Actionable technical trading ideas. Not investment advice. Also, links to thought provoking articles.
Joined November 2012
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Jim Furey retweeted
this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.
so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).
polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).
there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.
supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?
well as it turns out, they did.
a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.
proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.
just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.
but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.
so when you add it all up you get:
+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax
of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.
and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.
[1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…
Jim Furey retweeted
Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.
F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.
The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.
Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.
Jim Furey retweeted
Reuters just released a sneak peak of Anthropic financials, showing the company reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025 - and this is before it started losing market share to dirt cheap open source models
Anyone still wondering why the company is threatening to end humanity unless the government shuts down their competition?
Jim Furey retweeted
The S&P 500 is 0.7% below a record high, yet 430 of those stocks are 21.7% below their highs. That means on average 86% of the stocks are in a bear market. Breadth has only been this bad twice, in January 1973 and in 1999/2000. On both occasions, the S&P then crashed nearly 50%
Jim Furey retweeted
Total investment in data centers and related AI infrastructure is projected to total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, or 3.6% of GDP per year, according to new estimates. That would dwarf other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet.
Jim Furey retweeted
🚨 ALEX KARP reveals OpenAI will NEVER IPO — their real playbook is to get NATIONALIZED
HOST: How does the liability get written into the S-1? What do the risk factors sound like?
KARP: You're assuming that there will be an S-1… The only way to deal with this kind of liability is to go to the government and say:
"Nationalize us, please!"
HOST: Do you think the Trump administration is going to get on board with that?
KARP: When you have unlimited liability, the only way to deal with it would be to go to the government and say:
"We'll give you 50% of our business."
Of course, the value of the business will collapse first when you do that… collapse another time when you have people on the board… collapse another time…
It might even collapse the whole market.
Jim Furey retweeted
🚨BREAKING: Jensen Huang just EXPOSED Dario and Altman’s "Rogue AI" grift to avoid getting sued into oblivion under EXISTING law
“Don't let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.
Go and read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws; they're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have.”
ABSOLUTE TRUTH NUKE
Jim Furey retweeted
Look, I know...perma-bear blah blah blah.
But this is crazy stuff.
There are 2 days in history like today, when the S&P 500 $SPY rallied at least 1% to within 1% of a new high, and more of its stocks fell to new lows than highs.
• Jul 23, 1929
• Dec 21, 1999
We've never in almost 100 years seen breadth this bad.
The S&P $SPY is knocking on new highs but there are (many) more stocks at lows than highs.
The percentage of stocks in long-term uptrends is plunging.
The only remotely similar setups were January 1973 and November 1999.
Jim Furey retweeted
HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM:
This is a well written and thought out article written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA.
What a GREAT perspecitve...
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth.
Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."
Jim Furey retweeted
Warsh Fails the Oil-Shock Test
An oil shock is not a monetary-policy failure. It is a tax imposed by producers abroad, a supply disruption, or both. The Federal Reserve cannot drill another barrel, reopen a shipping lane, or make gasoline cheaper by raising the cost of a mortgage.
Yet Kevin Warsh’s response to the current energy-price surge suggests that he would do exactly what the Fed has too often done: hike into a supply shock, sacrifice the interest-rate-sensitive economy, and call the resulting contraction a victory over inflation.
That is a dangerous misreading of both the facts and history.
In their landmark 1997 paper, Ben Bernanke, Mark Gertler, and Mark Watson found that much of the economic damage following postwar oil-price shocks stemmed not from oil itself, but from the Fed’s systematic response higher interest rates. Oil was the trigger. Monetary tightening was the amplifier. Their work does not say that central banks should disregard inflation. It says they must distinguish an inflationary regime from a one-time jump in a key relative price.
That distinction is central today. A rise in energy costs can lift headline inflation and strain household budgets without producing a self-sustaining inflation process. The relevant questions are whether expectations are becoming unanchored, whether wage growth is accelerating in response, and whether price increases are spreading broadly through core services and goods.
If expectations remain anchored and there is no persuasive evidence of durable second- or third-round effects, a rate hike would be an act of economic vandalism. It would not lower the price of oil. It would simply add a credit shock to an energy shock.
Housing, commercial real estate, construction, autos, durable goods, and business investment have already borne the brunt of restrictive policy. These are not abstract lines on a Bloomberg terminal. They are the sectors where rate hikes become layoffs, cancelled projects, unaffordable homes, and weaker capital formation.
Warsh is as bad as Powell: both mistake a rigid response to headline inflation for credibility.
Warsh reacted to Wall St prediction market.
Warsh is making a policy decision based on what geopolitical events could be. Again classic mission creep.
Wall Street may cheer, of course. The Bloomberg bros crowd always admires the theater of a central banker promising resolve. But that is a Hall of Mirrors markets congratulating themselves for embracing a policy that may validate a fashionable narrative while weakening the underlying economy.
The test of a Fed leader is not whether he can raise rates. Anyone can raise rates. The test is whether he can change the reaction function when the facts demand it: recognize a supply shock, protect credibility without chasing oil prices, and avoid turning transitory inflation into a recession.
Warsh failed that test. Investors should take note.
brookings.edu/wp-content/upl…
Jim Furey retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Jim Furey retweeted
My all-time favorite quote by Charles Krauthammer explains why I've dedicated the past 16 years of my professional life to getting our politics right, even when politics is far from my favorite subject:
"While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933… Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns."
