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What people fail to understand is that none of us are gloating about any of this. What worries me is what happens when hundreds of millions of people who were taught to equate consumption with wealth suddenly discover that much of that prosperity rested on debt, reserve currency privilege, and asset inflation rather than balanced production. Bob has been consuming 6,000 calories a day for decades, but he wasn’t growing the food, transporting it, cooking it, or paying for all of it with current income. Meanwhile Hans quietly lived on the 2,000 calories he actually needed, maintaining discipline the whole time. Now, Bob is suddenly told he must cut 4,000 calories overnight and start producing more of his own food himself. What are the odds that transition is smooth and graceful? The danger is not simply economic. Entire populations built expectations, lifestyles, identities, and political systems around permanently rising consumption levels funded by deficits and financial dominance. And when a heavily armed, politically polarized society experiences declining living standards after decades of being told it was the richest civilization in history, it is fair to question whether that process will be peaceful and orderly - or angry and destabilizing on a global scale.

If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP (TS: 21 Mar 19:44 ET)​​​‍​​‌‍​​‌‍​​​​​​​‌‍​​​‌‍​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​‌‍​​​‌‍​​​​‌‍​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​​​‌‍​​​​​‌‍

I heard on podcast electricians could earn $750k pa in hyper scale projects in Texas at the moment . I don’t know if it’s true, but it sounds believable. We built an economy that split in two. One part deals in money and paper claims, the other deals in materials, energy, and work. They’ve drifted apart. That’s unhealthy, especially when the material side is increasingly controlled outside the West and the financial side is controlled inside it. That gap creates instability. It creates perverse incentives to push their advantage while they have it . Who blames them we would ? Globalisation as we knew it is ending. As production moves closer to home, whether in the US or Australia, society changes. Skills change. Training changes. People become more directly responsible for food, water, power, and shelter. It’s different organisation a different society altogether What we have now isn’t sustainable. We mostly serve each other services while paying a large share of our working lives to banks for housing. People accept this because they’re conditioned to it. They even celebrate rising prices that tighten the trap. It feels normal because it’s all they’ve known, even though it isn’t grounded in reality. The core problem is a structural split between the financial economy and the material economy. Finance prices claims on the future; the material system converts energy, labour, and resources into physical output. When finance expands faster than physical capacity, price stops reflecting reality. The system becomes unstable by design ( or lack) The old globalisation model depended on cheap wages , cheap energy, neutral capital, and stable geopolitics. Those conditions are gone. Production is re-localising because supply chains are now strategic assets. That shift changes who matters . Practical competence regains value. Pure intermediaries lose it. Culture changes because incentives change. Education, skills, wages, and status reorganise around people who can build, maintain, and operate real systems. This is not a morally driven return to the past. It is a response to constraint. Economic systems fail at two different boundaries. The first is a physical constraint: insufficient materials, energy, labour, or logistics to expand output. Production stops because reality runs out. The second is a financial constraint: balance sheets, debt service, and prices hit levels that suppress demand and investment, even when physical capacity still exists. Minsky instability is the financial constraint. It emerges when leverage, asset prices, and debt service outrun cash flows. The system looks stable until it isn’t. Credit expansion suppresses volatility, encourages risk, and then flips into forced deleveraging. Nothing physical has to break. Balance sheets do. Hamiltonian constraint is the material constraint. It appears when an economy lacks domestic capacity to transform capital into output. Money can be created, rates can be cut, prices can rise, and nothing happens because the factories, skills, energy, and inputs are missing or offshore. The constraint is not demand. It is conversion. They operate on different axes: Minsky answers: Can this system carry its financial claims? Hamilton answers: Can this system turn capital into matter? Modern policy treats everything as Minsky and reaches for interest rates and liquidity. That works only when Hamiltonian capacity exists underneath. When it doesn’t, monetary easing inflates assets, not output. The failure mode today is the intersection: financial instability on top of material fragility. Credit breaks first, supply cannot respond second, and inflation becomes structural rather than cyclical. Minsky explains why the financial system collapses. Hamilton explains why stimulus stops working. Together they describe a system that cannot stabilize itself with price alone. Modern economies are colliding with both at once.

