All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory including our long-form content, a library of hundreds of pieces written by Ben, Rusty and others over the course of the last 5+ years. Plus, short-form pieces for those without the time (or attention span) for classic Epsilon Theory notes.
“He who controls the spice controls the universe.”
The world’s principal supplier of semiconductors – the spice of OUR global empire – is now Taiwan.
Thanks a lot, Intel. Thanks a lot, Bob Swan. Thanks a lot, Jack Welch. Thanks a lot, all you Wall Street wizards of financialization.
Taiwan is now Arrakis. And we WILL fight over it.
Everyone is in a tizzy about day traders and Robinhood. “Ooooh, they’re going to have such a hangover when the bubble pops.”
Pffft. They’ll be fine.
The investors facing a hangover are small family offices, plied with endless offerings of fee-heavy SPVs and SPACs by multi-billion dollar asset managers.
The war over reopening schools is a proxy war.
The real war is between political parties, but they’ve set up the fight as teachers on one side vs. parents on the other.
This is not our war. This is THEIR war.
How to stop it? We refuse to fight.
Both Trump and Biden have proposed $2 trillion spending plans for next year, confirming exactly what we wrote last December. To the dollar. To the word.
We can’t always write tomorrow’s headlines today. But we do try!
I still believe this will be our finest hour.
Not of the America that was. But of the America that can be.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
Sometimes good news comes from unexpected places.
And sometimes it’s best just to go with it.
Defund the police? No.
Demilitarize and Deunionize? Yes.
Here’s how we use narrative to start taking back our world from the culture-porn merchants on the left and the right.
Police reform is just the start.
There is an emerging narrative structure that places a lot of demands on us as citizens – and justifiably so.
But the claim that “silence is complicity” becomes something else entirely when we redefine silence as the failure to say exactly what we demand.
Market propaganda used to be an art form, I tell you! What happened to us?
The transformation of capital markets into political utilities happened.
It’s the June 30th edition of ET Live!, an interactive livestream in which Ben and Rusty discuss all things narrative in the world today.
A sideways moment is when your life becomes a probabilistic exercise, where you are at the mercy of one of two merciless social institutions: hospitals or the police.
My life went sideways a week ago, and here’s what I learned about pain and privilege.
Epsilon Theory contributor Neville Crawley is back with an interview of Adam Julian Goldstein, discussing Adam’s fascinating new work on anxiety. If, like me, you have the entrepreneurial bug (and it is a bug, not a feature), this is a must read!
The slow wave that has moved America’s largest asset owners from direct positions in American companies to indirect pools of passive ownership has been a good thing for costs and diversification. It has, however, contributed to our present breakdown in corporate governance.
The past revolutions to fix this have failed for predictable reasons. Future revolutions don’t have to.
It is time to take back your ownership.
There is practically no information in knowing that everybody is talking about something. There is some information in knowing that everybody is using the same language to talk about something.
But there is a lot of value in knowing that people and publications with no underlying connection are simultaneously inspired to use the same language to talk about different angles of the same issue.
Written during last week’s sell-off, ET Contributor Peter Cecchini coins a phrase – The Portnoy Top.
What do you get when you combine Barstool Sports and Printer Goes Brrr?
We all know someone who is in urgent-but-not-emergency need of some medical procedure that can’t be scheduled while Covid-19 is storming the hospital ramparts.
I’m one of them.
What’s happening with the Bureau of Labor Statistics with recent employment data reports is an intentional, political carelessness that supports status quo cartoons of control.
It’s not a Democrat thing and it’s not a Republican thing.
It’s a power thing.
Since June 4th 1989, the Chinese government has tried to erase any record of the Tiananmen Square massacre from history.
Can a Tiananmen Square massacre happen in the United States? I doubt it.
Can a Tiananmen Square rewriting of history happen in the United States? Absolutely. It already is.
Our bi-modal political environment doesn’t just impact our politics. It shapes our social and cultural narratives and channels our responses to every event.
Yet Americans are large. They contain multitudes. And they can reject the political archetypes into which narratives seek to channel them. If this is to be our finest hour, then they must.
In this ET Live!, Ben and Rusty discuss all things pandemic recovery, markets and the narratives of protests surrounding the death of George Floyd.