Peter's Blog

The US tax system is often praised as a means of funding essential government services and redistributing wealth. A deeper analysis reveals that it is primarily driven by envy and resentment rather than a genuine concern for the common good. By pitting different groups against each other, the tax code fuels social division and undermines […]

June’s Employment Situation report offered little comfort to households or policymakers. Headline non-farm payrolls grew by a scant 57,000, a figure that arrived alongside a combined 74,000 downward revision to April and May. The official unemployment rate edged down to 4.2 percent, yet that improvement came only because 720,000 Americans exited the labor force. As […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) on Tuesday, and the report offered little new for markets to digest. Total openings in May held at 7.6 million, hires came in at 5.2 million, and separations totaled 5.1 million. The underlying rates (openings at 4.6%, hiring at 3.3%, […]

The analysis below covers the Employment picture released on the first Friday of every month. While most of the attention goes to the Headline Report, it can be helpful to look at the details, revisions, and other reports to get a better gauge of what is really going on. Current Trends The jobs report showed […]

The model of software-as-a-service is dead. Already successful businesses have been able to hold onto some of their past glory, but new SaaS businesses have it much more difficult than they did even five years ago. Businesses are tired of paying for tools that have potential to make them more efficient. People are ready to […]

The AI bubble has become a frequent fixture in the financial news cycle as pundits and institutions express their fear that, when it pops, it could drag the global economy into crisis. Central bankers and institutions like the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are sounding alarms about debt-fueled AI investments, overexuberance, fragile funding structures, and […]

Nearly all read distributive forms of government try to find some way to give moral justification for their poor economic choices. They assume that it will be easier for people to accept wealth redistribution if they can somehow prove that the wealthy are morally inferior. While like any group of people the wealthy have their […]

People love to lie to themselves, particularly about themselves. This has been true throughout all of history, and it is now revealing itself to be even more true because of incredible material abundance and new technologies. Artificial intelligence is explicitly sycophantic, but there has always been a large market for things that can increase the […]

New York Federal Reserve President John Williams didn’t show up to Tuesday’s Crane’s Money Fund Symposium in person, but his prepared remarks got out anyway. Gold didn’t care either way. Williams described the U.S. economy as “resilient amid the uncertainty” from the Middle East conflict, pointing to steady consumer spending and “robust” artificial-intelligence investment. In […]

Please note: the CoTs report was published 06/26/2026 for the period ending 06/23/2026. “Managed Money” and “Hedge Funds” are used interchangeably. The Commitment of Traders report is a weekly publication that shows the breakdown of ownership in the Futures market. For every contract, there is a long and a short, so the net positioning will […]