Steve

@so_lean

Husband & Father• contrarian/reader/sports fan/social media novice/equity trader/ student of Macro Economics, Leadership & Hebrew.

USA

Joined February 2009

2.2K Following

628 Followers

3.8K Posts

so_lean retweeted

Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭

@ThierryBorgeat

13 days ago

Railroads were once 63% of the entire US stock market. Not 63% of transport stocks. 63% of everything listed. The history of concentration, in order: – Tulips, 1637. A single bulb traded for the price of an Amsterdam canal house. – South Sea Company, 1720. Shares went from about £128 in January to above £1,000 by summer, then back near £150 by December. – US railroads, 1840s. 63% of US market cap. – Utilities, telecom and industrials, 1929. 36%. – Nifty Fifty, 1972. 40%. – Japan, 1989. 44% of global equity. – Dot com, 2000. 41%. – AI Big 10, today. About 40%. Every one of them was built on something real. Railroads did compress a continent. The internet did rewire commerce. Being right about the technology was never the thing that protected you. The tulip story is also less clean than the legend. Modern research found the economic damage was modest and the ruin was mostly literary. The bubble was never in the idea. It was in how many people decided to own the same idea at the same time.

ThierryBorgeat's tweet photo. Railroads were once 63% of the entire US stock market.

Not 63% of transport stocks. 63% of everything listed.

The history of concentration, in order:

– Tulips, 1637. A single bulb traded for the price of an Amsterdam canal house.
– South Sea Company, 1720. Shares went from about £128 in January to above £1,000 by summer, then back near £150 by December.
– US railroads, 1840s. 63% of US market cap.
– Utilities, telecom and industrials, 1929. 36%.
– Nifty Fifty, 1972. 40%.
– Japan, 1989. 44% of global equity.
– Dot com, 2000. 41%.
– AI Big 10, today. About 40%.

Every one of them was built on something real. Railroads did compress a continent. The internet did rewire commerce. Being right about the technology was never the thing that protected you.

The tulip story is also less clean than the legend. Modern research found the economic damage was modest and the ruin was mostly literary.

The bubble was never in the idea. It was in how many people decided to own the same idea at the same time.

111

3K

535

1K

512K

5 months ago

@ctindale @SantiagoAuFund @yoderpaul @TimothyDSnyder Spot on! Incredible reply. Has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with Human nature.

0

0

0

0

19

6 months ago

@SantiagoAuFund 🤣

0

0

0

0

15

6 months ago

@HighbrowHaze @SantiagoAuFund @grok can you answer this question? BDCs seem to be getting hammered.

