All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
What’s happening with the Bureau of Labor Statistics with recent employment data reports is an intentional, political carelessness that supports status quo cartoons of control.
It’s not a Democrat thing and it’s not a Republican thing.
It’s a power thing.
Since June 4th 1989, the Chinese government has tried to erase any record of the Tiananmen Square massacre from history.
Can a Tiananmen Square massacre happen in the United States? I doubt it.
Can a Tiananmen Square rewriting of history happen in the United States? Absolutely. It already is.
Our bi-modal political environment doesn’t just impact our politics. It shapes our social and cultural narratives and channels our responses to every event.
Yet Americans are large. They contain multitudes. And they can reject the political archetypes into which narratives seek to channel them. If this is to be our finest hour, then they must.
In this Office Hours, Ben and Rusty discuss all things pandemic recovery, markets and the narratives of protests surrounding the death of George Floyd.
Our leaders have botched the Covid-19 war, and we are defenseless against a now endemic disease.
15,000 to 20,000 Americans officially sick. 500 to 1,000 Americans officially dead.
Every day.
The free world does not easily survive a globally endemic Covid-19.
The Hertz bankruptcy is not a story of financialization by an entrenched, self-dealing management team.
It’s a story of financialization by an entrenched, self-dealing minority ownership.
A Gilded Age isn’t an age of prosperity. It is an age of the Narrative of prosperity, and narratives of prosperity are always top-down political narratives.
There is but one way to tear down top-down political narratives: action.
ET contributor Demonetized is back, grappling with some investment themes here at the end of the beginning.
The skinny: deep value is at best a tactical trade. At best.
ET Contributor Pete Cecchini looks at the monetary and fiscal policy stimulus coming out of Washington and sees a staggering price to pay in lost real growth and massive institutional corruption.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
– William Blake
Our narratives of COVID-19 are all lies.
They are lies of a particular sort, political narratives that have a nugget of truth within them, but are told with bad intent. They are told this way because it works. Because the nugget of truth hides a deeper, unpleasant truth. And a Big Lie.
There’s light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, and there’s light at the end of the pandemic narrative tunnel. No, on second thought I think that’s an oncoming train called “election season.”
Take away a great performer’s live audience, and you take away their source of narrative power.
That’s true for American Idol. That’s true for Warren Buffett.
It’s also true for Donald Trump.
We have written that one of the major social changes occurring at present is the transformation of capital markets into public utilities.
The COVID-19 pandemic and policy response have accelerated that transformation. It is now the water in which we swim.
Join us this afternoon for the Pandemic Edition of Office Hours! As usual, we start promptly, so if you don’t have video within a short…
We are now in the Flooz.com phase of the “how is COVID-19 going to change the world forever” process. Be careful out there.
The systemic risk question you need to ask yourself today is the same question you needed to ask in 2008.
What is the micro-level truth of the potential real-world shock, and does that micro-level truth threaten the Common Knowledge surrounding a levered business model and securitized asset class of enormous size?
I, for one, am delighted to learn of the “Through No Fault of Their Own” exemption to stock market risk.
One day, and soon, there will be a reckoning. Time to choose a side.
There was no greater sin between 2009 and 2020 than enduring a ‘constant drag on returns’. This is the Meme of Yay, Efficiency!, and it permeates every layer of our economy and markets.
ET contributor Peter Cecchini makes a strong case that the Fed is playing a dangerous game with its constant use of the “exigent circumstances” exception to Section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act.
Does the alphabet soup of new facilities and SPVs established by the Fed in recent weeks amount to an illegal taking of assets? It’s a reasonable question.
Even more reasonable: if not here, where do you draw the line?
We’re going to change the world, you know … you and me. We’re going to create points of failure for the system of sociopathic oligarchy AT SCALE.