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Bob Andersen romped home the winner of last week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ about how the Lakers are worth $12.5 billion now, or the GDP of Chad:

“Thank you, Matt,” writes Bob in an email. “I appreciate the honor bestowed upon me given the talented individuals who participate each week. I also want to give you a shout out for creating such a great way for us to get our creative juices flowing each week.” 

It’s an honor and a pleasure, Bob! And here’s how the competition fared: 

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 1.   A basketball team, valued like a small country. Lakers Nation rules! ~MTS (17)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 2.   GDP of Chad, Don't leave us hanging forever. Lakers score a win. ~Stephen R. Balzac (13)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 3. Ex-chief Mouse teams with, MAGA bro to outbid Chad? Bye, Moundou Lakers. ~Scott Bauer (13)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 4.   Twelve and a half bil? To play with Bouncy Punkins? Huge 'Flated Egos! ~Dick Peterson (41)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 5.   12.5 billion, I just want one million, please, LA Lakers, geez! ~Yolea M.  (18)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 6.   Big ball energy! Bounces through the Lakers’ sale. 12.5 billion! ~Margaret Lea (10)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 7.   The team costs too much. Can I still afford tickets? No way! Thanks, AI. ~Tim Olsen (53)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 8.   Lakers worth so much, Same as Chad (that’s my friend in…venture capital). ~Lodro Rinzler (10)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 9.   Sports teams value rise, To the GDP of Chad. Sports fans foot the bill. ~Bob Andersen (78)

253 Votes via @beehiiv polls

This week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ is about how Bitcoin and Gold are surging against the dollar, following the treasury’s interventions in the bond market and our national debt surpassing $40 Trillion. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. (Don’t worry if you get a bounceback email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately, thank goodness!)

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

Table of Contents

• Bitcoin and Gold Surge Against the Dollar

• Former Pro-Data-Center Politicians Do U-Turns

• Index Funds Are the Daddy, Now

• Healthcare Premiums Are Set to Rocket

• The Absurd Economics of NYC Urban Farming

• Poll of the Day: Health Insurance Premium

What’s the Stock Market Up To, Eh?

$SPX ( ▲ 0.43% )  $DJI ( ▲ 0.98% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies Mentioned in Today’s Newsletter

$GOOGL ( ▲ 1.22% )  $AMZN ( ▼ 0.57% )  $AON ( ▲ 0.9% )

Bitcoin and Gold Surge Against the Dollar

Ah, the U.S. dollar. Once a proud symbol of global economic dominance, now apparently playing the role of the nervous parent watching its retirement fund get vaporized.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s brilliant plan to “bring equilibrium” to the bond market by doubling long-term debt purchases last week was, it turns out, just the stabilizer we didn't know we didn't want. Or, as Eoin Walsh, portfolio manager at TwentyFour Asset Management, told the Financial Times: “Being erratic and unpredictable generally translates into higher premiums, which partly explains why the dollar is depreciating.” 

Naturally, with the greenback sliding and the national debt nudging a casual $40 trillion, investors sprinted toward "debasement trades" like Bitcoin and gold. Why trust a central bank when you can trust yellow rocks and digital tokens?

Those trades are thriving. Gold is on track for its biggest monthly gain since 1999, and Bitcoin is up 23% in the past week alone. A commodities trader practically giddy with schadenfreude remarked, “Everyone liked debasement — the Iran war threw a spanner in the works but now we’re back to the debasement theme,” adding that the market has been “gifted a perfect storm” for a return to the trade.

Of course, the crypto crowd is in full euphoria. Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise, declared it “hard not to be extremely bullish both [on bitcoin] and crypto right now.” 

Although it’s not impossible, Matt. Trust me.

Quote of the Day

Former Pro-Data-Center Politicians Do U-Turns

Last year, data centers were the darlings of every state governor. Texas Governor Greg Abbott proudly declared his state the “epicenter of AI development” alongside Google’s $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.22% ) CEO, Sundar Pichai. Ah, the sweet, intoxicating scent of tech investment and campaign donations…

Fast-forward, and the political wind has, let’s say, shifted. With voters realizing that AI consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, and drives up local utility bills, politicians are doing Olympic-caliber U-turns to protect their careers.

Suddenly, Governor Abbott has halted approvals on some 1,800 data centers, complaining to a GOP dinner: “You see the issue about data centers cropping up all over the state, and they were doing so without any sense of regulation.” Yes, a Republican governor lamenting a lack of corporate regulation. Nature is indeed healing.

Opponents are capitalizing. Abbott's challenger, Gina Hinojosa, has hammered him: “The data center issue is the latest example of a governor who has been doing the bidding of moneyed interests instead of the people of Texas,” she said. She even released an ad featuring a chatbot explaining to a voter why their electric bills are skyrocketing.

But it was Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed who captured the electorate’s raw, unvarnished vibe: “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.

It’s a bipartisan panic. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who praised Amazon’s $AMZN ( ▼ 0.57% ) facilities last summer, just signed an executive order giving the state power to block them. As former Congressman Brad Carson put it: “If you’re a Democrat, we haven’t had a wedge issue like this in decades.”

