Ongoing Technical Analysis of Financial markets and Crypto


For sure financial advice - More on Substack & Twitter

Tylerisyoung.Substack.com
Twitter.com/TylerisYoung
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The Fundamentals

Read: Modern Monetary Theory - Slow at first, then all at once.


The Macroeconomic Backdrop

The macroeconomics problem displayed in a single chart:




Ongoing Technical Analysis



5/19/25

US Treasuries are no longer a AAA rated asset, the abyss approaches.

The market’s up…Again.

$8 trillion has come pouring back into the stock market, making up for more than half of the recent $15 trillion destruction of funds since February when the market experienced a 21% drawdown.

The driving forces are primarily a pause on the worst part of the traiffs, but something more ominous is lurking - Moodys a global credit rating organization has lowered their reliability status of US Treasuries from AAA (the highest tier) to AA1 (Just below) citing the government’s potential inability to cover unfunded liabilities.

So…Is this a real recovery or just exit liquidity in a bear market rally? Bear market rallies are fast, aggressive, and often short-lived.

Looking back to 2022, the market clawed back over 75% of its losses… then plunged again over inflationary fears.

Now in 2025, we’ve recovered just over 75% once again, history may not repeat but it can rhyme. Technicals of this recovery are looking decent—S&P futures are above the 200-day moving average which was a major area of concern.

Jst remember, the same type of setup in 2022 led to a head-and-shoulders top… and a collapse.

So, it always looks good—until it doesn’t.

What is the real driving force here? It’s of course difficult to tell with so much going on, every bear market has its own story.

In 2022, it was the beginning of the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes and inflation panic and markets surged anytime investors thought the Fed might pause.

But 2025 is slightly different and no—it’s not all about tariffs - the the so called 90 day pause doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods yet. The real issue today reduarging treasuries is interest rates and the national deficit.

We just took a big leap forward on on the escalator of America’s debt sprial.

While the majority of conservatives and mainstream have stopped worrying about the defecit, hawks have been warning for years that it would come back to bite us. After we hit 120% debt/GDP ratio in 2020, this was the point of no return - no country which has ever accumulated so much debt was able to recover without experiencing either hyper inflation, or a devaluing of the currency to gold or another comodity based assets.

This is what we have just experienced in 2025 - a devaluing of the currency through Moody’s reavaluation of US treasuries as less than a AAA rated asset to own - suggesting that the risk of the US defaulting on its debts has increased significantly.

Despite this, the current president, love him or hate him has proposed an increase to the federal deficit within his “One Big Beautiful Bill”.

Currently, over $1 trillion now goes toward interest payments—more than we spend on defense or healthcare, and apparently our congress is jointly suggesting that we increase defence spending in order to return order to this world.

And even with weak economic growth, bond yields are rising. Why? Because investors are demanding higher returns just to hold U.S. debt. America isn’t seen as a safe bet anymore and that’s a big problem.

Some believe rate cuts will fix this. They won’t.

Lowering rates may actually push long-term yields higher if investors think we’re just kicking the can down the road again. Despite the efforts of Elon’s DOGE, this year we have still managed to add $1 Trillion to the defecit.

Yet Trump’s bill is still proposing tax cuts, tariff hikes and hoping for rate cuts. The CME group which monitors investor sentiment in order to predict FED rates estimates that there is an 8.6% chance of rate cuts in the FED’s June meeting, but an 86.2% chance that the fed cuts rates in October. The question will remain - are they cytting for the right reasons, or the wrong ones?

The market might look strong right now, portfolios are up and everyone feels better… but underneath it all the US is staring down the barrel of the largest financial reckoning in a generation. Maybe even the last one the dollar gets to survive in its current form.

Whatever happens next, recovery or relapse, we will be watching.
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9/28/2022

Global economic outlook is the worst it has been since 1929

Given the USD global reserve currency status, all eyes are on the fed who’s DXY dollar index is sucking liquidity from every other global currency, there are only two ways out, one goes up, and the other goes down. Until we see the path resolved, our economy will remain in a downward trending stagflation.

