Market Outlook: JOLTS surprised to the upside, creating hot-and-cold signals that complicate near-term Fed cut probabilities.
Fed Rate Cuts: Despite odds shifting after JOLTS, the speaker argues aggressive cuts can still materialize if a Wile E. Coyote-style downturn hits.
US Recession Risk: Historical patterns around job openings vs. unemployment suggest caution, with brief flips signaling potential recession risk.
Travel and Leisure: Goldman Sachs’ timeline shows early-cycle weakness in Vegas gaming, followed by airlines, hotels (RevPAR), Disney parks, and cruises.
Casinos & Gaming: Las Vegas GGR and visitation are already weakening, while domestic gaming tends to turn later and recover earlier.
Airlines: CEOs report softening demand even as revenues hold up via premium cabins; watch for a broader slowdown consistent with past cycles.
Hotels/Cruises: Monitor US RevPAR for hotel softness and note cruises are typically late-cycle with an 18–24 month lag; boomers continue booking cruises.
Key Mentions: Disney parks cited as a demand indicator (no specific stock pitched); focus remains on sector-level signals over individual names.
Transcript
Hello, fellow Rebel Capitals. Hope you're well. So, we got big news. The Jolts data might have put the pause on Fed interest rate cuts. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Didn't see that one coming. So, let's go over to the Jolts data and see why this shocked markets. See if it changed the probabilities of the Fed rate cut or pause tomorrow. And then I also want to go over another Zero Hedge article that I found fascinating. Probably one of the best articles I have read in months. So I I I'll be a little hard on or a little critical with Zero Hedge when I think they get a a little maybe overly political, let's say, a little rah rah rah mega. But uh this one they knocked the ball out of the park and I think they have to give credit to Goldman Sachs. Incredible report. really really insightful. So I'm excited to dive in. Let's go over to Oh, we'll start with Zero Hedge. They had another good article on the Jolts numbers. So job openings unexpectedly soar even as number of quits plunge to 5-year lows. It's really weird. We're just getting we're getting all of this data and it's never even in the middle. It's either way too hot or way too cold. Nothing right down the middle. [laughter] So, it's always it's kind of a head scratcher, but I think if you think things through and connect the dots, it starts to make more sense. And actually, before we go here, let's go right over to our trusty calendar where you can see the number was right around 7.7. I think they rounded up. The expectation was for 7.2 and last month or the last month we got it because this even this was delayed data was uh 7.6. So now let's go now that we've got that let's go back to zero hedge and here's kind of a chart. You can see there's a lot of noise in the jolts data. So I don't know it's tough to put a lot of weight into just one number but uh now they're kind of breaking it down and it's just more hot and cold, hot and cold. Hot and cold and more data that's conflicting whether we're looking at the ADP numbers or the jolts because as an example the ADP numbers the manufacturing has been negative. has been now you know and that's more real time so maybe that's the difference here but we can see there was a bump from September to October but from October to October 2024 to September 2025 big decline there in manufacturing and uh let's see let's keep going down financial activities take a big hit professional business services big hit federal ederal big hit. No surprise there. So now they go into the federal job openings. U that's down as you would expect. And good good I give Trump a lot of crap because I think he deserves it a lot of the time. But uh when he does something right or the administration gets something right, I'll be the first person to applaud and this is fantastic. We're hiring fewer government workers. Yes. So now they go over something really interesting. This 55,000 more job openings than unemployed workers. So they're looking at the spread. They're looking at the the delta here. And you can't really see it, but we had two months where it was negative. And that means there were more unemployed workers than there were job openings. And as you can see, going back to the surveys sickness, that ain't good. That ain't good. Usually when you get that, you're right on the brink of a recession. So let's see. Let's go down. And here is where they have a chart so you can get a visual representation of kind of how that plays out. So the black line or dark green line is job vacancy. So the job number of job openings and the uh green line is the unemployment rate. So we'll you got labor force participation in there. So that's skewed a bit but we'll assume that is a proxy for the number of people basically looking for a job. And so we have the job vacancy. So number of job openings going up up up. And you see when we cross that threshold right here, there's prior to.com where all of a sudden there are more job openings than people unemployed right here rather. I'm saying it the opposite. So you it's weird because you get this dynamic where the number of job openings goes below the amount unemployed then amount unemployed skyrockets. And that's usually when you get into a recession. So that would be the green line