| Swan Dive — January 23, 2026 Addison Wiggin Stocks climbed for a second straight day, which is what they tend to do when President Trump does what he always does: pushes the world toward the ledge, peers over the edge for a moment, then steps back and calls it statesmanship.
The tariff threats aimed at Europe softened. The talk of taking Greenland “by force” lost its teeth. Dip-buyers, conditioned by a year of tariff threats and muscle memory, treated the retreat as the all-clear.
The party resumed.
GE Aerospace, meanwhile, played the role of the awkward guest at the wedding reception — standing alone near the shrimp cocktail, underwhelming everyone with a sales forecast that didn’t match the crowd’s mood.
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The market slapped it anyway. But a single corporate stumble doesn’t matter much when the broader tape is levitating on a more potent, and potentially more dangerous, force than earnings: belief.
Belief is precisely what we’re dealing with now. Not analysis. Not prudent pricing. Not sober portfolio construction. Faith. The kind of faith that makes even veteran strategists stare into the glowing screen and pretend they don’t see the cliff.
We’ve entered a new territory on Wall Street: for the first time in recorded history, zero strategists are predicting a down year.
Not “most are bullish.”
Not “nearly all expect gains.”
Zero bearish calls for 2026.
Unanimity so complete it resembles a vote in a collapsing authoritarian state.
The numbers match the mood. Buy ratings are at a record 57.5%. Sell ratings are down to 4.8%, near an all-time low. Cash allocations are 3.7%, a level that trips traditional sell signals — because historically, when everyone is fully invested and fully convinced, there is no one left to buy.
It’s worth repeating: There’s no historical parallel for this level of consensus. Not 1999. Not 2007. Not 2021. This is new. A market that has convinced traders that pessimism is career suicide, and doubt is a disqualifying trait.
When dissent disappears from a pricing mechanism designed to incorporate dissent, you no longer have a market. You have a global echo chamber with ticker symbols.
You have to imagine the hairs on the back of any contrarian's neck are at full attention. 🧠 The Labor Market Myth Wall Street Lives On Here’s what makes today’s setup especially fragile. The largest capital concentration in modern history — the $4 trillion in duration extensions since October 2023, the $21 trillion in market cap packed into seven technology companies — rests on a single assumption about the U.S. labor market.
Repeated as doctrine in every major research note and every financial media panel, the assumption goes like this: the American economy requires roughly 200,000 new jobs per month to maintain stability.
Anything below that signals deterioration. Deterioration forces Fed cuts. Fed cuts support equities. Add in maximum pressure from the Trump administration… from the President to the Treasury Secretary through the trade envoys and labor economists… all are gunning for the Fed to drop rates toward 1% again (Trump’s Truth Social objective).
The mirage of 200,000 new jobs provides a clean narrative. A nice round number and a comforting story. It provides incentive for the Fed to “go along, to get along” and just cut rates, already.
The number is also structurally outdated.
The number of jobs needed to keep unemployment stable has collapsed — not from politics or sentiment, but from demographics.
The Dallas Federal Reserve estimates breakeven job growth around 30,000. Kansas City estimates 29,000. The Brookings Institution, in a January 13, 2026, analysis, suggests breakeven could be as low as 20,000 under aggressive enforcement scenarios.
That means December’s payroll print, adding 50,000 jobs, which was universally framed as “weak” in financial media and bank research, was actually 150% above demographic breakeven.
The unemployment rate fell to 4.4% not despite weak hiring — but because weak hiring is no longer weak when the labor force itself is shrinking.
Now, understand what this means: every payroll report this year is likely to be systematically misread. And, if the pattern from 2025 persists, previous “prints” will be revised downward.
The media will call 50,000 “weak.” Strategists will call it “softening.” Markets will price in new cuts. This mispricing matters because it’s the keystone holding up the entire consensus trade: the belief that the Fed will be forced to cut aggressively in response to “labor market deterioration.”
But if the labor market doesn’t deteriorate the way the models expect — if low payroll prints are not a sign of collapse but a sign of demographic reality — then the Fed doesn’t get the permission structure it needs to cut quickly.
