Making Hay Monday – December 1st, 2025

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David Hay

Editor

Haymaker

Making Hay Monday

Handling Loose Ends

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning,” -Albert Einstein (in the Haymaker view, the second sentence is particularly important when it comes to the “wisdom” of U.S. government policies)

“80% to 90% of (oil supply) growth came from (U.S.) shale. If you look at the next 15 years, shale is most likely to plateau and then decline. Where will you get the additional barrels to meet demand?” -Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco

“The time to buy a stock is when the short-term owners have finished their selling, and the time to sell a stock is when the short-term owners have finished their buying.” -The late, very great, John Templeton (the exhaustion of year-end tax-selling is an example of the former)

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Tidying Up

As 2025 rapidly winds down, we wanted to address some lingering issues and questions. Those have been accumulating partially due to the elder, and elderly, Haymaker’s recent attainment of the age three score and ten. That precipitated a series of travel events that stretched out over nearly a month, some business-related, but most celebratory.

Accordingly, the format of this Making Hay Monday will be notably different versus our usual start-of-the-week style. As you know, that involves a macro, or big picture, opening section followed by a micro section, where we outline specific potential investment action items.

Because there is a lot to cover in this edition, the macro portion will be extremely brief. However, as part of the aged Haymaker’s multi-week odyssey, he had the opportunity to attend a meeting in Georgia week before last with his long-time pal, and celebrated financial media personality, Grant Williams. This event also included a gentleman whose analysis I’ve tracked for years via numerous podcasts: James Aitken.

It was my first chance to meet James and he made an extremely positive impression, both due to his intriguing insights on major economic and investment trends, as well as his engaging personality. The key takeaway from his presentation (all from memory, by the way) is that he believes Team Trump is vectoring to run the U.S. economy as hot as it can to prevent a mid-term election bloodbath for the GOP. Besides the obvious political considerations, there is the plausible thesis that Mr. Trump dreads the possibility/likelihood of new impeachment proceedings should the House flip back to the Dems.

The proposal to send out $2,000 tariff rebatement checks to Americans earning $100,000 or less is, of course, indicative this belief is correct. (The Supreme Court may well invalidate Mr. Trump’s tariff plans, though this populist ploy might give it pause.) If this stimmie goes through, it will, of course, worsen both the budget deficit and inflation. The estimated cost of this proposed handout is $400 billion; i.e., it’s far from a rounding error. An aggrieved taxpayer could justifiably ask: “What price mid-terms?” (Mr. Trump seems to be waking up to the inflation risks from tariffs based on his removals and/or reductions of those on a number of food related items. By the way, Brazil, a Haymakerfavorite for both its stocks and local currency bonds, is a prime beneficiary of these roll-backs; more to follow on Brazil below.)

Other brilliant people, whose insights we also greatly respect, such as Darius Dale, are also believers in the “run it hot” scenario. We are increasingly inclined to side with that theory, which is informing a number of the following potential action steps, such as our bullish stance on aluminum.

If so, does that mean a rollicking stock market in 2026? It could be though one could argue this may catalyze The Great Rotation from AI and other tech stocks into equities that have much more economic sensitivity. We’ll delve into that aspect in more detail shortly.

As you will see, we’ve created a series of mini-sections on the various topics at hand. To avoid information overload, and to give it the focus it deserves, we’ll be running a second edition tomorrow, another of our Making Hay (Almost) Mondays. It will be an in-depth take on one of our worst ideas – positively highlighted earlier this year – and why you may want to reconsider this name.

First, a couple of housekeeping notes:…