One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

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First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

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All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

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A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

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The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

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Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

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Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

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In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

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This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

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Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

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The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a founding member of the EU, but it's also a rogue state, enabling massive corruption throughout the trading bloc; while Cyprus and Malta will sell any corrupt robber-baron EU citizenship, it's Luxembourg that leads in laundering their money.

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As the @TaxJusticeNet's @nickshaxson memorably put it, Luxembourg is "a criminal enterprise with a country attached" - a country where corporations are guaranteed "an easy ride on taxes, disclosure, financial regulations, and criminal

2014's #Luxleaks exposed some of the worst corruption, whereby @PwC worked with Luxembourg officials to secure illegal tax benefits for major corporations and the world's richest

Luxleaks lead to a 2018 EU directive that required member states to publish registers of the true owners of the companies they registered.

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Luxembourg published theirs in 2019, and @lemondefr partnered with ten media orgs for a year-long analysis of the register, which was published this week: #Openlux. The findings reveal that Luxleaks was just the tip of the

1. Been excited about @JoeNBC's sustained convo today about @KBAndersen's new book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America which explains how the Republican Party radicalized OVER ECONOMICS over the past 30 years. It was launched w the radical tax cuts in Reagan's presidency, but

2. as the GOP evolved through the 90s & 2000s they became dogmatic about their economic philosophy- until it became a radical litmus test/position the party followed even when conditions screamed for different policy. It was a MIRACLE the party acted to stabilize the economy at

3. at the end of 2008 when it was crashing down around us (though they just barely did & some didn't and that's bc it was before the Great Purges of 2010,2012, & 2014). America doesn't know the hit job the GOP did on the American economy as they dogmatically pursued tax cuts to

4. the exclusion of everything else while denying any policy that could grow wages or improve the economic lives of the bottom 80% aside from the 2 or 3 times Ds managed to squeeze through policy while in charge (minimum wage increase in 2007-which was the 1st time in a decade

5. and now, of course, its been another decade. It's actually a miracle wages (all wages bc when the min wage is artificially low it affects all the wages above it, that's how you end up w $10 per hr EMTs & teachers) aren't even more out of wack w inflation. As @JoeNBC points out

A thread on an interesting report by Goldman Sachs' Peter Oppenheimer, the bank's chief global equity strategist. He points out that Goldman's "Bear Market Risk Indicator" is looking ominous.

There are three factors that suggest that the recent stability could evaporate and that equities are "about to enter a sustained bear market", Oppenheimer says.

First is the fact that growth, inflation and interest rate outlook is unfriendly for equities.

Second is that greater volatility, such as multiple corrections and new peaks (which we've seen in 2018) tend to presage a full bear market.

Here is Goldman's data showing how falls and bounces tend to come ahead of "the dramatic final fall".

1. “Who Are Ireland’s Members Of The World Economic Forum Implementing The Great Reset In 2021 ? 🧵1/28

🕵️🔎 Politicians, Musicians, Clergy, Bankers, Journalists, Human Rights, Artificial Intelligence, Sustainability, Corporations & Agriculture

2. In previous threads I have looked at 🇮🇪 key players in the Trilateral Commission as well as 🇮🇪 people who have attended the Bilderberger meetings. I also looked at the 🇮🇪 in the Young Global Leaders which is a site run by the WEF. You will see a lot of crossover between them.

3. The purpose of this thread is to compile all the Irish members into one thread for ease of access and reading rather than having to dive through the WEF site. This is by no means definitive and I will be adding more over time when they pop out of the woodwork.

4. Ireland’s WEF members are drawn from all walks of life but can be split into 2 separate areas. The WEF calls the first category “people” and the 2nd one “agenda contributors”. In total Ireland has a minimum of 61 members. Some of the names will be familiar and others will not

5. In this thread I’m just going to concentrate on the 21 people (there are probably a lot more). There are also 40 “agenda contributors” which I will cover in a separate thread. The agenda contributors are those who write articles or do research for the WEF site.

On Sep 3rd 2020 we closed on a 120k sf glove factory built in 1890 in a small NY town.

Has 45k sf of self storage inside and had $14k a month of net operating income at closing.

Let's breakdown this deal.

A THREAD on creating $2 million out of thin air in 18 months...

👇👇

First saw the property on Loopnet in mid 2018. I ignored it. Who wants to try to operate a business in an old factory in a dying NY town.

A few months later I reached out. Broker sent me financials. They were good. $24k a month in revenue and $10k in expenses.

So I visited the property. It was old. Needed a new roof. Full time manager. Only accessible to customers 9am-5pm M-S. No autopay. A lot of folks paying 1/2 market rent.

I loved everything about it.

But I knew they were going to have trouble selling this thing no matter the profitability, so on July 1 2018 I made a low offer. $750k + seller pays for new $250k roof + $20k in environmental work.

Countered at asking price + $100k credit towards roof.

I ignored the response.

Broker called me back mid September of 2018. Make another offer, he urged.

I knew it was a good biz so I got more aggressive - $1MM + seller pays for roof / environmental.

Declined. Countered with $1.2MM but they'd give me a new roof and do the environmental.