Víctor

Eastern Promises, Cronenberg. Detectives salvajes, Bolaño. Riquelme: last10 #GivemeGreatChartsorDeath.

[Víctor @vitoscn]

El Proyecto de Modernización de la Refinería de Talara (PMRT) destruyó valor por cerca de USD 1650 millones a Petroperú, el patrimonio en 2013 era de solo USD 1025 millones. ¿Por qué se hizo entonces? Porque Petroperú está capturada por sus agentes (empleados de alto nivel).

[Brad Setser @Brad_Setser]

Very much agree with @adam_tooze --

The most important thing to know about the international financial system right now is that the dollar's share of a global equity market index is higher than the dollar's share of official fx reserves

1/

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

This is becoming an increasingly important story: "A Chinese thin tank estimates the number of people in flexible employment - without a permanent full-time contract - rising to 320 million this year from 280 million in 2025, about 44% of China's workforce. China's gig economy has become a crucial employment buffer as the property crisis wipes out construction jobs and manufacturers shed workers through automation and cost-cutting ​amid tariffs, overcapacity and price wars."
https://t.co/3y2EkzuB5Q

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

Bloomberg: "Pimco views China’s role as a global source of disinflation as a structural trend. It expects Beijing to continue prioritizing manufacturing and technology, allowing it to keep expanding production capacity faster than domestic demand and exerting downward pressure on prices abroad. Between what China produces and what it consumes, “that gap is not closing,” said Stephen Chang, PIMCO managing director and portfolio manager."
https://t.co/2xoTXWIJWo

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

FT: "Venezuela is set to reveal a much higher than expected debt pile of $240 bn, as the country embarks on the biggest sovereign restructuring in history in a bid to return to international markets."

This promises to be a fascinating (and very difficult) exercise.
https://t.co/jwyOqKncIU

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

There is no emerging market that weathered this shock better than Egypt. Egypt ditched decades of "fear of floating" and allowed the Pound to fall at the peak of the shock. Now the Pound is recovering. FX flexibility will usher in a new era for Egypt...
https://t.co/4UnVt9MB13

[khalid yousef @khalidsyossef]

Russia and Iran, 1780–1828
Muriel Atkin, University of Minnesota Press, 1980
PDF 🎯
https://t.co/xcO1htbTom
https://t.co/9zop3o0sxa

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy shows how quantum mechanics reshaped our understanding of reality, blending science with deep philosophical questions.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

There is an old laptop in your closet.

Gathering dust. Dead battery. Slow processor. You keep it because you feel guilty throwing it away.

That laptop can replace every cloud subscription you pay for.

- Netflix
- Google
- Dropbox
- 1Password

That is $42 a month. $504 a year. To rent things you used to own.

The old laptop in your closet could do all of it.

Now meet CasaOS.

A free and open source system that turns any old laptop, Raspberry Pi, or mini PC into your own personal cloud.

You run one command. In 30 minutes, the laptop becomes a server. You open it from your phone, your TV, your work computer, anywhere in the world.

Then you pick the apps you want from a built-in store. One click each.

- Jellyfin to replace Netflix. Stream every movie and show you own.
- Immich to replace Google Photos. Faces and search included.
- Nextcloud to replace Dropbox. Sync every file across every device.
- Vaultwarden to replace 1Password. All your passwords, your keys.
- Syncthing to keep files in sync across every device, no cloud.
- Home Assistant to control every smart device in your home.
- AdGuard to block ads on every device on your wifi.

Setting up a home server the old way took an entire weekend. Install Linux. Learn Docker. Write config files. Set up storage. Fix errors. Look up every app one by one.

CasaOS does all of that for you. No code. No config files. No Linux skills. You see icons on a screen. You click them.

34,116 stars on GitHub. Apache 2.0. Free forever.

Built by a small team starting September 2021. Runs on Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC, old laptops, and most home servers. Over 100,000 Docker apps can be installed.

A new Raspberry Pi costs $50. The old laptop in your closet costs $0. It already works. It is already in your house.

Netflix charges every month. CasaOS doesn't.
Google charges every month. CasaOS doesn't.
Dropbox charges every month. CasaOS doesn't.
1Password charges every month. CasaOS doesn't.

Here is the wild part.

The laptop you forgot about is more powerful than the web server that ran most websites in 2008.

It is sitting in a drawer. It costs you nothing. It already works.

One command. Thirty minutes. Five hundred dollars a year back in your pocket.

