July 24, 2026

When Bab el-Mandeb adds nine days to ocean routes, shippers pay premium rates for trucking to compensate, pushing costs higher for global trade. These cascading transportation costs put some upward pressure on consumer prices, keeping inflation sticky and limiting the Fed's ability to cut rates, see charts below.

July 23, 2026

The chart below shows that IPOs since 2019 have underperformed the broader market over the following three years, driven by three main forces: 1) Peak valuations: The 2020–2021 wave came public at rich multiples amid zero rates, stimulus and speculative retail demand, leaving little room for gains. 2) A hostile rate regime: The Fed's hiking cycle from 2022 compressed valuations and hit the long-duration, unprofitable growth stocks that dominate IPO cohorts hardest. 3) Low quality, high bar: The boom pushed marginal companies public before they were ready while the market-adjusted benchmark was set against an index carried by a handful of mega-cap winners. Each of these forces could persist: valuations may re-inflate in the next IPO window, rates look set to stay structurally higher than the 2010s and index returns remain concentrated in a few mega-caps that keep the relative bar high.

July 22, 2026

Tanker crossings through the Strait of Hormuz have declined again, and refining crack spreads are widening sharply as constrained crude oil supplies prevent refineries from boosting throughput to meet steady demand for gasoline and diesel. The real tail risk emerges if inventories at critical nodes like airports or power plants suddenly run dry, triggering non-linear cascading damage. Edward Fishman's Chokepoints thesis explains the dynamic: geopolitical leverage concentrates not in reserves, but in the narrow passages through which the world's oil actually flows. Our chart book, available here, does a deeper dive into energy demand and supply dynamics around the Strait of Hormuz.