저자: Kevin · 외국인
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미 펜타곤의 중동 해병원정대(MEU) 배치 소식을 계기로 지상군 투입·호르무즈 해협 상황을 분석하며, 전쟁 장기화 가능성을 근거로 유가 상승→나스닥 하락 위험을 경고. 유가 $2 상승 시 QQQ 595 하락 가능성, 토마호크 재고 소진, 러시아 제재 완화에 따른 유가·자금 흐름, 사모신용·은행권 리스크와 2008년 유사성, S&P500 100일선 이탈, 연준 6월 점도표 매파 전환 가능성을 언급하며 전반적으로 신중(약세) 입장을 보임.
다듬은 글
Moments ago, per the Wall Street Journal, via Reuters, it has been announced that the Pentagon is deploying a Marine Expeditionary Unit to the Middle East. Now, it's unclear if they're going to immediately engage in Iran, but here's what a Marine Expeditionary Unit is and what it means for markets, your money, and the state of this war, as well as what's going on with the Strait, recession risks, and Federal Reserve information.
Let's break it all down in this video. First, an MEU is a sea-based force of about 2,200 during peace and around 4,400 during war. They're typical They're typically capable of raids from the water. They're famous for their amphibious assault vehicles. I'll show you an image of one of these just so you can kind of see them.
They're actually pretty awesome, pretty great technology, but this is essentially boots moving to the region. And it makes you wonder why air power alone isn't helping, and there's some reasons why air power alone isn't I shouldn't say helping, but solving the issue. So, MEUs are typically deployed from an amphibious ready group.
It's basically a set of three ships in the region, so you send them and it takes time for them, obviously, to sail to the region, or I guess use their engines to get to the region. Uh We don't really have sailboats anymore, but anyway. Uh Some of these can actually look like aircraft carriers so because they have a flat deck and they carry a lot of Ospreys, transport helicopters, and vertical takeoff and land F-35s, or short takeoff uh F-35s.
Usually, they short takeoff and then uh VTOL down. But anyway, uh the back of the ship, like you could see in this image here, can actually open up this sort of well deck and flood with water, enabling the amphibious vehicles to essentially have this harbor and launch out of the back of what looks like an aircraft carrier, which to some extent it it is, but it's a much smaller version of it.
Uh and for different aircraft, But, anyway, this is how you get troops on the ground to Iran to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. So, again, why not just use air superiority and air strikes? Well, it could be for a few things, mostly three things. One, you could try to deter Iranian strikes from being launched from the coast if you actually have a contingent of troops, let's say squadrons or, you know, up to 4,400 troops, American troops along that Strait of Hormuz.
Those could be used as a way to say, "Hey, if you walk up to the surface with a rocket, we're going to shoot you." Obviously, this increases the risk of injuries to and casualties to American soldiers. However, they could also be used for securing hijacked ships or frankly just enabling any kind of Iranian naval launches for be blocked because you're now taking control of that Iranian coastline.
This to me suggests that things are getting more challenging, not less, and it's potentially why we're seeing oil prices move up yet again. Now, we know how important market prices are to Donald Trump, and I want to show you something that I think is a really important and I'll just give this away for free here, but this morning we made an argument in the Alpha report that if Brent crude goes from 98.75, where it was this morning around market open at about 98.75, it's down here somewhere, wherever it is.
98.75 is where it was right before market open. If it goes up $2, the Nasdaq 100, through the QQQ's we watch all the time, would likely fall to $595. This followed our cautious outlook this morning and our that that the sort of early morning steam that markets tend to get for the first, you know, 30 minutes of the day, the first little buy the dipping, usually doesn't last.
And a $2 move in oil would almost certainly move us down. And so what happened? We literally moved $2 and now 17-ish cents, that's 12 cents actually to make that math right. Uh and if you look at the Q's, we went straight down to the 595 line, which is often a playable bounce. Something to watch, but the point is there's a direct correlation between just a $2 move in oil and the stock market going down.
