The most interesting story in global markets right now isn’t “Sell America.” It’s that reallocating capital toward faster-growing, less-correlated economies could raise returns and reduce risk at the same time. My Essay for #Bloomberg on why this is good news! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Quite funny that Starmer's allies are waking up to this point now … Cuts to Winter Fuel… not in the manifesto Disability benefit cuts… not in there either Cutting jury trials… also not there Digital ID… no mention Raising employers NI… nope Freezing tax threholds… nah Contracts with Palantir… no

We are gradually getting answers to the question "why had practically nobody on wall Street heard of this guy if he was such a big money manager?" And the answers seem to be related to tech VC.

in which, I try to remember why so many IT types hate Excel so much and what it might mean for the future of AI backofmind.substack.com/p/snobby-abo...

So apparently it was real. Words fail me, truly. How can we give this shit stain a state visit?? Would we have honoured the leaders of apartheid South Africa? Have we no sense of decency left as a country? bsky.app/profile/otto...

This is, and I will be blunt here, enormously more important a political story than what some twerp of a Labour backbench MP may be whispering.

Absolutely - if it was wrong to appoint Mandelson as the UK's US ambassador because of his links to Epstein, and it was; it is equally as wrong for Farage to have appointed Nick Candy as Reform's treasurer. There is no getting round that ... except there is because Farage is a scrutiny free zone.

Trump is seeking to undermine British and European democracy and anyone who takes the money and does his bidding should be called out fir what they are

There’s a fair amount of money to be made IMO in successfully timing mean-reverting shifts in narratives of relative regional hubris.

The major flaw with the claim that Trump's foreign policy is "realist" is the fact that it is so deeply ideological. There is no "realist" case for driving South Africa into China's embrace, rather than competing for its partnership. The only reason Trump is doing so is based on racist memes.

Whoa, Senator Scott. 👀

The UK's political order may collapse over this Epstein stuff and the US is just shrugging this shit off like it's any given Tuesday because it is now the country equivalent of the guy who goes into Walmart without a shirt on

Anti-black animus has been the guiding principle of Trump’s entire life, personal and political. While *he’s* hardly made any effort to conceal it, our media and political class have often stepped in on his behalf.

when I was in high school I had male teachers in their 30s who I totally thought I was adult peer friends with. when I was in my 30s and was a high school youth group leader I was like “those are not my friends, those are children.” that’s when I realized those men just had bad boundaries

Democracy for Sale's scoop about Labour Together paying a firm to investigate journalists has now been picked up in FT, Politico and the Guardian Huge questions to answer - for Morgan McSweeney, Josh Simons, and Keir Starmer Oh, and do support D4S 😀 democracyforsale.substack.com/subscribe

Ellsberg's advice to Kissinger about classified info applies to insider brain too (worth reading it all): "The danger is, you’ll become .. incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."

Good explanation by Hannah Roberts of Politico of the importance of Milan Cortina Winter Olympics for Italy's Infrastructure Minister Salvini (yes, same one who wants to build a bridge btw Sicily & mainland & who's just been "betrayed" by his deputy leader Vanbacci). With comments by yours truly.

I'm generally of the view that systems matter more than individuals but the individuals do make some difference!

Yes, four of our last five PMs have been objectively terrible at politics and Johnson was good at politics but terrible at governing.

I was just saying that Starmer's lack of judgment on Mandelson is a symptom of a broader problem I called "insider brain." They all become susceptible to it, but he entered office particularly so. And he probably assumed that because Mandelson also has insider brain, he'd be perfect for Trump's DC.

Pet take that counter-UAV rather than a now saturated drone sector is the next big investment opportunity in the European defence industry

Politico: Trump wanted Dulles Airport and Penn Station named after him as condition of releasing federal rail tunnel funds www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Need some bucket list politics. YOLO

this is very funny www.foxnews.com/media/jd-van...

Bitcoin is getting pretty close to being down 50% from its October peak, and it's hard not to view that as one of the most positive indicators we've had in a while.

