"At their Covid-era peak, households’ cash assets were up $4.3T, 33%. But still, that only comprises 10% of the $43T Covid-era household asset runup." @SteveRoth https://wealtheconomics.substack.com/p/massive-wealth-accumulation-during
Via that @maxbsawicky piece, an excellent (but paywalled) newsletter on contemporary banking and its fragile shittiness by Matthew C. Klein https://theovershoot.co/p/thoughts-on-the-bank-bailouts
I'm late to this, but a very good round-up on l'affaire SVB by @maxbsawicky https://maxread.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-silicon-valley-bank
EDIT: OMG did I get this wrong! This is not by @maxbsawicky but by a person named Max Read (which I think used to be the name of Max Sawicky's blog!)
I so apologize to the real Max Read! #MaxRead
@kentindell @projectgus welcome to discord.
some domains are private and competitive.
others are public and accountable.
and then there are the motherfuckers in between.
"people spend far too much energy worrying about the cost of bank failures, and far too little worrying about the cost of bank survival… Bank failures…are much less expensive than the things we do to fill holes in bank balance sheets so we need never acknowledge their failures." ~me https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/21/banks-are-not-private/index.html
// is this kind of self-quote a gross form of self-promotion?
[new draft post] Banks are not private https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/21/banks-are-not-private/index.html
“You might have some swivel-eyed loons in your life…Remember that we have common ground. When they say they don’t trust vaccines bc the pharma companies are corrupt…that’s not your signal to defend the manifestly corrupt pharma companies who murdered 800,000 Americans with opioids… Remember…the things they’re right about. Lean into the common ground. Help them understand that corporate power, and its capture of government, is our true shared enemy.” @pluralistic https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2
has #ChatGPT achieved full self backseat-driving yet?
RESOLVED: Imperialism is bad, but so is devolution.
a bad pun is not just a calamity, it is a rhyme against humanity.
in the Iraq War retrospectiving today, why did we do it, it was based on lies, etc, i haven’t seen much talk of a mundane, almost bureaucratic driver. the western consensus surrounding continuing sanctions was fraying. unless something was done, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was likely to become increasingly normalized. US hawks perceived this as an unacceptable surrender of the prior Iraq War’s celebrated victory. it was either “finish the job” or accept defeat. (in the end, of course, we got both.)
“This is why rhetoric like Michael Knowles’s is so dangerous. I don’t think Knowles yearns to personally murder trans people. I don’t think he longs to direct other people to murder trans people on his behalf. I don’t think he fantasizes about the prospect of trans people being murdered.”
“But I do think he and too many like him knowingly, willingly, and eagerly court the praise, likes, follows, speech attendances, and novelty gift budgets of people who do”
@radleybalko https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/shrugging-in-the-shadow-of-a-monster
@Jonathanglick i’d imagine that’d be very secret service…
how would the secret service protect an ex-president in jail?
@failedLyndonLaRouchite i wasn’t being snarky! self-deprecating, sure. (but actually slime molds are quite brilliant when you get to know them!)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite oh, i'm just a slime mold with an internet connection. those are great people!
@failedLyndonLaRouchite autarky is undesirable, but for a large diverse economy like the US an “autarky option”, the capacity if necessary to rely on domestic production at a cost, expensive but not existential, is desirable. we should always have reasonable alternatives should the terms of trade turn, or should somebody threaten to turn them. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite diversification across many, friendly, foreign suppliers is another choice, but “friendly” can change and diversification doesn’t work well when changes can correlate. There are judgment calls here, but for the US simply to lack core industrial capacities it can expand if necessary is terribly foolish. 2/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite and yes, the fact that the capabilities that make for a domestic ship-building industry are important complements to military production (and can reduce the costs of necessarily more source-selective military procurement) is an important and relevant consideration. /fin
The thing is, we really want and need a cost-competitive domestic ship-building industry. The Jones Act is obviously horrible when applied to PR, AK, and HI, and may well be the wrong tool in general. But it’s no use railing against it without talking about better, alternative means of structuring a vibrant, more competitive ship-building industry. Why must it be so expensive here? We tried pretending we could just have no industrial policy. That worked out very poorly. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/jones-act-ship-american-1920-law-industrial-policy-joe-biden/673433/