The economic impact of the Brexit deal: our

The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

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As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

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In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

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Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

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THREAD on how economically Muslims maybe poorer (the state is overall also not as rich) in #Bengal but have relatively got socio-political empowerment (part of Threads I am writing for the understanding of Bengal politics in the context of upcoming assembly election):

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The socio-economic status of Muslims in the state is far behind other communities as the Sachar Committee Report (2006) and Pratichi-SNAP’s “Living Reality of Muslims in West Bengal” (2016) attest.

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But it has not witnessed the rule of the BJP yet although the founder of the predecessor of the saffron party, Bharatiya Jan-Sangh, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was himself a Bengali.

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During both the Congress and the Left Front rule earlier, and now under TMC Muslims did get some leverage although political marginalization even at block level had continued.

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Across India, the last two general elections, and even the recent Bihar assembly elections, have resulted in the further marginalization of Muslims.

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Diminishing Marginal Returns

The productivity of our debt is collapsing and that is creating a major problem.

The problem is here now, and not in the future.

Here is why:

1)

Charted below is the increase in total debt and the increase in nominal GDP in the 8 quarters before each of the last six recessions.

In other words, how much did debt increase, and how much did GDP increase in the final two years of each economic expansion?

2)

As the chart shows, it is taking a larger amount of debt to increase GDP.

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Graphed another way, leading up to the 1980 recession it took about 1.94 dollars of debt to boost GDP by 1 dollar.

Leading up to the COVID recession saw debt increase nearly 6 dollars for each 1 dollar of GDP growth.

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Flipping the ratio shows the decline in the utility of debt.

We are only generating about 15-20 cents of growth for each dollar of debt.

This becomes a larger problem when we think about "growth rates" instead of nominal dollars.

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@Lol_0fficial @HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead Oh my goodness. Economic interests -absolutely- tie into this. You need to think about 1) that there are different factions involved & 2) people see economic interest more broadly than just govt spending. On the first point, evangelicals have been part of the Republican base B1/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead since the party became identical with movement conservatism, but movement conservatism only became significant as an ideology because of coalition building. Movement conservatism brought together the hawks, laissez faire economics, and cultural conservatives. B2/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead Evangelicals have always been the best organized element of the cultural conservative faction. Trump's coalition is a new one and it includes cultural conservatives, but that is the only element that is unchanged - and really even it is somewhat different.
B3/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead A minor difference is accepting Obergefell (which has made it possible for openly gay people to be highly visible members of the new coalition), but the main difference is that social conservatives no longer make a priority of the politician as an individual
B4/X

@HoodieMorr @shoe0nhead as opposed to focusing on politicians merely as conduits through which government is affected. The foreign policy contingent changed completely. The hawks are just gone from Trump's coalition. Instead there's a deep skepticism of interventionism, but without the desire B5/x

1/ Unit economic for founders thread.

Despite being a founder and a student of the subject, I missed out on a key point growing up.

Length of relationship with your customers, order frequency, product usage and utility matter.

They didn't teach me this in business school.

2/ Structured right, products used daily vs weekly vs monthly vs yearly lead to different profitability and scalability paths.

Quiz. Which business would you pick?

a) Enterprise software - US$ 250k one time license
b) Enterprise software - US$ 30k/month recurring subscription

3/ Sound's obvious? Which one did you pick?

Twice in my life I picked A. They were both great businesses, but they didn't compare to B. Especially in the long run.

Looking back, with hindsight, I know I should have picked B.

Why?

4/ Bringing in customers is hard.

When those customers leave after a few orders, your investment in that relationship is written off.

But it is not just about the relationship or investment. It is also about scale.

What are the easiest ways to scale a business?

5/ Think about it?

a) Get more customers - acquire
b) Get existing customers to order again - retain
c) Increase order size - up sell
d) Increase order frequency - cross sell / new use case
e) Get existing customers to get you new customers - referral

(b) to (e) are free.