Kevin Muir, who writes The MacroTourist newsletter and has a market-making background in ETFs, returns to Excess Returns for an hour on the bond selloff, the Treasury's buyback plan, why he thinks the AI trade is an earnings bubble rather than a multiple bubble, the systemic risk building inside leveraged ETFs, his re-entry into gold and platinum, and the US Census Bureau numbers he pulled on Canadian trade.
Guest: Kevin Muir, author of The MacroTourist, an economics major who did the CFA and whose background is in ETF market making
Host: Matt Zeigler
Published: 29 August 2026 on the Excess Returns feed
Watch on YouTube | Apple Podcasts | 1 hr 5 min
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Key Takeaways
The AI trade is an earnings bubble, not a multiple bubble
Capital spending shows up as revenue immediately and as expense over five to ten years
"we're taking all the benefit right off right up at the front and then saying the stocks are cheap"
Bonds are behaving well, not badly, given the amount of supply coming
Nominal GDP has gone from around 4.5% to 6.5% in a year while the long end moved about 50 basis points
The Treasury General Account, not the buyback program, is the thing to watch
The account holds close to a trillion dollars, and Mr. Muir assumes it gets spent down before the midterms
Leveraged ETFs reset every night, which makes them buy strength and sell weakness
A leveraged Lucid product fell 45% on bankruptcy rumors and 55% once the provider began flattening it
Stock prices roll over before earnings do
In early 2022 next-twelve-month EPS kept rising as the market fell, and the market stopped falling once earnings finally turned
Retail investors hold the one advantage institutions cannot buy: the right to sit out
"I firmly believe that today retail is at an advantage over institutional because they can choose to not play the game"
Gold is a People's Bank of China story and nothing else
Real rates and the dollar are the wrong models; he stepped back in when a 50-day moving average broke
Precious metals were the last mini-bubble, and the point of remembering it is AI
Silver near $100 late last year felt like it would never go down
Take oil and gas out of the trade data and the US runs a surplus with Canada
Autos across every category leave Canada with a $7.2 billion deficit, on his read of 2025 Census Bureau figures
Tariffs that go on and off are worse for US factory investment than a high, permanent tariff
He would legislate a flat 10% on Canada and never renegotiate it
Barry Bonds, PUP and Druckenmiller's answer about AI
Mr. Zeigler opened with a Canadian punk-band reference — "if this tourist doesn't kill you, I will. Which is a PUP reference" — and a complaint that the day's subject was bonds rather than Sean Connery or Barry Bonds' home run record. Mr. Muir's answer was that the drama is the fun part after years of nothing: Scott Bessent worked for George Soros, who hired Stanley Druckenmiller, and Druckenmiller had just acknowledged using AI in his own work.
Mr. Muir liked the flatness of Druckenmiller's answer more than the substance of it
As he characterized it: "Yeah, of course I use AI. Why wouldn't you? You're an idiot if you don't."
"The audacity by which he responded though, like clearly not considering anything else and just like this is who I am"
Mr. Zeigler relayed a line he had seen elsewhere — "I don't pay for sex and I don't let AI write my stuff" — and added his own view: "I think that Druck should write his own stuff and not let AI do it."
Mr. Zeigler's setup for the bond section was that the market, like Barry Bonds, "might be on steroids right now", and asked when it was last this volatile
The bond market is behaving better than it should be, not worse
Mr. Muir pushed back on the premise. The ranges are narrow by historical standards, and everything about the environment argues for higher yields than the ones on the screen.
