Ryan Cummings

I hope they sue you Jake

A huge congrats to the Harvard Endowment, who in Q3 2025 bought at the top of the market to nearly quadruple its Bitcoin holdings, only to watch that position get absolutely destroyed, losing over $200 million in less than 6 months.

Another big win for active management!

Line graph showing both revenues and spending falling behind old projections.

The most important thing to understand about the debt:

Yes, spending is rising – due to demographics & health care cost growth

But taxes used to be on pace to match that rising spending

Then we cut taxes and now it isn't

Spending is rising slower than expected, so tax cuts bear 100% of the blame

The correct way to view universities+government-sponsored research is that it is a magic machine where taxpayers put $1 in and get $5 back (in addition to the utility from new inventions such as life-saving drugs). The gutting of this research is one of the dumbest own-goals in our history.

There are kids entering college this year who weren't alive before Bitcoin. The industry has had that much time to demonstrate a single (legal) use case for blockchain, and has failed miserably.

With no more regulatory boogeyman, crypto has been exposed for what it is: useless.

🧵New SIEPR Policy Brief looks at the U.S. #economy's biggest risks and opportunities to shed light on what could go right or wrong in 2026, from SIEPR's Jared Bernstein @jaredb-econ.bsky.social, Ryan Cummings @weakinstrument.bsky.social, @nealemahoney.bsky.social and Erika McEntarfer. Read in link 👇

The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember:

- Organized a city wide general strike
- Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence
- Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE
- Flipped public opinion against ICE

As usual, the current Administration is laser-focused on pressing issues, both at home and abroad, that keep Americans up at night.

Very glad to see this important policy process elevated to the level where the highest ranking cabinet official personally weights in on it 👏👏👏

The emails have Summers reporting to Epstein about his attempts to date a Harvard economics student & to hit on her during a seminar she was giving.

🚀 I'm on the #EconSky Job Market!

My JMP asks a classic question:
Do large, dominant firms foster or hinder innovation?

To study this, I turn to the Great Merger Wave (1895–1904), when >2,600 U.S. firms combined into corporate giants like U.S. Steel and DuPont.

A JMP 🧵👇 (1/13)

Total federal spending is up +7% in 2025 over 2024 year-to-date to Oct 20.

The story that the fed govt is tightening its belt is contradicted by its own real-time expenditure data. Admin spectacularly hammering some things but raising spending elsewhere.

Was -7% just after Inauguration Day.

The more-or-less consensus view (among researchers looking at the impact of AI on labor demand) is that AI is unlikely impacting economic aggregates.

Demand for young workers is very cyclical so we would expect given the no-hire, no-fire economy that youth unemployment would be rising.

Important evidence 👇 in the debate over how best to address homelessness. Study by Mark Duggan, SIEPR senior fellow, and Derek Christopher, SIEPR research scholar, finds that investments in homeless shelters pay off, not just for unhoused individuals but adjacent and regional communities.

DISTURBING: I went out in Palo Alto to perform a tactical threat analysis on behalf of the Supreme Intergalactic Commander of Warfare Hegseth, and found the median antifa member is 67 and drives a luxury German car.

Opinion | The A.I. Bubble Looks Real The A.I. boom is likely a speculative bubble. Like the dot-com bust and the housing crisis, its pop is going to hurt.

Is #AI the century's third speculative bubble? Yes, say SIEPR's @jaredb-econ.bsky.social and @weakinstrument.bsky.social in a @nytimes.com op-ed. They lay out the reasons and examine whether the fallout could be better or worse than the internet, housing bursts. Free link 👇

tinyurl.com/nhjcm62v

End/ While we can say what isn’t causing the gap, we don’t have a good answer for what is causing it. For a more informed take, we asked our friend @draliceevans.bsky.social
what she thought. We think examining this more deeply is a ripe area for future research.

4/ We then use individual-level data to see if demographic factors can help explain the gap. Surprisingly, we find that controls such as education, income, age, and political party explain little (<20%) of the gap.

3/ Interestingly, the gap—in both level and proportional terms—increases when a R is president. This largely reflects the fact that men are more likely to be Rs, and Rs are more optimistic when there is an R president.

2/ In what we call “The Gender Optimism Gap,” we use UMich Consumer Sentiment data and (consistent with others) find since the 70s (as far back as the data go), women are persistently less optimistic than men about the economy.

The Gender Optimism Gap Men are significantly and persistently more optimistic than women about the economic outlook

1/ Me and @nealemahoney.bsky.social are back to analyzing the vibecession. This time, We dug into the #s on how men vs. women experience the economy and found a striking result: women tend to be 10 points less optimistic about the economy than men nealemahoney.substack.com/p/the-gender...

There's a lot of bad happening in the world today. So take some time to read something good--dare I say, great!--from
@jaredb-econ.bsky.social and @nealemahoney.bsky.social who boil down the econ of "affordability" to a simple, three-legged framework. Good economics, good policy!

It’s actually quite unstrategic to abandon vulnerable people in your coalition. It doesn’t make you look tough, it makes you look like a coward.

Opinion | These Invisible Whales Could Sink the Economy (Published 2021)

In 2021, I warned that “family offices”—investment firms that manage the $ of tech titans & other billionaires—have more assets combined ($6TN) than all of private equity ($4TN).

Unlike PE, the public has NO insight into where they put that money. Zero.

www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/o...

Lol Miran also projecting GDP growth to stay at 2.6% a year through 2028 (ht @weakinstrument.bsky.social)

If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it's not even close. It would amount to a **$2B** bribe to the President; the next closest scandal in terms of $ would be Teapot Dome, a measly ~$10M in today's $s

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

The jobs numbers are safe for now, but the labor market might not be The civil servants devoted to the mission of the BLS make U.S. economic statistics the envy of the world.

Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to replace her with a loyalist widely criticized by conservatives and liberal economists alike

Read how these 2,000+ civil servants are pushing back to protect the integrity of the agency @weakinstrument.bsky.social

What People Don't Know About The Economy

(2/5) The story cites Mahoney's research with SIEPR's Ryan Cummings @weakinstrument.bsky.social and Ben Harris of @brookings.edu on how Americans’ views on the #economy versus what the data show have diverged since the #Covid19 pandemic: tinyurl.com/333f777d

Crypto wants to bring you down with it The Trump administration is speedrunning government bailouts for the crypto industry.

Update
contrarian.substack.com/p/crypto-wan...
@weakinstrument.bsky.social puts in essay form the key mechanisms described in the 🧵: the crypto/stablecoin & Treasury markets feed on each other in a doom-loop; faced with economic damage the government bails out the miscreants, socialising the costs.

What the crypto industry wants is simple: insurance--paid for taxpayers--that essentially provides a price floor for their useless assets. It's not subtle, and it's not complicated.

Today, I'm in @contrariannews.org about the non-stop effort to shoehorn crytpo into the real economy so that when crypto prices decline, the gov is forced to bailout the industry or face a financial crisis.

contrarian.substack.com/p/crypto-wan...