DOOMSCROLLING THE NEXT FINANCIAL CRASH — TWO INDEXES TO WATCH: If financial crash prediction were a science, it wouldn’t work because then market participants would position themselves to counter the risk and the crash would be accelerated or delayed to a time before or after the predicted date.
May 6, 2024, 10:42 a.m.
THE ORIGIN OF THE PALESTINIAN FLAG: The Gaza-friendly demonstrators on US university campuses and around the world cluster around people carrying the “Palestine flag”… Do they know the origin of the flag? It was designed by Sir Mark Sykes, a British Foreign Office official who was the lead architect of Britain’s WWI policy regarding the Ottoman Empire. In 1917 Sykes wanted a flag to symbolize a variant of Arab nationalism that would further official British interests (
May 6, 2024, 10:26 a.m.
HOW WASHINGTON CREATED AND SOLVED THE GREAT TRANSFORMER SHORTAGE: You can learn a lot about big things by zooming in on (relatively) small things. I found the recent Great Transformer Panic shows how the political economy of energy works through the Washington influence machine. The cool kids in the power business have known about the problems with procuring distribution and transmission transformers for about
April 22, 2024, 2:36 p.m.
RON DESANTIS AND THE FLORIDA HOME INSURANCE UPRISING: Even as Governor Ron DeSantis begins to engage his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, he will be dragged back into a bitter insurgency in his home base of Florida. Compared to Florida’s warring lawyers and insurance companies, the Washington press corps and opposition campaign consultants are just a bunch of kittens waiting to be put in a sack and thrown into the river.
June 22, 2023, 3:51 p.m.
To my Subscribers: April 18, 2023 Dear paid Substack subscribers: I regret not having kept up the Substack production schedule I have promised you. I was not well for a few months, but I have recovered now. I have used this time to reflect on how I want to write for you going for…
April 18, 2023, 5:06 p.m.
Venture Capital Needs a Reset: Guilfoyle: “Your entire life has prepared you to publicly fail” - Silicon Valley Season 6 Episode 7, December 2019 The venture-capital-startup ecosystem needs a meteor strike to kill off its dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the Silicon Valley Bank collapse seems to have been not much more than a pebble in the pond. It seems it will take a true financial disaster to purge the excesses that have been created by the overcapitalization and overstaffing of American technology
April 18, 2023, 5:02 p.m.
A note to my readers: Dear subscribers, I had promised that my next article (which, by the way, is about Binance, the crypto exchange) would be published today. However, I find that I am having unusually complex issues in reconciling the statements of the people I have interviewed. It’s going to take me another day or so to write my article. Please bear with me as my analysis evolves. Because the numbers involved are so staggering high, and since the issues involved permeate the entire crypto in
Nov. 26, 2022, 9:37 p.m.
Thanksgiving and a bonus to loyal subscribers: November 24, 2022 Dear paid (and loyal!) subscribers: First, for the Americans or Americanized among you, Happy Thanksgiving! This has always been my favorite holiday of the year— the least commercial and most family-minded of the all too infrequent…
Nov. 24, 2022, 2:28 p.m.
LONDON: MODELS FIGHT IN PUBLIC!: PART 1 OF 2 PARTS Oh, sorry, not fashion models…I meant the UK’s monetary, fiscal and pension funding models, which the “working level” geeks who manage them usually reduce to mathematical models. Only the perverse (and tabloid editors) think watching fashion models fight would be entertaining. Or so I am told.
Oct. 5, 2022, 6:42 a.m.
THE DIESEL CRUNCH - PART II: As you read in Part I, diesel is a critically essential product in short supply. Prices for the internationally traded fuel are rapidly on their way up, even as oil fluctuates while economies and equities fitfully sink towards recessionary levels. Europe is more vulnerable than the US to diesel shortages. Russia has been supplying some 10% of European diesel imports, though under current EU sanctions those are supposed to be ended by February.
Sept. 12, 2022, 9:50 a.m.
THE DIESEL CRUNCH: PART I of II: Diesel is the blue-collar fuel. Demand and prices for jet fuel and gasoline slump after summer, but diesel is still smoking away in the highways, fields and factories. And the diesel price, already high, is set to rise even faster as the northern hemisphere heads into winter.
Sept. 10, 2022, 1:13 p.m.
