I spent 35 years building banking systems for banks worldwide, including central banks. I know how banks decide where their money goes. When you build systems, you have to make them work, so you have to know how they work. The Basel Committee de-industrialised the countries that adopted its rules. It's that simple: I explain the whole complicated mechanism in my essay. They simply regulated it away because that was the most profitable thing to do. It was implemented in such a systemic global way, and nobody seemed to notice Capital is what a bank must hold before it can lend, the way a manufacturer or miner must hold supplies before it can sell. No miner doubles their costs to serve one group of customers. But that's what the banking system does to miners and manufacturers. Since 1988, the Basel rules have required banks to hold twice the capital against a factory loan as against a home loan, and under Basel III the gap reaches five times. So banks lend less to industry and more against houses. It should be stopped tomorrow. Manufacturing's share of GDP fell in ten of the eleven countries I examined. In Australia it fell from 13.7% to 5.4%. Every other country that followed fell as well. The only truly crafty ones were the Koreans, who did a good job of offsetting it. Regulators were warned in writing that the rule would steer credit, and they adopted it anyway. No parliament voted for it, and it's simply too dumb to keep doing, but we do . Not today; there is no justification. Yet from India, across Europe, across the US, including Australia, sanctions against industrial capacity. Financialization has gone too far it needs to be reviewed . The charge is manslaughter by gross negligence. The mechanism is proven. Same Rules, Different Ruins:ctindale.substack.com/p/same…

So I went to the Paris Motor Show... Here's what I found 👇 - European and US car manufacturers are in massive trouble. The features and materials used in their cars are just so far behind. - Many western car brands offer cars for €60–80k with plastic interior finishings. Even the AMG Mercedes had this. Always thought they were "Premium". - The price differences are crazy. €40k gets you a shitty Kia with plastic trim and a curved panoramic screen. For the same price, you can get a BYD Sealion with leather finishings, much more features and a premium feel. - Chinese cars get you so much more for your money, and in many cases cost less. I don't know who would ever choose a Tesla over XPeng or Zeekr... they aren't even playing in the same league. - The busiest stalls were mostly Chinese cars. The level of interest was staggering. Zeekr, BYD, XPeng and Aito were by far the busiest, with big lines to view and sit in the cars. - Literally no western cars I saw had a TV screen in the back or a fridge built into the console. - I was surprised the most by Aito. Beautiful cars that are premium, luxurious and customisable, like having 2 seats in the back instead of 3. Nice that they offered all their models in either electric or hybrid. Means you don't need to sacrifice design or features for any model. -- EU and US cars, watch out. Your brand image won't help you for much longer.

entourez vous toujours de gens ambitieux qui vous poussent continuellement à vous élever le véritable cheat code des américains réside dans leur capacité à rêver grand et à attirer des profils optimistes qui ne passent pas leur temps à vous expliquer pourquoi votre projet est impossible à aucun moment il ne s’agit d’une question de diplôme

avec l’IA nous sommes en train de sacrifier la maturation lente de la pensée sur l'autel du rendement immédiat et à vouloir effacer l'effort et le doute qui façonnent l'intuition on condamne le cerveau humain à l'atrophie et on réduit l’humain à un simple spectateur analphabète devant des LLMs qui pensent à sa place

This is what crowd out looks like.

Breaking: Michael Burry says the AI boom is running on one giant loop and time is running out Here's his breakdown: 1. Burry shared a report from Wall Street lender Ares tracking $573B of AI financing from the last 12 months 2. All of it runs through just 8 companies: Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Broadcom and Nvidia 3. They lend to each other, guarantee each other's debt and buy from each other, so one company's loan is backed by another company's promise to keep spending 4. Every deal depends on one thing: AI spending never slowing down 5. If AI revenue disappoints for even one season, the guarantees could all get called at once, right when the companies backing them are at their weakest 6. Burry says it's the same circular financing that turned the 2000 telecom fiber boom into a bust Burry claims the stock market in the first stage of grief and the crash is soon

#FlixBus has launched its first electric long-distance line in Central Europe. 🚍⚡ "Started on 1st of October, FlixBus now connects Vienna and Bratislava with electric buses. Not a pilot, but everyday operation from day one!" eight Yutong T12E running up to 66 trips/day!

