Shift From Petrodollar To Mag7-Dollar Signals Tech Currency Dominance

the cpi print is irrelevant for real inflation. t10 listed equities have become the only realistic store of value, and the white house will not let that fall, so if your wealth is in labor or property instead of mag7, you've been repriced 90% down in less than a decade.

my view is scaled employers know they can't do mass-layoffs even if the underlying productivity is not there lest face lord of the flies style societal collapse, and the employchuds want "6 figure salaries" so you can just kind of give everyone that allow inflation to take it

my foreign correspondent "cs" who i won't tag here has harped on the london print above as a particular piece of evidence for the divergence. real london RE prices are down some %, but are a total face-ripper if you view them in real currency terms (mag7)

a jeremy giffon idea ive stolen shamelessly is you can always tell where the inflation mark actually is based on how many $100m houses sell every year. when we were kids a $100m house selling was global news, now there's like sixty of them in new york and no one seems to care

@JacobDaddario @WillManidis I’ve wondered if people tolerate cronyism / corporatism so much because many people have effectively become samurai for the companies that employ them (lest they face the Kill Line).

I consider UBI as a lesser of two evils if it allows people to fear unemployment less.

@WillManidis "cpi print is irrelevant for real inflation" - wait what? i don't pay for my groceries in mag7 stock

UBI might be an okay solution to the distribution problem if labor scarcity stops existing, to the extent that we don't already have UBI. The problem is that it's unclear how we'll resolve the management of innately scarce resources like land.

Also, there's a moral dimension to labor as well. It's not clear what will happen to us if we have nothing meaningful to do. I think the modern man severely underrates the importance of occupation on our psyche.

@WillManidis Are you saying Mag7 is literally the correct metric of inflation? Reasonable enough, but you have to be long Mag7 for that metric to hold continuously. I don't see why there's not some notion of a "basket of goods" even if not CPI

Total capitalization of the stock market actually doesn't seem like a good metric for measuring inflation. It for sure does track inflation to an extent, but it seems more likely that total capital in the market and capital concentration has increased.

@WillManidis

@WillManidis Geo arb is real though as China has faced real deflation since 2021. This is only true in the consumer debt driven US

@WillManidis The jump in Mag7 circa 2020 has to do with a lack of trust in American Bonds as well

I also wonder if there was knock on effects of seizing Russian Assets without due process around that time

@WillManidis Project South Africa

@DonMiami3

@WillManidis Something something permanent underclass

@WillManidis Isn’t it more that most scaled employers = physical jobs (healthcare, retail), and that the others don’t know who’s productive/load bearing

@WillManidis What do you think is the absolute best bet among mag7, I have thought Google for a while but curious what your opinion is here

I wonder why we accept that productivity can only increase for a microscopic slice of the population. Yes, only software engineering and petroleum engineering have real wage growth (per Peter Thiel) but civilization has so much more than that.

The Mag7-dollar can describe reality, but if so it also describes extreme civilizational rot.

@WillManidis This is why you rent

@WillManidis are you bullish Bitcoin?

I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking on how much of this is novel vs how much of this is a time honored tradition that the boomers were very capable of ignoring. Thinking a lot about early Industrial landed gentry in Britain, the effect of factories on our perception of work, etc.