Crisis Averted, Retail Sales, And Regional Manufacturing

Good Morning Everyone!

Remember, tough markets don’t last but tough investors do.

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Prices as of 4 pm EST, 9/14/22; % YTD

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MARKET UPDATE

Yield curve remains inverted

• 10yr 3.4% - highest since 2011

• 2yr 3.8% - highest since 2007

• Fed typically ends tightening after inversions…

• …different this time…

Retail Sales +0.3% MoM (vs. 0.0% expected)

• Retail sales ex autos dropped (-0.3% vs +0.1% expected) for first time this year

Regional manufacturing - contraction

• NY Empire State Manufacturing -1.5 (vs. -13 expected)

• Philly Fed Manufacturing Index -9.9 (vs. 2.8 expected)

Import prices -1% (vs. -1.2% expected)

Export prices -1.6% (vs. -1.2% expected)

US 30-year mortgage interest rate tops 6% for first time since 2008

Railroad strike - crisis averted

• White House reaches tentative agreement

• Would have been massive disruption to economy

• 27% of US freight moved by rail

• Ports already bottlenecked:

• And food shipments threatened:

Crude $87.5

• China eases Covid restrictions in Chengdu (megacity, 21 million people)

  • BUT, growth projections have been declining

• EIA small crude inventory build (2.4 million barrels)

Earnings None

CRYPTO UPDATE

And we finalized!

Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022

Merge SUCCESSFUL: Ethereum ETH/USD switches to proof-of-stake

• Initiated at 2:45 am EST, completed 13 min later

• Nothing seems to have broken

• Estimated to reduce blockchain’s power consumption by 99.95%

• Move will drop new supply issuance of ETH by 90%

• ETH mined per day down to 1,600 from 13,000

• Miners replaced by validators

• End-user experience unchanged

• Focus will now be to grow scalability via rollups

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MEME OF THE DAY