Borrowed Time

Inflation came in soft last week. Two prints, both below consensus, both cheered.

And roughly seven thousand miles away, 1.2 million leveraged retail accounts in South Korea were being liquidated by their brokers.

Nobody connected the two, because on the surface there is nothing to connect. One is a story about prices, the other about Samsung and SK Hynix. Different continents, different asset classes, different news cycles.

But run both stories down to the mechanism and they are the same story. Both are about what happens when the money doing the buying was borrowed.

So here is the question worth paying for: if borrowed money can do that to a market with a fraction of the leverage, what is the number in American accounts telling us right now?