I woke up today just before 11:00 am, opened up the curtains and let the sun light flood into the room. I then opened up my laptop and checked my usual news sources such as RNZ (Radio New Zealand), NPR, PBS, plus some sources on YouTube such as DW, France 24 etc. There are protests and riots in the street, what frustrates me is how little the current governments are doing to firstly empathise with the protesters but also use this as a moment to show “this is the end result of Trump style politics”.
Here is an opportunity for the political establishment to link the higher fuel prices and the broader the cost of living crisis to the policies that Trump champions. What we see today regarding higher fuel prices and the broader the cost of living crisis are the downstream consequences of populist knee jerk reactionary policies that tap into people’s desire for simplistic solutions but actually end up causing even worse problems in the long run. There is a reason why ‘populism’ is a pejorative because rathe than having evidence based policy the policy is derived from a reaction to a genuine problem with a solution that is based on vibes and invocations of ‘it’s just common sense’.
Regarding the whole AI bubble, I saw a comment in the YouTube section of a video where the video went into detail regarding people wanting to get their money out of investment funds. The title of the video alludes to the people demand their money back from these funds as akin to a bank run however this commenter took exception to that analogy:
“Calling redemption caps at Blackstone or Blue Owl an AI bank run is pure click-farming. Private credit gates exist specifically because unlisted loans to data centers and private software shops can’t be liquidated in an afternoon, it’s duration matching 101, not a systemic banking collapse.”
The person who made the video wasn’t creating a one to one analogy but demonstrating that people are losing confidence in these institutions and want to get their money back. It is the same reason why there are bank runs because people lose confidence in the banking system and believe that the money would be safer in their own hands rather than in the bank – this is the same reason for why people want their money back from those large investment funds. Investers are looking at the numbers, the promises that were made in justification of the build out and realising that “the math isn’t mathing”.
In the end investing is all a confidence game of “can you keep the confidence high enough to buy enough time to deliver on your promises” which why there are so many cons out there being pulled with the only ones being caught are the ones that collapse before they could deliver on the promise – the old story of ‘faking it till you make it”.
