The financialization of everything
Up in the air
“I feel like memories are so short. Have people forgotten the volatility during Trump 1.0? Why is this a surprise to anybody? I call him the “long gamma1 president,” because you need to effectively be long gamma during his presidency”
“The Trump Administration is attacking some obvious issues, but in a very disruptive way.”
This was probably the most succinct explanation I’ve heard for the general tariff panic, from Steve Englander of Standard Chartered:
“I think what happened is that the emphasis on tariffs was an order of magnitude more than the market expected it to be. The implementation of the tariffs was more disorganized than the market expected it to be, and I think that would they have come in saying, okay, they've been planning this for four years, there's a blueprint here for how they're going to do it - you know, the realization struck or or the possibility struck that there was no blueprint.”
[more on tariffs below the fold]
There's something rather amusing about a “global expert in currency risk management" getting killed by...checks notes...currency fluctuations.
"Dollar rout forces UK currency risk specialist to suspend shares"
Argentex[???], a UK-listed specialist in managing foreign exchange risk, has become a casualty of market volatility…
The company, which trades on the UK’s junior stock exchange Aim, said on Tuesday that it had suffered a “rapid and significant impact on its near-term liquidity position” from margin calls on its currency derivative positions…
The company calls itself a “global expert in currency risk management and alternative banking for businesses and financial institutions”. Its shares have risen 50 per cent this year as activity surged in the FX market, giving it a market value of just over £50mn.
Here’s the “dollar rout”:
$2,100 ago…
Oh no!!
Stunning. I think overpriced housing (and the high cost of living in general) is a major reason for the plummeting birthrates. Kids are expensive. Thanks Ben, Janet and Jay!
Much more below for paid subscribers. Godspeed.
Jim Walker on Tariffs
“Everything's up in the air, because we don't know from one day to the next what the tariff structure’s going to be like. I mean, Trump brings out boards of writing, and every country is labeled, and they've all got these various tariffs to pay, and then we go into hiding for 2 days, and all of a sudden it's delayed for a month, and then it's all back on again, and then it's going to be 90% tariffs for China, because they've retaliated, and then it's 145% tariffs for China. It's crazy, because you know the one thing that was in place before all of this started was supposedly a road map produced by the the chairman of the Council for Economic Advisors for President Trump. That road map - Steven Miran was the the architect behind it - tells you that the only way that tariffs work is if they're set at optimal levels. If they're set too high, the welfare benefits to the country setting the the tariffs are actually negative. So what was the optimal tariff? He basically said it was no more than 20%, and yet so many of the countries that President Trump listed were facing much, much higher tariffs than that - certainly it's not anything like 145%. That's just trade stopping. You don't even get the benefits of the revenue flow from the tariffs when you set them at 145%, because there's nothing to flow. There's no trade. So this was a very strange period.”
“There's no way in my view of avoiding a recession this year in the U.S., and probably globally, as a direct result of the negotiating position that the United States has taken. Now in my view the U.S. does not benefit at all from a recession. The rest of the world doesn't benefit from a recession. The two countries in in my universe that actually probably are relatively, not quite ring-fenced, but more immune than others to this trade disruption and investment disruption and the global trading sphere are India - very obviously a very domestic economy - and, believe it or not, China, because although trade is still important to China, the the total export percentage of Chinese GDP is only 17% now. It used to be higher. The U.S. component is less than 3%.”
Michael Every
“The path we were on up to this point was unsustainable”
“Markets are constantly thinking, ‘this is all going to go away. Trump will wake up and realize that everything is about markets. Everything's about them.’
It isn't.
The entire fundamental structure of the U.S. economy is trying to be changed, which will change the world economy, which will change markets.
