EMERGENCY PIECE: It’s not true that DOGE only has “read only” access to the most top secret systems at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. They have “read AND write” access with a current employee of BFS calling “apocalyptic” Specifically Marko Elez, 25 year old former SpaceX employee, has read & write access for The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) & Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). PAM processed 4.7 trillion dollars of payments in 2024.

EMERGENCY PIECE: Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury’s Payment System. This Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous. Worse, exclusive new information revealed here explicate how Musk’s actions relate to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent In my last piece I went into detail about why we were facing an alarming “five alarm fire” constitutional crisis. That was Friday morning. Now it’s clear that we face something far, far worse. Musk’s DOGE has gotten access to the Treasury’s payment system architecture

I have not felt prepared to read @JStein_WaPo's article today about the resignation of the Treasury's Fiscal Assistant Secretary (who was just acting Treasury Secretary) until now and I've only just started going through it but its absolutely terrifying.
washingtonpost.com/business/2025/… “[It's] a mechanical job—they pay Social Security benefits,they pay vendors,whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things[...]It's never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case”

I think people do not understand what we mean when we say the holocaust was not understood in real time. The first credible report which became public arrived in England in May 1942. It was, by the way, from the Jewish Labor Bund. At least 1.5 million Jews had already died.

https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1827815016638107991

It was publicly announced in June and the @nytimes buried the story On June 27: "the Times buried the Bund story at the end of a column of short news items from Europe." They then played down the reporting in early July 1942

enc.wymaninstitute.org/?p=113

Something I've only really started to fully appreciate is its not simply that our ruling elites can only even minimally sympathize with Palestinians if they are perceived as total helpless victims, their "holocaust memory" is based on the same premise of total Jewish victimhood "Judeo-Bolshevism" is a myth, but many Jews **were** supporters (especially at the voter level) of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks & of course the Bund & militant Zionist political parties (including of the "socialist") type. The Nazis bear total responsibility for the Shoah regardless

Ever since the insane Höss thing I've been going down various rabbit holes again. One of the craziest has been William E. Blackstone. I've known about Christian Zionism, but I hadn't quite realized that Christian **Political** Zionism was older than Jewish Political Zionism He wrote a bestseller translated into 42 languages called "Jesus is Coming" in *1878* which broke with the idea that Jews needed to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior before, or **after**, gathering in Israel. They just needed to accept Jesus after he comes back.

We Jews wonder why the world did nothing as the Nazis put us into concentration camps. Well there were not photos of the true conditions of the concentration camps in 1941, let alone photos every day. Every hour of every day. Livestreams. Yet people talk about college campuses. The denial and justification far too many Jewish Americans engage in for the genocide happening in Gaza is on a far more profound and earth shattering scale than the most vile antisemitic America firster in 1941. I don't want to ever hear any of this "wondering" ever again.

I have been reading this revolting quote from Nixon circulating about "Indian women" from the middle of the Bangladesh genocide in June 1971 and I like to periodically check up on primary sources so I dug it out and made subtitles. Truly disgusting freaks. You can find the Nixon library link for the whole tape here. This is extracted from roughly the 50 minute mark.

nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-ta…

Like many,I enjoyed reading @SethAckerman's piece on Brenner. He covers a lot of things that I've had a problem with and may eventually write up in a more comphrensive thing on profit rates (there's just a lot to do!) I have a few critical comments though

jacobin.com/2023/09/robert… I want to emphasize here that I think the piece is good in a number of respects and my critical comments are not meant to reject the piece as a whole. I just care about a lot of issues tangential to the main point but which come up over the course of it.

