Mark

The protests in Ireland are not about just fuel! They are about the distance between Ireland on this graph and every other modern and developed economy. Ireland is second wealthiest but gets waaaaay less than any other country for that wealth. By a golden mile. That visual gap in this graph? That’s what people are protesting. It’s a lack of infrastructure and the everyday enshittification of services, the economy, and the additional difficulty of trying to live, relative to peers in any other country. It also highlights why people don’t get uniformly listened to! - because there is no government architecture to engage meaningfully across this huge gap. That gap is a three hour drive to work in traffic, a 14 month wait for an MRI, buses that don’t arrive, trains that don’t exist, schools that have no places for your kids, houses that are unaffordable, pubs that close before midnight, €12 sandwiches, expensive fuel. People feel this gap, even if they can’t explain it precisely. And that builds into resentment, and ultimately protest. Fuel just happened to be the next thing that could be pointed to, today.

Scott Bessent just flagged it: “The banking system created at Bretton Woods after World War II unleashed worldwide prosperity. Why not recreate that now?” Translation: the architects are openly discussing a new financial architecture. If you’ve read _The Great Taking, you know “resets” aren’t neutral, they reassign who owns what. When they redesign the pipes, control of assets, collateral, and custody is on the table. This is why we talk “safety zone” and direct ownership. Don’t wait for their version of Bretton Woods 2.0 to find out where you stand.

Why is the British economy so broken?

If you knew the entire system was about to collapse... What would you do?

Oil prices in real terms remain very far away from the all-time high and previous crisis levels. Additionally, the energy intensity of GDP has fallen quite fast. via Bloomberg, JPMAM

The enshittification of Ireland and the hollowing out of our institutions is the single largest threat to Irish civil society and prosperity. In this damning piece, I'm going into more detail about the graph I posted yesterday: why it's happening in Ireland, why the way we're thinking about the protests is entirely wrong, and what this means for our collective governance. Link to the article is below!

Every week ~180 to 270 new people arrive to feed the Emergency Accommodation industry. Each arrival will cost the taxpayer €122,000. This means each year the taxpayer is being saddled with €1.46billion in extra taxes.