"the long end has gone from 485 to 530 or something like that" — about 50 basis points, which he called staid rather than a monster move
The backdrop got worse over the same period, on his account
Nominal GDP was "4 1/2, or 4 something" a year ago and is "6 1/2" today
The federal deficit stayed at elevated levels, so supply keeps coming
Record corporate bond issuance is funding what he called "the largest infrastructure buildout since the railroads of 1850 or whatever it is"
Foreign deficits are converging upward on the US, which adds supply everywhere at once
Two or three years ago the US ran a 7% deficit to GDP against "two, two and a half in terms of the developed world"
He put Canada at two to two and a half, Japan at two and a half, Europe at "2 and 3/4 or something"
That is being "thrown out the window as we all scramble as the world order is being redrawn"
"I actually will go take the other side and say I'm surprised it's not a lot worse"
The reaction says more about conditioning than about bonds: everyone "has priced in a risk-free rate that is much lower"
He is sympathetic to the Druckenmiller argument that intervening in the market removes a signal capitalism runs on, and said one market read it immediately
"the gold market got the memo real quick and took off and ran like it stole something"
"although maybe this isn't the actual mechanism that pushes us into the monetization of debt, it's the first step into it"
What a liquidity buyback is, and the route from there to monetizing the debt
Asked to contextualize what the Treasury is doing, Mr. Muir walked through the mechanics before giving his own verdict. Some commentators have called the plan QE; he does not.
A liquidity buyback exists to clean up the parts of the curve nobody wants to trade
A 30-year issued two years ago is now a 28-year, and "not everyone has the ability or the desire to go buy that one"
Those off-the-run bonds trade at a higher yield than on-the-runs, so the Treasury buys them back and issues a fresh, more liquid 30-year
Druckenmiller's objection is that the tool is being pointed somewhere else
The concern is that Mr. Bessent buys back the 28-year off-the-run and issues bills instead of 30s, which at first glance looks like an Operation Twist
The debt-monetization path runs through bank reserves, in a chain Mr. Muir credited to "I think it was Cabana from Bank of America"
Bill issuance overwhelms the capital willing to sit at the front end, so primary dealers have to take the bills and pay for them with reserves
Reserves fall, front-end funding costs rise, and the Fed loses control of its target range
The Fed responds with reserve management purchases, which are "in essence a permanent expansion of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet"
He noted the Fed spent last year feeling for the minimum level of ample reserves and that "you don't know it until you see it" — an aside he tied, off color, to what he called Judge Potter's line on pornography, before pulling back because "They lose the audience"
His own conclusion is that the program is too small to matter mechanically
There are seven long-end liquidity buybacks scheduled, "which by the way, interestingly enough, are between now and the midterms"
Each was going to be two billion and is now four: "So, we're 28 billion of long-end bonds that they're going to buy"
Against the stock of long bonds outstanding that is tiny, and even measured flow against flow he called it a small amount
"So yeah, he's monkeying with the curve, but it's a small amount. Like, it's not really that big a deal. To me, it had more to do with the signaling and the willingness to do it."
Mr. Zeigler credited a commentator both hosts follow with the sharpest memes about the buyback plan, and pointed out how obvious the calendar is
The follow-up comment about the TGA was the one that worried him
The initial announcement rallied bonds, the market decided it was not a big deal, and bonds sold off again. Two or three days later Mr. Bessent added that the Treasury could use the Treasury General Account if it needed to. That is the comment Mr. Muir flagged.
"that account is almost a trillion dollars, and if starts going and doing that— that moves the needle"
"to me that was actually a more worrisome comment than the initial one"
Mr. Zeigler brought in a previous guest's view to frame it: Liz Ann Sonders said "you can't jawbone the bond market. It's too big and too deep for you to just talk", which he glossed as pouring a bottle of Evian into the ocean and announcing the tide
Mr. Muir spotted the setup — "you brought Liz Ann up on purpose, didn't you?" — and said he considers her "the greatest strategist out there, the most underrated strategist out there"
The host asked for the explainer, and Mr. Muir gave it: the TGA is the government's checking account
It used to be run close to zero, the way a household account is
Under the Obama administration the balance was built up, he thinks in preparation for a government shutdown, and it has swung wildly ever since
Building the balance withdraws liquidity and delivers nothing in return
The Treasury will "borrow 100, 200, 300 billion and not spend it"
"There's the liquidity withdrawal and then there's no actual economic benefit."
He assumes the account gets drained before the midterms and does not think that is a scandal so much as an inevitability
"one of the things that I've assumed is that Scott's going to spend down the TGA in front of the midterms. Like it's you'd be dumb not to, right?"
"It's just the way it is. It's game theory tells you to do it."
