Weekly Weigh In: Orban Defeated In Hungary, AI Folding White Collars, Brace for Impact, Deployment, Lithium, $NTR, No Pain Yet
Orban’s defeat after 16 years could lead to a huge likelihood increase of continental war between the EU and Russia. Orban has been responsible for the majority of the stabilization between the two blocs since the Ukraine War; brokering relationships with respect to energy and continued dialogue with Russia.
The winner, Peter Magyar, has self-identified as a “critical” pro-European
My guess is that this is bad news for Hungary. Something that was rolled out by Magyar’s political party was a 13 questionnaire asking for citizen feedback. Obviously, I doubt the honesty and accuracy of this, instead this was just a campaign of “answering for the people”. There were 1,137,266 responses to the questionnaire (Hungary’s population is almost 10 million).
While most of the questions seem sensible enough–some matters are clearly in the wrong direction. I’ve posted some of them below.
| Question | Yes | No |
| Do you agree with the imposition of an extra tax on assets above 5 billion forints? (15.8M USD). | 96.1 | 3.9 |
| Do you agree with Hungary remaining a member of the European Union and NATO? | 98.7 | 1.3 |
| Do you support Ukraine becoming a member of the European Union? | 58.2 | 41.8 |
| Do you agree with spending the recovered national wealth on education, healthcare, and rural development? | 99.3 | 0.7 |
| Do you agree with introducing a Pensioner SZÉP Card with a maximum annual value of 200 thousand forints, which can be used for food, medicine and health care? | 92.3 | 7.7 |
It will blend into the rest of dystopian Europe.
White Collar Jobs Lost
White-collar jobs have been declining for 34 consecutive months. THIS IS THE LONGEST EVER OUTSIDE OF A RECESSION!
Of course, there is no declared recession but by all previous definitions we’re currently in a recession. Irregardless of this point, AI is only beginning amongst the corporate world and has the capacity to wipe out far, far more employment figures yet. I wrote something similar to this, mostly related to specialty fields such as medicine below:
There’s No Way We Aren’t All Impacted
At some point, the longer they have the Strait closed, this is just going to cause the USA to shoot themselves in the foot as they throw a curveball to the global financial system which is dependent upon dollars [and for the USA to service the record high debt levels/interests].
More Casualties?
Last week where I said the ceasefire was temporary–it seems to be playing out like it: The US is deploying 10,000 more troops to the Middle East for the war Trump told Fox News last night was “over”. Let’s hope that this deployment is to regions that are away from harm.
Commodity
Weekly, Monthly, YTD and YoY we’re now seeing that Lithium is having a bounce back! This is fantastic because there has been a major sell off of lithium stocks as the market was flooded with supplies and many companies were burning through cash.
Cash Quad Update
Monday’s Cash Quad named a stock that has just received some news to it. The world’s largest producer of potash with six mines in Saskatchewan – chose Washington State over insane NDP B.C. Nutrien’s reasoning has come down to regulations, taxes and approval timelines.
They’re now deciding to spend $1B on a Washington export terminal for cheaper access to Indo-Asian markets because transport costs now exceed mining costs in Canada.
Hell to Come
Warren Buffet was asked recently “since the market has pulled back slightly would you be buying?” and he corrected the interviewer by saying something to effect of “this hasn’t been a pullback, I don’t consider 5-6% a pullback, I’m not in the industry of looking for little deals like that”. Do you agree with him? Let’s look at how index markets are doing still (the figure closest to the right is year to date)