There are two competing hypotheses about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The first hypothesis is that the invasion was unprovoked, as Russia is another "Hitler" pursuing expansionism, and that the logical response of NATO is therefore to stop Russia and raise the costs. From this perspective, even diplomacy can be viewed as "appeasement." The second, competing hypothesis is that Russia responded to 30 years of NATO expansion, which it considers an existential threat, and thus considers itself to be fighting a defensive war. If the second hypothesis is correct, then NATO deepening its direct involvement and rejecting negotiations will only result in the destruction of Ukraine while taking further steps toward nuclear war. George Beebe, the former Director of Russia Analysis at the CIA, argues that the second hypothesis is clearly correct: Russia sees this as a war for its survival and therefore cannot back down. One does not need to agree with the analysis of Beebe, but this should really be at the center of the debate in the West, as our survival depends on it. My great concern is that we are not even permitted to discuss or debate these two competing hypotheses, because the narrative must be protected and all dissent is smeared as repeating Russian propaganda. youtu.be/HrgVTdBvSpI

If u invested $1 million in $QQQ -Nasdaq- on Feb 2009 when NSA told Congress that economy was #1 threat, u have $27 million now. After that testimony, stock market became economy and no matter who ran #FED or who ran the government, primary objective was to pump up the stock market. On average FED pumped money supply 6% a year. Normally that would have created double digit inflation decades ago but BLS took care of that problem. Media treated PCE and CPI as real numbers. FED also supplied vol by selling VIX futures on a daily basis and US Treasury intervened by buying stock futures, usually in Asia hours before cash opened... sometimes during Europe open and US close as well. Macro Trading had become meaningless and Paul Tudor Jones, one of the legends in macro, was the last one to shut down macro trading group in 2015. Paul did not fight the powers, he joined them... usually as a spokesman for crypto, stablecoins and AI recently. Imagine you try to trade macro and buy or sell #OIL futures in last 7 months. Can u make money? WTI and even Brent are paper products... less than 5% settles at the expiry for physical... do u have any chance if government uses its power to create an alternative reality and backs it up with unlimited ammo in futures markets? Then you can only trade what US Government will do if you have that information. That's exactly how trading had been done in Turkiye since I was a child. If you go and check the founders and CEOs of sunk funds in Turkiye now, you willl see absurd resumes... men literally from the street... but with connections. I used to think that it was unique to Türkiye or Emerging Markets people to have the character to repeat the same circus over and over again, not learning any lessons. Some of the sunk funds went up 10-20 times last few years in Turkiye but people kept their money there and now claim to be victims. Is that different than what most Americans do now? As long as the charade continues, they are ok with fake inflation reports, government manipulations in markets and fake media reporting. You are loser if u don't participate and that thinking turned USA into Gotham with a Joker in charge. Western Civilization relied on two pillars: #RuleofLaw and Markets... but real markets, not this kabuki. Both pillars are gone. They will not come back when markets crash and today's winners feel they are victims.

In quest’era dell’intelligenza artificiale diventa urgente distinguere l’arte umana da ciò che viene prodotto dalle macchine. C’è una differenza ontologica, prima ancora che estetica, tra l’arte e ciò che una macchina può generare per calcolo statistico a partire da milioni di immagini altrui. Agli algoritmi manca la scintilla dell’umano. Per questo, la Chiesa desidera rinnovare con gli artisti e con le istituzioni culturali un’alleanza: un’alleanza per custodire l’umano.

China’s Industrialization Did Not Begin in 1978 How the Soviet-Backed 156 Projects Built the Heavy-Industrial Skeleton for China’s Post-Reform Manufacturing Boom "It was also an extremely rare mechanism of accelerated industrialization in twentieth-century world history: a country that had already built heavy industry and military industry transferred, through state-to-state agreements, complete factories, equipment, blueprints, production processes, experts, training, and management systems to a backward agrarian country that had only recently completed political reconstruction." leonliao.substack.com/p/chin…

restez des éternels curieux et gardez ce regard de gosse pour poser des questions à partir des premiers principes: c’est la seule compétence dont la valeur va exploser à l’ère de l’IA

The West still seems not to understand that the transition from combustion heat engines to electrical machines is fundamentally a materials-science transition. It is rather like entering the Industrial Revolution without noticing that civilisation was moving from eating carbohydrates to burning hydrocarbons.

The primary problem is too much money in the hands of too few. Those few now own just about everything or enough of everything to drive up the prices for everyone else while those few seek "financial returns" on their investments (ie. our homes, our stores, our restaurants). They buy things, jack up the prices, enshittify the services, cut staff, and then resell them to the next elite who rinses and repeats. The drive for ever-increasing profits has led to excessive debt. The rates reflect that. The businesses must fail, and they will then reconcentrate into the hands of the bankers, as intended. The only way out of the death-spiral is a complete reset, and that involves redistribution. Example from @HedgieMarkets

RT @BrianJBerletic: 🇺🇸NEW ARTICLE: US Cannibalizes Its Proxies and Itself as War on Multipolarism Expands (Because X blocks NEO links just…