Nobody, he added, hands the next administration a full TGA any more
Issuing debt and buying back your own securities through the account "just shows you kind of what a mockery of the whole financial system this has become as people use these mechanisms for their political gains"
Why he wants the bond market allowed to say what it thinks
The Druckenmiller point he endorses is not about the size of the trade, it is about the signal
"stop monkeying with markets. Let us see where the prices are. The prices are an important signal and I am definitely in that camp."
He described himself as sympathetic to Modern Monetary Theory and still critical of it on exactly this point
MMT proponents "are willing to ignore the signals that the market is sending you in terms of what the bond yields are doing"
The Liz Truss episode is the version everyone accepts
Her budget sent the long end of the UK gilt curve "no bid", and the read was that the market had judged the budget too big
He argued the same logic ran the other way after the financial crisis and nobody wanted to hear it
Negative yields were "a signal that too many governments were either spending too little or taxing too much", with the choice between those two left to the reader's politics
"The collective wisdom of the markets are better than any one individual and especially one individual that's running it with a political agenda."
The bubble is in the earnings, not in the multiple
Mr. Zeigler turned to earnings, noting that beats are accelerating and Nvidia had just reported, and asked what the bulls are missing. Mr. Muir prefaced his answer by disclaiming the expertise: he is an economics major, and the accounting sections of the CFA — contrasting American and German treatment, the depreciation of goodwill — were the parts he hated most. He handed the framework to Jim Chanos.
Mr. Chanos, he said, has "very eloquently talked about how this is an earnings bubble"
For every 10, 20, 50 or 100 billion dollars Microsoft borrows to build a data center, the spending lands as revenue at Nvidia, Bloom Energy and the rest, and "those benefits are immediately felt"
"the expense side of it is amortized over the next 5, 7, 10 years whatever it is right so the larger this AI buildout becomes the more earnings get bumped"
That is fine only if the data centers deliver what everyone assumes
Analysts are marking up both sides at once, which is what makes it compound
They raise the multiples and assume the earnings grow, so "the earnings are growing on both sides of it as the bubble has grown out"
The cash flow machine argument no longer describes these companies
"They're not cash flow machines. They're buying back stock."
Google's share count fell for ten years and has now turned up for the first time, and the companies are "borrowing aggressively"
He suggested putting free cash flow on the same chart
He thinks everyone has gone numb to the scale of the numbers, and used the Situational Awareness fund as the example, reaching for the manager's name and getting as far as "the Leo"
"he went and lost $30 billion. What did you do when you were 25?"
"Long-Term Capital almost brought the system down by losing $4.5 billion, and he lost 30 billion in the space of two weeks and to be fair to the markets they barely blinked"
His fear is a single correlated bet on earnings that keep growing
"I am so scared that they're all become one huge monster bet and that at some point it's not going to meet expectation"
On when a bubble actually tops, he pointed to a Gartner Group report during the dot-com era showing internet growth decelerating from its earlier pace
Nobody knows when the dot-com bubble peaked, and one theory is that report: "that's all it took was a slowing of the rate of growth"
The summary claim: this is not a price bubble, it is an accounting one
"it is a bubble in terms of that actual earnings and it is in essence getting double-counted: the largest AI buildout— or sorry, the largest infrastructure buildout in history— is getting accounted for in earnings and we're taking all the benefit right off right up at the front and then saying the stocks are cheap"
Stock prices roll over first, and 2022 is the template
Mr. Zeigler said the implication he had been struggling to articulate is that prices could fall before earnings do, which changes what "cheap" means, and asked why the order runs that way.
In early 2022 the two moved in opposite directions for months
Next-twelve-month EPS "continued to grow" through January, February and March while the market fell
When earnings finally rolled over, "the stock market actually stopped going down"
"the stock market is a forward-looking instrument. They are going to anticipate it before the actual earnings roll over."
A pod shop trader gave him the professional version of the same trade
On semiconductors: "Everyone knows the semis are going to roll over and that you never want to pay too much for peak earnings because the earnings are going to collapse"
The game is squeezing one more quarter — "if I got one more quarter with this growth, then I can make a lot more"
Mr. Muir said that mandate is exactly what retail does not have
"This isn't a point where the risk-reward makes any sense from a long-term perspective."
