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Matt O'Brien Profile picture
Matt O'Brien
@ObsoleteDogma
Writer in New York. Formerly the Washington Post & the Atlantic. https://t.co/OwdoDtQgn1 https://t.co/ODLsHkejTQ
Sep 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It’s incredible how bad the Tories are at making economic policy. They did austerity in 2010 when markets were begging them to borrow more, and budget-busting tax cuts for the rich today when markets wanted them to cut the deficit.

Also incredible Labour keeps losing to them. I might've been giving the Tories too much credit when I said they were incredibly bad at econ policy 5 days ago.

Blithely pushing through tax cuts for the rich that, due to pension fund weakness, create a vicious circle in your bond markets is one of the dumbest things ever. Image
Mar 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The problem with creating an off-ramp for Putin—which we should try to do—is it isn’t clear anything would be acceptable to him.

He started this war with maximalist aims. He wants, at the very least, to install a puppet regime that isn’t close to NATO *or* the EU. Remember, what set off Ukraine’s 2014 revolution wasn’t anything to do with NATO, but rather their pro-Russian president backing out of a trade deal with the EU because Putin wanted him to.
Sep 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
If it's a day that ends in "y," Greg Mankiw is arguing that the higher taxes we'd need to pay for a bigger welfare state aren't worth it because it'd hurt growth too much. nytimes.com/2021/09/15/opi… Mankiw likes to talk about this in terms of the theoretical tradeoff between efficiency & equality. But what he doesn't mention is that research from those wild-eyed liberals at the IMF has found there might not be much of a tradeoff at all.
May 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is an important point: a lot of very smart people, from VCs to bank execs, have invested a lot of time and money into trying to find a use for bitcoin. They haven’t found one yet…

…Well, other than as a pyramid scheme, which it excels at. This creates a perverse feedback loop: bitcoin investors make so much money off its socially useless pyramid scheme qualities that they think even more that it *must* be important, because it’s making them money.

But no. It’s just a pyramid scheme. An energy intensive one too.
May 6, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Imagine thinking that a joke pyramid scheme is better than the most widely used currency in the world, a currency which hasn’t even experienced more than 2% inflation in decades either Currencies don’t exist just to be scarce. Currencies don’t exist to be good investments either. Currencies exist to facilitate the everyday trade—i.e., buying things at stores—that we call having an economy.
Mar 4, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This has always been bitcoin’s fundamental flaw: it’s a good investment because it’s a bad currency, but if it’s a bad currency, why would it be a good investment? I have a more philosophical objection to bitcoin, though. Most technology creates value by making things more abundant.

Take TV or movies. Those have made performances by the top actors available to everyone, not just those who could afford to see them in person.
Feb 3, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
My God. Do you know how stupid you have to be to believe that daytraders executing a short squeeze against a few hedge funds while the rest of Wall Street makes money is a populist revolt against Wall Street?

Or that deregulating daytrading is a way to get back at Wall Street? Glenn Greenwald thinks that socialists are sellouts if they don’t try to ally with fascists, because he’s a moron. This incredibly stupid GameStop saga is just another example of that. theintercept.com/2020/06/25/sho…
Jan 30, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Matt Taibbi is another leftist reinventing right-wing liquidationism. You hate to see it. Step 1: The Fed raises interest rates and stops doing QE despite inflation being below target and unemployment being above target

Step 2: …

Step 3: Socialist utopia!
Jan 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I know what WallStreetBets is doing seems pretty hilarious, but they’re just reinventing pyramid schemes. Short squeezes can also be a good strategy—it’s made WallStreetBets a lot of money!—but going after short-sellers as a general matter isn’t good. Markets need them. Short sellers were the ones ringing the alarm bell about Enron and the housing bubble.
Jan 15, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Our minoritarian government aids and abets Republican extremism ft.com/content/cabfd2… The way the system is biased towards Republicans—gerrymandering, the Senate, & the Electoral College all overrepresent rural/exurban voters who strongly lean GOP—is what Daniel Ziblatt calls “constitutional welfare.”

