Welcome anon to another week of paid content.
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Please feel free to skip around or ignore certain sections if it does not apply to you. The Table of Contents is made to preserve your time in this manner. You can always simply read the conclusion if you are in a hurry.
All times given in this update are in US Central time (UTC-6 clock).
Song of the Week - Allen Stone - Unaware
Table of Contents
The French Election
Twitter Sale
Economic Calendar
US Treasury Bond Updates
Central Bank Speeches
European Central Bank
Swiss National Bank
Bank of Canada
Bank of Japan Interest Rates
Crypto Macro
Conclusion
1. The French Election
We previously discussed the run-up to the main election period for France 2 weeks ago after the runoff election completed. You can re-read that here in Section 2 and 5 of this post.
As you can see from this image taken from a BBC article, Macron has won again, although by a smaller margin. Le Pen winning would have put the Euro and ECB at risk in a way that Macron simply won’t do. This was the more likely outcome, of course, and will tamp down any potential increase in euro-skepticism over the next few years. Germany and the ECB will now be under less pressure to stop printing Euro’s soon, and we will see the Euro’s purchasing power further diluted as Germany lacks the conviction to tell other members of the Eurozone to stop spending. While 41.5% of the vote is impressive for Le Pen, it is still far away from a Euro-skeptic France. It’s plausible that if there was no Russian-Ukrainian conflict, there might have been more support for Le Pen’s National Front Party, but that no longer matters. With no threat of countries leaving the Euro currency, the EU can focus on appeasing countries that are running significant deficits while ignoring the preferences of those running balanced budgets or surpluses. I don’t have much to add beyond what was stated 2 weeks ago. For now, all you need to know is that Macron winning releases some potential pressure on the ECB to otherwise stop printing Euros.
2. Twitter Sale
Twitter’s sale has now been approved by their board of directors to Elon Musk. Elon will be buying the remaining outstanding shares for about $44 billion.
$21 billion of that is being paid directly by Elon, with the remaining amount financed by JP Morgan and Bank of America. One of the few remaining roadblocks that could overturn the sale would be if a shareholder vote was held and 51% voted to refuse the sale, but that is unlikely from my view. After Elon Musk secured funding on 4/20, the board of directors had no reasonable avenue for rejecting funding.
This is likely to be a significant move for all of us, as the worst case scenario is that Elon Musk changes and fixes nothing since Twitter is already a trash heap. However, if Elon can even improve Twitter 1%, this is a win for us.
Twitter is currently an echo-chamber where any content that is not explicitly leftist is at risk of being blocked/banned. I have been banned from Twitter since 2020, I was banned for retweeting the following tweet making fun of the US presidential debates, you can decide if I broke Twitter’s rules or not.
Twitter as a social media platform has the ability to allow users to filter their feed and the circle within which they interact by IQ level. In this manner it is superior to Instagram. It is far easier to self-segregate, and you are more likely to be exposed to 2nd and 3rd level connection content that you enjoy, and replies have far more reach on Twitter than on Instagram or other platforms. If you are trying to gain impressions, Twitter simply performs far better. Consider even the simple act of sharing sample content from my Substack on Twitter vs. Instagram. An IG story can only go so far, while a twitter thread can explain the basic concepts behind a segment of a post with a link to it. People can debate in the replies, their connections can see the comments, and it’s far easier to reach people you otherwise normally wouldn’t.
Consider also how conversational circles can form, you don’t have to be following someone, you just have to be a 2nd or 3rd connection away, which creates loosely aggregated groups. Crypto Twitter (CT) is a good example. If you follow a handful of twitter users that leak Alpha related to crypto, your home page can end up full of conversations on Crypto just based on the people you’re following’s comments and retweets. From a structural standpoint, twitter allows you to far easier curate your content and be exposed to content adjacent to your interests.
I have filed another appeal to my Twitter ban from 2020. We’ll see if anything happens, but I see reason for some optimism. As I said before, the worst case scenario is that nothing changes and Twitter continues as it is. We don’t lose anything since Twitter is already lost. In all other scenarios we gain. In gambling, this is called a freeroll. In poker, a freeroll is when one player is guaranteed to at least tie and so has no risk if they were to increase the bet. In the case of Twitter, anyone that is not tied in to the globalist neo-liberal world order has a freeroll. At the absolute worst, Elon does not improve Twitter at all and nothing changes for us. In all other cases it gets better. Pessimism here is a misunderstanding of the current state of social media and just how things already are. Twitter can’t get worse from here.
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