CLOSING BELL
Green Friday
The markets climbed on Black Friday, as turkey-battered Americans woke up to a half trading day, checking retail sale prices to fulfill Christmas list wishes with some savings.
The Nasdaq finished the week rebounding, but it’s been battered, too, nearly 2% lower than where it started the month, even with the biggest weekly gain in five months.
Silver was hitting all-time highs, some traders rotating out of cash and into metals, with a rate cut almost fully priced in for Dec. 10. CME Futures, the most trusted betting market (aside from real betting markets) that tracks rate cut probabilities, was hit by a 10-hour trading halt Friday morning due to a data center cooling issue in Chicago. Imagine that, in this age of data center spending.
10 of 11 sectors closed green. Energy $XLE ( ▲ 1.31% ) lead and health care $XLV ( ▼ 0.49% ) lagged.
STOCKS
All-Time Highs: S&P 500 Tickers Hit Records
On Friday, a wide range of companies across multiple sectors achieved significant all-time high milestones.
In the industrial and automotive sectors, General Motors $GM ( ▲ 0.98% ) hit a record after an aggressive share buyback plan and strong earnings, signaling investor confidence in its overall profitability. Steel Dynamics $STLD ( ▲ 0.73% ) and services firm Rollins Inc $ROL ( ▼ 0.03% ) also reached new record highs.
In the crucial semiconductor and technology sectors, Broadcom $AVGO ( ▲ 1.36% ) hit an all-time high, driven by surging demand for its AI data center chips and its strong partnership with Google. Similarly, Analog Devices $ADI ( ▲ 2.88% )achieved a new record following strong results fueled by expanding applications in AI and industrial automation.
In retail, Walmart Stores $WMT ( ▲ 1.29% )surged to its all-time high (dating back to 1972) and Ross Stores $ROST ( ▼ 0.75% )set a new record after both demonstrated market dominance and benefited from the value-conscious consumer.
Healthcare REITs Ventas $VNT ( ▲ 1.57% )and Welltower $WELL ( ▲ 0.96% ) , hospitality giant Hilton Worldwide $HLT ( ▼ 0.26% ) , financial services firm Synchrony Financial $SYF ( ▲ 0.53% ) , and logistics provider C.H. Robinson Worldwide $CHRW ( ▼ 0.42% ) all rounded out the list of stocks reaching historic high levels.
MACRO NEWS
The $140k Poverty Line?
In the past week, you may have seen arguments online, from nerd economists on Substack to other nerd economists on twitter, over the poverty line in America.
Michael Green, Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Simplify Asset Management, wrote a piece this week where he argued that the actual ‘poverty line’ in the U.S., if counting up costs paid by average families with two adults and two children, was a lot closer to $140,000 than official estimates.
The U.S. Census Bureau figure of a $31,000 poverty line is too low Green argued, and that low barrier keeps people stuck in actual working poverty until they get out over the hump of the mid-$100k range. Shockingly high a salary to call poverty, Green was trying to get at the question of our time: why is everything so damn expensive?
It would explain the political angst and pain Americans have felt since before the pandemic, based on a pessimistic view of the wealth distribution in the U.S. Green wrote a super low ‘poverty’ line means benifits like SNAP cut off far to early, and making each invcremental dollar after $32k nets less actual income net after a lack of subsidies and acess of taxes.
This Bloomberg graph reads as real sour if you take Green’s word for the bare minimum income line.
He calculated his findings and refuted what he calls an outdated way to make up a poverty line, with some averages shown below:
Fair point, but what is “other essentials?”
Of course, other economists and substack writers took to twitter and their blogs to call out the shoddy math, the ‘other essentials’ category that adds like 20% on top of the rest of the calculation, and other aspects of Green’s work.
Scott Winship, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (many words to mean substack writer) argued Green had exaggerated his figures to the upside, to make his point. Winship focuses much of his writing on refuting how the original poverty line was calculated, but that’s clearly not what people care about. Americans care that everything is expensive.
Though at the very end of one of his refutations, Winship makes his own average cost calculation, and comes up with $91,000 — a number much higher than the poverty line for a family’s bare average participation in the world.
Inflated numbers to argue inflation is bad aside, Winship’s findings seem to support the “we are undercounting how expensive everything is,” even while trying to refute that idea. Winship and others have admirable optimism, but if you pay attention to how Americans are voting, either for right-wing populist Trump, ‘things are too expensive,’ or left-wing NYC socialist (populist) Mamdami, ‘things are too expensive,’ you start seeing the real picture.
But I turn it to the readers of the Daily Rip, on the blessed savings day of Black Friday: how exclusive is it to make it in America right now?
What is the bare minimum for a 4 person Family?Make your vote, what do you feel is the bare minimum, or average minimum required to raise a 4-person family in the U.S., either combined or single breadwinner income. |
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