"I firmly believe that today retail is at an advantage over institutional because they can choose to not play the game."
Mr. Zeigler agreed, saying that without an institutional mandate this is the moment to use it, because "it hasn't been this weird in a while"
Leveraged ETFs are rebuilding portfolio insurance and nobody is pricing it
Mr. Zeigler brought up Mr. Muir's market-making background and his writing on systemic risk in leveraged ETFs. This was the longest single stretch of the episode, and most of it was Mr. Muir explaining the plumbing.
The Hong Kong SK Hynix product is his headline example of the growth
Ticker 7709, a three-times leveraged product: "It went from like two billion to 30 billion. So at that point it's tossing around $90 billion of SK Hynix"
He also blamed the category for part of the Situational Awareness loss
The key misunderstanding is what a buyer actually owns
Using SOXL against the SOXX semiconductor index: "you are not buying a triple levered of the SOXX return over the next month. What you are buying is a triple levered of the daily returns for the next month."
The daily reset exists to solve a margin problem, and it creates a market-structure one
In a margin account, a 3x position that falls leaves you with less equity and a broker asking for money
Put $100,000 in, buy $300,000 of SOXL, and a 10% down day changes the ratio
So "the levered ETFs work is that they reset every night" to keep equity to position correct
In practice "as it goes up the index or the ETF is buying more every close and as it goes down they're selling more every close"
That was a quirk when the funds were small and is not one now
"the public is getting more and more levered to those instruments as it goes up"
"this is way more dangerous than we are giving credit for"
The Lucid episode showed what happens at the stop-out point
A small two-times leveraged ETF on the EV maker, only a few million dollars in it, hit bankruptcy rumors
At a 55% decline on a 2x product the provider is technically at negative equity, so it has the option to close the fund entirely
"We got to this situation where Lucid went down 45%" and the provider flattened it: "So, it went down 55% because they were busy selling off the position."
He named XIV as the earlier version of the same event, which nobody had thought about at the time
Size makes these funds targets
"there's just a lot of sharks out there": with SOXL down 25% one morning, a large fund can reason "I can push that another 10 and then I can stop them out and I can buy it"
All the mechanical flow happens at the close, so a midday break is where the liquidity demand becomes an event that pushes something else down
His analogy is 1987, and his hedge is that he does not want to be the doom guy
Portfolio insurance failed because "they assumed as they could go down that there was going to be someone to sell to"
"in crisises or crashes it's always something we haven't considered or we don't think can happen"
"I don't want to be like the doom guy, doom at 11. I don't want to be that guy. But having said that I think you should be aware that the market and the underlying structure is becoming increasingly fragile."
"These are products that are running amok and they're much too big for the underlying system."
Leverage stacked on the most concentrated index since 1929
Mr. Zeigler offered what he called "the worst throughline in Excess Returns history" — "it reminds me of the stripper in The Big Short with the houses" — and made the point that leverage always spills onto people who did not choose it
The public conversation treats leveraged ETFs as a story about "the poor yahoo 60-year-old" losing his own money, not as a structural question
Mr. Muir's compounding worry is that the leverage sits on an index that is already a single bet
The market is "getting increasingly concentrated on terms of one theme which is AI" and is "dangerously concentrated" by his read, on a scale not seen since 1929
"then we're going and applying levered ETFs on those things that we already know are fully priced and prone to disappointment"
Saying so out loud, he said, leaves you looking like the Simpsons character yelling at clouds
Mr. Zeigler disagreed with the self-description: "it's not an old man yelling at clouds. It's literally like degenerate gambling on bum fights or something."
