Emigration from Canada has doubled since the Liberals took office in 2015. This trend continued through 2025, marking the fourth consecutive year of Emigration growth, with a record 120,016 people leaving the country.

The primary demographic leaving Canada is educated young people.

According to Statistics Canada, 67% of emigrants are between the age of 20-44…

… and 31% have a masters degree or higher.

Canada's youngest, most talented, most educated and wealthiest are giving up.

The question is: why?

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#2: Happiness

Over the past decade Canada has dropped from one of the world’s happiest countries to 25th.

Of the 3 countries that experienced a greater drop in happiness among young people than Canada, one is Malawi (with a poverty rate of 70%), and the other is Afghanistan.

This decline is not consistent across age brackets...

Canadians over 60 still rank in the global top 10 for life satisfaction.

Canadians under 25 rank 71st.

#3: Money Supply

While every other G7 nation has moved to rein in monetary expansion, Canada doubled down on the money printer. By 2025, Canada’s rate of money printing outpaced every other major economy on Earth.

#4: Gold Supply

Did you know Canada is the only G7 nation with zero gold reserves? The Bank of Canada used to have 1,023 tonnes of gold, but sold it for an average of just $1200 an ounce.

As of March 28, 2026, 1,023 tonnes of gold is worth ~$205.5 billion CAD.

#5: Loonie

Fifteen years ago, one American dollar was worth one Canadian dollar.

Today, one Canadian dollar is worth ~70 American cents.

#6: White Population

In 1971, 96% of the Canadian population was white.

Today, it is approaching 50%.

#7: Indian Immigration

Over the past 20 years, Indian Immigration has dwarfed all other forms.

Most Indian immigrants are from the state of Punjab.

#8: Asylum Claims

#9: Temporary Foreign Workers

Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program is a government-run guest worker program that lets employers hire foreign workers to fill labor shortages.

The TFW gets lots of heat, but if you look at who is actually coming into the country, TFWs are a relatively small part. Most newcomers are students and “International Mobility Program” migrants.

#10: International Mobility Program

Canada’s International Mobility Program lets employers hire foreign workers without proving a labor shortage.

Just like every other program, the IMP has been primarily abused by India.

#10: Study Permits

Again, most international students are Indian.

They aren’t coming here to learn. They are mostly coming to scam the immigration system via third-rate colleges, not top universities.

For example, Conestoga College has become almost a billion dollar institution in under 6 years because of international student tuition.

#11: Productivity

Largely as a result of importing millions of low-wage, low-skilled, low-human-capital immigrants, Canada’s productivity has lagged behind the United States.

#12: Foreign Direct Investment & Capital Stock

One input in measuring productivity is labor.

The other is capital.

#13: Aging Population

Older Canadians have gotten wealthier, younger Canadians have gotten poorer.

Boomers have captured virtually all economic gains of the last 50 years.

#14: Healthcare

#15: Mental Health

#16: Wait Times

#17: Housing

#18: Fertility and Marriage

#19: Trade & Current Account Deficit

#20: GDP

#21: National Debt

#22: Provincial Debt

#23: Household Debt

#24: Tax rate

#25: R&D Spending

#26: Venture Capital

#27: Private vs. Public Sector employment

#28: Unemployment

#29: Equalization Payments

#30: Food Insecurity and Food bank Usage

#31: Inflation

#32: Car Theft

#33: Violent Crime

#34: Overdose Deaths

#35: Religion

#36: MAID

What does this all add up to?

100,000 Canadians have now been Murdered by MAID.

96% of those euthanized were white.

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In the language of global finance, these actors have a name: vultures.

They circle distressed states, wait for the moment of maximum weakness, then swoop in to buy debt and assets for pennies, only to extract full value later through courts, sanctions, or political leverage. Or, in this case, at gunpoint.

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Towering over the vulture ecosystem is one figure more synonymous with the name “vulture” than anyone: billionaire activist Paul Singer, founder and CEO of a hedge fund called Elliott Management, which currently manages $78 billion worth of capital, making it one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. Forbes currently ranks Singer’s personal fortune as the 578th richest person in the world.

Singer has feasted on too many corpses for me to catalog in this article.

One prominent example, as described by Tucker Carlson in one of his stronger monologues below, is the tale of how Singer destroyed the small town of Sidney, Nebraska, by gutting their largest employer and selling it for parts (after donating the maximum allowable amount to Nebraska’s governor, of course):

Singer did the same thing in Detroit:

And in Korea.

In 2015, as part of dispute between Singer and Samsung, Samsung published several cartoons of him as an anthropomorphic vulture on its corporate website.

The cartoons were denounced by Singer as antisemitic, and Samsung was forced to apologize to the ADL.

While Singer often targets private companies, such as in Nebraska, Detroit, or South Korea, his most notorious campaigns have involved bring entire nations to their knees. These include the Republic of the Congo (he filed at least fifteen separate lawsuits against Congo, at a time when they were in the middle of the worst food shortage in the world) and Peru (where, as former president Alberto Fujimori attempted to flee the country, Singer’s firm seized his jet). Most famously, Singer spent fifteen years in open conflict with the Argentine government over defaulted bond payments, a campaign that culminated in a $2.4 billion payout to his firm in 2016.

• Paul Singer: The Vulture Chewing Argentina’s Living Corpse

• The Vulture: How Paul Singer Made Billions off Argentina Debt Crisis

• Paul Singer—market master or litigious vulture?

Which brings us to Venezuela.

How Paul Singer Stole Venezuela’s Crown Jewel

About a month ago, on November 25, 2025, a US judge approved the sale of Citgo Petroleum Corporation (CITGO), a subsidiary of Venezuela’s a state-owned oil company, to Amber Energy, a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management.

Venezuela rejected the legitimacy of the sale, with the Maduro administration calling it “fraudulent process,” a “barbaric theft, ”and “the theft of the century.”

The sale price for CITGO was $5.9 billion, with the proceeds flowing to creditors of the Venezuelan state. The acquisition is expected to be finalized sometime next year, pending regulatory approval... Maduro was the obstacle blocking that approval, but now he’s gone.

On a fundamentals basis, CITGO is worth far more than what Singer paid for it. Valuations during the auction ranged from $10 billion to $20 billion, depending on methodology and assumptions. Evercore, the investment bank advising the court-supervised sale, placed CITGO’s value at roughly $13 billion, while the Venezuelan government has argued the company is worth north of $20 billion.

The reason CITGO sold for a fraction of its real value is simple: U.S. sanctions and non-recognition of the Maduro government made Venezuela radioactive to investors. Most serious buyers would not touch the asset. Financing dried up. The auction never became competitive. What should have been a sale turned into a clearance event, with one vulture left standing.

What great luck for Paul Singer, then, that only one month after his purchase was approved, Trump invaded Venezuela and turned it into a puppet state, declaring that all the oil now belonged to American investors!

This outcome was not an accident, and it was not the result of normal market risk. It was the product of a specific sequence. First, sanctions isolate a country financially and legally. Then creditors use U.S. courts to strip away sovereign protections. By the time assets are finally put up for sale, the original owner is boxed out, legitimate buyers have fled, and the only actors left are those who specialize in siege warfare. At that stage, price discovery is a fiction. The asset is no longer being sold. It is being harvested by parasitic vultures.

This is the terrain Paul Singer understands better than anyone alive. His business does not depend on growth, innovation, or productive investment. It depends on collapse that stops just short of total ruin. Courts must still function, nominally. Contracts must still bind. The state must be weak enough to surrender assets, but intact enough for judgments to be enforced. Venezuela, after years of sanctions and diplomatic isolation, met those conditions perfectly.

How Paul Singer Purchases Political Influence

Am I saying that Donald Trump invaded Venezuela for Paul Singer?

No.

Popular Information

Venezuela raid enriches MAGA billionaire

In a Saturday morning military raid ordered by President Trump, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. After Maduro was apprehended and transported to New York to face …

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4 months ago · 624 likes · 60 comments · Judd Legum

Foreign policy is never driven by a single donor, and pretending otherwise would be unserious. Venezuela sits at the intersection of energy markets, regional power politics, sanctions regimes, the war on drugs, domestic U.S. electoral incentives, and long-standing ideological hostility to the Maduro government… Any intervention would have happened in a crowded causal field.

But that does not make Singer irrelevant.

It makes him unusually well positioned and influential.

Political donors like Paul Singer don’t need to micromanage strategies when those strategies already align with their interests. Instead, they strategically fund media outlets, think tanks, politicians, and campaigns to create an ecosystem where policies—such as framing military actions against regimes like Venezuela’s under Nicolás Maduro as moral imperatives—become legally enforceable and financially beneficial.

Here are 7 clear, distinct ways Singer exerts this influence:

1. Paul Singer owns the Washington Free Beacon — it’s his personal mouthpiece. In the month leading up to this week’s invasion, the Free Beacon published at least five articles portraying Maduro’s regime as a narcoterrorist threat linked to Hezbollah and drug cartels. This media barrage frames intervention as a security necessity, without disclosing that Singer, who is pushing the intervention, would profit billions.

   1. Hezbollah, Short on Support From Iran, Turns to Drug Trafficking in Venezuela To Fill Its Coffers (December 23, 2025)

   2. Bill Barr Defends Legality of Trump Boat Strikes and Describes Danger of Maduro Regime: Hezbollah’s ‘Anchor in Our Hemisphere’ (December 19, 2025)

   3. Dealing With Maduro Is No Distraction. It’s a Necessity. (December 6, 2025)

   4. Biden Admin Prosecuted Leader of Venezuelan Drug Cartel That Mainstream Media Now Say ‘Doesn’t Exist’ (December 1, 2025)

   5. Ben Shapiro Savages Tucker Carlson’s Defense of Commie Drug Lord Nicolas Maduro (November 7, 2025)

2. Singer has donated over $10 million to the Manhattan Institute since 2011, including $2 million in 2024 and $1.8 million in 2023. From 2008 to 2025, Singer served as chairman of the Manhattan Institute board of directors. He currently serves as chairman emeritus. The Manhattan Institute has produced a steady stream of papers and reports calling for Maduro’s ouster and defending Trump’s aggressive policies against the regime.

   1. “A September 2025 column criticized Columbian President Gustavo Petro for opposing foreign military intervention in Venezuela designed to oust Maduro.”

   2. “An October 2025 piece by another Manhattan Institute analyst and a co-author praised Trump’s “consistent policies against Venezuela’s Maduro,” describing them as part of an effective strategy to eventually remove Maduro from power.”

   3. “And a November 2025 article criticized Democrats for raising the alarm about Trump’s push for regime change in Venezuela.”

   4. In March 2025, the Manhattan Institute hired a Venezuelan dissident dedicated full-time to tweet about how they need regime change to pump more oil:

3. Singer is a major donor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In the month leading up the invasion, they published 8 articles with such subtle titles as: "A FREE VENEZUELA ELEVATES U.S. ENERGY SECURITY.”

   

4. Paul Singer is currently funding (via a $1 million donation) a vicious primary campaign against Congressman Thomas Massie, who is “one of the most vocal opponents in Congress to Trump’s regime change push in Venezuela, joining Democrats to co-sponsor multiple failed war powers resolutions that would have reined in the president’s ability to launch military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and launch an attack on mainland Venezuela.”

5. Singer has been one of Marco Rubio’s primary financial backers for more than a decade, helping elevate one of Washington’s most consistent advocates of sanctions and intervention in Latin America

   

6. In 2024, Singer donated $5 million to Trump’s Super PAC, along with $37 million more to Trump’s allies, and $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Singer has met personally with Trump at least four times.

