Tyler Kleinbauer

In my book, The Great Rebalancing, I spend a great deal of time discussing debt. Most people underestimate how profoundly (government) debt will shape their future, and ultimately determine the real value of their wealth. Debt is not some abstract statistic describing what governments or companies owe their bondholders. It sits at the very core of our economic system, and therefore at the core of our society. The chart below illustrates debt intensity, in this case for China. Rather than looking at debt relative to GDP, debt intensity measures how much GDP is generated by each additional dollar, or yuan, of debt. The lower that number, meaning the less growth created by new borrowing, the higher the debt intensity. The chart reveals that China’s debt intensity has risen to extremely high levels. Each additional dollar of debt now generates less than one dollar of additional GDP. In other words, China increasingly relies on ever larger amounts of debt to sustain growth. So whenever China reports that it has achieved its official GDP growth target of around 5%, it is worth considering how much additional debt was required to get there. This is one of the key reasons why China’s debt accumulation is among the fastest in the world. But this is not just about China. Debt intensity is rising across nearly every major and aging economy. That has massive implications. If policymakers remain committed to promoting economic growth, debt must continue to rise to finance it. The realities of a debt-driven economy are uncomfortable at best. Governments will attempt to raise taxes, often to the point where human capital, people, and financial capital, assets, leave. At the same time, the cost of maintaining extensive welfare states, such as in France, is outright unaffordable. With current policies in place, the level of social security must decline. There is simply no escaping that arithmetic. If this sounds familiar, it is because many individuals and businesses are already reconsidering where they live and keep their wealth. There is more. Over the long run, interest rates must remain structurally low to keep debt sustainable. At the same time, inflation needs to run above the 2% target central banks claim to pursue to reduce the relative burden of debt. The combination of low interest rates and higher inflation represents a difficult environment for savers and bond investors. Debt is therefore not just a statistic. As economic growth has become the primary objective of policymakers, and as nearly all of that growth is financed by debt, debt sustainability becomes the defining constraint of our economic system, both today and in the future. That is what The Great Rebalancing aims to explain. Fortunately, it's not all doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. The second part of the book focuses on the implications, and more importantly, on what investors can do to protect themselves in an age of fiscal dominance.

@VraserX And how will they power them ?

Germany wants to double data center capacity by 2030 and quadruple AI processing. That is Europe saying out loud that sovereign compute is now strategic infrastructure, not some niche tech vanity project. Should Europe spend much more on sovereign AI compute, yes or no?

Hands down, one of the best explanations on inflation by a politician that you'll ever hear.

Omg all those helium ballons when I was a kid.. what have I done ?

Hopefully this isn't how things evolve

The real problem is nitrogen-based fertilizers, which are, as a rule, derived from oil-based naphtha or natural gas. Currently, Qatar takes natural gas produced at its South Pars gas field, which was recently struck by Iran, to make ammonia and convert it into urea. Urea is a natural gas-based fertilizer made primarily of nitrogen that you can spread in physical form, whether pellets or ground powder. This one facility in Qatar is responsible for about 11% of global urea production, the primary method that people use to apply nitrogen. Collectively, the Persian Gulf is responsible for between 30 and 35% of global ammonia production. And all of that has now gone to zero. Now, of the three primary fertilizer nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium), nitrogen is the one I am least concerned with in the short term, because it can be derived from either natural gas itself or oil. Here in the United States, we are a net oil exporter, have scads of natural gas, and can produce pretty much all the nitrogen we need. But now, due to recent attacks on Persian Gulf infrastructure, a large majority of the globe cannot do the same. In the short term - in the U.S. - we're likely to avoid massive shortages of nitrogen-based fertilizers. Yes, prices will rise, but we won't have actual shortages. But if you fast forward one, two, three, ten, or twenty years, the rest of the world will be in chronic nitrogen deficit. That's before you consider shortages of the other materials that are likely to manifest in the years to come. So, prepare for an environment where global food production stalls...and then crashes. #agriculture #farming #fertilizer #geopolitics

@EU_Commission How about not shutting down nuclear plants ? Maybe even building more ?

