The latest Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey has gone extremely bullish. The bank’s Bull & Bear Indicator has climbed to 9.4, a “hyper‑bull” reading that the bank sees as a contrarian sell signal and a warning to add hedges rather than increase risk.
Sometimes we put economic datapoints into different series. And that makes its hard to create a unified picture of what’s going on in a country’s economy. I’d argue that’s the case with China right now. And the two economic data sets released on today, Monday, January 19. Put the two sets of figures together and China is facing an economic crisis.
I expect more volatility as forth quarter earnings season picks up speed. Next week, despite the short week created by Monday’s Martin Luther King holiday, 157 companies are scheduled to report earnings with highlights that include Netflix (NFLX) on Tuesday; and General Electric (GE),Procter & Gamble (PG), and Intel (INTC) on Thursday.
Frankly, I’ve never heard this before. But apparently a lack of volatility in the Treasury market is an indicator of a potential sell off ahead. According to Bloomberg, the 10-year Treasury note’s yield is headed for a fifth straight week of minimal change, rivaling its longest stretch of inertia in the past two decades. Since 2006, the median weekly range for 10-year yields has been 16 basis points. For the past five weeks, it’s been less than 10 basis points, the longest comparable stretch since 2020. The trend–a result primarily of expected stability in U.S. monetary policy–is stoking anxiety among bond-market professionals because previous instances of constricted yield ranges have been followed by selloffs.
PJM Interconnection, the biggest US grid operator, has dialed back its forecast for electricity demand growth. Maybe the data center boom will take longer to go from paper commitments to centers will customers than projections have assumed. PJM Interconnection, which manages the 13-state eastern grid from the mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, has cut its peak demand forecast for the summer of 2027 to 160 gigawatts. That’s down from a previous outlook of 164 gigawatts. Not a huge change in absolute numbers, but a significant change in direction.
Economics, yep, the dismal science, is the key to understanding 2026 for investors–and for making money in what is shaping up as a chaotic and confusing year. Which is why I’ll be starting a new subscription Substack “Economics for Investors” in the next two weeks. Every week I’ll publish three posts on Economics for Investors.
New government figures this morning show that headline CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation rose by 0.3% in December. That’s in line with September’s reading of 0.3%. (Remember that because of the government shutdown there was no CPI inflation report in October and no data for November.) Prices rose at a 2.7% annual rate. Core CPI inflation–that is inflation without food or energy prices–came in with a 0.2% monthly increase and a 2.6% annual rate, both slightly below expectations. Please take all the numbers in this report with a truckload of salt.
The yield on the 10-year U.s. Treasury board 2 basus points to 4.18% today in response to news that Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Fed chair Jerome Powell over his Congressional testimony on the Fed’s building project. Yep, this major escalation of the Trump Administration’s campaign to force the Fed to cut interest rates more deeply and at a faster pace produced almost no reaction in the bond market.
Payrolls were up 50,000 last month and the unemployment rate ticked down a tenth to 4.4% from November’s revised rate of 4.5%. Revisions to payroll growth were negative, with combined October and November totals marked down 78,000. Over the past three months, overall monthly gains have averaged a loss of 22,000 jobs, due to federal government job losses. The private sector jobs market isn’t a whole lot stronger with the comparable average for the private sector at a low 29,000 per month.
I’d argue that the bIg news out of the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas so far isn’t about new chips, or flashy hardware across TVs, PCs, phones, and robots.
It’s all about speed: Nvidia (NVDA) pushed up the launch schedule for its new Vera Rubin AI computing platform by several months from late 2026 to the middle of 2026. Vera Rubin promises about 10x higher throughput and 10x lower token cost than the prior Grace Blackwell platform. The chip now looks be available to customers in the second half of 2026. Cloud partners like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and CoreWeave planning Rubin-based instances starting in that second half 2026 window.
I think the answer is no. Global oil companies aren’t interested in Venezuela’s oil unless it is heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Reuters put together a good profile of the market for Venezuelan oil: “Most of Venezuela’s oil reserves, located in the Orinoco belt, are classified as heavy and extra‑heavy. These highly viscous grades must be blended with diluent and upgraded into lighter oil to be extracted, transported and processed. All this raises the production costs. “The energy-intensive upgrading process also increases the carbon footprint of these heavy grades, which could push up costs further if more governments ts start taxing emissions or raising existing levies. Breakeven costs for key grades in the Orinoco belt already average more than $80 a barrel. That places Venezuelan oil at the higher end of the global cost scale for new production. By comparison, heavy oil produced in Canada has an average breakeven cost of around $55 a barrel. “Exxon’s breakeven target for its global oil production by 2030 is $30 a barrel
I expect the December jobs report on Friday, January 9, to draw a lot of market attention–but not to provide much clarity.
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