银行财报折射的宏观韧性与金融交易狂热
本周全球金融市场动能明显衰竭，各大主流指数相继跌破移动平均线，呈现整体下挫态势。然而，从银行业的微观表现来看，实体经济的韧性依旧完好。作为宏观经济最敏感的“晴雨表”，各大银行掌握着最直接的支付流向与信贷质量数据。美国银行（Bank of America）的数据显示，消费者支出仍维持同比5%的稳健增长，且坏账拨备与拨备覆盖率并未出现恶化。摩根大通（JP Morgan）在业绩说明会中进一步指出，从其底层数据看，市场所担忧的“K型复苏”——即高收入群体向好、低收入群体恶化的贫富分化型经济形态——在现实中并未被观测到，美国居民消费整体健康。
但在消费信贷保持健康的另一端，金融市场的风险投机却已趋于狂热。高盛（Goldman Sachs）等投行股本部门业绩同比暴增50%以上，这直接反映了美股首次公开募股的活跃以及二级市场极为频繁的交易量。在这种高度频繁的交易背后，投机者正在通过保证金贷款（Margin Loans：投资者以证券为抵押向券商借入资金进行交易）、互换合约（Swaps：双方约定交换未来现金流的金融衍生工具）等金融衍生品疯狂加杠杆。这种金融系统内的资金狂热与实体经济的稳步增长形成了鲜明的反差，也为后续的流动性踩踏埋下了隐患。
Original English Source
Hello my friends. Today is July 18th and this is markets weekly. All right, so this past week was actually a pretty eventful week in the markets. We had a lot of big things happening and overall the markets did not do well. You can see that the major indexes are very clearly losing momentum breaking those moving averages. So today first let's talk a little bit about the economy based on bank earnings and a little Fed speak as well. And as you guys know, one of the things that I like to look about look at when understanding the economy is what the big banks are saying. Everyone has an account at a bank. So banks see how payments are flowing and they can see credit quality. So they are a very good sign as to how the overall macroeconomy is doing and overall all the banks are basically saying that things are doing well. Now in particular let's look at the spending data from Bank of America. You can see that spending is fine still up 5% year-over-year. That's solid. And if you look at credit quality you can see that credit quality is totally fine as well. there's no increase in charge offs and really not much in the loan loss reserves either. So looking at these just these basic metrics it's pretty fine. one of the interesting comments I heard from JP Morgan and JP Morgan is always asked at every earnings conference what they think about the US consumer and there's they're saying that across the board everything is fine and that K-shaped economy where the top half of the K is doing well the bottom half is struggling they don't actually see that in the data so again this is all very good now one of the interesting things that we also see in bank earnings data is banks especially their equities division are performing spectacularly. Now, here's this performance by Goldman Sachs. You can see year-over-year their equity segment is basically performing you know 50% better. Now, that is of course due to IPOs and due to the frantic trading and equities. We see when there's a lot of trading, where there's a lot of transactions, you can bet that people are livering up. It could be margin loans, it could be through swaps and so forth. And the investment banks are benefiting from that. And we see that in all the major investment banks. So again, it's just a reflection of the frenzy we see in the financial markets.通胀断崖与美联储决策：政治大选阴影下的利率博弈
在宏观政策层面，本周美联储官员的公开表态极具博弈色彩。美联储官员凯文（Kevin）在国会听证会上重申了强硬的鹰派立场，其背后的宏观逻辑源于标准经济学理论：通货膨胀主要由通胀预期（Inflation Expectations：公众对未来物价变动的主观心理预期）所驱动。只要维持稳定的预期，真实的通胀走势便会趋于平稳。因此，他的表态更像是一种预期管理。与此相比，具有实质性政策风向标意义的沃勒理事（Governor Waller）在上周一的发言则更为强硬，他暗示若核心消费者物价指数（Core CPI：剔除食品和能源价格波动的消费物价指数）数据持续过热，他将支持在7月的政策会议上继续加息。
然而，本周公布的通胀数据却出人意料地出现断崖式下跌。核心CPI月度环比增长率直接降至零，这彻底打消了市场对7月加息的顾虑。尽管美联储的核心锚定指标是个人消费支出平减指数（PCE: Personal Consumption Expenditures），但随着核心CPI与生产者物价指数（PPI）的双双降温，7月加息概率已完全归零。目前市场普遍预计年内仅在12月有一次防御性加息。值得注意的是，11月美国即将迎来关键的中期选举（Midterm Elections: 美国在总统任期中期进行的国会选举），美联储极力避免在9月敏感期进行任何政策干预。这意味着未来的货币政策将高度依赖数据表现，且极易受到美股市场大幅波动导致的流动性收紧而随时转向。
Original English Source