7. Paul Singer has donated a total of $3 million to AIPAC since 2022, making him tied for AIPAC’s third largest donor. This matters because the court-appointed special master who forced the sale of CITGO, Robert Pincus, sits on the board of directors for AIPAC.

Taken individually, these carefully curated relationships can be dismissed as ordinary political activity: a donor funding media, think tanks publishing white papers, senators advancing hawkish views, super PACs backing friendly candidates.

Taken together, they form something else entirely.

Paul Singer did not invent sanctions. He did not invent sovereign debt litigation. He did not invent regime change. What he perfected was the ability to profit from all three at once, while remaining legally insulated from the consequences.

CITGO was not lost because Venezuela failed to manage its assets.

It was lost because transnational capital wanted it, so they took it.

Straight gangsterism.

This is what vulture capitalism looks like at its apex. Not chaos; precision. Not theft in the dark; but seizure in broad daylight. The asset survives. The state does not. And by the time the sale is approved, the only remaining question is not whether it was just, but whether anyone still remembers who owned it in the first place.

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Not anymore.

The economics job market is in freefall, and the profession’s own data proves it.

Unlike most fields, economics has a bizarrely centralized hiring ritual. Once a year, in the fall, every employer posts openings at the same time. Every candidate applies at the same time. The entire profession runs through one clearinghouse: the American Economic Association’s “Job Openings for Economists” (JOE). This makes economics PhD market uniquely measurable, and the numbers are brutal.

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Job postings for PhD economists are down 30 percent in just three years

The JOE data shows few jobs in 2022, fewer still in 2023, and fewer still in 2024.

This year’s trajectory suggests 2025 will be even worse:

Extrapolating, the 2025 market looks set to bottom out around 1,000 openings:

I think my freehand projection is a very conservative approximation of reality—actual numbers may come in slightly higher or lower, of course, but this reasonably looks like what the market is on track for, barring a miracle.

Just three years ago, there were 1,477 openings.

The fall to ~1,000 this year will represent a 32% collapse.

Most economics PhD students aren’t looking for just any job, though, they want a tenure-track position in academia. According to polling data from the 2025 Webinar on the Economics PhD Job Market, 94% of candidates from the past four cohorts reported being “very interested” or “somewhat interested” in becoming an assistant professor, dwarfing all non-academic options.

Subsetting the JOE data to permanent academic positions (tenure-track or tenured) yields a nearly identical trend: openings dropped from 631 in 2022 to about 400 in 2025, a 35% decline over three years:

Again, please forgive my Microsoft Paint skills:

The JOE data is confirmed by Econ Job Market (EJM) data, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) whose stated mission is “to improve the flow of information in the job market for academic economists, by providing a central repository for job-market materials.”

EJM data makes the pattern robust: nearly all interview invitations are sent out during a concentrated few weeks in December, and the volume of those invitations has collapsed from 3,835 down to 2,502… a 34.8% decline.

As a result, the AEA’s own Job Market Committee quietly admitted in its 2025 report that last year was “challenging” for candidates.

While Supply of Tenure-Track Jobs Plummets, Demand Rises

EJM data show that the cumulative number of views on job ads is higher than ever, with 2025 easily on track to set a new record.

That isn’t surprising: according to the 2024 NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients, 1,385 Americans earned economics PhDs in 2024, more than in 2023, more than in 2022, and more than in 2021.

You now have 1,385 brand-new PhDs chasing just 400 tenure-track jobs.

At first glance, that ratio might not look catastrophic. But here’s the catch:

They’re not competing only against each other. An equally large wave of international candidates floods the U.S. market every year. American universities routinely hire from London, Oxford, Cambridge, Toronto, Paris, Barcelona, and beyond.

Furthermore, the new graduates aren’t competing just with their own cohort. They’re thrown into the same bucket as the leftovers from every prior cycle: post-docs clinging to hope, visiting professors chasing stability, lecturers desperate to upgrade, assistant professors stranded at second-tier schools. The “new supply” is just the visible tip; the true applicant pool is a rolling backlog several times larger.

The result? According to EJM, 5,341 candidates participated in the 2024–25 market, the largest applicant pool ever recorded:

Yet the AEA’s Survey of the Labor Market for New Ph.D. Hires in Economics found that only 99 fresh PhD secured a tenure-track job in America.

That’s a ~7% placement rate for American PhD students.

Put differently: if 100 students spend six years earning an econ PhD in America (the current U.S. median time to degree is 5.8 years, not counting the growing detour of “pre-docs”), only seven will get a tenure-track job.

Even if we allow for survey response gaps and use the most charitable assumptions, the best possible placement rate for fresh Econ PhDs is likely no higher than 10–20%, maybe 25%? My methodology isn’t perfect, but no matter what, that’s still catastrophic.

And these jobs aren’t evenly distributed. A massively disproportionate share go to graduates of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, and Penn. That means for every grad student outside the top 10 programs, the odds of landing tenure track are significantly less than 5%.

Beyond academia is even more grim

Government has long been the second-largest employer of economics PhDs, traditionally offering stable if less glamorous careers at agencies like the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Bureau of Labor Statistics, or Congressional Budget Office. But even here, the number of available positions has fallen sharply. Federal hiring freezes, budget constraints, and shifting political priorities mean that many agencies are cutting back.

International organizations once served as the safety net for economists who missed out on academia or Washington. The IMF, World Bank, and OECD hired tons of econ PhDs. Today, those doors are far more scarce, and the competition is global: an American graduate is just as likely to be measured against candidates from LSE, Sciences Po, or Peking University.

Oh yeah, and they have hiring freezes too:

Outside academia, government, or IGOs, the tech industry used to provide a reliable fallback. Tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and Airbnb built entire teams of economists to optimize pricing, design experiments, and model consumer behavior.

That avenue, too, has begun to shrink. Tech hiring, which exploded during the pandemic, has collapsed. Today, demand is not just weak but structurally below trend, as firms automate more of the work that junior economists once did.

The only seemingly stable landing spot left for economists is in banking and finance, but even here hiring is stagnant and remains well below its pre-pandemic trend. Counterintuitively, most private-sector banks and investment firms do not rely heavily on PhDs in economics. They prefer MBAs, statisticians, or computer scientists, leaving economics doctorates as niche hires rather than a core part of the workforce.

Four Structural Reasons Behind Decline of Demand for Economics professors

REASON 1: Declining undergraduate enrollment in economics

Benjamin Hansen, an econ professor at the University of Oregon, recently tweeted out His department’s own data show a steady fall in the number of declared majors, which has now translated into fewer degrees conferred.

National statistics confirm the trend: the number of students graduating with economics degrees is now slipping after years of steady growth.

Because universities hire faculty in proportion to student demand, this drop in majors eventually trickles down into fewer faculty lines.

REASON 2: The looming demographic cliff

The decline in majors is compounded by a larger demographic shift. The U.S. is approaching a “demographic cliff,” as the number of 18-year-olds begins to shrink in the 2020s and 2030s. Fewer college-aged students overall means fiercer competition among departments for enrollments.

REASON 3: The rise of artificial intelligence

Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, gave ChatGPT his graduate-level Labor Economics final exam. The AI earned a “D” (this was 2 years ago), but soon enough, we all know it will be smart enough to earn an A. The technology is improving rapidly, and universities know it, and so does the private sector. Tasks once reserved for graduate students and junior faculty—data cleaning, econometric modeling, even writing referee reports—are now being automated.

REASON 4: Lying About Inflation

If you were there during the pandemic money printing, you remember the sequence all too well: first the confident insistence that government spending wouldn’t fuel inflation, then the soothing claim that inflation was merely “transitory,” and finally the outright gaslighting that prices weren’t rising at all. Each step was wrong, and each was delivered with smug certainty. Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.

Is an Economics PhD still a good deal?

The answer is no. An economics PhD is no longer an investment. It is a gamble with terrible odds. A handful of winners still exist, almost all of them minted at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, or Chicago. For everyone else, the degree is a trap: six or more years of grinding work that too often ends with being overeducated, underpaid, and locked out of the profession you trained to join.

In My Tribe

Beware of Econ Grad School

Which of these best describes your motivation for wanting to go for a Ph.D in economics…

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a year ago · 64 likes · 19 comments · Arnold Kling

After I wrote this entire article, I came across a similar one published last month by the New York Times:

It essentially just blamed the ‘‘bull market for economists being over’’ on the same three core reasons as I did:

• ‘‘Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts.’’

• ‘‘At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones.’’

• ‘‘Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned.’’

Much more interesting than the NYT article was this commentary on it from , a PhD economist trained at UC Berkeley:

Global Developments

Twilight of the Econs?

A story getting covered in The New York Times is usually a lagging indicator: a good way to learn that something horrible has happened, long after you could conceivably profit from the news…

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8 months ago · 46 likes · 7 comments · Oliver Kim

He begins by engaging with the NYT article, then runs through the same JOE data I did, ultimately landing on a similar diagnosis: the collapse is driven largely by federal hiring freezes and the looming demographic cliff. From there, though, his piece becomes more distinctive and interesting, exploring the social dynamics and internal hierarchies of the profession. His conclusion is bleak for the discipline itself, but notably optimistic about the future of Substack:

Do I think the PhD job market will bounce back?

Prognosticating too eagerly is a good way to land yourself a place in the Irving Fisher Hall of Forever Being Remembered For Having Said One Stupid Thing.⁴ A 16% fall in jobs, while devastating, is not yet apocalyptic. (By comparison, historian job ads have fallen closer to 50% since their 2008 peak.) But for things to get better requires a causal mechanism. Reinstating science and academic funding would require either Republicans to reverse their stance on the value of higher education, or for Democrats to win back the Senate. I don’t have a great sense of if either will happen.⁵

In this case, prediction may be less important than preparation. Placement chairs need to own up to the harshness of the labor market, and urge job market candidates to start prepping non-academic options. (Better yet, admissions chairs should consider paring back cohort sizes.) Candidates who would like a proper job after graduating should be networking, hard. And candidates resolutely committed to academia should steel themselves for long hibernations as post docs, to wait out the coming storm.

On second thought, I will venture one dark prediction, for at least the near future.

We’re going to see a lot more Substacks.

The wager, then, is that the future of intellectual life will be increasingly decentralized. Platforms like Substack are already siphoning off the kind of energy and analysis that once flowed into journals or policy shops.

As for the economics profession, the only real fix would be radical: every PhD program would have to coordinate and act like a cartel to slash admissions to dramatically reduce supply. Without that discipline, the system will keep flooding the market with useless doctorates, a Ponzi scheme destined to collapse under its own weight.

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Back in 2022, when almost nobody was paying attention to Lisa Cook, I obtained her tenure packet through a FOIA request and published it. At the time, the story barely registered. That post got just 19 likes.

Chris Brunet

EXCLUSIVE: Lisa Cook's Tenure Packet

Lisa Cook’s nomination to the Fed Board is being voted on by the United States Senate this week, or sometime soon. I am not sure when exactly the vote will take place. I have covered her fecklessness extensively — my article Biden’s Fed Nominee Lisa Cook Criticized For Being Unqualified, Embellishing Resume…

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4 years ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Christopher Brunet

Fast forward to 2025. Lisa Cook is now the number one story in America, with the entire media, both mainstream and alternative, finally paying attention.