Let me just conclude with one little anecdote to summarize it. I've said this again and again to people - when you move from economic policy which is all about ‘give markets what they want’ or ‘because markets’ to economic statecraft, which is all about national security and foreign policy objectives, you shift from asking what is GDP as in 1.9%, 1.8%, 2.0%, which markets speculate on. There's a whole industry of people speculating whether it's going to be 1.8%, 1.9%, 2.0%, making money when it comes out, and it's slightly higher or lower, as if that tells you anything, but I can't tell you how much money goes into doing that, right? And we call this rational allocation of capital. We move away from that to asking what is GDP for? What's it for? What am I trying to do with my GDP. In every aspect - what are my fundamental principles, my targets, my goals?
And if you can't say anything more intelligent than ‘because markets,’ what the hell are you doing running a country? And I would suspect that either you won't be for long, or your country won't be doing very well for very long. So in that environment, the market will still always have a key role, because the pricing transparency is incredibly important. That's what destroyed the Soviet system. You have to have pricing transparency, but you also have to have recognition that some things are more important than markets. Sometimes price isn't everything.
You know, raising a child is incredibly expensive. Do you actually get a financial return that's commensurate with that? No, I can assure you, you don't. There's no financial return commensurate with raising a child. Is it therefore rational to say let's have no children? Well, you're actually seeing that in demography in country after country ,because we're all thinking, ‘because markets.’ That just means you don't have any future for the country, because there are no children. So certain things trump pure financial thinking…”
“The fact that China keeps overproducing means other people have to over consume. So in in the near term, the U.S. is clearly saying we don't want to, in the hardest way it can. If we see in the next three to six months Europe doing something very silly - which is entirely possible - and saying because Donald Trump offends us, we're going to go with China, either actively or by default - And don't rule that possibility out, because European companies absolutely are capable of making that kind of geostrategic error.”
“When countries really have to make a decision, I don't think they will choose China over the United States.”
High-Yield seems to be hanging in there…
San Diego-based fast food chain Jack in the Box to close more than 150 locations “San Diego-based fast food chain Jack in the Box announced plans this week to close 150 to 200 locations as part of a broader strategy to improve long-term finances. The chain offering burgers, chicken sandwiches and curly fries is the latest to shrink its footprint amid inflationary pressures and high labor costs. Popular destinations including Shake Shack, Red Lobster and Rubio’s Coastal Grill all closed locations last year amid a reduction in consumer spending driven by inflation.”
Inflation
“The year-ahead inflation expectations in the United States, as compiled by the University of Michigan, were revised slightly down to 6.5% in April 2025, from an earlier estimate of 6.7%, yet remained above March’s 5%. It was the highest reading since November 1981. In the meantime, the five-year outlook was unrevised at 4.4% in April, the highest since June 1991, up from 4.1% in the previous month.”
The Big Shorters
“It's always leverage that brings you down. Nothing else, because you can unwind anything without leverage, because all you can lose is what you have, right? But who's holding the leverage? Who's lending against it? Those are the things that you're talking about.”
“Do you know how hard it is to own multiple casinos and go bankrupt?”
“What we have not seen yet is the stuff that we don't know.”
Steve Eisman
“The MSCI USA index — a broad gauge of US equities — lost 11 per cent in the first 16 weeks of the year. The MSCI all world ex-US benchmark climbed 4 per cent in dollar terms over the same period, the biggest gap with Wall Street since 1993, when US investor enthusiasm for foreign stocks surged on the back of trade liberalisation and concerns over the domestic economy.”
Surreal Estate
“All of the history up - until Greenspan got in control…There wasn't a lot of fluctuation, because it was dependent on your income. We've seen as we hyper-financialized housing and it became a casino - that is where we've seen these wild fluctuations in pricing.”
“All over the country, outright sales by most of the big mortgage lenders I work with are more than half. It used to be 10%.”
So if you do an outright sale where do you go?
“You start renting. You're going into a rental.
So what what that tells you is that the cost of home ownership is forcing some people out, and others are just making a decision to relocate, usually to a cheaper state. So they're migrating obviously, but my point is that's a big change That doesn't talk to me about a healthy market.”
Most expensive states for home insurance in 2024:
Melody Wright
“From taxes to insurance, folks are getting hammered which we discuss here often. It’s bizarre how those who live in affluent and insulated communities have no clue just how bad it has gotten. According to a recent NerdWallet study, 57% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Depending on who you ask some think this number is lower or higher. The disagreement seems to be around how one defines paycheck-to-paycheck. Regardless, if you are not in the top 10% then likely any increase to expenses causes stress especially as inflation has ravaged households.”
Check out Melody’s latest post here.
“We're still expecting a pretty significant housing reset in 2027-2028. The script goes like this: Fed eventually cuts interest rates, for obvious reasons. You'll get a little bump. You'll see home prices go up again, a little rally in terms of lending, and then after that we see a correction, because we've run out of buyers. When prices go up too much, you run out of buyers. And that's where the U.S. is now. Home prices have gone up way too fast.”
2025 CMBS Delinquency Rates
“The Trepp CMBS Delinquency Rate ticked back up in March 2025, with the overall delinquency rate increasing 35 basis points to 6.65 percent. In March, the overall delinquent balance was $39.3 billion, up from $36.0 billion in February. Prior to this month, the overall rate had fallen for two consecutive months; it is now back up near its four-year high. One driver of the increase was the multifamily sector, which is up 98 basis points in March to 5.44 percent. The multifamily rate has now climbed 360 basis points over the past year, from 1.84 percent to its current level – the highest the rate has been since December 2015, when it stood at 8.28 percent.”
CRE seems like an aircraft carrier slowly doing a U-turn over the past few years.
Last November, Nathan Berman’s Metro Loft Management got into trouble when 180 Water Street, a 460,000 square-foot office-to-residential conversion in Manhattan, faced a mortgage that came due with $100 million in mezzanine debt, reported Crain’s New York Business at the time. Rents were $4,800 a month, and the occupancy rate was 98%. Hard to believe? Not when you know about other properties that faced similar trouble…
“This is not a normal market occurrence,” David Wegman, a director in the commercial real estate division for Trepp, told Commercial Observer. “If a property is performing in terms of occupancy and rent collection, then normally this is not an issue.”
These aren’t normal times, though, for a few reasons. One is timing. Buildings purchased through 2021 and early 2022 probably benefited from low floating-rate interest loans and high leverage. Now the shorter-term money is coming due, rates are much higher, and longer rates are subject to the whims of the 10-year yield, which has been well above 4% for most of the last month.”
Again, for some pointless perspective, since 1953, the 10-year has averaged about 5.5%, and the median is 4.8%. Rates are not high. Debt is high.
Gee, how’d that happen?
The ‘Zombie Buildings’ at the Heart of the Office Meltdown
One of the biggest office towers in Chicago’s River North district occupies some 1.7 million square feet. These days, too much of that space is empty—and the whole neighborhood is paying the price.
A messy restructuring with creditors left the building struggling to attract tenants after its owner, private-equity giant Blackstone, walked away from the office complex two years ago. Lenders including Pimco and Oaktree Capital spent about a year battling each other for control of the property, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal…
Blackstone bought the River North office complex in 2015 when it was full of tenants like advertising giant Ogilvy. The owner refinanced in 2018 with about $300 million of bonds and a $60 million loan from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America.
By 2023, the building was 30% vacant and Blackstone defaulted, triggering terms in the bond contract that transferred stewardship to Wells Fargo as “special servicer.”
A tug of war ensued over whom Wells should take orders from: junior bondholders represented by Oaktree, or Pimco and other owners of the safest bonds. The senior bondholders peppered Wells with requests for information that went unanswered for months, according to electronic messages reviewed by the Journal. Teachers booked a total loss on the deal, according to its 2023 financial statement.
In the WSJ comments are a number of mentions of crime and violence in the area. One commenter has a cogent take: “it's the usual PE story: buy an asset, pump out the value, walk away. The Pandemic just accelerated the process.”
