News & Notes
- Politics: The entire managerial class in control of American politics currently, in the military, financial and legal arenas, prove a level of ineptitude, decrepitude, and dangerousness that may exceed the empire-killing elites of pre-WWI that ended the centuries-old empires of Britain, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Russians in less than a decade. The Fed, looking at worse data than the summer of 2019 when they cut rates out of concern, now raise rates instead. The Pentagon props up a disastrous war overseas, while losing power globally to the rise of the new global south, with Putin its figurehead. The DOJ indicts Trump again on the most trumped-up charges yet. America heads into the depths of the declining empire stage, and that tends to be ugly, and more variable, than most epochs. But, remember, variability itself can factor into profits on predictability markets. A mindset lesson: the unpredictable is, itself, predictable.
- Economy: Most Americans see the economy as bad, and that is likely to worsen according to global trade data, key manufacturing data, costly housing markets, declining savings, rising debt, freezing credit, and consumer uneasiness. Near impossible to imagine a Democratic reelection in 2024 with war abroad, recession at home, and scandal everywhere.
- Geopolitics: War in Ukraine backfires, as the counteroffensive fails, Russian strength grows, Niger coups succeed, China struggles with its own stagnation and managed decline, Germany sinks into recession along with the EuroZone, the neo-con Tories see likely demise in the UK, and the most popular pols are populists like Putin in Russia & the anti-crime Bitcoin-loving leader of El Salvador. Populism’s rise likely just begun.