Paul Krugman

In the Matter of Lisa Cook

Yesterday Donald Trump said that he had fired Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. My wording is advisable: He “said” that he had fired her. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems clear that he does not have the right to summarily fire Fed officials, certainly on tissue-thin allegations of mortgage fraud before she even went to the Fed…

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9 months ago · 2881 likes · 581 comments · Paul Krugman

The Contrarian

Lisa Cook made history. Now she’s being punished for it.

One of my first jobs was teaching economic education and entrepreneurship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, where I also proudly served as a member of the Student Board of Directors. It was there that I learned how public affairs could serve the public g…

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9 months ago · 66 likes · 7 comments · Michael Franklin

Jared’s Substack

Lisa Cook's Unjust, Illegal Firing

I have little to add to reams of digital ink being spilled re Trump unjust and illegal firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. Not a lawyer, of course, but much commentary supports the view that this is an illegal firing, in that, as far as we know, the president does not have cause for her dismissal, which is the statutory requirement in this cas…

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9 months ago · 92 likes · 21 comments · Jared Bernstein

Two days ago, I republished the same tenure packet that everyone ignored three years ago. This time, it exploded: 16,000+ likes and nearly 700,000 views.

After that went viral, I joined Carl Higbie on Newsmax to break down Lisa Cook’s tenure packet and explain why her rise to the Fed is such a scandal. That interview is already closing in on 200,000 views on YouTube.

For me, that appearance was a milestone. If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know that public speaking has always been my Achilles heel — I used to stutter, freeze, panic, and even turn down big interview opportunities out of fear.

But speaking live to Carl’s half a million viewers (imagine five packed football stadiums), I was calmer, clearer, and more confident than ever before. Well, relatively clear and confident. I still have verbal tics, and trouble making eye contact with the camera, but I made my points, spoke in full sentences, wasn’t nervous, and came across coherently. That’s a win in my books, and I am happy with my progress. I just need to keep practicing.

After that Newsmax interview, yesterday, Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro featured my reporting. They talk about me at the 4:00 mark of this clip:

It’s rewarding to see a story I’ve been working on for so long finally breaking through. Now that the country is finally paying attention, here’s the FOIA’d tenure packet that started it all, please download and share it so people can see for themselves why Cook’s rise is such a scandal, and why her downfall was so predictable.

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In my previous update, published a month ago, I reported a major development: the Trump administration opened an investigation. That article also contains links to my previous dozen pieces on the topic.

Chris Brunet

Exclusive: Trump Administration Launches Probe Into Yale’s Use of Hacked EJMR Data

Long-time Karlstack readers will recall my crusade against a team of Yale economists who hacked an economics forum (https://www.econjobrumors.com/), which I covered in a series of 10 articles, culminating in me giving a speech at Stanford University on free speech and anonymity…

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a year ago · 60 likes · 11 comments · Christopher Brunet

The next day, Marginal Revolution, the most influential econ blog in the world, picked up my story, and I was heartened to see that their comments section was overwhelmingly supportive of my perspective:

• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/06/trump-administration-launches-probe-into-yales-use-of-hacked-ejmr-data.html

Today brings another significant development.

The dataset at the center of this controversy—the hacked EJMR data—had been hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a major academic data repository housed at the University of Michigan.

Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, ICPSR removed the dataset and sent an urgent email to everyone who had previously downloaded it. The message read:

‘‘Please delete all data files you downloaded from this project and confirm you have done so by replying all to this email.’’

This is an extraordinary request. In all my years of covering academic misconduct, I’ve never seen a dataset pulled like this—especially one that had already been cleared for academic use. Even more unusual is the demand that everyone who downloaded it confirm its deletion. It signals a serious escalation.

Shortly afterward, ICPSR Director Margaret C. Levenstein confirmed via email that ‘‘we [the University of Michigan] are investigating.’’

I’m sharing this update not just to document what happened, but to ensure it doesn’t get buried. This story needs eyeballs on it. For two years, I’ve autistically dragged this story into the light, one painstaking step at a time. Every new development continues to validate what I’ve been reporting: this scandal is real, it’s serious, and it’s finally catching up to the people and institutions involved.

The story isn’t over. And I’ll be here until the end.

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From the quality of the logic and writing in this article, suffice it to say that it's evident she got into Harvard because she is Sheryl Sandberg's niece.

Maya’s argument is, ‘‘Chris Rufo & his allies (i.e. Karlstack) are leading a plagiarism witch hunt and creating the false impression that Black women disproportionately plagiarize.’’

This morning, hilariously undermining Maya’s narrative, I woke up to the news that another black woman had been popped for plagiarism.

The news comes courtesy of an exclusive City Journal and Daily Wire investigation which ‘‘reveals additional facts that cast new doubt on Cook’s seriousness as a scholar’’.

I am not going to walk through each new instance of plagiarism. If you are interested in this scandal, go read that story directly, it is very descriptive. Give them some clicks, it’s an interesting piece of reporting:

• Trouble at the Fed: Investigation into Lisa Cook’s Academic Record Raises Questions (DAILY WIRE)

This article was co-authored by Chris Rufo and Luke Rosiak.

It includes a Karlstack shoutout:

Cook also seems to have consistently inflated her own credentials. In 2022, investigative journalist Christopher Brunet pointed out that, despite billing herself as a macroeconomist, Cook had never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article and had misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming that she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review. In truth, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine.

This is why I am so interested in today’s story.

Lisa Cook and I go waaaaay back.

Longtime Karstack subscribers will be familiar with this saga, but the vast majority of my subscribers are brand new, so it is worth briefly recapping,

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I wrote about Lisa Cook in my first ever Substack article all the way back in 2021 — in fact, this was the first thing I had ever written in my life, in any format — “The Federal Reserve Goes Woke”:

Karlstack

The Federal Reserve Goes Woke

Navigate to newyorkfed.org, and rather than anything relating to monetary policy, you will be met with the following impenetrable statement front-and-center on the landing page: In the turgid tradition of Fedspeak, this word salad simultaneously means nothing — purposely crafted to be a series of vague platitudes — while also signaling their true intenti…

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5 years ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Christopher Brunet

I conclude in that article that this scandal was entirely predictable:

I then was hired at the Daily Caller, at which point Lisa Cook was nominated to the Fed Board of Governor’s, so I did some digging into her resume…..:

Which led to a Tucker segment:

Two months later, I did some more digging, uncovering her tenure packet

Karlstack

EXCLUSIVE: Lisa Cook's Tenure Packet

Lisa Cook’s nomination to the Fed Board is being voted on by the United States Senate this week, or sometime soon. I am not sure when exactly the vote will take place. I have covered her fecklessness extensively — my article Biden’s Fed Nominee Lisa Cook Criticized For Being Unqualified, Embellishing Resume…

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4 years ago · 17 likes · 4 comments · Christopher Brunet

Disclaimer: I am about to recycle a few paragraphs from this old Tenure Packet article.

When I got my hands on her tenure packet I found that her own econ department voted against tenuring her, and her case had to be overruled by the Dean on the basis of diversity.

So…. she is not good enough for the Michigan State economics department — a mediocre department in terms of ranking — but she is somehow good enough for the Fed Board?

My investigation into her tenure packet generated another Tucker segment.

I was invited on Tucker’s show several times as a guest, but sadly I declined as I was afraid of public speaking live in front of 4 million people.

Following that article, Cook’s only respectable publication (which was already thoroughly debunked and shown not to replicate by economist Michael Wiebe) was further found to have more glaring fatal flaws by some internet sleuths:

And further covered by the inimitable Steve Sailer.

He again eviscerates her fraudulent paper in a series of detailed articles:

It is also worthwhile reading this EJMR thread :

And especially this thread from her anonymous colleague:

The dagger in the heart of this paper was then University of Chicago macroeconomist Harald Uhlig who buries it beyond any shadow of a doubt in a blog post.

Uhlig then published an op-ed in the WSJ explaining why Cook is a partisan hack:

Why is her debunked paper so important? Because her boosters pretend that her qualifications are better than they are. This includes her fields of expertise, the quality of her research, the nature of her policy experience, and her employment trajectory as a professor (such as describing her visiting position at Harvard as having been an Assistant Professor at Harvard).

She is portrayed by Democrats as some sort of macroeconomic genius. But the reality she is a midwit with a penchant for lying and scheming. Oh, and she isn’t even a macroeconomist.

After this all went down, The New Yorker put out a hitpiece against me, indicating that I was over the target.

I was proud of my reporting at the time, because I single-handedly caused the US Senate to debate her credentials for several weeks, holding up her nomination.

Cook was almost denied as a result, but squeaked through.

I like to imagine that I gave the Republican Senate Banking Committee enough political capital via the Lisa Cook fight that they leveraged into getting Sarah Raskin denied.

The Left wanted 2 seats on the Fed, but instead, they only got 1.

That’s real impact! Karlstack driving debates in the US Senate.

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work:

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Anyways, that’s the Lisa Cook saga.

We now have the latest chapter.

In addition to being a liar, hack, lightweight, and DEI activist, she is also a plagiarist.

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The Sahm Rule identifies signals related to the start of a recession when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate rises by 0.50 percentage points or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months.

— Federal Reserve Economic Data

It’s a simple recession indicator, ‘‘invented’’ by friend-of-the-blog Claudia Sahm.

Stay-At-Home Macro (SAHM)

My goal is to make economic policy and macroeconomics better.

By Claudia Sahm

You may remember her from this peculiar episode in which she went around advertising herself as the ‘‘Chief Economic Consultant of the Conservative Party of Canada’’.

A fabrication, as I unveiled.

She’s a far-left political operative who worked for John Podesta. It is wholly inconceivable that the Conservative Party of Canada would bestow upon her the title of ‘Chief Economic Consultant’.

As many political operatives do, she cloaks herself in a thin veneer of credentials, in this case, a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Her career as an economist is built primarily upon the ‘‘Sahm Rule’’.

It’s featured front and center on her website:

In recent years, the Sahm Rule has been featured ad nauseam in the mainstream media, who constantly trip over themselves to fawn over it:

• 'Sahm Rule' enters Fed lexicon as fast, real-time recession flag (Reuters)

• Claudia Sahm breaks down her recession indicator (Fox News)

• Economist Claudia Sahm has a better way to handle recessions (MIT Sloan)

• What the Jobs Report Says About the 'Sahm Rule' (Wall Street Journal)

• .Claudia Sahm on what is driving inflation in America (The Economist)

The Sahm Rule is a huge deal in macroeconomics!

Which is weird. Because it’s not only trivial… but stolen.

Trivial, because the rule states: Unemployment rises in a recession.

To claim a revelation in stating the rise of unemployment during economic downturns is akin to announcing the arrival of rain during a storm.

Stolen, because it was first invented by economist Bill Dudley.

We know this because Claudia Sahm angrily tweeted out an email she received from Dudley, in which he politely points her toward the same rule that he came up with 20 years prior, in a Goldman Sachs research report:

Did Sahm fail to acknowledge a prior economist’s identical work, or was she simply unaware? The pursuit of truth demands transparency and proper attribution.

Upon being notified of this, she repeatedly called Dudley a ‘‘LOSER’’.

And then repeatedly played the gender card, making this issue of academic integrity about ‘‘men who refuse to acknowledge women’s expertise’’.

She then states that she chose to disregard Dudley and ‘‘own it’’ because ‘‘any man would.’’

