Daily Commentary

MarketMinder’s View: A lot of partisan politics coloring this piece, so please note MarketMinder is nonpartisan, favoring no politician nor any party and assessing developments solely for their potential economic and/or market implications. Furthermore, it mentions several individual companies in its discussion, so remember that we don’t make individual security recommendations. With all that covered, here we go. While many consider the offshore oil fields in the North Sea in terminal decline, European energy powerhouse Norway is busy exploring for new, commercially viable wells. And they have found them! “Norway has drilled around 45 exploratory wells in 2025, with 12 yielding commercial quantities of oil and gas. This included 30 in the North Sea of which six were economic,” the latest find coming earlier this month. This suggests that the narrative of the North Sea’s decline may be a touch overstated, even if these finds are small and quite a ways from production. The oil glut presently may dissuade significant new production now anyway. But it is interesting they have had successes and the policy discussion here is worth noting. The UK government’s lofty levies on North Sea oil and gas profits and ban on new exploration seem to be disincentivizing British production. Now, the comparison here of current UK production to 2000 levels is a bit of a stretch, considering many of the fields’ productivity has simply declined. But policy is a hurdle to firms backfilling lost output from declining fields. This is somewhat intentional, as it is part of the vaunted “energy transition.” But it really increases reliance on imports in the foreseeable future, and amounts to something of an own-goal in terms of economic activity. The Labour government did loosen the exploration ban some in November’s Budget, but not materially.

MarketMinder’s View: Sometimes you have to read until the end to get the spoiler. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, and this piece. Namely, it waits until the final two paragraphs to reveal international trade’s (represented as exports minus imports) big influence on Q3 GDP’s better-than-expected, 4.3% annualized headline growth. That slight critique aside, this is an overall fine look at the data. It accurately points out consumer spending’s 3.5% annualized growth led the way, offsetting business investment’s slowing from Q2’s 7.3% to 2.8%. It also—strangely, in our view—veers into politics and presidential records in the midsection, so please note MarketMinder remains nonpartisan. And after some waffling over false K-shaped economy and AI bubble fears, it acknowledges net trade’s boosting GDP’s headline figure by a whopping 1.6 percentage points—a major factor tied directly to tariffs’ effect on trade, arguably the biggest story in America’s economy this year. We explained this in detail yesterday, but in short—falling imports juiced trade’s contribution, although falling imports aren’t good for the economy outside GDP’s math. Strip this and government spending out, and you see the private sector grew at nearly the same clip as Q2. Fine and all, but not so strong as the headline might suggest.

MarketMinder’s View: Initial jobless claims came in lower than expected last week, falling -10,000 to 214,000—below previous estimates for 224,000. Yet over the same stretch, continuing claims, or the number of people already receiving benefits, rose to 1.92 million, bouncing back from late November’s fall. Perhaps this sounds strange—how can fewer folks file for benefits while the number of existing beneficiaries rises? It is actually quite ordinary. Consider: If layoffs slow broadly—as data have shown—there are typically fewer new initial claims. And if folks already receiving benefits aren’t finding jobs quickly, they stay on the rolls longer, sending continuing claims up. Some call this a “low fire, low hire” environment, which fits the bill here given businesses (especially retailers) tend to finalize headcount before the holiday rush, in a typically bouncy period for hiring data, seasonal adjustments notwithstanding. Now, the article warns recently announced layoffs aren’t yet showing in the data—which may be true. But this is again looking only at the firing side of the ledger and not the hiring side. It is entirely possible that hiring was sufficient to outweigh this, which has held for most of 2025.