We don’t need more or less capitalism - we need to vigilantly redirect it from extraction to creation. The solution is a two-pronged revolution that makes speculation toxic and building irresistible. First, make financialization expensive as hell: - Tax every high-frequency trade, every derivative swap, every real estate flip. - Eliminate capital gains preferences - why should shuffling assets pay lower taxes than designing rockets? - Tax stock buybacks into oblivion while creating massive depreciation benefits for mission-oriented factories and labs. - Make land speculation punitive while exempting productive industrial property. But here’s the real hammer: impose credit guidance on the entire banking system. Banks want Fed backstops and FDIC insurance? Then 60% of their lending goes to productive enterprise - manufacturing, R&D, infrastructure - not asset speculation. Set punitive reserve requirements for loans that inflate existing assets while offering zero reserves for loans that build new productive capacity. Make it literally impossible for banks to profit from financialization. Maybe also create a Sovereign Wealth Fund that competes directly with private equity, but seeks expansion, not extraction. Every incentive in our tax code that rewards financial engineering over actual engineering gets reversed. Then, deploy those resources into humanity’s next chapter: - Conquer death through massive biotech investment: organ printing, cellular reprogramming, precision medicine at scale - Industrialize space: orbital factories, asteroid mining, space-based solar. - Achieve computational supremacy: quantum computing, neuromorphic chips, AI that designs new physics - Master fusion and next-gen nuclear: research - yes, but also actual deployment. Energy abundance changes everything - Build the molecular economy: factories that grow rather than stamp, precision fermentation, synthetic biology - Make geography irrelevant: high-speed rail, supersonic transport, hyperloop freight. Not just vision; actually build it. Here’s the key: These aren’t separate policies - they’re a Gestalt. The sum is vastly greater than the parts. Every dollar we extract from speculation becomes seed capital for fusion reactors. Every tax on unproductive wealth transforms into a biotech campus. Every penalty on financial engineering becomes a subsidy for actual engineering. This isn’t industrial policy - it’s civilizational redirection. We’re not picking winners and losers. We’re changing what game we’re playing. Instead of competing to extract value from existing assets, we’re competing to build things that don’t exist yet. Private capital doesn’t disappear - it gets drafted into the mission. Want those fusion contracts? Build the reactors here. Want biotech subsidies? Establish your R&D headquarters here and attract the world’s best minds. The market still allocates resources, but we’re making America the gravitational center where global talent comes to build the impossible, not where capital goes to play financial games. The brutal truth is that Neoliberalism turned capitalism into an extraction machine. Every policy, every tax break, every regulatory capture pushed capital away from building the future and toward strip-mining the present. We don’t need less market forces - we need to aim them at targets that matter. Financialization is what civilizations do while they’re dying. Industrial renaissance is what they do when they choose to live forever. That’s not more capitalism or less capitalism. That’s the difference between managing decline and engineering transcendence. Every day we waste on financial engineering instead of actual engineering is a day closer to civilizational heat death. The tools are neutral. The choice is not.

Fertility, Finance, and the Development Trap: Lessons from The Time Travelling Economist Charlie Robertson’s The Time Travelling Economist argues that literacy, electricity, and fertility determine whether nations escape poverty or remain trapped in stagnation. High literacy allows citizens to adapt to complexity, electricity powers industrialization and services, and fertility rates shape savings, investment, and ultimately the stability of banking and government finance. Low fertility frees households to save more, reduces debt burdens, and allows capital to fund growth instead of subsistence. Seen through this lens, America’s fertility story today is economic. U.S. birth rates have fallen below replacement, but unlike the virtuous cycle Robertson describes in emerging markets (where declining fertility lifts savings and reduces sovereign risk), the U.S. has financialised its economy in ways that turn falling fertility into a vulnerability. In theory, lower fertility should support stronger household savings and a healthier banking system. In practice, financialisation has reversed the mechanism. Instead of higher savings, the U.S. relies on credit markets to fund consumption. Families with fewer children face not higher surpluses, but higher fixed costs: student debt, healthcare premiums, housing inflated by asset bubbles. The very conditions that should produce a demographic dividend instead produce debt dependency. Fertility declines become not a release valve for growth, but a symptom of systemic financial pressure. Housing illustrates the trap. In Robertson’s framework, electricity access signals industrial scaling. In the U.S., the modern equivalent is affordable housing stock, yet financialisation turned homes into speculative assets. When mortgages, REITs, and private equity flows drive up shelter costs, young families delay or abandon childbearing. Fertility falls further, not from cultural preference alone, but from balance sheet stress. At the sovereign level, the same dynamic unfolds. Lower fertility should ease debt ratios by boosting savings and lowering interest rates. Instead, U.S. fiscal policy has piled up unprecedented public debt, financed by the global demand for Treasuries. Rather than stability, financialisation has exported risk abroad, leaving domestic households squeezed and less willing to have children. Where Robertson would expect lower fertility to produce stronger balance sheets, in America it has coincided with the hollowing out of the middle class and an economy skewed toward asset holders. The irony is stark. In emerging markets, falling fertility can be the spark that accelerates escape from poverty. In the U.S., falling fertility under financialisation has become both a cause and consequence of middle class erosion. Families are too indebted to expand, and the state is too leveraged to support them. Robertson’s framework reminds us that fertility is not just biology, it is political economy. America’s declining birth rates are not only about cultural divides between conservatives and progressives; they are a reflection of an economy where the benefits of lower fertility, higher savings, reduced debt, stronger banking have been swallowed by a financial system that converts every gain into leverage. Until that cycle is broken, America’s fertility decline will look less like a path to stability, and more like a slow slide into structural fragility.