The introduction of gender into this discourse is a distraction from the core issue of intellectual integrity. Did she create the "rule" or not? That is the question that demands an answer, free from emotional manipulation.

What she fails to realize is this has nothing to do with gender. If Justin Wolfers stole a rule, for example, and then spent years parading it around on the world stage, it would be just as egregious. This is a prime example of a weaponized victimhood complex.

She then appeared on the Mercatus Center podcast to further manipulate the narrative:

INTERVIEWER: To have a rule named after you is a pretty big feat, a pretty big accomplishment … You have a rule named after you. You've done it at a blazing pace … How did the name come about?

SAHM: Christy Romer, I was talking to her … I said, "Oh, the Sahm Rule," and she looked to me, and she's like, "Claudia, you have got to own this. Any man economist would own this," and I was like, "This is true. I've never heard John Taylor push back on the Taylor rule," so I've tried really hard.

…

So then, like, two or three weeks ago when it got more coverage, I think this was when the Wall Street Journal article came out, we were driving home in the car, and [my teenage daughter] looked at me, and she's like, "Mom, are you worried that you've peaked with the Sahm Rule?"

She then explains that her rule is different than Dudley’s because she uses a chart, and he uses a table.

Except… when you turn his table into a chart… it turns into her chart.

Dudley's table laid the foundation, Sahm's chart merely decorates/visualizes it.

SAHM: And I actually got an email from Bill Dudley like a week or two ago. And the subject line of the email was, for what it's worth, here's my three-tenths rule I put it in a Goldman Sachs newsletter in 2000, 2001 and he did a little screenshot of the Goldman thing, highlighted the sentence, he'd written and then there was a table. A table, not a chart of like how it worked in [mine]. I didn't reply to him.

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Here she says that she ‘‘couldn’t believe that a man cared enough’’ about the naming of her rule to send her an email.

Well, which is it?

Does she see the "rule" as a trivial matter, or a stolen treasure?

Why does the name of this rule matter?

Well, it doesn’t, really.

It’s academics fighting over table scraps as usual.

Except she loudly built her entire career on these stolen table scraps, and is now playing the gendered victim.

Here is where you will quote Stigler’s law of eponomy to me, which states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

However, Stigler’s law exists for concepts that have been cemented in scientific lingo only after being used for decades/centuries. The Wikipedia page for the Sahm Rule is a mere 4 years old, and will exist for decades/centuries, so it’s not too late to rename this the ‘‘Dudley-Sahm Rule’’.

If you are a Wikipedia user, please make the edit:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sahm_rule

In fact, in 2022, the Wikipedia page for the ‘‘Sahm Rule’’ used to have a caveat stating that it should be called the ‘‘Dudley-Sahm rule’’, or at least that there was controversy over the naming, but this caveat was deleted because ‘‘mostly non-economists who are politically opposed to Claudia Sahm’s discussions of women’s role in economics and therefore … [is] misleading information.’’

Except… it’s not ‘‘mostly non-economists’’ who use the correct ‘‘Dudley-Sahm Rule’’ terminology.

Michael Feroli is Chief US Economist at J. P. Morgan.

He referred to it as simply the ‘‘Dudley Rule’’ in a 2022 report, and was viciously dragged and shamed on Twitter for it.

That was the last time anyone high-profile referred to it as the Dudley Rule.

It’s simply not worth the fight for serious economists to be intellectually honest about this, because the feminist mob will jump on them.

A woman invented the Sahm rule. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over?

Why is the Dudley-Sahm Rule in the news?

I began this article by saying that the ‘The ‘Sahm Rule’ is in the news again.’’

That’s because the recession rule is currently triggering across 20+ states, including big ones like New York and California.

She now says the rule doesn’t apply to states, only on a national level.

Yesterday, she wrote a Bloomberg article defending her arbitrary usage of the rule:

• https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-27/stop-applying-the-sahm-rule-recession-indicator-to-states

What this reveals is that Claudia Sahm is a partisan hack.

I am 100% sure that if Trump were president she would be arguing that it applies at a state level.

Serious economists and journalists should refer to it as the ‘‘Dudley-Sahm Rule’’ moving forward.

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1. It’s been about a month since I published an article on Substack — so sorry for the lack of productivity, especially to all my new subscribers who signed up following the Claudine Gay episode — I contracted COVID in January, which torpedoe’d my productivity for a few weeks. I am back on the grind.

2. Upon recovering from COVID, I had to spend a week flying from Europe to Florida to attend this fellowship conference…I am happy to announce that I have been awarded the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship (MILF):

   

3. Coindesk wrote an interesting piece about me, or more accurately, they wrote about how I would have won a couple of thousand dollars in crypto gambling markets if Claudine Gay stepped down as POTUS of Harvard before January 1st.

   

   Sadly, CG stepped down on January 2nd, so my trade didn’t pay off.

   

4. True North — Canada’s top conservative outlet, wrote a piece about my Canadian involvement in the Claudine Gay affair:

I have always had a policy against writing book reviews because I find the genre boring… I don’t read other people’s book reviews… so why would I want to force other people to read a genre that I wouldn’t want to read?

Today, I broke my own rule and wrote my first book review, because an outlet offered me $200 to write about Thomas Sowell’s newest book. Upon seeing the completed product, however, they told me they were not willing to publish it. The feedback I got was:

‘The obligation that falls on the shoulders of someone reviewing a book by an elder statesman of a school of thought is to put the work in biographical and historical context; to recognize why the elder statesman has achieved his stature; and to appreciate whatever most merits attention in this late (and perhaps last) work. It's really not the kind of book that should trigger sharp polemics in a reviewer.’’

Fair enough.

I wasn’t trying to be deliberately polemical — I love Sowell more than anyone, and didn’t set out to be negative — I just didn’t love this book, so I am not going to pretend I did. Maybe I should have written a reverential puffpiece.

Overall, this was a good learning experience for me to experiment and branch out into a new genre, but I don’t think I am about to become a professional book reviewer anytime soon. I have a few big upcoming journalism scoops in the pipeline :)

Buy the book:

• https://www.amazon.com/Social-Justice-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541603923

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I couldn't suppress a groan upon reading the first page of ‘‘Social Justice Fallacies’’ by 93-year-old legendary economist Thomas Sowell. 

‘‘In American sports,’’ it begins, ‘‘blacks are very over-represented in professional basketball.’’

This is the same argument we’ve all read thousands of times before from the anti-affirmative action wing of the internet: if Asian athletes do not receive affirmative action on basketball teams, then why does it make sense for black scholars in academia? 

The point is not wrong, it’s just… trite; and that triteness sets the tone for this entire book. The premise of ‘‘Social Justice Fallacies’’, which might have been a clarion call to action 40 years ago, now feels like a repetitive sermon in a world thoroughly versed in the equity vs. equality debate. While comprehensive and persuasive, this book lacks the fresh spark of originality that even a genius nonagenarian is frankly incapable of producing.

To wit, 40 years ago, in 1983, Thomas Sowell wrote a book, ‘‘The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective’’, the description for which brags that ‘‘Sowell finds that the social and economic patterns among Italians in Australia and Argentina are similar in many respects to those of Italians in Italy or the United States’’. Lo and behold, on page 93 of his new book, you will find a story about how ‘‘nearly 90 percent of the Italian immigrants to Australia came from an area in Italy containing just 10 percent of that country’s population.’’ 

The vast majority of points made in this book are recycled similarly, and if you’ve been chewing the same piece of gristle about Italian immigrants for 40 years — even if you are making a valid point about how people sort themselves out in society — don’t expect me to swoon when you tell it again for the 41st year. 

And yet, I swoon nonetheless, because when your beloved grandfather fondly tells the same story you’ve already heard 40 times, you don't roll your eyes; you sit, you listen, he's earned that deference. Thus, despite its predictability, I approached this book with a sense of duty and found a great degree of enjoyment in its familiar pages.

It’s a breeze to get through: although listed as 224 pages, 78 of those are just references, making the main text a mere 146 pages of succinct, yet thought-provoking analysis of the fallacies inherent in our contemporary cultural Marxism paradigm. The prose is not elaborate or flowery. It is written in a plainspoken and direct manner. That’s Sowell’s whole schtick; he’s the ‘‘common sense’’ maverick, and he doesn’t need to try to be anything more. This no-nonsense approach renders the book ideal for high school students seeking to swallow their first red pill, or perhaps for older adults seeking a gentle introduction to culture wars.

Describing Thomas Sowell's contributions as 'common sense' is not to diminish them; rather, it highlights a rare and valuable form of wisdom. Sowell excels in extracting clear insights from a world enamored with complexity and constant distraction. His analyses cuts to the bone of each subject he examines, with unerring precision.

Sowell's book shines brightest in weaving together a fun tapestry of anecdotes about race, gender, geography, governments, professions, schools, countries, and cultures. The book is essentially a collection of fun story after fun story. These stories work together to form an ironclad historical narrative; however, there are moments where Sowell's stories provoke skepticism. The first to come to mind is his peculiar and overly-libertarian defense of predatory payday loans in Chapter 4, which he thinks shouldn’t be capped or regulated in any way:

• In the particular cases where legislated limits on what is called “interest” force payday loan businesses to go out of business, social justice reformers may go away feeling good about having ended the “exploitation” of the poor, when they have in fact simply denied the poor one of their very few options in an emergency (pg. 99)

Thomas Sowell's most significant blind spot, however, is in Chapter 2 where he critiques genetic determinism—the theory that genetic differences account for variations in racial groups' test scores.

First off, he rehashes the same arguments he’s been writing about for decades, without introducing novel insights into the discussion. None of this is new; Sowell's longstanding engagement in the discourse surrounding IQ's role in social mobility and racial disparities is well-documented. Advocates of ‘‘race realism’’ have always expressed disappointment with his steadfast argument that environmental factors are predominantly responsible for test gap scores. 

Sowell’s response to the race realist crowd is not only tired and repetitive, but weak. Despite considerable mental gymnastics, he fails to build a compelling argument as to why impoverished Han Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish children will always, no matter what, outscore wealthy Somalian and Aboriginal Australian children on IQ tests.  I wouldn't expect a good response to this from an economist. No one wants to talk about it seriously.

I believe Sowell is being purposely obtuse when he acts puzzled over Asian students taking the spots of black students at a school for gifted children: he dismisses genetics altogether simply by waving his hands --  instead, he blames the overrepresentation of Asian geniuses on a nebulous cabal of  ‘‘social justice advocates’’. He fails to even entertain the possibility that Asian kids are naturally smarter and better at standardized testing due, at least in part, to their genes. 

• As late as 1971, there were more black students than Asian students at Stuyvesant [a school for gifted children]. As of 1979, blacks were 12.9 percent of the students at Stuyvesant, but that declined to 4.8 percent by 1995. By 2012, blacks were just 1.2 percent of the students at Stuyvesant. Over a span of 33 years, the proportion of black students at Stuyvesant High School fell to less than one-tenth of what it had been before. Neither of the usual suspects— genetics or racism— can explain these developments in those years. (pg. 145)

Furthermore, Sowell appears to be disconnected from the current dynamics of the social justice discourse, a realm that evolves rapidly, often unfolding in real-time on platforms like Twitter. His references and narratives, although rich with historical significance, seem dated. For an author tackling the subject of social justice in the contemporary era, a familiarity with current influencers and issues is crucial -- he gives a nod to Ralph Nader, for example, but fails to mention any modern movers and shakers such as Trump, Biden, Tucker, or Ibram X Kendi. Few of his stories are from the past 5-10 years,  missing an opportunity to address today’s most polarizing topics—such as transgenderism, climate change, and open borders. He barely talks about modern college campus culture wars.

