We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🇺🇸 The Sahm Rule Was Right All Along
The Sahm Rule is one of the cleanest, most reliable ways to identify when the U.S. is in recession. It’s simple: if the three month average unemployment rate rises half a percentage point above its 12 month low, you’re already in one. It’s not about forecasts, it’s a contemporaneous signal and it’s been 100% accurate since the 1970s. When it flirted with activation in 2023, Claudia Sahm herself urged caution because of pandemic era distortions, but she also stressed that if it flipped cleanly, it meant the labor market was weaker than the glossy headlines implied.
Fast forward, and the revisions now show that’s exactly what happened. In August 2024, BLS benchmark adjustments erased 818,000 jobs. By February 2025, another 589,000 were gone. And just recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flagged that another 800,000 could be stripped out. Add to that the steady drip of downward revisions through 2025, June flipping from a modest gain to a net job loss and the labor market has been overstated by somewhere between 2.3 and 2.4 million jobs since April 2023.
Like i said in my previous post that kind of wholesale rewrite hasn’t happened since 2009, when the BLS had to admit it had massively overstated payrolls heading into the financial crisis. And history shows that these benchmark adjustments aren’t just statistical clean up. They almost always surface at turning points, the stagflationary recession of the mid 1970s, the double dip downturn in the early 1980s, and the collapse of 2007-09. They’re usually evidence that the economy was already much weaker beneath the surface, and the headline strength was more illusion than fact.
Which brings us back to the Sahm Rule. On the charts today, the indicator looks muted, sitting well below the 0.5 threshold. But that’s because the unemployment rate itself has been calculated off job counts that are now being revised down. If those missing millions of jobs had been reflected at the time, the unemployment rate would have been higher, the Sahm Rule would have ticked up, and the U.S. might already be shown as having tripped into recession. In other words, the Sahm Rule didn’t miss, the inputs did. Once the revisions are fully baked in, history may show it was flashing red in 2023 while policymakers insisted on labor resilience.
That’s what makes this so consequential. For two years, the Fed leaned on the strong jobs market as its justification for keeping rates higher for longer. But if those jobs never really existed, then the Fed was tightening into fragility. That turns its high for longer stance into a policy error built on faulty data.
Which is why the September 17, 2025 cut is unlikely to be a one off. As these revisions settle and the depth of labor weakness becomes impossible to deny, the Fed won’t just be trimming for optics. It will be forced into a broader pivot in 2026 acknowledging, belatedly, that the Sahm Rule was right all along.
🔗 EndGame Macro
Ukrainian forces have begun training and testing exoskeletons for battlefield use. Soldiers from the 147th Separate Artillery Brigade are using them in the Pokrovsk sector for both logistics and frontline operations. The goal is to reduce physical strain, especially when loading heavy artillery shells into howitzers without automatic loaders. Artillery crews can handle up to 1200 kg of ammunition per day, and early tests show that exoskeletons help them work faster and with less fatigue Above all, by improving the conditions for those soldiers on the front lines who handle such heavy loads, plus the stress of work. Seeking to reduce overall fatigue in the troops
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🇮🇷🇮🇱 - 14 wounded in Iranian missile strike in central Israel, according to Israeli media.
🇬🇧🇮🇶 - A drone struck British Castrol oil warehouses in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, causing extensive damage.
🇮🇷🇮🇱 - Iran launched 9 missiles towards Israel this morning alone, with at least 3 of them being cluster missiles.
🇱🇧🇮🇱 - Over the past 12 hours, Hezbollah launched counterattacks in Khiam and Qantara, in the Nabatieh direction, southeast Lebanon. Hezbollah recaptured northern Khiam, with fighting ongoing for the south of the town. Hezbollah units also re-entered Qantara; frontline sources reported clashes in the center of the town last night.
🇱🇧🇮🇱 - 48 IDF soldiers have been wounded in clashes with Hezbollah over the last 24 hours in southern Lebanon, according to the Israeli Army.
🇱🇧🇮🇱 - "The Israeli army is barely catching its breath in southern Lebanon, and its resources are less than in the previous round of fighting," - Haaretz....
🇺🇸 Blue Owl Capital just disclosed that investors tried to pull 40.7% of one fund and 21.9% of another in a single quarter, and both funds gave the same answer, you can only have 5% back, and everyone else waits in line.
This is a bank run, not a normal withdrawal.
Wall Street spent the last decade selling millions of investors on something called semi-liquid private credit, higher yields, steady income and the promise you could get your money back every quarter if you needed it. What they buried in the fine print was what happens when too many people try to leave at the same time.
Analysts who have covered private credit for decades say nothing on this scale has ever been reported before at any major private credit manager.
These funds do not hold stocks you can sell on a Tuesday afternoon, they hold private loans to mid sized companies that cannot be liquidated quickly without destroying the price for every investor still trapped inside.
This product was originally designed for ...
🇺🇸 President Trump wants to switch to war economy in 2027 with massive increase in military spending and massive cuts to healthcare and other domestic agencies
Once a deficit hawk — he said in 2016 that he thought he could balance the budget in five years — Trump ended his first term with $7.8 trillion in added debt. His 2027 proposal is expected to give an update on 10-year deficit projections currently estimated at around $16 trillion.
The GOP's message for the Midterms will be focused on the "need" for a massive defense build up while the Democrats' message will be focused on affordability.
The fiscal 2027 budget will be the first time Trump puts his second-term governing agenda into one comprehensive document — with the numbers to back it up. The budget he released last year lacked detailed line-by-line spending targets and the economic assumptions necessary to project the long-term cost of his proposals.
Investors in US Treasuries will be looking to see if the debt and ...
