Hello, my friends. Today is November 22nd, and this is markets weekly. So this past week was a tremendously exciting week in markets. We had a lot of volatility in the equity markets. Many are wondering whether or not the AI bubble has finally popped and now we're going to see a bear market or maybe even a crash. Or it could just simply be a garden variety in a correction in an upward trend after all. It's been sometime since the equity market had even a 5% correction, which it's finally had.
So today let's talk about two things. First off, let's talk about what happened in the equity market the past week. And let's talk a little bit about what's happening in Japan because Japanese banhios are absolutely surging, but no one seems to care. All right, starting with the equity markets. First, earlier in the week, the market was looking a bit shaky. We saw the S&P 500 lose the 50 day moving average. Now people who trade markets often look at moving averages as a potential signal of momentum, whereas when you fall below the 50 day moving average, maybe you are losing momentum.
Maybe the trend is changing. The pool, two big things the market was watching was, of course, the delayed non-farm's payroll sprint for September and the all important and media earnings. The non-farm's payroll sprint was actually kind of mixed. On the surface, the headline number was really good. 100,000 jobs created in September. However, it also came with down revisions such that we actually had job losses the prior month. That would be two months of negative job prints this year, usually things, usually something you see when you were heading into a recession.
Also, we saw the unemployment rate ticked up a bit to 4.4%. So it was a mixed bag, but more importantly, it was considered to be stale. This is something that happened months ago. And between then and now we've had private job data and also surveys that suggest kind of ongoing weakness in the labor market. And Fed speakers also dismissed the data as stale. The much more important print the past week was the end-video earnings.
So much of the bull market so far has been driven by excitement in AI names. And the general of the AI movement is, of course, Nvidia. So it was widely perceived that if we had a bad end-video print, maybe the AI hype is finally over and we would just implode. As at a side, I'd also note that sometimes I also tried to use AI to help my workload. And honestly, it hasn't really been super helpful. So a lot of the things that I do, of course, is figuring out what the Fed is going to do.
And so what's very helpful would be to just have AI tell me who is speaking next week so that I know who to focus on. So earlier in the week, I asked AI, can you give me a table of Fed speakers this coming week? And very impressively, it gave me a table of Fed speakers. All these Fed people that no one really cares about are speaking. But what I really wanted to know, of course, was whether or not it could help me with kind of knowing what the really important people are speaking.
For example, Governor Waller, who is one of the more influential policymakers on the FOMC. Now, before asking the AI, of course, I had to figure out whether or not the AI could do its job. So I looked at the Federal Reserve's website. And I saw, under its schedule for the coming week, that Governor Waller would be speaking on Monday. And when I asked the AI to give me a table of Fed speakers, it gave me a table, a lot of people, but there was no Governor Waller.
So, you know, AI makes a mistake. Maybe this is a mistake. So I gave it specifically the Federal Reserve's website and asked you to check again. And I asked whether or not Governor Waller was going to speak. It told me no. So again, this is kind of confusing to me because I see it on the Federal Reserve's website. So I asked it a third time. And this time I prompted it with the specific, in quotes, section of the Federal Reserve's website. I wanted to look under.
Can you go to this section of the website and tell me whether or not Governor Waller is speaking the next, this coming week? And again, the AI, and I'm using GROC, told me, no. And actually, it told me something even more interesting. Now, this website is using Ajax. It's probably out of date. And so maybe this is why we're having confusion here. I saw that I was like, insanely impressed. Is the AI even smarter than the Federal Reserve's website?
Wow. If that's the case, I got to use AI because I'm going to get even better information than the public sector. And then as the week progressed, Governor Waller did, in fact, speak on Monday. And so the website was correct. GROC after asking him three times, could not even tell me that there was such an influential policy speaker, policymaker speaking on Monday. And so I have to say that AI is useful, but you also, but really, I have to go check and you can make these big mistakes. It's never something that I'm going to be able to rely on. And so I personally, again, I think that these AI applications are not going to make money. But that's not really the problem at the moment. The problem, of course, is that there are parts of the ecosystem that do make money and that is Nvidia.
