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The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Ankur Crawford, Portfolio Manager, Alger Capital Appreciation, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

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MASTERS IN BUSINESS
Bloomberg Radio  ·  Hosted by Barry Ritholtz

Transcript: Dr. Ankur Crawford
Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager, Alger

 

00:00:08  BARRY RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast, another extra special guest: Dr. Ankur Crawford is co-head portfolio manager of large cap strategies at Alger. She’s got a fascinating background. She was an engineer at Intel, won a number of patents, and was the awardee of the Intel PhD Fellowship. She’s been recognized as one of the top women in asset management.

If you’re interested at all in the details of how artificial intelligence, semiconductors and software work, as I am, you’re going to find this to be a fascinating conversation. With no further ado, my conversation with Alger’s Ankur Crawford. Ankur Crawford, welcome to Bloomberg.

00:01:03  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Thank you for having me, Barry.

00:01:05  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s start with your background, which is really kind of fascinating. Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering — that’s a double BS from UC Berkeley — and then a master’s and a PhD in materials science and engineering at Stanford. What was the original career plan?

00:01:27  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I didn’t have one, to be honest. When I made the decision to become a mechanical engineer, I was kind of following my brother’s footsteps. He was a mechanical engineer and became an orthopedic surgeon. And I realized if I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I wanted to keep my options open.

00:01:46  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So he becomes an orthopedic surgeon with a mechanical engineering degree. Is he designing replacement joints and things like that?

00:01:55  ANKUR CRAWFORD: He does. He does actually bring that aspect of his engineering background into devices, different device configurations. And he works a lot with the device companies as well. But there’s also — as a kid I loved figuring out how things work, whether it was a car or a calculator, and I would always be fidgeting to understand how things work. I loved building, so mechanical engineering kind of felt like — I’m just a curious person. So I like to satiate that need to know how things work.

00:02:34  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And I read somewhere that you originally wanted to be an astronaut. Is this correct?

00:02:39  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I did. I grew up — till I was five, we lived in Florida, close to Cape Canaveral, and we would go watch the space shuttle take off. And I was so fascinated by space because it was almost ethereal — this thing goes up into the sky. And for me, the astronauts were celebrities. So for a long time I did want to be an astronaut.

00:03:08  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I have Florida somewhere in between. You’re born in Kansas — is this correct?

00:03:08  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yes, yes. Kansas.

00:03:14  BARRY RITHOLTZ: But you end up in the Middle East.

00:03:16  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yes.

00:03:17  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And then you’re sent to a convent boarding school in the Himalayas. Is this possibly right?

00:03:17  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yes.

00:03:17  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That has to be an AI hallucination, right?

00:03:26  ANKUR CRAWFORD: No, that is all correct.

00:03:27  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And then you end up in Buffalo, New York.

00:03:30  ANKUR CRAWFORD: You got it.

00:03:31  BARRY RITHOLTZ: All right, so that’s real human research, not chat. I’m curious — that is a broad global life experience. How does that shape your views on either international investing, or just the concept of risk and reward?

00:03:49  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think it more so shapes the way I think about the cultural differences. When I look at companies, when I look at management teams, I understand very well that there are certain cultural differences that are simply endemic to businesses and to management teams. And just because a management team isn’t necessarily always bullish, or they’re always telling you the negative aspect of their company, doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something wrong.

An example of this is this company called Nebius, where the CEO is a Russian CEO who is incredibly humble, and he will never tell you what’s right. He will always point out to you all the things that are wrong. And a lot of investors are like, “I don’t — that doesn’t sound good.” And I’m kind of looking at the opportunity, because that’s just his culture, right? It’s his culture not to be boastful.

So just living in all these different countries and having exposure as a kid to many different religions, it gives a really unique perspective on any problem that you look at, because it helps take the blinders off.

00:05:13  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s fascinating. I never really thought about how a societal, cultural set of norms makes its way to management. You think about the Japanese culture — the sort of bravado and very aggressive forecasts we tend to see in the United States, you would never see anything like that.

00:05:13  ANKUR CRAWFORD: That’s right.

00:05:35  BARRY RITHOLTZ: In Japan. How do you calibrate what is cultural nuance and what is just, hey, there’s a problem here and they’re telling us this is an issue?

00:05:48  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think you have to know the business, right? The first thing is, know the business, and then you can calibrate the tone of the management. An example is Taiwan Semiconductor. I remember speaking to them over many of these years that we’ve owned the stock.

And I would always say, “You guys are going to become the single supplier of leading edge. Why is it that you can’t take up pricing?” And they would always talk me down and say, “Oh no, we are here to serve our customer, we are here to —” And I was like, “There’s absolutely no reason for you not to be raising pricing.”

And they would just push back, because that wasn’t part of their philosophy. It wasn’t part of the philosophy that Morris Chang had kind of put into place in the early years. However, that is what they ended up doing. And so I had to take that with a grain of salt, understanding that’s their philosophy.

It was a little frustrating at the time, but a business is a business, and at some point the realization of how good that business was came into the numbers.

00:07:01  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you mentioned the advantage of really understanding the business. You are an Intel doctorate fellow, you worked as an engineer at Intel, you hold multiple patents. How much of an advantage is that when you’re looking at semiconductors or AI or any of the hyperscalers? What advantage does that give you?

00:07:24  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Look, I think understanding the technology is kind of crucial right now, because in this world of AI, there are a lot of people who don’t really understand what is happening under the covers. And that’s dangerous. And that’s why you also see the volatility that you see today — they’re kind of loose holders and not truly understanding the different dynamics of the technology. And it’s just a hard way to invest when you can get shaken out because you don’t have conviction in the technologies.

So I feel like it’s always helped. And in part because — chips. I was a semiconductor analyst when I first started at Alger, and I kind of immediately understood, well, I understand what a deposition tool is. I used one. I understand what etching is. I used this tool. I understand what the issues are in fabricating a chip, and how hard it is to fabricate a chip. So it just gives you a little bit of an edge on the conceptual understanding and where the industry is going.

So early on, I remember in 2011, ’12 or ’13 — one of those years — I put together a presentation about how we’re at the end of Moore’s Law and what will happen if we’re at the end of Moore’s Law. And I sent the presentation out to all of the companies that I covered and I said, “I would like your feedback, and tell me why I’m wrong.” But that was thinking kind of eight, nine years ahead, because it had implications for the entire sector. And so those kinds of insights, I think, are easier. Not that everyone can’t have them — they just come probably a little easier because I understand the technology.

00:09:19  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I see the advantage of having the technical background as an analyst. I’m curious what made you leave the technical field — being an engineer and working with semis — to becoming an analyst in the space and working on the financing of semis?

