Sunday: RAGE Against the War Machine in San Francisco

The Passive Aggressive Market: Bogle's Warning Came True Authored by Michael Lebowitz via realinvestmentadvice.com, Since the pandemic, the line between passive investing and aggressive speculation has blurred. The current bout of speculative fervor extends beyond financial markets. For instance, we see the same impulse in the explosion of sports betting and the surge in event-betting sites like Kalshi and Polymarket. In the investment arena, margin debt is at record highs (as shown below), and zero-day-to-expiry (0DTE) stock options now account for approximately 50 percent of all options volume. Furthermore, the number of...

We Want One Solution, But One Solution Can't Solve Our Polycrisis Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via Substack, Whatever the problem, our minds seek one solution--preferably a simple one--to escape the trackless wilderness of complex, inter-connected problems. Problem-solving boils down to identifying the key problem and finding a fix that’s easy to understand and straightforward to apply. Our minds rebel when confronted with polycrisis, a knotted mess of inter-connected problems, and so we apply solutions we already have in hand. As I explained in previous Musings, this leads us to modify our...

The Crowdsourcing Of Cutting Waste & Fraud Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times, The Trump administration came into office with a pledge to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse within the government’s system of transfer payments. Leading the charge would be Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They began their work early on with earnest and passion, starting inauguration evening, with many long days and nights of data crunching and number slinging, under the assumption that auditing government would be similar to auditing a private company. DOGE quickly found...