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EndGame Macro
The Bet That Backfired And How the World Built Its Economy Around China
That map isn’t really about trade rankings. It’s about how the global economy slowly organized itself around one production engine and only realized the consequences years later.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the prevailing idea in Washington was constructive engagement. The belief was simple and, at the time, widely shared that if you bring China into the global trade system, give it access to markets, and economic integration would pull it toward openness, reform, and convergence with Western norms. Leaders promised this would expand U.S. exports without hollowing out domestic industry, arguing America could export products without exporting jobs. It sounded reasonable in a post Cold War world that still believed economics could tame geopolitics.
Once China received permanent normal trade relations and entered the WTO, the incentives flipped almost overnight. U.S. and European firms suddenly had certainty. Capital moved fast. Supply chains followed. And China didn’t just offer cheap labor…it offered scale, speed, infrastructure, and eventually entire industrial ecosystems clustered in one place. That’s when manufacturing stopped being something you could easily move back and forth. It became embedded.
Why the Bet Went Wrong
The core mistake wasn’t opening trade. It was assuming China would play by the same rules.
Western policymakers treated China like a market economy in waiting. China treated trade as a state project. While global firms optimized for efficiency, Beijing optimized for capability. Subsidies, directed credit, technology transfer, and long term industrial planning weren’t bugs in the system, they were the system. China never dismantled state control the way advocates assumed; it used global access to accelerate it.
At the same time, the political costs were unevenly distributed. Consumers benefited from lower prices. Corporations boosted margins. But manufacturing regions lost jobs, skills, and bargaining power. That tension simmered for years while trade deficits widened and supply chains grew more concentrated. By the time the backlash arrived, the structure was already locked in.
That’s what the 2024 map is really showing. Not that China won trade but that the world built its physical economy around the one place that could reliably make almost everything, all the time. Even now, when countries talk about diversification or decoupling, much of the upstream machinery, components, and inputs still trace back to China. The dependence is deeper than final assembly.
The uncomfortable truth is globalization was designed for efficiency, not resilience. China mastered that system faster and more deliberately than anyone else. Reversing it isn’t a switch you flip, it’s a slow, costly rebuild. And until that happens, the map stays red, even as politics tries to move in the opposite direction.
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The Bet That Backfired And How the World Built Its Economy Around China
That map isn’t really about trade rankings. It’s about how the global economy slowly organized itself around one production engine and only realized the consequences years later.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the prevailing idea in Washington was constructive engagement. The belief was simple and, at the time, widely shared that if you bring China into the global trade system, give it access to markets, and economic integration would pull it toward openness, reform, and convergence with Western norms. Leaders promised this would expand U.S. exports without hollowing out domestic industry, arguing America could export products without exporting jobs. It sounded reasonable in a post Cold War world that still believed economics could tame geopolitics.
Once China received permanent normal trade relations and entered the WTO, the incentives flipped almost overnight. U.S. and European firms suddenly had certainty. Capital moved fast. Supply chains followed. And China didn’t just offer cheap labor…it offered scale, speed, infrastructure, and eventually entire industrial ecosystems clustered in one place. That’s when manufacturing stopped being something you could easily move back and forth. It became embedded.
Why the Bet Went Wrong
The core mistake wasn’t opening trade. It was assuming China would play by the same rules.
Western policymakers treated China like a market economy in waiting. China treated trade as a state project. While global firms optimized for efficiency, Beijing optimized for capability. Subsidies, directed credit, technology transfer, and long term industrial planning weren’t bugs in the system, they were the system. China never dismantled state control the way advocates assumed; it used global access to accelerate it.
At the same time, the political costs were unevenly distributed. Consumers benefited from lower prices. Corporations boosted margins. But manufacturing regions lost jobs, skills, and bargaining power. That tension simmered for years while trade deficits widened and supply chains grew more concentrated. By the time the backlash arrived, the structure was already locked in.
That’s what the 2024 map is really showing. Not that China won trade but that the world built its physical economy around the one place that could reliably make almost everything, all the time. Even now, when countries talk about diversification or decoupling, much of the upstream machinery, components, and inputs still trace back to China. The dependence is deeper than final assembly.
The uncomfortable truth is globalization was designed for efficiency, not resilience. China mastered that system faster and more deliberately than anyone else. Reversing it isn’t a switch you flip, it’s a slow, costly rebuild. And until that happens, the map stays red, even as politics tries to move in the opposite direction.
Over two decades China became the largest source of merchandise imports for two-thirds of countries 📊 https://t.co/MqjRs5rWSt tweet
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Fiscal.ai
CAVA's management team wants 1,000 restaurants by 2032.
What's stopping them?
$CAVA https://t.co/cyhguCkIQz
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CAVA's management team wants 1,000 restaurants by 2032.
What's stopping them?
$CAVA https://t.co/cyhguCkIQz
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Fiscal.ai
20% of Lululemon's revenue now comes from China.
That's up from 15% last year.
$LULU https://t.co/qAakePh0qK
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20% of Lululemon's revenue now comes from China.
That's up from 15% last year.
$LULU https://t.co/qAakePh0qK
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EndGame Macro
Q3 2025 Crane Index With Fewer Cranes, Tighter Money, Slower Momentum
The RLB Crane Index is a ground truth snapshot of real construction activity. It counts tower cranes actively operating on job sites across major North American cities. No surveys, no forecasts just a physical read on how busy large scale construction actually is.
Total crane counts are down. A meaningful share of cities saw sharp declines, and commercial construction is taking most of the hit. Seven of the sixteen cities recorded drops greater than 20% from the prior count, and commercial cranes are down 44% overall. That’s capital stepping back.
The map is mixed. Seven cities are down, six are flat, four are up. The areas holding up best skew toward education, federal projects, and transportation. That’s a quiet but important signal about who still has both the willingness and the ability to spend.
You see the same pattern in the sector breakdown. Commercial, hospitality, industrial, and public/civic are weaker. Education, federal government, and transportation are firmer. Residential and mixed use are broadly flat. Rate sensitive private development is pulling back while institutional, public, and select demographic demand keeps building.
How we got here (and why it looks like this)
The simple explanation is that the cost of money rose and risk tolerance fell. Big projects don’t die because the narrative changed they die because the math stopped working.
The city details make this clear. In New York, crane counts fell from nine to six, tied to high rates, financing constraints, and projects wrapping up. That’s underwriting reality in 2025 that fewer deals clear the hurdle, and even solid projects struggle to secure clean financing. In Las Vegas, mega projects move forward while other hotel and casino builds are paused amid tariff uncertainty and high rates a classic late cycle behavior where capital concentrates into can’t lose bets and sidelines the marginal ones. In Boston, the decline reflects projects finishing rather than a sudden slowdown, but fewer new starts are visible. The pipeline is being worked down faster than it’s being refilled.
At the same time, the economy doesn’t just tip over because pockets of real demand still exist. Miami still shows strong residential tower activity driven by population growth and in migration. Denver is up meaningfully, transitioning from a residential boom into a more diversified pipeline. Some cities are still building, others are quietly stalling.
That’s exactly what a late cycle, high rate environment looks like. The winners keep building, the middle stalls, and the weakest categories disappear from the skyline.
Is the Crane Index leading or lagging?
It’s both. Relative to money and permitting, it lags, cranes only go up after financing, approvals, and risk decisions are already made. By the time cranes come down, the no decisions happened months earlier. Relative to official economic data, it can lead. Construction is one of the first places tight financial conditions show up in the real economy.
My View
This is a tight money economy wearing a calm mask. The market is still functioning, but fewer large risks are being taken. Private risk is retreating while public and institutional spending fills part of the gap. That stabilizes activity, but it rarely creates a broad, self reinforcing growth cycle.
Commercial real estate remains the pressure point. A 44% drop in commercial cranes is lenders and capital partners refusing to believe the old growth assumptions. The macro implication isn’t immediate collapse. It’s slower forward momentum. The clean takeaway is that we’re late cycle. The skyline isn’t panicking but it’s clearly being selective.
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Q3 2025 Crane Index With Fewer Cranes, Tighter Money, Slower Momentum
The RLB Crane Index is a ground truth snapshot of real construction activity. It counts tower cranes actively operating on job sites across major North American cities. No surveys, no forecasts just a physical read on how busy large scale construction actually is.
Total crane counts are down. A meaningful share of cities saw sharp declines, and commercial construction is taking most of the hit. Seven of the sixteen cities recorded drops greater than 20% from the prior count, and commercial cranes are down 44% overall. That’s capital stepping back.
The map is mixed. Seven cities are down, six are flat, four are up. The areas holding up best skew toward education, federal projects, and transportation. That’s a quiet but important signal about who still has both the willingness and the ability to spend.
You see the same pattern in the sector breakdown. Commercial, hospitality, industrial, and public/civic are weaker. Education, federal government, and transportation are firmer. Residential and mixed use are broadly flat. Rate sensitive private development is pulling back while institutional, public, and select demographic demand keeps building.
How we got here (and why it looks like this)
The simple explanation is that the cost of money rose and risk tolerance fell. Big projects don’t die because the narrative changed they die because the math stopped working.
The city details make this clear. In New York, crane counts fell from nine to six, tied to high rates, financing constraints, and projects wrapping up. That’s underwriting reality in 2025 that fewer deals clear the hurdle, and even solid projects struggle to secure clean financing. In Las Vegas, mega projects move forward while other hotel and casino builds are paused amid tariff uncertainty and high rates a classic late cycle behavior where capital concentrates into can’t lose bets and sidelines the marginal ones. In Boston, the decline reflects projects finishing rather than a sudden slowdown, but fewer new starts are visible. The pipeline is being worked down faster than it’s being refilled.
At the same time, the economy doesn’t just tip over because pockets of real demand still exist. Miami still shows strong residential tower activity driven by population growth and in migration. Denver is up meaningfully, transitioning from a residential boom into a more diversified pipeline. Some cities are still building, others are quietly stalling.
That’s exactly what a late cycle, high rate environment looks like. The winners keep building, the middle stalls, and the weakest categories disappear from the skyline.
Is the Crane Index leading or lagging?
It’s both. Relative to money and permitting, it lags, cranes only go up after financing, approvals, and risk decisions are already made. By the time cranes come down, the no decisions happened months earlier. Relative to official economic data, it can lead. Construction is one of the first places tight financial conditions show up in the real economy.
My View
This is a tight money economy wearing a calm mask. The market is still functioning, but fewer large risks are being taken. Private risk is retreating while public and institutional spending fills part of the gap. That stabilizes activity, but it rarely creates a broad, self reinforcing growth cycle.
Commercial real estate remains the pressure point. A 44% drop in commercial cranes is lenders and capital partners refusing to believe the old growth assumptions. The macro implication isn’t immediate collapse. It’s slower forward momentum. The clean takeaway is that we’re late cycle. The skyline isn’t panicking but it’s clearly being selective.
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EndGame Macro
When dealers are short VIX gamma, they’re not positioned to absorb moves, they’re positioned in a way that forces them to react to them. That means volatility doesn’t get smoothed out; it gets chased.
So even when the VIX looks calm on the surface, the system underneath can be unstable. Small equity moves can trigger outsized jumps in volatility because hedging flows start reinforcing the move instead of dampening it. That’s why you sometimes get sharp vol spikes that feel disconnected from the headline news.
The key takeaway isn’t that volatility is guaranteed to explode. It’s that the response function is brittle. If a real catalyst hits in macro, credit or geopolitics the market may react faster and harder than people expect, simply because of how it’s positioned. Calm conditions can persist… right up until they don’t.
