Hello C3 Family!

Weekly Rant - Yeah, I am asking for Money!

I promise not to spend it on Chic-fil-A

Let me get right down to it. This whole C3 thing started as a business, and it has morphed into a passion project with two objectives. The first objective is to produce a book that lays out the Christian case against the stock market in a way that is digestible, concise, and convincing. The second objective is to create a sharing platform for people that takes the Christian Health Share Ministry concept and applies it to other aspects of life like auto, home, life, and disability needs.

The book has been written and is going to go through one more round of editing. However, we want to give this book away for free, and to do that we need help. We truly believe that the stock market has been a source of great evil in our world, and we want this information to be easily obtainable. But as you could imagine, publishing and distributing a book can be very expensive. Our goal is to raise at least $10,000 so we can print and distribute a few thousand copies in hopes that it will snowball from there. If everyone who typically opens and reads this weekly email gave just $5 then our goal would be reached and then some!!

Our second objective is an ambitious one. Creating an all-encompassing sharing platform that is a non-profit entity is going to take time and capital. Getting the legality right, marketing the ministry, and putting the staff in place to manage it is going to be a monstrous task. If anyone out there thinks they can do it, I will gladly hand it off!!! This project will need hundreds of thousands of dollars, but our initial goal is $10,000. This money would be used for the research and discovery phase (namely, getting some savvy lawyers together who can layout the path to getting this done).

If you feel called to contribute to either of these objectives than just click the button below. if you would like your contribution to go to one objective over the other, just send us an email indicating exactly that support@christcenteredcapital.com.

Top Stories of the Week

• Stocks ticked up last week since labor reports showed more evidence that the job market is cooling. Remember - Less jobs, means less money, which means inflation goes down, which means stocks will probably heat up. Powells soft-landing is looking more probable.

• The Jury in the Fortnite/Google app store case just delivered a verdict that we all already know...That Google operates as a monopoly. This could be a huge deal depending on what the judge says the penalty will be. The gist of the case is that Fortnite, a video game, claimed that Google was giving preferential treatment to its own apps and charging high fees to other apps like Fortnite.

• Big Oil is thinking the climate summit COP28 was a big win while climate activists are seeing it as a major failure. Many thought COP28 was going to produce plans to phase out of fossil fuels, but instead it used 'soft' language suggesting what countries could do to limit their carbon impact.

• Bitcoin hit a 20-month high because traders are eyeing up a bitcoin ETF that could get approval next month. Notice the use of the word traders in that last sentence! BTC is stuck in the rut of being treated like a tech stock instead of a form of currency. 

• Job satisfaction among Americans has gone down 10% in 2023, but the "quitting" number has also gone down. During the pandemic and the year after people were quitting left and right but that quitting has pretty much stopped according to recent labor reports. So why are people staying in their jobs with bad job satisfaction? Well, because stimulus paychecks have run out, consumers have amassed a $1 trillion in credit-card debt, inflation has paychecks becoming less valuable. All that makes it hard to leave a steady paycheck.

• Disney's film division has not turned a profit in over a year thanks to duds like "Wish" and the "Marvels."

• High scale restaurants are struggling, but Olive Garden is still killing it with 11% sales growth in September. The casual Italian eatery is the budget friendly option for people looking for a sit-down meal. The OG has really capitalized on the niche market of 'I don't want fast food, but a real restaurant is too expensive, I guess Olive Garden is the move!'

• Mortgage rates are at 20-year highs and even homebuilders are struggling and unable to capitalize on a market that has too few of homes for sale.

• SEC boss Gary Gensler warned companies against making bogus claims about AI to capitalize on hype. How many bogus claims by stock market companies do you think have been made that have not been policed by the SEC?!?!

• The US is facing a huge nurse shortage. The pandemic saw 100K nurses leave their stations and those numbers have not been replenished. The US started looking to bring in foreign nurses, but VISA backlogs have thrown a wrench into that plan. A starting salary in most states for an RN is well north of $75K.

• As of August, more than a quarter of all dollars invested into startups this year went to AI.

• The State Department showed support for Israel by sidestepping Congress and approving the emergency sale of $106 million worth of tank ammunitions to Israel in its fight against Hamas.

• Ukraine funding hangs in the balance as the fight over border security amongst lawmakers rages on. Why does our border security matter to Ukraine, because this is the US and that is how we approve funds and make laws, hence why every law is 30,000,000,000 pages long.

• Liz Magill, President of University of Pennsylvania, just resigned because of the backlash she and UPenn got following her inability to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the school's code of conduct at a congressional hearing. one of my favorite commentators has this to say...Antisemitism at College.