being above the black line. We see the same thing with the GFC where the number of unemployed people way higher way higher than the job vacancy rate. And we even saw the same thing in the survea sickness where the black line uh gets higher, green line higher. This is a recovery that makes sense. We get the black line higher which would indicate a tight labor market and then obviously the stuff hits the fan. And right now we are at a point where we just crossed that threshold which you can see in the negative those red numbers where the amount you see just barely right there where the unemployed number of people was slightly higher than the job openings and usually that's not a good sign. Um but then we kind of flip back. So you see there's some noise here. There's some noise and I think that might be what we're seeing. But it's in a way it's all about the trend, right? It's all about the trend. When you have the number of unemployed um going down, down, but then you have the job openings going up. That's you, ironically, that's when you're usually seeing kind of the what we would consider a tight labor market or the labor market tightening and then the stuff usually hits the fan. So I I don't know that we can extract too much data other than this is usually the trend where you've got the black line going up, the green line coming down, but this time we've got the black line going down, green line going up. H [clears throat] So they're saying that this would be demand constrained and this would be supply constraint. This is a a this is kind of a tough chart to read, isn't it? Let's go back here to make sure I'm not missing something. Why does this matter? Because we discussed recently US never entered a recession in a period when there were more job openings than unemployed. So that would represent a tight labor market. So job openings than unemployed workers. See that the difficulty here, what makes this confusing is now they're using different verbiage. So the job openings would be the vacancy rate. So they're saying that the US never entered a recession in a period where there were more job openings. So that would be vacancy. So that would be the black line above the green line. So the black line above the green line, which is where we are right now. But we weren't there just a couple months over the last two months. So black line, I mean, we were close here though, weren't we? Jeez, we were really close here. And then black line was definitely over the green line here doing the surveys sickness. So I don't know h I don't know the the charts [laughter] not really playing along uh with what they're saying. The one thing we can say definitively is that if there are more job openings or if there are more unemployed people than job openings that that ain't good. That's not good. Okay. So, we look at hires and quits. How does this make sense of the data? On the surface, Jolts report suggests that the job market is much stronger than Sub had feared and certainly the bottom is not falling out. It also suggests that anyone expecting an aggressive easing cycle in the future in the immediate future will be disappointed. There we go. But see what this doesn't capture is every single time you see you know the some crazy spike or you see a recession like nobody was expecting it like and they just saw you know the path of interest rates or the path of the Fed funds like let's go to a cutting cycle like you look at these cutting cycles and and the Fed wasn't expecting the bottom to drop out like if you would have asked the Fed head when they started cutting in August of 2007. Hey, do you think you're going to stop at 2%, 4%, or 0%. There is no way they would have said, "Oh, probably 0%. We're going to drop 525 basis points in the next year." Like, there's no way they would have said [laughter] that. It's the same thing in the dot. They dropped 500 basis points for heaven's sakes. And you think that was the game plan right here? No, it's just that that they weren't expecting the stuff to hit the fan. They were expecting like this, right? And what they get is the w coyote. So this I kind of disagree. The other Zero Hedge article is fantastic, but this one I don't know that I I really agree with that because what they're saying uh let's go down here. how to make sense of this is that if you're expecting a an aggressive rate cutting cycle, you're going to be disappointed. But you could have said the exact same thing at the beginning of 2008. You could have said the exact same thing in 2000. It's it's it's it's like a black swan. The definition is you don't know what's going to hit the fan. It just hits the fan. So, let's see. It won't change anything as far as the FOMC decision tomorrow. That's their call. It will be odds of January subsequent rate cut which will drop. At the same time, the continued collapse in both hires and quits is concerning. Yet, it's a frozen. It's just completely frozen like the uh housing market which is rapidly finding new equilibrium now that millions of illegal aliens aren't pulling the statistics are artificially depressing wages. Come on. [laughter] Artificially depressing wages. Okay. Okay. Um sure. Sure. I'm not going to get into that back and forth on this video, but this is an argument that I see from a lot of bulls. when you highlight the fact that the labor market is slowing and like the negative ADP numbers, negative