A conversation that has happened many times in banking, with various flavor texts, from fintech to public banking to microfinance. A: We think there is an opportunity to write loans to an underserved population. B: At usuriously high rates? A: No, at usual rates. Maybe lower.

The thing is. And this was a major 🔑 for me several years ago, in thinking about the podcast, is that communists are obsessed with capitalism. Some of them are so obsessed that they might even secretly love it. Whereas capitalists rarely spend any time thinking about it.

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.

In another world. In our world, he was isolated from the whole discipline; forced to work in a little corner of his own; not even regarded as a real economist by the math junkies. His entire career is a great indictment of economics. The situation in 2006 was so bad that you were better off reading one book by Mehring than getting a PhD in economics from Harvard. It was only with the shock of 2008 — that only he and a few others, and none of the mainstream economists, could make sense of — that his star rose. This was the beginning to the empirical turn in a discipline long dominated by math junkies. We’re maybe a quarter of the way out of the vice grip of the Brahmins. Take the current fake Nobel prize. It was awarded to someone for mathematical jiu jitsu that greatly satisfied the Brahmins but has almost no empirical support. Even a single paper by Mehring is vastly more important to an actual understanding of the world than the entire literature on microfoundations of the New Keynesian toy models.

Perry Mehrling, RIP. According to the History of Economics Society, Perry Mehrling died "Monday night from injury sustained in a fall several days earlier." He was Professor of International Political Economy at Boston University and, previously, longtime Professor of Economics at Barnard College. He was a highly esteemed historian of economics. Here is his homepage: sites.bu.edu/perry/ His last book: "Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System" amzn.to/47RVhJ2 "Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century's best known and most influential international economists. This book traces the evolution of his thinking in the context of a 'key-currency' approach to the rise of the dollar system, here revealed as the indispensable framework for global economic development since World War II. Unlike most of his colleagues, Kindleberger was deeply interested in history, and his economics brimmed with real people and institutional details. His research at the New York Fed and BIS during the Great Depression, his wartime intelligence work, and his role in administering the Marshall Plan gave him deep insight into how the international financial system really operated. A biography of both the dollar and a man, this book is also the story of the development of ideas about how money works. It throws revealing light on the underlying economic forces and political obstacles shaping our globalized world." Charles Goodhart: "The discipline of economics is balanced, somewhat unsteadily, between two legs, with the skill of the historian on one side and of the mathematical modeler on the other. In the second half of the 20th century, the tide flowed strongly to elevate the second leg and to diminish the first. In this delightful biography of Charlie Kindleberger, a charming and loveable man, Perry Mehrling shows how Charlie, in his chosen role, as an international monetary economist, fought against that tide, often unsuccessfully. Perry writes so beautifully that one would only need a smattering of economics to enjoy the tale; while if one is interested in the history of economic thought in international monetary economics, then this book is, of course, a must read.' amzn.to/47RVhJ2

I like this confidence from the Panthers fans #IDontWantToOverreactBUT #PMSLive

Bryce Young vs. Chicago All-22 (Week 1, 2026)