Is anyone else looking at this perfect storm hitting by November? ($150 oil, US debt spiral, and the IPO index drain)
I've been trying to connect the dots on a few massive macro risks coming up over the next few months, and honestly, the math is starting to look pretty crazy heading into the elections.
First, this US-Iran "deal" feels incredibly shaky. Markets are happily rallying today :). Even if the heads of state signed a paper, the IRGC has zero reason to play nice. If I'm them, the smartest move to hurt the US to the maximum extent is striking oil choke points right when the elections are around the corner. If they hit the Strait of Hormuz and include Bab el-Mandeb this time to really turn up the heat, Jamie Dimon’s prediction of $150+ oil is basically a guarantee. That triggers a massive second wave of inflation that we aren't prepared for.
Which leads to the next domino: the Fed and the US debt spiral. If oil hits $150, inflation screams back up, and the bond market is already pricing in a rate hike. But if the Fed has to hike rates to kill energy inflation, the interest on our national debt explodes. We literally enter a trap where the government has to borrow money just to pay the interest on the money we already borrowed.
Then you look at the plumbing of the stock market itself. SpaceX just went public at a ridiculous $2.1T valuation, and everyone is yelling "SpaceX to the moon." But look at the timing. Because of the Nasdaq-100 fast-track rule, passive index funds and 401k trackers have exactly 15 trading days to buy it. Since it's a closed pool of capital inside those ETFs, they mathematically have to dump existing tech anchors like NVDA, GOOGL, and AAPL to make room to squeeze SpaceX in. And there are two more massive IPOs (Anthropic and OpenAI) stubbornly lined up right behind it, swearing to repeat history.
Professor Jeremy Siegel was just on CNBC saying "global liquidity" will act as a floor and prevent a crash. But how does macro liquidity fix a forced structural index squeeze combined with a massive geopolitical oil shock?
Thinking about all of this hitting at the exact same time around November is getting wild. Am I missing something here or does this look like a massive systemic trap?