another exciting week in markets. We had finally the end of the government shutdown, the longest in the US history. And we also learned that some of the data that releases that we missed, we may never see. So we are probably never going to find out what happened to the JAWS market in October nor will we have an October CPI.
Looking at the equity markets, it was also about a week. We rallied earlier in the week, but towards the end of the week, we kind of had a lot of volatility, big declines on Thursday. On Friday, we once again tested the 50 day moving average on the S&P 500, bounced off of it, and remember, we are in a seasonally positive part of the year and that Christmas center rally is a real thing. Now it seems like the S&P 500 bottom markets were upset by two things. First off, of course, was that it looks like a Fed December cut is becoming less likely. And secondly, there are cracks emerging in the AI narrative, which has been a big driver in the equity market.
So today, let's talk about two things. First off, let's talk about why the market is pricing in only a 50% chance of a December rate cut and what the cracks are in the AI narrative, starting with the Fed. Now let's rewind a little bit. Now after the September FOMC meeting, the markets were pricing in a 100% chance of a December rate cut. Why would it because the Fed basically guided towards that in September? Remember, in September, we got a dot plot. And if you look at the dots on the dot plot where each dot shows where a Fed official thinks Ritz would be at the end of the year, you'll see that a majority were guiding towards a December rate cut.
But not all, it was a very big majority. You had a sizable plurality that thought that maybe we just need one or two cuts this year. But in any case, the markets saw the dot plot and was basically thinking that, yeah, we're going to get a December rate cut. Moving on to the most recent October meeting, Pawe had very, very memorable and strong words. Here's what he said. In the committee's discussions at this meeting, there were strongly differing views about how to proceed in December. A further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion far from it.
So Pawe was basically strongly telegraphed into the market that he did not have enough support, at least at that time, to guide towards a December rate cut. There seems to be a lot of vocal opposition toward a December rate cut. And so he basically pushed back against it. And so December rate cut odds gradually faded. Now this past week, we got a lot more Fed speakers, specifically a lot more Fed presence speaking who were sounding a very hawkish note.
Now what they were saying is basically that, you know, I don't think we should cut rates. We should basically wait and see from their perspective, they were worried about inflation and they felt that the labor market was okay. Now if you look at the data, again, this is going to be out of data a little bit, but it's the most recent official data we get from the government, you can see that the Fed is in kind of a difficult situation.
On the one hand, inflation has been stuck around say 200.7% for some time. It really hasn't been going anywhere. On the other hand, you see the unemployment rate gradually creep up. So they are at a time where things are moving in opposite directions and they're not really sure where inflation will be because some of them are afraid that tariffs will actually move inflation higher. And they're not really sure how the labor market would perform because, you know, we have this changes in population growth.
Whereas the weak job numbers we saw earlier in the year could be in part due to just lower population growth. And the third dimension that they're really not afraid of, not sure of is how restrictive is monetary policy is say 4% through point 8% Fed funds rate. Is that restrictive today? Some people will say that, you know, the economy has changed between now and the pre pandemic world. And so where we are now, not super restrictive and you have other people would say that, you know, the structural forces that kept the neutral rate low are still here.
And so we are still pretty restrictive. So we have all sorts of uncertainty. And on top of that, different risk tolerances, some people are just have a lot more sensitive to inflation. Being above target since it has been above target for a number of years. So all this confusion is ending up to the market just saying that, hey, 50-50% of a Fed December rate cuts. And a lot, it seems at least part of the enthusiasm in equity markets has been due to the fact that, hey, markets are kind of in a mania, Fed's actually going to be cutting into it.
And for sure, expanding their balance sheet. So let's party on. Now this is actually historically quite strange. Usually when we have these big mania, let's say during the dot com or during the 1920s, we have the central bank actually raising rates. Not so much to proud of pop the bubble, although that may play a role in it. But usually when you have strong stock markets, you also have a strong economy, it just doesn't seem to be the case at the moment. Now for my perspective, I think all this hawkish talk is really, really strange because, you know, if you were kind of dovish in September between then and now, we really haven't had a lot of official data. So you haven't had good data to change your mind.