Mind the gap between the issuance of bonds and central bank purchases if you want to understand which way global real long yields are headed. Below, a plot of the aggregates for the Eurozone, the UK, Japan, and the US (blue bars) against the average 10-year real yield. thetwocents.substack.com/p/g…

bon je considère que Laurent se trompre très largement avec cette take et je vais m’expliquer déjà je pense que la + grande tragédie des 2 derniers siècles aura été de contraindre la conscience biologique à simuler le comportement d'un processeur, la bureaucratie, l'administration de surface, la saisie de données et la répétition mécanique etc etc.. (la globalité du travail tertiaire) n'ont jamais été conçues pour l'esprit humain a mon sens ces métiers ont mutilé la dignité de l'être en ravalant des millions d'âmes au rang d'exécutants algorithmiques et nous avons qualifié de «progrès » un modèle de société dont l'unique produit était la déshumanisation du temps et l'asphyxie des relations réelles d’ici 2030 je dirais même, l'intelligence artificielle ne va pas détruire le travail humain,elle va liquider le travail artificiel (tout le lot de BS jobs et m’a recommandation de lire David Graeber tient toujours) en ramenant le coût marginal de l'exécution mécanique et du jargon symbolique à 0 et en ce sens je dirais que l’IA va nous arracher notre masque de robots désolé que je vais choquer mais je pense que tout ce que l'IA peut automatiser n'a jamais été digne de l'esprit humain et ne subsistera que ce qui résiste à la simulation: la présence physique, l'empathie brute, le courage, la créativité, la philosophie, l'art incarné et la beauté d'un lien social libéré de la transaction et cnest ce que je trouve absolument fabuleux de manière plus profonde je crois que nous entrons dans une forme de renaissance existentialiste de notre histoire et contrairement à ceux qui parlent d’émettre une forme de conscience chez les robots, 2030 ne sera pas l'année où les machines seront enfin devenues humaines mais très certainement l'instant sacré où les êtres humains auront enfin le droit d'arrêter d'être des machines

Very int thanks! I have a different model that says that default isn't literal but rather through FTPL (jump in prices, collapse of FX, political inability to collect taxes). In which case the mechanism of how things go wrong is important. In my model when (partial derivative of creditworthiness/interest rates) turns negative then further rate rises cause a collapse in debt prices. In other words the CB can't raise rates to dampen inflation. So there is a regime change. From Volker to Germany 1924. And prices don't rise linearly, they jump by a factor of say 4 , which is equivalent to a payout on default of corporate debt in bankruptcy of 25% (for example). I'm saying that actual default unlikely today, Vs a price/FX level jump.

The Summary 📌 Summary of Questions & Core Answers 1. Question: Is raising central bank rates historically effective at taming inflation when the primary deficit is at the current US level of 2.6%? Answer: Yes, but its efficacy is severely degraded. While rate hikes historically crushed inflation (e.g., the Volcker Shock), doing so alongside a persistent 2.6% primary deficit creates a "tug-of-war." Under the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL), higher rates exponentially increase government interest payments. This acts as an involuntary fiscal stimulus to bondholders, injecting liquidity back into the private sector and making inflation structural and sticky. 2. Question: How does the post-WWII era of capping rates compare, considering today's debt is held externally and countries like Japan are actively selling US Treasuries (USTs)? Answer: The 1940s playbook is unusable today due to globalization. In the 1940s, US debt was held domestically in a captive market. Today, ~32% is held externally, with Japan as the largest holder. If the Fed capped rates today, foreign investors would face deeply negative real yields. Japan and others would stop buying and aggressively dump USTs. To prevent a bond market crash, the Fed would be forced to print money and absorb the supply, leading to direct debt monetization and hyper-inflation. 3. Question: Does shifting government debt issuance to the short end (T-Bills) compound this problem by further increasing liquidity injections? Answer: Yes, this creates "Fiscal Dominance via the Front End." Shifting to short-term T-Bills introduces "near-cash" assets into the economy, keeping the velocity of money high. It drains sterile cash out of the Fed's Reverse Repurchase (RRP) facility and spends it directly into the real economy. Because T-Bills must roll over constantly, Fed rate hikes instantly inflate the government's interest payouts, creating an immediate, compounding liquidity loop that weakens monetary tightening. 4. Question: How does Japan selling USTs to defend the Yen compound this, transforming "locked-box" sterilized assets into active T-Bills and forcing US authorities to inject liquidity via swaps? Answer: It unmasks the ultimate global liquidity loop. Japan's USTs were once "dead," passive capital. When Japan sells them for USD to buy Yen, those dollars enter the active banking system and are recycled into hyper-liquid T-Bills. Furthermore, because US authorities cannot let long-end yields spike, the Fed/Treasury activates backstops like the FIMA Repo Facility. The Fed takes Japan's USTs as collateral and hands them fresh USD cash. This monetizes the foreign debt, neutralizing the Fed's domestic inflation-fighting efforts.

Gas prices are at crazy levels--fire Obama!