Jeff Gordon

I'll continue to make the case that policy resilience doesn't mean invincibility, and we shouldn't overinterpret when an otherwise effective policy succumbs to American Maosim.
bsky.app/profile/ilmi...

This is a logical fallacy. A resilient strategy is not an invincible one. IRA may fail but note it's over the shocked objections of the market. One cannot ignore the decades of tax credit extension, for example, and then cherry pick a black swan data point.

Awesome stuff in here. Turns out a lot of my favorite people are “LPE-adjacent”

Also, learning from this list that @jeffgordon.bsky.social and I are issue-mates for the second time in a row.

I assume the next step is we start publishing our own journal

Great reporting. For more detail on the public-private electricity generation structures available under new Mexican laws, I found this helpful: www.projectfinance.law/publications...

The Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook Policies for kickstarting America’s techno-industrial renaissance

I like a number of the people involved in this, but it's amusing to see the Tax Foundation folks (who are ideologically aligned) ripping apart the tax policy chapter (by Oren Cass) over on Twitter for a number of basic factual and conceptual errors. Cass is reminding us all the value of expertise...

Very DC, even the grocery stores getting in on abundance discourse

In Defense of Everything-Bagel Liberalism | Washington Monthly Critics warned that the Biden administration put so many conditions on the grants it offered to semiconductor manufacturers that the centerpiece of its industrial policy would fail. Those conditions t...

Excellent essay by @joeldodge07.bsky.social. "Everything bagel liberalism" might be a useful critique in theory but the examples critics have relied on (like childcare in CHIPS) are super weak. The firms got a good deal and the public got basic protections. washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/24/i...

Yes of course, calling it cost of service was a joke meant to highlight the perhaps surprisingly tight relationship between (average, not marginal) cost and price here

Yes, LCOE includes the capital investment. It doesn't include cushion for disruptions. And indeed recent PPA prices have risen along with supply chain disruptions etc. But I think the general point about lack of market power here stands.

emp.lbl.gov/news/berkele...

Remarkable graph from Berkeley Lab's annual report on solar deployment (through 2023). PPA prices have closely tracked the cost of electricity, suggesting very low profit margins for merchant generators. Tempting to call it cost of service regulation.

Too kind! Thank you!

A sign of decreased interest in ESG signaling more than a sign of green projects ending (though that may also come) - see paper on emptiness of green bond commitments papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

@lingchenscholar.bsky.social chatgpt is absolutely convinced that you have published an article about the local politics and regional rivalries of China's semiconductor industry. While this seems totally hallucinatory, I'm sure many of us would be grateful for such an article!

I think individual people are acting no differently than they would have on twitter but it adds up to something different because there aren’t many conservatives around. Not sure it’s something individuals can be expected to change.

Amazing opportunity for a creative litigator with interests in private law to break into legal academia and work with one of the smartest and most generous mentors imaginable (Daniel Markovits)

Wow this is wild.

James: "The Trump team didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us."

Happy to see commentary on industrial policy from people who were in the room. Sam rightly argues that Congress should allow agencies more iterative processes rather than linear waterfalls.This complements Bharat Ramamurti's point that incumbents lobbied for a slower process in the first place.

Let’s build this

Using the arm of the state to punish people for writing op-eds the government disagrees with is tyranny.

Obviously “current policy” is incoherent…but if it means you don’t need to cut the IRA and Medicaid…

Extremely @nathantankus.bsky.social / @lookheron.bsky.social style report on the administrative complexity of lithium pricing. There is supply and demand if you zoom out far enough, but not sufficient to describe what's going on in the details. www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-con...

Though, I don't fully understand why credit spreads rise when utilities can pass through price volatility to customers. The citation is to something generic, not industry specific.

Why do we need to derisk investment in renewables? Because moving to renewables (here, exploiting variation in RPS) raises electric price volatility, which widens credit spreads. Better storage will mitigate the volatility, but price-smoothing policy can help too. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Figuring out how to reshape governance incentives towards high-output, low-margin strategies strikes me as a key desideratum, undoing perhaps the elimination of what shareholders take to be managerial agency costs. 19/

Definitely. We think that legal scholars have recognized the resilience issue in finance more than in any other area, and to some extent this paper could be seen as transporting over capital risk regulation concepts to the non-financial economy. But we should get more explicit about the parallels.

Indeed this is exactly what most antitrust scholars say when we've shared the paper with them!