Nick Newling currently live-blogging monochiracally

This headline is a disgusting lie Special Disability Trusts are not affected *AT ALL* The article even makes it clear the concerns of the bloke (a solicitor with expertise in wills and estates) in this story are not about his disabled son but his other children being able to minimize their tax!

Here is a timely & comprehensive review of this week's Australian federal budget from the whole team at the Centre for Future Work: futurework.org.au/report/budge.... Tax reforms on capital gains & trusts needed and long overdue. But more commitment needed on the spending side.

Who among us did not have a $50,000 share portfolio when we were 20yo? The Oz finds a typical young person.

Welfare is good, actually. We should aspire to having the best welfare system in the world

Israel had threatened previously to murder the Lebanese journalist that they assassinated today

perfect snapshot of the property-owner welfare state: nurse 1 has $30k urgent dental expenses 2 asks personal finance guru how to pay 3 is “cash strapped” but has investment properties 4 hates capital gains tax, doesn't want to sell 5 barefoot investor advises never to touch precious super

Once, the Australian would consider such a critical factual error to be deeply embarrassing. Now no one cares. The column does its job as partisan slop.

Excellent demolition of “affordable housing”. It’s a muddled no man’s land between market and social housing, achieving the goals of neither. It functions as a modest benefit to a tiny fraction of middle class families. It’s costly, inefficient and impedes geographic and occupational mobility.

Regarding the Partner Income Test "Respondents reported delayed medical care, skipped essentials, unpaid bills, housing insecurity, relationship strain, fear of disclosure, financial dependency, and reduced ability to leave unsafe relationships." #AusPol #Centrelink 1/3

“For states to thrive & to accumulate & maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this & there is the inevitable tension between the skills needed to rise to the top & those suited to serving the general interest.” open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

hard power only works as a backstop to soft power.

Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed.   Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us.

This is definitely worth paying attention to. But we should keep in mind that what matters for bond markets is *not* inflation as such, but central bank action in response to it. For a long time the distinction didn’t matter much, but in the Warsh era it might. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Was just checking to see if anyone had made this joke. Sure enough.

People seem to have a lot of resistance to solar and storage as solving a lot of decarbonisation and replacing gas quickly because it seems too simple. Friend, do you know that AI is substantially just matrix multiplication? Simple and scaled often works. #EnergySky

Great reporting www.ft.com/content/7d51...

YIMBY + rent control + counter-cyclical public finance for new builds + putting manners on landlords is the way to go

that rare exception to Betteridge's law of headlines

As I said to my students the other day, while talking about the banking system: When everything is working you don’t think about your plumbing. You turn on the faucet and the water comes out. But when something goes wrong, that’s when you really need to know where the pipes are.

The Missing Model? Got it right here pal #EnergySky

Nuts that gov is giving the money away rather than having a cap / floor on which they could - at times like this - make a return.

greater the trust and stability in a society, the lower the chances of fuel riots and political instability bsky.app/profile/iand...

“If your reaction to the news last month that the US and Israel had begun airstrikes against Iran was to buy Fartcoin, congratulations, you win. Nearly everyone else lost.” open.substack.com/pub/ftav/p/f...

This is the largest oil supply shock in history in mb/d The enemy gets a vote. Iran is now delivering pain to Trump via multiple paths (1) Gulf Kings (2) Financial meltdown (3) AI tech oligarchs (4) Fuel, fertilizer, food disruptions Read our Polycrisis Dispatch: buttondown.com/polycrisisdi...

Britain is once again on the brink of an energy crisis because of the role of gas in our electricity system. 🧵 Our new briefing explains why this is happening — and how we can reform the system to protect ordinary billpayers. www.common-wealth.org/publications...

They fired the people who made the plan!

Bibi / Israel lobby 2028 nightmare blunt rotation forming: Pro Palestine on the left, Nazis on the right

It’s a good day to be a Greek shipping magnet

missed this lol

This is absolutely insane and Total would be even crazier to take the deal and get legally exposed in something like this.

2/ "We're price taker and not a price maker" "There is one lesson from this crisis, and only one lesson" "We need homegrown clean power that we can control" "We cannot keep being on this fossil fuel roller coaster" Thank you for the clear explanation @Ed_Miliband" x.com/implausibleb...

1/ Disruptions mean countries will rush to exit US-led oil order Worst case scenario for oil companies (best for rest of us) is that people permanently shift...what they call “demand destruction“ i.e short term pain but Long: Iran war will accelerate ongoing STRUCTURAL shift to solar+EVs+batteries

"Perhaps the most startling thing about the whole situation is that the Trump Administration was apparently surprised by, and unprepared for, Iran’s capability to inflict economic pain on the U.S. and its allies," writes @johncassidysays.bsky.social: www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin... 🔌💡

People switching from ChatGPT to Anthropic are telling on themselves. Will they now cancel their Claude subscriptions because it was used to help plan the attack on Iran? They won’t and we all know it.

Sure they are evil in their lobbying but the nice thing about having a crude admin (Bush Jr) vs a crypto admin (Trump) is they understand a lot more about the physical world and that you cannot pump or tweet your way out of this big a mess.

You know why sulphur was super valuable before? Gunpowder production!

WELKER: If you were prepared, why is the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed right now? CHRIS WRIGHT: Because it's right near the Iranian shoreline

We might be about to find out again

"Democrats are realising...that they have to be for something. "That it is not enough to serve up the same policies that would put money in the pockets of the same billionaires & tech CEOs backing Donald Trump." - Liz Pancotti, @groundwork.bsky.social 🎧 theaus.in/3P130hR

I’ve explained to various non-finance people IRL recently how tight the supply-demand balance in oil markets is, and its asymmetric price elasticity, and tbh most people get it pretty quickly so yeah markets are weird and consensus is still just *somehow* US ends this?

"Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same."

This documented Sde Teman torture+abuse was the only major Gaza-related case pursued by the military prosecution. It led to the downfall of the military prosecutor herself - dismissed, charged, and tried to take her life. Her successor today closed the abuse case. apnews.com/article/isra...

The US is losing this war and no one is going to be better off than before this utter clusterfuck.

Crude prices aren't what will ultimately drive the necessary demand destruction should the Strait of Hormuz remain closed. That job will fall to refined product prices, the things we as consumers actually consume. Singapore spot jet fuel prices are there already, over $200/bbl

I've been thinking more about the underlying tenets of investing in equity indices as a savings mechanism and how they may be breaking down in the U.S. There are a few underlying premises around 'owning the market' - the existence of a positive equity risk premium - strong corporate governance

Gillian Tett, of course, knows a thing or two about impending crises. In this column, she looks at the private credit risks which are gaining so much attention. She says the problem is more akin to a slow-moving cancer than a sudden heart attack www.ft.com/content/d8d1...

i feel like if i was tasked with not starting a war and bringing back US manufacturing jobs, i could have done a better job than this