JZ (not a cat) 🕙

Finance | Macro | Derivatives | Buy the dip, buy the rip | Sport | Views/opinions = personal | Likes = NOT endorsement | Not investment advice

[Arsen Ostrovsky @Ostrov_A]

OTD in 1995, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered over 5 days in Srebrenica, in the worst mass killing on European soil since the Holocaust.

You want to see real genocide? Then look at Srebrenica, not what some political activists claim is happening in Gaza.

As @SpencerGuard and I have written previously, the analogy to Gaza is not just inaccurate, it is a gross distortion of truth and perversion of justice. Words matter. So does the law. Genocide is not a political football. It is the gravest of crimes, and when maliciously weaponized against Israel, it demeans the memory of the victims of real genocides - like in Srebrenica - and endangers the integrity of international law itself.

[Dina D. Pomeranz 🟣 @DinaPomeranz]

Extreme poverty worldwide has never been as low as it is today, and it's never fallen as fast as in recent decades.

We need more facts and less ideology...

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

America innovates
China replicates
Europe regulates

[JOHN WHITE @Ngonge69JOHN]

For Lineker to refer to The Falklands as 'Las Malvinas' is utterly disgraceful. He should never work on TV again. It's so disrespectful to those that lost their lives defending them. He knew what he was doing. Vile man.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Many thousands of Costco’s U.S. hourly workers have over $1 million in their 401(k) accounts, per WSJ

[Jeremy Clarkson @JeremyClarkson]

Twitter is a handy and constant reminder that socialists are disgusting people.

[Emma Trimble @Emma_A_Webb]

It looks as if they’ve deleted it, but the internet has a long memory. Other than the obvious, what the fuck is wrong with the @socialistworker?

[Iain Dale 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 ⚒️ @IainDale]

I will curb my language but that tweet is disgusting. You profess to be an advocate of human rights, and the right to be treated with dignity after death is a basic human right everyone should have, yet you rejoice in her death. Yes, her religion guided her views on equality issues, and I had many disagreements with her, but as a gay man I counted her as a friend, as did many others. She was actually a profoundly kind person. She endorsed my candidacy knowing of my sexuality. She softened her views on equal marriage and told me in 2019 she would not support reversing it.
So be ashamed of yourself today, Peter. You do some great work, but in this instance it's you that's the bigot. Bigoted against the dead, and bringing upset to those of us who counted Ann as a friend. Think on that.

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Your regular reminder that “one off taxes” don’t exist.

Income tax was a “one off tax” introduced in 1799 as a “strictly temporary measure” to fund the war against Napoleon. Napoleon has been dead for 205 years. How’s that going? 🤣

A wealth tax is just unworkable slop, even the leftist think tank wonks who wanted it and fervently researched it agree. That admission is just them saying intellectually “we can’t justify this but we were commissioned to find a way so here it is… so… er… maaaaaybe a one off would work, maybe please bro please just a little one off bro I swear bro?!”

Capital is ultra mobile. The wealth is paper mostly not liquid. I wrote about this recently.

The précis here:

A billionaire’s wealth is mostly shares in a company they founded, or assets they own. There’s no vault of cash to raid.

So a wealth tax bill can only be paid one way: selling shares or assets.

Now scale that up. Every wealthy person in the country gets the same bill at the same time, so they all sell at the same time. But share prices are set by the last trade, and markets are thin. Gabaix and Koijen’s research shows every £1 of forced selling destroys roughly £5 of market value. So a tax assessed on £670bn of paper wealth triggers selling that shrinks the £670bn while it’s being collected. You’re pouring from a bucket that drains as you pour. Even a one-off levy has this problem, because the assessment is done at yesterday’s prices and the collection happens at tomorrow’s, and tomorrow’s are lower because of the collection itself.

And the destruction doesn’t stay with the billionaires. Those same shares sit in everyone’s pension funds and ISAs, so the markdown hits every saver in the country simultaneously. Downstream savings get smashed. Your ISA. Your parents pension pot.

Then the second-round effects. Founders forced to sell down lose control of their companies. Companies whose share price is falling and whose ownership is unstable don’t invest: capex gets shelved, R&D gets cut, hiring freezes, they can’t borrow the same against the asset base because they were forced to liquidate parts of it to settle the “one off tax bill”, because the cost of capital just went up and the founder is now managing a tax bill instead of a business.

Equity value is just the market’s estimate of future output, so taxing the stock of it annually is functionally taxing future investment, future jobs and future tax receipts.

That’s the core problem with if - the tax treats a price as a pile. But the price only exists because nobody’s selling, and the tax makes everybody sell.

Socialists don’t understand this because they are market and economically illiterate.

[Cllr Elliot Keck @ElliotKeck]

No Guardian article has ever brought me more joy than this. Some best bits:

"This evangelising of a wealth tax should have made for a truly amazing documentary. But it allows its host to be totally out-argued by all his interviewees. Why?"

"Stevenson is not an appealing presenter. He has an adolescent bullishness about him that comes across badly on screen, raising a sort of fight-or-flight response in the viewer instead of encouraging engagement"

"He is outdone and undone by almost all of his interviewees."

Stevenson was "left floundering, without convincing comebacks to any of them."

"Just a faintly embarrassing waste of time."

If Gary cannot even convince the Guardian's TV critic that he is not just a grifter, it's no wonder he is deciding to quit

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Four churches have burned down in New York since Zohran Mamdani took office. Yesterday alone, two churches were set on fire.

Imagine if it were mosques. He would be crying Islamophobia and declaring a state of emergency.

But since it’s churches, he hasn’t said a single word.

[Adam Cohen @adambcohen93]

Founder friendly VCs in the 90's

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Gary Stevenson is not an expert, he's an activist. The Greta Thunberg of tax. And he's finally been found out.

https://t.co/O1kxYlvY4y

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

BREAKING: Minneapolis daycare owner featured in Nick Shirley’s video Fahima Egeh Mahamud, PLEADS GUILTY to over $4 million fraud scheme

[Anglo Futurism Capital LP 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

Tax’s final boss @DanNeidle nails @garyseconomics here.

Dan is probably the last man in Britain you’d want to have an argument about tax with, what he doesn’t know fits on the back of a grain of rice 🤣

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

I don't usually write personal stuff, but a few words about my experience of being interviewed by Gary Stevenson.

It started with a nice chat, comparing taste in hoodies... then the tone changed. He demanded to know why I'd deleted a tweet criticising him.

[نواف الاسيوي 🇸🇦 @football_li5]

والله أكثر مقطع أستفزني..

إحتفالية روميرو أمام محمد صلاح؛ شوفوا مارتينيز الي معروف بإستفزازه في الاحتفالات كيف منعه من هالشيء

[Martien 🇳🇱 @MartienBall]

If Argentina beat Switzerland, they’ll become the first team in World Cup HISTORY to reach the semi finals without facing a single top 10 ranked nation.

Just another coincidence, of course...

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

China's residential property prices have effectively dropped back to roughly 2006 levels in real terms, wiping out an estimated $18–$20 trillion USD in perceived household wealth since the 2021 peak, per BIS

[Madrid Zone @theMadridZone]

🚨 How often do teams playing in World Cup quarterfinals get booked:

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England - Card per every 7 fouls
🇲🇦 Morocco - Card per every 9,8 fouls
🇧🇪 Belgium - Card per every 10 fouls
🇨🇭 Switzerland - Card per every 11,5 fouls
🇫🇷 France - Card per every 12,2 fouls
🇳🇴 Norway - Card per every 13,6 fouls
🇪🇸 Spain - Card per every 17,5 fouls
🇦🇷 Argentina - Card per every 22 fouls