Ted Siedle on Public Pensions
Great interview.
“There's never been a pension that failed that didn't have a room full of experts saying it wouldn't.”
“I think that one of the problems is that people don't understand pensions. The general public doesn't, and politicians don't, and they don't understand investing, so the outrage isn't there that that should be. What what I was seeing recently in North Carolina, for example, there's a legislative proposal to invest 10% of the money in crypto, and the legislators said they're going to do it in a safe way, and I'm like, what is that?”
“The craziest case I ever came on was in Ohio. The state Ohio bureau of workers compensation invested in beanie babies, and of course lost the money.”
“Pensions are the paths for Wall Street, because in addition to being able to unload all of these highly illiquid assets, they collect fees upon fees upon fees”
“The Feds want nothing to do with state pension matters. State authorities are all elected officials who depend on contributions from Wall Street, so there's really no one to report it to, now more than ever there's no one to report it to, because the enforcement at the SEC has been gutted basically in the last few months. I can tell you that we have found massive fraud and wrongdoing, that that we have gone to everybody who could possibly address it, on behalf of participants, and no one is willing to do so.”
“the legislators haven't a clue about the realities of crypto or private equity or hedge funds, but they're presenting the issues to the public. They're being discussed in a way that nobody really understands what's going on”
“When pensions are are spiraling down, you will see in the last five years, they load up on risk, right? You know why. It’s a ‘Hail Mary’. And who's selling the Hail Mary’s? Their Wall Street advisors. There's only one way out of this, and that's gambling. The the other side of that is if you have investments that are high risk, and you want to unload that risk, Wall Street goes to public pensions, and I think that's what's going on right now with crypto. There's a desire to get government in the crypto market, and the way to do that is to sell crypto to public pensions, so that if there is a failure, there will have to be a bailout”
“The 401k plans were never designed to be retirement plans. They were supplemental savings plans, and so you have this equally bizarre system
where the average American is presumed to be an adept portfolio manager, who can decide not only what his asset allocation is, but which particular funds, and analyze the fees and the risks, there's been a huge push under Trump 1.0 and now Trump 2.0 for private equity in 401k plans. Why is that? Because somebody wants to distribute risk, and the untapped market is the 401k marketplace. I think 401ks have failed uh utterly to provide the vast majority of Americans with retirement security, and it's been a it's been a colossal failure if you look at what is the average 401k balance for a 65 year old.”
“Many workers don't have a 401k. They don't have any retirement plan at all. It's not true that all workers have a retirement plan. A lot of people don't have a 401k, and then those who have a 401k have virtually nothing in it. Then you have these state pensions that promise benefits, butt because of years of mismanagement will not be able to pay, so I don't know where the money comes from, but certainly it creates an environment with a lot of angry people”
“The US Air pilots hired me in 2012 to meet with the PBGC, and to do the first
ever forensic investigation of a failed plan entrusted by the PBGC, and we said to them -the pilots and I met with senior executives at the PBGC - and we said we see a lot of money that's been looted from this pension by Wall Street that we could recover if you will authorize us to do so, and they said no. They were not interested in recovering money from the the firms that had looted the money. One of the interesting things was they said we wouldn't even know what to do with it under the statute ,because if the PBGC recovered money from looting the US air pension plan, would it go to US Air workers, or would it go to the general coffers of the PBGC? That question has never been answered, and so I concluded by saying to them, well, wouldn't it be better to have the money and have that problem than not have the money, and they said no, they were not interested.”
“The mismatch that I see is that you are expecting 7%, and we went through basically a decade of artificially repressed interest rates, where the real world risk-free rate was pretty close to zero, which forced all these pensions to go into the farthest corners of risk to get anything approximating a seven or eight percent return”
‘More money has been lost reaching for yield than at the point of a gun.’
