My statements about transparency can be summarized as: In the presence of transparency, buyer and seller can Trust, but Verify the stories told by the issuer/Wall Street. They have the info they need to assess the risk/reward/value of a security. Their independent assessments are close enough so they are willing to engage in a trade without any governmental assistance even during a financial crisis. Worth repeating: trading in markets with transparency doesn't freeze. In the presence of opacity, buyers and sellers cannot Trust, but Verify the valuation stories told by the issuer/Wall Street. When the valuation story told by Wall Street is called into doubt, buyer and seller assessments can be so far apart no trade is possible and the market freezes. Government intervention is required to "unfreeze" the market. Perhaps more importantly, to the extent owners of opaque securities can, they "run" to get their money back when the valuation story is called into doubt. This is true for all opaque securities. These observations find their theoretical support in the Information Matrix. The Information Matrix underlies 100% of finance and most economic theories. These theories don't state their assumption trades happen in the "Perfect Information" quadrant - perfect information here being buyer and seller have the necessary info they need to know what they own. instituteforfinancialtranspa…

How Trump Became Mob Boss of the United States The most corrupt president in American history has been preparing his entire life to co-opt the government for personal gain rollingstone.com/politics/po…

Blowing up critical energy infrastructure & water desalination plants in the region? The IRGC views this war as existential and if they get desperate enough, well desperate people do desperate things.....

Except that is not how the tax code allocates responsibility. It should allocate equally but exclude from responsibility everyone under 30. They had nothing to do with creating this mess.

Warren Buffett once bought a gas station. He lost every dollar. He was 21. He put about $2,000 into a Sinclair station in Omaha with a friend. That was roughly 20% of everything he owned. On paper it looked simple. Cars need fuel. People pay cash. It seemed like easy money. Across the street sat a Texaco. The owner was well known and well liked. Drivers kept going there. Buffett’s station lost, month after month. He even worked weekends at the counter and washed windshields. It did not matter. People already trusted the other place. Buffett’s station could not win them over. He lost the full $2,000. That money never got the chance to grow. The lesson was blunt. A business with no edge is a job, not an investment. If the rival is loved and you are not, price cuts and hard work will not save you. Buffett stopped trying to beat a shop that was already stronger. He started buying businesses that customers already loved.

Labour gutted London financial sector over the years

Just heard an analyst commenting on NPR that Trump is pursuing extremely unpopular positions--the war in Iran, tariffs, opposition to AI regulation, support for data centers, tax cuts for the wealthy, mass deportation, or healthcare cuts. It's as if our election design, which perversely awards candidates who fundraise from and cater to the needs of oligarchs, fails to deliver leaders who can express the popular will.

Someone asked a good question. It flickered by me on the timeline and I didn’t catch who it was. “If Saudis have ramped up exports via East so much (btw it’s closer to 6.5 MBPD on 7dma), why didn’t they do it before?” 1. Red Sea was safer - Prior to the MoU falling apart and the Houthis entering the fray in earnest, the Red Sea route was absolutely “safer” than SoH. They care very much about the safety of their assets and more importantly personnel. 2. Naval support in earnest started late- Even though the US navy was offering protective transit, they really didn’t get organized and at scale until late July (when we first started seeing the tick up). 3. UAE laid the blueprint 🫡- It wasn’t until the UAE showed the world how’s it done (Sinokor shuttle) that everyone else with stranded supply in PG found the courage to give it a go. And timing was right with a pick up in US naval support. Iraq is a great example, hitting ~ 3.15 MBPD mtd avg for Sep (total exports not just seaborne) 4. Cost - It was always cheaper to go the Red Sea route when it was safe. Cost of shifting exports East meant higher shipping costs. And we still don’t know what if any payments are made to the navy.

🦔The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says insurers paid out nearly $1 billion more than usual from AI-assisted hospital documentation in 2024-2025. Hospitals use AI to scan records and find secondary diagnoses that human reviewers missed. More diagnoses means higher reimbursements. But treatment levels haven't gone up. BCBSA's SVP of data science said AI is "identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients." Insurers now deploy their own AI to deny those same claims. Patients pay for both through higher premiums. My Take This might be the most American healthcare story I've ever read. Hospitals bought AI to find more things to bill for. Insurers bought AI to deny those bills. The technology cost money on each end and the tab went straight to patients through higher premiums. A billion dollars moved and no one got any healthier. The only thing that changed was the size of the invoices. Two sides of a trillion-dollar industry found a new tool to fight over the same pool of money and the person in the hospital bed pays for all of it. Premiums go up, denials go up, and the AI vendors collect from everyone. If you want to know who AI works for, stop reading the press releases and look at where the money goes. In healthcare it went straight into the billing department. Hedgie🤗

We are caught in this endless cycle of short term gain, ending in long term pain. It truely is what George Ritzer called the "McDonaldization" of society back in 1983.

Muse is just going to prove to be another “free”service that just collects info to be used against you. You will think you get bargains but you don’t once it has a full view of how truly price conscious you are or not. There are no “free” conveniences.

Capitalism works best when everyone benefits.

"Though it’s a bit depressing if true, since it implies financial stability is entirely dependent on most people being a mug." Sorry, that's been the official policy since the GFC. And I can tell you why, since I was there. The biggest issue from where I sat at the time was that while there was a fig leaf about "you can only buy bonds listed on an official exchange", that exchange was Louxembourg and no institution traded via the exchange, it was all market making, Reuter pages and access to the yes, Lehman brothers of the world. When the balloon went up, all portfolios lived in a Schroedinger's state: valued at "realizable value", i.e. bid prices, the losses were horrid, and since in bonds returns can be calculated in advance, that means that yields and prospective returns were absurdly HIGH. But assume for a minute that you were an institution under no cash strain and wanted to put some more money at work. There was NO way to directly input competing bids and authorities turned a blind eye since a bond trading 40 bid and 60 ask meant less problems of biggies going into problems (50% profit on trades), and THOSE were the ones at risk of going belly up. The obvious, "free market" solution would have been to impose an ability to input bids and offers on the official stock exchange of listing (Luxembourg again), which would have cut the middleman and on top of that caused the "single European market" about 25 years before hapless second generation authorities pretended that they actually WANT a single European financial market. But that would have hung intermediaries out to dry. @INArteCarloDoss @CantillonCH @HarrisSamaras @TheMichaelEvery @AlessandroPonz4 @jeuasommenulle @PPGMacro

Finding out Henry Ford was right after all when he set about paying his employees enough so they could afford to buy his cars ...

Because the truth is typically somewhere in the middle....

So the cost of services is going to increase because everyone is unleashing Muse to negotiate with human customer service agents. Y’all are shooting yourselves in the foot by deploying AI to argue with someone over a $7 fee.

I effectively “killed myself” from 1978 to 2022, 44 years, “selling” my message. I have four technical degrees, I know of what I speak from a theory and research standpoint. It boils down to this: do you want to maximize profit? Want the most invented products and services? Then pull together a group of decent people and be kind and thoughtful and laugh and listen and care. And the world, and your bank account, we both be winners.

No company is too big to fail. Let them go bankrupt and sell off assets to pay creditors

Politicians continue to demand lower oil prices, vilify energy companies and then are confused why they won't "drill, baby, drill". Strange these same politicians were not upset by Big Pharma profits during a global pandemic....

The game plan is a massive outside movement against all politicians demanding a total systems reset — built on anticorruption, antitrust and radical transparency for any of all politicians - our prosperity lies on the other side of this reset.

Everyone in the administration or related - like Kushner and Witcoff are pulling in the cash as fast as they can. Without Trump they have no more chances. To jail with the lot of them!