1

0

0

0

147

Who to follow

Hedera Is The Future ☦️

Studioso Research

@StudiosoResearc

Research: looking for future failures and current fads

so_lean retweeted

Connor Boyack 📚

7 months ago

178 yrs ago today, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. It's one of the most influential political documents ever written. It also provided the intellectual blueprint for what became the deadliest ideology in human history. Marx was 29 and Engels was 27 when the Manifesto was published in London on February 21, 1848. Europe was a powder keg. Workers in newly industrialized cities labored in brutal conditions (children included). The old feudal order was crumbling. Poverty was grinding and visible. People were searching for answers. And Marx was a decent observer of problems. Give him that much. His descriptions of industrial exploitation, of workers treated as disposable inputs in a machine, of wealth concentrating among a connected elite while masses suffered: these observations had real substance. He saw genuine suffering and wanted to explain it. Many of the conditions he described were indefensible. Child labor in coal mines. 16-hour workdays. Dangerous factories with no recourse for the injured. These were real problems that deserved real scrutiny. But diagnosing a disease correctly doesn't mean your prescribed cure won't kill the patient. Marx and Engels looked at the suffering around them and concluded that the problem was private property itself, that the solution was the abolition of individual ownership, the centralization of all production in the hands of the state, and the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order by force. The Manifesto doesn't hide this: "The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." They called for centralized control of credit, communication, transport, factories, and education. All of it. In the hands of the state. What they failed to understand, fatally, is that the very problems they identified were largely products of state power, not free exchange. The monopolies, the exploitation, the barriers to advancement that crushed workers in 1848 were enabled by governments granting privileges to the politically connected. The solution to state-enabled cronyism was never more state power. It was less. But the Manifesto's call to revolution spread like wildfire, and the 20th century became its proving ground. The results are now a matter of historical record, and they are staggering. The Soviet Union: roughly 20 million dead under Stalin alone through forced collectivization, purges, and the Gulag system. Mao's China: 40-80 million dead, w/ the Great Leap Forward producing one of the worst famines in recorded history, entirely man-made. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: nearly 2 million killed, roughly a quarter of the entire population, in just four years. North Korea, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe. The pattern repeated everywhere the ideology took root. Centralized control. Suppression of dissent. Economic collapse. Mass death. The total body count of communist regimes in the 20th century is conservatively estimated at 100 million people. (!!) These weren't casualties of natural disaster or unavoidable tragedy. They were the direct, predictable consequences of an ideology that believed individual rights could be sacrificed for the collective, that a vanguard class of planners could allocate resources better than millions of free people making voluntary decisions, and that the ends justified any means necessary to achieve utopia. Every single time, the utopia never arrived. What arrived instead was poverty, surveillance, political imprisonment, and death. And yet. Walk through any university campus today and you'll find the Manifesto assigned sympathetically in classrooms, Marx quoted approvingly by tenured professors, and hammer-and-sickle imagery worn without a shred of the revulsion that would rightly accompany any other symbol of mass murder. Imagine wearing a swastika to class. Now ask yourself why the communist equivalent gets a pass despite a higher death toll. The answer, I think, is that Marx's diagnosis still resonates emotionally. People see inequality, suffering, exploitation, and they want someone to blame and something to fix it. The Manifesto offers both: blame the property owners, and fix it with revolution. It's seductive in its simplicity. It validates resentment and promises justice. But resentment isn't a foundation for a just society. Envy dressed up as compassion is still envy. And centralizing power in the hands of the state doesn't liberate workers. It replaces one set of masters with another, only now those masters have absolute authority and no competition. Free markets aren't perfect. But they're the only system in human history that has consistently reduced poverty, increased prosperity, and respected individual choice. The answer to exploitation has always been more freedom, not less. More competition, not central planning. More individual rights, not collective ownership enforced at gunpoint. The Communist Manifesto turns 178 today. Read it if you haven't. Know what it says. Understand its appeal. Then look at what happened every single time someone tried to implement it. Ideas have consequences. These ideas had 100 million of them.

cboyack's tweet photo. 178 yrs ago today, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

It's one of the most influential political documents ever written. It also provided the intellectual blueprint for what became the deadliest ideology in human history.

Marx was 29 and Engels was 27 when the Manifesto was published in London on February 21, 1848. Europe was a powder keg. Workers in newly industrialized cities labored in brutal conditions (children included). The old feudal order was crumbling. Poverty was grinding and visible. People were searching for answers.

And Marx was a decent observer of problems. Give him that much. His descriptions of industrial exploitation, of workers treated as disposable inputs in a machine, of wealth concentrating among a connected elite while masses suffered: these observations had real substance.

He saw genuine suffering and wanted to explain it. Many of the conditions he described were indefensible. Child labor in coal mines. 16-hour workdays. Dangerous factories with no recourse for the injured. These were real problems that deserved real scrutiny.

But diagnosing a disease correctly doesn't mean your prescribed cure won't kill the patient.

Marx and Engels looked at the suffering around them and concluded that the problem was private property itself, that the solution was the abolition of individual ownership, the centralization of all production in the hands of the state, and the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order by force.

The Manifesto doesn't hide this: "The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

They called for centralized control of credit, communication, transport, factories, and education. All of it. In the hands of the state.

What they failed to understand, fatally, is that the very problems they identified were largely products of state power, not free exchange.

The monopolies, the exploitation, the barriers to advancement that crushed workers in 1848 were enabled by governments granting privileges to the politically connected. The solution to state-enabled cronyism was never more state power. It was less.

But the Manifesto's call to revolution spread like wildfire, and the 20th century became its proving ground. The results are now a matter of historical record, and they are staggering.

