Macro Twain

Two very clear charts showing the US has been in recession since 4Q22, but for the AI charade

Depressing chart, but I think this administrative takeover is happening in literally every industry…

Was Lisa Cook the 1 hike?

A lot of people have mentioned the risk of a full-fledged Civil War in America lately. I've been writing about these risks for about a decade. Governments that adopt the policies we have always collapse -- and usually because of internal divisions. But, so far, I haven't seen any real discussion of what will trigger the "kinetic" portion of America's Second Civil War. Remember, Civil Wars are always primarily economic. And, in America, it will be no different. The collapse of Social Security in 2028 will be the trigger. To learn why, read below. Porter Why Social Security’s 2028 Collapse Will Spark a Civil War War is upon us. I don’t think anyone can deny the America we all knew, has been destroyed. In the future, most historians will date the beginning of America’s Second Civil War to Trump’s and Charlie’s shootings and to the election of a Muslim communist to mayor of New York in the fall of 2025 – even though the “kinetic” part of the Second Civil War didn’t begin until 2028, when Social Security failed. When you see what’s coming, you will finally understand. America has been taken over by socialists, racists, and sexual deviants. The extreme philosophical and cultural differences between Americans today means cooperative, self-government is no longer feasible. A reckoning is coming. It will happen in 2028. Our government’s socialist financial model is a ticking bomb. And it is set to explode in the fall of 2028, in the middle of the next presidential election. There is no way to avoid this catastrophe. And this isn’t an opinion or even a prediction. This is codified into law, a law passed in 1935, during the birth of socialism in America. Again, when you finally see what’s going to happen, your life will never be the same. You’ll finally understand all the weirdness. You’ll understand America’s massive cultural decline over the last two decades. And you’ll see very clearly why political radicalism will spill over into a shooting war. This is the ultimate “red pill.” I’d urge you to read this carefully. Look up these facts for yourself. Share these warnings with everyone you care about. Sadly, most people – most families, most businesses, most civil institutions – will be destroyed in the coming war. Today, only a few people know the truth. And so, I’ve written this. It’s the best, most detailed, explanation of why what’s going to happen, will happen. This is your best opportunity to finally understand why America has fallen apart and is spiraling into violence. This is your map to survive what’s about to happen. But, first, I want to show you who is going to win this war. Ask yourself this question: Who are the most dangerous, capable warriors on earth? America’s elite special forces, so-called “Tier 1” operators, like 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta– aka, “The Unit.” And the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, Team Six. Our “Tier 2” warriors, like the 75th Ranger Regiment, the Army’s Special Forces Green Berets, and the Navy’s other SEAL teams, are likewise far more lethal than any other nations' warriors. Both our tier 1 and tier 2 operators are selected through competitive and rigorous testing programs to ensure elite levels of both physical and mental performance. These men are trained to kill with every kind of lethal weapon you can imagine – starting with their bare hands. If you’ve ever met these people in real life, you can see their competency in everything they do. They’re smart. Disciplined. And savage. You cannot beat them in a fight. There’s zero chance. Special forces members are 100% male. And they are overwhelmingly white (~90%). When it comes to our elite warfighters, there’s no room for DEI hires. They are also, virtually to a man, people who love the America we remember. They believe in the Constitution as it was written. They believe in low taxes, a limited government, balanced budgets, and sound money. Most of them believe in God. They believe freedom is the right to be left alone. And, if you don’t leave them alone, your day is coming. It’s these men who will, ultimately, heal our nation. But only after millions are dead. And when that happens, don’t forget that for decades our government, the media, and popular culture declared war on them. For their entire adult lives, these men have been told by their teachers, by their HR directors, by their girlfriends, and even by their own mothers that they’re “the problem.” They’re evil racists. They’re sexual predators. They’re cruel oppressors. These men were told by the president that “they didn’t build that” – that they’re not entitled to their property. They’ve been cheated by government-sponsored institutions and passed over for opportunities they earned. They’ve been taught, in words, deeds, and social conventions that they’re not wanted or needed in this society. These aren’t moderates like Charlie Kirk. These are men who are as used to killing as you are to going to the bathroom. And these men, after decades of abuse, will be galvanized to kill anyone who threatens to their wealth, or threatens their women, or who threatens their