Thomas A. Anderson

@Handre The United States didn't become an industrial colossus through laissez-faire venture capital; it built its dominance because men like LBJ, economists like Galbraith, and builders like the Browns weaponized the sovereign power of the state to build physical capacity at cost.

@Handre The LBJ-Brown & Root alliance: LBJ pulled strings with the Navy and the War Production Board. The state didn't care about their lack of experience. Using federal credit via the Defense Plant Corporation model, Brown & Root built Brown Shipbuilding from an empty, muddy pasture.

Alan Greenspan died today, and the man who spent two decades inflating bubbles will be eulogized as a maestro. Fitting, because he understood exactly what he was doing. In 1966 a younger Greenspan wrote an essay called "Gold and Economic Freedom." He laid out the case with precision. The gold standard protected savers from confiscation by inflation. Welfare statists hated gold because it stood in the way of their deficits. He wrote that the abandonment of gold made deficit spending a "scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth." He was right. He knew it. Then he took the job running the printing press. From August 1987 to January 2006 Greenspan sat atop the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything that essay defended. After the 1987 crash he flooded the banks with liquidity and taught a generation of traders that the central bank would catch them every time they fell. They named the reflex after him: the Greenspan put. He cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent by June 2003 and held it there, and you watched housing prices detach from any sane relationship to income. Mortgage credit gushed. He went on television in February 2004 and suggested Americans consider adjustable-rate mortgages, roughly eighteen months before he started hiking rates into those very borrowers. The man who warned in 1966 about the hidden confiscation of wealth engineered the largest credit distortion in postwar history. Then came the apology that wasn't one. In October 2008, sitting before Congress as the wreckage smoked, Greenspan confessed he had found "a flaw" in his model of how the world worked. He was "shocked" that lenders had not policed themselves. You don't get to spend twenty years pricing risk at zero and then act surprised when men respond to the incentives you built. Any committee of economists cannot set the price of money better than a market can. Greenspan knew the answer at 40 and spent the next half century pretending he'd forgotten it. The savers he warned about in 1966 paid for that performance.

@Handre This is what terrifies financial interests in the west to compete with what China is doing the west going to go back to how it did financing in WW2. People like Lyndon Johnson understood this from WW2 working with Galbraith & engineering firms like Brown & Root.

@Handre You have to study how the Defense Plant Corporation subsidiary of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation finance the expansion of American industry so the state not Wall Street.

@Handre So you say only profit margins can allocate resources while using gold. They are having division of labor w/o profit & instead at cost that's is why they can produce things so cheaply & the west can't compete with the financing cost structure which is you get industrial policy.

@Handre Say China has state banks that print $/credit for production no gold involved, & their has being drastic deflation in the cost of items like batteries, solar panels, etc because they are doing a division of labor economy at cost instead of each layer w/ a 31% profit margin.

@Handre The real estate bubble in the US wasn't because of lack of gold but Ronald Reagan's deregulation of private credit using real estate as collateral that happens with gold or without gold, the inflation was deregulation of private credit not going off gold.

@_sn_n He & the people who put him in power didn't like an economically secure and educated middle class and went after both. Real Estate bubble, student loan bubble were some of the main attack vectors while promoting the trades & blue collar that propaganda works on.

then Reagan got elected

@wbmosler @IranObserver0 A Pacific & Atlantic Campaign like the US used during WW2 could not be done with the oil reserves the US has left today. Back then it was conventional, high ROEI, so just due to the oil dynamics power is going to more local and hard to project globally.

@wbmosler @IranObserver0 The problem when you believe your own propaganda like the US is the largest oil producer when a lot of that is condensate not oil & also have decapitation in Venezuela thinking you captured the largest oil reserves that are actually tar so can risk Hormuz disruption.

⚡️BREAKING: JD Vance says that Iran's Frozen Funds will be used to purchase American Agricultural products "If Iranian assets are ever unfrozen, they are going to make American farmers richer and help feed the Iranian people"

@EdwardMehr @bscholl

@EdwardMehr @bscholl

What should America’s competitive advantage in manufacturing be? speed. How fast can you go from “I have an idea” to “here’s the product.” At Deep Tech Week today, three ideas emerged for enabling speed : 1- Vertical integration (@bscholl): make one thing ridiculously fast. 2- Operational excellence (@jimbelosic): make lots of different things fast. 3- Reinvent manufacturing tech (@MachinaLabs_): make the process itself fast. One focuses on the org. One focuses on the factory. One focuses on the machine. The winner probably does all three.

@garyboomer58 This is exactly the baby boomer you encounter at Church, just like the hypocrisy Jesus called out in the Pharisees. "Whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean." Matthew 23:27

@garyboomer58 I appreciate the attention to detail, all the nuances.

Martha and I bought this house in 1974 for $62,000 Was it easy then? Hell no! I had to work 2 hours overtime a week at the factory to pay it off in 10 years But now we’re being punished with property taxes that cost over $1,000/month! End property taxes for seniors now! - Sent from iPhone