00:09:39  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, I had gone through my graduate career, and really I had set some goals for myself. I want to write this many papers. I want to present. I want to be useful to society. And at the end of it, I felt like I had kind of achieved all those goals, but I wasn’t happy.

I just wasn’t content and happy. And I thought to myself, my gosh, if I have achieved everything that I set out to do and yet I’m still not happy, what happens if I become a professor and we just go through a tough spot on raising money, or whatever it might be like in the research? Will I be even happier? And I think that self-awareness made me realize I needed to go look somewhere else.

And when I came to Alger, it was really like — I was thinking I’d be here for two years and then go back and do a postdoc somewhere and be a professor. And I never left.

00:10:46  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really, really interesting. One of the complaints I’ve heard from people who are technologists or engineers or what have you is that everything has become so increasingly specialized and narrow that you get put into a silo. You have no idea what’s going on in any of the adjacent sciences, more or less even within your field. Everybody gets too specific. Was that a concern?

00:11:11  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Oh, for sure. And that’s a great insight. I was in a room — this is probably a 15-by-15 room. I spent three and a half years in the basement of a building at Stanford taking care of a tool that was about this big.

00:11:11  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wow.

00:11:27  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I was the plumber and the electrician, carrying out cryopumps and fixing them. And it was a very narrow, lonely experience.

00:11:38  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I can imagine.

00:11:39  ANKUR CRAWFORD: And my advisor was fantastic, but just that process required — it was very narrow. And I’m very proud of the work that we did, but it was very, very niche.

00:11:53  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you move from a field governed by the laws of physics and nature to another field kind of governed by the eccentricities of human behavior. What are the challenges in that transition?

00:12:10  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I didn’t know anything when I started in this business. I knew a lot about atoms and materials and magnets, and how to make a chip. But I really didn’t know very much about investing. So honestly, it was all new to me.

So the challenge was really understanding — I was always asking why. Well, why does this happen? Or why does the stock go up on this? Or why does the stock not go up on this? And understanding that human behavior aspect was more a fascination versus a challenge, because this idea of expectations versus the truth — I grew up in a world where there is a single answer, right?

Where you write an equation and there is a way to do it, versus people can skin the cat in so many different ways in what we do. You can get to the same result in an infinite number of ways. So I suppose that was the challenge, of understanding that there isn’t just one way of doing it, but perhaps you have to understand the different ways, then adopt your own way of approaching the problem.

00:13:41  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I love the Richard Feynman quote: imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings. Right? Always cracks me up, at the intersection of science and investing. So you answer a recruiting ad from Alger despite knowing nothing about investing. What made you think your skills might get you through the door at a shop like Alger?

00:14:13  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I didn’t really. I really didn’t. I was reading a book — it was written by a bunch of McKinsey consultants at the time, and I forgot the name of the book, but it was all about profit and loss and just businesses, how businesses are run. And I really didn’t know, honestly, Barry, what I was applying for.

I knew that I needed to do something else. I had worked at Merrill Lynch for a summer before I had started graduate school and I loved it. It was kind of the emerging markets debt desk. And I was like, let me give this a go again.

And when I applied to Alger, I knew that I was curious enough that I would be able to cross the chasm, and I would be able to learn and give back to our company.

00:15:07  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Huh. Really, really —

00:15:08  ANKUR CRAWFORD: But I really didn’t know.

00:15:10  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, that’s really fascinating. We’ll explore that more coming up.

We continue our conversation with Ankur Crawford, co-PM of the large cap strategy at Alger and PM of the concentrated portfolio ETF, talking about her career at Alger. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

00:15:35  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Dr. Ankur Crawford. She is portfolio manager at Alger, where she co-PMs the large capital appreciation strategy as well as running the concentrated ETF.

So we were talking earlier about — you answered an ad that Alger had put up to hire people. I read a story that Alger’s CEO Dan Chung hired you right on the spot. That’s kind of unusual in this space. Tell us about what happened there.

00:16:17  ANKUR CRAWFORD: It was funny. I actually walked into this meeting — I had just come back from Tahoe, I’m a big skier — and I was really frustrated because it was pouring outside, and I walked in like drenched and really upset. And I was like, the only good thing about this is that it’s snowing in Tahoe. And Dan happens to be a skier.

I didn’t know that. And so we started this conversation talking about our mutual love of skiing. After that, I think he realized I didn’t know very much at all about investing, and he asked me my opinion of Intel versus AMD. And this was 2003, 2004, and peak —

00:17:01  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Intel.

00:17:02  ANKUR CRAWFORD: It was peak Intel. And I remember saying, “You know, I worked at Intel, and I think I prefer AMD versus Intel, because this is kind of what I’m seeing inside of Intel.” Not inside information, but more the culture that had developed. And we had this long discussion about it.

That evening they hosted a kind of get-together for all of the applicants. And Dan and I got into an argument about NAND versus hard disk drives.

00:17:38  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And you were on the NAND side, right?

00:17:39  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Well, he was telling me that all hard drives were going to go to zero.

00:17:44  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And he was eventually right?

00:17:45  ANKUR CRAWFORD: And he will be eventually right. And you know what’s so funny? I just had this discussion with him yesterday, and I was like, “Dan, we had this discussion 22 years ago.”

00:17:55  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It only took you two decades to be right. In trading, early is the same as wrong.

00:18:01  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. Well, it was great, because we had this really — it wasn’t a heated conversation, but it was definitely kind of looking at this problem in two different ways. And as we were walking out, he was like, “You’re hired.”

00:18:15  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Just like that.

00:18:15  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Just like that.

00:18:15  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I need someone who’s not afraid of me, who will stand up and make me think of this problem from multiple angles.

00:18:23  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Well, I think it’s a little bit of the culture that we have at Alger, of it’s always better to have different perspectives versus go along with the norm and be consensus, and to always encourage that debate. And one thing I am for sure — especially because, again, I come from a place of, we’re always trying to find the truth. There is an answer. I do bring that to the table here too, in that there is an answer, right?

Whether or not you look at it from one angle versus the other, there is an answer. The earnings are the answer. The trajectory of earnings are the answer. And getting that right can be a topic of debate, and how you get there — we can debate it to make sure that we’re getting to the truth.

00:19:15  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you start in the analyst training program at Alger, you advance to a research associate, then an analyst, then a tech sector head, and ultimately a portfolio manager. What transition was the most challenging? What changed the way you thought about the job?