Perhaps my expectations going into this book were skewed. The inclusion of "social justice" in the title led me to anticipate a discussion centered on contemporary social justice. However, the book leans heavily more towards historical analysis than a reflection on current societal dynamics. It is fitting, therefore, that Sowell concludes with a quotation from British historian Paul Johnson, underscoring the book's emphasis on the lessons of history.

• The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. (pg. 146)

If this turns out to be his last book, it won't be remembered as his magnum opus, but it's a decent last call. It stands as a suitable culmination of a long and earnest career committed to preaching factual analysis and clear-eyed interpretation of economic realities. I can only pray that I am half as lucid when I am 93 years old.

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… please retweet my tweet:

https://twitter.com/realChrisBrunet/status/1702700108893077815

… and pre-order Sowell’s new book. Written at the age of 93!

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Justice-Fallacies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541603923

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/destroying-canadas-farms-for-what/

I just tweeted it out 2 minutes ago, so, as much as I hate to be contrived and Macheavellian about twitter, if you could go like/reply/RT/QT, it would be helpful to boost it in the algorithm.

https://twitter.com/realChrisBrunet/status/1691128661213429760?s=20

As always, I hate to send you paywalled articles, but it is new, and my job to promote it! Today’s article will be unpaywalled in a few weeks from now, at which point I will blast out the unpaywalled version.

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More importantly, such a price ceiling had never been attempted before, and I thought it would fail if for no other reason than I didn’t think the hubristic West had the competence to pull it off. Surely such an audacious plan would backfire, much like most of the other economic sanctions against Russia have backfired or utterly failed.

It still might backfire — we are early days yet, the cap on crude oil was first implemented on December 5th, 2022, and it won’t be fully implemented until February 5th, 2023 when further caps will be imposed on diesel, kerosene and fuel oil — but so far, it seems to be working as intended.

At least, it’s kind of working. It seems like it is going to work. Probably. Maybe.

Quick Overview

The price cap is exactly what it sounds like: a maximum price of $60-a-barrel on Russian oil. The intent of the price cap is exactly what it sounds like: to deprive Russia of revenue.

The Ministry of Economy of Ukraine expects that this will cut Russia’s oil profits by at least 50%. That is a biased source, obviously, but not too far out of the realm of what other analysts are expecting. Ultimately, nobody really knows what the actual impact will be on Russia’s finances. All we can do is guess. It’s safe to say, though, that it will deprive Russia of untold billions.

Largely as a result of this price cap, Urals oil (Russian export oil mixture is called “Urals” oil) is currently selling at a discount of roughly 50% compared to the exact same oil produced in other countries. Below is what the spread looks like, you can see it has increasingly widened as the price cap became a reality.

“This spread is the result of the combination of the EU [ban on Russian oil shipments], which is the main factor, and the oil cap,” said Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

My expectations are that this spread is only going to widen in months to come, as Russia maintains its status as an international pariah, and the screws are tightened.

Just two days ago, it was announced that Western nations have agreed to “review” the level of the price cap in March 2023. I would be shocked if they didn’t tighten the screws upon review, and decrease the price cap from $60 to $55 or $50 or even lower. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) is recommending lowering the price cap to $25 to $35 a barrel — which would slash Russia's oil export revenue by ~$100 million per day. "Further cuts to Kremlin's revenue will therefore materially weaken the country's ability to continue its assault and help bring the war to an end," CREA said in a report.

The IMF estimates the breakeven price for production of Russian oil is close to $30 or $40 per barrel. As long as the cap remains above that, Russia will have an incentive to keep producing. The last thing Western nations want is for Russia to drastically stop producing oil, which is a very real possibility if they get backed into a corner and feel like they have no other choice.

“The oil product market is arguably the one place where Russia retains meaningful leverage if it chooses to weaponise exports,” says Henning Gloystein, an analyst at Eurasia Group. “Any shortfall of Russian product exports could coincide with higher demand in China, tightening markets even further and raising the prospect of price spikes that renew inflationary pressure.”

Russia’s internal 2023 budget is built using the assumption of $70 for oil, and this budget predicts a 2023 deficit of 2% of GDP. So, if the price of oil is significantly lower than this $70 benchmark, their GDP is likely to drop by 3%… 4%… or more. Last month, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov hinted that the country’s budget deficit in 2023 might exceed the expected 2% of GDP.

Russia can fight this price cap by allowing the ruble to weaken, “thus increasing the ruble value of lower dollar oil receipts, this would raise broader risks to macroeconomic financial stability and likely accelerate capital flight. “

Will this price cap impact Russia’s ability to wage war? No, not really. It will still take a military defeat of Russia by Ukraine (or vice versa) to end the war. This price cap is simply one more bargaining chip.

For starters, Russia has a big financial buffer to work with, because their current account surplus rose to more than $227 billion in 2022, more than double the $108bn surplus from 2021. To offset the damage done by the price cap, they will simply draw from this surplus, take on more debt, and/or increase taxes. Military spending isn’t expected to be touched.

President Vladimir Putin last month called the cap “stupid”, saw no reason to “worry about the budget”, and boasted of his “unlimited” ability to finance the invasion of Ukraine. I believe him. 1 or 2 percentage points of GDP won’t shake his resolve — he’s in too deep for such a marginal increase in the budget deficit to matter.

Last week, Putin signed a decree banning the supply of oil to countries who participate in the oil cap. This ban will come into effect on Feb. 1, next week.

“Russia, as a matter of principle, will not supply oil at the prices set by the West. Russia will look for new markets and logistics even as costs rise," says Russian finance minister Siluanov.

So who will Russia sell their oil to, if not the West?

The Big Winners: India and China

In 2021, India and China combined to purchase roughly 20% of Russia’s oil exports.

In February 2023, it is expected that they will combine to purchase ~70% of Russian oil exports.

They are purchasing this oil at a deep discount to the free market, which is an unexpected windfall for them. I guess the West simply decided they preferred to transfer money from Russia’s pocket to India/China’s pocket, and India/China were all too happy to accept it.

While this hurts Russia, the West is playing right into China’s hands by handing them massive amounts of free/discounted oil. Chinese President Xi Jinping announced last month that the energy partnership was one of the cornerstones of cooperation between the two countries. “China intends to work with Russia to build even closer partnership and cooperation in the energy sector,” said Xi.

Moving forward, I suspect China and India are going to ask for even bigger discounts as their bargaining position improves and they leverage their position as the only buyers. That was explicitly part of the West’s rationale for implementing the price cap: even though they knew only 27 nations took part in the price cap, they were aiming to reduce Russia’s bargaining power with other countries.

The funniest part is that India isn’t even consuming all this deeply discounted oil, they are shrewdly turning around and selling it on the open market at a markup.

As per the Times of India, “During April-October of 2022, India’s total exports where up 12.5% [relative to 2021], while oil product exports soared nearly 70%. In the case of Netherlands, Brazil, Tanzania, Togo, Israel and Oman, oil shipments have soared at a much higher pace.”

These numbers are a couple of months out of date… moving forward, India is expected to export more and more and more of this discounted Russian oil to the world, effectively acting as a middleman between Russia and the rest of the world. In preparation for these increased exports, the government of India just cut taxes on oil exports in order to stimulate them.

The Maybe Winners: Africa?

Last week, Janet Yellen went on a tour through several African countries and repeatedly shilled the talking point that her price cap “could save the 17 largest net oil-importing African countries $6 billion annually.” She encouraged African countries (who aren’t part of the price cap) to use their increased bargaining power to squeeze Russia for deeper discounts.

“While our approach may be exacting, we believe it delivers lasting results. Countries need to be wary of shiny deals that may be opaque and ultimately fail to actually benefit the people they were purportedly designed to help in the first place,” said Yellen. “This can leave countries with a legacy of debt, diverted resources, and environmental destruction.”

I guess it makes sense that Africa could and should take advantage of the cheap Russian oil — just like India and China are doing — but it also feels like Yellen is blatantly trying to manipulate African nations like a puppet master to achieve her own ends. I don’t know… it feels kind of… yucky… to use Africa as a pawn.

Long Term Impact: It May Backfire Bigtime

When Putin stops selling oil to countries participating in the cap on February 1st (next week), Western countries will be left fighting for oil from Norway, Saudi Arabia, United States, etc… meaning the same amount of Western demand will be chasing a lower supply!

Same Western demand + less supply to the West = higher prices

Thus, in the long-term (this price cap is likely to stay in place at least until the war is over) I expect the global price of oil to rise, therefore exacerbating global inflationary pressures at a time when interest rates are already rising.

At least, oil prices will be higher than they would be in a counterfactual world where this price cap didn’t exist.

While this cap will certainly hurt Russia financially, it may hurt the West as well if and when oil prices skyrocket. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face; I understand that in war it’s sometimes necessary to hurt yourself in order to hurt your enemies, but don’t lie to yourself and pretend like you aren’t hurting yourself by cutting off your nose.

In addition to the supply/demand factors exacerbating upside price risk in the long-term, there is also a significant risk that this cap overlooks or underestimates how Russia could influence global oil prices by weaponizing their production. By backing Russia into a corner, Russia could easily react by slashing production. According to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, Russia “may reduce its oil output by 500,000-700,000 barrels a day in early 2023” in response to the price cap. “We are ready to partially cut our production early [in 2023],” he said in an interview.

Bob McNally, a former energy official in the George W. Bush administration, says Putin “may not be bluffing about slashing oil or natural gas exports”, and that Putin “could withstand the economic pain longer than Washington and Europe.”

“This thing could go horribly wrong,” McNally said. “Let’s say Putin decides to have an endurance contest with the West. Who can survive $6 gas longer?”

"[Western] countries are today praying that Russian oil exports will not go down," says Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at Swedish bank SEB, "Because if they do, then the oil price will spike … to above $200 a barrel.”

What if Putin does something even more unorthodox than slashing production, and implements a floor on Russian oil to counter the ceiling? What then? Are oil-hungry nations like China really going to refuse to buy Russian oil altogether? I doubt it.

“Ultimately, if the price cap regime is implemented and buyers try to adhere to it, then naturally Russia will say 'pay the price or no oil," says Schieldrop.

The bigger picture is that this price cap has accelerated the push towards a multipolar world; it has driven Russia into the open arms of Asia and Africa, and they have embraced one other. Russia’s economy is undoubtedly more intertwined with Asia and Africa than it was a year ago, thus making it harder for them to decouple in the long-term.

By forcing the world to accept a new regime of partitioned oil markets, rather than a unified global oil market, the West is accelerating the creation of a multipolar new world order, which would be to the detriment of NATO’s desired unipolar world order.

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Karlstack

The Federal Reserve Goes Woke

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5 years ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Chris Brunet

That article will always hold a sentimental place in my heart — I fondly recall the nervousness & trepidation that any new writer feels upon nakedly putting themselves out on a limb for the first time

A big reason for the success of this article was that Quote Tweeted it to his 0.5 million Twitter followers, adding simply, “seems a little over the top.”

While this was ostensible criticism (everyone is the comment section of the tweet was mercilessly mocking me), I am 90% sure that he was giving a straussian wink, perhaps to magnanimously boost a new writer, perhaps because he agreed with me with about the future of the Fed.

repeatedly tweeted the article out to her 30,000+ twitter followers, which gave it a big boost.This was before I had any subscribers at all, and is what kickstarted my Substack career.