Gold: he stepped aside for the mania and came back on a broken moving average
His framework comes from Dennis Gartman, whom he called one of his heroes
In bull markets "you should be either long, really long, or flat"
He has called gold a bull market since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, on one driver only
"I think that the People's Bank of China is the only player that matters and that they're going to continue to diversify their reserves into gold"
He reduced the position into the 2025 rally and went flat during the late-2025 and early-2026 mania
"my job is to tell you what's on page 18 on the way to page one. It's been stuck on page one for the past two months, and I have no clue what's going on now"
He tried to buy the decline once and was "right for about 10 minutes"
His timing discipline is borrowed from his view of the buyer
The PBoC wants as much gold as cheaply as possible "Not today, not this week, not next week, but like for the next 10 years"
So when the market gets frothy he walks away rather than letting momentum traders sell to him higher
The models everyone else uses are, on his account, the wrong models
Since 2022 he has told people to "put away their multi-regression linear models" — real rates and the dollar are not what has been driving gold and will not be
The actual re-entry trigger was a chart, which he was slightly sheepish about
"I'm kind of embarrassed, but I was just like letting the crayons tell me when to buy it"
A 50-day moving average had been acting as overhead resistance and finally broke
Oil was rising and has recently been negatively correlated with gold, and he chose not to overthink it: "This is a bull market and I'm just going to do my Dennis Gartman"
"I still like gold and I think it's going to continue to surprise to the upside."
What famous traders actually do, according to a friend who was in the room
Mr. Muir's aside on technical analysis was that the professional mystique is largely wrong
After years of interviewing traders: "You'd be shocked at how many of them are just crayon chewers and just chasing charts"
A friend relayed a presentation by a very famous manager whose name Mr. Muir would not give
The manager said "up to 50% of my trading is technical", and the audience did not get the chance to follow up
"it wouldn't surprise me at all if like if you went and did the Market Wizards guys that at least that amount is just pure technicals"
His own method keeps the two separate
"I'm not a true technical guy. I have to have the fundamental story. So I know my fundamental story. I use technicals as the trigger."
Platinum, and a theory of rolling bubbles he wrote down in 2014
He missed the platinum rally last year and was annoyed about it
The setup was that the metal traded below the cost of production, and "anytime a commodity is below a cost of production it just piques my interest"
A friend had pitched him the trade; personal circumstances got in the way and he never put it on
The mini-bubble framework is his own, written in 2014, and the example he used at the time is the joke
He wrote that a small bubble was possible and offered a flyer that "I think it might double, might even triple"
The stock was Tesla — "For those who don't know me, I can't stand Elon"
His claim is that the cycle has accelerated since
"these mini bubbles are occurring with increasing speed" and with increasing ferociousness
Gold and silver were one of them: silver "at like a 100 bucks" in late 2025 and early 2026 "felt like it was never going to go down"
The reason to remember that feeling, he said, is AI today
He bought platinum this time on two arguments
A precious metals bull market he does not want to miss, and a cheap asset against cost of production
The EV transition was overstated, so "it kind of felt like nobody was ever going to build another catalytic converter"
"the hybrid cars are winning" — and, he told Mr. Zeigler, Tesla can take the blame for that
What applause means when you write a newsletter
Mr. Zeigler recalled a line from a strategist he could not place — possibly Rich Bernstein, possibly David Rosenberg — about gold conferences: "One of the worst sentiment indicators for stuff like the price of gold is when you're at the gold conference and all these people are coming up to you because they want to ask you about how much silver they should own."
He drew the parallel to investors bored of the biggest names and hunting an obscure cloud company instead — "I want more juice than the already amazing juice that I have"
Mr. Muir's version came from Bill Fleckenstein's hate meter
"When I got lots of hate mail, I knew the top was in."
The professional irony he described is that a well-received idea is usually a bad one
If everyone says you are smart to own it, it is in the price
The idea worth having is the one that draws "I think you're wrong, but I've never thought about that. That actually might happen."
He attributed the compressed version to Jim Grant: "good investing is having everyone agree with you, dot dot dot, later"
The inside joke among newsletter writers is a sizing rule
"if people tell you you're an idiot, you double it because that means that it's not in the market"
A detour through PUP, Canadian Bacon and Idiocracy
Before the trade section, the two spent a few minutes on Canadian cultural exports. Mr. Zeigler said he was trying to manifest another PUP US tour, having missed the last one, and asked for subtitles in both languages. Mr. Muir had been planning to raise Canadian Bacon himself and said Mr. Zeigler was the only person he knew who would get the reference, adding that "Idiocracy was the documentary that we should all have watched for last year. So maybe this year the documentary is Canadian Bacon." Mr. Zeigler offered to live stream a John Candy celebration.