FYI @LevMenand and Josh Younger's paper on the repo market as money financing of treasury securities is out. I appreciate their citations to @StephanieKelton and I making a similar argument as well as my 2020 piece where I make the same core argument

journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/CBLR… Here's that 2020 piece.

crisesnotes.com/the-way-people…

"Minting the coin would be almost as bad as default" is such an annoying argument because there's absolutely no evidence for it but you can't ever fully debunk it because it's an argument designed to be impervious to evidence. "hOw CaN YoU eB sUrE???" concern trolling abounds. The Fed buys trillions of dollars of government securities and it has no impact on household spending plans but suddenly people are going to hear about a big coin and splurge? Give me a break. It's one of the most unserious arguments that has the gloss of "very serious thinking"

This piece captures something really important: The Biden administration genuinely thinks doing the coin hurts them more than doing what they are currently doing. They are wrong about that. Shitposters and suburban moms alike will be thrilled.

theverge.com/2023/5/23/2373… Democrats and Dem-leaning independents want nothing more than for republicans to eat shit and be owned. Politics is about persuading Democratic and Democratic leaning voters that what you're doing is good and defeats republicans and the coin does it in spades.

I'm going to ask the Fed for more detailed demographic information, but based on these percentages of each racial group who use cryptocurrency for investment purposes, Black people don't seem to disproportionately use cryptocurrency for investment purposes. Based on their numbers (and using the "identify as x" only adult U.S. population numbers) the rough estimate of the percentage of cryptocurrency investors who are Black is 11.5%, below the percentage of U.S. adults who only identify as Black.

The amount of people who refuse to believe Democratic party leadership would be hubristic and foolish and assume that this debt ceiling episode must be a contrived plot from the beginning to get austerity is staggering. It's just a photo negative of American Exceptionalism. A party that was just chomping at the bit for austerity would have started negotiating at day one and get whatever deal with cuts was acceptable to house Republicans (if there was one) two months ago. They really did royally screw this up. What's going on right now is not an act.

Good newsletter today from @TheStalwart about their upcoming interview with @RajaKorman. I've long emphasized that the most important thing to look for in changing the international currency hierarchy is changes in debt denomination

bloomberg.com/news/newslette… Here's a pull quote from a talk I gave five years ago at the University of Manchester at @johndhaskell . This reminds me I should edit that talk and publish it in the Newsletter. And here's my March 2020 piece on international monetary issues.

crisesnotes.com/the-federal-re…

Okay i am bored on this flight so lets do a classic: ask me about whatever curiouscat.live/crisesnotes ever do meetups in town? — Yes! I did one right before i left but will be doing a proper one next week in Manhattan curiouscat.live/crisesnotes/po…

Those who read this piece I wrote last year know that I don't think higher measured after the fact ("ex post") profits tells us anything causally about target profit margin driven price increases. Kalecki-Levy Profits equation determines those. However...

crisesnotes.com/prices-prices-… The flipside of this point is that economists (and Powell) are totally wrong to claim the opposite- you can't simply tell us that any changes to margins are all about demand (either directly through sales growth or through some supply and demand explanation of price setting)

My questions for the FDIC after the New Republic acquisition by JPM.
My questions are based on my understanding from this piece I wrote the week after the SVB rescue.
Happy to have any journalists ask my questions to make sure they get answers
crisesnotes.com/the-dizzying-a… Actually got a quick reply before I finished reposting this from my typo. Pretty unsatisfying, but good to know we won't know anything for days. Established journalists should grill them on this stuff.

This sentence is absolutely true, but it is not the twitter understanding of New Keynesianism at all

"The main tenet of the New Keynesian (NK) paradigm is that price dispersion caused by nominal price stickiness is the primary source of allocative
inefficiency" (quote is from this paper

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… )

Krugman has done a lot of damage to the popular understanding of modern economics

I will write a whole piece on this, & its important engagement which I really appreciate from @PeterContiBrown.TLDR:

1) I think this historical narrative is inaccurate

2) I think this thread fundamentally misunderstands the franchise view which begins with inductive description

https://twitter.com/PeterContiBrown/status/1636069375651336193

Let's take the historical component first. Here,where I think @PeterContiBrown is wrong is based in original historical research I began conducting a decade ago & have presented on,but got derailed from finishing and publishing (I'm hoping to devote at least part of my PHD to it)

The Fed's announcement says "These assets will be valued at par". What that means is the collateral price for these assets at the discount window will be equal to their face value. To get a taste of what that means, read this piece I wrote from 2020

crisesnotes.com/central-bank-c… Here's the Fed's announcement. What is confusing to me is why they created a separate facility ("Bank Term Funding Program"), and whether this separate facility is based on 13(3).

federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…