Erik Poole

Free market capitalism loving economist
Realist, Tiers mondiste
Oil & gas investor with a focus on overseas
Wilderness enthusiast
Fluent in French and Spanish

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@DA_Stockman US-style corporate fascism in 2026?

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@TheRabbitHole @elonmusk I like Sowell but that is an overstatement.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

Wrong. Incorrect. The biggest strategic mistake has been unconditional US support for Zionist Israeli ethnic cleansing, a brutal apartheid system, systemic human rights abuses and serial war crimes.

[Wolfgang Munchau @EuroBriefing]

The biggest unforced error of US and western diplomacy in the last decade has been to force Russia, China and North Korea to form a strategic military and economic alliance. This has been the work of Trump and Biden administrations, and Europeans partners who can't think for themselves. You can fight China, or you can fight Russia, but you cannot fight both of them at the same time.
https://t.co/xhrTyJS1Hq

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@EuroBriefing Wrong. Incorrect. The biggest strategic mistake has been unconditional US support for Zionist Israeli ethnic cleansing, a brutal apartheid system, systemic human rights abuses and serial war crimes.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@stphnmaher How about learning something about taxes and subsidies, in particular the concept of net taxes?

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

Is this why Elon Musk supports financial and military aid for Zionist Israel so it can commit serial war crimes?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

That’s what it comes down to

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@BrianMcDonaldIE No! Absolutely not. Au contraire. The post simply reminded me of all the North Americans and Europeans who love to condemn conservative traditional peoples in 'other' countries.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

For an insight into how the other half err 1% live.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@DA_Stockman Hear! Hear!

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

Michelle, Knock, knock. The USA has always treated Latin America like its own personal backyard.

From the Monroe Doctrine to the Dunroe Doctrine, there is a long tradition.

Oddly enough, US policy choices make it harder, not easier for well-managed US multinational corporations to operate and thrive in Latin America. US sheeple do not understand this.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

Yet chain-saw Elon Musk has only added political cover to an out of control, rapidly growing federal deficit, US wars and US war crimes. Hmm....

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The magnitude & brazen nature of the government payment fraud is staggering

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@rupasubramanya Rupa, Are you sure that you are not conflating anti-Zionism sentiments in the wake of ongoing ethnic cleansing, a doubling down on the apartheid system, systemic human rights abuses and serial war crimes?

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@rupasubramanya Really? Anti-Jewish behaviour. Never stumbled across it.

Anti-group x, y, z? Often and all the time.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@DA_Stockman ... and productivity growth.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@DA_Stockman Carter was a lovely man but he made certain incredibly naive and silly mistakes. Jimmy Carter never understood that the peace treaties he negotiated would allow Israel to continue ethnic cleansing and maintaining the apartheid system

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@OopsGuess Translation key:

If China can do no 'right', it must mean that to an approximation, China can do no wrong.

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@DanielLMcAdams Is there a Viagra product designed specifically for the president of the United States?

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

Oof.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

They are disappearing

[Erik Poole @AboutResources]

@sarobertson_ ... Or the Democrats turned out to be war criminal scum?