00:19:36  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I would say that the transition from being an analyst to a portfolio manager. And even as a tech sector head, I kind of had my fingers in everything, and my little OCD tendencies were still able to play out a little bit. That transition to portfolio manager, however, required a different skill set, which was allowing for other people to do the thinking and the detailed work, which I loved to do. And kind of taking a much more macro perspective and a bigger picture perspective, where it was a much more Socratic methodology of questioning and asking the right questions to guide the analysts in the right direction. And that was like — I used to do that with the companies, right?

I would ask all these questions of the companies, but doing it with your peer set and people that work with you is a little bit different. And so that was kind of a tough transition for me.

00:20:52  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you have a PhD but not an MBA. I’m curious, the apprenticeship you went through, going through all those steps at Alger — what do you think you learned through that process that, hey, a green MBA right out of school is going to take them a couple of years to figure out?

00:21:12  ANKUR CRAWFORD: When you are on the hook for real performance for real clients, and you make a wrong decision, it isn’t like doing poorly on a test, right? It’s simply not equivalent, because you actually feel the pain of having made that decision that impacted someone else. So I think learned abilities that are experiential just have a different impact than when you’re sitting in a classroom. Because I think in a classroom, the consequences are just lower than they are when you’re really investing other people’s money.

00:22:02  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That is the classic academia versus real life. All right, I didn’t get a hundred, I got a 96, isn’t the same as this one position is ruining all of my performance for the quarter.

00:22:15  ANKUR CRAWFORD: That’s right.

00:22:16  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s very different.

00:22:17  ANKUR CRAWFORD: And I think what you learn from it is — I have this book where I used to write down, and not so much anymore, but I have all my learnings from when I was a kid in the business, to remind myself not to make those same mistakes again. And I haven’t looked at it in a while. I probably should go back and see how I developed, because there were so many learnings that I would carry with me and have shaped who I am today.

00:22:49  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I think that’s how Ray Dalio wrote Principles — just writing all his mistakes and what he learned from them.

00:22:54  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Oh, really?

00:22:54  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Yeah.

00:22:54  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I love Principles. I actually have his book for kids.

00:22:58  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, really?

00:22:59  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yes. I thought it was so good.

00:22:59  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That one I haven’t read. But he’s described Principles as just every mistake he’s made, every adjustment he’s made, and ultimately how to turn errors into better performance. It’s really very insightful, especially from a time when Wall Street didn’t love to admit they ever got anything wrong.

It’s kind of fascinating. So you ran Alger’s tech sector and then took over, with your colleague, the capital appreciation strategies. Being hyper-focused in one sector versus broad capital appreciation — what’s that transition like? That sounds like a really big leap, from something you’re very comfortable with to, gee, there’s a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty around that sort of new job description.

00:23:50  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, absolutely. But look, there’s things that rhyme. And I think the sector I struggled with most was healthcare, because it is so incredibly esoteric.

00:24:02  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Why is healthcare so esoteric? You come out with a drug, you sell a few billion dollars worth, everybody’s happy.

00:24:08  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, but it doesn’t quite work that way all the time.

00:24:08  BARRY RITHOLTZ: No, does it?

00:24:08  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So there’s all this legislative overhang, there’s regulatory stuff that’s happening. There’s subsidies that come and go. There’s a political backdrop that you have to always be aware of for healthcare. So healthcare actually was a part of the market where it didn’t really rhyme with anything that I had done before. But if you think about industrials and financials, those were cyclicals — cyclicals of a different nature.

Some were long-time cyclicals versus semis. Financials were also cyclicals tied to the economy. The emphasis more on the macro was something I started to incorporate more in my thinking. But for someone who is very curious — I’m always curious and I’m always asking questions — to me it was kind of a breath of fresh air to expand my purview, to understand and synthesize how the world works. I quite enjoy having that broader perspective.

And what else is super interesting — and I’ve only had this appreciation probably in the last decade — is how history rhymes. So I have become a bit of a history fan. And in part because I started when I was working with my now 18-year-old and doing history homework with her. And all of a sudden I started to realize there is so much that is similar that is going on today, as has happened before.

So I think that is also really fascinating as you start to pull the big picture together, because it just gives you a different perspective on sectors and how to invest.

00:26:18  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Huh. Really, really interesting. So you also are the sole manager of the Alger Concentrated Equity strategy, which is now in ETF form. When I think of concentrated portfolios, we’re talking 15, 20, 25 names. How many names are in it, and then how do you size them? Are they all equal weight, or how — what does that look like?

00:26:43  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, so this portfolio is 20 to 30 stocks. It is an actively managed, fully transparent ETF. And when we think about sizing for the portfolio — look, the concept of this portfolio is to just invest in the best businesses that are going to have the greatest change and have the best risk-reward at any given point in time.

00:27:10  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So tell us the full name of the ETF and the —

00:27:14  ANKUR CRAWFORD: It’s the Concentrated Equity portfolio, and the ticker CNEQ. So the idea here is we want to invest in the best companies that are going to be benefited by the best growing trends in the market, and the compounding nature of earnings should drive the portfolio and drive the companies that are within that portfolio. So position sizing is just like any other portfolio: the risk-reward dictates how big the companies are in the portfolio. And there are some that — Nvidia’s currently at a 13.5% position in the portfolio, whereas there’s other companies that we’re weighting at the bottom of the portfolio, kind of like Figure Technologies, that is smaller and waiting to see when the true traction in their markets starts and the overhang of some of the selling — and to take it up.

But each of the businesses that are owned in this portfolio have large opportunity and big TAM.

00:28:27  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Total addressable market. Yes. CNEQ. All right, I’m going to make a note of that.

So I know Alger, back when it was Alger Capital Growth or Alger Capital Management, launched in 1964. What does growth investing mean at Alger? Because there are definitions that seem to be different from place to place. What are you looking for that perhaps the market hasn’t priced correctly?

00:28:54  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So I think what makes us interesting as growth investors is that the fundamental thing we look for is not necessarily growth — it is change. And the change begets the growth, right? So the growth is an output of the change. And I think that’s an important differentiator, because it’s not just expressed as, let’s do a screen and find the companies that are growing the fastest.

It is, let us look for the change. Because where there is change, there is often unidentified opportunity, and because of that, we will get the growth. So we have a significant research team that is always looking for change. Now, the way that Fred had initially incepted this concept of change was to look at two different pillars.

The first is what we call high unit volume growth. And that is a typical kind of company that is growing their top line. They become market dominant, or have a positioning where they’re taking a lot of share, very forward thinking, and it expresses itself as high top line and growing bottom line. It could be small and mid-cap companies, it could be larger companies.

Really, it spans the gamut of change and growth. So that would be more of a typical growth company. Traditional growth.

