Remember the Talking Heads song? “I can see my lifetime piling up…“
This was supposed to be a day off – to celebrate Elaine and me rolling through 26-years of non-stop, action-packed adventures. Again, though, workaholism strikes. A mixed blessing, but it pays well.
CFNAI: That Signpost Up Ahead
Chicago Fed National Activity Indicator may be one of the few reasons to open the peepers today. After all, as we explained in our ChartPack over on the Peoplenomics side Saturday, our call was for higher. And the cash-infested market is not likely to disappoint.
“Index Suggests Economic Growth Increased in April
The Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) increased to +0.14 in April from –0.15 in March. Two of the four broad categories of indicators used to construct the index increased from March, and two categories made positive contributions in April. The index’s three-month moving average, CFNAI-MA3, increased to +0.03 in April from +0.02 in March.”
What concerns us most? It’s the nagging waveform similarity to 1929.
Of course, we have a lineup of asterisks as long as your arm: 1) Poster in Chief chills, 2) Benjamin bombs remain parked, 3) cash keeps flowing into markets, 4) Drought is downplayed, 5)…oh, wait. We could keep going for hours. But, you get the idea. Calculus and ballistics say continuation, sanity and generally accepted accounting principles say “Hold the phone.”
We entertain ourselves by running the Kleenex concession at the train wreck. The “Houses on Boardwalk” report will be out just after the top of the hour, so check back then. Bring Maalox and Tums. And a corkscrew. When a nation is $39,071,200,457,366.45 in debt, with co-signers all running for the doors (*and squatting real estate) what could possibly go wrong?
Blink: the Week Ahead
Our undercover BlinkLabNews.com project – which ignores filler headlines to allow focus on tangible change – looks ahead for the week like this:
Debt Is Still the Main Character
Markets continue behaving as though liquidity itself has become a permanent economic policy. Yet beneath the indexes sits a national debt structure so large it now resembles a weather system more than a balance sheet. And hurricane season is only a week out?
Vacation America Meets Infrastructure America
Holiday traffic, airports, fuel demand, and campground economics all point to a country still trying to consume normally while the underlying systems carrying modern life age visibly in public. Financial Ozempic will be along but with summer here (mentally), who cares?
AI Moves from Novelty to Utility Layer
The AI story is no longer about chatbots amusing office workers. It is becoming embedded infrastructure — quietly moving into scheduling, search, logistics, research, customer handling, and small-business survival. It’s a Mind Amplifier. So were pencils and word processors. Deal with it. You too, Leo. Pope Leo warns of AI fueling warfare.
Housing Refuses to Behave Rationally
High interest rates were supposed to cool everything down. Instead, inventory lock-in and demographic pressure continue creating a distorted market where fewer transactions occur, but prices often remain stubbornly elevated. Housing rehab bed-check shortly.
Food Inflation Has Become Behavioral
Consumers now pre-shop mentally before entering stores. Shrinkflation, substitutions, bulk buying, and delayed purchases are becoming normalized survival behaviors rather than temporary reactions. Our ShopTalk Sunday greenhouse and hydroponic ravings do appear a little more cogent now, don’t they?
The Drought Story Is Being Underplayed
Water tables, reservoir levels, crop stress, and heat patterns suggest the West and portions of the Plains remain one bad summer away from a much larger agricultural and insurance conversation. Wet spots are more fun than dry, if you haven’t figured that out.
Energy Quietly Reasserts Control
Every major political promise eventually runs into the physics of energy density, transport, storage, and cost. The world continues relearning that civilization runs first on fuel and only second on ideology. Washington has opted for the “bomb now or forever hold your peace” approach: US carries out renewed strikes in southern Iran.
Markets Still Believe the Fed Has Their Back
The dominant psychology remains that central banks will intervene before systemic pain becomes politically intolerable. Whether that assumption survives the next true stress event remains unanswered. The Fed’s role hasn’t changed: Still the arsonist making matches.
The Human Attention Span Is Breaking Apart
Media velocity has become so extreme that many people can no longer distinguish between events, reactions, narratives, and consequences. The result is a population perpetually stimulated yet increasingly disoriented. Social media – as we’ve warned for over a decade – is just this Ponzi Cycle’s latest spin on “mining the miners.”
