⚡️The Fed’s rate cuts were supposed to transmit relief downstream - cheaper credit, easier borrowing, revived consumption. But what actually happened is the transmission mechanism fractured. The banking and credit system no longer channels monetary policy; it harvests it. Here’s the core: 1. The Fed cut rates but banks didn’t pass it on. Credit card rates have decoupled from the policy rate. The average is sitting above 21%, even as the Fed trims the base rate. Why? Because consumer credit has become a profit extraction mechanism, not a monetary conduit. The Fed can lower the cost of reserves, but the banks price consumer risk at a psychological premium. They know consumers are trapped - wages are flat, savings are gone, and credit cards are the last oxygen tank. So they squeeze harder. The policy signal says ease; the profit motive says bleed them. 2. Monetary transmission is now asymmetric. When the Fed hikes, rates on consumer debt rise instantly. When it cuts, they barely move. That asymmetry is the defining feature of late-stage fiat credit markets. Policy easing doesn’t create relief; it just widens the spread between cost of money for the elite (corporates, shadow banks, sovereigns) and cost of money for the poor. The Fed stimulates the top of the pyramid. The banks extract from the base. 3. The middle class is now the collateral. This isn't inflation anymore. This is the monetization of desperation. Banks know that delinquency risk is surging (see student loans, auto loans, personal loans). So they hike spreads even as policy rates fall - pre-emptively offsetting future defaults. They are securitizing risk in real time through higher margins. Consumers are being turned into an asset class -“default-backed yield.” 4. The reflexive feedback loop. Every rate cut the Fed delivers now does two things at once: •It supports asset prices and capital markets (which makes the rich richer). •It tightens the real cost of credit for households (which makes the poor poorer). This is why consumer sentiment is collapsing even as equity markets remain resilient. The Fed has inverted its social mandate. It’s no longer the lender of last resort, it’s the liquidity pump of first resort for capital, and the extraction engine of last resort for labor. 5. Macro meaning. We’ve entered an era where monetary easing doesn’t ease and tightening doesn’t discipline. Both simply transfer value from the real economy to the financial superstructure. In that sense, ZeroHedge’s post is more than snark, it’s an obituary. The “credit channel” is gone. Monetary policy no longer governs money. It governs control.

The housing problem is both a symptom and a cause of many financial challenges across the economy. Worse, it reinforces bad decisions while masquerading as a win.

At $99,000, Bitcoin is now down 21% from its all-time high of $126,000 on October 6. Is that a big decline for Bitcoin? No... $BTC

JMC'S ELECTION DAY THREAD

Great article. The IPO analogy isn’t perfect, far from it, especially as you watch the birth of a new asset class. But it’s the best I’ve seen yet: Early investors sell. New long-term holders accumulate. Ownership transfers from the visionaries to the institutions.

The government incentivizes wealthy investors to buy a house they don’t need and rent it to someone who can’t afford the mortgage. All for a tidy profit.

Bessent was the first man in history to buy pesos and make money

I read this expecting it to end with the @CapitalOne commercials.

High chance your kids will still use fiat in 2050. It might just have a different name than the "dollar", be fully digital, probably programmable, but still infinitely printable by whoever controls the keyboard. Bitcoin doesn't need to kill fiat to win it just needs to exist as the alternative. IMO we'll have two monetary systems: One for spending, one for storing. Both necessary. By the way this is how ordinary people in the Global South already navigate the world. Westerners are just starting to catch up. Few.

Gold and silver continue to tumble as investors rotate into new safe haven assets

IKEA: box 1 of 37,503

But 𝕏 and Starlink didn’t skip a beat

Bitcoin is now down 18% from its all-time high of $126,000 on October 6. Is that a big decline for Bitcoin? No... $BTC

All aboard. Nothing stops this train @LynAldenContact

So I just spent $6700 to sit behind home plate at the Cubs playoff game, Wore a hoodie that said $YES in huge letters for Kalshi, Got posted on MLB's tiktok twice All at 18 years old Here's what happened🧵

