Senator Kelly is correct. Plus a Public Service Announcement: KEY section of Department of Defense's Law of War Manual is 18.3.2.1. The VERY rule on the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders gives as its paradigmatic example of what is "clearly illegal: "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

I heard there was a secret verse That David used to make AI worse But you don't really want to pub that, do ya

Please stop confusing the absence of an external financing constraint with the presence of a formal constraint to deploy an alleged excess of foreign financial inflows on the acquisition of ROW goods rather than ROW assets.

On the other hand, maybe we will finally put to rest the deeply memory-holing notion that Flucht nach Vorn is solely a feature of countries that don’t have elections.

As an aside, one of the great things about the coyote/roadrunner cartoons is how they observe strictly all the unities of classical theater—character, place, time, action, and monopolistic vertically integrated supplier of goods.

“I was just following otters.”

German is a beautiful language.

One of my brainwaves for LVMH is to develop a line of Thatcher Handbags in the 2.5-5K $ range, which I think would be insanely popular with certain demographics in the US.

It would not only help resolve global imbalances, it would mark yet another step in China becoming a burgerliche gesellschaft. on.ft.com/4p5o8kh Why China needs to let the renminbi rise

The complete replacement of income taxes with tariff revenue is essentially the same as an uncapped SALT deduction for high-density America and a measure that would dramatically reduce the politico-fiscal authority of the US Federal Government and thus of the electoral mechanisms that install it.

The funny thing is that contrary to people who use it that way now, not too long ago, the defining features of the West were supposed to be that it alone had moved from faith to doubt, status to contract, charismatic to bureaucratic authority, and gemeinschaft to gesellschaft.

I can’t even remember why I have these two screenshots next to each other, but it must have been important.

Maybe she thinks it was a public-pilate partnership.

Looks like a pretty quiet day. I guess even crypto fans are susceptible to tryptophans.

Escargone 🐌

Huh, I wonder if there were any other parts of the world where increases in state capacity and technological complexity came decades or maybe even centuries before broad increases in input-legitimacy-based state accountability.

The greatest film ever made about a an extremely rational person trying to explain to someone suffering from bipolar disorder that the current account and the financial account must balance.

Reality, May I meet you?

My Trade Secrets today. Funny* thing about Trump's tariffs: they're really unpopular and he's retreating from them even before most of the bad effects have come through. God knows what will happen when they do. *By funny I mean both unexpected but also very amusing. on.ft.com/4p5NUVy

“The Ice Storm” is a Thanksgiving movie in the same sense that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie.

Runyon is great. Not *exactly* investment advice but I think you’ll understand why I include it. ‘

We too. This is like a TV series I've heard of and lots of people seem to talk about but I've never watched it and it's way too late to bother starting, especially as it sounds shit.

My feed these days— Don’t be stupid Be a shmarty Come and join The Nuzzi party

The only good investment maxim is Will Rogers. "Buy some good stocks, wait till they go up, then sell 'em. If they don't go up, don't buy 'em"

ICYMI, I hijacked the discourse to make one of my long-standing favorite points. The screen-shoot is from a WSJ op-ed by the Treasury Secretary doing before your very eyes EXACTLY (and with his customary insouciance) exactly what I complain about.

Hanno Lustig on the other site:

Its still there!

Edward Jenner finds a clue from folk wisdom about milkmaids who remain protected from smallpox after being infected by cowpox – a mild disease whose pustules are easy to spot.

IMO, important to distinguish btwn. 1. Size of trade deficits 2. Sectoral composition of same 3. Shifts in geographic location of technology frontiers & implications for geopolitics/politics of lower ability to redistribute tech rents 4. Nontradeables response to a +ve tradeable import supply shock.

Full endorsement of this take from an FX guy. Stablecoins are best thought of as derivatives on the dollar with massive embedded counterparty risk. I don't understand why the US policy establishment thinks these things will play a big role outside cross-border payments in developing countries.

Next Thursday! Join us.

Since Christmas is just around the corner, giving another nudge to this one because it's (genuinely) beautiful and a great gift

Allow me to introduce you to my corpus of substacks yelling at Michael Pettis much the way Homer Simpson’s father yelled at clouds. open.substack.com/pub/sankaran...

All that "post-neoliberalism" has accomplished so far is to make tradable sectors less efficient and more expensive, while doing nothing to curb the costs of non-tradable services. 🙃

Please stop blaming on trade the things (or putative things like the $140k number) that are pretty much entirely the fault of America’s terrible nontradeable sectors. www.wsj.com/opinion/trum...

👍😊 bsky.app/profile/tedg...

The Nixon goes to China moment of domestic policy is a Republican president exercising the functional monopsony power of the American state in pharmaceutical pricing.

In all fairness,

I wonder if the new Chair might be someone wholly on board with the Fed’s 3rd mandate of moderate long term interest rate, and if yes, would it be an instance of Hasset-Liability Matching.

I wonder if Germany’s transport minister tells them to stop complaining and dress the way they did on the Zeppelin.

A world where the EU is objectively less threatened by Russia (a fear that IMO was somewhat overwrought as regards actual EU members) and subjectively much more annoyed at the US may not be a bad place for the EU fiscal/monetary/defense/institutional/geopolitical mix.

Mnuchin as Cincinnatus would be plot twist.

A Man, No Plan, A Canal —Suez.

What do you call a Mrs. RFK Jr.? A Trofim Wife.

$32k/year is not unreasonable for two kids in full-time care (that's less than $10/hour per kid), but that's only for a few years. Once the kids are in school you only have to pay for afterschool and summers – which is still high, but not quite as expensive.

About that cost of living piece—insofar as the single biggest cost item is childcare for a dual-income family at 32k annually (which may be too high but still), its a reminder of how things might have been different had Nixon not vetoed a national childcare bill in 1971 that passed the Senate 63-17.

Starting soon!