That's not good. If you haven't been paying attention to stuff like this, remember I give these sort of insights every single day over at meetkevin.com. You join once, write it off your taxes, you get lifetime access all courses, every trade alert. And the next coupon too big to rig expires on Wednesday, which is Fed day, which we'll talk about in just a moment.
Now, in Iran we or actually in Iraq, we did just have a KC-135 refueling accident that led one plane to land damaged and another to crash. The one that crashed unfortunately lost all six crew members. They have now been confirmed deceased. Trump says he is currently not focused on the operation to take uranium, but at some point we might have to take uranium from Iran, which is really interesting because at the same time he's saying, "Ah, we're not focused on taking the uranium right now." Uh which would require special forces.
Uh which I suppose could could come in through the air, but at the same time we're also now deploying our amphibious assault units to the region, which again suggests that this is not anywhere close to done, that things are actually getting worse and not better. France and Italy have been in talks to try to guarantee safe passage for their ships so they could try to get their liquefied natural gas uh to Europe.
But uh so far this hasn't really gone anywhere. One Turkish ship was allowed to pass, potentially because it did uh supposedly use an Iranian port. But so far this war is at 2,600 deaths. Most of these deaths in Iran, including that uh horrible uh misfire by the United States or mis-target uh against that Iranian uh school of uh girl school which killed over 175 mostly young girls which is devastating.
The Trump administration is also reportedly burning through years of critical munitions including Tomahawk cruise missiles which isn't great because we really haven't been stockpiling a lot of them. If you take a look over here we have you know unfortunately not been buying a lot of Tomahawks. This is going to lead the Pentagon to likely ask for another 50 billion dollars in spending from Congress soon but in the last 5 years we only bought 322 Tomahawks.
124 of them so if I take 322 minus 124 124 of them were launched against the Houthis and Iranian nuclear facilities in 2024 and 2025. And we likely just fired another 168 missiles which means we might be down to 30 Tomahawks in the regions especially in the region especially since 168 are estimated to have been fired in just the first 100 hours of the attacks.
So Donald Trump responds to this and says we have the greatest firepower in the world. Nobody has more firepower than us. We will never run out of firepower. Actually his actual quote was We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition and plenty of time. That doesn't seem to align with the purchase history that we can track for Tomahawks.
So I think some of this might be half true and it certainly doesn't align with we can end the war at any time. There are no targets there are virtually no targets left to hit because we've hit them all. Or we're running out of rockets and now we're needing to go towards well cruise missiles a little different than rockets given that cruise missiles are powered all the way and rockets are rockets are generally uh powered for a shorter period of flight.
But anyway let's let's get off of that for a moment and and just focus on here. You know, this is going to last longer. Donald Trump on Monday is like, "Ah, we're almost done." And now it's like, "We got plenty of time and we're sending ground troops to the region." Uh, that don't sound right. And this is why people are now intentionally misspelling the board of peace as the board of peace.
It doesn't come across verbally very well. So, board of peace is spelled b o a r d of peace, right? Like a a meeting of peace members, right? And the joke that people are doing, which I mean is leading I mean it's not much of a joke given that people are dying in this war, but the the way people are putting this, I suppose, is they are spelling it b o r e d of peace.
In other words, we're tired of peace, we want war. Donald Trump is now also arguing that Vladimir Putin may be trying to help Iran a bit. Which is interesting because it sort of makes you scratch your head. It's like, where could where could Russia potentially get it be getting more money to help Iran a bit?
Oh, I know. Just yesterday the Trump administration allowed Russian oil sales to other countries, lifting the sanctions we placed on Russia due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And now he's doing that to try to lower oil prices so he can boost the stock market, but at the same time he's funding Russia who's turning around and helping Iran, which even Donald Trump admits.
Huh? Russia is likely receiving $150 million per day just in an increase of the oil sales that are now enabled by this sanctions relief and of course higher oil prices. The new supreme leader is reportedly also now disfigured. It's unclear if that's from a new strike or the original strike, but that might explain why he didn't appear on video to release his message yesterday.
Instead, he just sort of like sent the memo to news agencies and then Iranian news agencies reported it and then we picked up on it. Anyway, all of this is leading to some concerns about the broader market which which isn't great. First of all, you've got Bank of America's Hardnet suggesting that the spike in oil prices and private credit issues are creating this sort of resemblance to the 2008 financial crisis.
