How much private credit has been put in place but isn’t in the official credit total is unknown and very likely unknowable. That means total systemic risk is also unknowable. Everyone wants to lend us money now, even though they’re not banks: the insurance company Progressive offered us a loan, PayPal […]
This is why “knowledge is power”: those who define what is “knowable” and “known” shape the reality of everyone in the model / system. Oh crikey, is this another boring post trying to make philosophy relevant? No, it’s a post about survival of the fittest, as what we “know” will lead […]
No wonder the world seems deranged–it is deranged by the immense strength of an Old Guard clinging onto power by any means available even as the world around them spins into incoherence. There are many reasons why we fail, but perhaps the most critical one is continuing to do more of what has […]
The conclusion that soaring asset prices mean the economy is strong is a hallucination that goes unrecognized because the entire financial system is hallucinating. Consider the data that the financial sector bases conclusions / decisions on (i.e. the data that the financial sector “trains” on) in a Bubble Economy like the present. The […]
Yes, AI is a catalyst. But for what is not yet knowable. The current narrative holds that the big problem we need to solve is conjuring up cheap energy to power AI data centers. Fortunately for us, the solutions are at hand: building modular nuclear power plants at scale and tapping […]
What we’ve lost are the foundations of a healthy standard of living / quality of life. Amidst the constant drumbeat of tech “progress” and grandiose “solutions,” it’s a useful exercise to ask: what have we lost in the past 40 years despite all the “progress” and “solutions”? Put another way: what […]
Here’s the real problem: there’s no profit in a raw carrot and a walk around the block. Here’s our mythology in a nutshell: human needs are limited but human desires are unlimited, and the economy is fueled by smart people motivated by profit to fulfill our desires. Since desires and human […]
Just as a reminder of what’s being gambled on “AI supremacy”: it’s not just financial capital, it’s everything. The risk that AI transitions from Servant to Master is dramatically appealing–Skynet!–but the real risks are in the mundane realms of the socio-economic order. As I explain in my new book Investing In Revolution, […]
The pool of speculative fervor will be drained, as impossible as that seems in this moment in history. 2025 may go down as The Year When Everything Happened in No Particular Order, tracking William Gibson’s famous line that “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Those expecting […]
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, […]