Long Form is Best Form
Economic satirist “Rudy Havenstein” got booted off twitter today. It was a kind and thoughtful thank you & goodbye from the Twitter corporation for his account generating 20 million monthly impressions using humor and satire to warn about the dangers of centrally managed markets, Keynesian irresponsibility, and the simple logic of Austrian School economics.
It’s also a clear warning to the rest of us: we don’t own our audiences when contributing to another corporate platform. It got me questioning the value of contributing and building an audience and generating ad revenue for the Twitter corporation when the same can happen to me without warning.
Here is Jack Dorsey’s declaration saying the opposite, from just three and a half years ago:
I’m told that substack is different and that it’s owners will resist the urge to control or manipulate the conversation. We’ll see.
But if being on substack forces me to write longer form posts instead of quick-hit tweets, well that’s gonna be a good thing. So here I am.
Markets are wild this week, and I can’t lie: I enjoy the chaos. Here is what I am watching:
Gold. I am hoping for a breakout to the upside, although gold has broken my heart over and over the past few years. I am subscribing to the TINA theory here (There Is No Alternative), and waiting to see if investors will follow that idea once the selling subsides.
Broad market & tech selloff. I am bearish. Super bearish. Sure, Powell could cave to the selling pressure at FOMC tomorrow, but political pressure on inflation is just more intense than political pressure to support the markets at this moment in time, and to me nothing else needs to be said. The squeeze yesterday does not deter me in the slightest.
Bitcoin. Apparently Tether printed $1 Billion new Tethers on January 22, and Bitcoin immediately found a price floor. I don’t pretend to understand this as well as others, and I don’t know enough to allege fraud. But something does smell rotten in the state of Denmark. I am trying to learn more while staying on the sidelines. This is worth watching, imo.
Startups. I am working hard on the upcoming atNav launch - putting a team together and working on the capital raise. I’ll be building in public and will be sharing more on this going forward.
That’s all for today. If you enjoy this longer-form content please subscribe and share this substack, I’ll try to keep this going. Thank you for reading!
Phil