Weekly Signal Playbook · Jun 11, 2026 — The Drain Arrived Early
Garrett's Signal · Weekly Signal Playbook · June 11, 2026
The market dropped right after we warned about the drain last Thursday. Gold and silver are also dipping as we have been bearish for weeks. What’s next? Has the worst finished?
1. What Changed This Week
Change 1 · AI token demand may be rolling over
The token spend index — the receipt for what the world actually pays for AI inference — doubled from December, then turned down in recent weeks. Yes, it’s one index from one vendor — but the corporate behavior below points the same way. We addressed this in our SoftBank piece: this index is where the whole $750B capex story starts.
The demand wasn’t all real. Meta and Amazon shut down their internal token leaderboards, Uber capped AI spend after burning its full-year AI coding budget in 4 months. Part of the usage was a KPI game — and the CFOs are now checking the bill.
Usage can keep rising while the money falls: spend = volume × price, and price is collapsing. DeepSeek charges 1/200th the price of OpenAI’s flagship, and on the largest model router, ~60% of top-model traffic already runs on Chinese open-source models.
Change 2 · CPI 4.2%
Headline CPI hit 4.2%, the highest since 2023. Most of it is energy. The war is the inflation. But core was only +0.2%, below expectations, and real wages are falling.
This doesn’t kill the hike story. It just hands the decision to the Fed. And remember last week’s real lesson: what hurts is the speed of repricing, not the level. One 13bp day did more damage than any fully-priced hike would.
The next seven days are the densest event window of the year: 6/12 SpaceX debut → 6/15–16 BOJ (a hike to 1.0% is >90% priced) → 6/16–17 FOMC (Warsh’s first meeting). A hawkish surprise burns Japan and Korea. A dovish one burns the dollar — and squeezes Asia’s exporters from the appreciation side. There is no safe outcome — only a choice of what burns first.
Change 3 · SpaceX lists tomorrow
The biggest IPO ever: ~$75B at a ~$1.8T valuation. 30% is reserved for retail (normal is ~5%). Even crypto retail is rotating into the IPO. 20+ SpaceX ETFs already filed. Schwab client cash is at the lowest since 2019.
How to read tomorrow: pop or fade → does the buying stick → does it drain the AI-chip complex or bring new money in. Don’t trade the first print — read it.
Bigger picture: Big Tech has flipped from buying stock back to selling it. Big-five quarterly buybacks are down 74% from the 2021 peak ($12.6B in Q4; NVIDIA’s $80B program is the lone exception), Alphabet is raising $80B+, and ~$4T of valuations (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic) are queueing to list. The bid under US large caps is thinner than the index makes it look.
