The excess flow of $140 billion thus corresponds to 3% of ADV, so an instantaneous rise of the S&P500 of (25 x 140)/50,000 = 7%.
Maybe half of this impact has already dissipated, so let’s say that flows into stock funds alone have contributed to a rise of 3% of the S&P, which is indeed in the right ballpark (actual number is 5.3%).
…as economist John Cochrane suggested while analyzing a conference panel that discussed the review:
I realized, wow, what we need in a new strategy to replace flexible average inflation targeting is getting mighty complicated. Distinguishing supply from demand shocks from fiscal shocks, dealing with crises, zero bound vs. regular policy, changes in the financial system, fiscal and financial dominance, needing to think about contingencies not forecasts, stress testing monetary policy . . . how do you write this all down?30
Fortunately, there is an approach that incorporates all seven principles into one unified framework: nominal GDP level targeting.
In the basis trade, hedge funds are taking long-term Treasuries and using them to manufacture different Treasury instruments: short-term, Treasury-backed repos that can then be held by the ultimate source of funds – institutional cash piles. From an institutional cash management perspective, a Treasury-bond backed repo is wholly dominated by a Treasury bill. There is no counterparty risk, no duration risk in the collateral, no risk of needing to take possession of an asset the liquidity pool is not allowed to own.
The Treasury is thus missing an opportunity to issue substantially more bills, the size of which can at least be proxied by the basis trade. Indeed, such issuance would crowd out the trade. Yet, Treasury secretary-nominee Scott Bessent wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Treasury’s recent inching toward shorter-term issuance ‘has distorted Treasury markets’, suggesting he’ll seek to term out Treasury issuance.
That whole system is going to — so all of — right now, there’s $2 trillion in private credit I think very rapidly, the $20 trillion that’s left in the banking system of below investment-grade credit is going to move over here. And that will reshape everything.
As it happens, I’m something of an exorbitant skeptic. I don’t believe that the dollar’s special role provides major economic benefits to the United States
In general, the updated illustrative options for recapitalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac show the GSEs having a higher value to investors than they did in the previous analysis, making it easier to recapitalize them through the sale of common stock and to repay the Treasury for its support of the enterprises. Under current conditions, nearly 60 percent of CBO’s 250 recapitalization scenarios would raise enough funds to allow the GSEs to fully repay the Treasury for its roughly $190 billion in outstanding preferred shares issued before the GSEs’ conservatorships (which CBO rounded to $190 billion for this analysis). In the 2020 analysis, by comparison, that outcome occurred in only 12 percent of scenarios.
The Boring News combines prediction markets at Polymarket with AI explanations of the odds movements to create a podcast news report. What I want is the text version of this. Don’t give me an AI-voiced podcast, give me a button at Polymarket that says ‘generate an AI summary explaining the odds movements,’ or something similar. It occurs to me that building that into a Chrome extension to utilize Perplexity or ChatGPT probably would not be that hard?
…equivalent to having the Treasury borrow $100 billion (or whatever its Bitcoin purchases end up costing) directly from the Fed (putting-up gold as collateral), and indirectly from the nations’ banks, at interest rates that are higher, and perhaps much higher, than it could get by selling securities.
Debanking (and Debunking?). Very long Bits About Money piece that contextualizes and explains tech bro debanking complaints.
Part of it is philosophical: they believe they are entitled to something like individualized attention and a presumption of innocence. This assumption is deeply embedded in our legal system.
We do nothave this assumption embedded in our banking system.
We’re reaching a tipping point where the technology is not just functional, but increasingly reliable and commercially viable. And handily, the S-curve of technology improvement is overlapping with another one: the adoption curve. Combined, Waymo’s growth in San Francisco and Baidu’s mass experiments in Wuhan begin to look like proof that we have worked out how to deliver robotaxis at scale.
Having said that, the biggest caveat to the “1025 years” result is one to which I fear Google drew insufficient attention. Namely, for the exact same reason why (as far as anyone knows) this quantum computation would take ~1025 years for a classical computer to simulate, it would also take ~1025 years for a classical computer to directly verify the quantum computer’s results!! (For example, by computing the “Linear Cross-Entropy” score of the outputs.) For this reason, all validation of Google’s new supremacy experiment is indirect, based on extrapolations from smaller circuits, ones for which a classical computer can feasibly check the results. To be clear, I personally see no reason to doubt those extrapolations. But for anyone who wonders why I’ve been obsessing for years about the need to design efficientlyverifiable near-term quantum supremacy experiments: well, this is why! We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about.
“If the demand is again going to simply fall off, why invest millions of dollars’ worth of capital into your manufacturing facility?”
But greater demand for electricity is coming. The recent book Energy 2040 (Springer), coauthored by Georgia Tech’s Divan, lays out some of the staggering numbers. The capacity of all the energy projects waiting to connect to the U.S. grid amounts to 2,600 GW—more than double the nation’s entire generation capacity currently.
Visegrád 24 also quoted Sweden’s deputy prime minister and energy minister, Ebba Busch, as being “furious with the Germans.” The article continued, explaining that due to Germany’s decision to shutter its nuclear plants, “people in southern Sweden and southern Norway now have [to] pay $5 for a 10-minute shower.”
One critical issue, however, often goes underexplored in these discussions: the United States has relied far more heavily on borrowing than Europe.
However, if US GDP had been 20.3 trillion in 2023, because the government would have increased its spending only as much as the euro area, the US economy would have grown by 20.5 per cent only since 2007. This is 5 percentage points more than the euro area economy has grown, substantially less than the 22.5 percentage point difference observed (38 per cent minus 15.5 per cent). Thus, a substantial portion of the growth disparity between the US and Europe can be attributed to the US’s more expansionary fiscal policy, i.e., debt-fueled growth.
We think many investors widely under-appreciate how crucial US fiscal dysentery is as the propellant of far superior US profits growth which in turn ‘justifies’ far higher equity market valuations. It is much ‘sexier’ to latch onto a story around US corporate exceptionalism in tech. Understanding the true (fiscal) source of US corporate superior profits growth gives us a handle on figuring out just how sustainable the US equity bubble is.
Outright coups are a surprise in the EU. Usually, there are other mechanisms to overthrow governments, force a redo of elections, or corrupt the democratic process in order to impose the EU Constitution as the Treaty of Lisbon.
Italy, Ireland and Greece have all been through it in the 21st century and now apparently it’s Romania’s turn.
…in order to join the national military, you must first acquire your own gun, which seems almost humorously backward.
Somaliland has two locally owned telecommunications companies, Somtel and Telesom, which do not allow their respective users to call each other (even corner shops tend to list two different phone numbers).
Trump is likely to recognize Somaliland, possibly as part of a deal that would crowd in the interests of both Ethiopia and the UAE. Landlocked Ethiopia would benefit from accessing the sea via Somaliland’s Berbera port, while the UAE would profit as the main investor in the development of this logistical corridor and its related security infrastructure. Recognizing Somaliland would undoubtedly rattle the rump state of Somalia, further destabilize the Horn, and elicit a sharp rebuke from the African Union, which has long opposed secessionist movements.
As the power broker whose actions led to the downfall of the Assad regime, Turkey will own Syria’s problems. Many in Ankara were quick to declare victory after Assad fled the country. Having a friendly government in Damascus may indeed open doors for Erdogan. He wants refugees to return to Syria, and his allies in Turkey’s construction sector want to take part in rebuilding the country.
National security advisors to incoming President Donald Trump are considering decapitating Iran's nuclear program in a bombing campaign. They would not be thinking this way had not Israel been remarkably successful in wiping out Iran's air defenses. The star of the show was the F-35. Interest in the Trump camp, with Elon Musk one of the strongest voices, to replace the F-35 with drones, just took a body blow thanks to Israel.
So post-Assad Syria is at least a 3-sided conflict, akin to the climatic scene of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (minus any Good character a la Clint):
The most amazing thing is that Milei was able to do all this virtually without any support in Congress.
Just imagine what is in store after the Midterms in 2025, which his party La Libertad Avanza, in combination with a PRO alliance, is set to win with over 50% of the votes. If that happens next October, you can bet on an even bigger chainsaw mowing through backwards regulations and a morbidly obese public sector.
I give this short manifesto a failing grade. It did not provide even one iota of support for its writer’s actions and basic fact-checking apparently wasn’t involved in making the case for premeditated murder.
We also have to re-conceptualize the idea of the health care “business.” The amount of financial bullshit in this part of the economy is insane, and fake entrepreneurs are constantly spreadsheet jockeying for money. So on a basic level, if you’re not producing medicine or dealing with patients, you should probably be employed by the government or in an administrative role making very thin profit margins. These are lives we’re talking about.
It’s not easy to push up electricity costs so high as to make charging an EV more expensive than filling it with gas—it’s really not easy when your gas is already the most expensive in the nation.