Anyways, thanks Matt and Claudia. I suppose I should return the favor:

Stay-At-Home Macro

My goal is to make economic policy and macroeconomics better.

By Claudia Sahm

Slow Boring

Passion and Perspective from Matthew Yglesias

By Matthew Yglesias

I ended that article with an emphatic call for Lisa Cook to not be nominated to the Fed board… and over the next year she was nominated and confirmed. Nominating an incompetent black woman to one of the most powerful positions in the world simply because she is a black woman is about as woke as you can get, and lying while you do it (“She’s a leading expert on monetary policy! She’s a genius!”) is par for the course.

With Lisa Cook at the helm, the Fed has only descended further into wokeness and will continue to do so at an accelerated pace moving forward. As such, it’s worth following up on this phenomenon because once the public loses trust in the Fed, it’s over. That’s the whole ballgame. That’s the end of fiat currency.

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Auston Goolsbee: A Poor Man’s Paul Krugman

In December 2022, Dr. Austan Goolsbee was named the next Chicago Fed president.

Hilariously, he has blocked me on Twitter despite the fact that I have never interacted with him:

Goolsbee is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and by all accounts a very good one (just like Paul Krugman was an excellent trade economist back in his day). Goolsbee’s 10,695 citations on Google Scholar are more than 10 times what Lisa Cook has, and they graduated from their PhDs at nearly the same time.

I spoke with another UChicago economist, Dr. Harald Uhlig about this appointment.

Here is what he had to say:

I have not interacted with him much. I guess econ prof in Chicago plus Washington experience makes him highly qualified in the eyes of those that selected him. I am always happy if good things happen to a colleague of mine. He is not a monetary economist, though, and there are plenty of excellent ones in the area. So this looks like another case of appointment due to connection rather than specific expertise. At least his academic record strikes me as legit.

While Goolsbee is indeed “not a monetary economist,” the traditional prerequisite for Fed leadership, I think it's not terrible to have a public finance economist on the FOMC who understands fiscal policy much better than monetary economists.

The “Washington experience” and “another case of appointment due to connection rather than specific expertise” lines are much more problematic, and get to the crux of the issue — for all intents and purposes (this is my opinion, not Uhlig’s) Goolsbee is no longer an economist, he’s a politician… an extremely left-wing partisan operative.

Goolsbee was Chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and served in the Obama Cabinet. In 2019 he endorsed Pete Buttigieg for President. In the 2020 general election, he co-chaired the Economic Advisory Council for the Joe Biden Campaign.

While he himself is not overtly “woke,” per se, he will side with the Democrat party line 100% of the time. That’s his entire schtick— he’s a salesman trotted out to give a veneer of “technocrat” to whatever the Dems him to. The Dem line in the year 2023 is to blindly support an uber-woke fed, thus you can be sure he will too. He’s a good soldier. A mouthpiece. A water carry-er. A loyal bannerman. That’s all he is.

In his role as Obama’s CEA chair, he utilized his homespun, folksy, high-IQ huckstership to turn the Office of the CEA into a pure partisan sales show.

Goolsbee is the attack dog sent to do the cable TV circuit whenever the blue team has propaganda to push.

Here he is, for example, arguing just a few months ago that 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not the definition of a recession.

Remember that whole “2 quarters of negative GDP growth is not a recession!” psyop?

Yeah, Goolsbee is the one who psyop’d you. He’ll say anything he’s told to by his masters.

Another example of his willingness to lie to support the blue agenda is when he went on TV and talked about how there are only ~6 million undocumented immigrants in the United States… so we shouldn’t worry about it too much.

This is especially blatant because Goolsbee had just reviewed a paper where the opening line is, “The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 11.4 million undocumented persons reside in the United States.”

To further underscore how hyper-partisan he is, here is a great blog post by The Grumpy Economist which goes into depth about Goolsbee being a political hack. This article says that “Austan is repeating a well-orchestrated bit of democratic party spin, talking point, or propaganda.” and that “Usually, ‘‘actual economics’ finds little value in either party’s porgapada. Echoing that propaganda is a sure sign of empty analysis, so avoid it.”

“When Austan wraps his political dog-whistles in "I'm an Actual Economist" and shows his PhD, honest citizens don't so much update the deep truth of democratic party propaganda, they update on what academic credentials mean, and what academic research and analysis is. No, 99% of us are not here to scream one party's talking points are the utter truth, and the others scheming evildoers.”

Goolsbee’s descent into political hackdom mirrors that of Paul Krugman — once respected as a bookish academic, he has now fully sold his soul to the Dem apparatus.

Guess he thought imitating Kruggles was the key to success, and hey, looks like he was right. He’s playing the game successfully. The fact that it’s working for him doesn’t make it right, though. Appointing Auston Goolsbee to lead the Chicago Fed would be analogous to appointing Peter Navarro. I have no issues with Peter Navarro as a person, per se, but I still wouldn’t appoint him to the Fed because he’s an overtly partisan pugilistic, and that’s all he is.

This is a race to the bottom. Moving forward, you can be sure that Ron DeSantis will appoint a bevy of Peter Navarro types to the Fed simply because it;s necessary to fight fire with fire, and Dems will flip their shit when he does, shrieking about the sanctity of an independant , non-partisan Fed.

But they will have brought the erosion of the Fed’s independence on themselves — it will have been 100% self-inflicted, and entirely foreseeable. It’s sad to watch the integrity of the Fed crumble and being unable to do anything about it. It feels like I am in sleep paralysis. This sort of thing does a real disservice to your profession and the role of economists generally in objectively giving policy advice.

This is neither here nor there, but Goolsbee is also a member of the Skull and Bones secret society. In my humble opinion, nobody who is a member of a Satanic-sex-orgy-cult should be allowed to have any power over a nation’s purse strings, just as a matter of common sense.

Republicans Pick a Fight With Mission Creep

The problem with fighting mission creep is that people find it extremely boring.

That’s the insidious nature of a “creep” or a “long march through institutions” — it’s a war of attrition waged over the course of many years, so there is never any sense of urgency.

Despite how boring it is, mission creep has stubbornly clung onto the periphery of public discourse and has been written about ad-nauseum by the mainstream financial press; a new mission creep article pops up every few weeks, seemingly it’s the go-to topic that Fed watchers write about when they run out of other ideas. Yet none of these articles ever go remotely viral… because nobody really cares.

• Reject the Fed’s Mission Creep

• The Fed’s Mission Creep Has Turned Its Monetary Policy into a Failed Mission

• Mission creep at the Fed

• Mission Creep at the Federal Reserve? Or Mission Focus?

• Central bank mission creep

If the right-wing had any modicum of media prowess, they would rebrand mission creep as something sexier; maybe describe it as totalitarianism and stress how bureaucracy co-opts the private sector to accomplish its ends. It's fascism really. These fascists can't accomplish their goals democratically, so they subvert democracy and instead focus on wielding power via an unelected administrative state.

Seriously: call it “fascist creep” rather than “mission creep” and watch how much more traction your articles get. Branding is important, and I don’t think this new term is needlessly inflammatory, this is a very real existential threat that can accurately be described as fascism. If the Federal Reserve continues to focus on objectives that are outside of this core mission, it will not be able to effectively fulfill its primary responsibilities. They’ve already fallen asleep at the wheel and caused the highest inflation in several generations, and instead of redoubling on their core mission of low prices and stable employment, they choose to double down on activism? Madness.

To quantify this focus on activism, the Mercatus Center published a report in 2022 titled "Mission Critical or Mission Creep? The Research Function of the Federal Reserve Banks," which found that:

The Fed regional banks' research staffs have increasingly engaged in research on activist topics (i.e., inequality, climate, race, and gender).

More than one-fifth of all Fed regional bank papers were coded as activist in 2021, versus between four and eight percent each year from 2006 through 2013.

Increasingly activist research agendas could pose problems if the public comes to view the regional Fed banks' research as controversial or designed to influence public opinion on politically charged topics. Activist research agendas risk politicizing the Fed, which values its reputation as a politically independent, technocratic institution.

Here is what this focus on activist topics looks like:

Now that this has proven to be happening, the old line “this isn’t happening!” has predictably shifted to “it’s a good thing this is happening! Diversity and climate has always been the purview of the fed!”

One major sign of pushback from within the Fed came in December 2nd, 2022, when Chris Waller, a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, put out the following press release:

I cannot support this issuance of guidance on climate change. Climate change is real, but I disagree with the premise that it poses a serious risk to the safety and soundness of large banks and the financial stability of the United States. The Federal Reserve conducts regular stress tests on large banks that impose extremely severe macroeconomic shocks and they show that the banks are resilient.

This is an extraordinary statement simply because the Fed generally likes to present a united front, and any dissent whatsoever is usually minor, if at all. The fact that someone in the Fed leadership broke ranks and came out with this strongly-worded anti-activist statement is… unprecedented.

A second sign of pushback came just a few weeks later, when the Senate Republicans introduced the Federal Reserve Accountability Act of 2022.

There are a few random provisions in the bill, such as geographic requirements and anti-lobbying provisions, but we will ignore those for now as they are ancillary.

There are 2 main aspects to this legislation:

1. Makes the presidents of the Fed regional banks (such as Austan Goolsbee!) presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed positions.

   1. Currently, they are selected by their private sector boards of directors and then are approved by the Fed Board of Governors in Washington.

2. Reduces the number of Fed regional banks and Federal Reserve districts from 12 to 5.

   1. Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis will dissapear, while New York, Cleveland, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. will survive.

   2. I am happy about this if for no other reason than it’s ridiculously inefficient to have 2 out of the 12 banks, St. Louis and Kansas City, both located in the state of Missouri.

I am confused why this bill hasn’t gotten more attention; it totally blows up the dynamics of the monetary system which have been status quo for the past 100+ years, since The Fed's 12-bank structure was established in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I guess the reason it’s gotten very little coverage in the mainstream financial press is that it has a very low probability of passing with Democrats controlling government.

Still, it’s the first sign of life I’ve seen out of the anti-mission-creep faction in… forever. At very least, I’m glad that they’ve gone on the offensive. In politics, whenever you’re not playing offense, you’re playing defense.

A pessimist might say that this is nothing more than a symbolic parting shot from Pat Toomey, the leader of the Senate Banking Committee. He was the main sponsor of this bill, and has long been the most vocal (read: the only) opponent of mission creep in the Senate. He retired last week, immediately after introducing this bill.

An optimist might say that he didn’t introduce the bill alone; it was co-sponsored by 5 other Republican Senators (Mike Lee, Cynthia Lummis, Thom Tillis, Bill Hagerty, and Ted Cruz). Perhaps they can keep the specter of this bill alive until the Republican eventually regain control of the Senate.

More generally, I think this is good because re-opening the Federal Reserve Act gives the opportunity to do lots of other stuff that should be done — it paves the way for a whole legislative agenda. For starters, the regional banks should be made public institutions that can be FOIA’d. Currently, they hide behind them being private and hide anything sensitive in the NY Fed and say you can’t FOIA it.

What impact would this bill actually have on monetary policy? It’s hard to say.

Are 5 big branches really better than 12 small branches? Why? The stated purpose of the bill is to “limit the concentration of power in Washington”, but I have a feeling concentration of power would only increase when 5 people are wielding the power that 12 people used to hold. This makes the fed system more centralized, not more decentralized.