freedom. The whole world seems to have forgotten these men. But they are still here. They walk among us, in every state, in every city. And no one can beat them. Now, let me tell you the exact day they will pick up a rifle and man a post to defend themselves and their rights as free men. By 2028, America will be divided into two separate nations, at war with each other. The proximate cause will be soaring violence between conservatives (mostly white males, small business owners, and religious conservatives) and socialists (mostly white females, virtually all minorities, foreign born residents, sexual deviants, and government dependents.) But the real cause of America’s Second Civil War, like all civil wars, will be economic. For decades America’s left has promised voters the government can deliver the benefits of hard work, thrift, and innovation – without voters doing any hard work, practicing thrift, or developing innovations. They’ve sold the socialist lie: that you can live at the expense of your neighbor. And they’ve taken more and more of the government’s tax receipts to redistribute in ways that support their political ends. I know you’re familiar with the outcomes of these policies. In virtually all of America’s largest cities, progressives have created tax structures (income, sales, property, capital gains, estate taxes) that result in successful entrepreneurs and professionals paying ~ 60% of their incomes every year to the government and then half of entire remaining estates when they die. While taxing the “rich” is certainly popular, the economic reality is darker. With so much capital in the hands of the government, there’s enormous waste, leading, inevitably, to these cities becoming wastelands of violence, trash, and crime. It’s led to political graft on a third-world scale, like the massive NGO corruption that DOGE uncovered. But, the worst outcome of these socialist policies was a cultural change in America. Since our founding, a guiding principle of America’s politics was that government, while necessary, is also dangerous. Our Constitution was designed to prevent the government from becoming a leviathan – but that’s what’s happened. More and more voters have come to believe that not only is more government a good thing, there’s virtually no problem the Fed’s printing press can’t solve, from “structural racism,” to the global banking crisis, to global warming, to the COVID pandemic. The left even invented an entire economic theory “modern monetary theory” to justify their use of debt monetization for political ends. These ideas have bankrupted our government. And they’ve almost destroyed the freedoms our founders fought and died for. Almost. If you’re honest, you must admit the Republicans are hardly much better. There’s been a corruption of our country’s defense and foreign policies, which, rather than being focused on our own country’s defense has instead placed our troops in more than 70 foreign countries, needlessly entangling us in virtually every conflict in the world. Trump even calls the Pentagon the “War Department,” again. Well, wars are very destructive and very expensive. And our founders explicitly designed limitations on the federal government to keep us of foreign wars – limitations that have been completely ignored since World War II. All the taxing and spending, all the wars, and all of the printing and borrowing to finance it, has caused the dollar to collapse. People have noticed the soaring price of gold, and silver, and Bitcoin, and housing. But most people don’t understand – and will never understand – that these changing prices aren’t measuring any increase in these assets’ utility or value. What these soaring prices are measuring is the decline of the U.S. dollar and the growing inevitability of a U.S. Treasury default. You see this clearly today as central banks around the world abandon the dollar; as the savviest investors sell the dollar (borrow dollars) to buy houses, gold, Bitcoin, silver and whole businesses. And, as the dollar collapses, all over America, people experience sharp declines in their standard of living. The purchasing power of their wages and their savings disappears. They can’t escape the enslavement of debt and rent. And they’re bewildered: they have no idea why, no matter how hard they work, it is impossible to achieve any financial security or independence. America’s middle class has been destroyed by the political ambitions of both the left and the right. And that’s what will lead, directly, to the kinetic phase of America’s Second Civil War. In the presidential election of 2028, Americans will be faced with a stark choice between socialism and freedom. The entire election will become a referendum on Social Security. You see, by the end of 2028, Social Security will collapse. Reductions in benefits will be automatic. This default will impact more than 70 million Americans, all of whom will demand what’s been promised to them... And millions of young, white men will be faced with an existential choice: free themselves through violence or continue living as slaves. You may believe this kind of conflict is impossible. You may have heard “nothing stops this train,” in regards to the government’s spending. In fact, there’s nearly universal agreement among economists that the never-ending expansion of government budgets