Guilt, as I’ve noted before, is the great vulnerability of the Western world. I’ll pass up an explanation of why for today, but the validity of this statement is made ever so clear by the fact that political types rise to power by championing one class or…

Medi-Cal doubled to $222B. Nick Shirley found empty strip malls billing millions. After Minnesota, California is even worse.

It has become a common belief among Americans that they should “respect the office” of an official, even if they don’t respect the person holding that office. The same, of course, goes for “the law.” And while I understand that people saying such things are…

Dubai crude at $152. WTI at $94. An Indian tanker paid in yuan for safe passage through Hormuz. The petrodollar is dying in a shipping lane.

The modern world will allow you to join any of a thousand collectives, but it will punish you for standing on your own, as a self-willed entity. People who commit this crime understand that they are outlaws in the present world. And if at first they don’t…

Square Lightning for 4M merchants. Tether funding Ark. $1.17B Lightning volume. 4nm mining chips. The builders aren't watching the price chart.

Put/call ratio highest in 5 years. Transfer volume down 31%. Maximum fear precedes maximum opportunity.

A great tragedy of our era is that young people have no feeling of what Western civilization was like. In the government owned and operated schools where they sat for years, they were presented with a litany of the West’s failures, most of them exaggerated…

I promise I won’t ask you to become normies. Please read on. It seems there are easily a hundred thousand Bitcoin (or crypto) millionaires, with more reaching that level as the numbers rise. A million dollars isn’t actually that much money anymore, but it…

There’s a common refrain that “Bitcoin fixes this.” Sometimes it’s used well and other times less so (it would often be more accurate to say “bitcoiners fix this”), but I’m being very serious when I say that Bitcoin fixes society. Bitcoin changes the incentives…

Iran's parliament speaker declared Treasury bond holders legitimate military targets. Global yields are exploding. The 'risk-free' rate just got risky.

America, 1910 1910 was well before my own time, of course, but I knew at least ten people who lived through it as adults, and discussed the era at some length with one of them, my great uncle Dave. And so this is an era I feel I can still reach out and touch.…

19th Century America If we wish to grasp American life in the 19th century, it’s probably best to start by understanding that when America was young, it had no myth. Once we really understand that, the rest falls into place fairly easily. Here’s how Alexis…

(Originally published January 18, 2021.) Aside from a breathless stream of headlines and a few random inputs, I haven’t seen many facts regarding the events of January 6th. Circumstances made things that way for me, and now I’m glad they did, because it set…

Apollo and Ares gate redemptions. $10B+ in withdrawal requests. The $2T private credit unwind has begun.

AI commoditizes intelligence. Private credit funds that bet on software are gating exits. Apollo and Ares cap redemptions. $13T in PE/PC marks its own homework.