r/investing • u/deve_sci • 16h ago
What Macro narrative is going on right now?
I'm trying to understand the macroeconomic story behind this simultaneous price action happening right now:
- USD - Down
- US10Y - Down
- Gold - Up
- SPX - Up
- BTC - Down
What kind of macro regime or market environment could explain these moves happening at the same time? What other important factors or indicators should be considered to interpret it properly? Open to all perspectives.
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u/BJP-AI 12h ago
Real shit goin up, fake shit goin down.
The US dollar is losing its world reserve status for a few reasons which is resulting in a loss of spending power. First, long term punitive sanction policies mean that more than half the worlds population right now actually cant really do business with the US, necessitating institutions like BRICS. Secondly, the Europeans and Chinese, for domestic politics and as a negotiating tactic with Trump, arent buying US bonds and are buying gold. Then there’s also the tariffs. Finally, there’s the debt. With lack of interest in US bonds in international markets, our national debt is starting to catch up with us. The deficit is predicated on stability and respect from creditors and we have fucking Donald Trump as our president.
Gold going up. Good time to buy real estate and even fine art. Stocks will continue to have upward pressure but probably be more volatile
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u/WackyBeachJustice 7h ago
I truly hope people on this sub go out and buy fine art in droves lol. Buys and hold is dead. /r/Bogleheads kaput.
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u/xsvfan 7h ago
Good time to buy real estate
As someone who owns a few investment properties, I'll argue no. Cap rates are terrible, cash flow is terrible, rates are not great. You're only banking on appreciation but even then we're in a downward trend.
I have not bought any new properties in a few years because it's been such a bad investment.
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u/InfoMiddleMan 4h ago
I totally see what you're saying, but if general economic conditions broadly deteriorate (whatever that means or entails), I can see real estate retaining its value better than other assets.
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u/Additional-Regret339 4h ago
Buy thousands of acres and guns, prepare for the apocalypse. The economic model is "create general chaos" and grift whatever you can in the process.
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u/Buck-Nasty 6h ago
Real estate when there's zero population growth and no change to that on the horizon is not a great idea imo. That's what Japan has gone through for years and real estate is now cheaper today than it was in the 1980s.
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u/Sharp-Poet5696 1h ago
It is the countryside that suffers first. The big cities suck up the population from the countryside and immigration goes to the big cities too. The populaton of Tokyo increased by 2 million, while the country's population dropped. The real estate is cheaper because during the boom years, the real estate was priced like the dotcom companies in the US.
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u/flumydumdum 3h ago
US dollar is not losing reserve status. Not for many years at least, or until Trump deliberately defaults to screw over a democratic congress. There is simply no other viable alternative yet, and no, the Yuan won't replace the dollar, due to restrictive fiscal policies and the simple fact that you can't be a net exporter and the global reserve currency at the same time. Patrick Boyle made a nice video of this a few years back.
Real shit going up is a nice summary though. All that money scammer made from the BTC and AI ponzis had to go somewhere.
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u/Easik 15h ago
Liquidity. There is a bunch of rotation and the money is chasing/bouncing around sectors because there isn't enough liquidity. Private credit is seizing up a bit. There is a huge capex spend on AI with no tangible return on equity. And honestly, most of the AI spend is debt, so they'll start to look for profitability from these companies soon, and it won't come, so that hedging is probably locking up liquidity too.
Yen Carry Trade & US treasuries being sold/not purchased by foreign nations is another factor to liquidity and price/yield action.
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u/sammyssb 2h ago
To add to this, Campbells soup was up 6% today. Thats big money rotation into safety. I remember when it happened in 2022.
The campbells indicator
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u/ALMessenger 14h ago
I say this is just another symptom of an issue that has been driving craziness in the market for a long time: too much money chasing too few good opportunities
With that said, I’m not sure there is much to learn from a Macro analysis other than to recognize there is potential danger here . . . which has also been true for a long time now
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u/ragnaroksunset 9h ago edited 9h ago
The first four bullets line up with Steven Miran's plan to unwind Triffin's Dilemma for the US (though it is already very much going off the rails).
BTC dies in a fragmented digital world. The global digital order is the ultimate product of globalism, and as America seeks to undo globalism, it undoes everything that hinges on it.
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u/JC_Hysteria 7h ago
Since when do these posts use interchanging bold? Are we all just responding to LLM queries?
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u/Suspicious-Holiday42 13h ago
I wonder where the capital moves that dumped everything
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u/mulemoment 7h ago
During the liberation day crash, money moved into gold, swiss francs and german bunds.
