Asad Khan

We're excited to announce 'The Situation Room' by Polymarket is coming to Washington, D.C. The world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation. 🧵

Iran has more than 40 million men fit for military service, all of whom have been conscripted, trained and served in the armed services for 21 months. Some 1.4 million men reach military age per annum. For reference, Vietnam had no more than 10 million men of military age in 1965. US commitment of ground forces peaked at a half a million men. US armed strength was 1.88 million, 3X larger than 0.62 million today. Even if the US could field enough divisions in Iran, which it assuredly cannot (see rt), there is just no possibility of winning a counterinsurgency war in Iran. None. Zero. Nada. Not only is defeat certain if the US commits ground forces to occupy Iran, it will chew up the American army. It’s going to make Vietnam look like a cake walk. Can’t remember the name of the Substack author who wrote that any serious war will consume the American military and basically put it out of business for a decade. If the US commits large-scale ground forces to Iran, that wager becomes a near certainty.

DUNE PART THREE

Sorry to be the downer because this is an impressive story in some senses. But it is ~trivially easy to make a single mRNA vaccine. It's not hard. I cure mice of various cancers with various therapeutics all the time. I've made mice lose more weight in a month than tirzepatide does in a year. What is hard and expensive is proving its BOTH safe AND effective **in a randomized and controlled study in humans** while ALSO manufacturing it at clinical scale and grade. I am happy for this man and his dog. It is impressive. But y'all are overhyping it.

Thanks. It just feels awfully coincidental that on one side of the world you have overproduction forced upon western markets at below cost prices and ultimately funded by financial repression. And on the other side of the world you have a private credit binge keeping people employed in equally inefficient companies, many of them also going after scale at any price and funded by historic liquidity, now consciously being removed. The whole SV emerging tech unicorn phenomenon is to me the mirror of Chinese industrial policy. Most of the corps coming out of that space “win” by giving away their product for free or at below cost prices until they capture enough market share to kill off all their competitors. But the model is perpetual meaning there are alway new loss makers entering the market hoping to undercut the dominant ones. So just like in China you get this insane competition until only one dominant player can survive, and in emerging they eat up all the other players at pennies on the dollar in a way that allows them to extend and pretend via consolidation. But it’s also a quota based rather than price based system. Even in the west the market has over the past decade been conditioned to rewarding companies for growth at any cost rather than for profit, sustaining unprofitable companies for years and years providing they just keep growing. And they’re only able to keep growing because of the deep pocketed support of private equity corps or VCs, most of whom are funded by real money pension funds, and rewarded in paper returns expressed through rising stock prices rather than dividends. That is the only difference. Except now that pension funds are being drawn on because of demographic forces that is going to become much harder to sustain. These investors need cashflows not unrealised stock market gains. As it stands, it’s just a deferred form of financial repression. The illusion that it’s not was maintained by Fed liquidity. People will eventually realise their investments are worthless (or rather only worth anything for as long as they don’t draw on them), but only when they try to draw on them. And where does the quota based effect come in in the west? I think via the compensation channel. Remember private credit mostly became a thing to support the businesses that were over invested in by private equity just to keep their opaque valuations up, an to maintain the pay checks of all the people who became dependent on the original capital misallocation. To me it is akin to the circularity of the Chinese financial institution model, wherein banks buy the debt of local municipalities which then support projects that keep the failing firms going. Except where Chinese banks are funded by depositors at repressed rates, private credit is funded by pooled long term investment capital, at fantasy return promises. But the key point is that managers at private credit firms earn large rewards through carried interest, bonuses, and equity tied to the size and performance of their funds, which creates incentives to raise larger pools of capital and lend it quickly on the promise that these companies will grow at any cost. Compensation becomes tied to growth. And as competition increases, this leads to higher leverage and weaker loan protections for borrowers. That is involution. Eventually every unit of new credit extend simply feeds a loss making business model that only makes it more expensive to fund the next unit of growth.

🔴The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) has published a new research paper on illicit finance in "self-hosted" cryptocurrencies. The researchers find that "self-hosted" cryptocurrencies may be used by illicit actors, arguing for both holistic and targeted frameworks to combat illicit finance in peer-to-peer transactions. Notably, the researchers appear to base their call for increased regulation on hypotheticals rather than factual data, such as the ease of transactions in peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions vs. cash.

man i hope they build around “bryce” instead of getting an edge and a LB 😂

ESPN sources: former Buccaneers six-time Pro-Bowl WR Mike Evans is expected to sign a three-year deal with the San Francisco 49ers.

A community bank isn't just a smaller version of a big bank. It's the lender who knew your grandfather, who called you back within a day, who made a judgment call when your financials weren't perfect but your character was. Preserving that model isn't nostalgia — it's smart policy.