Chief Economist; Prior IRS, IHS Global Insight, DRI, WEFA, Nippon (NLIRI), J&W Seligman | Former PCBE (Philly NABE) President | Views my own not my employer
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Mike Donnelly retweeted
For a more fulsome view:
Latest Hormuz oil flow run shows more than 13.5 MMbpd clearing the Strait as of yesterday on a 7dma (and as regular readers will know, day-ago numbers are usually an undercount)
By far the biggest rise has come from Saudi Arabia's new Gulf loadings blitz.
(Data via Kpler)
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Saudi Pipeline Attack Risks ‘Disastrous’ Loss of Oil nytimes.com/2026/09/16/busin… via @NYTimes
Article misses many things
1. Short repair time ignores the obvious. US and Saudi incapable of defending pipeline from more attacks
2. Bab el closure cuts pipeline capacity in half
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Health insurance fell m/m in August in the CPI and rose in the PPI. it drives me insane.
U.S. consumer prices rose 0.4% in August and were up 3.4% from a year earlier. “Core” prices, excluding the volatile food and energy categories, were up 0.3% month-over-month and 2.4% year-over-year.
Data: bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0…
Full coverage: nytimes.com/live/2026/09/11/…
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Mike Donnelly retweeted
Houthis push towards Bab el Mandeb after seizure of Mokha, raising fears for Red Sea shipping
⚓️Mokha falls: Houthi forces have seized the strategic Red Sea port, pushing Saudi-backed forces south towards the Bab el Mandeb Strait
⚓️Island threat grows: reports suggest Houthi fighters are moving onto Perim and Hanish islands, potentially giving them greater reach over shipping transiting the southern Red Sea
⚓️Risk to energy trade: the advance threatens a key alternative route for Saudi oil exports, adding pressure to global supply chains and keeping crude prices above $100 per barrel
lloydslist.com/articles/2026…
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I’m pro nuke but what nearly all pro nuke folks refuse to engage on, is the massive site requirements of nukes. Cooling is massive and the security perimeter is larger. Solar and wind don’t suffer from this
"Just build nuclear"
The FT concludes: "The technology has to contend with the high costs, long lead times and stop-start record that make it difficult to get projects off the ground. Meanwhile, competing technologies such as renewables with storage are rapidly gathering pace."
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Gap between health insurance inflation in the PPI and the CPI is a comical 45ppts. Have premiums nationwide fallen 24% or risen 21%? I know what my paystub shows
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Germany has treated the Rhine's crises as temporary. They're not. 2018, 2022, & now 2026 expose a single point of failure. A parallel canal would be expensive—but repeated disruptions are more costly.. stop pretending climate change is going away
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Mike Donnelly retweeted
New: The US military’s munitions stockpiles, including its inventory of crucial air defense missiles, remain severely depleted, per new CSIS analysis & sources familiar with recent Pentagon data.
Updated CSIS stockpile estimates:
Fewer than 827 Patriot interceptors
Fewer than 278 THAAD ballistic missile interceptors.
More w/ @davis_winkie cnn.com/2026/07/29/politics/…
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Major Escalation:
July 17: U.S. strikes conducted overnight into Friday, a desalination facility near Jask in Iran’s Hormozgan Province was damaged.
Later on July 17: Iran attacked a combined power-generation and water-desalination facility in Kuwait.
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Mike Donnelly retweeted
If you think we could win a war against this, with the current state of our industrial base, you're just stupid, I don't know what else to say.
Some scary stats on China's militaro-industrail complex's capacity:
- China casts more metal products than the next nine countries combined and >5× the US.
- Its shipbuilding capacity is ~200× the US (a total-capacity figure, not per-ship speed).
- It makes ~90% of the world's commercial drones, and controls ~80% of drone components.
- Chinese civilian factories could retool within a year to produce ~1 billion weaponized drones annually using under 1% of existing assembly capacity.
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World Cup Miami: England v Norway. England given the Visitor side which is in the sun and has been as much as 30 degrees hotter than the home team side . Massive advantage for Norway
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Mike Donnelly retweeted
The United States has roughly two dozen people who know how to run rare earth solvent extraction at commercial scale. The Chinese Society of Rare Earths has over 100,000 members. In 2023, American mining engineering programs graduated 162 students. China graduated about 3,000 from 45 programs. Twelve US universities have shut down their mining engineering departments, including UC Berkeley and Ohio State. The Bureau of Mines, the federal agency responsible for mining research and training, was dissolved in 1996. Chinese pricing drove Western rare earth operations out of business through the 1990s and 2000s. The people who knew how to run those plants retired, changed industries, or died. Rare earth separation requires understanding how 17 chemically similar elements behave across hundreds of interconnected mixer-settler stages over months of continuous operation. That knowledge is accumulated through years of hands-on work in facilities the West stopped running. The average US mine worker is 46. 221,000 are expected to retire by 2029. Building an entirely new critical minerals supply chain means rebuilding the workforce that was eliminated a generation ago. The operational knowledge only comes back by running real plants.
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Iran “viewed (the Lebanon ceasefire) as point number one, and if you can’t abide by point number one, then why should we discuss two, three, four?” the diplomat said.
cbs8.com/article/news/nation…
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For 1/3 of 2026 inflation in goods has been brutal. Sticky services by contrast barely move, up or down. Likely some demand destruction under the covers
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a float adjusted market weight is genius
SpaceX is now in the total stock market ETF $ITOT.
Its weight: 0.15%.
That's the same weight as Newmont despite SpaceX having a $2.4 trillion market cap vs. $110 billion for Newmont.
Why?
SpaceX only floated 5% of their shares and $ITOT uses a float-adjusted market cap.
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