Weekend Reading
Russia
A loving portrait of US Intelligence, with lots of details, in the lead up to the Russian invasion.
Ukraine has telegraphed its big counteroffensive for months. So where is it?
Washington and its allies are being much too cavalier. Although disastrous escalation may be avoided, the warring parties’ ability to manage that danger is far from certain. The risk of it is substantially greater than the conventional wisdom holds.
An encounter with a sword is an encounter with a swordsman. An encounter with an arrow is an encounter with an only slightly more distant bowman. But an encounter with an M31 rocket fired from a HIMARS launcher is an encounter with General Dynamics.
no matter where you place the fulcrum and the lever, Russia, China, and India collectively are now too much for the United States to lift.
“The weapons are stolen, the humanitarian aid is stolen, and we have no idea where the billions sent to this country have gone,”
American Investor Known For Russian Nightclub, Pro-Ukrainian Stances Found Dead In Washington
More Boogaloo Bois Are Heading to Ukraine to Fight—Maybe ex-Marine right wing extremists agree with the ‘rules based international order’ and enthusiastically back Ukraine against Russia, the darling of the populist right. Maybe.
China
The Rise And Fall Of Chimerica—Tremendous essay by an ex-pat on what America means to China and how it is changing.
All of China is a red state, he said. The collectivist impulse that American populists point to as a paradise lost is a paradise present in China today.
Pushing Back Against China’s New Normal In The Taiwan Strait
Taipei and Washington should be prepared for the possibility that Beijing may not be willing to back down and cede its newly gained ground. Challenging China could cause Beijing to escalate again, but that is a risk that cannot be avoided if the United States and Taiwan want to return to the status quo before Beijing’s August 2022 exercise.
Beijing’s Upper Hand in the South China Sea
The Pearl Harbor naval base could fit inside the lagoon at Subi Reef, the second largest of China’s bases in the Spratly Islands. Mischief Reef, its largest, is roughly the size of the I-495 Beltway around Washington, D.C.
What Happens Without Taiwan's Chips?
Should the Taiwanese chip industry be destroyed due to war or embargo, the consequences for the rest of the world would be immediate and dramatic. The capital investment required to replace that segment is in the trillions. Even once that money starts to be spent, global production would fall to early 2000s levels for perhaps 15 years as the lag in production of fabs and tools, not to mention engineering know-how, would take decades to reacquire.
International Miscellany
A Hedge Fund With A Health Service
When it isn’t presiding over the sale of strategically important British companies abroad, the government is hard at work allowing them to close down.
Why does Switzerland, AKA Richard Scarry’s Busytown, outperform so much of the West?
The Unlawful U.S. Killing of Ayman al-Zawahri
But it’s cool, the folks there don’t mind—Precise And Popular: Why People in Northwest Pakistan Support Drones
USA
Soft bigotry of low expectations—Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam
Cancelling Student Debt Would Undermine Inflation Reduction Act
By 2032, they forecast, outstanding government debt will stand at 110 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), and by 2052, that figure will reach 185 percent—an astronomical share that exceeds that accumulated during World War II.
Take the over.
Want to know if a red wave is happening? Watch this special election next week
Washington DC requires a bachelor’s degree to watch young kids!? In unrelated news, DC is the most expensive child care market in the country.
Culture Wars
The price we pay for elite overproduction
no industry has scooped up more of this labor market overflow than the non-profit sector. Unlike in tech and media, in the world of progressive NGOs, there is an actual organic demand for the moral capital that these job applicants have spent four years of college accumulating.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” consulting jobs have thus metastasized into a global, multi-billion dollar industry. That industry has become not only a life raft for otherwise employment-challenged college graduates, but a job-producing juggernaut that can sustain the credentialed class indefinitely, whatever happens to the real economy.
Self-awareness was the first casualty of this war of words. The Washington Post, owned by multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, solemnly preached the need for regulation “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.”
Should Republicans win Congress and the White House, I would expect American politics to experience a cultural Armageddon. The output of culture can’t be legislated on demand: otherwise, the Soviet Union would have been a golden age of creativity. But raw political power can make the cost of cultural monopoly—and of idle posturing, Disney-style—unpleasantly high.
Former Prime Minster of Iceland, David Gunnlaugsson: “The woke have far too much power over the future direction of society. That is why we must take the culture wars seriously. It’s time to fight back.”
How Unmoderated Platforms Became the Frontline for Russian Propaganda
The Russia-Ukraine war has shown that platforms are not simply neutral or commercial entities: Their policies make them arbiters of geopolitics, and the decisions they make—or don’t make, in the case of Telegram—can mean life or death during times of war, conflict, and violence.
Markets
Who Got Inflation Right and Who Got it Wrong? The Longlist
From the Department of the Obvious at the Fed:
Information Externalities, Funding Liquidity, and Fire Sales
As a result, beliefs about fundamentals are shaped endogenously by cost shocks which are orthogonal to fundamentals, leading to socially costly booms and busts in asset prices
Using endogenously and orthogonal in the same sentence proves that these authors are super smart.
“the underlying trend of inflation looks poised to remain at or above 4 percent.”
When high profile mercenaries have opinions about markets, and more
Interview with Erik Prince she refers to here. Related—Erik Prince wants to sell you a “secure” smartphone that’s too good to be true
A long twitter thread about it if you want to do down the rabbit hole:
Closing Down the Billionaire Factory—Private equity isn’t all bad, but the fee shenanigans are a bit much.
A recent investigation by Bloomberg found that major public pension funds do not or cannot keep track of the fees and expenses they pay to private equity titans like Blackstone, Apollo, and the like. The common denominator is that private equity firms report data in scattershot ways, allowing for no comparability across companies. And they are notorious for padding expenses, such as charging their clients when they fly on private jets. SEC probes have resulted in warnings to this effect.
Be careful with VPNs on Apple products
I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)October 14, 2012