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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 13h

A very fun thing [🤮🫠] about these markets is that the bears have been right about everything and the bulls wrong about everything except that the equity market would care either way. It turned out the bad thing could happen and equities still only go up.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 13h

SpaceX valuation does psychological damage to me everytime I see it. And it’s still going up!

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 15h

Me looking at Brazilian rates today:

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

‘Setting aside the merits of the policy’ is unfortunately how far too much of uk policy is decided. If I were trying to govern a country I would consider the merits of the policy to be the primary or perhaps only relevant concern.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Is now a good time to mention that CCC/junk rated bonds are now at 16%.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I said the other day: ‘if normal people don’t join political parties then the parties won’t be normal’ and I see the greens are today providing stunning evidence of this.

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Reposted by @ironeconomist.bsky.social

Jim Waterson @jim.londoncentric.media · 04/10/2026

Different nations of the UK have different policies but - starting with Welsh-based politicians - MPs with young children will begin losing their free nursery hours from 2028 onwards when their salaries hit £100k. So, yknow, this might suddenly become a policy of mysterious cross-party appeal.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Kinda think both these miss an important subtly. What’s true is that large businesses have more productivity so displacing small firms is good. What’s a little bit true is that large firms in aggregate have more productivity growth.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A fun side effect is going to be the return of the gentleman scholar. Yesterday I used a frontier model to solve a small problem I worked on in my PhD. Sadly this result turned out to be very boring (effect real but too small to matter), but lots of people in industry going to write more papers.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The really bad thing about these changes is they don’t engage with the real reason for self-employment and subcontracting - tax. There are no employers NI contributions on self employed sub contractors! Painting this as about rights misses why it’s good for both sides!

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Part of this is we had our adjustment earlier thanks to Liz truss, but a lot of it is that the Uk is one of the only countries where the politics of fixing the deficit seems tractable. Both because we can just raise taxes and because the politics is not so frozen.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

In labours eyes this a a feature not a bug. They won’t actually have to do any of the unpopular things they think need doing. Best leave that to the Tories.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

A secondary but important effect here though is ‘social learning’ most people end up getting an electric car because their neighbour got one so accelerating sales can itself causally accelerate sales.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Emily bender lost her mind a long time ago on this and is constantly insisting things are impossible that are actually happening in real time. Let’s each our stochastic parrot/text classifier learn to paint in real time by learning to control a robotic arm www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/com...

reddit.com

From the aiwars community on Reddit: GPT6 Astra controlling a robot and learning how to paint with it.

Explore this post and more from the aiwars community

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I really got to stop wishing on the monkey’s paw here.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s Armageddon in the rates markets and on one has even noticed.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ah yes Eton, famously a typical private school extremely close to the median example of the form and very representative of why ~15% of parents put their kids into private schools for at least part of their education.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is correct but doesn’t quite engage with why private schools remain popular. Fundamentally most state schools aren’t set up very well to deal with two high grade professional career career families.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Someone wishes for the good old days and the monkeys paw has decided we should do: (1) a 1970s oil crisis (2) a 1990s tech cycle (3) a 2010s eurozone debt crisis All at once.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If you are a popular politician and you just announce things people will support them because they are confident you are acting in their best interests.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

We are doing Parable of the Vineyard discourse and I am here for it.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This £30bn a year number is nonsense btw. If you switch to a tiered system your 0 interest tier needs to be smaller than the monetary base can ever go. No bank will sell the BoE a gilt in return for non interest bearing money!

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Reposted by @ironeconomist.bsky.social

Banjon @beardybanjo.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"what if we continued the work of George Osborne to hollow out the broad tax base, but with lefist vibes?"

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Marie once again discovering chains are Good Actually. Would never have happened at Wetherspoons.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I regret to inform you the bond market is going to be front page news again.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I can’t verify their numbers but the there’s here aligns with my view. Its also the @tomashirstecon.bsky.social point about how fixed/senior obligations end up eating the equity returns when capital is scarce. www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser...

groundbrkr.com

The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall

Trillions in compute commitments come due in 2027–2028. The Reset Wall reveals how the AI boom breaks, and when.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The bond market is once again on the front page of the FT and I am once again reminding you that bond markets only do this when they are extremely distressed.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

When I was a physics PhD student and started reading economics books papers because, well the GFC and EZ debt crises was playing out, one thing that struck me is the large cultural difference between economics and physics.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The uk state is an endless cycle of (1) create bad tax (2) realise its a bad tax but don’t admit defeat so create loop holes for the activity you accidentally crushed (3) get mad people are using the loop holes (4) make the tax worse to try and stamp out (3). Just scrap stamp duty honestly.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Surprisingly often the answer to this was ‘they had an effective union’. IIRC there are several unions for oil workers and off shore workers and they were quite effective over the Grangemouth refinery closure.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I wonder how leveraged this guy is. Have heard a few stories like this where people have just kept expanding at a constant 5:1 or 4:1 levered ratio and I can’t help but wonder how easily he can be wiped out if we get another hiking cycle and people internalise 4-5% mortgage is the new normal.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This FT article just filled with the craziest numbers. US short 6x uk peak electricity demand by 2028 of the chip orders/datacenter build implies by bank forecasts happen.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Watching people explain that actually they are pro immigration except for slightly richer people from another part of the country is one of my favourite hobbies.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Everywhere you look people are doing Catholic posting.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It’s also just a strange standard to apply even to humans. Most school kids don’t ’understand’ what finding the roots of a polynomial is but they can plug numbers into the formula just fine. In many ways the purpose of formalism is to allow people to do what they don’t really understand!

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

What new horror is this? Get a life people!

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

The thing that’s really great here is that the us is basically a closed market for natural gas, they produce more than they can consume and export capacity is saturated so it’s completely de coupled from global prices.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

It’s fun to think about what will happen if we are really back to a long period of 5-7% interest rates. Firstly to support the much higher investment this implies consumption has to fall. Given debt loads this means either cuts to government spending or tax hikes on the average consumers.

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Rory Johnston @roryjohnston.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Imagine US policy in the Middle East plunging the world into energy crisis? IMAGINE?!

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Green Day really had this one covered open.spotify.com/track/6nTiIh...

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is the ending this story deserves. Magnificent, no notes. All that trouble to organise a referendum when you could just make a planning objection instead. Always a little newt can be found when you need to block something.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I have a phone addiction and I would like to break it but the reality is none of my wife, family etc would tolerate me not answering their messages for 12 hours so a bit snookered. Tried leaving my personal phone at home when I went to work and was told that was inappropriate behaviour 🫠.

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ironeconomist.bsky.social @ironeconomist.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Frontier lab pricing is so incredibly cooked.

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Reposted by @ironeconomist.bsky.social

Bancroft Sutherland @bancsutherland.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Warsh, seven weeks ago: “market prices will continue to respond in the direction and magnitude they see fit” Market prices: “OK”

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