And the ire and angst over rates Trump has focused on Jerome Powell – including a criminal probe by the Department of Justice – will heat up before Powell’s term ends on May 15, 2026.
Either way, the “Fed must cut” and “don’t fight the Fed” ethos is apparently alive and well among Wall Strategists… every one of them. 🎢 When Everyone Is Long, the Market Gets Brittle Goldman Sachs's Shawn Tuteja said something important in plain language: equity sentiment is so positive that the market becomes more susceptible to shocks.
When “everyone is long already,” the path gets more dangerous.
That’s the whole story. And worth paying attention to.
Investors have become excited about the same catalysts: economic reacceleration, Fed cuts, strong earnings growth. Tuteja says discretionary positioning is very long equities, particularly in AI productivity names and consumer exposure. This positioning was layered in late 2025 and reinforced early in 2026.
And that’s why Tuesday’s tariff panic mattered. Not because tariffs are new. Because the market is stretched. A market with wide positioning doesn’t snap. It bends. A market with narrow positioning shatters.
Tuteja still thinks stocks grind higher. He’s probably right — until he’s not. What he’s describing is a market in late-cycle psychology: high conviction, low cash, universal optimism, brittle structure. This is how bull markets end. They don’t die in despair. They die in confidence. Continued Below...
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🤖 AI Stops Being a “Theme” and Becomes the Operating System At the same time, Goldman’s chief information officer, Marco Argenti, also released a statement this morning that adds some dramatic tension.
Artificial Intelligence, Argenti says, is evolving beyond chat into something more consequential: AI models are becoming operating systems — systems that can access tools, make decisions, and execute tasks independently.
This is more than a small upgrade, it’s the difference between a calculator and a CFO. Between an app and an agent. Between a gadget and an economic restructuring.
Argenti’s prediction reads like a map of the near future.
Context becomes the frontier — not training data, but the ability to reason across vast contextual landscapes.
The personal agent becomes standard — not a novelty, but a background service that handles your cancellations, reschedules your meetings, reroutes your travel, and orders dinner when the restaurants are closing because the weather is bad.
And then comes the inevitable monetization shift: a world where companies deploy fleets of agents, human-orchestrated but machine-driven, billing by tokens consumed rather than hours worked.
This implies a wholesale reorganization of labor.
The skill that matters most becomes learning — the ability to adapt, to reimagine, to change your own role faster than the machine changes it for you.  Wall Street analysts — who have consistently underestimated AI investment — now expect the hyperscalers to pour over half a trillion dollars into capex in 2026. That’s not an “AI boom.” That’s a parallel industrial revolution — electric grid scale, telecom scale, defense scale.
And that’s the part that matters: AI is fast becoming a national infrastructure layer.
Investors are as bullish on capex spending as they were throughout the second half of 2025. Hence, the drama. 🟡 Gold, Oil, and the Dollar: The Quiet Rotation Out of Fiat Trust It seems, we’re heavy on Goldman’s Outlook 2026 today. This one is not new for Swan Dive readers, but it is notable who’s saying it:
Goldman’s forecast podcast offered another notable conviction: their strategists expect the dollar to depreciate further in 2026, and they maintain a high-conviction long on gold due to central bank demand and anticipated Fed cuts. Oil, by contrast, is expected to trend lower.
On paper, this looks like a neat and orderly outlook: falling dollar, rising gold, lower oil, higher stocks. The kind of model that makes asset allocators smile politely while they rebalance their 60/40 into something more exotic.
But there’s something deeper here that matters more than the clean forecast: gold is acting as a global referendum on fiat regimes. A referendum on trust — in institutions, in reserve currency credibility, in political stability, in the ability of governments to fund themselves without inflating the purchasing power of the citizenry into dust.
When gold rises persistently alongside rising risk assets, it’s not “risk on.” It’s hedged risk on — a vote that says: yes, we’ll play the game, but we want a lifeboat strapped to our backs.
And that framing connects directly to a crucial piece of today’s content. 🌫️ The Shutdown Hangover: “Fog” as Monetary Policy Risk Further complicating the rate cut picture…
As we head toward another potential shutdown next week, it’s worth noting that the previous shutdown in October and November has not stopped distorting the economy.
