China just pumped 129 Billion Yuan ($19 Billion) into their stock market to try and stop the longest losing streak in their history 🚨

“Be ready by having some everyday essentials… three litres of water per person per day, tinned goods... to last a few days” Speaking to @vicderbyshire, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting details advice to households to be prepared for a “dangerous and turbulent world”. #Newsnight

I dumped it all. The Maelstrom directional book, took profits on $ETH, $ENA, $UNI and other shitcoins. I think we gotta go down to go up. It looks a bit dicey out there in macro and geopolitical land. Going to sit on the sidelines and wait for the all clear signal … Brrrrr

The McRib is coming back soon btw. IYKYK.

this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…

The big news last week was of course the sharp drawdown in high yield data center bonds and what that might mean for the broader AI buildout. I have been eyeing the price analog between the AI boom today and the internet boom-turned-bust in 1998-2000 and have been comforted by the fact that earnings are so strong today that equity valuations are falling instead of rising. We can see that below. 🧵(1/3)

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

Got a feeling META beats big and drives a painful chase higher for AI stocks Just a spidey sense, no particular insight

Official figures out this morning report that last month, the UK government borrowed £24.5 billion. But the fineprint shows that almost £11 billion of that extra borrowing went on debt interest payments. That's more than £400 per household on debt service costs, in September alone. So far during this financial year, from April to September, the government's debt interest payments amount to £61 billion. Now, this number will barely feature in UK newspapers and across our airwaves. It may be mentioned in passing in out-of-the-way business sections, or on the odd business bulletin. But this huge debt interest bill won't register with the vast majority of our political and media class, or impact the national debate. Let me explain why that's so wrong and so dangerous ... £61 billion is a massive amount of money. It's equivalent to the UK's entire annual defence budget – the money we're paying, increasingly to foreign creditors, simply to service our national debt for six months, not to pay any of it back. £61 billion is equivalent to the money you'd raise over a year from adding a whopping 7 pence to the basic rate of income tax. For £61 billion, you could build around 40 large, state-of-the-art hospitals, or employ more than 100 thousand extra nurses for ten years. £61 billion would pay for free-at-the-point of use social care for everyone who needs it in the UK, for an entire year – three times over. Again, this is the debt interest bill on Britain's spiralling national debt – now more than 3 trillion pounds – over the last six months alone. The UK's public finances are close to meltdown – yet so many MPs and journalists continue blithely to view ever more public spending and borrowing as the answer to every problem. Those who highlight the dangers post by our hugely precarious national accounts are dismissed as cranks, ideologues or worse. But basic arithmetic has no ideology. And there is nothing "progressive" or "kind" or "right-on" about driving the UK ever closer to the fiscal cliff edge, provoking a crisis that will make the "austerity" years of the 2010s feel like a picnic, a crisis in which poorer households will suffer the most. Yes, Britain's national debt is lower than that of France. But because our borrowing has been rising so sharply, and because we're so prone to inflation, our debt service costs are much higher. The UK is spending a disgraceful 3.6pc of GDP on public debt interest, while France spends less than 2.5pc. Endless airtime and column inches are devoted to spurious conversations about a billion or two of additional "fiscal headroom" we may or may not have in three years' time. And, of course, any "extra headroom" is immediately pledged in new spending – which means yet more borrowing. These conversations are a waste of time – and, in fact, are deeply counterproductive. Three-year fiscal forecasts, even one- and two-year forecasts, routinely turn out to be askew by tens of billions of pounds. I'm not saying we don't need fiscal rules - we do, but we need more immediate rules, which actually bite, acting as a meaningful constraint on out-of-control borrowing and spending. Instead, political and media sages present the nation with spuriously precise discussions about fictional fiscal outcomes way into the future – using rules which are deliberately designed to kick arithmetic realities into the long grass .... An increasingly expensive, over-bearing, out of control state is not the answer to Britain problems. But unless we change course, it will certainly be our downfall. Please like/share if you think what I'm saying is important – and if fiscal realities should feature more prominently in our national debate. And for more sharp, plain-speaking economic analysis subscribe to: "When The Facts Change - economic and politics in a fast-moving world, with Liam Halligan"