Mike Green
“People will always say that as the market becomes more passive, the opportunity set for the active manager should be growing. Perversely, it's 180 degrees in the opposite direction, because what is actually happening is you are losing demand for a fundamental signal. Nobody cares. You can scream from the top of your lungs - earnings are going to be a miss, the CEO is sleeping with Martians, right? - it really doesn't matter what you say. At the end of the day the non-fundamental traders are the only ones that are actually attracting incremental capital right now…
Information is being paid for by the Citadels, Millenniums etc. of the world, who are all engaged in payment for order flow or various types of index arbitrage strategies. They have become the dominant players, and all they care about is flow information. Look at your inbox, look at the research you now receive from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley etc. It talks about ETF positioning, and flows - not the fundamentals of companies. If you introduce a beast in the form of passive that responds exclusively to flows, everybody else is eventually going to have to bend a knee to that.”
“Did the private sector expend a whole bunch of stuff sending false signals because the government suppressed signals from the credit markets? Absolutely. This is the thing I'm most concerned about right now.
In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the government engaged in all sorts of fraudulent activity to prevent fair clearing and fair information creation in credit. The critical thing to remember about capitalism is price is the mechanism of information exchange in a capital economy, right? If I know the correct information, I can influence the price in the right way, but if the government suppresses that information and lies to me about what's happening, it becomes harder and harder to properly price stuff.
That means I can extend credit when I shouldn't. It means also that credit can be withdrawn rapidly and artificially when suddenly that information starts to be revealed. Now that's happening. Student loans are here, FHA loans - we're aware that they've been going bad for an extended period of time - that's coming back on. The combination of a tariff, which is a tax, student loan repayment, which since it's going to the government and payments to the private sector were already guaranteed, those payments to the government are just another tax, and now all of a sudden you're talking about various other forms of taxes in the United States.”
Bitcoin
I know a number of very smart people who are Bitcoin fans. Mike is a very smart person who is not.
Mike added this in his latest Substack post:
“Bitcoin vs. Gold: Deep recursive analyses (powered by AI and agent-based modeling) suggest Bitcoin’s structure inherently concentrates wealth, limiting societal benefit and implying a true valuation far below current prices ($4k-$6k). In contrast, gold, despite being a "barbarous relic," remains an unmatched store-of-value and pricing metric. Bitcoin has arguably suppressed gold’s fair market price by as much as 30-50%.”
Lawrence Lepard
“We've had two big prints already. We had one in '08 and we had another in 2020, and I think another one's coming, and as the book lays out, this is just because of what I call Stein's Law - that if something can't go on forever, it will end. We cannot grow debt faster than GDP forever without there eventually being either a collapse of the system or a demand for massive growth in the money supply, which really is inflation. The Federal Reserve's third mandate, the unwritten one, is financial stability, and when financial stability gets threatened, they run to the printer, and they will this time as well…
If the financial system gets unstable, and starts to come unglued, Powell is going to say "Forget the inflation mandate, I've got to keep the ATMs running. It's an emergency. I have to do it”…
“I’m kind of at a loss for how to think of a scenario where the government doesn't print a lot of money. I just don't see it."
Kevin Warsh
“I was a member of the Fed’s board of governors more than a dozen years ago…I still have the scars to show from the darkest days of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009…the debates in Chairman Bernanke’s office were civil, also intense and consequential. Nothing about the period was easy. We made good calls and mistakes, both. Inevitably, the hardest question then—and the most salient now—was the Fed’s role and responsibility.
After one particularly intense weekend that resulted in extraordinary policy support, former Chairman Paul Volcker commented: The Fed had gone “to the very edge of its lawful and implied power, transcending certain long embedded central banking principles and practices.”2 We took that as the equivalent of a brushback pitch—high and tight—from a strong institutional ally to his successors.