It short-circuits the reform process. economist.com/united-states/…
Jan 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There’s *a lot* to like in Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package, but $415 billion more for vaccines, testing, and tracing would have the most ridiculous ROI.

It’s literally impossible to spend too much on this. statnews.com/2021/01/14/bid… Image The Biden plan not only includes bigger checks—increasing them to $2,000—but also better- targeted checks that include adult dependents
Jan 7, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I'm 36 years old. The two other times in my lifetime that a Republican administration committed serious crimes—Iran-Contra and torture—nothing happened. We looked forwards, not back, etc.

It's not good enough. How will elites learn there are consequences if there never are any? Democrats need to impeach Trump again, and they need to impeach him today. Inciting a coup, no matter how pitiful it might have been, is as bright as bright red lines get. If Democrats *don't do anything* in response, then Republicans will try it again.
Dec 2, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Bitcoiners are taking a victory lap because its price is back to where it was three years ago. This supposedly proves that it's a better store of value than other assets that don't regularly experience extreme volatility. It's worth pointing out, though, that the original pro-bitcoin arguments people were making years ago—either that it was a superior payment system, or that it would actually replace fiat currencies—haven't and won't come true.
Nov 19, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
If Joe Biden picks Janet Yellen as his Treasury Secretary, she will be the only person to have ever held all three of the most important economic policymaking positions in government: Fed Chair, CEA Chair, and Treasury Secretary. G. William Miller is the only person right now to have been both Fed Chair & Treasury Secretary. Both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke were CEA Chair before becoming Fed Chair.

Nobody has done the trifecta, though. At least not yet...
Nov 13, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
It's probably not too surprising, but it's still striking how much US & UK politics have mirrored each other the last 40 years: laissez-faire with Reagan & Thatcher, Third Way-ism with Clinton & Blair, right-wing nationalism with Trump & Brexit... ... and left-wing populism as a possible antidote to that right-wing nationalism with Bernie & Corbyn, both of whom were old-school socialists who resisted their parties' moves to the center in the 90s & found their parties coming back to them in 2016
Nov 4, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Younger Dems tend to be frustrated with the way older Dems, who came of age during Reagan, operate out of a constant defensive crouch, and I get it. I am too. But younger Dems need to learn how to talk about policies the way some of those older Dems—Clinton, Obama, and, Biden—do Younger Dems want to be more ambitious because the party is consistently strong on the national level. The problem, though, is that that isn't enough. The way the Senate & EC give disproportionate power to small, rural states means Dems have to win in conservative places too.
Nov 1, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Trump’s top covid adviser, a Fox News radiologist with no training in epidemiology who has been telling Trump that masks don’t work and to slow down testing, is insulting Fauci’s throwing arm after Fauci criticized him.

Meanwhile, the virus is spreading faster than ever. Scott Atlas is a good reminder that a think tank named after one of the worst presidents in history—the Hoover Institution—doesn’t exactly have high, or any, standards.
Oct 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The EU’s second wave of coronavirus cases has now, in per capita terms, even passed our own.

The combination of pandemic fatigue & people gathering with friends & family indoors during the cold months is going to be very, very bad. It’s why our third wave is starting too. The fact that already hard-hit countries like Spain, Italy, and Britain are seeing such big resurgences should put to rest the idea that we’re anywhere close to herd immunity
Sep 10, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The bottom line is that Trump knew the coronavirus was airborne back on February 7th, but has mocked or otherwise undermined the idea of wearing masks almost the entire time since.

This has likely cost tens and tens of thousands of lives. How many lives might have been saved if Trump had mdae masks mandatory back in March?

Well, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia all did that then—they were the first European countries to do so—and their per capita death tolls are 7 to *85* times lower than ours. Image
Sep 9, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Seems bad washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-w… Image “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump said on March 19th.

Mission accomplished, amirite. Image
Sep 4, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The good news: The economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, which pushed the unemployment rate down to 8.4%.

The bad news: the number of people who permanently lost their jobs increased again, this time by 534,000 (it’s up 2.1 million since February). This is the recession we’ll face once the pandemic is finally over.

And, after starting to improve a little last month, it’s getting worse again now.