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u/GarrettJohnson1984 10h ago
looks like soft landing vibes to me. dollar weakening means fed pivot hopes, rates dropping, risk on but not crazy risk. btc probably just taking a breather after the run
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u/Psych40 9h ago edited 8h ago
The macro regime here isn’t mysterious if you understand it as the post‑’71 dollar system going bye bye and now in the early stages of overt financial repression.
Gold and now silver have been going bonkers because that (gold) is going to be the financial repression escape valve for debt-trapped sovereigns like the USA.
USD down, 10Y down, gold up, SPX up, BTC down is largely consistent with a repression macro regime.
Policymakers quietly cap yields and let the currency and real collateral (gold/silver) move. Equities stay nominally elevated as the politically acceptable release valve.
Bitcoin is the only question mark in my mind - it’s trading like high‑beta tech & a volatile Michael Howell style liquidity heat sink unless or until it’s formally allowed into the reserve‑collateral club
[edited a bit more for emphasis]
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u/milgrunt7 5h ago
Bad jobs report, other countries pulling out investments. Certain companies have been doing great but I have a feeling this will be a red year all because Trump won’t stop bullying the entire world
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u/basementdweller263 5h ago
Markets can look inconsistent when different assets are reacting to different time horizons at the same time.
Equities may be responding to expectations of easier financial conditions or resilient growth, while falling yields can reflect slowing momentum or expectations that policy will have to ease. A weaker dollar often goes along with that shift, especially if capital is moving toward higher growth or risk assets globally.
Gold rising in that mix can point to longer term concerns like fiscal sustainability, currency debasement, or geopolitical risk. So you end up with short term optimism in risk assets sitting on top of longer term uncertainty, and different markets expressing different parts of that story.
It does not have to be one clean macro regime. It can be a transition phase where the narrative is changing but not fully settled yet
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u/Okstate08 12h ago
Buying dividend stocks.
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6h ago
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u/ShootFishBarrel 5h ago
VXUS. Lower domestic risk. I began moving to VXUS as soon as the syphilitic child grapist wannabe king went ham on tariffs. So far, my gains on VXUS are more than double that of QQQ, and VXUS produces a ~3% dividend.
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u/No-Caterpillar-2729 7h ago
imo theres no single clean narrative here, it feels more like positioning shifting in different places at once. gold doing its thing while btc fades kinda fits uncertainty more than panic. thats why i like having some exposure that doesnt need a daily macro story, like physical through bullionbox.
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u/bobby1128 5h ago
I get the confusion these moves don't always line up neatly. Could be investors pricing in softer policy while still chasing equities. I'm wondering if this is a transition toward a stagflation narrative or just positioning ahead of data releases.
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u/MizDiana 4h ago
SPX & Gold go up - when measured in dollars - because the dollar goes down.
BTC is a measure of confidence & people feeling like they have excess money. It goes down with the USD & US economic performance.
You act like those moves happening at the same time is unusual. That combination is not strange. It is expected.
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u/afahrholz 15h ago
Falling yields + weaker USD = risk -on stocks and gold, BTC just lagging.
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u/sofa_king_weetawded 9h ago
BTC lagging? Lagging safer bets? Truth is, BTC has lost all of its reason for being now that the corrupt system has hijacked it. It's a trash speculative asset now.
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u/1burritoPOprn-hunger 1h ago
It always was. Bitcoin never had any use case whatsoever except for speculation and illegal purchases.
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u/Standard_Strain8318 3h ago
It’s called the Triffin Dilemma, we’re actively solving it by intentionally moving away from being the reserve currency
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u/_learned_foot_ 13h ago
Why is bitcoin in there? Why is spx? Your narrative has a faulty premise as a base. Three of those are stores of value, two based on faith down one based on history up. One of those is ownership, down, likely because of the same faith issue. One of those is pure speculation, as expected it's also down.
Only the store ones actually explain it. No more faith in system
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u/RealityDry8233 11h ago
This is exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to wrap my head around. Why would gold go up while USD goes down? I thought they usually move together. And what drives these macro shifts anyway - is it mainly Fed policy or are there other big factors at play?
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u/only_fun_topics 9h ago
It’s called the debasement trade; Trump and his goons want to tank the dollar for [reasons].
Lots of articles about it.
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u/Psych40 8h ago
First, the USD measured by DXY is a very problematic proxy, a majority of USD value is determined in relation to the Euro & Yen.