It continues to inject fog into the data.
Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation, one of the Fed’s key gauges, is now running a month behind until April.
CPI was also affected: the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t collect October data at all. Prices were gathered later than normal in November. Some economists now speculate that holiday sales timing may have distorted the readings.
More than an administrative inconvenience, the “fog” is monetary policy impairment at a time when gold is already exerting its own corrective measures.
The Fed can tolerate uncertainty. It cannot tolerate distorted inputs at a time when the market is demanding cuts, the bond market is pricing a path, and equity valuations are precariously balanced on the assumption that the Fed will come to the rescue. For its opinion on the monetary risk faced by the US, silver blew through $100 today. And will likely keep going as another round of headlines about the metal are sure to follow. 🧓 Bonner’s “Dying Animal” and the New Sell America Trade Our erstwhile writing partner, Bill Bonner, offered his usual grim poetry: America is “fastened to a dying animal,” or maybe a herd of them — a president who will be 82 when he leaves office, a constitution nearly 240 years old, and a bubble dollar 55 years into its fiat experiment.
The historical examples are brutal. The German mark lasted two years. The Hungarian pengő lasted one. The Zimbabwe dollar collapsed in three, with inflation rates so grotesque they read like satire.
Bonner’s point is not that the U.S. is Zimbabwe. His point is that fiat systems have a shelf life, and once the perception shifts — once foreign savers begin to worry whether their money remains a store of value — the exit door narrows.
The “Sell America” trade used to be fringe speculation, poo-pooed by the likes of Warren Buffett.
Reuters reported that one of Sweden’s top pension funds, Alecta, cut U.S. Treasurys — reducing holdings in several rounds since early 2025. This isn’t ideological. This is portfolio risk management.
Meanwhile, European stocks outperformed U.S. stocks last year — 36% versus 17%. Emerging markets did 34%. And early 2026 continues the trend: Mag 7 down 4.6%, emerging markets up 4.6%.
Even the newly retired Warren Buffett, patron saint of “Never sell America,” left his successor Grey Abel sitting on $382 billion in cash because he couldn’t find value on the way out the door. 🚽 The Strange Case of Toto: From Washlets to Wafers Finally, because the market loves absurdity as long as the fundamentals are real: Japan’s famous bidet-and-heated-seat toilet company Toto surged 11% after Goldman said it’s positioned to profit from AI chip manufacturing.
One of our favorite stories from the tech wreck era was when Corning, makers of the pink insulation you can find stashed behind the walls of your house, briefly became a tech darling by allocating capex spending to fiber optic cables to carry the Internet’s millions of packets of cat videos and baking recipes.
Same story here. Toto does more than build smart toilets that tell jokes. They produce electrostatic “chucks” — ceramic components that hold silicon wafers steady during semiconductor processing.
They’ve been making them since the 1980s. The AI capex boom has turned this niche into a profit engine.
Non-toilet manufacturing accounted for 42% of Toto’s operating income last year. Goldman expects growth to continue as the data center frenzy squeezes chipmaking equipment supply chains. Other Japanese consumer brands are doing similar things: Kao makes chemicals that sanitize silicon wafers, alongside facial cleansers.
It’s a perfect metaphor for the moment we’re in: the industrial substrate of the AI era is being built by unlikely hands, in quiet factories, far from the influencer chatter of Silicon Valley.
~ Addison
P.S.: Earlier today, Nick Buhelos at Prime Corporate Services came back to help us cut your IRS tax bill in 2026.  Nick walked us through simple steps on how you can: - Unlock 250+ deductions you currently can’t access.
- Apply trading losses to other income (W2, 1099, even your spouse’s).
- Shield your personal finances from trading risk.
Plus, Nick went over some things you can do to lower your 2025 taxes before you file in April – and some things that you can start doing today to lower your taxes in 2026.
If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.
How did we get here? Find out in these riveting reads: Demise of the Dollar, Financial Reckoning Day, and Empire of Debt — all three books are now available in their third post-pandemic editions. You might enjoy one or all three. 
(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites: Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million or Target.)
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