Meanwhile, industry spokesperson Dan Diorio sighed: “We are trying to catch up to this narrative and it continues to grow by leaps and bounds.” Good luck, Dan. When voters' electric bills look like phone numbers, you’re kinda done, baby. Done.

Index Funds Are the Daddy, Now

Fifty years ago, Vanguard founder Jack Bogle launched the First Index Investment Trust, raising a spectacular $11 million—about a tenth of his target. Wall Street laughed itself silly, immediately dubbing it “Bogle’s Folly.” The concept was simple yet deeply offensive to high-flying finance professionals: Why pay astronomical fees to an active fund manager to pick stocks, when you could just settle for tracking the value of the stock market as a whole by following its index?

For decades, the active management industry preened itself, confident that human genius and expensive suits would always beat autopilot. But as Rodney Comegys, Vanguard’s Chief Investment Officer, told the Wall Street Journal: “It took a very long time to recognize that cost mattered.”

Bogle got the last laugh. In his 1973 classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton Malkiel famously joked that “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.” It turns out, that monkey was actually an investment genius. S&P Global reports that over the past 15 years, “only 10% of U.S. mutual-fund managers tracking the S&P 500 have beaten the index.” 

Yes, 90% of highly paid experts underperformed a literal autopilot. Now, index funds control over half of U.S. fund assets, transforming from a laughingstock into an 800-pound gorilla. Terrified active managers accuse passive funds of distorting the market by buying stocks on autopilot.

Bogle’s real genius was proving that the passive advantage always wins. Wall Street isn't laughing anymore, because the monkey rules!

Song of the Day: Sam Smith, ‘Constant Companion’

Sam Smith’s new single “Constant Companion,” from their fifth studio album Hazel Eyes, has received widespread critical acclaim for its cinematic production and emotional vulnerability. It’s an ambitious, Western-themed anthem that pairs a mythic outlaw romance with sparse, intimate instrumentation. So, it’s a lot like this newsletter.

Healthcare Premiums Are Set to Rocket

There’s nothing quite like your employer looking you in the eye and asking if you really, truly need both of your kidneys. Happy New Year!

For 2027, U.S. employers are facing health insurance cost hikes of up to 11.1%—the steepest, most terrifying increase in over two decades. According to benefits consultant Aon $AON ( ▲ 0.9% ) , Americans with workplace coverage are already shelling out an average of $5,297 this year, a cool $388 jump from 2025.

How are companies reacting? By kicking the problem to the top floor. As Mike Pasterick from Aon notes, “We’re seeing a lot of interest now from the finance organization and even the CEO and the board.” 

Why the sudden spike? You can blame a mix of expensive cancer treatments and the wild, unstoppable rise of miracle weight-loss drugs (utilization grew 75% in 2025 across Aon’s clients). And let’s not forget hospitals using artificial intelligence to aggressively optimize their billing. What the medical system really needed was a highly efficient, algorithmic robot to squeeze you for extra copays.

For small business owners like Jason Wilburn in West Virginia, whose health insurance expenses now consume 5% of revenue (more than his actual profit margin), the situation is bleak. “It’s frustrating and sad. Something’s got to change,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Harvard Medical School professor Michael Chernew dryly observes that “healthcare spending recently has risen more quickly than income.” 

Water is also wet.

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The Absurd Economics of NYC Urban Farming

New York City is pitching itself as the ultimate agricultural pioneer, blending the romanticism of the dirt-under-the-fingernails crowd with the high-tech sterility of Silicon Valley. On one hand, we have Brooklyn Grange, managing massive soil-based rooftop farms 11 stories above Brooklyn. As one of the firm’s spokespeople noted, "We actually have spaces in the city that get full sun that are totally underutilized." On the other hand, we have Kubota’s PlantX, an indoor "plant factory" where computers control everything from CO2 to humidity, and lettuce is harvested in a blazing 25 days instead of the usual 60.

It all sounds utopian—until you look at the price tag. Farming has always been a notoriously thin-margin business. Doing it on a rooftop in a city where a studio apartment costs a small fortune is a special kind of financial masochism. Even the folks at Brooklyn Grange admit the harsh reality: "There's only so much you can sell X, Y, and Z of vegetables for." Their solution? Diversifying into "client services" and corporate events. So your local, organic rooftop kale is heavily subsidized by hipster rooftop weddings.

Meanwhile, the indoor high-tech crowd is betting on automation and robots to cut production costs by half. A representative from Kubota argues that their hyper-controlled setup means a "crop can grow close to consumers, and give better quality and flavor through precise environmental control." 

They’re saving 20 liters of water per head of lettuce, but replacing free sunlight with high-voltage artificial lighting. If you can make it there…

Should You Check Your 401(k) Today?

👍️ 

Yep.

Poll of the Day: Health Insurance Premium

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P.S. So, you remember the cheese puns that used to open this newsletter? Suffice to say, they were divisive. Now, thanks to a thing called “dynamic content options,” I can offer you the option to see cheese puns again, if you’re one of the thousands who got in touch bemoaning their departure six months ago. All you need to do is answer “true” on this survey, and submit it. If you never want to see cheese puns in this newsletter again, don’t click that link, don’t fill out the survey, don’t submit it. Just keep reading and pretend this conversation never happened. Mmmkay? Thank you.