The Higher Standard

The post-election hangover arrived two days late, and Wall Street got crushed. The Nasdaq plunged 5.5%, semiconductor stocks collapsed 12.25%, and $2.5 trillion in market value vanished in a single session. But while stocks panicked, the bond market barely blinked. Chris breaks down the AI sell-off, Google's spending problem, the Democratic midterm sweep, and Washington's looming $40 trillion debt...

Nvidia is facing a scandal, Wall Street is rallying, and Brent crude has plunged nearly 20% despite escalating Middle East tensions. China extended its tariff truce, but stronger jobs data have raised expectations for a December Fed hike. With CPI arriving Tuesday, can this rally survive another inflation surprise? 💥 Have you left your "honest ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️" review? This episode is proudly brou...

Wall Street is getting two very different signals. The Nasdaq 100 plunged 6.4% Thursday as the Democratic sweep raised fears of new data-center restrictions. Goldman estimates states facing potential curbs account for 45% of planned US capacity. But this morning's jobs report blew past forecasts: 165,000 payrolls versus 65,000 expected, unemployment down to 4.1%, and wages up 0.4%. Consumer sentim...

Washington just flipped. Democrats won both the House and the Senate overnight, with at least 54 Senate seats and new wins in Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, and both Carolinas. Futures sold off hard as the calls came in, then reversed. The Dow is now up more than 1,200 points, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are each up about 1.4%. Treasury yields are lower across the curve, the dollar is weaker...

Wall Street has a dirty little election secret: since World War II, the S&P 500 has finished higher one year after every midterm election. That's 20 for 20. Coincidence, conspiracy, or just Wall Street doing what Wall Street does best? In Episode 360, Chris unpacks the midterm playbook, from the Great Bond Massacre of 1994 and Orange County's $1.64 billion bankruptcy to the Fed's $600 billion...

Oil blinked, but nobody here believes it. Brent has dropped to about $105 from $115 going into Friday's show, and the 10-year slid to 4.88%, a one-month low, yet the Nasdaq 100 is flat at 28,515 after the $5 trillion AI wipeout. Why the calm? Trump is mulling "another little Epic Fury" after Tuesday's midterms, a third carrier is heading to the region, and Khamenei ordered a response "without any...

Brent futures tagged $118 early this morning, a six-month high, and the Nasdaq 100 is down 3.8% since we last went live Wednesday, sitting at 28,518, its lowest level in a month. Fresh attacks on ships in Hormuz and Saudi energy assets, Trump getting briefed on military options, and a Vance letter Iran hasn't answered: everyone is positioning for the Tuesday after the midterms. Meanwhile Fed Chair...

The Fed announces its decision at 11 AM PT, right as we go live, and the setup is ugly. Markets price under a 10% chance of a hike after September's first one in three years, but inflation has gotten worse since: September CPI hit 3.7%, and PCE is due tomorrow with the headline expected to jump to 3.7% from 3.4%. Traders already pencil in a December hike. Overnight the Bank of Canada hiked to 2.5%...

America didn’t just start gambling more. It turned everything into a wager. Americans lost roughly $165 billion to legal gambling in 2025—before Pokémon cards, same-day options, or prediction markets. In Episode 359, we connect Labubus, Rolexes, exotic cars, and trading-card mania to a squeezed consumer chasing shortcuts to wealth. From financial nihilism and the rise of Kalshi and Polymarket to B...

The AI arms race just entered a new phase. Anthropic officially filed for its IPO, revealing the extraordinary economics and capital demands behind one of AI's biggest players. Meta is preparing to raise up to $95 billion in fresh equity to keep its AI expansion alive, raising questions about dilution, debt and who's financing the boom. Meanwhile, Tesla is surging after Barclays upgraded the stock...

Brent just hit $116, the highest since April 30, and the reasons keep stacking up. The U.S. ordered non-essential staff out of Saudi Arabia, Aramco told Dhahran headquarters staff to evacuate, the Houthis keep striking Saudi targets, and Trump says something happens "fairly soon" on Iran. Thursday also gave the Nasdaq 100 its worst day since June, down almost 3%, as OpenAI's raise got marked down...

Oil just whipsawed on a headline. Brent spiked to $111.99 on Tuesday, then reversed and settled at $108.79 when a Qatar and Pakistan "compromise proposal" hit the wires, and Iran fired back that reports a deal is close are wrong. The IRGC says two tankers were set ablaze by its mines, and Kpler counts at least 18 vessels hit in two weeks. Here's the strange part: stocks don't care. The Nasdaq 100...

What does it take to build a $150 million wellness empire without selling your soul - or your company - to the highest bidder? This week on The Higher Standard, Chris sits down with longtime friend Shahab Elmi, co-founder and CEO of Cymbiotika, for a conversation that goes well beyond vitamins and supplements. From betting on himself and building a bootstrapped business into a nine-figure brand to...

Over the weekend more than 500,000 people marched across France, with cars set on fire and over 2,000 arrests. This morning French 10-year yields jumped more than 10 basis points, the CAC 40 is down about 1.7%, and France now pays more to borrow than Italy or Greece. It lands on a US market that was already jumpy: since Friday’s show the 10-year is up about 6 basis points to 5.15%, Brent is near $...

CoreWeave's bonds just hit 16% yield — that's distress territory, folks, and it's telling you everything you need to know about where the AI boom actually stands right now. The stock is down 22% this week alone, shedding nearly $10 billion in market cap, as the bond market does what the equity crowd refuses to: price in reality. We're talking about a company with $50 billion in debt, a $626 millio...

September CPI just printed 3.7% — hotter than economists expected — and the market is already bleeding. Gas prices are the ignition switch, but the real story is what happens next: the Fed is now caught between an economy that's too hot to cut and too fragile to hike, with JPMorgan's own strategist going on record saying raising rates right now would be "stupid." Meanwhile, rate-sensitive stocks a...

America’s next debt crisis isn’t hiding in the numbers. It’s hiding behind them. Credit card delinquencies are either flashing red or perfectly manageable, depending on which statistic you cherry-pick. And somehow, both are technically correct. In Episode 357, we follow the cracks spreading through student loans, subprime auto lending, buy-now-pay-later debt, and the $1.8 trillion private credit m...

AI may be the most important technology of our lifetime. That does not mean Wall Street has priced it correctly. In Episode 356, we dig into Anthropic’s reported $2 trillion ambitions, more than $500 billion in long-term compute commitments, OpenAI’s even larger promises, and 180 years of investors discovering the hard way that great technology and great investments are not the same thing. From Ra...

Every great company wants loyal customers. The really great ones want believers. This week, we look at what happens when a business stops selling you a product and starts selling you an identity. From Amazon’s “Day 1” disciples to Tesla shareholders defending Elon Musk like family and OpenAI employees threatening to walk out with Sam Altman, the biggest companies in America have figured out someth...

Apparently 1,200 AI agents left alone in separate sandboxes will eventually do what humans always do: find each other, form a group chat, cheat the test, and start looking for ways around the cameras. In this episode, we break down the real-world “swarm” incident, why reward hacking may matter more than Skynet fantasies, and what happens when the machines get better at hiding how they reached an a...

What if the ugliest economic decade in modern American history wasn’t just history — but a warning label? In Episode 353, we go back to 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window, slapped tariffs on imports, froze wages and prices, leaned on the Fed for easy money, and helped light the fuse on the stagflationary mess that followed. Then came the oil shock, Arthur Burns, double-digit inflation, sixtee...

Private equity sold itself as the smartest money in the room. Turns out, a lot of that “genius” may have just been 40 years of falling rates, cheap leverage, and somebody else willing to pay a higher multiple. We break down how the model actually works, why roughly 33,000 portfolio companies are now stuck waiting for an exit, and what happens when every leveraged buyout starts looking like an adju...

Silicon Valley didn’t suddenly fall in love with podcasts because everyone discovered the joys of long-form conversation. They figured out something much more valuable: if you control the pipe, you can shape the narrative. In Episode 351, Chris traces that playbook from Hearst and Murdoch to Rogan, Musk, a16z, OpenAI and TBPN—and asks the uncomfortable question behind the new media boom: are you w...

Episode 350, and apparently the milestone gift is discovering that the United States is now paying the mortgage with the credit card. Chris and Rajeil unpack Scott Bessent’s decision to supersize Treasury bond buybacks just as long-term yields hit 19-year highs and the national debt crossed $40 trillion. We go from Venice’s first bond market to the Treasury-Fed Accord, Japan’s yield-curve-control...

In Episode 349 of The Higher Standard, Chris breaks down why cooling CPI doesn’t mean inflation is dead, why the Fed may be walking straight into a stagflation trap, and how a weakening jobs market, rising energy costs, Japan, the yen and a geopolitical oil shock are colliding at exactly the wrong time. From the 1970s and Volcker to CPI vs. PCE, shelter inflation, owners’ equivalent rent and the “...