non-form, and they'll be like, "Yeah, but it doesn't really matter because it's all just illegal aliens that are leaving the country." And so that's why you're seeing a decrease in jobs. And in order to get this equilibrium, we only need to add like 30,000 jobs a month. I don't know. That makes absolutely no sense to me. And maybe I'm just crazy, but here's my rationale. Say you have 300 million people working and the economy GDP is, let's just say, 30 trillion. Okay? And let's just take it to an extreme for the thought experiment. Let's say you have 299 million people that were working. Just go ahead and leave. So they just leave. So now you've only got 1 million people working. And let's say you've got a country of 350 million. So you've got uh a million people working and 49 million people not working. Is is that somehow supposed to not be concerning? It's [laughter] like, oh yeah, GDP went from 30 trillion down to two trillion overnight. And you know, only what uh what would that be? 5% of our uh or I don't even know what that number would be. 2% or 1%. That would be like 1% 2% maybe of our entire population is working. But who cares? Because it's just it's only a result of those 299 million people leaving. Like I don't [laughter] know. How could you argue that? Like how could you argue that wouldn't be a bad thing? Like like I mean that that would be catastrophic. Catastrophic. And yet somehow we're supposed to make it seem like if we're losing jobs on net that that's not a big deal just because the labor market is shrinking because those people are leaving. Just makes absolutely no sense to me. Makes no sense at all. It's almost like running a business and you've got uh let's just say your revenues are a million dollars a year, something like that, and you've got 10 employees, and five of those employees leave and your revenue goes down to 500,000, and you're like, "Oh, well, who cares? That doesn't matter because the only reason that the revenue went down, I mean, it's explainable because five of my employees left. Do you think that business owner would be like, "Oh, well, who who cares?" Yeah, no big deal. Of course not. [laughter] They would they would be in dire straits. They'd be freaking out. And so I I anyway, I don't want to get too far off topic, but this argument just does not make sense to me if this is the argument they're trying to make here. So now let's go over to this zero hedge article is really, really insightful because this plays into, you know, the labor market. It plays into what's going on with interest rates. Let's see if I can find it. It was from uh it was a report from Goldman Sachs. Here you go. Right here. This is really good. In fact, when we get done with this video, I would highly suggest going through and read. very short, but basically this gal Lizzy Dove, who's an analyst, I think with Goldman Sachs, she came out with this report and this analysis of how recessions usually play out in the timeline with typical things that just the average Joe and Jane spend money on. So, check this out. This is really cool. So, you've got the timeline here on the left. This is going back to the GFC. And then you've got the, you know, what they're spending money on. So, Vegas GGR is basically gambling. I forgot what it's called exactly. It It's basically gambling revenue. And then, uh, domestic G would be domestic gambling outside of Nevada. And then you've got Vegas visitations. You've got passenger in plainments. I'd never even heard this word in my life, but that's basically how many people are getting on planes. And then you've got US repar. So this is a hotel metric. It's basically I think how much revenue you're getting per room. And then you got Disney park. That's pretty straightforward. And then cruises. So going back to January of 2008, the first thing to decline was gambling revenue in Vegas. And then that decline, decline, decline until you get to November of 2008. That was peak decline. And then you kind of pause and then you start getting growth again in at the end of 2009. Okay. So then we've got Vegas visitations and they're pretty much see Vegas visitations they start declining later and they pick up a little faster which would totally make sense because you still want to go on your vacation but you don't have the disposable income to drop five grand on blackjack. And then we go to domestic. So this I think is more just, you know, people being degenerates is almost recession proof. [laughter] I hate to say that, but if you're going to an Indian casino to gamble, like dude, [laughter] like you got problems here. So I got some buddies that do that, so you know, and I love them to death. But, you know, it it's not like you're going to a Indian casino on like a vac like a family vacation like you might do uh when you go to Vegas. So, that's you see a much later decline there and then it picks up a little bit faster than the gambling in Vegas. And then you've got airlines. So, this makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? When you have the uh let's see, initial and the peak decline. That's weird. That is really weird, isn't it? But anyway, uh moving on to airlines. So, initial decline here, we start that in April of ' 08. That peaks out, doesn't peak out until January 09 or February, basically Q1 of09. Wow. I would have thought I mean, I remember stuff was just hitting the fan right here in Q4. So, I would have thought that would have been Q4, but a little bit later than that. And see, you don't take much much time off and then, you know, you kind of get back to business. You pick up your you dust yourself. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off. Kind of, okay, with life goes on here. Then we've got the hotels. So, airlines first, well, Vegas first, airlines next, hotels next, Disney park next, and then cruise lines last. That's the main takeaway. So then what you can do using this really, really insightful data is you can say, "All right, well, where are we now?" And so Zero Hedge did this and they said, "Okay, Vegas gambling check. We've seen that. Vegas visitation check. We've seen that." And I think we have seen some slowdown in the other gambling. But what they said is we really haven't seen a lot of slowdown in the airlines. Although we have had a lot of airline CEOs come out and say they are seeing slowdowns. So, and the only reason they're not seeing overall slowdowns is because they're picking it up as far as revenue. They're picking it up in first class. So, I this is borderline here. This is borderline. Now, hotels, let's see if they they looked at that track these consumers. Okay, we got that. Scott descent. Okay, we got that. See if they followed by late cycle. Okay, hotel demand dried up US RevPAR. So I wonder where US Revpar is right now. That would be interesting. Followed by the late cycle downturn in cruises. The cruises I don't think we have seen a decline yet. And what they point out here is there's a full 18 to 24month lag versus late cycle cruis's downturn. And I think they're talking about when this started, uh, the official recession, which was the either December of 07 or January of '08. Yeah. So, they don't give us any insight. So, I'm going to have to do this. I I think this would be a fun whiteboard video. I should do this on Thursday. So because uh are flashing early warning signs, Las Vegas trends are already pointing lower. Okay, that's it. Check. Yet airlines are still holding up. Yeah, but you listen again, you listen to the CEOs and they are really, really, really down on the business. Boomers continue to book cruise lines. Yeah, because that's they own all the assets. The stock portfolio is up. track these consumer trends in early 2026 to see whether weakness spreads more broadly to the travel industry. I completely agree. I completely agree. So I think you know on this channel and what I do with my own portfolio is I really focus on uh interest rates and the yield curve with the Treasury curve and what they're doing. that gives me a great signal. And then also what's happening with uh the labor market for obvious reasons and then I'm going to have to add this. So these kind of discretionary income spending broken down, you know, where are we and how are we tracking and when do we start to see a big hit in the airlines and how do you measure that to begin with? And then with the RevPAR, I think that should be pretty easy. In fact, let me do this. Let me see if I can pull up a chart of RevPar. Just going on the fly here. I just thought of that. That That's definitely something I'd do for a whiteboard video. Revar maybe chart for January 2025. Well, that's Okay, maybe this has some real time data here. Ah, dang it. December 20. That's all old, huh? That's You would think they would have some really good real time data on this. No, we'll have to save this for a whiteboard video. I'll have to do a little more digging, but the bottom line is I think that's some great great indicators to add to the bag of tricks to really determine what's going on with the economy and in timing really of what happens with the labor market, what happens to interest rates. Then taking it full circle to what this video was about is when the Fed is cutting rates, but cutting rates aggressively. That's where I disagree with zero hedge when we get into the wild e coyote. [laughter] You see even right here we're like ah let's go ahead and PAUSE AND THEN AH CUT RATES CUT RATES CUT rates and then here it's just ah cut rates cut rates. Here we had a little bit of a pause. Everyone forgets that in the middle of January 2008 they paused. Why did they do that? Because they thought inflation was getting out of hand. I'm not kidding you. They thought inflation was getting out of hand because the CPI went from like 3.5 right here when they started cutting rates to 5.6 in uh in June of 2008. So they're like, "Oh, shoot. We cut too fast. We cut too fast. The inflation genies out of the bottle." And by the way, what do you think long-term interest rates were doing back then? They were going up. They were going way up. And then you just had two months or three months of pause and then it's ah THE WORLD IS ENDING CUT DOWN to zero quantitative easing tarp anything and [laughter] and [clears throat] that's why I've got a little bit different view than uh zero hedge. What people tend to do and I've noticed this with investors they take a snapshot of where we are right now and they just extrapolate that indefinitely into the future. Don't do that. I think that's a big big mistake. All right, guys. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. As always, make sure you're standing up for freedom, liberty, free market, capitalism. We'll see what happens with the Fed rate cuts tomorrow. We'll see you in the next video.