Your files. Your photos. Your movies. Your home.

Your closet just became a data center.

[Patricia Zárate @pzarate_pz]

Este gráfico de César Martinelli, con datos del Banco Mundial, compara diversos países con el PBI per cápita de USA de 1994 y 2023.
Los países que se ubican por encima de la línea punteada han convergido hacia la frontera tecnológica. Por encima de la línea azul han convergido 1/

[Daniel J. Smith @Smithdanj]

Everyday consumption tells a different story than snapshot wealth inequality. Jeff Bezos may drive a fancier car, yet today’s average cars deliver performance and capabilities that vastly exceed what even elites had decades ago. Same thing for houses, appliances, and electronics.

Low-income college student enjoy living standards that exceed those of the world’s first billionaire roughly 100 years ago. The practical gap between top and average consumption has narrowed substantially over time. Why? Because capital is constantly being reallocated to the people judged the most capable of utilizing it to produce innovative new products and services for ordinary people.

Static inequality measures overlook global capital markets, rapid innovation, and economic mobility. Consumption data and economic mobility provide a much more accurate picture.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) is one of the most influential justifications for ideological coercion in modern Western thought.

The Frankfurt School philosopher argued that classical liberal tolerance was not neutral but served to perpetuate oppression. By allowing conservative and traditional views to circulate freely, he claimed, liberal societies protected the existing order. His proposed remedy was “liberating tolerance”: the deliberate suppression of “regressive” ideas combined with near-unrestricted freedom for progressive and revolutionary ones. In effect, he called for institutionalised discrimination against dissenting views under the guise of emancipation.

This framework inverted the principle of free speech. Instead of defending equal rights to expression, Marcuse treated speech as a form of power that must be redistributed. Once tolerance is redefined as selective and directional, the distinction between persuasion and coercion collapses. Institutions can then be justified in restricting, marginalising and punishing ideas deemed harmful to the desired social transformation.

Marcuse’s idea found many acolytes and the consequences of his reasoning are now visible across universities, corporations and public institutions. Policies that restrict speech, enforce ideological conformity and punish deviation are frequently defended on grounds that echo Marcuse’s distinction between “regressive” and “progressive” views. What presents itself as expanded tolerance often functions as a mechanism for enforcing a new orthodoxy.

By replacing the idea of equal liberty with the claim that some ideas deserve protection while others must be suppressed, he provided the intellectual blueprint for the coercive management of speech and thought that we now see in operation in so many of our institutions – presented as liberation but in reality a sophisticated rationale for ideological control.

[George Friedman @George_Friedman]

Cuba’s president went on television last week to announce profound changes in the economy. Cuba formally remains a communist country, although it is not one Karl Marx would recognize. Nor is it especially unique among self-described communist countries. Cuba is dominated by the army, which serves three purposes: to provide national defense, to maintain dictatorial order and to operate the Cuban economy. (In many ways, the army is the Cuban economy.) In a way, the army controls the party, which in turn controls the parliament.

The country’s economy is in a state of virtual collapse. Basic necessities like food, electricity and gas are available only intermittently, and the quality of life is poor, save for the political and military elite. That there have been no uprisings in Cuba against these conditions is explained by the fact that the economy, domestic police and the political system are in the hands of the military. Cuba is, in other words, Venezuela on steroids.

My full analysis is available at @GPFutures:
https://t.co/Q4vYpyLC5P

[Michael Thrower Chowdhury @BevansAdvocate]

I've heard very good things about this book to explain whya

[khalid yousef @khalidsyossef]

Dreaming in the World's Religions: A Comparative History
Kelly Bulkeley , NYU Press, 2008
PDF 🎯
https://t.co/nG1MA7AlVn

[David Coates @_jestingpilate_]

Nietzsche and Wittgenstein drew on him. Einstein kept his portrait on the wall. Proust, Wagner, and Mahler fell under his spell. Yet in his lifetime Schopenhauer was almost entirely unread.

My piece for @EngelsbergIdeas on a slow road to recognition: https://t.co/1GldOX9Qy0

[International and Monetary Economics Network @int_mon_econ]

Super interesting!

"The macroeconomics of stablecoins" by Boris Hofmann, Matthias Kaldorf, and Matthias Rottner.