This was probably the best thing I’ve ever read on this site. Thank you to all the incredible men who shared their perspective. Below is a summary, but I’d really encourage you to read them for yourself. Lots to reflect upon. *** 1. Family and Relationships: A recurring emphasis is on cherishing time with children, particularly creating meaningful memories before they reach 12, as the parent-child relationship shifts significantly with adolescence and independence (e.g., driving). Contributors like @DBarnettMoncton and @peakfomo stress that small, everyday moments (e.g., museum visits, sundaes for dinner) leave lasting impressions, while intentional time with a spouse, such as regular date nights, is vital to sustain the marital bond (@longtrain, @CPATaxTeam). 2. Physical Health: Nearly all respondents urge prioritizing health, with daily exercise, mobility work, and clean eating highlighted as critical to combat age-related decline. @CPATaxTeam and @seandsweeney note the increasing difficulty of maintaining muscle and joint health in the 40s and 50s, while @CorpFin_Guy suggests cutting alcohol entirely if it’s a concern, framing it as a transformative decision. 3. Financial Stability: Building equity through assets like land, a house, or index funds is a frequent recommendation, especially as earning potential peaks in the 40s (@peakfomo, @tony_levelle). The advice aligns with planning for future security, including managing mortgage debt and possibly consulting a fee-only financial advisor for complex midlife financial decisions. 4. Personal Growth and Community: Many suggest taking calculated risks or pursuing new skills earlier rather than later, as risk tolerance decreases with age (@longtrain). Additionally, forming a personal group of men for open support, distinct from social circles tied to a spouse, and engaging in spiritual practices (e.g., studying religious texts) are cited as key for emotional and mental resilience (@CPATaxTeam).

Recently been hearing a lot of buzz around @FoundersPodcast by David Senra. So I decided to check out his episode on Elon Musk and I feel David has this rare ability to go deep and abstract the nuances of greatness like very few people can. His storytelling makes ideas stick. It’s not just information. It’s insight that rewires how you think. Here’s my top learning from that video. 1.) A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. This intensity drives the entire organization, often involving aggressive deadlines and a demanding work environment. 2.) Question every requirement: Treat all requirements as recommendations (except those dictated by the laws of physics). Insist on knowing the name of the actual person who made the requirement, and question it, even if it came from Elon himself, to make them "less wrong and dumb". 3.) Delete any part of the process you can: A common mistake is simplifying a part that should never exist. If you do not end up adding back at least 10% of deleted parts, you didn't delete enough. "The best part is no part". 4.) Simplify and organize: This step must come after deletion 5.) Accelerate cycle time: Speed up every process, but only after following the above three steps 6.) Automate: This must come last. The mistake in earlier production was attempting to automate every step before questioning requirements and deleting unnecessary parts.

Lay's Marketing Team Deserves a Raise!