Now, this week, we also had some notable Fed speak. We had Kevin who went on the Hill reemphasizing hawkish stuff. You know, he has to say that because if you are a standard economist, you think that inflation is caused by inflation expectations. So you believe that if you have stable inflation expectations, inflation in real life will also be stable. And you think that people look at the central bank to shape their inflation expectations. So it's his job to go and emphasize price stability blah blah blah. I don't believe that's how the world works. But that's what he believes. And so he will have to go on to Capitol Hill and say hawkish stuff. But what was much more meaningful I think was that this week we had Governor Waller speak. And Governor Waller historically has been one of the more influential governors. And he was actually saying pretty hawkish stuff as well. He was suggesting actually when speaking Monday that he would be open to a July hike assuming that we had a hot core inflation print. His view was that you know inflation is core inflation has been rising and it's just not good and if things are not if it's not heading down then we will have to do something and so there was a lot of attention paid to CPI prints this past week. Now, to the surprise of many, CPI core CPI was actually much colder than expected. Actually, on a month-over-month basis, core CPI was actually zero. So, once that print came out and it was a huge surprise to the market, you can see that the July hike odds basically disappeared, right? So, if we had a hot month overmonth core, we would have had a July hike probably. But now that that all that concern is gone. Now of course the Fed doesn't target CPI. It targets PCE. And based on the cool CPI and the cool PPI we got the day after forecast are suggesting that you know PCE core PC month is going to be okay as well. Now the market at the moment is still pricing in one more hike one hike this year. Not this month but by December. Now this is kind of difficult to see. It's going to be data dependent of course but as you know in November we're going to have elections. So you know hiking in September just before the midterm elections I feel like that's something that Kevin would like to avoid. So maybe if we do have a hike we could see that in December. Again it's going to be heavily data dependent and also dependent on the markets as well. Should the stock market decline, the market would take out those hikes, which brings us to our second topic.美伊冲突再起与石油储备危局：地缘政治与能源瓶颈的博弈
本周美股市场的最大黑天鹅源自地缘政治冲突的再度升级。令人意外的是，标榜不参与无意义地缘冲突的MAGA政策框架本周出现巨大偏离。尽管现任总统曾反复抨击小布什（George Bush）入侵伊拉克是破坏中东局势的战略灾难，但其在今年却主动发起了对伊朗的全面空中打击。尽管此前双方达成了《凡尔赛谅解备忘录》（Versailles Memorandum of Understanding），通过美方向伊朗支付资金换取了为期60天的暂时停火，但停火协议到期后冲突立即卷土重来。目前，大量空中加油机已在以色列集结完毕，伊朗也对美军中东基地展开了反击，中东战云正迅速向全面战争演变。
伴随地缘冲突升级的是美国日益枯竭的战略石油储备（SPR: Strategic Petroleum Reserve）。目前的储备量已被消耗至历史罕见的3亿桶极低点。石油专家警告称，由于长期抽取，储备库内部结构出现物理劣化，其底部残余的大量储备在技术上已无法被有效提取，这意味着美国面临随时断油的绝对危机。与此同时，东欧炼油厂的持续遇袭导致柴油、航空煤油和汽油等精炼油品严重短缺，国际原油现货价格迅速飙升。这一原油危局不仅导致美债30年期利率一度突破5%的警戒线，也迫使军事战略学者如罗伯特·佩普（Robert Pape）教授研判，美军正在压制伊朗海岸防御，可能利用库尔德地方武装（Kurdish Forces）并协同美军地面部队展开实质性的入侵行动，地缘危机已进入最危险的临界点。
Original English Source
So, this past week was a pretty bad week for the stock market. We had two blows to the market. One of course is we have a significant significant tumble in the AI trade. And secondly, we had the reemergence of the Iran war. So, let's first start talking about the war. So, now this is actually a huge surprise to me. All of this actually has been a huge surprise to me. So, one of the core tenants of MAGA, of course, make America great again, was to not have these pointless foreign wars. And the president had been campaigning about this for on this for many times, many years, openly