Two concessions before the tariff argument
Mr. Muir made a point of conceding ground before making his case, and repeated three separate times that his objection is not sour grapes.
Canada has been negligent on military spending and deserved the criticism
"We promised we would do that and we didn't and Trump was right to call us out for that", and he is glad the commitment is now being met
The stated goal of returning manufacturing jobs to the middle of the country is, in his words, admirable
"Globalization has crushed Mid America— just absolutely crushed it."
Every manufacturing job went to China, India or Vietnam, and nobody came to fix what was left
His answer to the claim that the world took advantage of America is that the money arrived and stopped moving
"You guys are like the wealthiest country in the world. You have nailed globalization."
"You don't have a wealth problem. You have a distribution problem."
He also said the confrontation has been good for his own country
Canada has "finally gotten shaken out of our economic slumber", and his worry is the opposite of the usual one: "I'm actually worried we are going to come up with a trade deal and we're going to somehow slip back into our old coma"
He pulled the Census Bureau numbers, and they say the US already has a surplus with Canada
Rather than argue from claims, Mr. Muir went to the source: the US Census Bureau's 2025 trade data, category by category. Mr. Zeigler said the arithmetic was what impressed him, since almost nobody making this argument shows it.
Autos, the headline complaint, run the other way
Because parts cross the border repeatedly, he collected every automobile-related category and added them
"Lo and behold, Canada has a $7.2 billion deficit. Meaning you guys have a surplus to Canada in terms of the entire automobile section."
One category dwarfs everything else and it is not manufactured goods
Pulling up every category, one was "just like massive and it's oil and gas and I can't remember the number, $82 billion or something"
The rest are "like fives and tens and 20s in terms of surplus— net surplus or deficit"
"when we're looking at the deficit that we have with you guys, the vast, vast majority of it is from this oil and gas"
Take out the globally traded commodity and the picture inverts
Oil and gas creates few jobs in Canada — "we're just pumping it out and sending it to you guys"
"In fact, you guys are the ones refining it and sending it back to us. So the value added jobs are actually on your side."
Strip it out and the deficit becomes a surplus: "We are your best customer."
Canada's own position makes it worse, and he blamed Canada for that
With no pipelines to the coast the country is landlocked and can only sell south
"we sell our oil at a discount because we're so stupid that we don't go and open up markets and we don't go and put it on a barge"
He contrasted the tone on the two sides
"you don't hear Mark Carney talking about nasty Americans. He talks about the Trump administration"
His conclusion was a relationship analogy: a partner who punches you in the night, apologizes, and warns you it may happen again — "Okay, I think I should just go find a new partner."
A permanent 10% tariff would work better than the one being run
The mechanism he says is being ignored is investment certainty, not the tariff rate
A business owner deciding whether to build a US plant needs "the certainty that that tariff is going to stay consistent"
Turning tariffs on, off, and back on again is "no point" if factory investment is the objective
His counterfactual policy is higher and duller than the current one
"if I was an American Congress person, I'd be like, let's do tariffs. Let's just do 10% to Canada across the board and let's just leave it and let's not negotiate it and let's just do it"
Legislate an increase over the long run and stop touching it
His conclusion is that the damage lands on the US
"I think it's hurting America way more than people understand", because the plant does not get built under that much policy volatility
He argued that policy effects run for decades, using two American examples
The New Deal, whose benefits he said were felt for decades — with a brief mix-up over which Roosevelt signed it
Eisenhower putting returning GIs to work on the interstate highway system, which he called one of the reasons "America was so great for the longest time"
The current policies, on his read, will be felt negatively "for a long time to come"
Mr. Zeigler drew the line between politics and policy explicitly
"I don't want to talk about politics. I do want to talk about policy."
The investable version: policy volatility has to be discounted into everything that currently feels positive about the market or the economy
Picking on Canada is the evidence the stated goal is not the real one
Mr. Muir's closing argument is that the target choice gives the game away
Canada suffered the same hollowing out of manufacturing that the US did
"It's not like the American Midwest lost their jobs and they went to Northern Ontario. Like that's not where they went. They went to China. They went to India."