Did Rate Cuts Just Get Canceled?!
Summary
Transcript
Hello, fellow Rebel Capitals. Hope you're well. So, we got big news. The Jolts data might have put the pause on Fed interest rate cuts. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Didn't see that one coming. So, let's go over to the Jolts data and see why this shocked markets. See if it changed the probabilities of the Fed rate cut or pause tomorrow. And then I also want to go over another Zero Hedge article that I found fascinating. Probably one of the best articles I have read in months. So I I I'll be a little hard on or a little critical with Zero Hedge when I think they get a a little maybe overly political, let's say, a little rah rah rah mega. But uh this one they knocked the ball out of the park and I think they have to give credit to Goldman Sachs. Incredible report. really really insightful. So I'm excited to dive in. Let's go over to Oh, we'll start with Zero Hedge. They had another good article on the Jolts numbers. So job openings unexpectedly soar even as number of quits plunge to 5-year lows. It's really weird. We're just getting we're getting all of this data and it's never even in the middle. It's either way too hot or way too cold. Nothing right down the middle. [laughter] So, it's always it's kind of a head scratcher, but I think if you think things through and connect the dots, it starts to make more sense. And actually, before we go here, let's go right over to our trusty calendar where you can see the number was right around 7.7. I think they rounded up. The expectation was for 7.2 and last month or the last month we got it because this even this was delayed data was uh 7.6. So now let's go now that we've got that let's go back to zero hedge and here's kind of a chart. You can see there's a lot of noise in the jolts data. So I don't know it's tough to put a lot of weight into just one number but uh now they're kind of breaking it down and it's just more hot and cold, hot and cold. Hot and cold and more data that's conflicting whether we're looking at the ADP numbers or the jolts because as an example the ADP numbers the manufacturing has been negative. has been now you know and that's more real time so maybe that's the difference here but we can see there was a bump from September to October but from October to October 2024 to September 2025 big decline there in manufacturing and uh let's see let's keep going down financial activities take a big hit professional business services big hit federal ederal big hit. No surprise there. So now they go into the federal job openings. U that's down as you would expect. And good good I give Trump a lot of crap because I think he deserves it a lot of the time. But uh when he does something right or the administration gets something right, I'll be the first person to applaud and this is fantastic. We're hiring fewer government workers. Yes. So now they go over something really interesting. This 55,000 more job openings than unemployed workers. So they're looking at the spread. They're looking at the the delta here. And you can't really see it, but we had two months where it was negative. And that means there were more unemployed workers than there were job openings. And as you can see, going back to the surveys sickness, that ain't good. That ain't good. Usually when you get that, you're right on the brink of a recession. So let's see. Let's go down. And here is where they have a chart so you can get a visual representation of kind of how that plays out. So the black line or dark green line is job vacancy. So the job number of job openings and the uh green line is the unemployment rate. So we'll you got labor force participation in there. So that's skewed a bit but we'll assume that is a proxy for the number of people basically looking for a job. And so we have the job vacancy. So number of job openings going up up up. And you see when we cross that threshold right here, there's prior to.com where all of a sudden there are more job openings than people unemployed right here rather. I'm saying it the opposite. So you it's weird because you get this dynamic where the number of job openings goes below the amount unemployed then amount unemployed skyrockets. And that's usually when you get into a recession. So that would be the green line being above the black line. We see the same thing with the GFC where the number of unemployed people way higher way higher than the job vacancy rate. And we even saw the same thing in the survea sickness where the black line uh gets higher, green line higher. This is a recovery that makes sense. We get the black line higher which would indicate a tight labor market and then obviously the stuff hits the fan. And right now we are at a point where we just crossed that threshold which you can see in the negative those red numbers where the amount you see just barely right there where the unemployed number of people was slightly higher than the job openings and usually that's not a good sign. Um but then we kind of flip back. So you see there's some noise here. There's some noise and I think that might be what we're seeing. But