Zach Brown

Born in the north, raised down south. I'm a pretty famous country singer.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@PanthersCulture Bryce proves he’s a franchise QB, without a doubt. Lots of noise and weird year-to-year stuff that can impact playoff spots… you either have a dude at QB or you don’t.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

Hey @BrandonGaudin, where can I find that white @Braves hat you have on the desk in the broadcast booth? Love the look of that thing!

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

Way to have such a material impact on the outcome of a game of this magnitude @NFLOfficiating @NFL

[Ryan Clark @Realrclark25]

Carolina is getting Jobbed right now by the officials! No way around it. They’re getting crushed with awful calls.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@1PantherPlace All fair points. Totally agree that the improvement is clear and measurable. As you said, just really sucks when we see that they have the potential and it doesn’t consistently show up against inferior opponents.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@1PantherPlace Three most important words there are, “not there yet.” This team has had some unexpected wins by the game script going perfectly in their favor, but at this point they’ve clearly demonstrated that they’re still more of a back-third of the league type of team than a contender.

[Ahmed/The Ears/IG: BigBizTheGod 🇸🇴 @big_business_]

2025 Carolina Panthers team

[Robert Mays @robertmays]

The Panthers lost to the Saints, have two losses of 25+ points, scored 13 or fewer points in 6 games, had a 30-0 blowout win, and now have wins over the Rams and Packers.

Very normal team.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@JulianCouncil Julian. What the hell is this team?

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@gvedak @TraegerGrills I had a similar experience with @TraegerGrills and some ribs earlier this year. You love to see it.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@DCPandC https://t.co/fenBwVimwL

[Famously Garnet Sports @FamouslyGarnet]

I HAVE BEEF WITH THIS OFFICER

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@JulianCouncil Definitively yes.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@BCrawford247 Can we leave Lonnie Teasley and Mike Shula in Baton Rouge?

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@RixonLane Petition for Rixon to be South Carolina's new OC.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@PanthersCulture Loss in a tight, competitive game where we see BY and the offense look solid? Honestly, ok with that. Came into the season thinking we’d probably be neck-and-neck with the Falcons.

Dysfunction continues and we’re 0-3? Rebuild is essentially back to square one.

[NFL Draft Files @NFL_DF]

Spencer Rattler… we need to have some uncomfortable convos.

He looked like a borderline elite QB today. Top to bottom. A bad supporting cast let him down.

[Ryan McGee @ESPNMcGee]

The Gamecocks scoring a TD at the exact moment that engines fired for the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway is peak South Carolina. Anyone coincidentally biting into a mustard-based BBQ sandwich at that same instant was immediately raptured to the Myrtle Beach Pavilion.

[Threevo @mrporchguy]

I know we joke about stuff being incomprehensible to the European mind but 105,000 people giving a standing ovation to a 90-year-old man in a tuxedo after he puts on a mascot head is probably really hard for them to understand.

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@1PantherPlace Any chance this means they bring Renfrow back, or has that ship sailed?

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

The Art of the Cave

Trump fought the bond market and the bond market won

Since getting into office, Trump and Bessent have relentlessly spoken about wanting to bring interest rates down and wanting to manage the US debt sustainably. Countless Trump-aligned economists and influencers explained that the goal of their tariffs was to bring bond yields down, even if it meant crashing the stock market.

The gambit seemed to work for the first day, and the huge crash in the stock market was presented as a small price to pay for fiscal sustainability. But then the bonds began to crash, and it became clear how disastrous the tariffs were, and how wrong it was to expect that deliberately crashing the stock market would boost the bond market. It is cargo cult economics: people observe a reverse correlation between bonds and stocks and so assume that anything that crashes stocks must boost bonds. But there's no reason to suppose that the normal gyrations of market participants managing risk and allocations would hold when the government sabotages the financials of all the country's businesses with reckless tariffs. Ultimately, bond yields are a function of the ability of the government to pay its debts. As its credit-worthiness declines, yields rise. If taxpayers lose a lot of wealth, they pay less taxes, and the government's fiscal situation deteriorates. Tariffs made American businesses start revising profit estimates, consider downsizing, and reversing business plans, and crashed their stocks.

As bond yields began to rise, panic clearly took over the White House and Trump had to reverse course. You can safely and completely ignore anyone presenting this as a triumph or trying to rationalize it as some 'Art of the Deal' genius move. These people seem to think the bond market is Hillary Clinton or Rosie O'Donnell or some CNN bimbo. The rise in yields was the exact opposite of what the administration wanted, and reversing course on the tariffs half a day after they go into effect was absolutely devastating for Trump's negotiating position. All of the talk about China buckling under the threat of Trump now sounds hilarious in retrospect, when Trump could not keep his tariffs in place for 2 days. He later capitulated further, exempting a large number of high tech goods, many of which come from China. The White House, like a delusional ex-lover, repeatedly said China needs to reach out to them to strike a deal, while China showed absolutely no inclination to do so. 

Implications:

1- The US fiscal situation is bad, and Trump's ideas for improving it just spooked the bond markets and it will take something serious to get it to settle down again. Full capitulation might not be enough. 

2- Treasury bonds being the ultimate safe haven is the basic foundation of the global fiat financial system, and it was what Trump was counting on to reduce the US debt burden. This reputation has been taking a beating over the last five years of bond declines, but the past few weeks were probably the biggest punch it’s taken yet. It failed to act as a safe haven, and it failed to act in the way the administration had been counting on.

3- This situation will not be fixed through cutting government spending. Musk just said he expects DOGE to save USG $150b in the first year, practically a rounding error. Given that they've vigorously gone after USAID (under 1% of the federal budget) but no major government department like the DoD, Federal Reserve, or entitlements, DOGE looks less like a fiscal responsibility program and a lot more like a political project targeting the regime's enemies.

(Continues in next tweet)

[Zach Brown @brownzt]

@JStein_WaPo Rich, coming from the administration that campaigned heavily on accusing their opponent of presiding over an economy with high inflation and promised to cut costs on Day 1.