The Soviet Union: roughly 20 million dead under Stalin alone through forced collectivization, purges, and the Gulag system. Mao's China: 40-80 million dead, w/ the Great Leap Forward producing one of the worst famines in recorded history, entirely man-made.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: nearly 2 million killed, roughly a quarter of the entire population, in just four years. North Korea, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe. The pattern repeated everywhere the ideology took root. Centralized control. Suppression of dissent. Economic collapse. Mass death.

The total body count of communist regimes in the 20th century is conservatively estimated at 100 million people. (!!)

These weren't casualties of natural disaster or unavoidable tragedy. They were the direct, predictable consequences of an ideology that believed individual rights could be sacrificed for the collective, that a vanguard class of planners could allocate resources better than millions of free people making voluntary decisions, and that the ends justified any means necessary to achieve utopia.

Every single time, the utopia never arrived. What arrived instead was poverty, surveillance, political imprisonment, and death.

And yet. Walk through any university campus today and you'll find the Manifesto assigned sympathetically in classrooms, Marx quoted approvingly by tenured professors, and hammer-and-sickle imagery worn without a shred of the revulsion that would rightly accompany any other symbol of mass murder.

Imagine wearing a swastika to class. Now ask yourself why the communist equivalent gets a pass despite a higher death toll.

The answer, I think, is that Marx's diagnosis still resonates emotionally. People see inequality, suffering, exploitation, and they want someone to blame and something to fix it.

The Manifesto offers both: blame the property owners, and fix it with revolution. It's seductive in its simplicity. It validates resentment and promises justice.

But resentment isn't a foundation for a just society. Envy dressed up as compassion is still envy.

And centralizing power in the hands of the state doesn't liberate workers. It replaces one set of masters with another, only now those masters have absolute authority and no competition.

Free markets aren't perfect. But they're the only system in human history that has consistently reduced poverty, increased prosperity, and respected individual choice.

The answer to exploitation has always been more freedom, not less. More competition, not central planning. More individual rights, not collective ownership enforced at gunpoint.

The Communist Manifesto turns 178 today. Read it if you haven't. Know what it says. Understand its appeal. Then look at what happened every single time someone tried to implement it.

Ideas have consequences. These ideas had 100 million of them.

cboyack's tweet photo. 178 yrs ago today, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

It's one of the most influential political documents ever written. It also provided the intellectual blueprint for what became the deadliest ideology in human history.

Marx was 29 and Engels was 27 when the Manifesto was published in London on February 21, 1848. Europe was a powder keg. Workers in newly industrialized cities labored in brutal conditions (children included). The old feudal order was crumbling. Poverty was grinding and visible. People were searching for answers.

And Marx was a decent observer of problems. Give him that much. His descriptions of industrial exploitation, of workers treated as disposable inputs in a machine, of wealth concentrating among a connected elite while masses suffered: these observations had real substance.

He saw genuine suffering and wanted to explain it. Many of the conditions he described were indefensible. Child labor in coal mines. 16-hour workdays. Dangerous factories with no recourse for the injured. These were real problems that deserved real scrutiny.

But diagnosing a disease correctly doesn't mean your prescribed cure won't kill the patient.

Marx and Engels looked at the suffering around them and concluded that the problem was private property itself, that the solution was the abolition of individual ownership, the centralization of all production in the hands of the state, and the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order by force.

The Manifesto doesn't hide this: "The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

They called for centralized control of credit, communication, transport, factories, and education. All of it. In the hands of the state.

What they failed to understand, fatally, is that the very problems they identified were largely products of state power, not free exchange.

The monopolies, the exploitation, the barriers to advancement that crushed workers in 1848 were enabled by governments granting privileges to the politically connected. The solution to state-enabled cronyism was never more state power. It was less.

But the Manifesto's call to revolution spread like wildfire, and the 20th century became its proving ground. The results are now a matter of historical record, and they are staggering.

The Soviet Union: roughly 20 million dead under Stalin alone through forced collectivization, purges, and the Gulag system. Mao's China: 40-80 million dead, w/ the Great Leap Forward producing one of the worst famines in recorded history, entirely man-made.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: nearly 2 million killed, roughly a quarter of the entire population, in just four years. North Korea, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe. The pattern repeated everywhere the ideology took root. Centralized control. Suppression of dissent. Economic collapse. Mass death.

