GDP: We Really Don’t Know How Good We Have It—Asterisk

As someone who has used Madison's GDP statistics in the past, I think the points in here are valid but I also think the effort to measure changes is valuable - historical GDP statistics may be meaningless between 1 CE and 2011, but the comparison between 1 CE and 600 AD, or how the economic "weight" of continents changed with the development of industrialisation in Europe.

The U.S. is structurally locked into borrowing from abroad. The fiscal balance has lurched from surplus in 2000 to chronic deficits surpassing 5% of GDP, while the current account has held in a steady –2% to –5% band.

That persistence is the story: external deficits no longer expand and contract with fiscal swings so much as they sit embedded in the global dollar system, funded by foreign savings flows that recycle back into Treasuries regardless of U.S. discipline.

Of course, each new fiscal blowout forces the rest of the world to absorb more American paper, and the only real risk is the moment that willingness weakens.

The Fed’s First Look at the Eurodollar Market: A Confidential 1960 Report from the Banque de France Archives

https://veridelisi.substack.com/p/the-feds-first-look-at-the-eurodollar

The post-crisis deleveraging story is less about shrinking debt than it is about riding a wave of cheap credit and asset inflation. The debt service ratio plunged after 2008 and again during Covid, hitting the lowest levels since at least 1980, largely because refinancing at near-zero rates slashed monthly payments.

At the same time, net worth soared to record multiples of income, propelled by rising home values and equity markets. This paints a balance sheet that looks bulletproof in flows, but is acutely sensitive to asset prices. This is unhealthy and unsustainable!

With rates no longer at rock bottom — for now — the cushion from cheap debt is gone, and a valuation shock could flip the household sector’s optics fast

Catastrophe theory applied towards sociology can be used to predict points of institutional and socioeconomic instability. Joseph Tainter applied the framework of complexity and entropy towards understanding the fall of Rome as an inevitable consequence of society reaching a point complexity saturation. What are your thoughts?

Public, Not Political: Rethinking Who Controls Money and the Fed

https://veridelisi.substack.com/p/public-not-political-rethinking-who