Per Amlie

Faster

[Bogachan Ozdemir @Bogachan_1971]

How did USA end up with these clowns?

In order to understand the dynamics, you have to understand the eigen vectors. There are two kind of powers that can rule a nation or empire: Political power or markets power.

Most nations through out history had been ruled solely by political power. In some cases markets had some sort of a power. Think it like x vs y and x is political and y is markets power. Usually x had over 0.8 and y has 0.2 or less factor.

Only in USA, between 1833-1913, markets had more power than politics except during Civil War. As a result, USA had become the richest and most powerful nation in the world.... and #FederalReserve arrived to use that to fund the world wars.

Central Bank is a tool for political power to circumvent the obstacles to fund wars. Since Magna Carta, rich had been giving trouble to the Kings to fund the wars. It is invented in Sweden to fund the wars and came handy when German -originally Este Family from Italy- Kings started to rule England and needed funding for their mercenary armies.

Central Banks mortgage the future to fund the wars today.

There is nothing related to a market based economy within a central bank. A central bank is not a bank. It can function with negative equity and can support other banks to function with negative equity like in USA last few years.

A market based economy cannot have units that has negative equity.

A central bank sets the price of money, #InterestRate, while setting the supply of money at the same time. Think it like this: I decide how many cookies I produce and also set the price myself instead of letting customers decide at least supply or price. I produce a billion cookies and set the price at $100.. this is more like a USSR kind of economy that an American economy.

FED's monopoly on suppy and price of money created one crises after another and finally the markets had died in 2008. For the first time in US history, political power became the sole determinant of how things are run in USA.

They created an artificial set up which looked like markets while all the decisions are made by political power.

If USA was a market based economy today, #Trump could not have been a President and not feel so unhinged to bring all those clowns to the government. He would not be able to lie at all times and move the markets like we saw last 16 months, especially last 100 days.

What makes things worse is that the competition, #China, had always operated solely with political power but created instruments to excel in that. US, facing China, with the same power structure but not the instruments is a circus now. Xi or CCP in general, does not take USA seriously anymore and that is not even about the clown in #WhiteHouse.

China relies on a meritocracy system and supermen they breed to keep their Empire strong. USA does not have any such system and under Trump, the least competent people are positioned in key roles with no chance to operate. It looks like an amateur girls team vs an NBA team in basket ball field.

USA will not be able to restart its markets again. It will go down with this clownish political power and not in distant future but within 5-10 years max.

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@StealthQE4 https://t.co/Htx8r5WOjg

Contemplate while you listen to this music and read the comments from Vietnam veterans......

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@StealthQE4

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@leadlagreport Something is eating me. Are the Japanese going to avenge the nukes by blowing up the US bond market??

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

Thanks and agree. I was stuck in Singapore during COVID which sucked. After over 20 years living in big cities in Asia, I probably head back to the Scandinavian forest where I came from to a simpler life closer to how my grand parents lived. I run industrial rental equipment business for a living, and that business model can move anywhere. Take care and keep up the good work sharing your understanding of what is happening under the surface and media noise.

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@Beno10_MFC 8

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@rationalaussie Get dogman and rigger tickets. Lot's of work to support crane operations in mine sites, construction sites etc.

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

My understanding of SWAP lines is that countries connected to US FED SWAP lines can print local currency which will be purchased by US FED and paid in USD which will be used to cover local government costs. This way a country can print money with less or no debasement of local currency as they piggyback on the debasement of the global reserve currency which is slower due to bigger monetary volume.

[🇦🇺Craig Tindale @ctindale]

The people who offshored our petrochemical and refining capacity are the same people who offshored our industrial base.

They are the people who imagined that Australia could prosper in an asset-inflated, debt-driven economy, where we sold houses to one another, served coffee to one another, and called it prosperity.

They are the people who built vast domestic schemes while allowing the productive base that funds them to decay.

They are the central bankers who treated consumption as the measure of success, while the goods we consumed, the machines we needed, and the materials we depended upon were increasingly sourced from China.

They are the people who speak solemnly of “net zero” while ignoring the fact that much of our carbon burden has simply been exported, manufactured elsewhere, and then consumed here with clean hands and dirty supply chains.

They are the people who insist that Australian workers must have rights, protections, safety standards, and wages, while accepting that those same rights are extinguished for the workers who make our goods overseas.

That is the modern colonial mind. It no longer arrives with a flag and a gunboat. It arrives with ideology, moral absolutism, and a lecture.

It tells us what to think. It tells us what words to use. It tells us what industries we may have, what energy we may use, what history we must despise, and what future we must accept.

And it did all this without ever asking the Australian people the central question:

Do we wish to remain a serious country, capable of making, refining, building, repairing and defending itself?