"the fact that he's picked on Canada shows you that he's not really truly trying to put people back to work"
The alternative he wants is a joint one: "We would be so much stronger together", pushing back on the actual source of the losses
Mr. Zeigler closed the section with a Canadian Bacon line — "It's surrender pronto or we'll level Toronto" — and said the policy implications remain under-discussed
On why he wrote the piece up rather than posting the chart alone
"sometimes you actually have to not just ChatGPT to the Wall Street Journal and you got to do the work"
He offered to email the piece and the underlying numbers to anyone who asks
Mr. Muir's bottom line is that the market is not expensive on multiples and is dangerous anyway, because the AI buildout is booking its revenue now and its costs over the next decade, and the leverage sitting on top of the most concentrated index since 1929 is a structure nobody has stress-tested.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
The Treasury General Account (The government's checking account, now close to a trillion dollars; Mr. Muir expects it spent down before the midterms and called the option to use it more worrisome than the buyback announcement itself)
Treasury liquidity buybacks (Seven long-end operations, doubled from two billion each to four — $28 billion in total, all scheduled between now and the midterms)
SOXL and the SOXX semiconductor index (His worked example of a three-times leveraged ETF: what you own is three times the daily return, reset every night, which forces buying into strength and selling into weakness)
7709 in Hong Kong (A three-times leveraged SK Hynix product that grew from about two billion to 30 billion, "tossing around $90 billion of SK Hynix")
Lucid and its leveraged ETF (A small two-times product; bankruptcy rumors took the stock down 45%, and it finished down 55% as the provider flattened the position)
XIV (The earlier example of a leveraged product closing out at its stop-out point, which nobody had modeled at the time)
Nvidia, Microsoft and Bloom Energy (The immediate beneficiaries of data-center borrowing in the Chanos earnings-bubble argument — revenue now, amortized cost later)
Google (Share count fell for ten years and has turned up for the first time; Mr. Muir's evidence that the hyperscalers are no longer cash flow machines)
Situational Awareness (The fund Mr. Muir said lost $30 billion in two weeks, against the $4.5 billion that nearly brought the system down at Long-Term Capital Management)
Gold and the People's Bank of China (The only buyer that matters, on his account, and the reason he ignores real rates and the dollar)
Platinum (Bought after missing last year's move: below cost of production, with hybrids rather than EVs winning and catalytic converters still needed)
Silver (Near $100 in late 2025 and early 2026, his example of a mini-bubble that felt permanent at the top)
Tesla (The flyer in his 2014 rolling-bubbles piece — "might double, might even triple" — recommended by a writer who says he can't stand Elon)
US Census Bureau trade data for 2025 (The source he pulled category by category: a $7.2 billion Canadian deficit in autos, and a US surplus once oil and gas comes out)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The MacroTourist (Mr. Muir's newsletter and the source of the trade and earnings work discussed; he offered to send the Canada piece and its numbers to listeners who email him)
Jim Chanos on the AI earnings bubble (The framework Mr. Muir credited for the immediate-revenue, amortized-cost argument)
Cabana of Bank of America (Whose description of the bill-issuance-to-reserves chain Mr. Muir used to explain how buybacks could end in debt monetization)
Stanley Druckenmiller on Treasury intervention (The argument that tinkering removes a price signal, which Mr. Muir endorsed while disputing the scale of the buybacks)
Dennis Gartman's rule ("long, really long, or flat" in a bull market — the framework behind his gold positioning)
Bill Fleckenstein's hate meter (The contrarian sentiment gauge: heavy hate mail meant the top was in)
Jim Grant on agreement ("good investing is having everyone agree with you, dot dot dot, later")
Market Wizards (Invoked in his claim that a large share of even the most famous traders' decisions are technical)
Canadian Bacon and Idiocracy (The two films the hosts kept returning to, one of them nominated as this year's documentary)
Apple Podcasts (The episode on Apple)
Episode page (The show's own page for this episode)
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