Tomas Hirst

This is a cool paper on how direct lending interacts with private equity (and the underlying portfolio companies). knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12380...

The more I think about this the more I worry that the UK is lacking one of the growth narratives that might actually, you know, work…

*who almost certainly work in media

Less energy use isn’t necessarily de-growth

He’s just realised that, if there’s an afterlife, his odds ain’t great

LHR -> BOS (for anyone still keeping count)

Not sure how I feel about the long sleeves though

The Cameron project was that the state could pull back and the private sector would fill the gaps. There wasn’t really much outside of that conviction. And when it failed, the response was to keep plugging leaks rather than address the broader systemic issue causing the holes.

We now have a choice about whether to go all in on “jack labour power up to 11 and see if we can wring out productivity gains” or a middle ground approach of encouraging business via incentives (at the marginal cost of households) while protecting labour rights. And there’s no party offering either!

Narratively, there was a period where labour had it a little too good vs capital so some rebalancing was inevitable. Then Cons overdid it and (big L)abour came back into power. They used brute force state spending to rebalance vs capital/labour frictions. And then Cam et al kneecapped that approach.

That’s what they said about the mining communities. And what happened to those badgers?

Why do you want canine unemployment Alan?

The more I think about this the more I worry that the UK is lacking one of the growth narratives that might actually, you know, work…

Yeah, learning the binary wrong lesson from Sunak is a cardinal sin here - he couldn’t rescue the legacy and basically folded into a bad version of the alt-right model by the election. It was just a poor fit. People were tired of the Tories in government, and the party threw out the entire project.

The most frustrating thing being that a pro-business, broadly socially laissez faire party would be (I think) really pressuring Labour right now. Path dependence is such a nasty constraint.

Fear of Reform will skew the result in the exact wrong direction for actually beating Reform. And at almost any point over the last two decades I would have chuckled - except for this one.

We have firmly reached the stage of desperately wanting her to be better. Almost cheerleading for her to start actually doing the job.

Look at e.g. railway speculation, South American speculative bonds, the dot-com boom. This really isn’t that unusual.

This isn’t a picture of Mel Stride and the shadow chancellor being misidentified on ConHome feels quite indicative of where the Tories are at.

Ok, so I think we need a rundown of Conservative economic theory and why the party cannot get its head around any coherent stance.

Oh to the party that promises all the above with absolutely no trade-offs

Mostly to their base - so think triple-lock etc

The superpower is sort of…a seemingly limitless willingness to believe the hype. And I really mean that.

Yes I wish I had started with than point! Thank you for trudging all the way down thread to find it.

Good thread here. One of the points made further down is that we really do need a centre right party with a coherent economic policy if we are going to generate the battle of ideas needed to improve economic performance in a world where the economic fundamentals aren’t generally favourable.

The bad thing is, trivially, this is an extremely large one-way bet.

But this is also an archetypical example of American exceptionalism - funnelling an enormous quantum of resource at a particular project such that you break through resource frictions quickly to push to development/testing stages.

(I actually think some parts of the libertarian contingent began to think of Brexit as the rapture in this regard - and now cling to it like the Lost Cause)

Three stories

1) Oracle x OpenAI
2) NVDA investing in OpenAI
3) OpenAI’s agreement with AMD in exchange for warrants

All involve some form of weird financing, exchange of funds and more.

All because OpenAI has outgrown the private markets.

All bloody crazy

Thank you!

Thanks!