Is the fed done hiking? The math on total debt and interest along with the credit impulse markets say yes. Powell still needs unemployment and housing signals to come down significantly before attempting any sort of pivot, or at least pause in rate hikes. Analysts are saying that they’ll pile in at SPX 3500 if we get there, but it’s rare to see perfect entries in times of great fear. Look out below & stack cash for some great PE entries. Otherwise a verbal pivot will signal that we’re going up from here, Nasdaq and Bitcoin will be the first to rebound. Either way, we could see an october surprise i.e. bear market rally leading into midterm elections and the endgame that comes after, whatever that may be.




Charts thanks to Biancoresearch.















7/1/2022

Atlanta Fed Confirms that we are about to enter a Recession

Most economists use the 10-2 year yield spread and curve to predict upcoming recessions, however the fed today is using the 10 year - 3 month spread. This is likely because it will be the last to flash the warning sign of recession and allow Biden to say things like “We have a very strong economy” as GDP continues to slow.

The NY Fed tells us that, “This model uses the slope of the yield curve, or “term spread,” to calculate the probability of a recession in the United States twelve months ahead. Here, the term spread is defined as the difference between 10-year and 3-month Treasury rates.”

The only tool the Fed has to combat high inflation is raising interest rates, typically ABOVE the rate of inflation, as should have been done a year ago when the economy was stronger in order to avoid the stagflation we’re seeing today. Higher interest rates mean a stronger dollar, and higher interest rates as term duration increases on bonds - a normal and healthy yield curve which rewards people for saving their money in cash longer.

The real rate of return when accounting for inflation on any of these bonds is currently several points in the negative due to price inflation, therefore the Fed needs to continue raising rates until inflation calms down from demand destruction and yields on risk free treasuries trends back towards sensible returns. Until this happens, we will continue to see other currencies fall in value compared to the US Dollar denominated hegemony - “The Dollar Milkshake”.

The Fed is far behind the curve, and the government’s interest payments on $30 Trillion dollars of debt and much more in foreign obligations, will ensure that the Fed remains behind the curve, actually favoring inflation that goes unnoticed in order to inflate away the debt, the only way out is through a hard landing, a deep recession, or returning to Quantitative Easing in order to simply kick the can down the road. This last option of QE is unfortunately not on the table at the moment because the money printing is what got us here in the first place.








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6/30/2022

Energy Price Inflation Soars in Germany and around the World

Americans owe $22 billion in already late utility bills as energy costs in the US rise 34% YOY.

Europe, more directly affected by the Russia Ukraine War has it much worse, Germany specifically is has experienced a 6X increase in the cost of baseload power since 2020. They managed this by increasing their reliance on Russian oil and gas along with shortsighted energy policies and adherence to the ESG narrative at the expense of their own fragility.

In 2020 Germany’s percentage usage of renewables was 46%, largely coming from wind, solar, and hydro electric. The remainder of their energy was from coal, gas, oil, and nuclear.

Despite still struggling to meet their stringent carbon related policies, and despite the now soaring energy costs, Germany has recently upheld the pledge to continue with the shut down their remaining nuclear reactors by the end of 2022, a decision that was decided a decade prior, in the wake of the Fukishima disaster in Japan.

The German government has also pledged to phase out coal - but not until 2038. This series of moves has ensured that their baseload energy consumption is actually getting more carbon intensive, not less. These choices, alongside western imposed Russian sanctions which have increased natural gas prices globally leave the German’s supply of baseload power insufficient for meeting modern expectations or demand.

Germany’s Vice Chancellor warned of a “Lehman like” economic collapse due to their current energy policy, and we are seeing it play out in fast and slow motion.

Germany is extremely close to rationing stores of natural gas, and suggesting it will start with hot water, a luxury some of those living in energy poverty have already forsaken despite their middle class incomes. Today, likely more than 23% of German people are suffering some form of “Energy Poverty” where a significant enough portion of their income goes towards energy, causing them to cut back on other necessities.

With prices so high, and natural gas stockpiles at record low levels, the German Government has announced that they will re-establish the use of previously decommissioned coal-fired power plants. Coal is far easier to bring back online than nuclear, so any future hiccups will likely see expansion of this more carbon intense base energy.