Or are we content to become a nation of consumers, administrators and moralists, living off assets we don’t build, supply chains we do not control, and energy systems we no longer understand?

[Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺 @im_Mateus_]

Former Singapore PM Lee Kuan Yew on the fundamental difference between American and Chinese society:**

Why do America and China see the world so differently? Lee Kuan Yew argues it comes down to one thing: history.

"The difference in the core philosophy between the American and the Chinese... it's a reflection of your history."

He traces America's worldview back to its origins:

"You came over in the Mayflower. You were seeking religious freedom so much so that you refused to allow it to be taught in the schools. You believed in the individual as the creator of all things."

That belief in the individual shaped everything that followed:

"You captured the wild west. I mean, on horseback. New town, main street, you be mayor, I'm sheriff, you're saloon keeper. We build a gold rush town or cattle or whatever it is."

And then came extraordinary fortune:

"You have been immensely fortunate and successful. Two world wars left Europe in a shambles and you emerged as the undamaged technological and industrial power."

China's story, Lee explains, looks nothing like this.

"China has a completely different and a checkered history. 4,000 to 5,000 years of ups and downs. Long periods when there was no governments, anarchy, warlords."

He shares a personal moment that brought this reality home to him:

"I once had a Chinese masseur when I was in Beijing working my game shoulder and we were talking and I said during the war, Japanese time, what currency did you use? So Japanese currency if it's in Japanese controlled areas or other currencies in other areas. So I said how many currencies are there? Two, three? Says 14 or 15 depending on which warlord's area you're in."

So how did the Chinese people survive centuries of chaos, when the state itself kept collapsing?

"Why have they survived in spite of anarchy, disaster, floods, famines? Because there was a social network independent of government that sustained them. The immediate family, the extended family, the clan. You owed them an obligation. You cannot turn them away. That's how they survived."

This is the philosophical fork in the road. America placed the individual at the centre. China placed the family.

Lee describes the system Singapore deliberately chose to preserve:

"If we keep those family bonds, those traditional life raft systems not dependent on the state, which places the emphasis on family, extended family, and then the government, and not the individual at the expense of the family and the state, which is the American system."

He acknowledges what the American system produces:

"So you have Bill Gates or John Chambers of Cisco... you look up Forbes or Fortune or whatever and 50 of the best and the brightest and the wealthiest. That's your experience. That's not China's experience."

But the goal in Asia is different:

"Yes, we also now want to try and get our little Bill Gates going, but in the context of keeping our society solid so that we will survive as a people."

He closes with a sharp reminder of why these two civilisations may never fully understand each other:

"You have never been occupied. You have only had one civil war. So you will never understand what it is."

The takeaway is uncomfortable but worth sitting with: a society's values aren't chosen in the abstract. They're forged by what that society had to survive. Individualism is a luxury of stability. Family-first collectivism is the inheritance of centuries of collapse.

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

Wife explaining her husband's job to her close friend.

Wife: "He sells software to companies."
Her friend: "Oh nice, like apps?"
Wife: "No. Big software. For running whole businesses."
Friend: "Oh, like Microsoft?"
Wife: "No. A German company. SAP."
Friend: "What's SAP?"

Long pause.↓↓↓

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@TOzgokmen Nobody will give up world reserve currency without a fight. I believe it's called an exorbitant privelege. We are at the end of a debt cycle and what's happening is not a surprise but still shitty.

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

@TOzgokmen It feels like US is putting a gun to the head of the world to secure refinancing of their debt??

[Per Amlie @AmliePer]

The west can learn a lot from Singapore and LKY. A functional multicultural society built for progress and prosperity. Challenge is to keep up over several generations as good times creates weak men and so on....

[Alexandre Allegret-Pilot @AllegretPilot]

🇸🇬 Immigration : ce que tout le monde sait… mais que personne n’ose dire

Lee Kuan Yew l’expliquait sans détour :

👉 Un pays ne tient que par un noyau dur de citoyens prêts à le défendre, le faire vivre et s’y reconnaître.

Pas une addition d’individus.
Pas une juxtaposition de communautés.

👉 Une colonne vertébrale.

Et c’est précisément là que le débat migratoire est mal posé.

On parle de :

- quotas
- pénuries de main-d’œuvre
- accueil
- droits

Mais on évite la seule question qui compte vraiment :

👉 combien de diversité une nation peut-elle absorber sans se fragmenter ?

Quel est la fiabilité de quelqu’un qui méprise la nation à laquelle il appartient officiellement, tout en promouvant manifestement des intérêts extérieurs à celle-ci ?

Parce que oui, il existe une limite.
Et non, elle n’est pas uniquement économique.

Une société, ce n’est pas un marché.
C’est un équilibre fragile entre :

- culture commune
- confiance
- sentiment d’appartenance

Quand cet équilibre casse, tout le reste suit.