laughing at George Bush for making a huge mistake for getting into Iraq, which we can all see was absolutely right, which but at the time when he was campaigning for this was something that you wouldn't say as a Republican presidential candidate. >> The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. We don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. >> So, George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. >> But so, you >> Now, fast forward to this year. I think the president surprised many people by just starting a war in Iran, going out and attacking Iran. Now, this is not the first time. Last year he also bombed Iran but this time was a full-out assault that started earlier in the year and seemingly we had a ceasefire a memor the Versailles memorandum of understanding that basically freeze the conflict or at least for 60 days and looked like the US had to pay Iran to to to stop the conflict. And so at that time the president was telling everyone that I I got to stop this because we're running out of oil reserves and I don't want to be remembered as someone who basically destroyed the global economy. So I think it's a double surprise to me to see that basically the war is back on as we speak. it looks like there's ongoing skirmishes as we speak. It looks like there's a significant buildup in the Middle East where you have a lot of aerial refueling tankers that are parked in Israel for potential use for another air campaign in Iran. And of course, Iran is also striking a lot of US military bases. So, it looks really much like we're moving towards an allout war that could heat up in the coming days. And at the same time, the US position now is is not as strong as it was before. So again, one of our big constraints is that we have a stockpile of of oil and that's been running low. If you look at it now, you can see that you had a slight replenishment during the ceasefire, but really we're we're still at multi-year actually probably around alltime lows. And the thing is that although it looks like we still have say 300 billion 300 million barrels, all the oil experts are saying that we can't actually access all of them because past a certain level you just can't really use the SPR because it deteriorates and no one knows what that exact level is. So again, there's still a timer there where we could run out of oil and at the same time remember there's ongoing refinery problems in happening in in Eastern Europe and so forth. So you can have shortages in refined products like diesel, like jet fuel, like gasoline and so forth. So the situation hasn't improved on the economic front and of course the US continues to run low on key munitions. So it's it's it's really strange to see the conflict restart, but it is what it is. If you look at spot oil prices, you can see spot oil is going up again. So this is obviously very negative for the markets and for the global economy. So that is hurting market sentiment. And if you look at interest rates in the beginning, you can see that interest rates were going higher. You have the third year climbing notably above 5%. But towards the end of the week as the equity market also tumbled the rates also went down a bit balancing of course recession concerns with higher oil prices. So this is not good and we'll see how this evolves. Now Professor Robert Pap who was an expert on this is looking at the targets that the US is hitting and he is suggesting that this looks like the US is suppressing coastal defenses in preparation for a ground invasion. Now this could happen in part with encouraging so foreign troops like Kurdish forces to go and invade Iran but it will also involve some degree of US troops as well. So that would be a major escalation and we could see that if it happens in the coming days.AI概念股非理性调整与杠杆爆仓潮：利好出尽的底层逻辑
尽管地缘风险高企，但对本周市场资金面产生更大冲击的，是AI概念股的非理性大跌。此前，全球投机资金通过高杠杆持续推高AI标的，韩国Kospi指数呈现抛物线式的无量暴涨。然而，当本周五韩国股市因节日休市时，海外市场的断崖式下跌导致韩国投机账户遭遇系统性清算，据估计有多达百万个韩国散户账户收到了追加保证金通知（Margin Call：当投资者保证金账户余额低于维持要求时，券商发出的强制补足资金要求）。
更令市场担忧的是，本轮大跌并非由利空引发，相反，AI产业链的核心环节近期均释放了极其乐观的信息：SK海力士（SK Hynix）CEO强调高带宽内存需求持续暴增；欧洲光刻机巨头阿斯麦（ASML）重申AI订单强劲；晶圆代工龙头台积电（TSMC）亦发布了极其乐观的业绩指引。然而在这些利好落地后，ASML却遭遇获利盘出逃，台积电也在周五大跌7%。这种“利好出尽即大跌”的系统反馈，表明市场多头仓位已极度拥挤，杠杆投机资金的购买力在短期内已被完全耗尽。随着7月期权到期日和下周三VIX指数期权结算的临近，市场正失去最后的流动性支撑，走势愈发显得沉重。
Original English Source
Now the second punch to the market was something that I think was actually more impactful than the Iran war. I I kind of get got the sense that the market wasn't too caring too much about it. It was mostly about what's happening in AI. So as we know over the past few weeks AI has been powering the market higher and the vanguard of this of course is South Korea. The Cosby index basically going parabolic. Now over the past few days the Cosby has taken a huge huge tumble. You can see it basically it looks like it went you know it's basically VT topping. Now again markets are fundamentally at this point just leveraging momentum. And so what you saw over the past few months is a tremendous amount of speculators piling in and you have a lot of people buying leverage through options and a lot of people buying leverage through levered ETFs and you can see the assets under management of levered ETFs absolutely surged. Now there's reports going around that over a million Korean trading accounts got margin calls on Friday. It was a Korean holiday. So we don't know the full extent of the carnage that happened. Obviously, lower NASDAQ is going to bleed into Korea as well. So, we'll figure that out on Monday. What was doubly concerning though for the AI trade is that we actually had really good AI news. We had SK Highex who showed up in the US to sell more stock. Again, increasing supply of stock. Their CEO was very upbeat about demand for RAM. You had ASML in Euroland talking about very upbeat about demand for AI. And you also had TSMC again huge huge producer of microchips in Taiwan go out and tell you that very bullish outlook and everything was great. But at the same time you had ASML sell off on the good news and you had TSMC down 7% on Friday. And so if you have good news and yet the stock sells off, you have to wonder how can you get the stock to go back up. it's possible that everyone who was bought has already bought in and more with leverage. So that's I think a very dangerous moment when you're looking at just basic market positioning. And of course the many smart options people are saying that this past week there was some support because it was July options expiry and there's continued to be some support heading to next week until Wednesday's VIX expiration. But despite all this, the market looked pretty heavy and honestly just looks like it's losing momentum.开源模型Kimi冲击闭源双雄：AI商品化与全球生产力重塑
除了短期资金踩踏外，AI赛道也迎来了产业底座层面的颠覆性变数。中国大模型初创公司月之暗面发布了全新一代Kimi模型，在基准测试上展示出了极其接近ChatGPT与Claude等美国一线闭源大模型的技术实力。Kimi的颠覆性不仅在于其卓越的性能，更在于其采用了开放权重（Open-weight: 允许用户下载模型底层权重并在本地硬件运行的大模型部署模式）的形式，这重现了去年DeepSeek凭借开源直接打破行业格局、引发科技板块全线重估的“DeepSeek时刻”。
这一大模型格局的变化彻底重创了传统闭源AI巨头的商业闭环。OpenAI等闭源公司此前凭借千亿美元的估值预期，严重依赖于用户按月支付订阅费、由平台方托管算力的商业模式。而当同等量级的开源模型可以被以极低的运行成本部署在本地硬件时，用户对闭源模型的粘性势必发生松动。同时，这极大缓解了企业在数据隐私层面的焦虑，防止核心机密在云端托管中被二次训练。从长远来看，AI正逐步演变为一种商品化（Commoditized：技术门槛消失，转化为低成本、高可得性通用资源的过程）的公共资源。全球各地的开发者都能够以极低成本获取相当于百万名博士级别的智力支持。这虽然重塑了全球生产力并拉近了中低收入国家与发达国家之间的技术差距，但美国对全球的技术护城河与科技股估值溢价也将面临系统性的收缩。