But Volcker’s warning that has gone largely unheeded, even to this day. Changes in the role of the US central bank have been so pervasive as to be nearly invisible. The Fed has assumed a more expansive role inside our government on all matters of economic policy. And moved into matters of statecraft and soulcraft, too.
In my view, forays far afield—for all seasons and all reasons--have led to systematic errors in the conduct of macroeconomic policy. The Fed has acted more as a general-purpose agency of government than a narrow central bank.
Institutional drift has coincided with the Fed’s failure to satisfy an essential part of its statutory remit, price stability.
It has also contributed to an explosion of federal spending. And the Fed’s outsized role and underperformance have weakened the important and worthy case for monetary policy independence.
Warsh is an insider who loves the Fed: “My lecture today is more political treatise than how-to-guide. My hope is that it’s received in the spirit intended…more as a love letter than a cold critique…”
“First, frequent changes to the Fed’s metrics-- including its professed preferred measures of inflation-- are beneath the high standing of the central bank. Central bank credibility is the coin that purchases American economic strength. In Washington, a central banker can ill-afford to be anything other than a straight-shooter.
Second, I do not find the current Fed policy of ‘data dependence’ of much real value. We should care little about two numbers to the right of the decimal point in the latest government release. Breathlessly awaiting trailing data from stale national accounts-- subject to significant, subsequent revision-- is evidence of false precision and analytic complacency.
Third, near-term forecasting is another distracting Fed preoccupation. Economists are not immune to the frailties of human nature. Once policymakers reveal their economic forecast, they can become prisoners of their own words. Fed leaders would be well-served to skip opportunities to share their latest musings. The swivel chair problem, rhetorically waxing and waning with the latest data release, is common and counter-productive.
Fourth, forward-guidance – a tool rolled out to great fanfare in the financial crisis—has little role to play in normal times. Moving markets with rolling Fed incantations is tempting, but unhelpful to the Fed’s deliberations, and ultimately, to its mission. The central bank should find new comfort in working without applause and without the audience at the edge of its seats.
‘Since the panic of 2008, central bank dominance has become a new feature of American governance’
US fiscal policy is on a dangerous trajectory. Irresponsible spending surged, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. Today, the federal government is spending in excess of 60% more than five years ago. No plausible economic growth can deliver revenues to match.
I struggle to absolve the Fed of the nation’s fiscal profligacy. Fed leaders encouraged government spending when times were tough, a few years back. But did not call for fiscal discipline at the time of sustained growth and full employment. I’d prefer monetary policymakers to steer clear of fiscal commentary altogether. But, if the Fed chooses to cross the line, there should be real and rhetorical symmetry. That, however, is scarcely my chief concern.
The Fed has been the most important buyer of US treasury debt—and other liabilities backed by the US government-- since 2008. The Fed’s $7 trillion balance sheet is nearly an order of magnitude larger than the day I joined. It’s a proxy for the Fed’s growing imprimatur on the economy.
From my time long ago as a Fed governor, I bear some measure of responsibility for the creation of asset purchases, known more commonly as quantitative easing (QE). In the 2008 crisis, we cut interest rates to near zero, and sought new ways to make monetary policy looser and bring liquidity to illiquid markets. I strongly supported this crisis-time innovation, then and now.
But when the crisis ended, the Fed never retraced its steps. I worried mightily in the summer and fall of 2010-- a time of strong growth and financial stability –that the decision to buy more treasury bonds—would involve the Fed in the messy political business of fiscal policy. QE2 was announced. I disagreed with the decision, and resigned from the Fed soon after.
QE – with some fits and starts in the 2010s—has become a near permanent feature of central bank power and policy. Fiscal policymakers—that is, elected members of Congress—found it considerably easier appropriating money knowing that the government’s financing costs would be subsidized by the central bank…
The Fed often presents itself as humble and technocratic, hewing closely to the remit. They say they take fiscal policy decisions as given, and then react. But, it’s no longer obvious whether monetary policy is downstream or upstream from fiscal policy. Irresponsibility has a way of running in both directions.
