Jackson Hole Not exactly convenient, Jackson Hole. I’ve often wondered why the Federal Reserve decamps to the middle of Wyoming every year when their head office is on the other side of the country. It turns out that in the early 80s, the hosts of the conference wanted to attract then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

Eggs for the win Recently advertised. A good job with a large accounting firm. A$87,500 including superannuation (so, $78,125). I found this 1998 report on graduate salaries. 27 years have passed, which is roughly ‘a generation’. Graduate salaries in accounting firms at the time were A$28,000 across a decent sample size. If we use indexation

I’m in this camp. It seems to be obviously true. I can’t think of a song from the last five years that might stand the test of time — but I’m almost certainly wrong. It seems to correlate with openness to new ideas. By 35, you are most likely who you are are going to

Panic Rarely do we open with Lagarde, but she’s been forced into action by the United States Genius Act. As a quick refresher, the act will allow US banks to issue stablecoins provided they are 100% backed by US Treasuries (90 day maturity and less). It digitises the US bond market and turns it into

Bail-out “Bitcoin bails out the UK” was not a headline I expected to see quite yet. Should it go ahead, the sale is likely to go down in history alongside Gordon Brown’s memorable decision in 1999 to sell 500 tonnes of Britain’s gold for $275/oz. That gold is now worth $40 billion and Gordon sold

Vanguard Back in December 2023 we covered that Vanguard was one of the few large fund managers who had not submitted a Bitcoin ETF application. I was rather supportive of their view at the time: “Even so, Vanguard are sticking to their knitting and not pretending to know what they don’t know. In my estimation

Big Beautiful Bill Our investment thesis was and remains that governments will spend money they don’t have at an accelerating rate. Demographics, and therefore politics, point to this. The monetisation of huge state debts is really a universal basic income of sorts. We will continue to pay for everything with money we don’t have. Accordingly,

Abundance The best example of abundance I can find for you this week is this https://chat.minimax.io/, a new Chinese AI model that you haven’t heard of. Minimax is free and works slightly differently from other models, largely because US export restrictions on chips mean it has to. This one is sixteen small models behaving like

The Australian Way These stats from the UK are normally a good leading indicator. “Money numbers” from the Inland Revenue about what has been paid in payroll tax. Overall it’s a very sharp drop in employment and trending sharply down. One of the major causes has been an increase in what is known as Employers

Not friends That got ugly quickly. Elon actually believed he could cut government spending. He was given carte blanche by his former bestie to do so. He failed.  That is the thing about Elon Musk, he is actually prepared to fail. One of his rockets fell out of the sky too this week, because that