And I think just as importantly, the government shutdown itself is a headwind, right? You had all these government workers who were doing anything, industries that were reliant upon their patronage, not doing anything, and all these flight disruptions that are impacting airlines and so forth. Now, a lot of the economic slowdowns from the government shutdown will reverse as government workers get back pay and spend that money, but some of that will be lost and never come back, right? If you were a government worker, let's say buying a sandwich at a local restaurant by your office every day, you're not going to go back and buy two sandwiches instead. That restaurant owner is just never going to get that last revenue back.
So if you had these headwinds, it would seem that you would, you know, at least continue your dovish bias. There's certainly no reason to switch to hawkishness. And yet we do have some Fed presence who seem to have switched. Now, at the end of the day, though, the most vocal hawks are Fed presence and many of them don't even vote at the moment. The more important people, the Fed governors, there's still a very strong contingency there that are leading dovish, Governor Moran. I would assume that the other Trump appointees are also leaning towards a cut in December. I suspect that John Williams, President of New York Fed, is as well. And I think that Pablo probably is leaning towards a cut as well.
So at the end of the day, I think it's still likely that we would get a December cut, especially if the data that comes in is weaker than expected. One thing I'll also highlight is that we have this brand new research out of the San Francisco Fed that Nick Timoros of the Wall Street Journal highlighted. And that's showing that tariffs are actually disinflationary and raise unemployment rates looking through 150 years of history. And the reason, of course, is really simple. Tariffs are basically a tax. When you increase taxes, that slows down the economy, which, of course, you have less demand. That means unemployment rate goes up and inflation goes down, which usually a combination would lead to more monetary policy easing.
So all these talk about tariffs pushing up inflation so that the Fed should say more hawkish, that's just not supported in data. And so far, I think more and more people on the FOMC are becoming to realize that the hawks, not really sure what they're looking at, but a lot of time in the data for them to change their mind. All right, the second thing I want to talk about is cracks in the AI narrative. So again, as we've talked about before, AI is the thing that's driving markets higher, companies are spending hundreds and hundreds of billions on it. Not really clear how they're going to make money off of it, but that doesn't stop the equity market.
Now the two cracks emerging in the equity market this year are increases in the CDS. So credit default swaps for certain AI companies suggesting some concern from bond investors about the AI narrative. And secondly, you have, I guess, more concern from the earnings perspective due to depreciation chargers. And this was raised by famous short seller Michael Blurry, who was of course famous for calling the mortgage bust in the 2008 financial crisis. There's a movie made about it as well. Christian Bell plays Michael Barry there. It's a good movie.
Now first let's talk about the cracks in the AI from the bond market. So over the past few weeks, we see that the CDS spreads for Oracle and for CoreWeave, which are two companies that are engaged in the AI build up boom, basically widened significantly. And what that what a CDS is, it's basically insurance premium for default on their bonds. And so when CDS spreads widen, that means investors are demanding, that means insurance premiums are going higher, that means investors are getting more concerned about these companies defaulting on their debt. Now Oracle we've talked about before, they had a just a tremendous mind-blowing rally from their most recent earnings report.
At that earnings report, they guided towards tremendous amounts of AI related build out. They were going to build all these data centers and sell this compute that they had contracted out with AI companies. And so massive AI build out, massive AI contracts for compute, and they basically went to the moon. And these are all promises in the future. And if you were to find, to be a bit skeptical, I think you'd be understandable. But in any way, in order to provide all that compute, obviously they have to spend a lot of money to build out data centers, part of that money was financed in the debt market. So they went and borrowed some money and started, are starting to build data centers.
Now if you are a bond market investor, financing that debt, again, you're going to be a bit more skeptical because in order for you to be repaid, that data center spending actually has to generate revenue that covers its financing costs. So bond market investors, they're really cared about being repaid. They don't have that to the moon upside that equity investors would have. And so it seems like some of the bond market investors are becoming concerned that, hey, maybe these AI data centers might not generate enough cash flow to repay me. And so I'm getting a bit concerned again, that's a crack.
