The Giants Don’t Die. They Just Get Outgrown.
Let’s look at the world’s most valuable companies in 1995, at the dawn of the web. The biggest was a Japanese telephone company. General Electric came second, AT&T third, followed by Exxon and…
What if They're All Clouds?
Anthropic is considered an AI company, but it should be valued as a cloud. On that basis, at $1.5t to $2t it would be worth roughly what Wall Street's estimates imply for a standalone GCP, on…
5.53 Where Is Bitcoin's Price Actually Set? Unregulated Venues Win
Bitcoin price discovery squares the ratio of the Hasbrouck share to the component share, in a 10-millisecond error-correction model. The cheapest book takes the permanent move.
Michael Perelman - The Invention of Capitalism
Near the opening of Chapter Twenty Six of Capital, Karl Marx writes about Primitive Accumulation thus:This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in…
Retium's Testnet, Read Before the Ticker: One Dollar, One Executor, and the Block That Didn't Fit
Reading Retium's public testnet from its own API: RTM is held at a dollar until the billionth coin is sold, the company keeps the reserve's interest and 8.5% of fees, one keeper executes every…
Ten Farmers Model of Macroeconomics
I wrote this parable in 2010 when I was a teaching assistant for Laibson & Aghion’s Macro 1010b at Harvard. I am not a macroeconomist and I am probably butchering the literature. But I’ve found…
The week in review
tl;drA summary of how we entertained you this week.Market SnapMarket WrapBTC started the week close to $83k and may end up closer to $80k. The spot BTC ETFs saw a net outflow of roughly a…
Sharesies Joins the Total World Fund Club
Just six months after I looked at the Total World Funds available to New Zealand investors, things have changed again. Back in April, I wrote about the options available through Smart and InvestNow.…
How the AI boom might really end: 5 scenarios
With chip stocks on their longest losing streak since 2008 and Anthropic heading for IPO, five ways the AI boom could end - and why I think the value is real but may not flow to the people putting…
Paid to Wait: The Case for a Private Infrastructure Credit Fund
Banks lend against signed contracts at SOFR + 150 bp. Developers borrowing against similar contracts, before anything cash-flows, pay three to four times that, and a USD 1bn fund paid to wait in that…
租一张 GPU，电费其实只是零头
一张 GPU 跑一小时，电费大概一毛到三毛多美元，租金要两美元往上。所以算力生意的账都在合同里，价格锁多久，卡闲下来谁兜底。最后用 Abilene 把整个系列串一遍。
How more is land worth for raising cattle vs a data center?
This is killing me. I need to get my foot in the door and drain this bucket of endless cash.
How AMEX gets 685.3% APR and what it actually means
I can finally do the same calculation on a piece of paper, and you can read about it here
🔗 Opinion | Is There an A.I...
🔗 Opinion | Is There an A.I. Bubble? A Debate. - The New York Times: “So Paul, make the case to me that this is a bubble. I mean, it’s...
Phosphate: All hopes for food and LFP batteries rest on Morocco with up to 85% of remaining reserves
Phosphate is absolutely essential for both plants and animals. It’s estimated that Morocco has of 75-85% of phosphate reserves. How long reserves will last depends on being economic. So if the…
The Nature of the Firm
On 10 October 1932 a 21-year-old lecturer in Dundee wrote to Ronald Fowler about the first lecture of a course he had just begun. “As it was a new approach (I think) to this subject, I was…
An Inflation Surprise — Economic Outlook Remains Rosy
October 16, 2026 The CPI surprised to the upside in September. It rose 0.6% when a gain of 0.5% had been expected as energy prices rose slightly more than economists projected. The core rate climbed…
How much was September’s inflation?
You couldn’t miss the news on inflation and the Social Security COLA increase for next year. The stock market reacted negatively. Every measure of inflation was greater in September than in August…
Ezra Klein Appearance: Is There an AI Bubble?
I was a guest earlier this week on the Ezra Klein show, discussing the current AI moment. As ever, I was focused on the underlying financial and funding architecture, the implicit assumptions, and…
Industrial Production
October 16, 2026 Industrial production jumped 0.7% in September after having risen 0.1% in August.. In the past year industrial production has risen 2.2%. The September increase was driven by a 3.5%…
The Messy Business of Building a Futures Security Master
Before a systematic trading system buys or sells, it needs to know what it is trading and which price data to trust. These details live in a security master: a catalogue of the markets and contracts…
Big Tech’s Great Financial Gamble
Where is the AI boom going? Is it taking us to a place of economic and financial nirvana? Or are we on the road to catastrophe? Continue reading →
Men with No Reckoning, and the dangerous slide into half past six.