Want to know what hurtling towards an "i-shaped" economy looks like?

Minor correction re Germany and Japan. These countries did not become top economic powers because the United States ‘rebuilt’ them. The $$ from the Marshall Plan helped. But they became top powers because they were such highly advanced societies already with strong human capital that they could nearly defeat powers with higher populations and more resources in WW2. The tragedy of these countries was hubris - biting off too much. That some influx of Western capital could reinvigorate societies that had been bombed to ashes isnt that surprising. And the local people themselves don’t get enough credit. The idea that pouring money into wrecked places can work miracles has been destructive to our thinking. We did this in Germany and Japan, and it worked out. Then we thought we could do it everywhere - and it didn’t. And we are still suffering from this delusion because we don’t recognize the difference between capable people/societies vs basket cases. We didn’t really ‘remake’ Japan. We wrecked it and humbled it. And then helped it to do what it was inherently capable of achieving on its own. This doesn’t work the same way in Africa.

The Wealth of Everyday I wake up each morning on a Costco memory-foam mattress. Nothing fancy, nothing exclusive—just the same mid-tier slab that comes with free two-day shipping to anyone with an address and a debit card. At 6 a.m. my thermostat clicks to 70 °F, a luxury now enjoyed by the nearly nine in ten U.S. households that enjoy air-conditioning. In that first sleepy moment, the accumulated fruits of my investing career are irrelevant. My comfort is identical to that of a single mom earning the minimum wage who sets her window unit to the same number. I shuffle to the bathroom and twist the handle. Hot water answers. Indoor plumbing is not a perk of privilege; it’s an American birthright secured for about 99.6% of households. My bar of soap is three dollars. My toothbrush came in a six-pack. Our ancestors fought typhus and dysentery; we fight mint-flavored plaque. Breakfast is democratic fuel. The eggs, bacon, and coffee on my plate flow through the same temperature controlled supply chain that feeds families receiving SNAP. Calories do not discriminate. If I shave truffles over my omelet, it changes nothing about the protein that powers my morning—protein the Census Bureau tells us is affordable enough that chronic calorie deprivation is vanishingly rare in the USA. After dishes, I reach for the six-inch slab of silicon that collapses the world into my palm. Even among adults earning under $30k, 84% own a smartphone; the national figure is 91%. Access to the Library of Congress, emergency weather alerts, and live Yankees box scores rides in almost every pocket—wealthy or not. My ride to work is a 2016 Toyota. It blends into traffic governed by the same speed limits and maintained by the same tax dollars that serve school buses and rideshare Priuses. Asphalt egalitarianism: the road does not care who paid more income tax. Inside the office, I enjoy ergonomic chairs and rock-solid Wi-Fi. Yet so does the barista at the corner café, courtesy of OSHA regulations and a broadband penetration rate that now tops 90 % of US households. If calamity strikes—a ladder slip, a chest pain—911 dispatches EMTs trained to treat need, not net worth. Lunch? Likely Chipotle. I may order extra guac, but the 700-calorie burrito is built on the same assembly line for every customer, whether they swipe an Amex or an EBT card. Exercise is equally impartial. I sweat at an Equinox scented with eucalyptus; another American sweats at a public park pull-up bar. Muscles and mitochondria respond the same. Evenings reveal the sweetest equality. I stream the Yankees on a flat-screen indistinguishable from one in a studio apartment subsidized by Section 8. More than nine in ten low-income households own TVs, and the broadcast signal does not means-test its drama. When Aaron Judge hits another monster home run, the cheer in my living room echoes in millions of others. Yes, money smooths the edges. I can charter a Gulfstream, though I often wedge into seat 12B on JetBlue because it’s nonstop. I can book a villa on Kauai, yet the entry fee for Yellowstone is the same $35 that a college sophomore scrapes together. Nature, our oldest public good, refuses VIP pricing. So what does my fortune really buy? Convenience, optionality, a wider margin for error, status. But the core blessings—warm showers, climate control, instant information, paved roads, emergency medicine, streaming entertainment—blanket virtually all Americans, including those officially counted as poor. That is the quiet magnificence of our republic: prosperity has spilled so far past the castle moat that a billionaire’s Tuesday looks a lot like Tuesday everywhere else. Tomorrow, when I rise again on that utterly ordinary mattress, I’ll whisper a thank-you to the engineers, farmers, nurses, coders, and soldiers who turned luxury into baseline. God bless the United States of Standard-Issue Comfort—and the patriotic genius that made equality feel so wonderfully mundane. Happy July 4th

Q: “What is CAPITALISM?” Let’s hear the definition from a wealthy guy himself. Bet he won’t be invited on TV again.

The Caymans islands aren't complaining about being flooded by US exports of financial services ... Ireland is not complaining about being flooded by US exports of research and development services. Nor is Switzerland. 1/