After Titan, I decided to stick with the theme of oil entrepreneurs, and at the same time rectify an important omission in my US civics education. I happened to read Moby Dick alongside Shakespeare, specifically Richard II, and it's clear that Melville was quite directly inspired. “So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”, “the greater idiot ever scolds the lesser”, “I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.” I would have guessed Shakespeare if asked to speculate on the origin of many of the apothegms that Melville casually scatters. With hamartic compulsion, Ahab is obviously a tragic figure in the mold of Lear or Hamlet, and the Pequod serves as a kind of stage (complete with directions as prelude to many chapters). Soliloquies abound. Melville is a post-industrial revolution author, though, writing from the other side of modernity’s threshold. Where Shakespeare’s preoccupation is in human relations and the psyche, Melville recognizes that we are in a time of discovery and change, and he is just as intently interested in society, the economy, biology, and the wider planet. Even when telling the history of a country, Shakespeare’s worlds are small; Melville’s, despite being substantially hemmed to a boat, is somehow large. Maybe Shakespeare in some way captured all there was to be captured at the time; if so, in Melville we can see how much larger humanity has become: industry, trade networks, energy, science, anthropology, firms with multinational labour, knowable continents beyond great seas. It’s well known, or at least widely speculated, that VC economics are based on those of the whaling industry. As such, we presumably ought to reflect on Ahab as Silicon Valley hero: the cetacean anticipates the unicorn. Ahab recruits, he strategizes, he inspires, he exhorts, and he fully adheres to the doctrine that the captain’s fate must remain inexorably coupled with the ship’s. The most important imperative for a founder, of course, is to identify the right goals; here Ahab, in his fulminating single-mindedness, falls short. Much lore valorizes those who persist in dogged pursuit of their original mission no matter the impediments and the haters. Was Melville the first to illustrate this archetype? He doesn’t seem fully persuaded of its merits, however. Moby Dick perhaps serves to show that the founder’s zeal can exist in excess, and that, while no doubt flawed and liable to error, the signals provided by the market are a helpful check on frail human reason. Ahab himself reflects in a moment of self-awareness: “Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege.” Do we think? We assuredly imagine so, but maybe we should all listen to Starbuck: “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.” One should sometimes sell to Google, shut the company down, go try anew. — The 19th century Anglosphere is the time of the cathedralesque Victorian pumping stations, of Dickens, of Turner, of Romanesque Revival, Gothic Revival, Beaux-Arts. When @culturaltutor (check out his new documentary!) calls for a retvrn, it is to the nineteenth century more than any other. And at the same time, it is the century of the full-throated destruction of California’s redwood forests, previously one of the great majesties of the planet. It is the century of the slaughter of the American bison (tens of millions to fewer than a thousand) and of the elimination of the passenger pigeon (extinct by the early 20th century). Our post-60s culture is incapable of designing an appealing government building, but it does feel a revulsion at the unbridled extirpation of a species or of an ecosystem. “Just be more Victorian” does not feel like the right blanket prescription. The 19th century seems to have been possessed by the imperative to both forge and to debase grandeur; some kind of dialectic between the awesome and the awful. Did they merely happen to coincide or were they actually linked? Moby Dick is a novel about the counterpoise. It is unsparing in its description of the realities: “At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.” And yet the next chapter breezily (is that the point?) commences: “The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity.” Ishmael is not just ambivalent in the aftermath of the suffering; he is more impressed. How Melville himself felt about the industry is not made clear, but I see no particular reason to doubt his enthusiasm. He did, after all, himself work as a whaler. (Take that, MFA-ification of the novelist.) So, the question: does the psychological impulse that undergirds a Victorian desire to monumentalize and to elevate—the self-confidence and the narcissism—somehow also beget the attendant cruelty? Eureka’s Carson Mansion, one of the extravagant high points of American architecture of the period, was built by the clearcutting local lumber magnate. As far as I can tell, the presence of injury isn’t just incidental. Walt Whitman, who surely embodies the late 19th century’s numinous aspiration as well as anyone, hymns in Song of the Redwood Tree to the “crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms” yielding “the falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan”. Rather than be appalled (or at least discomfited), he is enraptured: “I see the Genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal, Clearing the ground for broad Humanity, the true America”. The true America! Now, there’s an obvious alternate view. Maybe all cultures are just imbued at the outset with malignity and blindness, with Victorian progress simply uneven. Perhaps their advancement in the aesthetic domain was simply not yet matched in the moral domain. But Melville, Whitman, Kipling, and others make me suspect that there is in fact a connection. In Gast’s American Progress, the bison are being driven into the darkness. As with all Nietzschean tendencies, spiritual self-regard is double-edged. — I hadn't previously know anything about the economics of whaling. Moby Dick was published in 1851. (Melville was, remarkably, just 31.) As with Liar’s Poker, he captured a sector in its heyday: whaling reached its peak in 1845, whereupon declining whale populations started to constrain. Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, and domestic petroleum extraction surpassed oil derived from the whaling industry pretty much immediately. By 1870, US whaling had declined by about 75%. (The decline also accelerated by the Norwegian invention and adoption of the explosive harpoon, rendering US fleets less competitive.) Whale oil was never the US’s primary energy source or source of oil and never amounted to even 1% of US GDP. Camphene (from alcohol) was the main lamp fuel, with annual production more than tenfold greater than peak whale oil. Lard oil, tallow, and vegetable oils were also used. Our whaling was in this sense a luxury undertaking: whale oil smelled better and burned more cleanly. While American whale oil use declined precipitously in the 19th century, it did not abate entirely. I had no idea that sperm oil was widely-employed until relatively recently. Wikipedia: “Prior to 1972, over 30 million lb (14 million kg) of sperm whale oil was used annually in lubricants because of its exceptional lubricity and heat stability. In 1972, the sperm whale was listed as an Endangered Species. The following year, the US Congress amended the Endangered Species Act, outlawing the killing of whales and the use of their oil. The loss of sperm oil had a profound impact in the automotive industry, where for example, transmission failures rose from under 1 million in 1972 to over 8 million by 1975.” One of the two last whaling stations in the US was active in the San Francisco Bay until 1971. “The station’s boats hauled in an average of 175 finbacks, humpbacks, and sperm whales a year.” It seems that the Western Pacific gray whale and the North Atlantic right whale may not survive the already-imposed population declines. While we rue the safetyism, proceduralism, and risk-aversion that took hold in our culture starting in the 60s (of all years, it is noteworthy that the last whaling station closed in 1971…), and see that cultural turn as a fulcrum for our whole world, whaling is perhaps as good example as any of its necessity: we were in fact careering towards acts of annihilation. — I listened to much of the book, and thought the narration by William Hootkins was just fantastic.

Gold jumped from being worth like 2% of global assets to 3% of global assets and my feed is like