Because in 11 months in between August of 2007 and July 2008, oil spiked twofold from $70 to $140. And then now of course we've got concerns about private credit potentially having a lot of exposure to banks. Or banks I guess having a lot of a lot of people are like, "Oh no, no, no, the banks are fine.
The banks are fine. They don't They don't lend to private credit. This is all isolated." But the IMF told us that banks have been spending a lot of money investing in companies that are lending to private credit firms. So it's sort of like one layer removed. So there might be a lot of risk in the banking sector and unfortunately there is now talk about the European Central Bank hiking rates in 2000 hiking rates this summer, which is exactly what they did in July of 2008.
And then just 74 days later they had to cut 375 basis points 325 basis points, excuse me, because of recession. So not great. History maybe doesn't repeat, but it certainly is starting to rhyme. But that's why I like to say, "Remember the Alamo and here's your coupon code too big to Reagan." Now, what is this on screen here?
This is the S&P 500 which has just lost its 100-day moving average, which isn't great. The S&P 500 dropping under its 100-day moving average over here is the signal that we have now, which is not great given that the last time we lost our 100-day moving average was a liberation and boy markets got liberated.
Not great. So, what does Goldman say? Mm. Well, Goldman did increase their odds of recession from 20% to 25%. So, obviously it's still not a base case scenario for them. Uh they do acknowledge though that it's hard for the Federal Reserve to cut rates and we just unpriced all of the rate cuts that we expected this year.
We were expecting two at the beginning of the year, those got unpriced. Uh and so now everybody's waiting for the Federal Reserve next Wednesday. This is where I'd like to bring up what I think Jerome Powell's going to say. I think Jerome Powell is going to make it obvious that you better get in before the big price increase that we do next Wednesday because we're releasing some really big features and you're going to want to be a part of it.
But, first, what we should actually talk about that's over at mekevin.com is what we think regarding Jerome Powell. So, I think Jerome Powell is going to get asked about asked about the February employment data. And uh Powell is likely going to defer to three to six month trends here. He'll say, "Hey, things are slowing, but it's unclear where break evens are.
It's too soon to tell. Right now, we just have to keep an eye on inflation and obviously we have a game-changing catalyst with war. And so, it's too soon to tell here, but obviously if this lasts, we expect headline inflation to rise. And if they follow the message of the Bank of England, they're going to tell us they can't keep calling this stuff transitory." Which means unfortunately the summary of economic projections is probably going to show a widening gulf where you have people like um uh Steve uh Myron who are going to come in and say, "Oh, we could still do rate cuts." But then you're going to have everybody else on the board, the the the whole cluster of dots probably going to move up.
We might actually potentially signal a rate hike. Not that the Federal Reserve says, "Hey, we're going to hike rates." But uh the summary of economic projections could project that by the end of the year rates are higher. That would be or even next year. That would be really bad and and probably wouldn't bode well for markets.
So, probably going into a bearish summary of economic projections, and it does suggest caution and at at until this war ends or at least until we get the March employment data. So, a little poopy doopy here, especially since we just wrote down GDP for the end of last year from 1.4% to government shutdown that happened between October and November.
Mind you, we also have a little bit of a government shutdown going on right now where the Department of Homeland Security isn't going to pay TSA agents starting today. Just kind of wild. But anyway, Deutsche Bank says that markets so far are pricing in a transitory shock to oil. Uh and so far they're not expecting a big impact on GDP.
Inflation expectations are still stable, and we have less risk than we had in 2022. Though, I would argue we might have more risk when you add in the compounding factor of rates on the high end like the 10-year Treasury going up to 4.25 just makes private credit worse. So, we don't just have an oil shock, we also have a financial and potentially banking shock ahead of us.
None of these are great, which again suggests caution. Bear bull scale in the mid fours. Obviously, the longer this war goes on, the the worse it gets. So, none of this is great. The only thing that's great is the elcome. Nice to have you. want to talk about love making, r. Kevin, always great to get your take.
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