John Luke Tyner

[J @JayTC53]

If President Trump was losing an election then called up his former personal attorney turned Supreme Court justice to extend voting by 3 hours...

All of the media would be sounding the alarm on corruption. But when fascist dictator Lula does it for Brazil the media cheers his victory.

[Santiago Capital @SantiagoAuFund]

In the last 9 months Rubio has given 2 of the best speeches I can remember hearing.

[Handre @Handre]

Learn Austrian Economics in one X post:

1. Humans act. Every choice a person makes traces back to an incentive, a trade-off, a cost weighed against a benefit. Remove the incentive and the action stops. Distort the incentive and the action warps.

Tax income at 90% and watch producers stop producing. Subsidize failure and watch failure multiply. The behavior follows the reward structure, always.

2. Value exists only in the mind of the person choosing. A glass of water is worth nothing to a drowning man and everything to a man dying of thirst. No central authority can calculate this, because it changes with every individual and every circumstance.

Nothing has value in itself, only the degree to which humans choose to value it. Diamonds and even gold only carry value because humans decided they do.

3. Money does not come from a government decree. It emerged spontaneously when traders needed something durable, divisible, and widely accepted to escape the limitations of direct barter. Gold won that competition across centuries and across dozens of independent civilizations because the market, not a ministry, chose it.

Fiat currency is the state hijacking that evolved institution and replacing it with paper backed by nothing but a legal threat. Every central bank on earth operates on this model right now.

4. Wealth does not fall from the sky. A farmer who eats his entire harvest produces nothing next season. The farmer who saves seed, plants it, and specializes in what he grows best accumulates a surplus. That surplus is capital. Capital funds everything that comes after.

Consumption without prior production is just burning down the furniture for warmth. Every welfare state eventually reaches this point.

5. Strip private property rights and production collapses. A farmer will work his own land until midnight. That same farmer, working collective land, stops at noon. The Soviet Union ran this experiment across seventy years and killed tens of millions, proving the point.

When you cannot own the outcome, you do not produce the outcome.

6. Voluntary trade generates wealth from nothing but mutual preference. When you pay twelve dollars for a meal, you value the meal above twelve dollars; the restaurant values twelve dollars above the meal. Both parties walk away wealthier in real terms. No politician, no regulator, no bureaucrat added anything.

Protectionism destroys this. The 2018 US steel tariffs raised steel prices for American manufacturers, killed more jobs in steel-consuming industries than existed in steel production itself, and transferred wealth from productive firms to a protected few.

7. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without corresponding production dilutes every dollar you already hold. The new money flows first to the government and its contractors, who spend it at current prices. By the time it reaches you, prices have already risen.

The US M2 money supply grew from roughly 15 trillion dollars in January 2020 to over 21 trillion by early 2022. Consumer prices followed. Your savings took the loss.

8. Prices carry information. A price spike tells producers to produce more and tells consumers to use less. It coordinates millions of strangers without a single central command. Interfere with that signal and the coordination breaks.

Rent control in New York City is the cleanest example. Cap rents below market and landlords stop maintaining buildings, stop building new ones, and convert units to other uses. The people rent control was supposed to help pay the price through collapsing supply.

9. Interest rates are the price of capital over time. When the Federal Reserve pushed rates to near zero between 2008 and 2022, it told every investor that capital was nearly free. Businesses built projects that only made sense at zero percent. When rates normalized, the projects failed. The 2022 collapse of the US tech sector and the crypto market were not random events. They were the correction of a decade of artificially cheap capital.

The business cycle is not a mystery of capitalism. Central banks manufacture it.

10. Bureaucrats face no profit and loss. A businessman who misallocates capital goes bankrupt. A bureaucrat who misallocates capital writes a report requesting more funding. The feedback loop that disciplines markets simply does not exist inside a government agency.

The US Department of Education has spent over a trillion dollars since 1980. Literacy rates have not improved. No one at the department has been bankrupted by this outcome.

11. Every producer inside a local market holds knowledge that no bureaucrat in a capital city can replicate. A wheat farmer in Kansas tracks soil moisture, futures prices, local equipment costs, his specific buyer relationships, and a hundred other variables simultaneously. That knowledge lives in the price he sets.

Friedrich Hayek called this tacit knowledge in 1945. The Soviet central planners ignored him and spent fifty years proving him correct, producing chronic shortages of goods that private markets coordinate effortlessly. No model, no algorithm, and no committee can compress what millions of independent actors know into a single plan.

12. Every government intervention produces effects you see and effects you don't. You see the road the state builds. You don't see the factory the tax dollars never funded, the job that never existed, the innovation that never happened because capital was extracted at gunpoint and redirected by bureaucrats with no skin in the game.