And the belief that AI is just going to be this huge thing that's going to change the world. A similar company core weave, which also of course is in the business of building data centers, also saw their credit spots widen. So that is some crack in the AI narrative, but I have to remind everyone that the bulk of the AI spending is financed from the hyperscalers like meta, Google, Amazon and so forth, Facebook. And these guys are paying for most of their AI spending from their cash flows. And they generate enormous amounts of cash. They are the actually some of the world's most successful companies, generate huge amounts of cash.
They're taking that cash and building AI stuff. Some of it, they have some debt as well, but of course, they generate so much cash in such exceptional businesses, not something to worry about. So the bigger picture is that you have some cracks on the periphery, but really the big part of the AI story, the max seven, the hyperscalers, these guys, they're still fine. You can make an argument that if you spend cash on data centers, you don't have cash for stock buybacks, but it seems like they are saving money by cutting headcount so far anyway. And of course, we get to hear from Nvidia this week, which will really help us understand the AI narrative better.
The second crack that's emerging has to do with whether or not these tech companies are popularly accounting for their depreciation expense, and this was raised by Michael Blurry. So what is depreciation expense? So if you buy a physical asset, let's say that's actually you buy a rental home, it costs $500,000 to buy it, and every year you get rental income, let's say $50,000 in rental income. So when you for tax purposes, that $50,000 in rental income isn't pure income because you have costs to gain it. You have actually you bought a house and that housing cost has to be spent over the lifespan, the useful life of the house.
Now the useful life of the house, it's going to be from accounting purposes, let's say that it's 20 years, 25 years, in any case, you divide the deprecial part of that house over a depreciation lifespan, and that is your annual depreciation cost. That's costs that you incurred in order to generate that $50,000 in rental income. And so when you have higher depreciation, you have lower income because you're allocating more of that real asset cost to the income, to against the income. Now at the moment, a lot of these guys are buying a tremendous amount of GPUs and are giving them a depreciation schedule of about five years.
So if you spend $100 on your GPU, let's say that every year you're recording $25, $20 of cost against that. So let's say you made $100 in revenue from your AI data center, your own cost is your GPU, you record $20 of GPU cost depreciation against that. That's basically saying that you had to buy a GPU to get that revenue. That's a cost. The GPU has a useful lifespan about five years. And so you're just saying that, hey, let's do a $20 cost a year. The longer the lifespan of the GPU, the smaller depreciation you get each year. And so the bigger your earnings look.
Now what Michael Blurry is suggesting is that the GPU lifespans that are being proposed or being used by these big tech companies are too long. And because they're too long, the depreciation charge is too low. So they're not properly accounting for the expenses they are incurring in getting their revenue and artificially boosting their profits. Now that's a large argument. So when I look at computers, when I look at GPUs, usually technology progresses pretty quickly. Five year lifespan, probably not super reasonable. Maybe it's three years, maybe it's four years, it's hard to say. Nvidia is going to come up with a new GPUs, say every year. And so maybe your old GPU becomes absolutely faster.
Now, other people would say that even old GPUs are still used out of 100%, because they can do, you know, similar tasks. And so a five year lifespan is appropriate. Again, this is all hard to say. But if you think that depreciation is too long, then you would assume that they are overstating their profits. And then the stocks, you know, if the profits are overstated, that should be negative for their stocks. But of course, we all know better, right? Stocks can have no earnings and still go to the roof. But if you are a fundamental investor like Michael Blurry, again, you would point towards things like that. And that is totally legitimate, totally valid.
But earnings don't really seem to matter all that much at the moment. And so these concerns about the overstating of the GPUs and of the credit concerns in the AI narrative seem to have shaken confidence a little bit as well. So that seems to be what's happening. Now, next week we have a lot to look forward to. We have data that was supposed to be released. We're going to get the September NFP data. And we're going to get Nvidia earnings.
Now, before we get too bearish on the market, we do seem to be losing a little bit of momentum. You know, you could have a very clear path where say that Nvidia is totally okay, as it usually is, reaffirming the AI narrative. And you could have data come in weaker than expected going forward. That puts a December rate cut back on the table. And then, you know, you could easily see the seasonal effects kick in and see us at 7,000 by the end of the year. That is, in my personal view, probably a pretty likely path.
And of course, we could also go down. So in any case, next week will be very important. Let's watch Nvidia and let's see what the data brings. All right, talk to you guys next week.