My statements about transparency can be summarized as: In the presence of transparency, buyer and seller can Trust, but Verify the stories told by the issuer/Wall Street. They have the info they need to assess the risk/reward/value of a security. Their independent assessments are close enough so they are willing to engage in a trade without any governmental assistance even during a financial crisis. Worth repeating: trading in markets with transparency doesn't freeze. In the presence of opacity, buyers and sellers cannot Trust, but Verify the valuation stories told by the issuer/Wall Street. When the valuation story told by Wall Street is called into doubt, buyer and seller assessments can be so far apart no trade is possible and the market freezes. Government intervention is required to "unfreeze" the market. Perhaps more importantly, to the extent owners of opaque securities can, they "run" to get their money back when the valuation story is called into doubt. This is true for all opaque securities. These observations find their theoretical support in the Information Matrix. The Information Matrix underlies 100% of finance and most economic theories. These theories don't state their assumption trades happen in the "Perfect Information" quadrant - perfect information here being buyer and seller have the necessary info they need to know what they own. instituteforfinancialtranspa…

White House cheers ADP number, silent on this

This should have changed the trajectory of our relationship…..but it didn’t……and here we are. What do we do next?

Tell me more…. (Narrator: before 2000, the USA was the #1 producer of magnesium….and the most used alloys were developed by Dow Corporation in the 1940s 🤔)

Been talking about how outsourcing high unemployment to other countries is important to China's leadership staying in power ... high unemployment IN China leads to leadership change ...

If only someone warned you about what was happening concerning Trump and Albania 2 years ago….

The giant sucking sound of retail money exiting private credit continues.. BCRED: 10% redemption requests, 5% cap

Trump threatened tariffs of 10–12.5% on 60 trading partners including the UK, EU, Canada and Australia over alleged forced labour failures, in a move designed to circumvent court rulings that struck down his earlier tariff measures. The EU pushed back, arguing the proposed levies breach a trade deal reached last July.

Beige Book: "middle-income households were described as “squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it,” and low-income consumers showed greater financial strain."

Maybe nationalizing the bubble is a bad idea

The federal government just banned bison from public land in Montana. Not cattle. Bison. Interior Secretary Burgum revoked grazing permits for 950 bison on 63,000 acres of federal land in northeastern Montana. The reason? Bison raised for conservation don't count as livestock under a 1934 law. Bison raised for meat and milk? Fine. Bison raised to restore a native species to its native land? Get out. Meanwhile, cattle ranchers across the West keep grazing on your land. For $1.69 a month. One cow. One calf. Thirty days. $1.69. On land that belongs to every American. The Cheyenne River Sioux. The Coalition of Large Tribes — 50 Native nations. Defenders of Wildlife. They all filed formal protests. They called it exactly what it is. "DEI for cows." The bison have until September 30 to be gone. Who decided cattle belong on public land more than bison do? #DemsUnited

Let’s feed them bespoke, complex alts and crypto. Should be fine.

Oligarchs buy rules that profit them. NASDAQ and SEC complicit.

“Don’t ask, Don’t tell” is making a comeback. Stock trading can also be anonymous. Banking. All of finance could be. This isn’t about the technology, it’s about dodging rules.

RT @ericnuttall: This morning I’m reading “alarmingly low US distillate stocks” ~7MM bbls above operationally challenging levels, and Mercu…

RT @chigrl: Trafigura Warns Oil at ‘Critical Juncture’ as Buffers Run Out Trafigura Group said energy markets are at a “critical juncture,…

