"The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
Washington
Joined April 2009
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Belongs in the Constitution (as an amendment).
No member of Congress would dare vote against it, and even if the amendment failed, the debate would command the country’s attention.
Mind The Gap ☘️⛈️ retweeted
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It is interesting – and a very good sign – that even free-trade advocates like Lamy now recognize that comparative advantage is not the same as competitive advantage, and that the latter actually distorts the logic of the former.
michaelpettis858496.substack…
A lot of us were taught that open trade (letting the market decide) was the path forward. It's a difficult thing to unlearn.
As it turns out, there is no free market in which to engage in free trade. Outside our borders, all we're dealing with are other nations' industrial policies and geopolitical goals.
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Caixin: "“It took me a long time to make up my mind, because I’m a deep believer in open trade,” Pascal Lamy told Caixin. But he believes that China’s combination of industrial subsidies, weak domestic consumption and price competitiveness across supply chains has distorted the traditional logic of comparative advantage."
caixinglobal.com/2026-11-07/…
Mind The Gap ☘️⛈️ retweeted
The most dangerous thing in the world right now is that the American public does not understand that the Chinese Communist Party hates us and wants to destroy America. They will not leave us in peace. You can talk about “America First” and the US retreating from its obligations around the world, but all that will do is turn China into the sole world superpower. And then they will kill us.
You don't set policy around an imagined outcome. You choose the best option from a list of bad choices. AI is here, and it's not going anywhere. Either the US leads, or our adversaries do. The managerial class is the most threatened. Everyone else's jobs fall under some version of "jobs Americans won't do," and get outsourced. Men's jobs.
Despite Brad Setser’s reasonable objections, there is a reason central governments resist absorbing local debt: Local debt can be restructured or defaulted on. Sovereign debt, not so much. You effectively enshrine it.
Moving LGFV debt onto Beijing’s balance sheet won't eliminate unproductive investments; it simply changes who services them.
This is how China becomes Japan.
Tokyo converted regional infrastructure liabilities and bad bank loans into central government obligations. While this prevented immediate defaults, it pushed debt-to-GDP above 250%.
The trade-offs:
Resource Misallocation: Money goes toward servicing "zombie" assets instead of funding high-growth, productive sectors.
Rate Sensitivity: At 250% debt-to-GDP, the government becomes dependent on financial repression and real negative interest rates just to keep sovereign debt service manageable.
Currency Depreciation: Real negative rates, especially when global interest rates diverge, weaken the currency and erode domestic purchasing power.
Sovereign debt conversion trades a local crisis for decades of lower national growth.
Beijing is understandably hesitant to go down this road, especially when it wants to fight a war.
It's going to need that clean sovereign balance sheet.
If you think invading Iran was wild, just wait till the trade war intensifies
Unless China revalued their currency, the economic attacks persist. China doesn’t want to revalue their currency because they have more debt than any other country in the world. Their currency goes up=the weight of the debt crushes them.
Any type of war is negative sum and we always want to try to avoid it with creative problem solving. This particular situation between the US and China will determine the outcome of the global system as a whole because it deals with the two largest economies and trade partners in the world.
Until @elonmusk creates more GDP in space than exists on earth, the policy changes of the US and China will have a very real impact on everything.
The only path forward is to out innovate China because it’s highly unlikely that US policy has the resolve to fix the issue. This is why $TSLA and $SPCX should have a premium. They represent the potential to out innovate the biggest economic imbalance in the system today.
Chinese spies. A bunch of hussies. The CCP needs to rein that in. Bad optics.
US believes Nvidia’s Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy ft.trib.al/5tCtZnH
I don't wanna be that guy, but neither Canada (esp) or Mexico are acting like they're on the same side of this trade conflict.
WSJ: "Democrats are eyeing President Trump’s trade war with Canada as the first target in a campaign to roll back his administration’s tariff agenda."
I hope so. While the US is right to want to reverse its global role of consumer (and de-industrializer) of last resort, the idea that it would do so through tariffs on countries like Canada and Mexico was always nonsense. Canada and Mexico are actually on the same side of the conflict as the US.
wsj.com/politics/elections/d…
I don't know that this is enough to dump US markets, but you have to wonder about the timing. It's one hell of a coincidence.
"The PBOC’s move to lock up a portion of US dollar liquidity should partially curb herding behaviour and help ease pressure on exporters"
scmp.com/economy/policy/arti…
Mind The Gap ☘️⛈️ retweeted
Russell Brand Convicted In UK Court On Charges Of Raping While Not Muslim buff.ly/cRxOqj6
Poltical affiliations are largely predicated on the Big Five personality traits. Those who vote reliably in one direction their entire lives will offer all manner of post hoc rationalizations when polled. That's why swing voters (and the economy) determine the outcome.
Those are post hoc rationalizations. People don't cast their votes based on FP; they vote on the economy and whether they're poorer than they were two or four years ago. That's close to home and personal. Democrats won because of government jobs and transfers. Taking that issue away from them would require Congress to restructure our trade and revitalize the economy, something it has failed to do for the better part of half a century.
Marc, while 34% said it was "crucial," a whopping additional 40% said it was a "major factor." (Only one out of four said it was not a big deal in their vote.) Of these 74% of Americans who said it was "crucial" or a "major factor," they overwhelmingly voted Democrat in the blowout election. In the same poll of voters who delivered Democrats a blowout victory, 63% said the decision to attack Iran was the "wrong" decision.
It is true that the minority of voters who voted Republican do not share these views, by and large, but the number of voters who shared these views was nowhere near enough to keep Republicans from being wiped out across the country.
Putting our head in the sand about what a devastating policy this was FOR ELECTION OUTCOMES is not helpful. (I understand that many people -- including people I genuinely love and admire -- feel it was worthwhile to suffer these election losses for the higher good of the military outcomes you successfully advocated for.)
As for the claim that internal data showed that former GOP voters who had become non-voters sought a change in the relationship ... that is almost certainly related to Trump's public announcement on election day that the relationship would, in fact, change by the end of the year. (archive.is/skA9E) And a reminder that "change" doesn't have to mean -- and certainly shouldn't mean -- a harmful change to either party -- it ideally means a mutually beneficial change for the sake of strong alliances and peace.
Session after session, Congress has failed to establish an industrial policy that revitalizes the US economy. The public had every right to vote for direct government transfers when Congress repeatedly fails to address the underlying problem.
Anything else would've been surprising. Markets have 3mo to prepare for a change in Congress, and even then.. what are they expecting will happen?
A big day across markets benefiting both Wall Street and Main Street.
Wall Street:
• Major US equity indices up 2–3%
• Gold & Bitcoin surging 3%
• Corporate bond spreads tightening
Main Street:
• Oil sliding 8%
• 10-year Treasury yield down 6 bps, easing borrowing costs.
#economy #markets #stocks #bonds #gold #bitcoin
We fall into this trap every time. We allow those who don't have term limits (and are largely responsible for the state of things) to shift the blame onto the one office that does.
At the end of the day, each race is its own local contest for representation in Congress or the state legislature, and voters are making decisions based on local candidates and issues.
It's a mistake thinking the executive branch was on the ballot and that this is why R's "lost the midterms".
That's a fallacy of composition.