A Print That Doesn't Add Up

Two numbers came out this week and they don't belong in the same economy. Nonfarm payrolls printed 162,000 against an estimate of 53,000. Two days earlier, ADP had private hiring at just 38,000, the slowest month since January. One of these is lying to you, or at least telling you a very selective version of the story. So where does that leave us?

Bartenders, Teachers, and Nothing Else

Look at where the jobs actually came from and the picture gets a lot less impressive. Almost three quarters of the gain came from three places. Leisure and hospitality added 62,000, and 59,000 of that was bars and restaurants. Local government education added another 42,000. Healthcare, usually the most reliable engine in this economy, only managed 13,000, well under its average for the year. Strip it down and you're left with bartenders, teachers, and hospital staff holding up the entire print.

Meanwhile the information sector lost 23,000 jobs. Computing infrastructure, data processing, web hosting, publishing, broadcasting, all of it shrinking at the same time.

Elites vs. Everybody

This is the first cycle where we're watching the top get eaten before the bottom does. It's not really a class system anymore. It's elites versus everybody else.

What that jobs number actually did wasn't fix anything, it bought time. Hike odds ticked up today and the rate cut everyone wants got pushed further down the road.

The Fed Is Running Out of Doors

The Fed doesn't have many doors left to walk through. Buybacks and swapping short-term debt for long-term debt is what they're doing right now, and it isn't moving the needle. Cutting Social Security and Medicare isn't happening, politically that's off the table. So the option that's left is the dollar itself. Print, cap the yields, buy people out of the long bonds. And this time there's no PPP check to soften the blow, nobody gets to feel rich on the way through it.

Who Actually Pays For This

Middle America ends up footing the bill. Go try to pull money out of your 401k today and see what it actually costs you to touch it. Ask yourself honestly whether that money was ever really yours to begin with.

Get Into What Can't Be Printed

This is why I keep saying to get into things that can't just be printed into existence. Bitcoin, copper, gold, silver, and crypto more broadly. Next week's bond auction is where we'll find out if that's paranoia or just math. If nobody wants to buy the long end at this price, the Fed prints, plain and simple.

Where the Liquidity Goes Next

And when the printing starts, the money finds its way to whatever's already leading the market. Right now that's AI, and I think the agentic economy ends up living on Solana. Fees are close to nothing there and nothing else runs autonomous agents that efficiently at scale. This is the time to be quietly picking up the strongest AI projects, because those are what move hardest the moment liquidity comes back into the system. It only takes one standout agent project for everyone else to catch on all at once. You already know that. It's exactly why the smart money positions early instead of chasing it later.

Just the Debasement Trade Doing Its Thing

Everybody needs to relax. It's fine. This is just the debasement trade doing what it always does, ebbing and flowing. The jobs data got questioned, hike odds moved, and today's price action was simply the market's response.

There's also a mechanical piece driving these swings that's worth understanding. Funds bought crash insurance earlier this month, and the desks on the other side of that trade had to short the market to hedge their own exposure. If the market drops fast, those desks get forced into more selling, and the selling feeds on itself. If it drops slowly, or just grinds sideways like it has this week, the insurance expires worthless while the desks are still holding their short positions, forcing them to buy the market back. They needed the fast crash and never got it. Nothing unusual here, this is just how the plumbing works.

So my read is a little more bleeding over the weekend, then green next week.

What to Watch Next

Keep an eye on the bond auctions. Weak demand there looks like bad news on the surface, but follow the logic further out. The moment nobody wants to buy the bonds, everyone realizes at the same time that the Fed has no choice but to print in order to hold the bond market together. The Fed answers to the bond market now, not the other way around. The normal rate cut playbook doesn't really apply anymore. Printing is printing, and every asset eventually reprices against a dollar that buys less than it used to. We still get where we're headed, just without the cheap money helping us along the way. Either way, we're already positioned for it.

Where I'm Positioned

CPI lands on the 11th, the Fed decision follows on the 16th. My guess is he doesn't hike. He sits still and lets the bond market do the heavy lifting instead.

Bought a couple things myself today. Scarce supply plays and the strongest AI projects out there. And if you've got a favorite old-school meme coin sitting 95% down from its highs, that's worth a small bag too.