Thomas A. Anderson

@RBReich Their is the narrative he started out as a pure gold bug & was corrupted by becoming an insider. In reality the bankers "insiders" were always the gold bugs wanting to control the economy with gold as a stateless money w/ 0 accountability.

R.I.P. Alan Greenspan: You were charming, thoughtful, powerful, and wrong. robertreich.substack.com/p/rip-alan-gre…

@jonbrooks Also private credit where the price of a home is how much credit someone will take out increasing realtor commission being a partner in crime.

@jonbrooks Now do realtor commissions.

My AC died today. HVAC company comes out and says: "Compressor is shot. $10,500." I call a friend. Same unit. Same day install. $6,500. How does a $4,000 price difference exist in a business that's supposed to be competitive?

@McFaul Soybeans, oil and gas have easy substitutions like food self sufficient, renewable energy & batteries. The new strategic points to control that don’t benefit legacy interests are minerals and supply chains of the 21st century economy.

@McFaul Obama then Biden were pivoting to the 21st century with the JCPOA pivot to Asia, Chips Act, Industrial Policy while you see in this administration legacy interest donated to protect their interests and relevance.

Trump’s Failed War against Iran Starting an unnecessary war was imprudent. Losing it is Trump’s greatest foreign policy failure so far. The link to the essays is in the first comment.

@johnkonrad To understand the founding of the US it starts with the Land Enclosure Movements in England which led to the Free Soil Movement the Republican Party came out of due to the displaced English who founded the US.

@johnkonrad Henry George was a major influence who wrote about the economic rents of real estate being unearned especially with events like the Land Enclosure Movements to get the population into the factories to use the land instead to raise sheep for wool and the cloth trade,

The guy genuinely sees himself as Upton Sinclair exposing child labor in coal mines and meatpacking plants. 💀

@EdwardMehr So compounding 31% markup gets you to about a 400% markup over cost of production which the OPA solved. Say China state directed credit is at 2% so 5 steps of markup only takes you to 10% markup, that is how they are undercutting using mid 20th century US financing strategies.

@EdwardMehr You have to look at the 1930s-40s with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation & its subsidiary the Defense Plant Corporation with the War Production Board & the Office of Price Administration with John Kenneth Galbraith.

Why reindustrialization must be bottom up: Nobody funds manufacturing capability without demand. Nobody creates demand without manufacturing capability. You ask what gov can do? Break this cycle by financing the primitives of building, focus on flexibility and availability…

@mweinbach When you buy a home you aren't paying rent and have capital rather then an expense. So it's better to own capital then pay fees. You are like the BMW dealership trying to get someone to lease a car for $1000/month making a horrible financial decision.

@mweinbach What depreciation schedule do you use for hardware when their is a trade war disrupting supply of producing more hardware & the end of Moore's Law?

The minimum to run the model is ~$20K in hardware and you get ~20 tok/s out ~$20K gets you around 34.6B tokens at a 12:1 input to output ratio assuming good token caching If you ran the hardware 24/7, it would take roughly 5.5 years to break even

@shaunrein Wall Street loved this cost structure when they were drop shipping from China hollowing out the real economy making the margin usually preserved for hard work, rent seeking. Well that was never going to be permanent.

@shaunrein If a Chinese firm can manufacture an EV battery at cost because its factory loans are rolled over at 2% by a state bank, putting a 60% or 100% tariff on that battery doesn't make the American factory more efficient.

China has turned diamonds, mobile phones, autos into commodities that the common man can afford Soon it's going to do the same for chips and AI LLMs

@shaunrein These 400% markups in the US economy have been possible due to the petrodollar creating demand for dollars, not competitive priced goods having to compete with 10% markup financing structures. Tariffs don't fix the problems.

@shaunrein Trumps protective tariffs are to try and keep these 400% markup in place for the financial class as opposed to what Biden was starting to do with the Chips Act & Industrial Policy to compete with the financing structure.

@tomselliott The problems all started with the Reagan Revolution and bringing in Ayn Rand causing all the problems. The gold standard caused the Great Depression & abandoning it got the economy out of the depression.

Before becoming part of the Establishment, Alan Greenspan was an eloquent defender of the gold standard. Writing in Ayn Rand's "Objectivist" newsletter in 1966, Greenspan said a gold standard was the only way to protect people's purchasing power, and thus their property. The welfare state, he wrote, can only exist via govt created credit. "In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. "This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." In the second paragraph, he gives us a wake-up call about our present reality. In that first, a clue for how we could one day reclaim our power. RIP