Blind spots to watch on “Orange Monday”
Greetings subscribers, I’m actually off on Easter school hoildays this week, but before I turn to family matters I thought I would jot down a few things to be mindful of. This is based on a mix of personal analysis and source-based insight. — As Rabobank’s Michael Every has been saying for a while, we […]
U.S. tariffs as an attack on the rentier class?
Yes, don’t laugh. But this coming Palm Sunday, as Christians around the world mark the day Jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple, a different sort of cleansing might be underway on Wall Street — one targeting America’s rentier class. One undertaken by arguably the most famous rent extractor of all: Donald J. Trump. As […]
The coming dollar superstructure: Why stablecoins are America’s next great export
As we peer into a future shaped by real-time, surge-priced liquidity demands, it’s becoming increasingly plausible that stablecoins will provide the plumbing. In a world where funding needs appear not just daily but intraday, and the Fed is increasingly hesitant to overextend its balance sheet or assume timing risk, market-based mechanisms are poised to take […]
The Fed’s quiet pivot to servicing intraday liquidity — and why it matters
Quite an important tweak happened to the U.S. financial system last week that you might have missed. And we at The Blind Spot consider it our duty not just to draw attention to it but to frame it in the broader context of what’s actually going on under the hood of modern monetary plumbing. From […]
It’s not ‘Military Keynesianism’, it’s ‘Military Thatcherism’
“Surplus production provokes a destructive backlash that precludes civilization for societies that do not have, or cannot build, defense capabilities. Yet, an optimal first public choice offers a resolution to the paradox of civilization along two paths. One is being twice-lucky in terms of growth and defense capabilities. The other is to create artificial defense […]
How the ‘power or prison’ dynamic gate-crashed our liberal consensus
Or, What Biden’s pardoning of Hunter augurs for late-stage liberalism — and what we can learn about it from Poland Here at The Blind Spot we’ve long highlighted that the “you’re either in power or in prison” dynamic, while largely alien to postwar Western states, is and always has been a feature of weak political […]
Spotlight on Israel’s permanent state of exception
By Dario Garcia Giner To many in the West, Israel’s fierce military posture clashes jarringly with its image as a beacon of democracy and progress in the Middle East. How can a society known for its rule of law, cutting-edge innovation, and bustling nightlife in Tel Aviv also maintain a harsh grip over millions of […]
Spotlight on ‘Dam Diplomacy’
Damned dams: Why Egypt’s alliance with Somalia is underpinned by dam diplomacy By Dario Garcia Giner KEY POINTS: — Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile has escalated tensions with Egypt, which fears the dam could threaten its crucial water supply, leading to military alliances and proxy conflict in […]
Spotlight on the 3D industrial revolution that may already be here
By Dario Garcia Giner The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting is (or, was, until Charlie Munger’s death in late 2023) an event so widely reported that it practically transcends the financial sector. Though less anticipated than an Nvidia earnings release and delivered without any of the razzle-dazzle one experiences at an Apple launch event, for those […]
Counter-disinfo tactics are getting more sophisticated ahead of election season
A coalition of publicly-funded fact-checking institutions, some boasting NATO affiliations, have embarked on a grand tour of American newsrooms to “inoculate” journalists against the disinformation of bad actors and foreign powers ahead of this year’s presidential elections, the Blind Spot can report. In a sign of growing counter-disinformation sophistication among fact-checking bodies, reporters are being […]
