30 years in the investment industry, newsletter writer, entrepreneur, gemologist, and elephant polo aficionado.
Working with Dr Jim Walker - DM for intro, rsch
Delighted to be working with old colleague/friend and living legend Dr. Jim Walker. Will be highlighting some of his work and themes as we move forward. Always insightful, knowledgeable, and highly pertinent. Please DM for intro, research, meetings et al
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Today's brief post.
The Instutional Response Curve
https://t.co/Qjto4CQQel
After years of reading official reports, press releases, public inquiries, corporate statements and media briefings, I have finally managed to compress the entire modern policy response to problems into a single Kűbler-Ross style diagram.
I wonder why those same Egyptian fans weren't out on the streets chanting for the Egyptian govt to open their border with Gaza in 2023 to allow Palestinians to flee all that genocide they claim they've been suffering. Instead Egypt chose to reinforce their border. 🤷🏻♀️
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of colonists decided that a distant king had no business taxing their tea, their paper, or their labor. They were right. Read the Declaration again and notice what it actually protests: not vague injustice, but specific violations. Taxation without consent. Standing armies in peacetime. Trade cut off by decree. These were economic grievances, and the men who signed the document understood that liberty and property are the same thing viewed from two angles.
You have inherited that idea, though you would hardly know it from your tax code.
Consider what freedom bought. In 1776 the average person lived close to subsistence, as every human had since the Pharaohs. Then free markets, sound money, and secure property did their work, and real income exploded. Millions of people traded voluntarily and kept what they earned, without central planning.
The men in Philadelphia never authorized a central bank that would shave 96 percent off the dollar's value since 1913. They never voted you a bureaucracy that spends four dollars for every three it collects. Jefferson warned you about this exact outcome in his letters, and you filed the warning away.
Freedom is the concrete right to trade, save, build, and refuse. Guard the specifics and the abstractions take care of themselves.
So dishonesty is now considered acceptable when practising the Law?
Who would have guessed with our current rash of legal beagle @UKLabour politicians?
Narrator: According to the Statistical Review of World Energy, global consumption of coal, oil and gas all reached record levels in 2025. There is no transition, only addition. Link in reply
Global coal, oil and gas consumption reached record highs last year. Explain how the UK building expensive and intermittent wind and solar that's destroying the economy will change the weather.
Net Zero is a massive growth opportunity for energy bills and for the rent seekers sucking subsidies and guaranteed returns from hard pressed customers. Subsides + Grid Integration costs set to double by 2030/31. For everyone else it's a disaster.
The interest rate is not the price of money. It is the price of time.
This distinction wrecks most of what you learned in your macro class. The mainstream tells a story where the interest rate emerges from a market for "loanable funds," a pool that grows when people save and shrinks when they borrow, with banks acting as neutral middlemen matching one to the other. Tidy. And wrong at its foundation, because it treats the rate as a monetary phenomenon rather than what it actually reflects: the ratio at which human beings value present goods over future goods. Economists call this time preference. You call it the reason you'd rather have a steak dinner tonight than the same steak dinner promised next December.
Here is where the story gets dangerous. Under sound money, savings and investment stay tethered. You defer consumption, real resources free up, the rate falls to reflect that people are willing to wait, and entrepreneurs stretch production into longer, more roundabout processes. The rate is a signal telling producers how far into the future the public actually wants them to reach. Now hand a central bank the power to conjure credit from nothing. Ben Bernanke's Fed dropped the funds rate to near zero in December 2008 and pinned it there for seven years. No new savings appeared. No one deferred a single dinner. The signal was simply falsified.
That falsification is the whole ballgame. When the rate drops because the Fed printed reserves rather than because you saved, entrepreneurs read a message the public never sent. They break ground on projects that require real capital which does not exist. The boom feels marvelous. It is a mirage built on a corrupted price.
Mises worked this out in 1912. Hayek refined it into the theory that won him the Nobel in 1974. Neither got a serious hearing from the people who set rates, which tells you something about what central banking is for. The loanable funds model survives not because it explains the world; it survives because it allows certain men to print money.
I’m starting to worry he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. And has no time to learn. The price of water and electricity is already controlled by the state.
Pinochet dropped 30,000 communists out of helicopters and created the most peaceful, prosperous society in South America.
Would you rather live in a free-market dictatorship or a communist democracy?
Would you rather live in Singapore or Venezuela?
@gave_vincent@RnaudBertrand He's committed a false-equivalence sleight-of-hand. He treats "dependency on the US" and the implied alternative as symmetric sovereignty problems, when the entire question is dependency on whom.
Notgenerator can survive with negative wholesale prices without subsidy. The economics of generation and grids is disastrous for consumers, with subsidies & grid integration costs set to 2X by 2030/31 & we already have the highest industrial electricity prices in the world.
Alex Karp on NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
“Obviously someone who has no work experience ever, who has views that have never worked, should not be put in charge of the most important enterprise of its kind, maybe in the world.”