I take on Wall Street & corporate America for investors, employees & consumers. Press regular. Today's geopolitics, last century's lessons. Not legal advice.
Washington DC & Cleveland
Joined November 2012
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Mandatory arbitration clauses forced by the banking industry onto its customers are banned as to active service members under the Military Lending Act.
So, a 4-star general with a Harvard degree enjoys this protection, but a poor struggling veteran does not.
If Congress recognized those mandatory arbitration clauses as predatory & one-sided, why not extend that ban to benefit all Americans?
If and when the world transitions to fusion energy, all those crazy fanatics in the Middle East and their squabbles will become irrelevant to the rest of the world.
The sooner the better.
Japan to team with Germany on fusion energy project, including power plant s.nikkei.com/47BF7nb
Depopulation is the world’s most pressing problem today. Most people don’t think of it as the root cause of the protests/riots in Europe, but it is: plummeting birth rates in Europe have created huge fiscal imbalances & deficits, & undermined (along w/ other factors) economic growth
China Shock 1.0: this is what globalization and unfettered market access of Chinese imports did to American manufacturing jobs. Entire communities in the Midwest were devastated and never recovered, despite the free-trade economists’ confident predictions of job retraining.
Europe is on a mission to commit economic suicide and help the Chinese government destroy Europe’s car industry, one of the continent’s few remaining key economic drivers.
Chinese automakers outsold Japanese rivals in Europe for the first time over a full quarter, underscoring how quickly brands like BYD and Chery Automobile are gaining ground in the region. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
The Permian extinction of unviable AI companies will begin soon.
Pretty much.
As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.
That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.
A federal judge used AI to draft a court order. The 5th Circuit has now taken the case away from him.
Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch (5th Cir., Oct. 22, 2026). In July 2025, Judge Henry Wingate (S.D. Miss.) issued a TRO that:
• named plaintiffs and defendants who were never parties
• misquoted the statute it was blocking
• relied on declarations not in the record
• cited "Cousins v. School Bd. of Norfolk," a 4th Circuit case that doesn't exist
When this came to light, the court swapped in a "corrected" order backdated to the original date, called the errors "clerical," and blamed a clerk's AI-assisted draft. The fake case carried into the preliminary injunction anyway.
The 5th Circuit vacated the injunction and directed that the case be reassigned to a different judge. Its reason was that an objective observer could question the judge's impartiality.
Lawyers have been sanctioned for AI hallucinations for two years. This time it was the court.
The rioters in France, estimated at between 410-800,000 represent 0.6-1.2% of France’s population.
That means 98.8-99.4% of France’s population is not participating in riots.
It only takes a minuscule % of the population to wreak havoc in a society.
WATCH: Large crowds marched through Paris today in a second national day of protests against the rising cost of living, as authorities deployed heavy security following last weekend’s riots.
The police prefecture put turnout in Paris at about 110,000, while the CGT union claimed around 250,000.
Nationwide, the Interior Ministry counted roughly 410,000 protesters, compared with up to 800,000 claimed by the CGT.
Savage treatment of Ukrainian prisoners by their Russian captors: they carved the word "Jew" in Russian ("evrey") on his back. And clearly tortured him beyond that.
Are those savages the people our government wants to be friendly with?
AI hallucinations strike again: an extraordinarily rare rebuke of a federal judge by a federal appellate court, arising out of the district court's use of AI to draft an important court ruling, which resulted in fabricated quotes, cites to inexistent cases, and references to made-up facts in that ruling -
French high school students protesting because their government doesn't give them the resources to help them study hard and get good grades in school?
Doesn't seem like it.
Alan Rosca retweeted
"China is not contributing to profitability anymore."
Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson says the market for Western-developed cars in China is disappearing fast, as the Swedish automaker plans to cut 2,5000 more jobs bloom.bg/4zTcRsm
Universities are following a historical trajectory not dissimilar from the old Church in Europe: they started as socially useful institutions with noble missions, but are turning into these bloated, sclerotic, self-absorbed, rent-seeking, resource-extracting organizations, on a path to take more value from society than they provide.
At some point soon there will be a big reckoning - just like the Reformation.
FWIW, at Berkeley, much of the administrative growth is the result of poor faculty governance. We're constantly approving new programs that require staff, such as zero-waste or sustainability programs. The result is that we now have scores of staff with "sustainability" in their title. These are permanent staff because we don't have a concept of sunset and because once hired, we're bad at supervising them.
