Califoreboding

I was seeing clients on the West Coast, mostly California, last week.

And I have to say, California, as everybody knows, is a very, very strange place.

The energy costs are 50% higher than the national median.

It's got the highest individual income tax rate.

And It's got the sixth highest corporate income tax rate.

It's got the least affordable homeownership market.

It's got the largest number of state-level regulatory restrictions, as a lot of our clients are constantly reminding me.

It has the highest state unemployment rate at 5%.

And it also has the highest rate of unsheltered homeless people at 66%.

In other words, two-thirds of all of the homeless people in California are unsheltered.

And yet, over the last year, California has experienced the third highest state GDP growth in the country at about 3.5% behind only New York and Idaho, which is a result that, of course, is largely attributable to AI.

But now the...

I have a chart in here on the energy costs in California.

We'll talk more about this in the energy piece, but what we do is we take the actual fuel sector mix in California in terms of natural gas and electricity, renewable fuels, diesel, gasoline, as they're actually consumed by transport, industrial, commercial, and residential sectors.

And then we take that same misc, and then we figure out how much that costs per BTU, and then we do the same thing to the other states, and there is a whopping premium to do business in California.

I don't have that much on the midterms.

Either way, no matter how things turn out, I don't think it's a huge market mover, at least in the near term, no matter how it turns out.

Although I will say I saw this one chart that I'm including here because I thought it was hilarious.

there was a poll by Ipsos that does a lot of polling and they asked different respondents, do you think the level of corruption under the Trump administration is better or worse than other recent presidential administrations? And only about 10% of the GOP respondents said it was worse.

About 50% of them said it was better, and 30% said it was the same.

So I'm not going to go into any other detail on it other than to say that this is one of the funniest charts I've seen in a really long time.

So the title of this eye on the market is Cala Forbodi.

I'm I appreciate the fact that clients are nervous at a time when the markets are all time highs.

I think it reflects a healthy discipline in terms of a sell high, buy low mentality.

But there were a lot of questions that were very much on the negative foreboding of things to come.