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We have a diesel deal that turned out to be a nothing sandwich, a ceasefire nobody actually agreed to, a 3D printed salmon with no fish in it, and two pieces of real data that dropped yesterday and this morning.

We start with Trump at a midterm rally saying out loud that he could say the stupidest things and the crowd would still clap. I think that is the most honest thing he has said in a while, and it frames everything that follows.

On the diesel deal with Putin, people ran the math. Trump described it in tons instead of barrels, and once you convert it, you find out it works out to roughly 18 to 20 minutes worth of diesel released to global markets over a two and a half month span. Not to America. To global markets. Then he turned around and blamed Ukraine for our diesel prices. This war has been going since 2023. Our prices started climbing in February of this year. Do that math too.

Ukraine responded by hitting three Yandex data centers, and Zelensky claimed it suddenly got easier to breathe on social media because the bots went quiet. There is some evidence for it, including a visible drop in impressions on major accounts, but there is also a strong case that what actually went offline was web crawler traffic. Every country runs PR, Ukraine included, so I am laying out both sides. Then Trump announced an energy ceasefire on Truth Social that Zelensky says he found out about through the media, and when asked why both sides deny agreeing to it, he said they agreed because I said they agreed.

On the September CPI, inflation came in at 3.7% year over year, higher than the last two months, and energy is the driver. Fuel oil is up 74.2% in twelve months. Gasoline is up 34.2%. Electricity is up 4.4%, which I do not believe for a second based on what people are actually paying. And I explain owner equivalent rent, which is how shelter gets measured. They call homeowners and ask them to guess what their house could rent for, then compare that guess to last year’s guess. More than a third of this data comes from surveys like that.

Then the good news, and it is real. The NAR affordability index shows the median existing single family home peaked at $448,800 in June and has come down every month since, to roughly $422,700 in September preliminary data. Three straight months of declines. On top of that, 14.5% of home purchase agreements fell through in September, the highest September on record, with only March and April of 2020 running higher. Rates jumping from 6.75% to 7.5% is the cause, and I had two clients personally lose their contracts over it.

But I also explain why prices are not falling faster despite the biggest seller to buyer gap on record. The answer is motivation. In 2008 we had 4 million homes on the market and 3.5 million of them belonged to people who had lost jobs and had to sell. Today we have 1.16 million listings, about 485,000 of which are new construction, leaving roughly 650,000 real sellers who mostly have low payments and no reason to move. Lennar has even been found buying back its own unsold homes through a separate LLC and renting them out. Builders are also handing out $40,000 to $50,000 in closing cost assistance, which never shows up in the price data.

So prices are coming down. Not because the market got healthy, but because high rates finally broke demand. And this data lags six to eight months, which means it is likely already lower than what we are seeing.

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