Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
❤️
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
on the left you have people annoyed they can't make rent and might die while they appeal their chemo denial. on the right you have people annoyed they'd get in trouble if they called someone "retard" and broadcast it to potentially millions of people. both sides have legitimate grievances.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
a thing about cutting medicaid is it's the most cost effective piece of the American health care system, with the possible exception of the VA.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i worry Trump's fantasies with respect to the Gaza Strip may create incentives among hopefully credulous Israelis to create a similar circumstance in the West Bank.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
love the kid the rest of us can wait.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
you don’t need retail to take systemic risk. professionals will do it, and they won’t be able to opt out and stay in business. it’s not a matter of personal character or risk attitude. that’s the lesson on Minsky. the prudent are outcompeted by the bold until oops. 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
panic of 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1901, 1907. then we get the Fed, a pause, then 1929. decentralized risk aversion, surely we’ve learned this time, has never worked. i think your relying upon it is unwise. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
so you think it’s the people not the regulations they put into place? the quiet period post Great Depression, that would have happened anyway, without Glass Steagall, the Securities and Securities Exchange Acts? 1/
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i’ll take the other side of that bet. regulation is how institutions and leaders prevent the catastrophes they experienced. there is no ethereal transmission mechanism by which scars become wisdom. recall that the people who lived through WWI and became desperately pacifist superintended WWII. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
yes. right now. you are extrapolating decades forward from how firms are operating just as regs are lifting? that strikes me as unreliable.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
God bless America.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
breaking enforcement of financial regulation won’t immediately break banks, no. but it will leave tinder dry for the next reignition of the Minsky Cycle. it’s like Gramm-Leach-Bliley in 1999. no, it didn’t cause an immediate crisis. but it made possible GFC.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
we never did finreg out of some liberal good government ideal. we do it after catastrophes. because when we don’t do it, there are frequent, large, catastrophes. if we are going back to the McKinley era, we also get the Panics.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
i don’t think we should assume that at all. we are in a period of expanding chaos, the wheel is in spin. it’s hubris to imagine you know where it lands. the present crew knows only how to wreck, has no clue how to stabilize. they are courting disasters worse than GFC.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
📌
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
a “transaction” in the sense of there’s a “contract” on you.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
Text: Progressive taxation is the single most important policy lever for reducing the power of the rich-not because it raises revenue that can be redistributed via public programs or directly to the poor, but because it imposes a de facto statutory maximum on income or wealth, eliminating the incentive to hoard the economy's resources. Unrestrained capital accumulation is the main reason for economic stagnation and the hollowing out of productive capacity. Conversely, as Piketty's research shows, economic growth is both faster and more equitably distributed—meaning pre-tax top income shares are low—in jurisdictions where effective tax rates at the top are highest. When elites face limits on how much they can take home, they use their dominant position to grab less, so there's more for everyone else.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
📌
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
observing that cash has not moved or that it has is an expression of ignorance? i find little value in thinking about how cash moves, more value in thinking about how shifts in preferences that imply a new aggregate portfolio composition mean non-cash asset prices must adjust.
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
"Trump clearly doesn't want to be president in the sense that it's a job. He wants to be president in the sense that it's a status, and would prefer to be king." @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social www.meditationsinanemergency.com/how-the-stup...
How the Stupid Coup Is Going: Week Five
Link Preview: How the Stupid Coup Is Going: Week Five: The Executive Branch There are steely evil masterminds who marshal strategy and discipline to stage successful coups, but in the USA, insofar as we have any luck at all we have the luck that this cou...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
yes! i’ve sometimes put it that way. i think thinking in terms of the private sector’s desired portfolio composition (so federal debt can leave it sometimes overweight cash until the price of other assets gets bid up) is most fruitful. drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/03/20/a...
Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
elon musk & his schrödinger games. he's the head of DOGE when he wants to direct and fire everybody, he's a mere advisor to the president in the courtroom. it's a lottery swing-state registered voters can enter by signing a petition, except in court there was no lottery, we just hired spokespeople.
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Steve Randy Waldman
@interfluidity.com
perhaps so. but here we are. better we do our best to tilt history in a good direction than sit back and let others tilt. there’s always the danger of paradox, that our work hurts rather than helps, we should think things through. but still.