1: “Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves”/ 2: “Tax Cuts Will Starve the Beast”/ 3: “The Middle Class Pays Higher Tax Rates than the Rich”/ 4: “Those Old 91% Tax Rates Raised Large Tax Revenues”/ 5: “Europe’s Higher Tax Revenues Derive from Aggressively Taxing the Rich”/ 6: “ ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich’ Drive Soaring Budget Deficits”/ 7: “Taxing Millionaires and Corporations Can Eliminate the Deficit”/ 8: “Most of the 2017 Tax Cuts Went to Corporations and the Wealthy”/ 9: “Repealing All Post-1980 Tax Cuts Provides Painless Deficit Reduction”/ 10: “America’s Corporate Taxes Are Far Below International Standards”
the national Democratic margin among Hispanics crashed by 16 points, from a 28-point advantage to just 12 points. This comes on top of another 16-point margin crash between 2016 to 2020, according to the gold standard Catalist data.
“The advantage lies with us, because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone14. The Chinese last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that.”
- General Eric Smith, USMC
The attitude and coping that is demonstrated by downplaying the very real challenge of China in 2025 is a large part of the reason we find ourselves where we are. No more excuses. No more alternative reality sweet little untruths in each other's ears.
Penny was worse than white, however. He was the nightmare of every Women’s Studies major: a blond, tall, former Marine. If Hollywood still made traditional Westerns, Penny would be the sheriff that introduces order to the wild frontier. Penny was not defending himself; he was defending those weaker than himself. Such self-sacrifice is the essence of male chivalry, which must be eradicated to pave the way for the nanny state’s monopoly on human action.
The Penny jury rebelled against the delinquency of government and the rule of the dysfunctional. Bragg should face a recall. For those still calling Penny a vigilante, the government brought such citizen action onto itself. Such self-action is what you get when government fails. Despite the acquittal, future potential Pennys are now on notice that they risk a homicide indictment if they guard their fellows from harm. The best solution to America’s self-willed urban chaos is to throw out current authority and start over from fundamental principles of law and order.
But now it’s our ruling class that is hidebound by political correctness, and it takes movement by the masses to give it permission to express a controversial view. That’s a major change, and it’s one that the ruling class isn’t likely to appreciate much.
But it’s good for the country. Preference falsification is undemocratic, and it makes a nation stupid. If people are taught to parrot slogans instead of to discuss, debate, and report on what’s actually happening, bad decisions get made. (See, again, the old Soviet Union.)
Over time, the team has identified seven genes associated with natural short sleep.
Recent studies from Fu and Ptáček suggest that naturally short sleepers may be more efficient at removing toxic brain aggregates that contribute to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.
Zee’s lab, for example, has tinkered with using acoustic stimulation to boost the slow waves of deep sleep that enhance memory processing and may be one of the secrets to short sleepers’ success. In a study, they played pink noise — a softer, more natural sound than white noise, more akin to rain or the ocean — while study participants slept. The next day those participants remembered more in a test of learning and recalling word pairs. “We can enhance memory, but we’re not making them sleep longer or necessarily shorter,” says Zee. “I think there’s a lot more to learn.”
Here’s the point: every step in the process that produces reviews like these is broken. The USDA office that conducts the reviews lacks rigor (as the National Academies found); the expert advisory committee doesn’t appear to have checked the evidence; and the “peer review” process for the systematic reviews was completed by federal employees with a conflict of interest (e.g., reviewers who criticize the USDA report rightly fear losing their jobs).
Bad Health Journalism. Gary Taubes demolishing an Atlantic hit piece on saturated fat. Cardiovascular causes of death declined starting in the 1960s, not because folks replaced butter with margarine, but because ambulances with EMTs doing CPR and using defibrillators started taking people to the ER.
I once had to listen to the same logic perpetrated by Mehmet Oz on his Dr. Oz show. He knew with certainty that saturated fat caused heart disease, he said, because he is (was?) a cardiothoracic surgeon (he wore his scrubs, presumably so viewers would not forget) and could somehow divine this cause and effect by having had his hands quite literally in his patients’ chests. The clotted arteries apparently whispered to him that it was saturated fat that did it. I remain skeptical.
That rise has far-reaching health implications that have often been downplayed or dismissed by some of our nation’s foremost nutrition experts. To turn the page on our chronic disease crisis, the new administration should initiate a thorough, science-based review of seed oils. This effort could include the Food and Drug Administration’s reexamination of its “generally recognized as safe” status, a process that would fall within RFK Jr.’s purview if Senate-confirmed.