👉 Moins de confiance
👉 Plus de tensions
👉 Moins de capacité à décider collectivement

Singapour n’a pas fait semblant :
✔️ ouverture, oui
✔️ naïveté, jamais
✔️ assimilation exigeante, non négociable

🧭Une seule boussole : l’intérêt de Singapour et des Singapouriens. Tout le reste y est subordonné. Il n’est pas question de grandes envolées lyriques sur le sauvetage de l’humanité. Charité bien ordonnée commence par soi-même.

En Europe, on fait souvent l’inverse :
👉 beaucoup de discours
👉 peu d’exigence
👉 et une peur constante de nommer les choses

Résultat ?

On découvre progressivement qu’une nation peut se déliter…
sans crise brutale,
sans effondrement visible,
mais par érosion lente du commun.

Une nation qui devient peu à peu incapable de réaliser un centième des desseins grandiloquents que certains lui assignent pourtant volontiers.

👉 Le vrai sujet n’est peut être pas tant « être pour ou contre l’immigration ».

Le vrai sujet, c’est :

voulons-nous encore être un peuple … ou simplement des populations qui se partagent un territoire ?

[Josh Man @JoshMandell6]

Tick tock
Another block

The new Fed chairman
Is not a sock

He says he's not a fan of quantitative easing
but what if he must do it to keep the gov't from seizing?

Some of the tougher questions he might have ducked
But if somebody doesn't do something, we're all _______

[Capitalist Exploits @capitalistexp]

1/11
The Iran war just cemented the most important investing framework for the next decade.
Not the Mag 7. Not AI. Not the SpaceX IPO.
Maslow's pyramid. The base is where the big returns will come from.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore.

They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute.

Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry."

He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns.

He asked: "Can I collect my other things?"

They said yes.

He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days.

When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through.

The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive.

60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth:

On what the war did to him:

"We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought."

Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed.

"Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did."

"But it changed us."

"What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?"

When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes.

"Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?"

On learning languages to lead:

Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English.

The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay.

"So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien."

"Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default."

His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him.

"I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding."

By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent.

"Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them."

"That came respect."

It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them.

On fighting the Communists:

The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born.

"Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization."

They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns.

Lee stood up and said no.

"They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages."

English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each.

"When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath."

"But it was a fight for survival. Life or death."

On where trust comes from:

"It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'"

"But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference."

"Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore."

On IQ vs EQ:

Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader?

"IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions."

"But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings."

"If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good."

He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120."

But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly.

"He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know."

"So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate."

On corruption:

Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime.

"When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed."

"We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent."

He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio.

"I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself."

One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee.

"I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer."

The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price."

"It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions."

On consistency:

Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches.

He asked them: what was the dominant theme?

All three said the same thing: consistency.

"What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear."

"That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do."

On delivering results:

"We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals."

"Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000."

"Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value."

"But that was planned."

Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own.

"So we give everybody a stake."

On changing culture slowly:

Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it.

"Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots."

Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English.

"They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched."

It took 16 years.

"I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack."

On whether leadership can be taught:

Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature.

Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?"

He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time."

Lee's version:

"Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so."

"He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family."

"You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it."

"But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble."

On sustaining yourself:

Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership.

"If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope."

"But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you."

"When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind."

"If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit."

In his later years, he learned to meditate.

"At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind."

"Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide."

This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined.

Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.

[Handre @Handre]

Sweden's socialist experiment collapsed so spectacularly in the 1990s that even the Social Democrats had to abandon their own system and embrace free markets.

By 1990, Sweden faced a full-blown economic crisis. Government spending had ballooned to 67% of GDP. Marginal tax rates hit 102% (literally paying the state to work). Public debt exploded. The banking system collapsed under the weight of government-directed credit allocation. Unemployment skyrocketed to 12%. The Swedish model had delivered exactly what free market economists predicted: economic stagnation, capital flight, and fiscal collapse.

The government had no choice but to deregulate. They privatized telecommunications, postal services, railways, and electricity. They abolished exchange controls and financial market regulations. They cut government spending from 67% to 49% of GDP. They reduced the top marginal tax rate from 87% to 57%. They opened domestic markets to foreign competition and eliminated price controls across entire sectors.

The results were immediate and undeniable. GDP growth accelerated from near-zero to 4% annually through the late 1990s. Unemployment plummeted to 4% by 2000. Productivity surged as companies like Ericsson and Volvo competed globally without government interference. Swedish startups like Skype and Spotify emerged from the newly liberalized economy. Foreign investment flooded back as Sweden transformed from socialist basket case to competitive market economy.

Capitalism worked once Sweden removed socialist barriers to growth and competition.

Yet, today it is paraded as a socialist success story😂.