I wrote about permanent layoffs for the @markets newsletter today, and how even with an overall recovery that's clearly faster than expected, they're still getting worse at a quicker pace than the Great recession bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
@markets BTW, I think when thinking about the election, it's going to be extra-difficult to plug in some "economic fundamentals" into a model. Top-line GDP growth may be surging, and unemployment is coming down. But beneath the surface, deeper labor market pain is continues to grow.
A middle class, professional thinking about the state of the economy may have been extremely worried about their job in March/April. Then relatively sanguine in June/July, and then increasingly anxious August - October.
Now bear in mind that there's dual-Y axes here, but I think this chart really drives home how weird the situation is right now, and how hard it is to say whether the economy is improving or worsening. And why it may be impossible to gauge its electoral impact this time.
There's no reason everyone needs to be making software. But for people who just want to play around, and see what's capable, I think a simple start is to
A) Think of any topic you're interested in
B) Prompt it to "look for any public data about that topic and then visualize it"
one thing I'm curious about is whether Chinese consumer brands are making inroads in the US. So I made a simple thing that just scrapes the running shoe boards on Reddit once a week to track the % of mentions of Chinese brands.
People here "code" and they think they have to come up with some complete piece of software, as opposed to using code to do some simple or interesting task that would've been annoying to do by hand.
This is really good from @matt_levine on tokenization.
If we're totally cool with people trading equity in "private" companies, because it's on-chain, then eventually it seems possible that in the future we don't have IPOs or even standardized disclosure for any company at all.
Especially since for so many companies, the IPO is not so much a capital raising event, but rather a liquidity event. Why bother?
The Booming Crypto Use Case That's Happening Right Now
@tracyalloway and I talked to @CampbellJAustin, prof at Columbia biz school and financial markets veteran, about the rise of stablecoins, and the genuine breakthrough that they represent bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
I'd say if there's ever been an episode that came close to convincing me and @tracyalloway that there's a genuine, non-speculative use for open blockchains (e.g. Ethereum, Solana etc.), this is it.
@tracyalloway Austin does a fantastic job explaining how the existing banking and payments system work, and how stablecoins augment it. And specifically, how they augment the existing system in a way that the existing system isn't capable of upgrading towards on its own without crypto.
In today's 5 Things newsletter, I jotted down a bunch of random stuff about this moment in stocks, crypto, FX, and macro.
Here they are
1) It was clear instantly on Wednesday that Powell was going to be offsides this market:
2) To some extent, I think the way Powell was talking about "normalization" of the labor market didn't make any sense, almost regardless of what's going on with the economy right now.
3) Regardless of whether you think the Fed has made a mistake or not, the Fed is now clearly offsides. Remember on Wednesday Powell was still talking about the possibility of no cuts at all coming soon.