"Our analysis suggests that stablecoin adoption affects the economy through two main channels: a bank lending channel and a fiscal space channel. The bank lending channel operates through banks' deposit funding and credit supply, while the fiscal space channel operates through stablecoin issuers' demand for Treasury bills and the government budget constraint. These channels have opposing effects on output. Calibrated to the United States, the model predicts that, in the long run under our baseline specification, the contractionary effect of the bank lending channel dominates slightly. The net effect, however, depends on stablecoin regulatory design, the strength of foreign demand for stablecoins and fiscal conditions. The model also implies that the fiscal space channel acts more quickly during the transition and that stablecoins can amplify monetary policy transmission through bank lending."

https://t.co/Up1UNIXBiw

[Dennis Wilder偉德寧 @dennisw5]

Admiral Blair is one of the finest US military leaders that I had the privilege to work for when he did a tour of duty at the senior military representative to the CIA. Here, he provides a valuable counterpoint to all of the hyperventilating bromides about a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

The Mirage of China's Military Edge https://t.co/MrYDlf82t7 via @ForeignAffairs

[Edward N Luttwak @ELuttwak]

https://t.co/UpEvFVeEKu
Robert Malley, Obama's ex-room mate and Iran point man (w zero Iran expertise but reliably anti Saudi) was also imposed on Biden..till fired for "a security violation" (the news came out of Tehran !) Now he celebrates Iran's victory .

[Anas Alhajji @anasalhajji]

Cuba: Postmortem of the Communist Revolution

"In 1958, Cuba’s per-capita GDP topped the equivalent of  $24,000 in today’s dollars, placing it among the most prosperous economies in Latin America. By 2025, official figures put it at roughly $7,500—a number Zimmerman finds far too high. Poverty was never eliminated. Instead, it was centralized, rationed, and weaponized as a control mechanism. Private enterprise was dismantled, and independent economic activity criminalized. The military conglomerate GAESA captures an estimated 37 percent of GDP. George Orwell, reflecting on the communist assertion that, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” once famously retorted: “Yes, but where is the omelet?” That’s a question as appropriate regarding Cuba as any other socialist disaster zone."

https://t.co/c8qgTvhgXr

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

Global Times on a new "Plaza Accord": "China will not accept using exchange rates as a pretext for oppression, nor will it return to the old era of great powers coordinating the fate of a few countries."

This is a rather bizarre argument to make, although it is one you often hear in the Chinese press. It assumes that the RMB exchange rate belongs to China, and that for the EU or anyone else to intervene in the RMB exchange rate is an act of colonial oppression.

But this simply isn't true. An exchange rate "belongs" to both countries involved. If China has intervened to devalue the RMB by 20-30% against the currency of its trade partners, this is exactly the same as if it had engineered a "stealth" Plaza Accord in which it forced its trade partners to revalue their currencies by 25-43%. There is no difference between the two, and so if one way isn't an act of colonial oppression, the other way isn't either.

The Global Times also argues that China's trade surplus and its manufacturing competitiveness have nothing to do with an undervalued RMB. If the PBoC actually believed this, it is pretty obvious what it should do – it should revalue the RMB as quickly as it can. There would be no cost to doing so as, presumably, Chinese manufacturers would be as globally competitive as ever, and it would immediately benefit Chinese households by raising the real value of their domestic income. Of course the reason the PBoC isn't doing this is because it knows (as most analysts know, including, I suspect, the editors of the Global Times) that this just isn't true. The claim that currency values don't affect trade imbalances is just silly.

But to the extent that these kind of editorials reflect actual positions among policymakers, we should expect a difficult and probably painful outcome. Joan Robinson warned in the 1930s that mercantilist regimes that ran large, persistent trade surpluses would inevitably drive their trade partners to retaliate with their own forms of trade intervention once the costs of beggar-thy-neighbor trade surpluses were perceived as too high. We are clearly in Joan Robinson's world, and denying the problem is an extremely ineffective way of resolving it.

We know this from the rather lengthy history. There have been many large trade imbalances – especially ones associated with large increases in debt – in the past 100 years, and they have usually ended very badly. The interesting question in retrospect has been why, and under what conditions, the brunt of the adjustment costs were ultimately borne by either the surplus countries or the deficit countries.

I worry that because there is clearly no appetite among surplus and deficit economies to reduce the imbalances in the least painful way possible for both sides, and because the imbalances may have already gone too far for any compromise, we may be moving inexorably towards an adjustment process in which the costs are magnified, as each side tries to force the other to bear the brunt.
https://t.co/dlvL5MQYND