The total body count of communist regimes in the 20th century is conservatively estimated at 100 million people. (!!)

These weren't casualties of natural disaster or unavoidable tragedy. They were the direct, predictable consequences of an ideology that believed individual rights could be sacrificed for the collective, that a vanguard class of planners could allocate resources better than millions of free people making voluntary decisions, and that the ends justified any means necessary to achieve utopia.

Every single time, the utopia never arrived. What arrived instead was poverty, surveillance, political imprisonment, and death.

And yet. Walk through any university campus today and you'll find the Manifesto assigned sympathetically in classrooms, Marx quoted approvingly by tenured professors, and hammer-and-sickle imagery worn without a shred of the revulsion that would rightly accompany any other symbol of mass murder.

Imagine wearing a swastika to class. Now ask yourself why the communist equivalent gets a pass despite a higher death toll.

The answer, I think, is that Marx's diagnosis still resonates emotionally. People see inequality, suffering, exploitation, and they want someone to blame and something to fix it.

The Manifesto offers both: blame the property owners, and fix it with revolution. It's seductive in its simplicity. It validates resentment and promises justice.

But resentment isn't a foundation for a just society. Envy dressed up as compassion is still envy.

And centralizing power in the hands of the state doesn't liberate workers. It replaces one set of masters with another, only now those masters have absolute authority and no competition.

Free markets aren't perfect. But they're the only system in human history that has consistently reduced poverty, increased prosperity, and respected individual choice.

The answer to exploitation has always been more freedom, not less. More competition, not central planning. More individual rights, not collective ownership enforced at gunpoint.

The Communist Manifesto turns 178 today. Read it if you haven't. Know what it says. Understand its appeal. Then look at what happened every single time someone tried to implement it.

Ideas have consequences. These ideas had 100 million of them.

cboyack's tweet photo. 178 yrs ago today, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.

It's one of the most influential political documents ever written. It also provided the intellectual blueprint for what became the deadliest ideology in human history.

Marx was 29 and Engels was 27 when the Manifesto was published in London on February 21, 1848. Europe was a powder keg. Workers in newly industrialized cities labored in brutal conditions (children included). The old feudal order was crumbling. Poverty was grinding and visible. People were searching for answers.

And Marx was a decent observer of problems. Give him that much. His descriptions of industrial exploitation, of workers treated as disposable inputs in a machine, of wealth concentrating among a connected elite while masses suffered: these observations had real substance.

He saw genuine suffering and wanted to explain it. Many of the conditions he described were indefensible. Child labor in coal mines. 16-hour workdays. Dangerous factories with no recourse for the injured. These were real problems that deserved real scrutiny.

But diagnosing a disease correctly doesn't mean your prescribed cure won't kill the patient.

Marx and Engels looked at the suffering around them and concluded that the problem was private property itself, that the solution was the abolition of individual ownership, the centralization of all production in the hands of the state, and the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order by force.

The Manifesto doesn't hide this: "The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."

They called for centralized control of credit, communication, transport, factories, and education. All of it. In the hands of the state.

What they failed to understand, fatally, is that the very problems they identified were largely products of state power, not free exchange.

The monopolies, the exploitation, the barriers to advancement that crushed workers in 1848 were enabled by governments granting privileges to the politically connected. The solution to state-enabled cronyism was never more state power. It was less.

But the Manifesto's call to revolution spread like wildfire, and the 20th century became its proving ground. The results are now a matter of historical record, and they are staggering.

The Soviet Union: roughly 20 million dead under Stalin alone through forced collectivization, purges, and the Gulag system. Mao's China: 40-80 million dead, w/ the Great Leap Forward producing one of the worst famines in recorded history, entirely man-made.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: nearly 2 million killed, roughly a quarter of the entire population, in just four years. North Korea, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Eastern Europe. The pattern repeated everywhere the ideology took root. Centralized control. Suppression of dissent. Economic collapse. Mass death.