Jim Furey retweeted
From @WSJopinion: The state of legal reporting has reached peak national embarrassment, a master class in fiction that rivals the reporting about Russia “collusion” and Joe Biden’s undiminished capacity, writes @KimStrassel on.wsj.com/4hTviHv
Jim Furey retweeted
🏦🥾The management of global financial systems has reached such an extent that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve- the most powerful financial institution in the world- deemed it necessary to begin his first keynote speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium with a cleverly designed scheme to TRICK all the algos into believing he is telegraphing an INTEREST RATE HIKE⚠️
In this morning's speech, Warsh literally opened with stories about HIKING on the trails around the area.
He noted that organizers had recreation options lined up and advised attendees to choose carefully.
He said there are two very different kinds of HIKES:
HIKES with former Fed Vice Chair Don Kohn were “steely marathon death marches.”
Warsh summed those up in two words: “I survived.” They “revealed a side of Don I wasn’t ready for.”
HIKES with former Chair Ben Bernanke were “a much more leisurely pace, an easy stroll along the wandering trails at the Rockefeller Preserve.”
His advice before heading out: do a wellness check and ask, “Is this a Kohn day or a Bernanke day?”
He also used the setting for a policy pun, calling his speech outline a “trail map” rather than “forward guidance.”
This was not accidental. I'd give 10 to 1 odds that Kevin Warsh hasn't set a single foot on any of the beautiful trails near Jackson Hole.
⚠️This is NEXT LEVEL MOPE (Management of Perception Economics).
Do traders REALLY believe that if Kevin Warsh ACTUALLY planned to HIKE interest rates in September, he would waste 10 minutes at the beginning of the most important speech of his career rambling about his wilderness explorations around Jackson Hole & the Grand Tetons before calling those ramblings more of a "trail map" than "forward guidance"⁉️
Warsh's speech was cleverly designed to trigger the algos to smash gold $200 & silver $5 merely due to 58 references to Kevin &Ben Bernanke's 🥾Merrell's within 10 minutes.
Followed by a disclaimer that this isn't forward guidance when Warsh fails to hike interest rates next month.
The markets are interpreting speech as a guarantee that The Fed is going to HIKE INTEREST RATES IN SEPTEMBER⁉️
The man who Donald Trump personally picked to replace Jerome Powell because he refused to CUT interest rates further is going to HIKE interest rates 45 days before the mid-term elections⁉️
GIVE ME A BREAK.
The Treasury and the Fed are BOXED IN.
They are going to need to launch Yield Curve Control.
They are going to attempt to PRINT their way out of this.
Kevin Warsh just executed an algo KILL SHOT that bought himself 3 weeks.
Thanks for playing.
Got gold & silver⁉️
(And for those who have made it this far, no this is not AI- this is my visceral disgust for the Creature From Jekyll Island)
Jim Furey retweeted
Dear Sane America,
I could care less about basketball but somehow managed to watch the clips and I am now choking on the sheer volume of selective courage: White people are so utterly terrified of the magic word “racist” that they’ll watch a full-arm swing rearrange a woman’s face, see the immediate all-caps “WHITE PRIVILEGE” post, and still clutch their pearls in silence. Fuck that shit. And while we’re handing out participation trophies for honesty, I think Blacks are some of the biggest racists there are...Olympic-level specialists at spotting “privilege” the exact second the whistle blows against them, yet mysteriously color-blind when the forearm is flying the other direction.
Sophie Cunningham, bless her actual adult soul, is streaking in for a layup like a normal human being who still thinks this is a basketball game. Cue the full-arm special across the face and neck. She hits the floor, bloodies her lip, pops up like a damn jack-in-the-box, and walks straight at the artist formerly known as “competitive.” No flopping. No race card. No tears for the cameras. Just pure, unfiltered “I can take it, now get your shit off.” That’s how you carry yourself when the universe decides your face is public property. Absolute dignity. Absolute class. Absolute refusal to become the latest martyr in the never-ending pity parade.
Meanwhile her own coach, her own coach...practically writes a love letter to the player who just turned Sophie’s head into a speed bag. “Hard foul.” “I don’t think it was intentional to the neck.” “She’s gonna play her butt off, nobody’s walking in for a layup.” Aw, how sweet. Sophie gets the bloodied lip and the intentional forearm; Coach gives the benefit of the doubt, a glowing character reference, and a big wet kiss to the competitive spirit of the ejected one. Real team loyalty right there. Real backbone. Real “I’ve got your back…as long as it’s not actually your back.”
That hit wasn’t an accident. It was a masterpiece of subtlety, if your idea of subtlety is a sledgehammer to the face. Assault with a side of pure, uncut hate and jealousy. The toxicity in that league could power a small city. Some people simply cannot cope with certain players succeeding, competing, and drawing actual attention without shrinking into the background, so the arms start swinging and the race card gets played like it’s a get-out-of-jail-free token the second anyone notices. If the roles were reversed, the league would be holding emergency prayer circles, the media would be writing dissertations, and half the internet would be demanding multi-game suspensions, fat fines, and a full police report. Instead Sophie gets to listen to her own coach soft-pedal the whole thing while the rest of the audience stays quiet, trembling at the thought of being called a name. Sophie doesn’t need the theatrics or the victim costume. She takes the hit, stays on her feet, keeps her head up, and refuses to join the circus while everyone else loses their spine in real time. Stiffer consequences should already be carved in stone before someone actually ends up in a hospital. Until then Sophie’s still out there carrying herself like a grown woman. The rest of the cast can keep writing excuses, defending the indefensible, and hiding behind the fear of a label. The clips don’t care about your feelings. Neither do I.