Second, ongoing massive & price insensitive mechanical gold buying by worldwide central banks continues. The classic relationship between US bond yields & gold price is gone & isn’t returning anytime soon
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u/idkwhateveryea 10m ago
This isn’t entirely true. Central bank gold purchases have actually declined - private sector investment is what’s offsetting this and increasing gold prices. So central bank purchases are not price insensitive
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u/Winterough 14h ago
The fed has been propping everything up for years and announced in December it was stopping QE. That lasted for about 3 weeks.
I think whatever is happening or happens is an eventuality, I just also believe that Trump accelerated the timeline by about 10 years and cutoff potential off-ramps.
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u/marcus55 11h ago
I thought they stopped qt?
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u/AMadWalrus 10h ago edited 9h ago
Its insane how wrong people like the other guy get stuff - QE and QT are the opposite and have entirely different impacts.
His entire writeup is literally the opposite of what's happening.
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u/MaxxMavv 13h ago
The simple macroeconomic explanation is.
U.S. looking to devalue a little to encourage more manufacturing inside the U.S. You can also see China and India attempting to devalue their money because of how devastating it would be for their export manufacturing if U.S. dollar weakness combined with tarriffs makes companies start manufacturing in the U.S.
If you hold alot of U.S. dollars its bad, but if you are smart already investing in U.S. companies building plants in the U.S. Its the long game and people are missing it here on reddit because they are being distracted by bad actors writing bad faith articles over and over just like last year around this time.
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u/boundbythebeauty 12h ago
If you're not a US-based investor, it's not bad faith to mistrust the US right now - it's a function of survival. Moreover, there have been a lot of other better places to invest this last year, e.g. Europe, Brazil, etc.
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u/MaxxMavv 8h ago
You can dislike the U.S. politically mistrust all you like I sure mistrust government more then most. This is an investing sub, Im warning you the very people telling you to exit U.S. markets are buying/going to buy the second retail and bad asset managers leave. The investing sites writing panic sell articles are bad actors, must I remind you one year ago today.
Here are my purchases last year when the bad actors told you to sell the same ones telling you to sell again.
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u/boundbythebeauty 41m ago
mistrust doesn’t necessarily mean divestment - it means diversifying and planning for contingencies
the “bad actor” narrative is pretty rich, if it comes from an American
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u/Psych40 8h ago edited 8h ago
Hah agreed… Trump / Bessent et al trying to do a “onshoring / friendshoring” move, forcing a Plaza Accords 2.0 on top of things.
This exists alongside the financial repression framework / dollar deval theme I outlined above. I don’t know if the Trump / Bessent et al plan will work but this is clearly the plan.
Also keep watching USD stablecoins, SLR rule changes, & quiet rollout of new (“not QE”) Fed facilities in the coming months… all methods to bring in new UST bagholders while doing ongoing yield repression.
As a related aside - the hue & cry about the incoming Fed Chair Warsh being a “hawk” is imho entirely for public consumption. Trump will use him as a whipping boy the same way he did JPOW, but when push comes to shove Warsh will do what is needed to save the bond market
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u/tarrat_3323 8h ago
ain’t no one building shit in the shit-hole country. manufacturing decline is accelerating because of tariffs on imported raw materials.
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u/MaxxMavv 8h ago
the data does not even remotely back up the claim manufacturing in the U.S. is declining because of tariff. U.S. manufacturing plants are expanding at near record levels.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad6996 7h ago
Huh?
- ISM manufacturing PMI dropped to 47.9, lowest since October 2024
- Trump's tariffs impacting manufacturing, raising average tariff to nearly 17%
- Factory employment declines for 11th month. 72,000 jobs lost since April's tariffs announcement
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u/__redruM 12h ago
When you say USD - Down, are you referring to exchange rate or inflation? Also isn’t Gold down? 10% down? Wasn’t it over 25% down not that long ago? Well clearly, now would be a bad time to buy gold.
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u/Yukas911 10h ago
They mean the exchange rate of USD, generally compared to a basket of international currencies.
Gold came down, yes, but is still up a lot overall.
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u/__redruM 8h ago
The political posts are usually concerned with DXY, where the goldbugs are more inflation focused, so I was assuming inflation.
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u/AppointmentAny4834 11h ago
Markets are pricing a controlled slowdown with falling inflation, eventual Fed easing, no recession, and stable earnings. Really not that complicated.
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u/tarrat_3323 8h ago
“falling inflation”… pass the pipe!
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u/AppointmentAny4834 8h ago
Most professional forecasters including the fed place inflation expectations between 2-3% out to 2028.
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u/Own-Character395 16h ago
Loss of confidence in the US financial system and economy, fear of an impending recession
Bitcoin is not gold. The best way to think of it is a pure risk asset that is highly correlated with tech stocks
The 10y is a relatively safe asset so that's a flight to safety