It’s very unfortunate that some leftists are comparing Elon Musk’s trillion dollar “net worth” to GDP of entire countries. The comparison is very sloppy:

1. Spacex free float ie shares that are being actively traded and not hoarded by people like Musk is mere 5%, and the supposed trillion dollar net worth is inferred from this number.

2. GDP is a flow measure, its measure of mostly real things (services makes it complicated) a country produces in a year. Net Worth is a stock measure and for individuals, it includes “market value” of financial claims.

3. A better comparison would be capital stock of a country. But again, Elon Musk net worth is mostly fictitious capital.

Eg. Taiwan/ROC’s capital stock is roughly $7 trillion. This is the value of all monetized assets of a country. It includes all the chip fabs, all the real stuff a country has.

Much of a country isn’t monetized, how do you put a $ value on a mountain or a forest? It’s not traded on the market at all.

Elon Musk net worth far exceeds the book value of assets held by his companies plus any possible cash flows for the foreseeable future.

4. My point is not to say Elon Musk being a trillionaire is good, it’s not. He shouldn’t exist. But comparing whole countries to someone who has lots of illiquid financial claims is ridiculous.

5. Elon Musk basically issued magic tokens he himself created, with no future obligations like with bonds, got people to buy only a small supply of it (5%) and now claims to be a trillionaire. That’s close to what Sam Bankman Fried did with the FTT token.

Full employment, detaching financial and real and planning according to real constraints.

Still don’t see the point of gold here other than may be sanctions evasion. The exporting nations have to accumulate Dollars first to buy gold.

And central banks buy gold off budget unlike most spending which has to be debated and appropriated by the legislature.

Central banks hoard it and pump up the price. If a central bank bought up real estate and didn’t even rent it out, it’ll raise questions from the public on why cb is hoarding homes. Yet no one cares when it’s gold. People even call gold hoarding to be prudent.

Heck, even copper buying by a central bank using its infinite local currency capacity or using limited foreign currency reserves would be scrutinised heavily. Yet gold is fine. Palladium has similar properties to gold, why not hoard palladium?

China will accept palladium as collateral and give you Yuan for it. You ultimately pay in Yuan or similar currencies if you are a sanctioned country.

And gold itself is marked in $ terms in the books so the more gold CBs lock up the higher the % due to valuation effect even though nothing was created.

Yea it’s very clear Israel isn’t reliant on US public funds directly. It has a large export surplus with the US, and embedding themselves more directly will raise dependence.

In fact the aid is probably hurting their export competitiveness. This way they can get their currency weaker and make others dependent on them.

Most of the dollars Israel receives is private sector financial wealth.

For all the handwringing from the West abt Chinese “overcapacity”, it is Israel that’s pursuing a neo-mercantilist policy.

Kimi K2, Deepseek 4, Qwen have been pretty good and very cheap.

While Claude may be somewhat better, it’s not worth it.

Fell for “sound finance” neoliberalism conflating real and financial award.

Good article

they’re enshittifying index funds now 😭

Hitman and Watch Dogs 2. I replay same games over and over

deleted by creator

Uranus, because it’s not that special other than name. Not the largest, just another gas ice giant, not as dense as Neptune.

Mercury: First planet, Venus: Hot and pressure cooker, Earth: has life, Mars: had life maybe, Jupiter: largest planet, Saturn: cool rings, Neptune: last ‘planet’, Pluto: former planet despite being moon sized distinction

the heatwaves don’t last long long, usually multiple weeks at most. Indian cities aren’t deserts tho (mostly) , even the concrete parts have occasional stray trees. Issue is all the cities weren’t well planned. There’s three types of neighborhoods in Indian cities, the well planned fancy regions where the better off and rich live (plenty of tree cover), the haphazardly built semi-planned neighborhoods and the densest slums where the poor live.

You can see the various parts from satellite/street view. Here’s the coords:

Type 1: 28.57, 77.23

Type 2: 28.532, 77.215

Type 3: 28.538, 77.228

Northern India is absolutely cooked.

I don’t think it was ever not “cooked” but it’s particularly cooked now. All the concrete doesnt help. Developing countries need to invest large amounts of resources into greening the concrete jungles.

China also has storage, they’ll also try keep the global economy holding as long as they can.

https://www.vortexa.com/insights/chinese-stock-draws-cap-spot-crude-rally

Retvrn to monke

I’ve not watched the boys since like season 2 but

If fuel is supplied through state enterprises, the state can essentially set prices and recapitalize from budget as needed.

The supply shock then manifests as the currency weakening and other imports becoming pricier. This works as long as the country has sufficient foreign currency sources (exports, capital flows, remittances).

Foreign currency reserves can help outbid other countries too for existing oil without affecting exchange rate.

Unfortunately, even in countries where oil corps are owned by the state (e.g. India), the state is unwilling to allow these enterprises to run losses in local currency (“sound” finance). Good to see Malaysia is holding the line for now.

The state can do this even without nationalizing but theres greater risk of fraud, arbitrage if private sector is involved.

Though at the aggregate subsidies doesnt create more oil, countries outbid one another, if all countries do this, oil prices get pushed up in Dollar terms too.

I’ll say it’s a good thing the US isnt doing this since its one of the largest consumers and US in particular can outbid countries without worrying about exchange rates, large countries should let fuel prices go up slowly and compress demand instead of keeping it fixed.

and i mog everyone by the benchmark i made up

Yep. I’ve found MMT to be most realistic descriptor of money, it says that logically the state must spend or the central bank must lend before you are able to pay taxes with state money instead of money dropping from a helicopter.

You can read after it’s fine. It’s only tangnetially related