German wholesale oil is up ~70% YOY, and even an end to the war wouldn’t mean that western nations return to direct purchases from Russia, therefore these price increases are likely to remain.

Furthermore,UK newspaper The Telegraph suggests that if Germans won’t stop buying Russian gas, they too should face sanctions.

Lastly, Reuters reports that; Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania have joined Germany’s finance minister in opposing the 2035 mandate to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. This move, is postponed would all but ensure that the EU does not meet it’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to 1990 levels before 2030.

Many across the globe will be priced out of the green energy revolution.








6/18/2022

Update to the Japan Crisis

Japan’s Ponzi Scheme is running out of time. Japan has 12.8 Trillion on the BOJ’s balance sheet and their current debt/GDP is nearly 200%.

They have apparently reached their limit to perform Yield Curve Control in both the bond and stock market with newly printed treasuries which cannot find the buyers necessary to prop up the Yen’s purchasing power against USD. A panic spike in selling lead to Bond yields jumping up above the governments mandated ability to continue QE driven purchases without becoming insolvent with a debt/gdp ratio too high. Market participants selling bonds lead to higher interest payments for a government that cannot afford it.




6/9/2022

Japanese Yen spirals against US dollar, the consequences of endless QE

Japan has been the canary in the coal mine for the last decade, forecasting where us in the US and western nations who are participating in Quantitative Easing might end up. Japan has apparently reached its limits in how far they can go before trust in assets held on the central bank’s balance sheet is lost.

Japan’s debt/GDP ratio is nearly 200%, the highest of any nation in the world.



With a debt/GDP ratio this high, the government technically owes money to itself through the central bank’s deficit printing. The problem with having so much debt is the interest rates. Once interest rates begin to rise, so do interest payments needed to remain solvent. Without a robust and increasing GDP for taxpayer generated income for the government to fund the debt, the only option becomes - devalue the debt denominated in fiat currency which has no limitations to creation - inflate it away.

When the M2 money stock goes up, each dollar held by citizens and the government goes down when measured against other commodities, or other currencies which will remain stronger if they are not also printing more money, though the debt, taken out years, even decades ago remains the same. The debt positions can thus continually be serviced with newly created money that has a lesser value, and the longer a nation waits to pay off the debt, the cheaper it becomes.

A true sovereign debt crisis occurred in Greece when their debt was denominated in Euros, instead of their own former Greek currency, the drachma. Since the Greek centrral bank could not control the newly issued wupply of Euros, regulated by the ECB, we saw them enter a period of default where their debts needed to be written down in lieu of a western humanitarian crisis.

Central Banks like Japan, or the United States who can self fund have the advantage especially when interest rates are low, but when entering a period of tightening, and slower economic growth, or even stagflation as we are now, the only tool to create demand destruction and thus lower inflation would traditionally be - raising interest rates to the rate of inflation.

The problem with an inflationary environment is that to solve the problem of inflation, it is all but mandatory to cease the creation of more dollars. Volker of the FED solved this problem in the 70’s by raising rates to match the rate of inflation which was above 10% at the time. The only problem with doing that now is that we have too much debt.

If the US or Japan raised rates this high, to 8-16% to match the current inflation rate, the governments would not be able to finance the interest payments on the debt, and would thus default.

But they can’t print more money either, so it’s necessary to rely on jawboning all markets into demand destruction without raising rates, and so far it’s working.

If this is not effective enough, the US will need to follow Japan’s lead, by implementing Yield Curve Control (YCC).

The aim of YCC is to craft a particular shape to the yield rates on bonds issued by the government. When any entity including individuals are holding treasuries issued by the government, they should be expected to at least retain their value, furthermore, the longer duration of the bond, the higher the expected yield, but with inflation, this becomes a problem.

Therefore, it has become necessary for the Bank of Japan to participate in yield curve control, printing money to directly purchase bonds and prop up the market. In addition to this, the BOJ is also purchasing stocks on the open market as well, something previously unheard of.

This has a two pronged effect; firstly is staves off insolvency for Japan, for now, they are able to service their debt’s on the balance sheet with new dollars, but secondly, it has eroded trust, and yield from all of their markets is gone leading investors to seek yield elsewhere.