The total body count of communist regimes in the 20th century is conservatively estimated at 100 million people. (!!)

These weren't casualties of natural disaster or unavoidable tragedy. They were the direct, predictable consequences of an ideology that believed individual rights could be sacrificed for the collective, that a vanguard class of planners could allocate resources better than millions of free people making voluntary decisions, and that the ends justified any means necessary to achieve utopia.

Every single time, the utopia never arrived. What arrived instead was poverty, surveillance, political imprisonment, and death.

And yet. Walk through any university campus today and you'll find the Manifesto assigned sympathetically in classrooms, Marx quoted approvingly by tenured professors, and hammer-and-sickle imagery worn without a shred of the revulsion that would rightly accompany any other symbol of mass murder.

Imagine wearing a swastika to class. Now ask yourself why the communist equivalent gets a pass despite a higher death toll.

The answer, I think, is that Marx's diagnosis still resonates emotionally. People see inequality, suffering, exploitation, and they want someone to blame and something to fix it.

The Manifesto offers both: blame the property owners, and fix it with revolution. It's seductive in its simplicity. It validates resentment and promises justice.

But resentment isn't a foundation for a just society. Envy dressed up as compassion is still envy.

And centralizing power in the hands of the state doesn't liberate workers. It replaces one set of masters with another, only now those masters have absolute authority and no competition.

Free markets aren't perfect. But they're the only system in human history that has consistently reduced poverty, increased prosperity, and respected individual choice.

The answer to exploitation has always been more freedom, not less. More competition, not central planning. More individual rights, not collective ownership enforced at gunpoint.

The Communist Manifesto turns 178 today. Read it if you haven't. Know what it says. Understand its appeal. Then look at what happened every single time someone tried to implement it.

Ideas have consequences. These ideas had 100 million of them.

113

1K

445

557

118K

7 months ago

@MuniBondz @Delta That's a lot of miles.

0

1

0

0

27

8 months ago

0

1

0

0

85

so_lean retweeted

Santiago Capital

@SantiagoAuFund

8 months ago

7

224

15

16

31K

8 months ago

@HariPKrishnan2 @threadreaderapp unroll

1

0

0

0

5

8 months ago

@RealJimRickards has been talking about this for a very long time. #Silver #Gold $silver #ForcedMajeure

8 months ago

Is Paper Silver about to burn? #ForceMajeure $SLV $GLD $GDX $GDXJ

130

1K

408

752

113K

0

2

0

0

675

8 months ago

@SantiagoAuFund I have refrained from crowing about PMs. Trying to walk in humility, but it’s hard when you have been called so many names through the years. 🤣

1

2

0

0

111

8 months ago

0

0

0

0

7

9 months ago

An AI investment boom is creating a thirst for massive data centers—and a bonanza for the workers building them https://t.co/YvP4JSRQDV via @WSJ

0

1

0

0

26

9 months ago

@clkleinmonaco The ultimate charlatan with the most skin in the game. Crypto is an asset class. Nothing more, nothing less.

0

1

0

0

52

11 months ago

Dollar up, commodities up, Silver and gold rising. Nothing to see right @SantiagoAuFund ? 🫣

so_lean's tweet photo. Dollar up, commodities up, Silver and gold rising. Nothing to see right @SantiagoAuFund ? 🫣 https://t.co/Vnpw4cqtxx

0

1

0

0

41

11 months ago

@TommyThornton Wow, are we at the point of irrational exuberance?

0

1

0

0

316

11 months ago

$USD up & $DXY up. The correlations are interesting to watch in today’s market. 🫣

0

0

0

0

34

12 months ago

@KeithMcCullough

0

0

0

0

15

12 months ago

Been holding #Silver for a long time. It’s nice to see this commodity finally start to break out. #RealMoney #fiatcrisis

so_lean's tweet photo. Been holding #Silver for a long time. It’s nice to see this commodity finally start to break out. #RealMoney #fiatcrisis https://t.co/KzUQZyQjFb

0

0

0

0

111

12 months ago

@BobMurphyEcon @SantiagoAuFund Wait until all these data centers come online. 🫣

0

1

0

0

135

Last Seen Users on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users