The Road to Nauru

“Private equity firms don’t just transform our economy:
they co-opt and compromise our government and our democracy.”

Russ Feingold, in the intro to the book Plunder

They’re taunting Jerome Powell.

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Consumer Confidence Improves to 2-Year High

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Unemployment Rate At or Near Record Lows in Half of US States

OK, but then I see this, from June:

So the official rate is quite low, which you may notice might be considered a leading-indicator of a recession, and continuing claims are rising.

Unemployment Rate

Also, I don’t know how many “jobs” are just made up, through various “adjustments" to some model. I’m reminded of what Mervyn King said recently:

If you look at the computer models, which not just the bank of England, but other central banks use, whatever you do to monetary policy, inflation always comes back to 2%. Why does it do that? Because the model says it has to, it's built in, it's an assumption.

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Fun with FTX

One memo exchanged between Gabriel Bankman-Fried and an officer of the FTX Foundation describes a plan to purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru in order to construct a “bunker / shelter” that would be used for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die [to]ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive” and to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there.” The memo further noted that “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too.”

Move along…

Nothing to see here either…

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Here I am with Dave Collum and Marty Bent the other day.

I’d suggest listening to my first one with Grant Williams first, but I’m not your dad.