-- The economy right now
-- Whether inflation is broadening
-- How the Fed's new framework (unveiled at Jackson Hole is being put into practice)
-- What full employment looks like
-- Taper timing
-- Delta concerns
Ok. I have a question for folks like @felixsalmon, @matt_levine, @IvanTheK and others on here who tweet or write sometimes about Payment For Order Flow and other aspects of retail equity market structure...
@felixsalmon@matt_levine@IvanTheK So obviously retail traders are, for the most part, getting totally free trades (through platforms like Robinhood et. al.). But in theory, they could be losing out if stuff like Payment For Order Flow is causing them to get subpar executions.
But how big of an issue could this really be? $VIRT is one of the biggest players in the space, and it's market cap is $4.8 billion. Maybe Citadel Securities would be worth like twice that much if it were public? We're obviously not talking about huge cash cow sums here.
I wrote a review of The Blocksize War by @jonathanbier. A fantastic read on the period from 2015-2017, when the Bitcoin world split into two bitterly opposed camps over how best to scale the network bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
@jonathanbier Even if you're not really into Bitcoin or anything, you might still find the book to be fascinating, as there's tons in there about how group dynamics form and then harden over time in the presence of conflict. Just the sociology of it is worth studying. amazon.com/dp/B08Z18GWD6/…
I started paying close attention to Bitcoin in around 2016. So there was a lot that I already knew. But also a ton of stuff that was new and surprising to me, including the fact that early on many of the most ardent "small blockers" did actually favor some increase at some point.
We’re back on the real economy beat with the author @RyanHoliday.
He talked with me and @tracyalloway about how he opened up a bookstore in Bastrop, TX in the middle of a pandemic, an epic freeze, and supply chain disruptions galore bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Favorite fact I learned in this one is that the recent Michelle Obama book was so popular that book printers actually ran short on paper to print other books at one point.
We also talked about the economics of getting a book made at and delivered from a specialty printer in Belarus when shipping costs are through the roof.
Stock futures ticking up modestly after the report.
You could argue that these numbers are kind of goldilocksish. The better than expected pace of job creation is positive, and the higher unemployment rate means a persistent level of labor market slack