If this persists, a debt driven deflationary spiral that leads to insolvency could follow, and it could be both abrupt, and catastrophic as it was for Greece who needed a bailout from the ECB.

Japan’s 10 year yield has been below the US 10 year yield for a decade now leaving less access to liquidity for paying off debts, but also Japan’s stock market has not reached a new all time high since 1990, in fact, it’s still down 26% from that date. Money is fleeing the country and GDP will remain low, threatening insolvency indefinitely.

The Japanese Yen is loosing value compared to the dollar, but the Dollar is loosing value compared to commodities and will inevitably face the same fate if we continue the current regime.









6/7/2022
Federal Reserve Releases Hilarious Hit Piece on Bitcoin

The FED has released a chart comparing Bitcoin’s purchasing power against the price of supermarket eggs. They suggest that this is the reason Bitcoin is not a good store of value.

This is the chart presented.

It only takes a moment to realize that the data is completely cherry picked from the last two years, and if you choose to drag the view options back to the inception of Bitcoin in 2009, their very same chart simply tells the opposite story.

If you were to have held Bitcoin instead of US dollars for nearly any period of Bitcoin’s existence, your purchasing power measured in eggs would have only increased, and significantly.

The US dollar has lost 95% of it’s purchasing power against commodities, goods, and services over the last several decades. It is interesting however that the FED finds the need to attempt to make these silly comparisons.




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6/6/2022

Natural Gas prices spike, World Food Crisis Looms


Many countries are being threatened with immediate food shortages, not next year or next month, right now. The current situation involving Russia-Ukraine is greatly exacerbating the problem. Known as the “bread basket of the world” which also includes Belarus. These countries make up more than 1/4 of all global grain trade, and Russia have announced that they will restrict grain trade within “Friendly countries.”
*Note: This is 2017 data, pre pandemic, pre money printing from the FED, and before war in Ukraine, unfortunately it only get’s worse from here.
Furthermore, fertilizer is made through a process invented by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch who is often credited alongside Norman Borlaug, inventor of genetic modification, for being the catalysts of the “Green Revolution” in the late 50’s to which they are credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives. Today, 50% of peoples food supply relies on both genetic modification of staple food crops which are pest and drought resistant, but also their growth is dependent on the Haber-Bosch process which uses nitrogen fixation to produce ammonia. Previously, many farmers would need to go through the season long process of planting nitrogen fixing plants to revive this necessary chemical. Today, it can be purchased in 1000LB+ quantities and applied at will. This is how we currently feed the world. Cheap fertilizers that contain ammonia are the reason the world population was able to move from 3 Billion people to nearly 8 Billion today.


Haber Bosch Process: {H^{}=-91.8~{}}
Historically fertilizers have been cheap, relying firstly on the recent boom in availability from the recent discovery of previously untappable oil reserves, this, alongside the deflationary pressures of technology evolution, lead to continually declining prices of methane (CH4) and ultimately the manufacturing process of fertilizers.

Secondly, fertilizers are made from nitrogen as we know, but also potassium and phosphorous, and Russia and Ukraine previously made up 28% of all global fertilizer supply. Given equal and consistent demand as farms tend to have, supply constraints will mean higher prices.

Recently, after Russia’s foreign treasury reserve assets held internationally were seized in the first ever occurrence of this sort which pokes a hole in the supposedly unbiased petrodollar hegemony, Russia retaliated by forcing purchasers of Oil and Gas to procure Russian Rubles to make those purchases through Russian banks who were cut off from the SWIFT network. This new demand for Rubles has caused it to outperform the US dollar, gaining purchasing power, and leading to higher prices on Natural Gas, of which Europe gets 40% of its gas from Russia.

European citizens have been experiencing a condition known as being “energy poor” where the average middle class family has all the modern amenities that we have in the US for example, but cannot afford to heat their homes, or use a hot water heater due to the skyrocketing prices of natural gas, both over the last decade due to ratcheting carbon tax tightening as well as the European Central Bank’s inflationary money printing, both causing prices to rise for end consumers.