it's in a way it's all about the trend, right? It's all about the trend. When you have the number of unemployed um going down, down, but then you have the job openings going up. That's you, ironically, that's when you're usually seeing kind of the what we would consider a tight labor market or the labor market tightening and then the stuff usually hits the fan. So I I don't know that we can extract too much data other than this is usually the trend where you've got the black line going up, the green line coming down, but this time we've got the black line going down, green line going up. H [clears throat] So they're saying that this would be demand constrained and this would be supply constraint. This is a a this is kind of a tough chart to read, isn't it? Let's go back here to make sure I'm not missing something. Why does this matter? Because we discussed recently US never entered a recession in a period when there were more job openings than unemployed. So that would represent a tight labor market. So job openings than unemployed workers. See that the difficulty here, what makes this confusing is now they're using different verbiage. So the job openings would be the vacancy rate. So they're saying that the US never entered a recession in a period where there were more job openings. So that would be vacancy. So that would be the black line above the green line. So the black line above the green line, which is where we are right now. But we weren't there just a couple months over the last two months. So black line, I mean, we were close here though, weren't we? Jeez, we were really close here. And then black line was definitely over the green line here doing the surveys sickness. So I don't know h I don't know the the charts [laughter] not really playing along uh with what they're saying. The one thing we can say definitively is that if there are more job openings or if there are more unemployed people than job openings that that ain't good. That's not good. Okay. So, we look at hires and quits. How does this make sense of the data? On the surface, Jolts report suggests that the job market is much stronger than Sub had feared and certainly the bottom is not falling out. It also suggests that anyone expecting an aggressive easing cycle in the future in the immediate future will be disappointed. There we go. But see what this doesn't capture is every single time you see you know the some crazy spike or you see a recession like nobody was expecting it like and they just saw you know the path of interest rates or the path of the Fed funds like let's go to a cutting cycle like you look at these cutting cycles and and the Fed wasn't expecting the bottom to drop out like if you would have asked the Fed head when they started cutting in August of 2007. Hey, do you think you're going to stop at 2%, 4%, or 0%. There is no way they would have said, "Oh, probably 0%. We're going to drop 525 basis points in the next year." Like, there's no way they would have said [laughter] that. It's the same thing in the dot. They dropped 500 basis points for heaven's sakes. And you think that was the game plan right here? No, it's just that that they weren't expecting the stuff to hit the fan. They were expecting like this, right? And what they get is the w coyote. So this I kind of disagree. The other Zero Hedge article is fantastic, but this one I don't know that I I really agree with that because what they're saying uh let's go down here. how to make sense of this is that if you're expecting a an aggressive rate cutting cycle, you're going to be disappointed. But you could have said the exact same thing at the beginning of 2008. You could have said the exact same thing in 2000. It's it's it's it's like a black swan. The definition is you don't know what's going to hit the fan. It just hits the fan. So, let's see. It won't change anything as far as the FOMC decision tomorrow. That's their call. It will be odds of January subsequent rate cut which will drop. At the same time, the continued collapse in both hires and quits is concerning. Yet, it's a frozen. It's just completely frozen like the uh housing market which is rapidly finding new equilibrium now that millions of illegal aliens aren't pulling the statistics are artificially depressing wages. Come on. [laughter] Artificially depressing wages. Okay. Okay. Um sure. Sure. I'm not going to get into that back and forth on this video, but this is an argument that I see from a lot of bulls. when you highlight the fact that the labor market is slowing and like the negative ADP numbers, negative non-form, and they'll be like, "Yeah, but it doesn't really matter because it's all just illegal aliens that are leaving the country." And so that's why you're seeing a decrease in jobs. And in order to get this equilibrium, we only need to add like 30,000 jobs a month. I don't know. That makes absolutely no sense to me. And maybe I'm just crazy, but here's my rationale. Say you have 300 million people working and the economy GDP is, let's just say, 30 trillion. Okay? And let's just take it to an extreme for the thought experiment. Let's say you have 