Here @playbookplus goes again: ‘HOW MUCH IS BIPARTISANSHIP WORTH?’ I don't know @politico, how many more months would you like the pandemic to drag on for? How many more dead? How many more people, businesses ruined economically? I'm sorry but this is garbage framing in a crisis.

OK. I may get slaughtered here, but there is a kind of pundit who doesn't know what he doesn't know. I'm not talking about ordinary people on @Twitter who shoot the shit on a variety of topics, but people with millions of followers, readers. 1/

These are usually men, who will assume expertise because they've always been told they were the smartest in the room, were given a platform because of who they are, and feel no sense of humility when they decide to ramble off and take down others. 2/

Here I am talking about @NateSilver538 @mattyglesias and @DouthatNYT who have decided they are the arbiters of truth in science and public health. 3/

It started with the #ACIP recommendations on the next phase of #COVID19 vaccination (which as far as I know is still pending). All three of them are suggesting that #ACIP doesn't know what it's doing because there are discussions happening about how to manage trade-offs. 3/

All three believe age-based allocation is the only way to triage vaccine delivery and they've been scornful of the deliberation of #ACIP for talking about things like equity, essential workers, etc. 4/

I've spent the past year as angry as I've been since the early days of the AIDS epidemic when I had to bury friends in their 20s, 30s because our government didn't care if gay men lived or died from a new virus among us. 1/

Some were put off by my anger, some thought scientists shouldn't be political or if they were tone it down a bit. 2/

I work in public health. I am not a basic scientist or a theoretician. I work in a field that is hemmed in by history and politics on every side. 3/

From the 19th century onwards, we've known that who lives and who dies isn't just a function of biology. The data support this thesis, we call them the social determinants of health. 4/

My friend and colleague Paul Farmer calls out these determinants in more direct terms as pathologies of power, structural violence. 5/

Eight years ago, Spencer Cox died of #AIDS. He had access to #antiretroviral therapy, but in his own struggles with #depression and substance use, he stopped taking them. 1/

Spencer left college, dropped out like me in the 80s, and we both found ourselves in @actupny where we joined the Treatment and Data Committee, doing battle with drug companies, the @US_FDA, the @NIH on a quest to save ourselves and our friends from near-certain death. 2/

Now everyone knows what those dark days before the advent of antiretroviral therapy were like. Waves upon waves of dying friends. A government who couldn't care less for the sick and dying. 3/

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. AIDS. #COVID19. The next pandemic. The fire next time. 4/

And it changes you. Seeing so much death so young. Seeing those in power turn away from the catastrophe, even joke about it (find, listen to the tape of Larry Speakes in Oval Office w Reagan laughing about AIDS). 5/

Remember, socialism leads to Communism. So, how do you create a
Socialistic State?
There are 8 levels of control; read the following recipe:
1) Healthcare - Control healthcare and you control the people.

1/ How to raise a real estate fund (and, ideally, avoid getting sued)

Have warned everyone it’s better to raise capital deal-by-deal, bc it’s easier to raise & bc it's better for the sponsor. Still, there’s interest in learning how to do a fund… so, here goes.

2/ Don’t think of doing this unless you have a record of successful deals, ideally mostly/all in the same asset class / strategy.

Remember: You will be asking LPs to invest in YOU; they need to feel like you know what you’re doing.

3/ Really helps to have a list of prospective LPs BEFORE you start your raise. The more high-quality leads you have, the more likely you are to succeed. (I built my list via my blog initially; now twitter leads predominate - see my bio.)

4/ Find an experienced attorney. Doesn’t need to be a huge, expensive firm, but you want someone who has done a lot of private offerings before. Don’t agree to a big fee yet… at first, you just want a few hrs of her time for advice.

5/ Find an experienced CPA. Ideally, your existing CPA has worked on a lot of private deals before. If not, get a new one. Prospective LPs need confidence that someone good is overseeing the bookkeeping and doing the tax prep.

Re: Fannie/Freddie-The Path Is Actually Clearer NOW. On its face, this claim may sound ludicrous off the back of a precipitous drop in valuations due to what some interpret as SM losing his nerve and punting to a hostile Admin. In this thread, I posit the exact opposite.

First, the economic realities: 1) GSEs are the bedrock behind our housing market which in turn is the bedrock behind our economy, 2) after 12 years and $300 bn, gov has thus far squandered the opportunity to recap, 3) this economy recovery is VERY long in the tooth.

When Trump took office, we all hoped that he would usher in a regime change from the Admins that enacted conservatorship and then the Net Worth Sweep. Well, he actually did that with the appointments of SM and MC.

Yet, what always bothered me about SM was his perfect poker-face. For those of you following me for awhile, you know I’ve been saying that I couldn’t tell whether he was just playing bad cop or really was Darth Vader incarnate.

The primary consensus exit preconditions were: 1) there has to be a demonstrable path to meeting cap reqs, 2) the SPS needs to be forgiven, 3) court cases need to be settled.

I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.

In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.

Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

However one chooses to tally up compensation for this social role, be it financial, social, or some other privilege, it's pretty obvious that every last 'essential worker' is shouldering more societal risk than most non-essential workers compensated far better than they.

The way this trade off gets (implicitly) articulated as 'pay vs. purpose' is one of the enduring insights of @davidgraeber's Bullshit Jobs. Yet there are many essential workers who don't even get the illusion of purpose in compensation for personal risk (e.g., warehouse staff).

1/ In @RayDalio's perspective, we are at the very late stages of the long term debt cycle. These long term debt cycles typically take 50-75 years to play out. This cycle began in 1945 when World War II ended and we began the US dollar-dominated world order.

2/ In the words of @RayDalio, "Right now, the world’s major central banks have the least fuel in their tanks since the late 1930s so are now in the later stages of the long-term debt cycle. Because they come along about once in a lifetime most people aren’t aware of them."

3/ Central banks have spent the last decade in a race to see who could devalue their currency the fastest. Near 0% interest rates have meant increased printing of the dollar, euro, and yen. Central banks no longer have the ability to tighten credit so they print money.

4/ Being towards the later stages of the long-term debt cycle there is a global sovereign debt bubble similar to what we saw in the 20's & 30's. In 2019, global debt-to-gdp hit 322% with total debt reaching a new all-time high of $253 Trillion.

5/ The wealth gap has also expanded to levels last seen in the 30's. Historically, inequality and large wealth gaps have eventually led to dire consequences. Periods of conflict and social unrest often marked by taxes, revolutions, or wars.