ARE exactually the men who believe that it is possible moral failures are created by circumstances and not what is ingrained in their DNA. LIKE a parrot, I have been repeating endlessly, that the day…
Book Review: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
TLDR: “Fascinating” This is the story of standardization – how the world’s shipping industries agreed on what the standard container was going to be and how it was going to function and…
Converting a Trump Account to Roth Isn’t as Powerful as It Sounds
A Trump Account converts to Roth. A UTMA can't, but it can still go into Roth accounts within a few years, paying lower taxes along the way. Learn the Nuts and Bolts I put everything I use to manage…
Reminder: Don’t Forget to File Your Objections to the Ventus Restructuring Plan
It appears the decision of the Ventus Restructuring vote hasn’t been officially confirmed despite ending on October 12th. That doesn’t mean the clock for investors who want to file an…
I Bought a Very Expensive Hedge
On a regular basis I receive an email telling me the enrollment window for the employee stock purchase plan is open. I always enroll. Buying company stock at a discount is one of the better deals a…
The AI boom vs dot-com boom
The AI boom vs dot-com boom
Lagos Life, Onward and Upward 🚀
Everyone eventually runs into the problem of sustainable economics for shared prosperity.
How to finance a data centre
Data centres are a new(ish) form of infrastructure investment that because of the sheer scale of AI-related investment are getting a lot of attention. Data centres are not new but what is somewhat…
The Trump administration blocking H-1B visas probably won’t help you get a job
I just saw that the Trump administration is blocking several companies from getting more H-1B visas, based on the fact these companies have been laying…
Walk Through of PROOF
This is a walk through of my PROOF financial reporting framework, a report prepared using that reporting framework, and a validation report which verifies that the report model and reported facts…
2026 2027 401k 403b 457 IRA FSA HSA Contribution Limits
The contribution and income limits for workplace retirement plans, FSA, and HSA will go up in 2027 to adjust for inflation. No change to IRA contribution limits. Learn the Nuts and Bolts I put…
Geoarbitrage Squared: Don’t buy the dream house abroad, buy the market that funds the dream life instead
Invest in the global stock markets to amplify the power of your georarbitrage opportunities with FIRE financial philosophies Most expats import the assumption that owning a home equals success.…
The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating…
The planet doesn't need more pledges. It needs proof.
Recycling rates are flat, sustainability reports are greenwash, and the circular economy keeps failing for one reason: the data doesn't exist. Here is the framework I'm building to fix it.
Will AI soon lead to double-digit growth? A reply to Moll and Imas
Moll and Imas argue that AI is unlikely to cause rapid growth in the next ten to fifteen years. Here is why I wasn't persuaded.
Nobody publishes how many people pay for it. So I punched at the number from three directions
Written with Kimi (kimi-for-coding). It started as idle curiosity. How many people in the world actually pay for the premium plan of a certain AI service? I hit a wall almost immediately. The company…
Will AI Robots Replace Skilled Manufacturing Workers?
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has fueled debates about the future of work, particularly in the manufacturing sector. While it is true that automation and…
The Contract as Data: How ISDA Rebuilt a Market's Paperwork
How the derivatives market turned a library of paper contracts, strained by every crisis from the 2005 backlog to Lehman to lockdown, into named clauses, versioned definitions, an open shared model…
Never Sell Your Stocks
$10k in NVIDIA in 2016 is worth $1.39M today. Why never selling your stocks, and owning a lot of them, can beat trying to time the perfect exit.
Price War in the Chip Aisle
Five frontier models now sit within five points of each other in terms of intelligence, but their cost per unit differs by 3.8x. Google, which has built chips alongside its models for more than 15…
Everyone is paying for the exit door.
The most sophisticated investors on both sides of the Pacific told us this week what they value most right now, and it is not the next model. It is the ability to change their minds. They are not…
Obsessed with Sequels? Stuck with Incremental Innovation?
In the movie business, sequels and remakes have proliferated. How many reboots of Spiderman, Superman, or Batman have been produced? How many sequels of The Fast and the Furious? Of course, some of…
Who Got Richer Since 2022?
Last Friday, the Federal Reserve released the results of its 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which takes a detailed snapshot of American households' finances every three years. And the big…
Were we blue-collar workers all along?
There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based,…
Valuations Need a Correction
Startup valuations miss the forest for a few successful trees
Luxury localism
When supermarket eggs were getting expensive a while back, a local farmer’s market vendor said she was raising the price of her eggs. Not because her input costs were increasing—they…
A New World on the Horizon: The Economic Singularity
On the anniversary of my landfall at Guanahani, a word to every reader: the SI to SI economy is a New World, and those who set a course now will own a piece of it.