These staff reduce efficiency because they exercise their power through procurement rules (e.g. can't order lunch from a company unless it has compostable boxes, which means someone needs to confirm compliance). So then, you need more staff to interact with the complexified staff/union-made procurement rules. At the law school, we have people who do our reimbursement requests because the process is so confusing that only specialists can do it.
Faculty are also generally neurotic people and they don't understand risk. So we overreact to regulatory demands, such as the Cleary Act, FERPA, etc. At Berkeley, we have 4 different people with "Cleary act" in their title. There's no concept of "reasonable compliance," it's an attempt to reach perfect compliance, which results in Cleary Act warnings about stolen sandwiches at the cafeteria...and more and more staff whenever any error appears.
Alan Rosca retweeted
Federal prosecutors have charged 15 people in Los Angeles in medical fraud schemes accused of stealing $2 billion from government and private health programs, per the California Post.
They’re accused of billing for unnecessary surgeries, recruiting homeless people into sham rehab programs, and charging the government for phony hospice care.
One case alone involves $1.6 billion in alleged sham rehab claims, which prosecutors call the largest of its kind ever.
GLP-1 weight loss drugs may prove as important to mankind as AI. Maybe more.
Most people still think of them as weight-loss drugs. They're far more consequential.
Obesity is a big part of what makes aging hugely expensive: diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure are direct results of being overweight. Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro don’t just help with weight loss. They throttle down those cascading conditions.
Healthier people put far less strain on the medical system, so the GLP-1 drugs should help reduce the national deficit.
But the bigger story isn’t what healthy people don’t cost. It’s what they produce.
A 65-year-old who isn’t fighting heart disease or diabetes can keep working, building a business, inventing, mentoring, and helping raise the next generation.
Every year someone stays healthy and productive is a year of output, income, and spending that would otherwise have been lost to illness. Multiply that by tens of millions of Americans.
We’re living through a medical revolution but still talking about it as if it's merely a diet trend.
History will see it differently.
US consumers taking weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro have turned to cobblers and tailors as they try to save money while shedding pounds, motivated in part by rising out-of-pocket costs as employers increasingly drop GLP-1 coverage reut.rs/4k3VvEg
US should welcome foreign visitors with open arms - tourist, students, academics, athletes, guest workers, etc.
But foreign visitors should not be allowed to engage in political protests in the US. They can do so in their own countries.
Political activities in the US should be the exclusive privilege of those who permanently live here.
🇺🇸🇨🇳 BREAKING NEWS: Chinese citizen Liu Lijun, who organizes pro-Palestine protests at the University of Los Angeles, has just had her visa revoked.
Trump is not playing around with the Hamasniks. xitter.cf/WikiLeakHq/status/2112…
Alan Rosca retweeted
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
What's happening with Ukraine right now is likely one half of a grand bargain between the US & Russia.
The other half is Iran.
Here's why. A nuclear-armed Iran would instantly become the world's fourth superpower, after the US, China, and Russia (nuclear Pakistan & North Korea are boxed in by a single, richer rival, and India, while much larger, doesn't control the world's energy resources).
Iran is a big country in a key location. Shielded by nukes, it would control most of the world's oil, bully its Arab neighbors, take control of their energy exports, and dictate the prices at every gas pump on earth.
Neither Russia nor China want that.
China gets most of its imported oil from the Gulf. Russia has been Iran's historic rival in Central Asia & the Caucasus. So both play it both ways: they give Iran enough support to bleed the US, but not enough to hand Iran a bomb & a seat at the superpower table.
Washington needs Moscow & Beijing on the sidelines while it deals with Iran. That's where Ukraine comes in.
Putin's pitch is probably: "You want me to stop helping your enemy? That's exactly what you're doing to me in Ukraine."
The two aren't remotely equivalent. Iran is a terror-sponsoring regime that bullies its neighbors. Ukraine is a freedom-loving nation with Western aspirations that was brutally invaded by Russia.
But the hard question remains: what will it take to keep Russia from helping Iran kill Americans, while the US does the world a huge, enormous, massive favor by keeping nukes away from religious & violent fanatics?
Hence the bargain: the US dials down support for Ukraine. In exchange, Russia and ideally China stop helping Iran, or at least don't help enough for Iran to win.
Unfair to Ukraine? Absolutely. Necessary to keep nukes out of Iran's hands? Maybe. Would Europe be mad at this? Certainly. Could they do anything to prevent it? Unlikely. Would this administration's foreign-policy realists lose sleep over it? No.
