I HATE PRIVATE EQUITY. I HATE IT WITH SO MUCH PASSION. Not investing. Not markets. Not business in general. I hate this one specific move: a firm buys a company using borrowed money, loads that debt onto the company's own books instead of the firm's, pays itself management fees straight out of whatever profit is left, and walks away clean no matter what happens to the business. Sears was a dominant, functioning retailer when Eddie Lampert's hedge fund took it over. Over the next 13 years, it got loaded with billions in debt, its real estate and brands got sold off piece by piece to pay Lampert and his fund, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018 with over $11 billion in liabilities. More than 200,000 jobs disappeared over that stretch. Lampert personally walked away with an estimated $1.4 billion. He didn't lose. He was never going to lose. The debt was never his. Nobody's saying capitalism itself is the problem. I'm saying there's a version of it where you can gut a company for parts, call it "restructuring," collect the fees either way, and the law treats it as a legitimate business strategy every single time.

If ever there were a metaphor for why our nations are in ruin, it's a bunch of Boomers dancing on the banks of the Seine while the sons of the third world burn Paris to the ground.

J’ai la nausée ce soir. J’ai traversé Paris à vélo. Des quartiers entiers livrés aux pillards. Des jeunes les bras chargés d’objets volés. Des familles terrorisées. Du mobilier urbain saccagé. Voir notre capitale ainsi défigurée me fend le cœur. Pauvre Paris. Pauvre France.

🚨Report: British Army Chief Sir Roly Walker says UK political leaders will soon have a “frank conversation” with the public about preparing for war and the need for citizens to make sacrifices for national defense “Every citizen will be asked to make sacrifices and to play their part in the defence of the nation.”

My prediction IF Marine Le Pen wins the French presidential election next year (still far from certain imo) A scenario in four parts 1) The Left will incite a lumpen Intifada to rampage through the cities - especially Paris and Marseilles. Their hatred of mass democracy, bitterness in defeat and hatred of the French nation will be on full, ugly display under hammer and sickle and foreign flags. 2) Macron and his cronies will leave and encourage plenty of saboteurs behind the lines - in finance, the senior civil service, the universities, to thwart and undermine the RN. The media assaults will be relentless. Expect the ECB to try and pull a Truss-style soft coup through the banks. The French Intifada and Euro/globalist subversion will make the Remainers, BLM and Never Trumpers all seem tame by comparison. 3) The Ukraine war will be cranked up to 11. An RN government will be crucified for failing to support the NATO proxy war; political, ideological and financial pressure will be enormous. MLP will likely fold to relieve the pressure and shore up her patriotic credentials. French money will be pumped to Kyiv, and when it does, the liberals will know they have won. 4) Beleaguered, MLP will crumple and hobble through a single term, if that. Macron will return in 2032 as a saviour for France. The French people, exhausted by the elite punishment beatings and inner city riots, will resignedly accept a return to liberal centrism, and technocratic authoritarianism. Euro-populism will slowly fizzle into obscurity.

NEW: 🇾🇪🇨🇳 The Houthis are building an advanced missile that can reach all of Saudi Arabia and Israel with Chinese parts — WSJ The Houthis shipped in from a Chinese supplier a range of components needed to make a version of one of Iran’s most powerful weapons, the Kheibar Shekan Iranian precision-guided missile — report by Conflict Armament Research, a group that works in conflict zone Houthi missile would have a range up to about 1,200 miles, putting all of Saudi Arabia and Israel within reach.

How many days did it take you to finish this book (Count of Monte Cristo)

china closing the gap w/ american ai models the future increasingly looks like a world where china leads in ai models, the united states leads in semiconductors. messy…

MSCI is considering double-downgrading Indonesia to standalone market

I posted in May about the (un)investability of the Indonesian equity market Today, MSCI launched a consultation on a proposal to reclassify Indonesia from Emerging Market to Standalone Market status This means investors don't even think that Indonesian equities can be accorded Frontier Market status. They deserve a special class on their own Reasons behind this action: ■ Persistent opacity in shareholding structures ■ Suspected coordinated trading behaviour (“saham gorengan”) MSCI first sounded the alarms in June While the Indonesian authorities responded by announcing reforms, market participants have indicated that sufficient progress has not been observed consistently, markets continue to be dysfunctional, and there's lack of evidence of meaningful enforcement Therefore, reclassification to Frontier Markets would not properly recognize the depth of the market problems Add this to their current forest & land fire crisis, I think Indonesia needs a new government

JUST IN: President Trump says "we'll make a decision on Iran very soon"