will, inevitably, lead to larger amounts of government bonds being issued, which when deposited into the banking system, will lead to vast amounts of new money and credit, propelling asset prices higher and higher. And that’s exactly what’s happened since 1971 when Nixon defaulted on America’s gold-backed debts. But, there’s ONE thing that will stop the Federal spending train cold in its tracks: the exhaustion of the Social Security “trust fund.” That, and millions of angry young white men who have absolutely nothing to live for under the current system. As the election of 2028 approaches, Social Security’s “Trust Fund,” the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund that provides all of the systems funding, will run out, mainly because of soaring inflation and the resulting huge COLAs increases to payments. What happens next? There is no way these promises can actually be funded. But that won’t stop the candidates from making these promises. And meanwhile, more and more young white men are going to ask themselves a simple question: why should my life be ruined by inflation & taxes when pensioners are guaranteed to maintain their standard of living, regardless of inflation? Why should I contribute to a society that treats me this unfairly? And the young men will be right. There is no way to sustain the current system. By 2028, more than 100 million Americans will receive a substantial government benefit: 75 million Social Security/Medicare recipients, 90 million Medicaid recipients, and 40 million food stamp recipients. Yes, there’s some overlap in these categories, but how it all shakes out is: by 2028, there will be 150 million private sector workers to support around 120 million people who depend, completely, on the government. Thus, for every 4 productive citizens, there’s 3 people who either work for, or live on, the government. These facts, alone, don’t describe the urgency of this situation. You need to know that we’re heading for a “zero horizon” event. The end of the road. An unavoidable crisis. There’s a legal deadline that will collapse the entire the Social Security funding mechanism. And it will be triggered by the end of 2028. The original Social Security legislation (from the 1930s) mandates all program spending must originate from OASI (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance), aka the Social Security Trust Fund. That sounds great, doesn’t it? We don’t need to worry about anything because there’s a Trust Fund (OASI) that’s been set up for our benefit! Unfortunately, as with everything else the government tells you, this is a lie. There never was any insurance. Or even an investment fund. After you pay payroll taxes, those funds are used to purchase special-issue U.S. Treasury securities for the OASI. These are non-marketable government bonds that are issued by the U.S. Treasury specifically for Social Security’s “trust fund.” These aren’t even real bonds: they’re simply promissory notes of the government. Your cash payments are then transferred, in exchange for these notes, to the Treasury’s general fund. And they are immediately spent. Your “contributions” were never invested in anything. They didn’t pay any insurance premium on your behalf. They were not even actually invested in anything – like bonds or stocks or real estate. They were simply used to fund the government’s current spending. Thus, when Social Security redeems securities from the OASI account to pay benefits, the Treasury must produce the cash. Where does it get the cash? Not from any Trust Fund. It gets the money it’s promised to pay primarily by borrowing still more money. In this way, Social Security is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme promoted by the government. There are no investments. The payments can only be financed as long more and more new “contributors” can be found – or as long as the government can borrow still more money. The trouble is, government has only been able to continue borrowing by beginning to monetize its debts (printing new dollars to buy its own bonds). And that’s lead to much higher-than-expected rates of inflation. As you known, inflation destroys civil society by debasing hard work and thrift. But what you may not understand is that inflation massively increases the costs of paying for Social Security. Thanks to laws passed in the 1970s (following the government’s last default) Social Security recipients are legally entitled to automatic cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs) that occur every year. And, thanks to the inflation of the last decade, the size of these COLA increases has grown vastly larger than ever anticipated. They’re literally swallowing the entire government. This will shock most Americans… but this is 100% true: Social Security and Medicare together consume more than 100% of all income taxes collected. Obviously, this can’t continue. And, in fact, it is about to collapse. The fight over Social Security is the fight for America. This is what will trigger the kinetic phase of America’s Second Civil War. We must be freed from this enormous economic yoke. And that’s what will bring out the “Saxon” in American’s “deplorables.” This is what will bring decades of injustice and racial profiling to a violent end. And this crisis has a specific date: late 2028. You see, while the entire