Lyric Hughes Hale

The world is entering a new nuclear era in which the assumptions and institutions that once contained catastrophic risk are breaking down. While policymakers are responding to this shift, markets remain structurally unable to price events as they occur. open.substack.com/pub/lyric/p/bo…?

@ewong Or sick people avoid spicy food.

This might be the best news I’ve read all year.

We all hate property taxes and waste. But we need to reach a middle ground so people feel that they are getting what they pay for in terms of services and security. Going to zero is not realistic but neither are the confiscatory rates we are paying now. My question is what can be done?

@lyrichues Property taxes have become a scourge bcs Greedy Govt and Govt Unions know that they can endlessly hike and hike and HIKE. And who benefits ? Not the property owners. The system must be burned to the ground. Salt the earth.

End property taxes for everyone. Who loves property taxes? Gubment. Who sets property taxes? Gubment. Who wants higher and HIGHER property taxes? Gubment. You live in same house 10, 20, 30+ yrs, pay more and more and MORE taxe$. What more do you get? Heck, get less.

@MauiBoyMacro @tyillc A moat is meaningless during a flood. In a world of insatiable demand all suppliers benefit.

“The problem is that the industry was so convinced of its own success that it invested $1.4T before it had any moats... Guys, none of you has a moat right now.” 👇🏼 cnbc.com/video/2026/07/…

A deep dive by a key player in the rapidly growing stablecoin space on the impact of OUSD.

We’re going a panel on US medical supply chains next week. I agree this goes beyond rare earths and will not be solved overnight. open.substack.com/pub/lyric/p/ec…? Also did you see Josh Rogin’s Substack on the pitfalls of govt ownership? No quick and easy solutions to building this infrastructure.

This is a complex question. First, I think we are making more progress now (our rate of speed and acceleration) than ever before BUT we still have a long long way to go and really aren't close to the speed we need to get to. Second, rare earths is arguably the biggest one (not by volume or USD size but ability to shut everything down) but there are multiple industries underneath that are vital that need lots of work. Couple examples: a) medical supplies/devices/medicines. Imagine no basic drugs such as aspirin and antibiotics as a simple example. b) Low end chips. Everyone focuses on the NVIDIA chips but China has a dominant position on low end chips which may not sound important but think of most any electrical device (calculator, oven, car) and chances are the the chips in the device come from China. Imagine being locked out of all chips tomorrow. c) Basic industry. China dominates industries like electrical panels that go into homes or transformer substations. Short version, this means you've outsourced your ability to build really anything to China. Rare earths is the crown jewel for sure but there are a whole host of other smaller things that aren't quite as vital but are none the less very important. I still see no evidence that anyone in the Acela Corridor, and let's not even discuss Europe, understands the depth of the issues you need to confront to deal with China. The right simply doesn't know or understand the depth of the issues and the left has never met an engagement policy they couldn't get behind. The reality is it is going to cost a lot of money and raise prices because you basically have to set an actually economic price rather than trying to compete with multiple levels of subsidies that China bestows upon its companies. Make no mistake, I don't like that decision set. I am a moderate libertarian in my heart but I also recognize that reality is reality whether I like it or not. Short version: we're not even close

@WuBlockchain Somehow crypto and licensing don’t go together.

EU Issues 244 MiCA Crypto Licenses as Germany and France Lead Rollout ESMA register data showed that the EU had issued 244 MiCA Crypto-Asset Service Provider licenses as of June 29, with Germany leading at 57 licenses and France second with 26, together accounting for more than one-third of the total. Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Romania have not issued any MiCA licenses. Crypto firms without a MiCA license must stop providing relevant services in the EU after July 1.

From this announcement in 2021 to today when Illinois became the first state in the country to create a special tax on all crypto assets. @JBPritzker I wonder if @CoinFlip will stay now.

@GovPritzker @CoinFlipATM What about your new tax on crypto assets, the first of its kind in the country? It’s likely to have the exact opposite effect.

The future of cryptocurrency is in Illinois. We're a home base for 58 different blockchain and crypto organizations. And today @CoinFlipATM, the world’s leading crypto ATM company, is expanding its roots and personnel right here in Illinois.

China’s supply chain disruptions are not just limited to the United States. asia.nikkei.com/politics/inter…

@RudyHavenstein Amsler grid:

So I've got this tiny black floater in my eye lately and I'm always seeing a phantom gnat flying around and just now there was a real gnat flying in the bathroom and I was trying to clap it with my hands but there were now two gnats and only one was real.

Watch as Apple makes further inroads into healthcare. They have millions of medical-adjacent devices, and offer relative privacy. The limiting factor will likely be insurance reimbursement. @AbilityLab sralab.org/articles/news/…

@austincampbell The real issue is student loans—that was the promise that wasn’t kept. But otherwise there are plenty of jobs, even if they don’t meet expectations, and lifestyle choices that influence savings. The American Dream is still alive, and still requires hard work and sacrifice.

