 Good Saturday morning everyone. I'm Mark Thornton and this is minor issue number nine It's gonna be an intelligence report on the status of the business cycle and what I'm gonna look at is the company Intel to represent our source of intelligence our Sample because Intel the computer chip making specialist is kind of a bellwether of sorts for the stock market. It's a high technology company it's a leveraged company and So it tends to swing wider in both directions and swing farther in both directions Now if we remember hearing about Intel recently reaching all-time high stock prices We'll also remember that they've been expanding their production capabilities significantly and they were a big part of President Biden and the Congress's Chips and Science Act which proposed to stimulate the computer chip industry and our supply chains and fighting China and All the rest it basically boils down to a taxpayer and consumer giveaway but that's not the point of Today's minor issue now we find this week that Intel is losing money It's lost money the last two quarters, which it hasn't done in a long time And it is in the process of cutting Expenses and cutting cost and now cutting the dividend significantly in a rather large Retrenchment from the days when it was building computer chip plants in Arizona and Ohio and of course all the other chip companies We're doing so as well So if we look back We'll see the all-time high stock price of Intel at $75 at the top of the technology bubble in the year Fast-forward several years to the bottom of the housing bubble and Intel was selling for $14 a share as recently as 2020 Intel shares were fetching over $60 a share and today It's selling for around $26 a share down 60% in a little over two years time So it's down Significantly and as we look forward in terms of the demand for their product Is it going to go up in the near term doesn't seem likely it seems more likely that demand overall will go down and supply in their industry in terms of the overall capacity is Certainly headed higher because it's not just Intel building new plants. It's other chip plants as Well, and if you put those two into your equation of supply and demand with demand probably going down supply probably going up you can only think in terms of softening of the price of computer chips, which is going to hit Intel even more so in overall terms Intel is a very good barometer or bellwether of the market and It's gone through it a tremendous expansion of output potential new factories and so forth Now it's starting to lose money and to take action and we're somewhere caught in the middle between It's really really high price of over $60 in 2020 down to 26 today Where is it going into the future? That's up to you and your guesses, but for me and my purpose I think it tells us a lot about where we've been and how we've got here Through monetary policy at the Fed keeping interest rates ridiculously low for an extended period of time but also the chips act and the government spending unbelievable amounts of money beyond Taxes and increasing the debt running up huge deficits In my recent book the skyscraper curse. I have a full hypothetical example of a computer chip factory during a business cycle At the end of chapter three I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute