I wrote this track about Trump vs Biden earlier in the year after I heard the weird and crazy "God Made Trump" Truth Social ad...

old enough to remember republicans slagging off Biden for using strategic oil reserves to reduce oil price.

8D Chess

🚨 🚩 This is a really important paper. Key finding: Brexit has cost the UK economy 7–8% of GVA by 2023 and the pain hasn’t been evenly shared. London took the biggest single hit (12% below counterfactual), largely bc financial and professional services lost Single Market access. Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 was also very hard hit. Meanwhile, areas that voted most heavily for Leave have not suffered the largest economic costs. The correlation is actually weakly negative As the authors put it: “Brexit was a levelling up by levelling down.” Northern Ireland is the clear outlier, the one part of the UK that kept close alignment with the EU Single Market has done far better.

You can see the original here. It is beautiful and I have a printed copy hanging in my house. However, it always bugged me that the metric it claims to visualize is "power", which is basically the author's subjective judgement. visualcapitalist.com/histoma…

the highbrow music to go with this is Blue in green by Miles Davis youtube.com/watch?v=TLDflhhd…

to make the reflecting pool green

There's a mad logic to the $SPCX valuation: if an 84x revenue valuation is mad then so is a 168x revenue valuation. Once a stock's valuation is untethered from fundamentals then the valuation calculation becomes a "how long is a piece of string?" question.

BREAKING: United States becomes the first country in history to pay $300 billion to a country they defeated 50 times in one war.

I think it's worth less than a tenth of IPO price which is less than $13 a share.

I love the red arrows but....

This looks like a Disney movie where a 12 year old becomes president

Big drop in London job ads from 2022 to now for stuff that's repetitive and automatable. Much of this isn't AI. AI just provides CEOs a convenient excuse to stop hiring and - eventually - to start firing. A big wave of white-collar downsizing is coming... robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…

I do not understand, in 2026, why anyone is shorting anything, and I have, over the last several years, watched a generation of intelligent, well-credentialed, technically sophisticated investors set fire to their capital on the short side of a market that has been telegraphing its direction with the subtlety of a marching band, and the only explanation I have ever been able to construct is that none of these people have read a single page of monetary history written before 1990. The setup is not subtle. The federal government is running a 7% structural deficit with no political coalition in either party willing to address it. The Treasury is issuing debt at a pace that will push publicly held debt-to-GDP past 130% within five years, which is the level at which, historically, every government in recorded history has either inflated its way out, defaulted, or both. The Fed is, regardless of what it says in public, the marginal buyer of that debt, and the only mechanism it has to fund the purchases is the creation of new dollars. The money is being printed. The debt is being monetized. The currency is being debased. And asset prices, which are denominated in the currency being debased, are doing the only thing they have ever done in any country that has ever tried this, which is going up. Every country that has run this experiment has produced the same chart. Weimar Germany in 1922 and 1923 produced one of the most violent equity bull markets in recorded history in nominal terms, as the mark collapsed and the Berlin exchange repriced upward by orders of magnitude. Argentina, across four separate inflationary cycles since 1975, produced in each cycle a nominal rally that outran every short thesis published, while the peso lost 99.9% of its purchasing power. Zimbabwe in 2007 and 2008 produced an equity market that rose so violently the exchange had to be closed because the calculations could not keep up. Turkey, right now, in front of the entire world, has produced a Borsa Istanbul up 1,400% in lira terms while the lira has lost 85% against the dollar, and every short of Turkish equities has been carried out in nominal terms even when they were right in real terms. The lesson is not that asset prices are going up because the businesses are getting better. The lesson is that asset prices are going up because the unit they are measured in is getting smaller, and any investor who positions short against this dynamic is betting against the will and capacity of a government to debase its own currency, which is the single most reliable bet you can lose in 4,000 years of recorded monetary history. The government always wins. The government always debases. The currency always loses purchasing power. The assets always reprice upward in nominal terms, on a path the shorts always insist is unsustainable and that always, somehow, sustains. You can short individual frauds. You cannot short the market. You cannot short the currency itself without being on the wrong side of the largest force in modern capital markets, which is the slow, politically inevitable destruction of the dollar’s purchasing power against everything that cannot be printed. The shorts have been wrong for five years. They will be wrong for the next five. The only investors who will, in real terms, preserve and grow their wealth are the ones who understood, early, that the game is not about being right on valuation, it is about being on the right side of monetary debasement, and the right side has always been owning real assets, productive businesses, scarce commodities, and the one monetary metal that has functioned as money continuously for 5,000 years, while the people on the other side continue to insist this time is different. This time has never been different. The math is the math. The shorts will continue to lose. The owners will continue to win.

How Brexit has made Britain poorer – in charts | Brexit | The Guardian theguardian.com/politics/202…

Heavy handed postmodern novel vol.2732

The French Marxist theorist, filmmaker, and professional troublemaker who led the Situationist International and wrote The Society of the Spectacle (1967) would see motorcycles flipping in front of the White House for what they are: not rebellion, but the spectacle flattering itself...a high-octane screensaver for a Herrenvolk democracy. The riders risk their necks so cameras can mine clips; the crowd risks nothing and calls it participation, mistaking adrenaline for agency. Power is so relaxed it stages "danger" at its own front door and sells it back as freedom, merch, and content. You walk away with a video instead of improved material conditions, convinced you've seen subversion when all you've really seen is how completely even your urge to rebel has been neutered. This is the movie they show on the Ship of Fools as you literally sail into your misery and destuction...Enjoy.

I watched a random world cup game last night. Switzerland vs Qatar. After an ad break (rehydration break) they had Whitney Houston's I'm so Excited on the PA, goalie was waiting for it to be switch off before he could kick the ball. The US is so tacky now. Money but no class.

The British legal system allows for activists to be sentenced as terrorists without a terrorism charge on the whim of a judge, who kept the jury in the dark about their conviction for criminal damage being repackaged at sentencing, gagged the defendants on presenting motive, gagged the defence on referring to jury equity in closing or from informing the jury that the judge cannot force them to convict, ruled that the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ could not be used in court, ordered the defendants’ own notebooks and writings redacted to remove references to Elbit’s arms supply to Israel, dismissed an abuse of process application which documented meetings between Elbit, Home Office, Attorney General and the Israeli Embassy concerning the prosecutions, remanded three of the four convicted defendants in custody between verdict and sentence without support from the prosecution, and restricted the entire British press for the better part of a year from reporting on his own pre-trial rulings on the terrorism connection, the restrictions on defence motive evidence and that he referred the defence for contempt after his closing address in the first trial, a first in British legal history. I’m struck by the fact that very few in the politico-media elite of this country seem to care just how much this degree of subservience to and connivance with murderous foreign interests (the United States and its genocidal satellite state) undermines the political legitimacy of the judiciary and the state as a whole. In fact, those who don’t actively support this (too many to count) seem perfectly happy in their complacency.

FREE TO READ: The top-10 reasons why oil prices are below $100 a barrel. 1) China, China and China 2) Demand destruction 3) Lots of oil bypassing/leaving the Strait of Hormuz 4) The original oversupply 5) Huge SPR release / commercial stocks draw 6) Refinery flexibility 7) Trump's jawboning 8) Options market development 9) The fog of war is thinner 10) Soaring Americas oil output bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Well, here's some math. Starlink is a profitable business with about $11 billion of sales and $3 billion of free cash flow. It might be worth $75 billion at a frisky multiple of 25X free cash flow. The balance----the space launch business and the AI/data centers in space fantasy----has $7 billion of sales and NEGATIVE -$17 billion of free cash flow. So why is it worth anything, unless you are pricing a dream peddled by sell-side hucksters?! In short, after trading up to $2 trillion based on $75 billion of tangible Starlink value, where's the remaining $1.925 trillion of it? This isn't just the classical mania of the crowds. This is sui generis--- mass insanity in a casino that has been giving a lobotomy by three decades of money-printing madness at the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks around the planet.