哇,如果真是这样的话,我一定要使用 AI,因为这样我能获取比公共部门更好的信息。随着本周的进行,果然,瓦勒州长确实在周一发表了讲话,网站的信息是正确的。而我三次问了 GROC,他们甚至不能告诉我周一有这样一位有影响力的政策演讲者在发言。因此,我得说 AI 确实有用,但我也必须自己去核实信息,因为它可能会犯大错。我无法完全依赖它。就我个人而言,我认为这些 AI 应用程序不会产生经济效益。但目前这并不是主要问题,问题在于生态系统中有些部分确实能赚钱,而那就是英伟达。
So it did Nvidia actually impress the market. So I tuned in to Nvidia earnings. It was actually the first big tech earnings I've ever listened to. That's this is not usually something I focus on. And the earnings conference was nothing but good news, right? It was everything is firing on cylinders or sold out huge, huge potential marketplace. We have all these legacy guys who are going to go moving on to GPU compute. Everything is great. We're generating tremendous amounts of earnings and growth cannot be higher. And that's all true. Nvidia continues to generate tremendous tremendous amounts of cash. They're inking new deals. For example, with Saudi Arabia, everything is nothing but blue skies.
And the market perceived that as well. You had Nvidia stock 5% after market. And that's basically a gain. It held all through market open the following day. The following day, it seemed like everything was going really well and market was surging, maybe even potentially overtaking the 50 day moving average. But then out of nowhere, everything just tumbled. It was a very, very ugly day to see such a positive opening, tumbled down into basically despair with the S&P 500 even losing the 100 day moving average. There was tremendous fear in the markets. And you can see it through the volatility structure were fixed right, but as healthy was was basically surging higher. A lot of people were buying protection in fear of maybe this AI thing. It's really all over.
On Friday, though, things did get a little bit better. So it's what seemed to happen was that, well, again, if you have volatility so high, you just can't it's hard to sustain a little bit of a wall crush. But also we had go fed President Williams of the New York Fed, one of the most influential policy makers on the FMC basically tell you that he wants a December cut, which in my view makes a December cut given the other speakers very, very likely event. And that seemed to suit the market as well. So we did eventually end up regaining the 100 day moving average. But it does just doesn't look good and sentiment has been damaged, technicals as well.
Now what caused this is actually kind of a mystery. It's not super clear why. I mean, Nvidia did beat and there wasn't really obvious bad news on that day that would cause this to happen. Now one thing that's been happening in the background of course was that Bitcoin has been basically imploding. Now it's been trading very poorly for the past few weeks. But this more recently just basically absolutely tumble in floating to about $80,000. So if I were to guess what was happening behind this, it's just that a lot of this speculation, well, I would say that it's a kind of a massive retail de leveraging. So a lot of the AI names and a lot of tech stock is driven by retail participation and buying calls just pouring in and it's been working spectacularly.
And of course, this is also the investor base that's bought a lot of crypto stuff. And with crypto imploding, I have to imagine that that's been hitting their portfolios a lot, maybe prompting, and leveraging here news flashes about crypto investors who oftentimes invest in tremendous leverage, basically getting margin calls. And I imagine that if that's happening, there may be retrenching also in the risk space here as well in tech stocks. So maybe that is kind of just a shakeout over there. Now if that's the case, then you know, this is I would assume that this is something that could be recoverable after all. You have some deleverging totally normal after such a good run. And maybe we just go back higher.
And I think that's probably what I'm going to write about. I view this probably as more likely to be a correction given than a beginning of a bear market or implosion given a lot of things that are other things that are happening in the policy and political space. In any case, we're also heading into a more seasonally positive time. It could be that Santa is not coming or maybe Santa is giving us a huge lump of coal. But again, it's it's early and we are just heading into the off into the holiday system. So let's let's see what happens.
The second thing that I want to talk about, of course, is what's happening in Japan. So quietly, quietly seemingly ignored by the market, Japanese bonnets were absolutely surging. Now, usually this would be kind of a big use because when Japanese bonnets are rising, that usually drags up bonnets globally. And you know, if you have bonnets rising, you would see usually it's a negative reaction in the risk market. But if you look at treasure yields, the 10 year yield has been steadily declining. In part, of course, due to expectations of cuts.
And also you do have kind of a risk off episode in the equity markets. And in addition to that, usually when you see Japanese bonnets rising, you would see the yen strengthening. And that could have some kind of disruption in the yen carry trade, whereas people who are borrowing in and buying rescuances elsewhere in the world would retrench sale rescuances say equities in the US, take those dollars and repay yen. So that means the yen would strengthen. But that's not happening either. So what's going on in Japan?