On top of that, Europe has sanctioned fertilizers and from Russia and Belarus, which will also lead to inflationary prices for end consumers. While France is the European country that has the closest to a carbonized energy grid, made up of mostly nuclear, Germany has recently decommissioned the last of the nuclear plants and replaced their energy with mostly coal and natural gas from Russia. The German society is now highly dependent on Russian gas, and a global divestment from fossil fuels in general means that there is not much more supply coming online for the next several years.

Together, this makes up the perfect storm for higher input costs from lack of fertilizers, and direct blockade of supplies from Russia, and now other countries which refuse to export certain items like China who has been accumulating food stores for years, now hoarding half of the world’s grain. Malaysia is banning the export of Chicken. Indonesia recently took to banning the export of Palm oil due to a poor harvest, which drives the price of palm oil up. This price increase leads to more deforestation in the amazon and southern Asia where palm oil is the majority of export crops, but it also incentives wheat farmers in the US - another large wheat producer- to flip and plant more soybeans for soybean oil instead of wheat, again driving wheat prices higher. India bans the export of wheat. This is a problem because wheat is in basically all the processed foods.

Joe Biden has been making the rounds to world leaders hoping to convince them to increase supply and drive down prices. He offered India $4 billion to export more wheat which they rejected. He asked Saudi Arabia to export more oil which they said they couldn’t do due to already tight supply constraints. We have such a significant problem that America’s past actions and alliances can be ignored in the search for more oil. We formerly accused Nicolas Maduro of both election fraud, then later drug trafficking in order to attempt to install the US-friendly Juan Guaido who never fully assumed power. Recently, Biden reached out to Maduro to try to procure more Venezuelan oil that should have originally been destined for our largest refinery owned by the Koch brothers in Corpus Christi, Texas. However, The political blowback of a nation supposedly aligned with Russian interests was nearly enough to shut down these talks, but it looks like we don’t actually care about politics or what we used to call Russian aliance, because it looks like Venezuelan oil may begin to be imported soon. This is all a result of US involvement in the Russia Ukraine war when we banned Russian oil imports to America.

We have no oil, we’ve released all of our strategic reserves, and we dont have the wells, refineries, or infrastructure to bring supply online to meet demand, therefore price must rise. Chevron’s CEO has said that he does not see any new oil refineries ever coming back to the US. This is in part due to the horrendous permitting and regulation process which can take time measured in years, and money measured in the millions, only to get approval, even nearly finish construction, costing billions, to then have the project held up in court for another several years and threaten its very completion. This is what happened to the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalacia which contains our largest natural gas reserves, and the Jordan Cove LNG pipeline in Oregon which developers abandoned. These projects are now sunk costs worth billions on investors balance sheets, definitively scaring away any new investors.

The environmental movement has a process of blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure that can sometimes be very effective. petitions, protests, court appeals, biodiversity, larger environmental concerns, damage from spills, air, noise, and unethical pollution, these things are all excellent and effective tactics that the environmental movement uses to block new fossil fuel infrastructure. The majority of the public is simultaneously on the side of the environmentalists wanting to make the world a batter place, but also desiring lower costs for gasoline at the fuel pump. The pendulum has swung too far.

The realities of economics and commodity inflation have already caught up with us and if we continue to invest in new fossil fuel infrastructure, oil prices will increase and remain high due to constrained supply. Of course, we also need to optimize out investments in green tech as well because many of the environmentalists concerns are warranted. Hoowever, renewables largely do not have the tech or the cost effectiveness to outcompete oil in most places, the cost of EV’s and the chips that run them are only going up due to all the supply shortages caused by quantitative easing which is necessary to keep the US from a debt driven collapse.

These intricate complexities only lead to regressive outcomes hurting those who cannot afford green tech, while also demonizing them for their supposed dirty emissions in what is quickly becoming a class divide driven by inflation and market manipulation from the Federal Reserve. We need to tackle climate change, but we don’t need to go overboard, and what we’re doing right now is not necessary even according to the IPCC and the IEA who don’t see any concerning tipping points until we reach a global temperature over 4 degrees celsius, which they project us to remain well under. Optimal policy is difficult, and the current two sidedness and bias towards extremity in order to gain moderate results is not helping.

