The Pound is Sinking
UK Press reaction to the tax news.
Harnessing the Power of Insurance—The Truss government pledged to scrap the EU regulations around Solvency II.
Over the Line, Mark it Zero
Scooter Executives Head for the Exits as Once Ambitious Technology Companies Falter
Valuations are plummeting.
Real estate tech company Compass, once valued at $6.5 billion in a $500 million round led by SoftBank and Dragoneer, has fallen below $1 billion in market cap and is shedding employees.
Speaking of SoftBank, the firm just cut its internal valuation of Indian hotel company Oyo from a peak of $10 billion to $2.7 billion, Bloomberg and TechCrunch reported.
Keith Rabois’ OpenDoor stock has been tanking. The home flipping company is worth $1.9 billion.
Self-driving car company Aurora Innovation is down 75% since it went public via a SPAC. The company’s CEO apparently accidentally emailed the entire company a message meant for the board. “‘Given our current stock price we should be an appealing target for any entity looking to own the future of automated driving,’” Urmson wrote, according to the Bloomberg report. “‘Of potentially appealing landing places, there are only a few: Apple, Microsoft, or potentially a Tier 1,’ referring to a large auto-parts supplier.”
Rigetti Computing, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed quantum computing company, has seen its market capitalization fall to $213 million.
ALL of Chamath Palihapitya’s SPACs are trading below their opening price. All but ProKidney — which recently listed and hasn’t really had time to nose-dive — were down more than 40%, according to a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week. Palihapitya called off two other SPAC vehicles this week.
Must Watch TV—Keith Rabois, the above mentioned co-founder of Opendoor and “the only one in the world that precisely called the top of the market,” drowning in flop sweat on CNBC.
To Mark Down or Not: That's the Question VCs Face as Market Slump Persists
Crypto Exchange FTX To Raise $1 Billion At Flat Valuation Of $32 Billion. Sure, Coinbase’s market cap is down ~75% over the comparable period, but FTX’s is unchanged. I won’t hold my breath until this closes.
US Econ
Dramatic change in mortgage rates contributes to America the Static—People who don’t move because they locked in low mortgage rates don’t help flatten the Beveridge curve.
Final Look at Local Housing Markets in August—Inventory Up, Sales Down Sharply, New Listings Decline.
Quantifying the role of interest rates, the Dollar and Covid in oil prices.
The New York Fed DSGE Model Forecast—September 2022—If you’re into that sort of thing.
More predictors of lower inflation
Biden’s Income-Driven Repayment plan would turn student loans into untargeted grants. THIS IS SUCH TERRIBLE POLICY. The new IDR rules may cost $450 billion, will incentivize colleges to jack tuition, encourage students to ignore the earning potential of their field of study, and favor Governmental and non-profit employment vs the private sector
The coming long-run slowdown in corporate profit growth and stock returns.
International
What might explain the strange goings-on this year among Turkish banking stocks?
If rumours are to be believed, the lone punter’s exposure has ballooned to 20bn TRY giving a paper profit of some 2-3bn. In a market characterised by regulatory vigilance and overseen by an obsessively panoptic finance ministry and central bank, these moves simply could not have passed unobserved.
Central Bank Independence and Inflation in Latin America—Through the Lens of History.
Europe’s Destructive Energy Policy.
C’mon Belgium, even California kept Diablo Canyon—Doel 3: Shutdown confirmed for Friday despite politicians' pleas
Who is going to vote for Italy's right-wing coalition? Breakdown of Italian voting demographics. For the record, I don’t think Italian elections matter, as Meloni seems very much to be an establishment McCain/Bush type.
I’d have thought Germany was cooling on helping Ukraine, given their incipient depression, etc. That being said, Germans do love sending panzers into the steppe. Pressure mounts on Germany’s Scholz to send tanks to Ukraine.
Point—Why Armenia Stands Alone. Counterpoint—Putin Is Turning Armenia Into a Russian Outpost.
…the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution presents challenges as grave as those of the Cold War, but we are far less ready to meet them. China’s 2,000 surface-to-ship missiles are a game-changer, like the Russian SAMs of 1973, or the dive bombers and torpedo planes that eliminated the battleship as a frontline platform at the start of World War II.
While Pledging to Defend Taiwan from China, Biden Shifted on Taiwan Independence. Likely it was just the senility talking, but Biden stating that the US is neutral on whether or not Taiwan declares independence, may escalate tensions with China.
Is South Africa America's Future?
Culture/Miscellany
Can Conservatives Form a Counterculture?
“If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star,” since at this point “intellectual life on the American center-left is dead.”
The Right Wing Is Laughing at You—Article about a book, about right wing comedy.
I refuse to believe that Space Force is real— Space Force reveals official song: "Semper Supra"
The Mitchell Institute, funded by a who’s who in defense contracting, thinks the US Air Force is dangerously underfunded—Decades of Air Force Underfunding Threaten America’s Ability to Win.
Are We Ready for the Next Massive Volcano? Hopefully there are a couple coal burning and nuclear power plants left when this happens.
You’ve written that there’s a 1 in 6 chance of a really large eruption this century. How big are we talking?
A magnitude seven. Rinjani was a magnitude seven. It caused a mini ice age and famine across the world. It wasn’t even a super eruption. Those super eruptions are 10 times larger. The odds of one occurring are about 1 in 170 this century. A really large eruption, one down from a super eruption, which could cause mass disruption, is a 1 in 6 in the next 100 years. It could cause cascading failures for lots of different things. And it would be great if it were taken more seriously.
New NYC ad campaign for my least favorite organized religion.
I Have Yet to Hear a Satisfactory Answer For Why Adults Care What Young People Think
Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent,” every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.
Russ Roberts’ podcast with philosopher Kieran Setiya.
Setiya argues we can learn from John Stuart Mill to help deal with the ennui to which so many midlifers succumb.
The Strategic A$$hole Reserve. Paywalled, but some excerpts:
Survivors of the short-lived jihadist regimes in cities like Aleppo report helplessly cowering in fear as roving gangs of armed foreigners invaded their homes in search of their valuables and their daughters. It is one thing to invade a country. It is an entirely different level of atrocity to send a bunch of unregulated foreign extremists hopped up on Captagon to do the job.
What we did to Syria was rather like if the Russians armed, trained, and funded a bunch of KKK, neo-Nazi, insert-bad-guy-here militias to overthrow the US government, and on their way to Washington, DC they stopped to genocide or enslave all the blacks, Jews and other minorities they encountered. This is a filthy way to fight, but our foreign policy establishment has become addicted to it. Time and again, the regime has empowered violent, often genocidal, groups and individuals, set them like mad dogs on a targeted regime, and then denied knowledge and responsibility when, as in Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, the dogs turned around to bite their owner.
The American Security State Comes Home
…the Biden Doctrine, which is expected to be unveiled in the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. It holds that the fight for democracy is incessant, totalising, and all-encompassing. That neutralising the alleged threat of fascism at home, personified by MAGA and former president Trump, is part of a larger apocalyptic struggle to defend the liberal international order abroad.
German domestic intelligence is running hundreds of fake right-wing extremist social media accounts. What could possibly go wrong?
The Osmonds, Saddam Hussein and the CIA — my search for the truth
It’s Now Possible To Track Your Oral Microbiome.
More supplements you maybe should take if you’d rather put off your reckoning with eternity—Natural Activators of Autophagy Increase Maximal Walking Distance and Reduce Oxidative Stress in Patients with Peripheral Artery Disease: A Pilot Study