As I often note, making Plans B and C is free. The stock market is always looking past “bad news” to front-run “good news.” Once it became clear that the Titanic was indeed going to sink, the stock market would rally on the prospect of sharp growth in lifeboat shares. In other words, […]
The lines of dominoes being toppled run through every nook and cranny of the economy. As we all know, the problem with euphoria is the inevitable collision with reality and the resulting disillusionment. But wait–it gets worse. The new love of your life, your savior who is going to make everything […]
Are we wise enough to refuse politicians’ offer of “free money” to spend today that was stolen from our future, and from our future generations? Probably not. Can Social Security be saved for future generations? Many have already concluded it’s hopeless, and if the current trajectory is left untouched, that is […]
The consensus holds there will be another bubble after the Everything Bubble pops, but this might be misplaced confidence in the godlike powers of central banks. The consensus holds that central banks–the Federal Reserve in the US–will gradually inflate away the world’s rising debt burden while propping up assets and the […]
The most pressing need now is for AI tools to protect us from AI tools. The good news about AI is there will be productive uses. The bad news is it will take 5 to 10 years to sort the wheat from the chaff. According to a recent study by Morgan […]
What nobody seems to notice is all the incentives for deploying AI are perverse. The real story of the US economy isn’t about AI, it’s about an economy that’s run out of rope. AI is being hyped not just by promoters reaping billions of dollars in stock market gains, it’s being […]
Extortion is the keystone of America’s Mafioso Economy. And scene: here are the dons, each the ruthless head of their own vast organization, seated next to their wives in a show of bourgeois respectability, assembled by invitation to kiss the ring of the Godfather. This isn’t just fiction, of course; we’ve all […]
We’re humoring our self-delusion. How do great powers come undone? We can start with a destructive force without equal: self-delusion. Emperor Norton comes to mind in this context. In 1859, in the Gold Rush-enriched city of San Francisco, Joshua Norton, a bankrupt businessman, declared himself “Emperor of these United States” in a […]
AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection–if we care to look. Attention has been riveted on what AI can do for the three years since the unveiling of ChatGPT, but very […]
As a thought experiment, consider these changes to our economy’s incentive structure. Warren Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger had a maxim: Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome. With that in mind, let’s look at two charts. The first is a chart depicting the use of ChatGPT. (Source: OpenAI Usage Plummets […]