Maybe we did and maybe we didn't, but I'd like to think that our Epsilon Theory note on Kodak played a role in getting Congress to investigate this sham within a con wrapped in a grift.
And if you liked this Chapter 1 on the White House grift with Kodak, wait till you see this week’s Chapter 2 on 3M, Honeywell, and the White House grift on N95 masks.
We're in the early stages of a bank run on the United States and the US dollar, and everyone on Wall Street is heading for the exits, including domestic investors who will exit not because they want to but because they know the Not-So-Golden Rule.
New on ET! 🧵
Do unto others as they would do unto you.
But do it first.
That's Wall Street's Not-So-Golden Rule, and if you want to be successful in the business of Money, it's the one rule you must obey.
I think that Trump a) recognizes he overplayed the tariff card, b) is sidelining ideologues like Navarro, and c) is looking to de-escalate the China trade war.
I promised a long-form note on why the tariffs are madness, yes, but even more so why replacing the Pax Americana regime with an America First regime is such a terrible deal for ALL Americans.
So here you go! No paywall on this one.
"Crashing the Car of Pax Americana" 🧵
Pax Americana is the dominance of the USD as the world’s reserve currency and the US military as the world’s security arbiter.
Pax Americana is most of all the American stories that have dominated the hearts and minds of everyone on Earth for 50+ years. epsilontheory.com/crashing-the-c…
Pax Americana is system of multilateral rules and institutions that coordinates the flow of capital, labor, goods, and services without trying to ‘win’ any head-to-head relationship.
The Road to Serfdom is not an endless road, but its path and duration, what I call the Great Ravine, is not up to us to choose. While we walk this road the only thing we can save is our souls, and we do it with one simple sentence: It was never going to be me.
🧵
Trumpism is an ideological embrace of America as a Great Power, that this is everything America should be, and an ideological rejection of America as a Good Power, that this is something America should never be.
I don’t mean “good” in the sense of doling out foreign aid lavishly and stupidly. I mean “good” in the sense of what the Framers called a more perfect Union, where ideas like liberty and justice are policy goals even at the cost of “efficiency”. epsilontheory.com/it-was-never-g…
This is the absolute level of MSM usage of propaganda-ish terms and rhetorical constructions. High since the invasion, and remains elevated (which is unusual).
But it’s not dominated by pro-Ukraine content.
In fact, ‘leftist’ MSM like the NYT gives a LOT more coverage to Putin’s rationales for the Ukraine invasion than Fox and Breitbart and the like.
BTW, the NBER paper that Stancil and his Renfields love to cite clearly shows that real wages are lower today than they were pre-pandemic. For women it's the same and for men it's lower.
To 'rescue' the vibecession narrative and avoid the unthinkable (that real wages increased under Trump and fell under Biden), a new graphic was created from the NBER dataset that appears nowhere in the original. We are told that we have 'returned to trend' in real wage growth.
This is an example of a perfectly fine (I guess) NBER paper trying to show wage compression post-pandemic that has been pressed into Yay, Bidenomics! service by the Stancil/Wolfers crowd for far more sweeping claims than it ever intended or can reasonably support.