Beijing thought it could hold the entire global tech industry hostage by locking down rare earth minerals, but Western innovators just broke the CCP’s chokehold. A Wall Street Journal report highlights a massive wave of optimism as industries successfully eliminate their reliance on Chinese critical minerals. For decades, Beijing controlled up to 90% of global rare earth processing, using that monopoly as political leverage. However, its recent aggressive export restrictions backfired completely, triggering an unprecedented boom in non-Chinese processing and substitution technologies that cannot be undone. Leading this technological rebellion is Minnesota-based startup Niron Magnetics, which has engineered the world’s first high-performance, rare-earth-free permanent magnets using iron nitride. By utilizing iron and nitrogen, which are abundant, cheap, and entirely domestic raw materials, Niron completely bypasses the dirty refining loops controlled by China. This breakthrough has attracted massive backing from automotive giants like GM Ventures, Stellantis, and Volvo, alongside defense partnerships to build military hardware. Demand is already outstripping supply, forcing Niron to expand from a pilot facility to a massive 190,000-square-foot production plant to fulfill its contracts. At the same time, startups like Conifer are transforming electric motors by swapping out rare earths for standard, abundant ferrite magnets. Conifer’s proprietary design slashes motor size and weight by up to 50% while boosting vehicle range and operating efficiency by up to 30%. These clean motors seamlessly drop into everything from delivery vehicles and robotics to data center cooling systems. By trying to weaponize its mineral monopoly, the CCP has accidentally forced the West to build a resilient, localized supply chain that leaves authoritarian chokeholds in the past. #RareEarths #SupplyChain #NationalSecurity #CleanTech #ChinaDecoupling #Innovation #Geopolitics #NironMagnetics wsj.com/world/does-the-world…

The below story about Chinese tech involution is really insightful. I think it perfectly explains why China has had such difficulty reinvesting capital into the West (beyond purely financial assets or assets it wants to strategically sabotage). Chinese FDI fell quite sharply post 2018 and it’s not just because Western countries became more wary of Chinese control and influence. The documentary ‘American Factory’ perfectly illustrated the beginnings of the involution problem. The Chinese factory model (when powered by cheap exploited labour) simply can’t be replicated competitively in the West. At least, not without making the West visibly poorer, something that would likely trigger a political backlash. The documentary tracks the successive attempts by the Chinese owners to block American unionisation to protect profitability. The Chinese managers are also regularly bewildered by American labour norms. But the reason their investments eventually fail has little to do with Americans being lazy or overly unionised. On the contrary, it’s because when one’s comparative advantage is cheap labour and repression, it’s impossible to make that model work anywhere that doesn’t abide the same norms. This limits Chinese corporate expansion to jurisdictions with poor worker protections and standards, or non democracies. This is why China’s American investments were eventually abandoned in favor of BRI countries: jurisdictions where China had more clout and influence over local governments and thus greater ability to run exploitative models. It also helped that these populations were generally poorer and had to take terms as presented. But even that strategy is becoming increasingly politically contentious. This has left China with no choice but to compete technologically. After all, the only alternatives at this point are: 1) bankrupting its primary customer and trade partner, aka the force that powers what growth it has, 2) writing off the wealth it thought it had on grounds it is no longer materialisable, a move that essentially locks its own people into exploitative conditions for the long term or 3) annexing foreign countries so that foreign populations can be forced to work in exploitative conditions instead. Aka actual old school colonial imperialism. So far China is opting for the technological path. But as the below story illustrates, the more China gives up on using its true comparative advantage (large cheap workforces) in favor of technological advances, the more likely it is to run into involution. This is because without a natural input cost advantage it has to compete on actual merit and non human labour cost control. The problem for China is that simply shifting towards automation and technology is no guarantee of success, especially if the overall operation is far more capital or energy intensive than the old way of doing things. It might not even guarantee greater efficiency, since foreign competition will no longer be put off by an inability to emulate exploitative working practices their systems won’t tolerate. On the contrary China will now be the one constrained by its own inability to adopt Western practices, notably the art of yielding to consumer feedback and power, cost control and respect for hard budget constraints.

#macro #oott #automotive If you need an oil change, get it done asap x.com/ekwufinance/status/206…

So we could have a tokenized "stock" with no rights or reporting obligations siphoning money away from the real stock market (and issuers), but with direct negative impacts on stock market participants. It destroys market efficiency, stability and integrity. 14/

None of the main fights in the crypto bill are about regulating spot Bitcoin or true crypto. The fights are about some "crypto" firms using blockchain to magically win new, lighter rules for traditional financial activities -- like stock trading or banking. 10/