So first off, I think it's basically a lot of that what's happening in the US is also happening in Japan. So in the US, we have again, big fiscal deficits, tremendous fiscal stimulus, and also concerns of a loss of monetary policy independence. That's a concern in the US. It's actually a concern in Japan as well. So the newly elected Prime Minister Takachi, she is promising to have more fiscal spending. She wants to address some of the cost of living concerns that Japanese citizens have had in our offering things like subsidies or stimulus to two people who are suffering from cost of living crisis.
Right? We see this in the US as well. One answer, one popular answer to cost of living problems that politicians have everywhere in the world is to just give other citizens more money. And of course, that obviously is not a very good solution. Right? Stimic checks are not a good solution to inflation. But in any case, they're politically popular. And it looks like they're about to bark upon the largest fiscal spending that fiscal stimulus package. They've seen since the pandemic.
And in addition to that, there are also concerns that maybe the makeup Japan is going to be subject to political pressure and not able to raise rates as at least at the pace that they were expecting. There's some commentary from the government there to, you know, makeup Japan can you, you know, kind of hold off on this or be slowed down. And so in that respect, that's kind of weighing on currency. And also, it's also making inflation expectations a little bit concerned.
If you look at inflation in Japan, the CPI is 3%, which is the same as it is in the US. So inflation continues to be a problem in Japan as it is in the US. 3% of course higher than their 2% target. So the combination of this is you're basically having a government that is purposely doing some pretty, I guess, nominal growth positive policy, big spending, controlling the central bank to not hike rates. So the combination of this is obviously you have a weaker currency, higher bond yields, and a much more buoyant stock market, which is what we see in the NICA basically surging.
Again, it's having a little bit of a tumble in line with US markets, but over the past few months, it's absolutely surge. This is basically what you would expect in a country that's reflating. So one concern is that as Japanese bond yields gradually rise, is that going to create disorder globally? And is that going to end the yen carry trade? And so far, the answer to those two questions is no, because although Japanese bond yields are rising, they're still far below inflation.
Japanese bond yields are very negative in real terms, and only becoming slightly less negative. So that does not seem to be enough of a pull to draw money back. It seems like what investors in Japan are doing is that they're still rushing out, as you can see, by the massive depreciation of the yen, almost touching that one 60 point, which many think that will prompt intervention by the Ministry of Finance. One other thing to note is also historically speaking, demand for Japanese government bonds comes from life insurers, comes from pension funds.
And those guys seem to be not that interested in bonds at the moment. Part of it is because they've already purchased a lot of bonds, but part of it also is demographic. One of the interesting things globally, and we see this in the US market as well, is that traditional buyers of bonds are entities that have long dated liabilities, and are seeking long dated assets to match them. So life insurance pension funds. What's been happening is due to demographic trends, the huge, huge, big boomer population, it's their life expectancy is reducing. So the actual demand for duration by from these entities is not as large as it used to be. And the newer generation, of course, is smaller than the past. And of course, a lot of them don't even have, um, defined benefit pension funds.
And so that structural bid from pension funds and life insurance companies, well, more pension funds than life insurance companies may not be the same, due to aging populations and also smaller new generations. So so far, it does not seem that what's happening in Japan is impacting risk markets. And at the end of the day, if it ever does become disorderly over there, we know the bank of Japan is more than willing to step in and have an iron grip on the bond market. We saw them do yield control, current control before work perfectly then.
We'll work perfectly again. One other concern is that do these rising bond yields create solvency issues for current entities, like we saw in Silicon Valley bank, whereas when higher yields in the US cause Silicon Valley bank to basically be, at least on a market market basis in solvent. So when you look at the holders of Japanese government bonds, one thing that stands out is that over half of Japanese government bonds are held by the bank of Japan. So that means that a lot of the losses are going to be socialized by the government.
They don't really, I mean, bank of Japan has infinite, has a money printer and it doesn't really matter for them whether or not they're solvent. The other entities, you know, insurance companies, pensions, these guys assume that the regulators are watching them and making sure that they have enough, their books are hedged enough. And if not, of course, the government could always fix that as they did in the US. So you never really want to bet on a bond market implosion because bonds and ultimately at the end of the day, there are just numbers, numbers in a database and the government in a fiat system can always control that.
What's most likely to be controlled is the currency and so far looks like the Japanese yen is in almost free fall. Okay, so that's all I prepared for today. Next week is Thanksgiving week. So thanksgiving week, there will be no videos because in the US, that's a very, very sleepy day, very sleepy week, mostly a holiday week. So there's not probably not going to be much to talk about. But again, watch closely the equity markets. Are we just going to implode or is this a correction? All right, talk to you all in December.