The EU Commission has preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act over its addictive design — infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications & hyper-personalized recommendations. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

Meanwhile a violent far-right student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), one of the largest in the country, has been allowed to get away with absolutely abusive and vile behaviour for several years with next to no reaction from the university archive.is/2026.02.06-1...

But a recurring pattern where each Prime Minister gets trapped in a cliquish intellectual bunker that magnifies bad decision-making and disrupts open channels of dialogue with key aspects of state and society is an indicator of structural dysfunction enabling personal failings.

ICE and CBP ended up hiring many GWOT vets who couldn't get jobs in more challenging and prestigious law enforcement institutions. America's imperial boomerang is a kind of Black and Tan effect where ICE/CBP absorb all the worst elements of the GWOT era military with none of its discipline

That said, by the government’s own count, about 1/3 of CBP are in fact veterans, though how they’ve acted suggests that CBP likely draws more from the Hegseth-types who thinks they were too constrained by the actual military / fantasize about “kicking ass” far more than they actually did.

however I do think there are some smart points to be made about the militarization of police in the u.s., which I think is less a function of boomerang stuff and, more boringly, a function of surplus mil gear being doled out to cops all over america. they want to look like soldiers

a lot of ex-mil people on here who served in the gwot have noted, correctly, that the stuff ice is doing would a) have gotten them killed and/or b) gotten them in a lot of trouble. war crimey stuff was correctly treated like war crimes etc

There’s an interesting perspective from David Runciman here. British politics has gone back to what was common In the interwar period open.spotify.com/episode/27kO...

👇🎯

Starmer's reported condition - incredibly unpopular, shorn of authority, probably un-reelectable and yet will stagger on for want of an alternative - is just the new normal of how Britain is governed. It was also true for two-thirds of May's premiership, half of Johnson's and all of Sunak's.

What would the reaction be if this were Russia, or China?

Remember the controversy when Obama was accused of intervening in UK politics? This is the current US government openly seeking to undermine liberal democracy in Europe.

This was to be expected - after cutting support to pro-democracy civil society last year, the US state is now looking to actively support far-right affiliated think tanks and charities in Europe.

The Al Carns stuff is nuts. He's not even been an MP for two years. He's not even a Minister of State. Parliamentary - and ministerial - careers have become accelerated recently, but not *that* accelerated.

This level of apologia (from Megan McArdle in a podcast with Josh Barro and Ross Douthat) is fucking appalling. Idk what else there is to say.

Hollywood producer Barry Josephson to Jeffrey Epstein: “I've been thinking a lot about that question that you asked bill gates 'how do we get rid of poor people as a whole'"

A snapshot of US diplomacy in the Trump era: how @USAmbPoland (aka @TomRoseIndy) wins friends and influences people

Amazing. If a professional wrestling crowd is chanting "fuck ICE," it suggests to me that large swaths of the culture are not just upset over ICE tactics, they're coalescing against mass deportations as a broader ideological project. newrepublic.com/article/2060...

Nigel Farage tells GB News that Keir Starmer's decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador shows his judgement is "seriously wrong" and he should stand down as Prime Minister. Here's what Farage said when Mandelson was appointed

In retrospect outsourcing a governing party's strategic thinking to the apprentices of a Dark Lord is a terrible idea

And doing so at the National Prayer Breakfast gathering of religious leaders. (And this sort of thing is what would make him such a hysterical but too over the top to be believable fictional comedic character.)

The new Gilded Age sucks

Bitcoin-Abstürze gab es ja schon viele. Aber der hier sieht anders aus.

This is not "how men behave." This is Gelernter's version of Trump saying "locker room talk"— a projection of his own pathologies onto a whole gender in order to buff up his own manly-man credentials in his mind.

in a democratic republic (and really in all times and places) the slavish hunger to be in the thrall of a strongman or a king is the ultimate moral degeneracy.