Fiscal dominance--where the nation’s debts constrain monetary policymakers—was long thought by economists to be a possible end-state. My view is that monetary dominance – where the central bank becomes the ultimate arbiter of fiscal policy—is the clearer and more present danger. The line between the central bank and the ostensible fiscal authority has grown harder to identify…
Our constitutional republic is accepting of an independent central bank, only if it sticks closely to its congressionally directed duty and successfully performs its tasks. Ours is, after all, our third experiment with a central bank…not because of the success of its predecessors, but their failure. We should remember that the revealed preference of the body politic is a deep distaste for inflation—and also, for bailouts and power grabs.
There’s much more in his speech. Recommended.
It’s a big club...
"The amenity is access to the Administration" - Robert Frank
Here’s a video of the swamp being drained:
LIFE Magazine talking about UAP's...in 1952.
“I didn’t have a religious upbringing at all…My adult life has all been spent in the world of finance essentially. And along with that decline in religion, not that I necessarily felt it at the time, but as I sit and think about it, it very clearly to me anyway, the decline in religion went hand in hand with the escalation of the importance of money in people’s lives, materialism, and all the things that the financial community, I won’t even say bestowed, has enabled, I think is a better word.
The financialization of everything has enabled people to have access to more money than they would ordinarily have had. And all those principles that you learn when you study the Bible about the sanctity of money and caring for it and all this, being a product of work and toil and all this stuff, it just seemed to fall by the wayside. And along with that prioritization of material things, you could see that there was a much lesser need for anything spiritual when you could hold something in your hand that was heavy and blingy and you could show off to your friends.”
"Imagine if the Fed had bought gold instead of mortgage-backed securities."
Why Are Babies Testing Positive For Cocaine At The Nation’s Biggest Daycare Chain?
Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users—Even Children
How did Spain’s electricity grid collapse? “Renewables are weather-dependent, but solar panels lack the big turbines that can help keep the system running if there is a power failure somewhere along the line…”
The "Calutron Girls" were approximately 10,000 young women, many recently out of high school, who worked at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Manhattan Project. A Calutron was “a mass spectrometer originally designed and used for separating the isotopes of uranium.”
“In training the Calutron Girls, Tennessee Eastman is credited with performing one of the largest civilian training programs in history. Instruction for the job was extensive and lasted several weeks. Up to this point, only advanced graduate students in physics at the University of California at Berkeley or their professors had operated these machines, whereas more than half of the Calutron Girls did not have their high school diplomas.33 This hiring practice did not sit well with all parties involved in the Manhattan Project.
Some scientists were understandably nervous about employing young southern women for such an important task. In order to put their minds at ease, a contest was set up in which for one week a group of scientists would control a set of dials operating a calutron and a group of Calutron Girls would operate a second set to see which group worked more efficiently. It was a contest of dueling calutrons.
At the end of the week, it was revealed that the Calutron Girls had won hands down, producing considerably more enriched uranium than the PhDs. This victory proved the capability of the young women working in Oak Ridge to doubting scientists and also worked as a morale booster for the women themselves.
Despite the celebratory nature of this story and its underdog appeal, it must be pointed out that there was a major difference between these two groups. The scientists knew exactly what they were doing as they wielded levers and turned knobs; the women had no idea what their mechanical manipulations were producing. “We were robots,” Gladys Owens recalled.”
Lindsey A. Freeman, Longing for the Bomb
“where you get a bigger reward when the underlying asset price moves up or down quickly, and you also take a bigger hit when the price moves in the wrong direction.”
Paul A. Volcker, Remarks to the Economic Club of New York, April 8, 2008.
Bitcoin was designed to suppress the gold price... I'd love to think it was by the CIA, but I don't think they are that smart 🤣
I don’t know when it will happen (maybe not for years), but there will be a rug pull in BTC. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but some of the biggest Bit-Bros are obvious grifters in the game.