Reducing the monitoring structure to 5 is akin to saying we should reduce the number of Congress people by 65% or we should reduce the number of police by 65%.

That argument assumed the Fed actually produces tangible value for society, though, which is unclear. More cops —> less crime. OTOH, what tangible value is provided by hundreds of PhD economists p-hacking thousands of fake papers on gender & green finance, all with predetermined conclusions? It’s merely a jobs program at this point, and I am fine with slashing it with a machete.

Arguably the more impactful change is making Fed presidents presidential appointees/Senate confirmed; this takes power away from the Fed, and I am always in favor of that. If they want to shove the next Goolsbee down our throats, they’ll need to prepare for a big political fight, rather than dictating it by waving their hands.

Although this also makes the Fed more political and at the mercy of Presidential whims, which kind of defeats the point of having an independant Fed in the first place. The Fed won’t be able to plausibly claim they are “arms-length” if this happens.

Mission Creep at the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

In the past month:

What’s going on at BLS?

Seems like they are being captured, too, and rigging the numbers for Biden.

Might be worth doing a deeper dive.

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Karlstack

FTX as a Controlled Demolition

This is my FTX article. There have been a million FTX articles over the past week; my challenge is to add value somehow; to do something different. No point reiterating what has been said ad nauseam. What I am not going to do in this article, then, is explain the logistics of the collapse, why it matters, how it happened etc… here are a good few Substac…

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4 years ago · 24 likes · 10 comments · Chris Brunet

A couple of hours later, this happened:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/banking-giants-new-york-fed-start-12-week-digital-dollar-pilot-2022-11-15/

Wow, good timing, this makes my article much less of a “schizophrenic conspiracy theory” and much more “this is actually happening.”

So, half the reason I wrote this article is to say i-told-you-so.

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What is this CBDC Pilot Program?

This is extremely reductive, but for the layman, rather than USD, think of CBDC as “USD coin” or “USD token.” Edward Snowden refers to it as a ”cryptofascist currency” but I like to refer to it simply as “fedcoin.”

For the duration of this 12-week pilot program (participants include BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo) fedcoin transactions will use simulated data.

The NY Federal Reserve press release says that this pilot program is “not intended to signal that the Federal Reserve will make any imminent decisions about the appropriateness of issuing a retail or wholesale CBDC, nor how one would necessarily be designed,“ but we all know what happens after the simulated test run.

Fedcoin is controlled through a distributed ledger that keeps track of central bank reserves. The specific technology undergirding fedcoin is called a “regulated liability network (RLN),” which is an “interoperable digital money platform.“

Here is the RLN whitepaper:

The Regulated Liability Network Whitepaper

4.62MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Why Does it Matter?

Will Sam Bankman-Fried go to jail?

Who will win the war in Ukraine?

Who is Pete Davidson dating?

Who will be the next POTUS?

All of these are petty, inconsequential distractions from the biggest story of our lifetime: CBDC is the future of money, and it’s not a vague, distant plan anymore… the future of money has arrived.

I’m old enough to remember last year, during the Canadian trucker protests, when the government of Canada froze the bank accounts of not only the protesters, but the bank accounts of anyone who donated as little as $20 to the protesters.

They did this without any due process whatsoever.

Honking for Freedom Newsletter

Bank Apologizes over Trucker Convoy account freeze

Scotiabank is the first of the ‘big five’ banks to issue an apology over the freezing of bank accounts belonging to a trucker convoy protester. In an email from the office of the CEO of Scotiabank (Brian J. Porter) asked protest spokesperson Benjamin Dichter to, “Please accept our sincere apologies for the frustration and inconvenience this situation may…

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4 years ago · 202 likes · 101 comments · B.J.

China is the world leader in CBDC; America is a couple of years behind their digital Yuan.

When 25 million people were locked down in Shanghai during Covid, police drones used facial recognition to identify anyone on a balcony… and fined them directly from their CBDC accounts.

Why should we copy China? China is horrible. Any sane person should watch this video and conclude that Western civilization should do the opposite of whatever China is doing here, not marching with them in lock-step, and certainly not trying to one-up them.

CBDCs are communism.

Kanekoa News

Central Bank Digital Currencies are the Bullet Train to Digital Concentration Camps

The White House published a "comprehensive framework" on Friday attacking decentralized cryptocurrencies while promoting a U.S. government-controlled programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), per an official press release. Agencies that were chosen to lead the ongoing working group for the research and possible development of a CBDC include the …

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4 years ago · 228 likes · 58 comments · KanekoaTheGreat

This is why the future of money scares me so much: CBDCs are an authoritarian dictator’s wet dream; fedcoin is one step away from government controlling you even having the ability to transact.

If I were religiously inclined, here is where I would point out that Fedcoin is the mark of the beast. How long until they connect fedcoin to a microchip implanted in your forearm? Oh, and of course, this microchip will also be tied to your “digital vaccine passport,” your race, your gender, carbon footprint, voting history and social credit score. Vote the right way and don’t say or write anything we disagree with… or we will turn your money off.

With fedcoin, Biden can make your money "expire" if you don't spend on green/BLM scams. They will call this a “nudge” at first, but trust me, it won’t be voluntary for very long.

I can't believe people are just rolling over and taking this. Allowing the federal government to have this level of control is total suicidal insanity.

Western civilization is commiting seppuku.

@kaizenteachingsIt’s the have nots and have yachts. #cbdc #uk

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What Can Be Done?

This is actually revolution worthy… this is it. This is the whole ballgame. We accept fedcoin and it really *is* over. Say goodbye to privacy, freedom, autonomy and free-market capitalism. It is not alarmist, hyperbolic, or conspiratorial to call CBDC an existential threat to liberty. This will be the greatest violation of human rights in history, and proles will cheer it on, just like they cheered on Covid lockdowns.

I would say “fight back” (raise awareness! sign a petition! call your Senator!) but I’ve given up hope, it’s pointless trying to fight, you will lose.

Not that Americans or Canadians have the will to fight/organize in the first place: too fat, too riddled with SSRIs, too mollified by screens and UberEats. Barring fighting back (which is futile — anyone that opposes fedcoin will be labelled a domestic terrorist and hunted down like a dog), there are only 2 pragmatic options: bend the knee and play along with your new CBDC overlords, or flee the West.

I fled.

I advise anyone who values freedom to do the same, before it’s too late. Once your CBDC social credit score gets too low, they won’t let you on planes or cross borders. It will creep up on you out of nowhere… and then one day, all of a sudden, you won’t be allowed to fly or leave the country. Is that really so crazy? I was already barred from flying once due to Covid, I was barred from leaving Canada. I was trapped as a political prisoner in my own country. I won’t let it happen again. I won’t give them a second chance.

Your ancestors fled their oppressive homeland to come to America/Canada in search of a better life. They left it all behind in the name of freedom.

When will you be brave enough do the same?

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I want to begin this article by stressing that I really don’t care about “lynching.”

It is not an interesting / relevant topic, and I especially never cared because I am Canadian and in the entire history of Canada, there was only one lynching, in 1884, and that was done by an American.

Race-obsessed Americans might think this is callow, but let’s put it this way: I give as much consideration to American lynchings that happened 200+ years ago as the typical American gives to lynchings in Rajasthan that happened this past summer.

It is much to my chagrin, then, that I keep being dragged into writing about lynching scandals in academic economics. Lynching has nothing to do with economics. Nonetheless, it is being shoved down the profession’s throat at every turn, and if you’re an academic economist, you’re not allowed to notice this.

First I wrote about lynching research because Lisa Cook’s career was based on fraudulent lynching research, and nobody in the media would report on it — perhaps because they didn’t know about it; perhaps because they were afraid of questioning a woke sacred cow. So when Joe Biden nominated Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors based on her fake lynching research (which was spun as “monetary economics”), I broke the scandal for the Daily Caller News Foundation:

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The top EJMR thread of September was about lynching… Woke paper in AEJ applied with just about the worst phacked graph I've ever seen.

How bad is this “worst graphs I’ve ever seen” that was so outrageous it was the econ professions’ most talked about thread of the month? Judge for yourself:

What they are laughing at, of course, is that if you remove the outlier, you can draw any line-of-best-fit in the remaining cluster, and any of these lines will fit the data equally as well as every other line:

This is especially egregious because the author’s final conclusion in her paper, Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks, is that "moving from the twenty-fifth percentile of lynching rates to the seventy-fifth percentile results in a 2.7 percent drop in voter registration rates among Blacks.“

There is plainly no effect in that range. So, the author’s final conclusion is wrong.

I drew a yellow line in Microsoft Paint to show what this 2.7% drop from the 25th to 75th percentile looks like:

The author of this paper is Dr. Jacohva WIlliam, assistant professor at GWU, otherwise known as “The Beyoncé of economics” according to this PhD student at Harvard.

How does the “Beyoncé of economics” “prove” with “science” her conclusion? By torturing/twisting the data to get statistical significance, of course… otherwise known as p-hacking.

P-Hacking by Binning

The first thing you need to know about this now-infamous chart is that while it may appear to only have 22 observations — there are 22 dots on the plot, right? — the dataset in question actually has 267 observations. The author aggregated these 267 datapoints into 22 higher level datapoints because it was convenient, without any real statistical justification.

I downloaded the author’s data and replicated the chart. This is what it looks like when it is not binned:

It’s immediatiely obvious that her results are being driven by a few outliers which were previous obscured by the binning. The binning creates the impression that there are lots of outliers, thereby undercutting the claim that they are truly outliers.

Let’s drill down into the outliers — things are even worse than they appear. These 5 counties are the 5 most extreme datapoints:

These 5 counties have populations of roughly 39k, 29k, 37k, 45k, 16k… this adds up to ~176,000 people. These ~176,000 people in these 5 heavily-white counties are given more weight than the millions of people in heavily-black Atlanta.

It gets even worse if we dig a bit more. Let’s isolate, for example, the rightmost point, Dade County, GA,

Dade county is 0.87% black, and population 16,000.

Fulton county is 43% black, and a population of 1,052,000.

Yet all counties are given equal weight, precisely to make lynching look much more common than it was. So the results are not driven by an outlier, but by a subsample of counties that are very different from the rest of the population. If you re-run this analysis using nominal values rather than per-capita values, the results disappear.

The results also disappear if you remove the 5 outlier counties. Notice how, when they are removed and disaggregated, the line of best fit goes from “very steep” to “basically flat” — meaning her results don’t survive having 1.8% (5/267) of the data dropped.

That still isn’t enough — dropping 1.8% of the data is actually being charitable to the author. Typically, a result is only considered to be “robust” if it holds after 5% of observations (13 of 267, in this case) are dropped. So, let’s drop 5% of outliers, and to top it off, let’s re-bin it, just like the author did! The results then not only disappears, but becomes positive.

These concerns about robustness are actually addressed by the author in footnote 31 of the paper:

The negative relationship remains when the group of outliers is removed from the sample.

In what sense does the relationship “remain” when outliers are removed? If the results were actually robust to removing the outliers, the associated regression results/tables would be reported in the paper.

The Clustering Clusterfuck

"Note: Standard errors are in parentheses and are clustered at the county level."

The observations are counties!

It is telling that the author wrote a paper in which # clusters = N.

Falsified Falsification Test

One commenter points out: You guys haven't even really dug into the data. Check the falsification test for white lynching rates. The zeroes are because she includes counties with zero white lynchings (most of them) in that spec, unlike for fig 5 or the corresponding headline regression. Talk about baking your results in.