00:30:21  BARRY RITHOLTZ: A kind of a traditional growth company.

00:30:21  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. The other side, which I think makes us really unique, is what we call lifecycle change.

And oftentimes we like to show this — it’s almost like an S-curve. We like to invest in the companies that are early on in the S-curve, and companies that have already gone through the S-curve, they’re kind of saturated out of their markets and they’re starting to question who they are.

00:31:05  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Saturated as in fully priced, or saturated as in, hey, that’s as big as their market share is going to get?

00:31:11  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, that’s as big as their market is going to get. So what you see is oftentimes companies where they were great growth companies, and all of a sudden their growth has stabilized, or growth is starting to approach GDP.

00:31:25  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Mature.

00:31:25  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Kind of more mature, right? So kind of a more mature company. And then the management has a decision to make: am I still a growth company, or am I going to just milk what we have? And oftentimes that begets change.

So a new management comes in and decides we’re going to jettison all our low-growth businesses and start buying higher-growth businesses, and it changes the profile of the business. It could be a regulatory change that makes the company a little bit more growthy than it was historically. It could be M&A that again re-accelerates top line growth. It could be a technological change that they really embrace.

And this was Microsoft in its early days, when Satya Nadella first came to the helm. So it’s almost as if the company had a decision to make, and we’re looking for changes where the decision from here is to get onto a growth trajectory — and then study how they execute, such that it drives both top line and bottom line growth. So oftentimes when we buy companies that are on that side of the ledger, people will think they’re value names, and they’re not really value names. They’re actually unidentified and misunderstood growth. And that’s how we think of them.

And a great example of this is what’s happening to the hard disk drive companies right now, where they were trading at single digit multiples, but in an era of AI, all of a sudden you need a lot more data and you need to store all that data. So hard disk drives all of a sudden became in shortage, and now they’re taking pricing, and their earnings power has gone up three, four, fivefold over the last few years.

00:33:24  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Even though people thought it was at the tail end of their useful —

00:33:24  ANKUR CRAWFORD: That’s right.

00:33:24  BARRY RITHOLTZ: — life cycle, they found a second life.

00:33:32  ANKUR CRAWFORD: That’s right. And so that is also a change, and it happens to be a change in the market broadly, right?

00:33:41  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So that raises a really fascinating question I have to ask you. There are companies that appear to be on the back end of their lifecycle, their growth has plateaued. Maybe they’re not gaining market share, maybe the market itself isn’t growing. How can you identify when something is legitimately fading, or potentially at the start — like, I know IBM just had a rough quarter, but how many times has that company reinvented itself and been left for dead only to surprise everybody?

And there’s a bunch of others. Microsoft, you brought up, is another example. What were they, 30, 40 years old when Nadella came in? That’s a huge turnaround story. So how do you identify when, hey, these guys are never going to be what they once were, versus, no, there’s something real happening?

00:34:42  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Okay, so there was this publicly traded fintech company that was just struggling, in part because they had saturated their markets and there was nowhere for them to grow. And it was becoming a lot more competitive. CEO and CFO leave, new management comes in, put together a brand new strategy that is fantastic. Our team looks at it, it’s like, promising.

However, the core issues of their business have not been resolved, right? Do you go from a four and 5% grower to a 10, 12, 15% grower with the strategy? We couldn’t really resolve that they would be able to get there, because the pressures in their markets were so significant.

00:35:33  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Competitive, mature, et —

00:35:35  ANKUR CRAWFORD: — cetera. Competitive maturity. They were just fighting to kind of stay alive, or stay at that like three, four, 5% type growth. So that was one that we looked at. The catalyst was a new CEO, a new management team.

Like, the entire management team was different, but to us it wasn’t really logical that they could change the trajectory of the business. Microsoft, a completely different story, because Satya comes in, he says, we’re going to turn the ship, we’re going to develop cloud. And then we started to understand what it meant to go to a SaaS-based business. Gosh, in the near term it would be depressing their earnings, but longer term it’s really interesting, right?

And they can get to a mid-teens type growth again, which they did get to. I mean, Microsoft, if you remember, everyone thought Google was going to take over. Google Sheets was going to take over Excel. And like, why do we all need Microsoft?

00:36:38  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I asked myself that question every time I launch and look at the annoying new ribbon that they changed a decade ago. But I use both.

00:36:47  ANKUR CRAWFORD: But you use both. Yeah. And after all these years — and I assume in 10 years we’ll still be using Microsoft. So Satya then pivoted the ship and got into the cloud business with Azure.

And so we watched the actions as well. So we can dream the dream and then test the hypothesis and see whether or not they’re executing against it.

00:37:13  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Hmm. Really, really interesting. Let me reverse the question to you and say, what leads you, when you’re running a concentrated portfolio, to say, I’m going to sell this? Is it the fundamentals deteriorating, the thesis not working out? Sometimes is it based on valuation? Or is it simply, we only have room for X number of companies, and this opportunity is here and that opportunity is all the way up here?

00:37:40  ANKUR CRAWFORD: It’s all of the above, right? There are examples of selling a company because there’s a better opportunity and you don’t want to take double the risk to the same end market, yet the upside of one is greater than the upside in the other. There are examples of you sell, or at least trim, because the price target has been achieved — and maybe beyond, the price target has been achieved. So the risk-reward is simply different.

There are examples of disappointments — companies that disappoint relative to our expectations, and they didn’t deliver on what we expected them to do, and the hypothesis didn’t play out. So I think there’s all of the above, and every sale has a different reason.

00:38:30  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Dr. Ankur Crawford, executive vice president and portfolio manager at Alger, diving into her AI thesis. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

00:38:58  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Dr. Ankur Crawford. She’s portfolio manager at Alger, where she co-PMs the large capital appreciation strategy and runs the concentrated ETF for the firm.

So we are legally obligated to discuss artificial intelligence, but you are the perfect person to have this conversation with. There’s a quote of yours that I found fascinating. You said, when software begins to write software, innovation becomes exponential — that’s already happening. Walk us through what this means for earning power for the semiconductors, for the hyperscalers, and then for the rest of the S&P 500.

00:39:42  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Okay, so that is a very big question. Look, I think we are at this — I mean, Elon would call it a singularity — we’re at this point in time where we have never seen this kind of innovation. And imagine everything that — let’s take what’s easiest to describe. Software. We used to sit and code software, right? And we had to understand the coding, we had to debug it.

It would take a long time. Well, when software begins to write software, that whole process is truncated. And imagine what can be done in our largely digital world when software begins to code, decode and create.

00:40:36  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let me push you a little bit there. The large language models that are out there give AI the ability to effectively cut and paste everything that’s been done before. How good is AI at creatively innovating code that’s never been written before?

00:40:59  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So look, I am not a coder, so I can’t tell you whether the code is elegant, or can be taken to production. I will tell you that I was able to build a pretty interesting app inside of a few months. And this is just doing it on the weekends — occasionally on the weekends, not even every weekend. And that was all vibe coded.

So it is adding this technology that is highly viable. You talk to coders, they are using it 90% of the time and are now just instructing, and have to have the logical framework of how to use the code. And I think the big picture here is that once the code begins to write the code, then it’s not going to necessarily be creative. The creation still has to come from you.

The insight still has to come from you, but it can actually innovate, right? The innovation curve for you is significantly higher. So that’s what we’re seeing today, where these digital assets are becoming more innovative, or they’re allowing us to be more innovative. And we’ve hit that point in time where we’re getting exponential innovation, and we’ve never really seen anything like this before.

Humanity hasn’t seen this before, in such a short period of time. If you look at previous industrial revolutions, they would be over generations. It wouldn’t be coming in the span of five years. And so this is what makes it really interesting. Because you asked, how good is it for semiconductors, and how good is it for the rest of the S&P and the hyperscalers — the impact on all of these differs. So, software: we wrote a paper three years ago called “AI and the Declining Cost to Create.”

And it was all about how, when software begins to write software, the cost to create software goes to zero. And what happens to the incumbents when the cost to create software is zero, right? One of the moats goes away. And that necessarily means that the operating profit of businesses must change.

Not that software is dead. It’s just that the operating profile of all of the companies must change, because it becomes more competitive, right? And where does that value go? We had five and a half trillion dollars of spending, now $6 trillion of IT spending. Fifty percent of that was IT services and software. And our contention was that the value would go from IT services and software into hardware and networking, because that is really what is driving this innovation curve.

So there’s entire sectors that have grown a lot and others that are facing their own pressures. I would say the same thing for any sector in the market. We spoke about healthcare earlier — how can a UnitedHealthcare actually use AI to bend the cost of care? And can there be incumbents that cross the chasm, or there might be some that can’t cross the chasm, and there are new companies that begin to use AI to bend the cost of care?

00:44:43  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m glad you brought up healthcare. I’ve been fascinated not so much by bending the curve of cost from somebody like United, but all of the small biotechs and new molecules, and the huge wealth of existing chemistry and pharmaceuticals and studies we’ve done that nobody’s really had the ability to go back to and say, hey, maybe something’s in here that we’ve missed. The most clichéd example is — I never pronounce it right — sildenafil, Viagra, was supposed to be a heart treatment and had this unusual side effect, and now it’s a multibillion-dollar med. Same thing with GLP-1s, originally for diabetes, but hey, everyone’s losing a lot of weight on these.

I’m curious, not so much on the cost side, but there’s this giant body of unexcavated research that just seems like it’s waiting for AI to attack it.

00:45:50  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. And so recently I was actually on a panel where I was the moderator for a company — and I’ve forgotten the name of the CEO and the company — but they’re basically a new AI company that is taking this compendium of knowledge and taking it to companies and saying, marry it with the data that you have. And can we start finding not only the solutions for your targets, but use this history to get there faster? So there’s lots of efforts being made on this right now.

I do think that we will accelerate drug discovery and the impact it will have to healthcare. I mean, look, the holy grail is personalized healthcare at some point.

00:46:41  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wasn’t DNA testing supposed to give us that a couple of years ago?

00:46:45  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Well, DNA, yes, but DNA testing used to cost a million dollars per sample, right? And today it’s a hundred. So we’re getting to the point where we can actually look at our individual DNA, and it just takes time. And at some point, can we marry it with some AI insights?

So look, I think healthcare is going to be greatly impacted. I think that I’m most excited actually to see how we can democratize healthcare, because really our healthcare system here is kind of broken.

00:47:19  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Not kind of.

00:47:21  ANKUR CRAWFORD: To be polite. And how can we take down that cost of care? I would love to have universal healthcare. It just can’t be done in the construct of healthcare as it is today. So can we use AI to provide universal healthcare? I think we can. It will take a few years, maybe a decade, but I think we can. And this is a global statement.

It’s not necessarily just the US. It’s bringing the cost of care down enough such that anyone on this planet will have access to healthcare.

00:48:01  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m going to assume that you think all the AI bubble talk is wildly overblown?

00:48:09  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yes, I do think it’s wildly overblown. Look, I think the trade has gotten a bit harder, in part because the first two to three years of the trade was, oh, you just have to buy the GPUs. And anything that the GPU touched was gold.

And then it became more nuanced. Well, agents use CPUs, and we have a memory shortage, and memory has now gone up four times in price. So capex budgets are going up. So that question of ROI is coming to the fore.

And how much does capex have to go up to accommodate the supply chains being as tight as they are? And there’s technological differences between a CPU versus a GPU and how they’re used, and the Chinese might be coming, and right? So there’s a lot of different aspects that have made it a little bit harder. The open versus closed source debate — the open model versus a closed model, that’s another debate. The debt and the CDS spreads widening, that’s another.

So all of a sudden we’ve gone from a relatively simple “we’re going to need AI, we are going to need compute” to there’s a slew of different narratives that one can press on for the bear case. Now, I structurally believe — we just talked about healthcare and the innovation curve in healthcare and what that can give back to society. That is true value, right? If we can bend the cost of care from X to X minus, that is value that’s created for humanity, and we will pay for that value.

The other day, there’s been this big debate about token maxing, and there was —

00:50:03  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Define that for the lay listener.

00:50:06  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. Token maxing was this behavior that companies were encouraging their engineers to basically have leaderboards of who can use the most tokens. Which sounds insane, right? It would almost be like telling your employees to see how much they can spend on lunch, and whoever spends the most on lunch gets an award, right?

00:50:31  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, I imagine if you’re a FedEx driver and the company holds a competition for who’s going to go through the most amount of gas and tires, meaning making the most deliveries — not a bad thing for the company.

00:50:44  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Not necessarily a bad thing. But in this case, what was being used is actually not necessarily tied to deliveries. It was just, use the most tokens as you can. It didn’t kind of matter what you built with it, right?

So there wasn’t as much scrutiny as to how many quote-unquote deliveries you made. You just burned through your tires. So it was kind of inefficient. But they came out and they said, we blew through our entire budget in a quarter —

00:51:27  BARRY RITHOLTZ: For the year. The whole —

00:51:28  ANKUR CRAWFORD: — budget for the year. Yeah, the entire budget for the year in a quarter. And we haven’t gotten an ROI. Well, no kidding.

Well, they turned around last week and they laid off 10% of the people that worked for the company because of AI. Well, somewhere along the way the use of artificial intelligence allowed them to kind of refine their workforce.

00:51:52  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That sounds like they didn’t lay off people because of AI. It sounds like they laid off people because management was kind of mis-incentivizing the employees.

00:52:03  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Well, I mean, they said that they laid off people because of AI. There’s been many companies — like Jack Dorsey at XYZ also, he cut 40% of the staff blaming AI. Who knows really what the real reason is? It could be AI, or it could be they just overhired.

00:52:23  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Which he has a history of.

00:52:24  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Which he has a history of.

00:52:25  BARRY RITHOLTZ: If you track him over his various companies.

00:52:27  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Right. And many of these companies did, right? So I can’t absolve that.

However, Uber in particular said it was because of AI. They have been very front-foot-forward on the use of AI, and now they’re able to increase productivity enough that they can titrate down their workforce. So I do think that there is value that is being created because of AI. I think that it is not necessarily a technology that’s plug and play into an enterprise, and there has to be some learnings before you can get to that ROI.

00:53:09  BARRY RITHOLTZ: And we’re seeing those stumbles in that learning curve.

00:53:12  ANKUR CRAWFORD: That’s right. And all these examples — it doesn’t mean that it’s never going to work. And my viewpoint is that where there is value, we work in a system of rewarding value. So if you can create value, I believe that whoever uses that system that creates the value, they will pay for it.

00:53:35  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you’ve described the demand for compute as insatiable. What would have to happen for you to say, all right, we’re getting to saturation, or satiation? What does the top of the cycle look like? Or is it so far off in the future that we can’t even think about it?

00:53:54  ANKUR CRAWFORD: What I would say is that this is not a question where I can say, oh, in 2030 we won’t need compute. I think it’s a function of how much we put into the ground, right? It’s a delicate balance of, if we put X into the ground today — the hyperscalers are spending $650 billion, or whatever that number is —

00:54:18  BARRY RITHOLTZ: It’s circular, it’s this, it’s that. We’ve heard these complaints now for two years.

00:54:20  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Right. But $650 billion seemed like a really big number, yet we are still short compute, right? You’re hearing from the hyperscalers, we do not have enough. The neoclouds are telling you that there are four times as many asks for compute as they have capacity.

00:54:38  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wow.

00:54:38  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So if one says that we are short compute today, I don’t really understand the logic. Now let’s fast forward two and three years. If we put $3 trillion into the ground next year or the year after — which we cannot do today, because we are short power, we are short people, we are short capacity, we can’t make those chips.

But let’s hypothetically say we put in $3 trillion of compute into the ground in 2028. I would say that that is overcapacity. But we can’t do it, because there is almost a natural limiter to the growth of this market in that we don’t have the chips, we don’t have the people, we don’t have the power, right? And so the market is being capped.

If all normal forces — and if we had an infinite supply of everything — I think we would be in overcapacity today, because it’s such a big market. Everyone would be building at a pace that they want it to be, that they would want to be first. But the fact is, it’s actually a blessing that the market is being capped by all of these supply chain shortages. The fact that we don’t have plumbers and electricians to actually work in the data centers is capping the growth of data centers.

And so it is allowing for duration versus kind of having a one-time growth pop, which you were not going to pay a high multiple for. So I think that oversupply is a function of how much we put into the ground and how we use it.

00:56:20  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s unpack some of that. In the beginning of ’25, when DeepSeek first was released and everyone was startled, the initial reaction was, oh, we’ve overbuilt, we don’t need this many GPUs, we don’t need all these giant data centers, we just need slightly clever software that can do more with less. Didn’t take long before that just was overrun with, no, we need horsepower. We really need the ability for big problems to not come up with clever little workarounds, but we need the firepower.

And then again, more recently, we’ve seen a number of open source models out of China that seem to be doing a whole lot more with less. At what point does it begin to become, hey, do we really need $3 trillion worth of capacity? Don’t we just need to take a little bit of that, working out of the constraints we have, the way the Chinese models have?

00:57:23  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. So one of the things that I think is well understood is that the Chinese models didn’t do this on their own. So the way I like to think of it is, you have like an animal world, right? I just went on safari to Kenya, and giraffes almost always have birds sitting on their necks, and those birds are — it’s a mutually symbiotic relationship.

I suppose it’s not that symbiotic to the giraffe, but the bird gets to rest on the giraffe’s neck and benefits from the fact that the giraffe is walking around. So similarly, I think —

00:58:06  BARRY RITHOLTZ: What does a giraffe get out of that?

00:58:07  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I suppose the bird might keep the —

00:58:10  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Bugs away.

00:58:11  ANKUR CRAWFORD: — keep the bugs away, or eat the ticks on the giraffe.

00:58:11  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Gotcha.

00:58:11  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I don’t know. But similarly, the Kimi model is a little bit like the bird on the giraffe. Whereas I look and I think that the Chinese are very innovative in their own right.

I think they’re very good fast followers. However, they need the giraffe, which is our LLMs, in order to survive. And so I think there are many different ways to address what is happening. The scenario that I think is actually most logical — which I’m not quite sure that the large language models will do — is basically to hold the n and n-minus-one model internal, and allow for certain businesses, certain companies, the US government, other governments who are not going to distill this model and kind of feed a Kimi-type model, allow for them use of that model, and only make public the n-minus-two model. And that way it keeps any of the distillation at bay.

Now, in order for that to happen, all of the frontier models will have to agree to do this, because if there’s any frontier model that is equivalently as good, then it kind of breaks the ecosystem that I’m describing. But so I think the point is that you need to spend the capex for the training in order to get that output, so that Kimi can train on that output.

01:00:05  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So these open — training on the output, not creating their own LLM.

01:00:09  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Well, Kimi has created their own LLM by feeding off the — it’s called distilling — feeding off the output from the large language models. So a lot of the spending that is happening is actually coming from the use of the compute, from the inference aspect. So you train, and then you have to infer.

So then the inference is what we experience as consumers. And so that inference is driving a majority of the spend. And you look at the revenues of OpenAI, Anthropic — I’ve never seen growth like this. I don’t think we ever have seen growth that is as significant as what we’re seeing today.

01:00:55  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You know, people frequently make a comparison to the dot-coms, and I always feel like that’s a terrible comparison, because these are real companies with real revenue, real potential profits — not clicks and eyeballs. But the one thing some of the skeptics have pointed out that almost resonates is, during the internet era we had this huge boom where most of that value ended up landing in the consumer’s lap, not the investors’ laps, because so many of those companies crashed and burned. How similar or different is this environment to that?

01:01:39  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So I think it’s quite different. Look, there may be parallels at some point — i.e., do we overbuild, and how long does it take to actually eat through that overbuild? So you think about the 2000s.

One of the reasons we overbuilt is because we had dreamed the dream of what the internet would be. And pets.com was actually a brilliant idea.

01:02:05  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Just a little early.

01:02:06  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Just early. Now it’s Chewy. But Chewy became a significant business. Amazon has built a multi-trillion-dollar business off the back of consumers buying on the internet. But we didn’t have the internet, right?

We had dial-up, right? Dial-up is not good enough to increase productivity back then. What I would argue today is that we actually have the tools. All we needed — we had the internet, we had the productivity, we had the infrastructure that was needed for ubiquitous intelligence. All we needed was the chips, right?

We need the data centers and the chips, and that’s what is happening today. And so if we actually need ubiquitous intelligence and infinite intelligence to some extent — if we overbuild, we will eat through that overbuild as well.

01:03:14  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So what do you think the skeptics misunderstand about AI? Is it the scale, the economics, how durable the investment cycle is? What are the bears getting wrong here?

01:03:27  ANKUR CRAWFORD: I think it’s the duration. I definitively think — I think maybe it’s all of the above, really. But it’s duration, it’s the scale, it’s the economics. All three of those is where I think they’re pushing on the wrong thread.

01:03:45  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So last question before I get to all of my favorite questions I ask all my guests: what do you think investors aren’t talking about or thinking about that perhaps they should be? What is getting overlooked here? And it could be any asset, geography, policy, whatever — but what aren’t people talking about but should?

01:04:08  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. I think that people aren’t really talking about the net positive benefits to humanity from AI. We talked about healthcare, and how we can make healthcare available to any human on this planet. The same goes for education. There’s no reason why any child should be quote-unquote left behind. I mean, I’ve been shocked at what I’ve been reading recently — kids going to college and they can’t read.

Right? That is a failure of our education system that can be solved using artificial intelligence. And this is again a global issue. It is not a local issue.

This is something that we can — there’s no one that should not be educated. And the anti-AI, or climate change, right? I mean, I do think that using AI, will we be able to solve the problems that we have with climate change? Will we be able to engineer things that will help with the rapid rate of climate change? And a lot of the AI doomers or AI naysayers, who don’t want the data center built in their backyard or a data center built anywhere, are ignoring the fact that there are many different aspects of AI that will be good for humanity.

And does it require great change? And is change scary? It is, and it will require change. It will require change from all of us. But the end point is actually quite beautiful.

01:05:58  BARRY RITHOLTZ: I like that. You’re such a techno-optimist. All right, let’s jump to our favorite questions, starting with who your mentors were who helped shape your career.

01:06:09  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Oh gosh. I think that’s a pretty easy one. Our CEO Dan Chung has been pivotal in my career growth. And I told you, he hired me from Stanford without my knowing anything — I really knew nothing about this business.

And he recognized that. Why not take a shot on someone who’s non-traditional? And he himself is a non-traditional thinker. He was a lawyer, and he thinks very much outside of the box. So over the years he’s challenged me in ways that have been sometimes frustrating.

But I learn from it. He pushes me in ways that sometimes I don’t understand, but again, I learn from and grow from. So yeah, I think Dan’s like my number one mentor.

01:07:11  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading currently?

01:07:15  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So my favorite book is a book called Think Again. It’s by Adam Grant.

01:07:15  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, of course.

01:07:15  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Who’s an organizational psychologist. And I know it’s an odd — was he at Harvard? Wharton?

01:07:24  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wharton, I think.

01:07:24  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. And I know it’s an odd book to be a favorite book of mine. But in the context of business, it definitively is. And in part it’s because it talks about how you can have a hypothesis, but you have to be humble enough to understand that you can also change your hypothesis — but you have to have the confidence enough to hold a hypothesis.

And really, intelligence is about the ability to morph and be nimble. And it’s not about arrogance. Our business requires a constant questioning of what you think, right?

And those that become very tied to a thesis end up, I think, on the wrong side of a lot of trades. And so I just loved the book because of the way he writes about intelligence and the humility of questioning, and of holding conversations with people. And I think this is true for society in general right now — of having conversations where you may not agree, but to hear other people out, even if they don’t agree with you.

01:08:53  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Anything you’re reading currently?

01:08:55  ANKUR CRAWFORD: The last book I read was the recent one by Brad Jacobs, which was How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars. Brad Jacobs is the CEO of QXO. And he wrote his first book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars.

And then he wrote How to Make a Few More Billion Dollars. And what I thought was so interesting about the book is the first two chapters are about how he centers himself. And he’s an incredibly successful entrepreneur, has built many businesses really from scratch — he’s a self-made billionaire — and he starts every morning meditating, right? And how he finds that center.

And to me it’s — we often don’t talk about that aspect of investing and business. It feels sometimes really transactional. But hearing that aspect of Brad, it only puts him in even higher regard for me.

01:09:58  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Hmm. Really interesting. What are you streaming these days? What are you either listening to or watching?

01:10:04  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Oh gosh, I don’t watch much. I don’t have that much time. And usually when I do watch something with my kids, I fall asleep. But I am a runner, and so I have a lot of time that I spend running, and I’m constantly listening to podcasts.

My favorite ones happen to be MacroVoices. I love The Knowledge Project.

01:10:26  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Oh, Shane Parrish. Yeah, he’s a regular on Sunday mornings for me.

01:10:31  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah. And so, I mean, the variety of conversations that he has with different people, from wellness and wellbeing — I was listening to one about the Alpha School and how education should be reshaped. There’s just an awesome amount of diversity of thought.

The Circuit, which is all about semiconductors and chips. I’m trying to think of other ones that I listen to regularly. That’s all that comes to mind.

01:11:04  BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s a nice list. To start with our final two questions: what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either engineering, materials science, or investing?

01:11:18  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Oh wow. Well look, I think for any college grad, make sure that you do something that you love, right? And it doesn’t have to be that you love it every day, but you spend a lot of your time at work. A third — more than a third — of your life is going to be spent from here on out at work.

Make sure that you do something that you believe in, that gives you great gratification, that you feel like you’re contributing to society. Don’t just do it because you’re on a treadmill of, I’m going to go do this because I set out to do this path and I just have to go trotting along. Allow yourself the grace to change and to change your mind. I did, and it was probably the best risk that I ever took.