Everyone in Europe should have access to affordable energy. Through the Citizens Energy Package, we’re taking concrete actions and supporting EU countries in implementing them to lower bills, protect consumers, and tackle energy poverty. link.europa.eu/X9DJDW

@rushicrypto The Greater ?

If the last one was named “The Great” Depression, what’s this one going to be called?

QatarEnergy CEO says the Iranian attack overnight damaged ~17% of its LNG production capacity, and it would take 3-5 years to repair the damage. reuters.com/business/energ…

@Frid45 Is it tho ?

The French startup, Mistral AI unveils Forge, a platform enabling enterprises to build AI models grounded in their own data, workflows, and systems. Not generic AI, but tailored intelligence. ASML, ESA, Ericsson already onboard. Europe is stepping up 🇪🇺

Gas facilities in Saudi Arabia. It’s over folks. We are heading into a major 1973-style energy crisis. There will likely be shortages and rationing. We will probably be moved to work-from-home - if you keep your job, of course. 🛢️📈

Balaji is obviously right, especially relating to what happens to international trade routes if the US recedes. Zeihan correctly diagnoses what would happen in 'all else equal' conditions: trade would become more regional, shipping routes would shorten But the thing is, reality is not 'all else equal'. It's obvious, given the map of the largest trading partner, that China would step in to fill that role. Overall I'm left wondering if this is good or bad for Europe.

BREAKING: European gas prices up 32%

Are we fucked ?

@pmarca There's no point in 'sitting there' trying to go deeper and deeper into yourself. There is a point in reviewing your experience in relationship to events and activities. That's how you discover your likes and dislikes. Is that introspection?

TLDR There is no inner self, you're chasing an imaginary concept, the end.

@_The_Prophet__ Why are people trying to sell their house now ? Economic downturn and they need money ? Boomers hitting retirement?

⚡️The housing market is becoming a trap. That is the signal. People were taught that a house is wealth because it can always be turned back into movement. Sell it. Move. Resize life. Reset. That was the deal. Now more people are discovering that the number can still be there while the freedom is gone. The house still has value on paper. The exit does not clear. That is why this search term is exploding. Owners are locked to old mortgages that belong to a dead rate regime. Selling means stepping into a much worse life equation. Buyers face the same equation from the other side and flinch. So the market cannot clear honestly. It freezes. Volume dies. Prices stay elevated longer than they should because the market is not really discovering price anymore. It is suppressing truth through immobility. That is the real break. The pain did not hit housing through a clean crash. It hit through paralysis. A crash would force reality into the open. This freezes people inside stale valuations and bad choices. You keep the house. You keep the old loan. You keep the illusion. You lose optionality. And optionality was the whole point. Once that goes, the damage spreads fast. People stop moving for work. Families stop upgrading. Older owners stop downsizing. Builders stop trusting demand. Every business that feeds on housing turnover starts starving. The house stops acting like stored mobility and starts acting like a concrete claim on your future. The cold truth is simple: This is what it looks like when an asset class stops functioning like wealth and starts functioning like captivity.

@levelsio And safety in case something happens to a loved one. Like a health issue

Even bigger irony of getting rich is that everything expensive isn't that much better than when you paid normal for it Many things are even worse (most expensive luxury hotels are guaranteed worse than regular simple hotels, I know I tried most of them now) The real reason you wanna get rich is not to buy expensive things It's so that $1M invested gives you 3% to take out every year with no risk, which is $30,000/year Which you can use to travel for $1000/mo on a shoestring budget forever without having to back to some desk job with a shitty boss Aka FREEDOM

Giant Bitcoin ad displayed over Lugano, Switzerland 🇨🇭 Bitcoin will eat your fiat currency.

POV: you’re a developer in 2026😂