Conclusion

Dr. Williams concludes her paper by writing, “this research has important policy implications.”

“Has policy implications”?

Really? What are they? Stop lynching people?

Lol, as if lynching is a real problem in 2022.

Brandon thinks it is. He just signed legislation that will solve this totally-real-problem-that-definitely-exists.

Needless to say, he’s putting on this performance with the legislation purely to pander to black people. How stupid does he think they are? I would be insulted.

I guess this is the same administration that fell hook-line-and-sinker for Jussie Smullet’s lynching hoax… so maybe they aren’t pandering, maybe they are genuinely stupid and believe lynching is a modern problem that needs a modern solution.

Jussie Smollet did a great job drawing attention to this important cause, just like Jhacova Williams is doing now.

You know what, actually? Fuck it. Who cares. Nothing matters. Call this lynching paper “monetary policy” and give Jhacova William a seat on the Fed Board next to Lisa Cook.

Give these lynching experts, who don’t understand basic econometrics — or worse, who do understand basic econometrics but pretend not to, for political gain — control of the national money printer.

What could go wrong?

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Spawned the #1 thread on EJMR this week. Rather than elucidate on the math mistake myself, I will elevate the voices of these outraged nerds.

The funniest part, to me, is that she uses this summation symbol in her papers, obviously without really knowing how it works:

One reason I chose to signal boost this blunder is that I know for a fact that hundreds of mathematics professors subscribe to Karlstack and they would get a kick out of it. Economists are a joke to them, this must be hilarious.

Karlstack

Woke Mathematicians Are Putting Their Enemies On A Surveillance List

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4 years ago · 9 likes · 3 comments · Chris Brunet

Karlstack

Chad Topaz Booted From the Williams College Math Department

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4 years ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Chris Brunet

Another, more petty and vindictive, reason is because Dr. Boustan signed the petition against my former supervisor.

This petition was covered by Fox News in this article:

So, this is personal for me.

Anyone who signed that petition is not only my personal enemy, but the enemy of free speech, the enemy of the spirit of the academy, and the enemy of western civilization. Here are the names of all 400+ economists who signed that petition. My advice is to download this file and check it whenever you want to hire or interview any economics professor — many of the signatories were PhD students at the time, a couple of years ago, so they are on the Job Market this cycle. Blacklist them. Don’t give them citations, don’t give them jobs. These are woke Bolsheviks and should be spat upon, repeatedly.

I know journalists are supposed to stay cold and detached and impersonal. Welcome to a new era of guerilla journalism, where Bolsheviks are spat upon rather than elevated.

Karlstack

Opinionated investigative journalism

By Chris Brunet

Karlstack

Princeton Plagiarism

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4 years ago · 15 likes · 9 comments · Chris Brunet

This particular innumerate woke Bolshevik is also an affirmative action hire; Boustan was tenured at Princeton econ department a few years ago with only 3 “A” publications at the time. Suffice is to say that if she were a Chinese male, there is a 0.000% chance that she would have been tenured at Princeton with 3 A publications.

Karlstack

The Economics Profession is Systemically Racist and Sexist

A hundred years ago, Harvard had what then-President Lawrence Lowell called a “Jewish problem” -- he was convinced that Harvard could only survive if the majority of its students came from non-Hebrew stock. The problem, you see, was that those pesky Jews were scoring too high on the admissions test; the solution was to make the admissions process more subjective/holistic. More weight was given to the interview process so they could best determine the "character" of the applicant. Harvard also mandated that a passport-sized photo become part of the application process… to screen out big noses, course. This worked for the next three decades to suppress the number of Jewish students…

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4 years ago · 13 likes · 15 comments · Chris Brunet

It should be noted that she looks like Bellatrix LeStrange from Harry Potter movies:

It should further be noted that Dr. Boustan is one of the most influential immigration experts in the world, and will probably work in a Democrat White House at some point in the future. Here she is running flame for Biden’s immigration plan:

To be clear: Biden’s immigration plan is, and was always, quiet literally, to intentionally flood the country with millions of illegal immigrants. This open border policy has resulted in 750 migrant dead migrants so far this 2022 fiscal year — a tragic new record — and Boustan was out there shilling that it didn’t go far enough.

For the record: this spike in border crossings following Biden’s “election victory” wasn’t an “unforeseen consequence that nobody could have seen coming.” This massive flood of illegal immigrants was the plan the whole time. We were there. We remember. That *was* the plan. You knew it, I knew it, Leah Boustan knew it. And yet she chose to lie and downplay this RADICAL open-borders immigration policy as “too conservative” so that it could pushed forward.

If you support mass immigration like Leah Boustan does, odds are high that you also support open borders, since, at a high enough influx of mass immigration, the difference between “mass immigration” or “open borders” just becomes semantics. If you support open borders, by definition you support a borderless world… otherwise known as a one-world-government, or a new world order.

I will end on this note. Leah Boustan sits on the Board of Editors at the American Economic Review (AER). Recently, the AER published a 100% fraudulent economic history paper.

Karlstack

Shuo Chen & Yiming Cao: The Men Who Made History

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4 years ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Chris Brunet

Since she can’t do math, I assume she is on the AER board solely to advise on economic history, her area of specialty. Was she the editor for this fraudulent paper? I don’t know. When I wrote that article 3 months ago, exposing Chen & Cao’s fraud, I repeatedly reached out to the AER, and they repeatedly ignored me.

If Boustan has any integrity, she will push the rest of the AER editorial board to retract this fraudulent AER paper. Or at least open an investigation, JFC, don’t just ignore this problem and hope it goes away. This is about having integrity. I hope the entire AER editorial team is reading this right now: the whole world knows you have a fraudulent paper sitting in your journal, I know it, you know it, the econ profession knows it. Your approach towards this fraud so far has been to ignore it, and to ignore me. Disgraceful. I can’t believe the AER needs me to lecture them on ethics. Perhaps they can take a page out of the Journal of Finance’s book, and act like professionals rather than like the mafia.

Karlstack

Journal of Finance Withdraws Article Following Karlstack Investigation

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4 years ago · 19 likes · 6 comments · Chris Brunet

JF > > > > AER

The Last Word

As is tradition in my articles, whenever I write about someone or some organization, I reach out to them and offer them the last word. To Dr. Boustan’s credit she answered my email.

Question: Are there any specific or general statements you would like to make [about the EJMR thread]? I would be happy to include them. No comment is also fine, of course. 

Answer: I have been quite open on Twitter and in conversations with people in real life that I have a limited math background, so a story on this topic does not seem like breaking news.

For example, on Twitter in November 2019, I wrote that "They tell you the best training for economics PhD programs is real analysis, but I say it’s high school or college debate team"

The context of this tweet was about the culture of econ seminars, so I was partially joking around that learning debate skills is useful for success in the profession. But, in another way, I was totally serious. I think that debate is a good preparation for developing the logical skills needed to build academic arguments, as I articulated here:

In a later tweet, I elaborated that I myself never took real analysis -- this is not a part of my background that I am hiding.

In fact, the last math classes that I took were multivariate calculus and linear algebra when I was 18 years old. I am soon turning 44, so that was 26 years ago (but, of course, this is probably the extent of the math I can do - so bear with me)!

I have also emphasized how important my writing background has been to the career I have now. I have talked about my time editing the college newspaper as one of the most important aspects of training for the career I have now -- for example here but also in other places.

Question : Did Harvard have qualifying exams for econ PhD students when you attended in the early 2000's? If so, did you pass the micro and metrics exams? 

Answer: Yes, we had comprehensive exams at Harvard when I was a first year student in 2001.

Your readers might be surprised to hear that I actually received a grade in the A range on the micro exam, so I placed in the top half of the class. For example, I shared this experience here on Twitter a while back:

Many of my fellow students had more math preparation than I did. Some already had MA degrees. So, how could I do well on the exam, given my limited preparation in math?

Two things helped, I would say.

First, I had a wonderful study group with three other students and I believe that we all received 'gains from trade' by participating in the group. I was an Econ major in college. The three other members of my study group were a math major, a physics major, and a chemistry major. We worked on our problem sets together. In many cases, I would get started on the problem that others were stuck on. I would have good insights into how to set up the answer, but then I would run into some math that I needed help with. The other people in my group then helped with solving the math, and taught me a lot along the way (probably many things that I since forget).

Second, I am very organized at studying and test taking. So, I was able to categorize in my mind the different types of problems and pull from my 'rolodex' the types of solutions one would need, given the type of problem. This skill has helped me in advising, for example, because I can easily make connections between the problem that a student is working on and related papers in the field that might serve as a useful template for that student.

Question: Do you regret signing the Uhlig petition?

Answer: I did not see how it was relevant. Could you explain why you are asking about it?

Question: I consider signatories of that petition to be enemies of free speech, thus in my article I argue that it is morally justified to single them out and mock their math skills.

Answer: Oh OK. I guess we don't see eye-to-eye on this. I think it's fine for people to wonder about my math skills whether or not I signed the petition, and so I don't see the petition as relevant. Thanks for clarifying.

Question: From what I can tell from your twitter feed, you advocate strongly for open borders and mass immigration. Do you also advocate for a one world government? 

Answer: On your question about open borders -- It is surprising to me that you are planning to write a piece about my views but that you don't want to read my book or listen to the many podcasts that Ran and I have given about the book. I would urge you to do the research on this yourself and see if my views accord with the stereotypes that you lay out here.

For example, I would draw your attention to p. 13 on Streets of Gold, which says "Even to those who are convinced that immigration is good for America, more immigration isn't always better. It would be facile to say that US policy should maximize the number of immigrants."

You can find many similar quotations from me -- maybe at the event that I did at the American Enterprise Institute, for example?

I appreciate the opportunity to engage with you on this topic. Because you have called my attention to the thread, and because I think it is important to engage with everyone in the profession who has questions for me, I will post my responses to your questions on the EJMR thread as well.

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An EJMR thread popped up this week titled Claudia is Chief Economic Consultant to the Conservative Party of Canada and I didn't bother to click on it because I thought it was a joke.

Then I saw this tweet:

Zooming in:

Hoooollly shit.

It is impossible to overstate just how cucked, toothless, and inept the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) is…. this hiring decision exemplifies everything that is wrong with the party: they are not conservatives, and they are terrible at politics.

I understand that bipartisanship is important, and adults should work together across the aisle… but this is a bridge too far. Politics is supposed to be brutal and vicious for a reason: it is a zero-sum game, and the CPC are being walked all over. Letting Claudia Sahm dictate their economic policy is like letting a bloodthirsty shitlib fox into the henhouse, and will only result in slaughtered chickens, big government, a nanny state, and fascism.

This is the same “conservative” party that features pronoun roles in their Discord server, and whose self-described “red Tory” moderators banned me when I asked about them:

That is the state of the conservative movement in Canada in the year of our lord 2022: anti-free-speech pronoun respecters with economic policy being dictated by Claudia fucking Sahm.

Sahm has never had a small-c conservative economic thought or opinion in her life. She is a big-government, pro-socialism, SJW activist and has spent her career working at far-left thinktanks such as John Podesta’s Equitable Growth. At Equitable Growth she served as Podesta’s attack dog, viciously attacking and rallying mobs against anyone on Twitter who got in the way of the Blue Team’s preferred economic policy.

Claudia Sahm has been fired from her past two jobs for being a bipolar alcoholic. This is widely known lore in the economics profession; here are some highlights from a 15-page thread Clodia got fired!: