As the stock market soars ever higher, the theories of why it rises have suffered the opposite fate. One by one, every favored explanation of what could be going on has been undermined by world events. The uncomfortable fact about the historic stock-market run is that no one really knows why it’s happening—or what could bring it to an end.
Tag: economics
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All the theories about why the stock market keeps going up
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Denmark will stop delivering letters
At the end of 2025, Denmark will stop delivering mail letters and functioning fully on packages. 100 million letters are still flowing through the system today, but nowhere near the peak of 1.8 billion nearly 25 years ago. It sounds like third-party companies will fill the gap, but at what cost?
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Import Immature
Spencer Wright muses on how the world changes, there are things that never mature, namely, imports.
I bring all of this up because the weird thing, and stick with me here, is that the world around us doesn’t mature. It keeps changing, even as we mostly stop doing so. The world doesn’t care that we’re not up for changing as much anymore, and actually maybe it seems to change more quickly the older we get, whether because culture actually accelerates over time or because of how we perceive the world as we age. Either way, to some extent each of us wakes up one day, and we’re forty-one, and we’ve shifted down like three gears. Life still feels crazy but we really have trimmed a lot of the extraneous stuff, we’re streamlined, we’ve chosen some kind of course, and maybe we’re even following it a bit. And for some reason, without really realizing it, we kind of expect the world to have chosen a course too. But the world, god bless it, is changing directions all the time, being immature as ever.
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FAFAnomics
Recent economic policy has turned into FAFAnomics – Fuck Around and Find Out Economics,
F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn’t good governance; it’s capturing attention at any cost. And it’s working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.
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FAFOnomics
Kyla Scanlon coins an apt term for our current economic state–FAFOnomics. Fuck Around, Find Out.
Yes, America needs change. But change without wisdom isn’t reform, it’s recklessness.
And of course, there is an important point to all of this, which is that it is all noise. It’s what Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein have both pointed out as strategic chaos: overwhelming the public’s already limited capacity for attention until exhaustion sets in. It’s the attention singularity that I wrote about last week in action, where power, narrative, and wealth merge into a self-reinforcing system of perpetual disruption.
Welcome to FAFAnomics – F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn’t good governance; it’s capturing attention at any cost. And it’s working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.
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Netflix and creative destruction
Creative destruction is a concept of capitalism, where the business innovations of today, destroy the innovations of yesterday. Netflix is finding out that those red envelopes aren’t enough to keep the lights on forever and is investing heavily in video streaming technologies, lest they become like Kodak.
Kodak just misjudged how fast consumers would give up on film and start snapping up digital cameras. And it misjudged its ability to outrun both trends.
Plus, they had the foresight to get their company name right:
But Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive, and early employees, recognized that delivery of movies over the Internet would replace the mail carrier soon. They named the company Netflix, not Mailflix or DVDs by Mail.