Social Security funding system is just a legalized Ponzi scheme, there was one critical limitation put on the system: By its founding law (The 1935 Social Security Act) Social Security benefits are strictly limited to funding by OASI’s assets – not the U.S. Treasury. Once OASI’s assets are depleted, the legal result is an automatic, across-the-board cut to benefits. For the legal scholars: Section 201(d) of the Social Security Act (codified at 42 USC §401) limits the Secretary of Treasury to making payments only to the extent that there are assets in the trust funds. No one has thought much about what would happen to our country when that fundamental limit was hit because that day was, supposedly, decades away. But, the raging inflation of the past decade has accelerated the scheme’s collapse. As I mentioned above, Social Security benefits are automatically indexed to inflation via annual cost of living adjustments (COLAs), which occur, by law, in September of every year. During the 2021–2023 inflation spike, COLAs were enormous (5.9% for 2022 and 8.7% for 2023), resulting in a sudden and significant increase in benefit payments. For example, the 8.7% COLA in 2023 boosted program-wide spending by $139 billion year-over-year—the largest jump in the history of the program. These outsized benefit increases also caused the trust fund's 75-year funding shortfall to increase by over a trillion dollars in the 2023, as costs accelerated faster than incoming payroll taxes. In short, the more money the government prints to manage its debt load and to pay out benefits, the faster the Social Security’s OASI depletes, and the larger the system’s total unfunded liabilities grow. If inflation averages 6% per year for the next five years, COLAs will deplete the entire OASI account by the end of 2028. A default is inevitable. And unless the law is completely restructured, that default will occur roughly at the same time as the 2028 Presidential election. Who will win? The roughly 120 million people who receive benefits or employment from the government, or the roughly 150 million people who have to pay for everything? It doesn’t matter that it’s not economically possible for 150 million people to provide decades of care for 120 million people. That won’t stop them from demanding these benefits. And it’s likewise not plausible that the 150 million people who have been enslaved to pay for this Ponzi scheme won’t fight back. And that’s not even mentioning paying interest on $50 trillion in government debt. This entire economic model is heading for a collapse for the system reason that it is entirely unworkable. And that’s what will spark the real war. I’ve been like a voice in the wilderness warning about these risks for decades. And today, for the first time ever, I heard a congressman calling for a peaceful separation. But never forget, this coming war, like all civil wars, is primarily about economics. America’s enormous wealth gap and the inability of young men to achieve financial independence has bred an enormous army of discontent. These are men without sexual partners. These are men who are trapped living in their parents’ basements. These are men who have grown up in a culture and with institutions that are actively hostile to all of their healthy, natural proclivities. They live in a world that hates them. And robs them. And they have nothing left to lose. Their entire generation has been enslaved by debt and ever-increasing rent, obligations they can’t afford because of the enormous declines in the real value of the dollar since the financial crisis of 2009 and the Covid shutdowns of 2020-2021. If the government moves to massively increase taxes (for example by increasing the amount of payroll taxes) these young men will finally realize there’s no point in participating in the system, as there’s no possibility of anything like the lifestyle their parents earned. They have no way of affording marriage, a home, or children. And everything our society has told them is that they’re the problem. This a recipe for a revolution. And it will happen here, just as it will happen all over the West, as more and more people reject the lies of socialism and the yoke of the state.

When I see all these senators trying to lecture and "gotcha" Bobby Kennedy today all I can think is: You all support off-label, untested, and irreversible hormonal "therapies" for children, mutilating our kids and enriching big pharma. You're full of shit and everyone knows it.

$SNOW added $15b of market cap on a non-GAAP "beat" of $30m If you look into the print, its all stock-based-comp & amortization being added back The best part is that they repurchased a ton of stock yet still have the same shares outs Their cash flow stmt is a hot oven 🔥

😂😂😂😂

Worth a read and there are parallels, but the author leaves out some critical details on Global Crossing late 1990's telecom CAPEX, and shale. In a word: LEVERAGE. Global Crossing had $12B in debt when it filed. IPOs, leveraged loans, and high yield funded the 1990's telecom/internet boom. The hyperscalers are funding this CAPEX with FCF. It's a different construct. It doesn't mean the AI bubble won't eventually burst, but I'm certain $META $GOOG $MSFT and others aren't going to trade like shale companies when their core biz remains extremely profitable and cash generative.