299 million people that were working. Just go ahead and leave. So they just leave. So now you've only got 1 million people working. And let's say you've got a country of 350 million. So you've got uh a million people working and 49 million people not working. Is is that somehow supposed to not be concerning? It's [laughter] like, oh yeah, GDP went from 30 trillion down to two trillion overnight. And you know, only what uh what would that be? 5% of our uh or I don't even know what that number would be. 2% or 1%. That would be like 1% 2% maybe of our entire population is working. But who cares? Because it's just it's only a result of those 299 million people leaving. Like I don't [laughter] know. How could you argue that? Like how could you argue that wouldn't be a bad thing? Like like I mean that that would be catastrophic. Catastrophic. And yet somehow we're supposed to make it seem like if we're losing jobs on net that that's not a big deal just because the labor market is shrinking because those people are leaving. Just makes absolutely no sense to me. Makes no sense at all. It's almost like running a business and you've got uh let's just say your revenues are a million dollars a year, something like that, and you've got 10 employees, and five of those employees leave and your revenue goes down to 500,000, and you're like, "Oh, well, who cares? That doesn't matter because the only reason that the revenue went down, I mean, it's explainable because five of my employees left. Do you think that business owner would be like, "Oh, well, who who cares?" Yeah, no big deal. Of course not. [laughter] They would they would be in dire straits. They'd be freaking out. And so I I anyway, I don't want to get too far off topic, but this argument just does not make sense to me if this is the argument they're trying to make here. So now let's go over to this zero hedge article is really, really insightful because this plays into, you know, the labor market. It plays into what's going on with interest rates. Let's see if I can find it. It was from uh it was a report from Goldman Sachs. Here you go. Right here. This is really good. In fact, when we get done with this video, I would highly suggest going through and read. very short, but basically this gal Lizzy Dove, who's an analyst, I think with Goldman Sachs, she came out with this report and this analysis of how recessions usually play out in the timeline with typical things that just the average Joe and Jane spend money on. So, check this out. This is really cool. So, you've got the timeline here on the left. This is going back to the GFC. And then you've got the, you know, what they're spending money on. So, Vegas GGR is basically gambling. I forgot what it's called exactly. It It's basically gambling revenue. And then, uh, domestic G would be domestic gambling outside of Nevada. And then you've got Vegas visitations. You've got passenger in plainments. I'd never even heard this word in my life, but that's basically how many people are getting on planes. And then you've got US repar. So this is a hotel metric. It's basically I think how much revenue you're getting per room. And then you got Disney park. That's pretty straightforward. And then cruises. So going back to January of 2008, the first thing to decline was gambling revenue in Vegas. And then that decline, decline, decline until you get to November of 2008. That was peak decline. And then you kind of pause and then you start getting growth again in at the end of 2009. Okay. So then we've got Vegas visitations and they're pretty much see Vegas visitations they start declining later and they pick up a little faster which would totally make sense because you still want to go on your vacation but you don't have the disposable income to drop five grand on blackjack. And then we go to domestic. So this I think is more just, you know, people being degenerates is almost recession proof. [laughter] I hate to say that, but if you're going to an Indian casino to gamble, like dude, [laughter] like you got problems here. So I got some buddies that do that, so you know, and I love them to death. But, you know, it it's not like you're going to a Indian casino on like a vac like a family vacation like you might do uh when you go to Vegas. So, that's you see a much later decline there and then it picks up a little bit faster than the gambling in Vegas. And then you've got airlines. So, this makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? When you have the uh let's see, initial and the peak decline. That's weird. That is really weird, isn't it? But anyway, uh moving on to airlines. So, initial decline here, we start that in April of ' 08. That peaks out, doesn't peak out until January 09 or February, basically Q1 of09. Wow. I would have thought I mean, I remember stuff was just hitting the fan right here in Q4. So, I would have thought that would have been Q4, but a little bit later than that. And see, you don't take much much time off and then, you know, you kind of get back to business. You pick up your you dust yourself. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off. Kind of, okay, with life goes on here. Then we've got the hotels. So, airlines first, well, Vegas first, airlines next, hotels next, Disney park next, and then cruise lines last. That's the main takeaway. So then what you can do using this really, really insightful data is you can say, "All right, well, where are we now?" And so Zero Hedge did this and they said, "Okay, Vegas gambling check. We've seen that. Vegas visitation check. We've seen that." And I think we have seen some slowdown in the other gambling. But what they said is we really haven't seen a lot of slowdown in the airlines. Although we have had a lot of airline CEOs come out and say they are seeing slowdowns. So, and the only reason they're not seeing overall slowdowns is because they're picking it up as far as revenue. They're picking it up in first class. So, I this is borderline here. This is borderline. Now, hotels, let's see if they they looked at that track these consumers. Okay, we got that. Scott descent. Okay, we got that. See if they followed by late cycle. Okay, hotel demand dried up US RevPAR. So I wonder where US Revpar is right now. That would be interesting. Followed by the late cycle downturn in cruises. The cruises I don't think we have seen a decline yet. And what they point out here is there's a full 18 to 24month lag versus late cycle cruis's downturn. And I think they're talking about when this started, uh, the official recession, which was the either December of 07 or January of '08. Yeah. So, they don't give us any insight. So, I'm going to have to do this. I I think this would be a fun whiteboard video. I should do this on Thursday. So because uh are flashing early warning signs, Las Vegas trends are already pointing lower. Okay, that's it. Check. Yet airlines are still holding up. Yeah, but you listen again, you listen to the CEOs and they are really, really, really down on the business. Boomers continue to book cruise lines. Yeah, because that's they own all the assets. The stock portfolio is up. track these consumer trends in early 2026 to see whether weakness spreads more broadly to the travel industry. I completely agree. I completely agree. So I think you know on this channel and what I do with my own portfolio is I really focus on uh interest rates and the yield curve with the Treasury curve and what they're doing. that gives me a great signal. And then also what's happening with uh the labor market for obvious reasons and then I'm going to have to add this. So these kind of discretionary income spending broken down, you know, where are we and how are we tracking and when do we start to see a big hit in the airlines and how do you measure that to begin with? And then with the RevPAR, I think that should be pretty easy. In fact, let me do this. Let me see if I can pull up a chart of RevPar. Just going on the fly here. I just thought of that. That That's definitely something I'd do for a whiteboard video. Revar maybe chart for January 2025. Well, that's Okay, maybe this has some real time data here. Ah, dang it. December 20. That's all old, huh? That's You would think they would have some really good real time data on this. No, we'll have to save this for a whiteboard video. I'll have to do a little more digging, but the bottom line is I think that's some great great indicators to add to the bag of tricks to really determine what's going on with the economy and in timing really of what happens with the labor market, what happens to interest rates. Then taking it full circle to what this video was about is when the Fed is cutting rates, but cutting rates aggressively. That's where I disagree with zero hedge when we get into the wild e coyote. [laughter] You see even right here we're like ah let's go ahead and PAUSE AND THEN AH CUT RATES CUT RATES CUT rates and then here it's just ah cut rates cut rates. Here we had a little bit of a pause. Everyone forgets that in the middle of January 2008 they paused. Why did they do that? Because they thought inflation was getting out of hand. I'm not kidding you. They thought inflation was getting out of hand because the CPI went from like 3.5 right here when they started cutting rates to 5.6 in uh in June of 2008. So they're like, "Oh, shoot. We cut too fast. We cut too fast. The inflation genies out of the bottle." And by the way, what do you think long-term interest rates were doing back then? They were going up. They were going way up. And then you just had two months or three months of pause and then it's ah THE WORLD IS ENDING CUT DOWN to zero quantitative easing tarp anything and [laughter] and [clears throat] that's why I've got a little bit different view than uh zero hedge. What people tend to do and I've noticed this with investors they take a snapshot of where we are right now and they just extrapolate that indefinitely into the future. Don't do that. I think that's a big big mistake. All right, guys. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon. As always, make sure you're standing up for freedom, liberty, free market, capitalism. We'll see what happens with the Fed rate cuts tomorrow. We'll see you in the next video.