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When dealers are short VIX gamma, they’re not positioned to absorb moves, they’re positioned in a way that forces them to react to them. That means volatility doesn’t get smoothed out; it gets chased.
So even when the VIX looks calm on the surface, the system underneath can be unstable. Small equity moves can trigger outsized jumps in volatility because hedging flows start reinforcing the move instead of dampening it. That’s why you sometimes get sharp vol spikes that feel disconnected from the headline news.
The key takeaway isn’t that volatility is guaranteed to explode. It’s that the response function is brittle. If a real catalyst hits in macro, credit or geopolitics the market may react faster and harder than people expect, simply because of how it’s positioned. Calm conditions can persist… right up until they don’t.
If only there were signs
available
in a platform
built by market makers instead of vibe coders and GEX-cons https://t.co/iufyPyKuJG tweet
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Clark Square Capital
Great checklist to gauge the potential signal in insider buying
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Great checklist to gauge the potential signal in insider buying
My insider buy "checklist" https://t.co/XpmTuxzH0u tweet
Offshore
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EndGame Macro
When The Student Loan Pause Ends, The Stress Shows Up
During the pandemic, payments were paused and delinquency reporting was effectively frozen. The system went quiet. When repayments restarted, the lights came back on and a lot of old stress showed up all at once. What you’re seeing now is the backlog finally being counted again.
Who’s actually falling behind
The part that surprises most people is the age breakdown. Younger borrowers don’t have the worst delinquency rates. The highest share of serious delinquency shows up among borrowers 50 and older, followed by those in their 40s and 30s. That points to something more complicated than new grads can’t pay.
For many older borrowers, this debt isn’t even theirs in the traditional sense. A lot of it comes from Parent PLUS loans or co-signing private loans for their kids. When the kid’s income stalls or disappears, the obligation lands back on the parent and often at a stage of life when expenses are already rising and income growth is limited.
Why 90+ days delinquent is a big deal
Once a loan is 90+ days past due, it stops being a warning sign and starts becoming a real financial problem. Credit scores can take a serious hit. Access to new credit tightens. Interest rates rise. Even everyday things like housing or insurance can get more expensive. And unlike credit cards or medical debt, student loans are incredibly hard to discharge in bankruptcy. For most people, there’s no clean reset button.
The bigger takeaway is that this is a household balance sheet story. Stress here tends to spill into everything else, from consumer spending to credit performance across the system. And because it’s showing up most clearly among older households, it hits right at the part of the economy people usually assume is stable.
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When The Student Loan Pause Ends, The Stress Shows Up
During the pandemic, payments were paused and delinquency reporting was effectively frozen. The system went quiet. When repayments restarted, the lights came back on and a lot of old stress showed up all at once. What you’re seeing now is the backlog finally being counted again.
Who’s actually falling behind
The part that surprises most people is the age breakdown. Younger borrowers don’t have the worst delinquency rates. The highest share of serious delinquency shows up among borrowers 50 and older, followed by those in their 40s and 30s. That points to something more complicated than new grads can’t pay.
For many older borrowers, this debt isn’t even theirs in the traditional sense. A lot of it comes from Parent PLUS loans or co-signing private loans for their kids. When the kid’s income stalls or disappears, the obligation lands back on the parent and often at a stage of life when expenses are already rising and income growth is limited.
Why 90+ days delinquent is a big deal
Once a loan is 90+ days past due, it stops being a warning sign and starts becoming a real financial problem. Credit scores can take a serious hit. Access to new credit tightens. Interest rates rise. Even everyday things like housing or insurance can get more expensive. And unlike credit cards or medical debt, student loans are incredibly hard to discharge in bankruptcy. For most people, there’s no clean reset button.
The bigger takeaway is that this is a household balance sheet story. Stress here tends to spill into everything else, from consumer spending to credit performance across the system. And because it’s showing up most clearly among older households, it hits right at the part of the economy people usually assume is stable.
tweet