It’s like he’s a drunk dentist in Vegas for a convention, sitting down at the poker table and getting bored after three hands. So he decides that he can “impose his will” on the table by opening up out of position with rags and making a continuation bet all the way through the river. Like everyone else at the table doesn’t see him for EXACTLY who he is.

This isn’t a US thing. This isn’t a China thing. This isn’t a Trump thing. This isn’t a Xi thing.

This is a social animal thing.

The words are not lies. The words are not wrong. The conflict may be just.

But you are being played nonetheless.

I’m not sure that people who aren’t immersed in this world realize how crappy B3 debt is. Or how much of it is getting pushed into the market.

THIS is financialization.

How will you know that the US-China trade Narrative is shifting towards a protracted game of Chicken?

When the narrative becomes dominated by national security language and clusters.

Rusty and I have been all over this for a year. More to the point, we have been right. If you want to know what’s happening with the Trade & Tariff narrative structure, you should subscribe to ET Professional. This is what we DO.

The word “spree” is so evocative in narrative-world, implying at a minimum some sort of wantonness and excess, some sort of moral bankruptcy.

How threadbare and slow-growing is the financial services world today? It’s a “hiring spree” just to open up a New York office. With 30 people. By 2022.

Facebook is a master at implementing price increases under the narrative of “optimization”, as if the company was doing you a favor by raising their ad prices so much. Now Amazon is reading from the same playbook in their advertising business.

Time to break up the trusts. Again.

It’s the best line in a movie full of great lines: You don’t run the same gag twice. You run the next gag.

Elon Musk is running the next gag.

It’s the Holiday Weekend Zeitgeist! In which we see an election season narrative make its way into other topics, hear the FDA’s plans to deal with expiring salt, hear from local man about local bear, hear from local man about local swimming hole, begin to doubt our judgment about the political import of impeachment proceedings, and read some perverse New York Times fanfic.

Huawei Founder Says U.S. Won’t Disrupt Business As Analysts Warn Of Sales Slowdown [Forbes]

Retirement plan menus are ground zero for what is delightfully referred to as “choice architecture” … steering and Nudging you into making the “right” choice.

Ad men understand choice architecture. So do mob bosses. It’s all about creating a Hobson’s Choice … a choice that’s no choice at all.

It’s not a Wheel. It’s a Carousel.

“According to the Aspen Institute, close to 6 in 10 working-age Americans do not have a retirement account. Sadly, the Aspen Institute also warns that things are likely to get worse due to the changing nature of work.”

The American worker is the proverbial boiled frog. Or Milton from Office Space. Same thing.

The best part of Robert Smith’s pledge to repay student loans? The pressure this puts on other billionaires when they get an invite from alma mater.

Then again, most billionaires are high-functioning sociopaths, so they truly believe that their words and moving speeches are reward enough for graduates. 

It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist! In which anti-Semitism raises its ugly head (again), the iconoclasm debate joins the fray (again), we stress about the gig economy, observe a campaign that doesn’t fit the narrative, explain away funeral cost increases and finally – finally! – hear the true story of…sky penis?