Reshoring of goods, services and commodities into our borders makes for a self sufficient economy, but globalization and free trade make for cheaper goods and a more diverse and growing global economy which predominantly benefits developing nations, but we cannot have both sides of the extreme. Privatization also matters, Venezuela is rich in oil, but poor in their Bolivar’s exchange rate, nationalization does not work when the government is allowed to continually operate at a loss, hyperinflation has arrived for Venezuela, and will continue to increase across the world as energy runs the show and the economy.

What was previously a perceived environmental win of slowing investment in fossil fuel infrastructure is now causing mass starvation for wage earners across the globe who cannot keep up with food price inflation. Those consumers who will not or cannot pay, will be forced to change their purchasing behavior and some will starve or become malnourished for lack of cheap and healthy food. Famines are created not by God, but by man.

The Food and Agricultural Organization price index tracking month over month and year over year changes shows every key agricultural product up significantly year over year as well as Cereal prices, which includes wheat, up by 30%. Every food that contains wheat will need to either rise by 30%, or the company selling it will need to choose to take what is for them hopefully* a temporary* loss to keep their customers.

In a United Nations press Release, Antonio Gutierrez said, ““When war is waged, people go hungry…Most important of all, we need to end the war in Ukraine.” The security council quotes Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State of the United States, “Recalling WFP and FAO estimates that people affected by food insecurity due to conflict would increase to an estimated 161 million in 2022, noted that the Russian Federation’s war in Ukraine could add another 40 million people to that total. That country’s flagrant disregard of resolution 2417 (2018) is just the latest example of a Government using the hunger of civilians to advance its objectives. The food supply for millions of Ukrainians and millions more around world “has quite literally been held hostage by the Russian military”, he said, noting 20 million tons of grain sit unused in Ukrainian silos as food prices skyrocket.”



Defense spending is both fine and desired, but war is bad for business, let’s stop fighting and funding proxy wars that aren’t on our soil.



There’s no use hoping inflation will come down, and producers know this, the debt/GDP ratio shows us that it will continue for the rest of the decade unless the US chooses to default or cause a recession which is far worse than 1929 due the the amount of leverage across all markets. Officials will never choose either of these options, they will always choose inflation with short term periods of demand destruction as we’re experiencing now. Macroeconomist Luke Gromen calls this “Peak Cheap Oil.”

Shadow Stats is a company currently tracking CPI inflation much more accurately than the massaged US government numbers, they do this by using the US government’s former calculation methods instead of the new ones which were recently changed several times to fit the narrative. Currently Shadow Stats has inflation above 16%, much closer to prices in the real world. Wheat inflation is now 30% year over year.

The healthy and reasonable way to fix this is to cause short term demand destruction in financial markets and commodity futures today, while the economy is still relatively strong and raise interest rates to the rate of inflation - the Volker method. This alongside a significant reduction in federal expenditure is necessary for the economy to recover in real terms, instead of waiting for stagflation to continue, for a recession to get worse, and only then attempting to raise rates into an economy already in a depression. If the FED doesn’t pivot within the year, this is where we’re headed. The FED is out of options, and not only are they behind the curve, they are also late to the party and too slow to act, and because of this people will starve.




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6/1/2022

Federal Reserve Begins Quantitative Tightening Today










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5/31/2022

Biden’s Plan to Combat Inflation

Biden wrote an op-ed for the Wall St Journal where he announces his three step plan to fight inflation. This is just after his previous plan released just days ago.
















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5/29/2022

Traditional Markets



Crypto Markets


Charts









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5/27/2022








5/25/2022

Short term outlook:

Longer term outlook:
Base case is:




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5/24/2022

- Bear market rally in QQQ less obvious
- Was Friday rally enough to calm these extreme oversold conditions?
- Larger uncertainty now
- Still bullish on long term price trend and eventual FED pivot, possibly before NOV midterms, but short term pain seems imminent





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5/23/2022

- Possible bounce here, then we’ll see. Markets on edge, everything oversold but still waiting for buyers.