I am watching the left propose increasingly bad (rent freeze, minimum wage hikes, huge tax increases) proposals that will wreck the economy. This is driven by anger from young voters, who are priced out of housing, can't get jobs, and feel like the system is rigged against them. And you know what? They are right. It is. What I'm not seeing is any politician, Democrat or Republican, courageous enough to point out the real issue: Boomers voted themselves huge future benefits but did not fund them, so now we are running huge deficits to pay for them while talking about raising taxes on people who weren't even born yet when those things were decided to pay the olds. The reality is this: young people in the US, to save yourselves, you're going to have to tear down the programs for the Boomers, rationalize immigration laws to ensure you get first look at American jobs and companies have the incentive to put them here, force housing to be built, and massively cut federal (and in many cases, state) spending and the size of the government. Any politician who is not willing to tell you the truth about this is fucking you. Trump? Fucking you. Mamdani? Also fucking you. If you can't figure this out, things will get worse from here.

@shanaka86 Same applies to crypto?

China's central bank has now bought gold for 19 months straight, the largest official buyer on earth. And this week, as gold broke 4,000 dollars, China's biggest banks moved to push ordinary Chinese out of leveraged gold trading, with at least one warning it will liquidate any position not closed by month-end. Both are true at once, and together they explain what this crash really is. Start with what is being banned, because the words matter. ICBC and a string of other banks are shutting down retail trading in what the Chinese themselves call paper gold, the margined, leveraged contracts where you bet on the price without ever owning a bar. Some banks lifted the margin requirement to 140 percent to choke the leverage off before closing the products outright. Physical gold, meanwhile, stays wide open. Coins, bars, savings plans, ETFs, all fine. It is only the paper, the leverage, the casino, that is being shut, the last step in a five-year retreat that the crash just finished. Officially this is about protecting small investors, and that part is real. The same kind of leverage wiped out a wave of Chinese retail in a 2020 commodity blowup. But set the ban beside what the state is doing and something larger comes into view. While its citizens are pushed out of the paper, the People's Bank of China has spent those same 19 months buying the physical metal, more than two thousand three hundred tonnes of it now, accumulating straight through a 28 percent crash that scared everyone else out. Beijing is not trading gold. It is hoarding it. That is the strategy in one frame. China looked at the two things both called gold, the paper bet and the physical bar, and made a choice no Western government would make. It is taking the metal for the state and closing the casino for everyone else. The reason sits in a single date. 2022, when Russia's reserves were frozen with a keystroke. That taught every country outside the Western system one lesson: dollars in an account can be switched off, gold in your own vault cannot. So China is building its monetary independence out of the one asset nobody can freeze, and it does not want that foundation in the hands of leveraged traders who panic-sell in a crash, or priced by a paper market it does not control. Watch this month and the two worlds split in real time. Western investors were forced out of their gold by margin calls and a rate scare. China's central bank bought that exact dip with both hands. One side treats gold as a trade. The other treats it as the floor under a currency. The West is selling paper gold and calling it a crash. China is buying physical gold and calling it a foundation. In ten years, only one of them will look like it understood what gold was for. The metal is already moving to that side.

@elerianm Both tragically and ironically, the earthquakes yesterday are likely to reverse Venezuela’s GDP decline as rebuilding begins.

The GDP numbers from the FT article are stark. If Venezuela's GDP contraction of over 70% in 15 years proves accurate—and it will surely be the subject of intense analytical debate and posturing—it would constitute one of the most dramatic in history. According to Google's Gemini AI, recent comparable contractions would include Lebanon and Zimbabwe. #Venezuela #GDP #Economy #GeoEconomics #markets #debt @ft

@CNBC No need to do this - just adjust tax policy so that mortgage interest and property taxes are not deductible to large investors.

Senate poised to advance housing bill to limit private equity purchases of single-family homes cnbc.com/2026/06/22/aff…

@Austin__Berg @notguiltyCHI @ilbtccouncil Done ✔️

@notguiltyCHI @ilbtccouncil Folks can use this tool to contact their state rep ⬇️ illinoispolicy.org/contact-your-r…

Illinois’ new digital asset tax threatens Chicago’s legacy. And its future. But it’s not too late to stop it. thelastward.org/p/illinois-new…

@tonjkb As we look at expanding UBI in the age of AI, we should look not only at economics, but beyond the better angels of our natural empathy to a more realistic view of human nature. @scottsantens

Chamath says his father chose welfare and drinking over working "My father couldn't get a job. So, we were on welfare and welfare was probably 17, 18, $19,000 a year at the time in Canada. And it's a family of five." ...my dad just spent this cycle between drinking and not working, drinking and not working......But could he have gotten a job making eight or 10 bucks an hour at a store? He could have. He chose not to. "

“Taken together, China’s rise not only reflects a historically specific combination of starting conditions, reform choices, and global economic integration that is not easily replicable; it has also generated huge costs, in inequality, in environmental damage, and in political repression, that official accounts systematically obscure.”

@CoinDesk @sidprabhu Most crypto is owned by young people-this is a huge political mistake. And irrational from an economic development view if Illinois wants to be the quantum capital of the US. Indiana should position itself as a crypto tax haven. They already got the Bears. @eddie_d_melton @saylor

NEW: Illinois Governor Pritzker has signed a 0.2% tax on crypto transactions into law including transfers between personal wallets, with the Crypto Council for Innovation calling it "the most punitive digital asset tax in the country."