Quiet Competence Is Becoming a Strategic Asset
In an era dominated by performance, branding, outrage, and noise, the people quietly learning practical skills, managing debt, fixing systems, growing food, and maintaining relationships may turn out to be the real long-term winners.
From the Woo Scanners
While we wait for the Baltic region power outage, notice how World leaders keep a wary eye on Belarus for any signs it might offer Russia help in Ukraine. Wars take power, don’t they?
Watch Trump’s Health
There has been chatter from various parts of the prophecy/seer world expressing concern that the period before Donald Trump’s June 14 birthday might be unusually risky. Some chatter was more in the personal-attack lane, but it’s a generalization – a vibe if you will. So when stories like Trump faces questions about age and health as he heads to Walter Reed we take them super-seriously. In woo-woo space, once he’s past that birthday zone, there doesn’t seem to be much else “out there” — except, of course, wars, nukes, and the usual background music.
Forget News – Focus on Action
200 Incredible Life Hacks That Make Life So Much Easier would be a starting point.
Second worthwhile stop is usually StudyFinds: Science News, Research Summaries & Health Findings.
And to MSH (make shit happen) keep an eye on the weather when laying out deck-building or outdoor work of any kind. Climate Prediction Center. Hovering over the timespan you’re interested will display both the temp and precip maps side-by-side.
ATR: Procrastination: The Book You Almost Read
Shameless self-promotion time. And proof that “The Devil makes work for idle keyboards.”
Eight bucks on Amazon for Kindle. Paperback will be along soonly.
Next up on my writing list? Extracted version of this one for Peoplenomics subscribers tomorrow. Next full book? “Timenamics: Time as the Hidden Currency.” And that will be followed by the “Time Farmer’s Secret.”
Happy Anniversary
26 years ago today, Elaine and I tied the knot in a public park, just west of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. Immediately after, we got back aboard the “Magic Elf” – the Hunter 40 sailboat I lived on for almost eleven years.
The fun part of an anniversary is going through all the “domains” traveled in that period.
Why, take the transportation domain. We both love sailing. On the sea, our longest adventure was out the Golden Gate and turning left, eventually living at Kona Kai Marina on Shelter Island (San Diego) for almost six months. Arriving in San Diego, I edited down some of our “hurricane alley” sailing into a calm reach up San Francisco Bay as a Thanksgiving ride along in 2001.
In the sky, we did the usual TSA lines and visiting the kids flights. But the fun stuff was flying our own plane from one side of the country (Florida) up to the PNW (Washington). We managed to get three or four “transcons” before age and vision issues urged us on to other adventures. You can still find an old video on YouTube about that segment.
Then there were the “land domain” vehicles. Over 26-years, we’ve had a lot of iron go through the garage. I bought Elaine a white Jag (red leather int.) as a wedding gift. I was pushing a 944 around at the time. Later, I moved up to a Porsche 930 wide body. Everyday drivers included a Daewoo which was a surprisingly good car. A full-sized Chrysler, meh, and then eventually an old Lexus 330 that still runs like a top.
Toss in a farm truck, a Kubota 4-by-4 tractor that I’ve nearly beaten to death, and three riding lawnmowers and we somehow kept ahead of the Reaper by staying in motion.
I could go through all the other “domains of life” we’ve walked in a quarter century plus but the reason for sharing these snips is what?
This is where the book after Timenamics will be grounded. In how each of us – whether we choose to be conscious of it, or not – is a Time Farmer. We plant “time seeds” through our decisions and actions. And the quality of our harvest as time rolls by is locked by the quality we put into our lives along the way.
That’s a simple, absolutely demonstrable and undeniable way of assessing life. Doesn’t matter what race, age, national origin, or gender you are. It just works. Sitting here, life has been an amazing panorama and I could share a whole book about it.
But not this morning. One of these days. I have no excuses left – they’re all in my procrastination book.
The one gift for today that I’d like to share?
“When you stop doing, you start dying.”
Write when you get rich,
[email protected] (refresh for the housing data after 8:15 AM Central)
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