Take the 2009 Cash for Clunkers program. Congress destroyed 690,000 working cars, handed dealers a short-term spike, and you saw the sales numbers. The used car market was stripped of affordable inventory, pricing working-class buyers out for years afterward.

13. Prices, supply chains, and language itself coordinate millions of strangers without any central planner issuing a single command. That coordination is spontaneous order: complex, functional patterns that emerge from individuals pursuing their own goals under rules they did not collectively design. No committee holds the dispersed local knowledge required to replicate what voluntary exchange produces every second.

Watch how English evolved. No king designed its grammar. Millions of speakers across centuries adopted words and structures that worked, dropped ones that didn't, and produced a language richer than any bureaucrat could have engineered. Central planners who believe they can replicate that process with price controls or production quotas destroy the feedback mechanism that generates the order in the first place.

Thanks for reading this long post! What would you add to this list?

[Mr. VIX @yieldsearcher]

The degree of attacks against this tells me how much FinTwit is going to be caught offside soon.

It is the slope of the descent and the composition of the move, not the figure, that matter. Not to mention seasonally, Jan is the seasonal peak.

Go check Fed’s Nowcast (0.1%/2.4%)

[boaz weinstein @boazweinstein]

Worst fears confirmed for BlueRock investors. 😱

BPRE opens at ~$15 vs. $24+ NAV. -38% discount.

Instant ~$1.5B wealth destruction. No more 5% quarterly liquidity at NAV.

Bluerock management chose to entrench themselves in a closed-end fund conversion.

Shareholders approved, not realizing the disaster that awaited them. From $24 to $15 in the blink of a greedy eye.

[Cboe @Cboe]

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[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

It’s been 18 days and Kamala Harris has done no interviews or press conferences since becoming the unelected Democratic nominee…

Literally zero questions.

When do I get to hear her ideas and policies? I have questions on immigration. The economy. Foreign wars. China. Anything?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

!!

[Nomi Prins @nomiprins]

The Crowdstrike outage reportedly cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4 billion, at an average of $43.64 million per affected company.

[Bob Elliott @BobEUnlimited]

Perfect example of the asset air pocket.

Extraordinary expectations are unmet crushing stocks.

No relief from bonds b/c books are stuffed with duration and broadly deleveraging.

No Fed relief b/c all the '24 easing is priced in.

No QRA relief b/c yields are at 4.3% on 10s.

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

Marginal personal income tax rate over 50% is not taxation, it is theft. Would you be willing to work harder, if majority of your incremental income was taken away as a result?

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

Pelosi, at the tender age of 84, questioning Biden’s suitability for the job is peak irony.

Is this what they call democracy?

Incontinent senile geriatrics playing nepotism Monopoly?

[Brian Wesbury @wesbury]

To all those who don’t understand the Chevron rollback. Here is James Madison in Federalist 51 (1788) on checks and balances. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The branches MUST defend themselves at a level and in a way “commensurate to the danger of attack.”

The DC metro area votes 95% democrat (these days, progressive). And these are the people who make up the agencies. Tell me they aren’t biased.

The Supreme Court is either 55% or 66% fundamentalists (depending on how you count).

So, the Chevron decision can be looked at as the Court using its Constitutional power to counteract the “ambitions” of those who man the bureaucracies of the executive branch.

Madison is smiling.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Now official…

CNN says RFK Jr. does not qualify.

The most popular Independent candidate in a generation and they created this private debate just to keep him off the stage.

The Democrats and CNN don’t get to talk about “protecting democracy”.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

If you are a man, you should feel deep shame when taking government welfare.

“The government” doesn’t make money.

It collects it from other taxpayers. You’re acting as a leech on your fellow citizens. If you do have to take it, you should feel shame and a drive to pay it back.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

University presidents everywhere need to embrace this simple statement by Ben Sasse, President of the University of Florida:

"At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended. In Gainesville, that means a three-year prohibition from campus. That’s serious. We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas."
https://t.co/z3TCWnh2i9

[Sid Prabhu @sidprabhu]

Remember on the way up you call inflation transitory and ignore rising housing costs/rents and their future impact on CPI and on the way down you call it lagging and change the index (without adjusting for the base effect that OER generally runs above CPI so you would need to target lower inflation without it). Just intellectually honest economics professors. 🙄

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Some of the least useful charts for investors over the past few years were all of the "excess savings are nearly depleted" charts.

They've been "months away from depletion" for years.

Money circulates, and there is permanently more money in the system now.

[Jake @EconomPic]

If you retired 25 years ago with $1 million dollars and decided you'd take out $50,000 / year in retirement (adjusted for inflation each year), you'd have run out in early 2020.

*ignores taxes

[Sid Prabhu @sidprabhu]

Inflation ex energy, food, goods, shelter, health insurance and airfares is looking good guys.