Yes, France is trading wide to Italy, but for historical context, here are some longer term (r,g) graphs for France and Italy.

Michael C. Mann’s 1491 does the best job of addressing this that I’ve observed. His section on the Northeastern US has settlers stumbling upon huge caches of corn and manicured orchards, thinking it divine provenance. Euros’ first look at the Amazon was bustling, their second look…nothing.

So it turns out that not all Science is WEIRD.

Because…

Trying to match last year’s rich meming opportunities.

Aghion (et al) have a paper on China, they recognised long ago & before many that the Chinese model departs from the East Asia model in having a Darwinian struggle-to-the-death competition of firms behind a wall of protection. It pairs Schumpeterian growth theory w the economics of industrial policy

Last year was a lot richer in possibilities. open.substack.com/pub/sankaran...

Gordoliberalism! (Origins of this joke go back to the 2008 G20 summit).

There’s a dissertation in American history or cultural studies waiting to be written comparing Diane Keaton’s kitchen in Manhattan with her kitchen in Something’s Gotta Give.

The joke is made better by the fact that many people would pronounce it "val-ay" like the people who park cars, when valet, meaning servant, is pronounced "val-it"

Fwiw, the right way to think about an entity’s exposure to Argentina is not so much in terms of dollars per se but more in terms of percent of assets under management.

Capitalists of the world unite. You have everything to lose, especially your supply chains.

Your periodic reminder that the greatest innovation of Crypto is to stop people out of positions at horrific levels when not even Auckland is in the office.

The Uncanny Valet

Today, in saying 999 to 666.

This was about Chancay port in Peru, but it’s also about “saving Argentina from China.” responsiblestatecraft.org/china-trade/

Your periodic reminder that the greatest innovation of Crypto is to stop people out of positions at horrific levels when not even Auckland is in the office.

Today, in saying 999 to 666.

The selective release of data during shutdown (CPI-yes, jobs report-no) is troubling.

Reupping something from last week about how the Argentine bailout (and Brazil tariffs) are mostly about the increasing mutual mirroring of left-right splits in North and South America. www.barrons.com/articles/arg...

Rather than worrying about the China Shock 2.0 in developed economies, we should be much more worried about the China Shock 1.0 in low- & middle-income countries, Arvind Subramanian says. Find slides & watch the Global Economic Prospects event here: www.piie.com/events/2025/...

One question, given the Fortune story about Hanke advising the UST about dollarization is whether this UST would then give a hypothetically dollarized Argentina would have its banking system have access to the discount window, repo for purely Argentine collateral (& then a BCRA ELA), an OMT etc.

I was not quite prepared for the first UST currency intervention since buying USDJPY after the earthquake being selling USDARS instead of (as I had hoped, expected, and advocated) selling USDJPY above 150 which they have had a couple of occasions to do in recent years.

“the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa”

And this, class, is why aiming at agricultural self-sufficiency rather than spreading risk across different countries through international trade is a *really stupid idea*.

Lots to mull, but 1 point is pushing $ization in a country & also pushing $ stablecoin more broadly creates a situation where the potential instant digital substitution of a $ liability from a local bank to say Tether has huge finstab implications in the $ized country. fortune.com/2025/10/08/i...

Through the Spanish silver dollar/peso, they are brothers now reunited.

Discovered a soapbox for various obsessions, at least some of which took off more widely; got one job; made many friends & even more professional contacts; reconnected with two childhood friends from 45 years ago; and found an outlet for my terrible puns, thus sparing my family from them.

Silver at 50 and a Hunt Bros mention there is a Steve Solomon klaxon.

Even if it was tardy, you fulfilled your Civic duty with that pun.

Sorry for the delay, but it’s obviously time for a Honda Accord.

Perhaps not the main point but I always hate it when people view it as a sign of failure when poorer countries grow faster. There is absolutely no intrinsic reason why Poland should have lower income than the UK or any other EU country forever, and that means it will have to grow faster sometimes

If Bob Dylan had won his Nobel much earlier in his career, he would learned of it by a Zimmerman Telegram.

This makes perfect sense TBF.

Politico gathered denunciations of Jensen Huang from a long list of the usual suspects in the China panic industry. I was very glad to be the lone voice against Chinese exclusion in our immigration policy and great power conflict in our foreign policy. subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter/2...

The Sound and The Furet

Well yes, all of which happened in intense, often violent, opposition to the established governments and religion of "the West". The sort of people who use the term now would have been on the other side.

NTTAWWT.

If it's for real (and IMHO though I don't do this for a living, it is), this kind of thing is typically less a point in a cycle, and more a reasonably sized arc in a circle.

Ranking the following in terms of degree of difficulty AS THINGS CURRENTLY STAND re: replacing the US in terms of: a) Contribution to global final demand b) Contribution to global security (Personally, I'm less alarmed/ist about aims elsewhere). c) Contribution to global financial "seamlessness."

The funny thing about Singapore is that between the autocratic state-capacity technocracy, the free-trading Hanseatic city-stateness, and the government having built owner-occupied housing on a massive scale, it’s like a blank screen where a lot of the political spectrum can project its fantasies.

Seoulmates!

That's neither here nor there.

Cant wait for the CFTC superpositioning report.

Starting to get spooky.... another spin up day for pure play quantum stocks.

This is a more joke than market commentary but still.

RIP Jane Goodall, a pioneering theorist of Primacy.

The entire US economy is going to become more data dependent than the Fed will be!