Tomas Hirst

Actually, same with the dot-com crash

Anyone describing the GFC policy response as “bailing out a bubble” is going to turn me into the joker

This might sound like a bit but basically…you can’t really impose these taxes in a world that tolerates crypto currencies.

So you did. Apologies.

Looks great! Is that sumac?

A federal judge has dismissed the charges against former FBI director James Comey, ruling that the former Trump attorney who brought the charges was not legally serving as the U.S. attorney.

NB this isn't to say that there's an imminent risk of blow-up, but playing it through debt proxies creates more convexity to the trade *if* there's a big enough setback.

Have a look at where most of the net growth in private credit lending has been flowing to

If you’re wondering why private credit proxies are garnering some interest from people looking to fade the AI theme, I think this is the reason

Incidentally, this is why the Tories cannot beat Reform on the ethnonationalist front. They will struggle to sell a clear vision of cutting red tape while making hiring harder & attacking some of the UK’s most successful exports. Anti-woke, anti-worker platform doesn’t have a large target audience.

Fwiw I think that Labour have a much better chance to sell honesty around tradeoffs pitch here to their base. But it doesn’t really matter because they appear to have largely decided that the *perception* of honesty trumps actual candour.

There is a coherent theory of growth potentially lurking in there, but it’s profoundly challenged by recklessness of their migration rhetoric escalation, their unseriousness about “size of the state” (what’s too big here? Are they going to cut healthcare? Pensions?), and their record in office.

Brexit managed to fudge this problem via the (obviously unsound) growth aspirations - sunlit uplands and all that. But the Tories are bound in the same fiscal vice as Labour - there aren’t any freebies to hand out, so the more of the burden they cut on the business side the more “savings” they need.

You can see it in Badenoch’s CBI speech - she has identified (correctly) that Labour are layering a lot of costs on firms so that they don’t have to tax households (directly). But by going after labour rights, it makes it harder to prop up the ethnopopulist aspects of their messaging.

We know why left governments struggle in a weak growth environment (their coalition is fragile and the redistribution they want likely has to come out of another part of their base). But the right is now trying to build a coalition of groups with interests in direct conflict with one another.

This is great. Also, for some reason, the only piano piece that fully lodged in my brain (so I can still play by memory)

The answer is...pretty well. Yeah, there were decent new issue premiums to get the deals out the door but those have mostly tightened in to secondaries rather than wholesale repricing them. Tiny bit of pressure at the long end.

The office is going to be insufferable

There’s more market cap to destroy in megatech but a shallower % drawdown IMO

If you want to target the more speculative parts of the structure, where the outcomes are more binary, private credit as a VC proxy is not a bad way of reflecting this. Megascalers have a lot of cash/revenues!

A fortnight ago, Keir Starmer told the Cabinet that leaking was not tolerated from his team. It obviously is! No wonder there is an endemic culture across much of this government of not going 'okay, is that true tho?'

I too think bond markets shouldn’t be the tail that wags the policy dog but failure to take the tradeoffs seriously by successive governments means we are where we are. The mooted shift in income tax could have got us a decent part of the way there fwiw.

And the political choices that would allow you to be indifferent to bond market sentiment are functionally identical to the ones people making these arguments are trying to reject

A movie that takes place where you’re from

Danny-Kruger effect (nominative determinism undefeated)

I think “smaller than expected gain” is probably a fair framing but as you say in the post it’s a quality improvement for those paying the rent in zone 2 and some people who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to live in zone 4 being able to do so. That’s a meaningful gain.

Right, and it’s that last part that the post ignores. And it’s not trivial. Basically I think a generation of underbuilding relative to population growth has created the impression that rents don’t respond to supply. Which makes sense in a world of chronic undersupply. But is not a safe heuristic.

Either way that’s pretty…good?

Also, I wonder, if everyone is trading up such that they maintain a roughly constant ratio of their rent-to-income surely what is happening w building new properties *is* that less desirable properties reprice to whatever the next cohort’s wage level reflects. Or we crowd in other high income people