The best gamble that I ever took on was completely pivoting in my career. So allow yourself to explore, because you change over time as well. What you want today may be different from what you want in five, in 10 years. But definitively, make sure that you love what you do, because once you know that you love what you do, you will be the best at it.

01:12:40  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Huh. And our final question: what do you know about the world of investing today that might have been useful 20 or so years ago, when you were first starting out?

01:12:53  ANKUR CRAWFORD: So you told me this question would stump me, and it is stumping me.

01:12:58  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, the answers that I’m not looking for are, you know, buy Amazon in ’02 when it was $7. It’s what insight might have been useful way back when. What have you learned? What expensive lessons came along that, you know, I could have saved myself a lot of headache had I figured this out sooner?

01:13:23  ANKUR CRAWFORD: You know what, Barry? I don’t think I would — in my way-back machine, I wouldn’t go tell myself anything.

01:13:30  BARRY RITHOLTZ: So it’s the path, and not necessarily —

01:13:32  ANKUR CRAWFORD: Yeah, it’s the journey. My most painful moments as an investor have been the biggest learning moments for me. They’ve branded me in some way with that experience. And so I wouldn’t want to shortcut that, because it has shaped me. And every single time I’ve fallen on my face, it has shaped me and it has reminded me of the perils of not paying attention to X, Y or Z. Or, I won’t make that same mistake again. Because again, it goes back to that first question you asked me about academic versus learning on the job.

01:14:20  BARRY RITHOLTZ: You need the real experience. You need the scars. You need the —

01:14:22  ANKUR CRAWFORD: You need the experience, you need the scars. And it’s a little bit like your kids, right? You can tell your kids, don’t do that, you’re going to get hurt. Don’t do that, you’re going to get hurt. Well, sometimes they just have to fall down and get hurt to realize they’re going to get hurt.

01:14:34  BARRY RITHOLTZ: Makes a ton of sense. Ankur, thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

We have been speaking with Ankur Crawford, portfolio manager at Alger. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 653 we’ve done over the past 12 years. We launched July 2014. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

 

~~~

 

 

 

The post Transcript: Ankur Crawford, Portfolio Manager, Alger Capital Appreciation appeared first on The Big Picture.

My Two-for-Tuesday morning train reads:

• A Breakdown of the Financial Advice That’s Flying All Over TikTok: The Journal reviewed nearly 50 hours of money advice across 212 accounts. A majority were run by people with no apparent financial license or certification. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Credit Market Lens: The Return of Financial Engineering – Not 2008, But Not Nothing: Leverage and complexity are gaining ground in late-cycle credit markets. The read is caution rather than crisis, with diversification and risk management doing the work. (PIMCO) see also Private Credit Is Under Growing Strain, Despite Industry’s Upbeat Tone: The marks say one thing and the underlying borrowers say another. (Wall Street Journal) see also Private credit under strain as troubled loans swell: FT analysis shows signals of stress in the market are back to levels last seen in 2017 https://www.ft.com/content/67acde0d-4154-4332-b33b-2d03d3a86007?syn-25a6b1a6=1

• Worried about earnings growth cooling? There’s evidence that the market has been pricing in this concern for a year: After topping out late last year, the forward P/E has trended lower. It currently sits at 20.1x, which is right in line with the five-year average. Sam Ro notes the forward P/E topped out late last year and has drifted down to 20.1x — right in line with the five-year average. (TKer)

• There Aren’t Enough Ships to Handle China’s Booming Car Exports: Chinese car exports are outrunning global shipping capacity, with specialized carriers booked years out and charter rates following. BYD bought its own vessel. As demand slumps at home, Chinese cars are flooding other markets—and testing the shipping industry (Wall Street Journal)

• Iran’s Secret Plan to Escalate the War: Intercepted communications and other intelligence point to a strategic shift by hard-line leaders toward raising the costs for the U.S. and its regional allies. • Iran’s Secret Plan to Escalate the War: Intercepted communications and other intelligence suggest a strategic shift by hard-line leaders to raise the costs for the U.S. and its regional allies (Wall Street Journal)

• Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI: Konstantin Kakaes on the May 2026 announcement that shook mathematics — an internal OpenAI model produced a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, a conjecture Erdős made in 1946.  AI’s greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understand how AI might change the rest of math. (Quanta Magazine)

• Why Aging May Be a Program, Not a Breakdown: Rockefeller cell biologist Junyue Cao read gene expression across millions of mouse cells and concluded aging is not haphazard wear and tear but a “remodeling of the cell society.” Not a Breakdown: By deciphering the molecular signatures of millions of mouse cells, Junyue Cao has found that aging is not haphazard wear and tear but rather a “remodeling of the cell society.” (Quanta Magazine)

• Did Poop Enable the Evolution of Complex Animals?: Kiona N. Smith on a study arguing the Cambrian explosion was fueled by waste. The first animals emerged about 600 million years ago; things got complicated 60 million years later. In a recent study, evolution gets even messier than usual. (Ars Technica)

• How 10,000 American Cities Got Their Names: Carl Churchill mines a century-old federal report in which geographer Henry Gannett of the United States Geological Survey catalogued the origins of some 10,000 town and city names. Good semiquincentennial reading. The federal government used to catalog the origins of town names nationwide. A 334-page report reveals the influences that shaped American communities as they spread across the country. (Wall Street Journal)

• Trump Races to Prepare for New Strains of Deadly Viruses After Cutting Biosecurity Experts: Ian Duncan on the scramble to rebuild biological-attack defenses. By the end of Biden’s term the White House had as many as 30 people working on biosecurity; staffing cuts early in the second Trump administration gutted the expertise. (Washington Post)

Video of the day: “Yacht Rock” Is Bullsh*t

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents.  She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.

 

LLMs ranked by capabilities, sized by billion parameters used for training

Source: Information Is Beautiful

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

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"Generates A Number Of Risks": UBS Warns German NatGas Storage Levels Alarmingly Below Seasonal Norms

Following up on our "Winter Is Coming: Europe Faces Twin Diesel And NatGas Crunch" note earlier this month, which focused on Europe as a whole, UBS analysts focused on Germany's natural gas inventories Monday morning and warned that levels are alarmingly low for this time of year, raising the risk of elevated prices and a renewed supply crunch if the Northern Hemisphere experiences a severe winter.

Simon Penn, a London-based UBS macro strategist, wrote earlier today that Germany's NatGas storage is just 48% full, compared with 65% a year ago and 75% during the 2022 energy crisis. 

We would go a step further: inventories are now at their lowest level for this time of year in 17 years.

Penn added more color:

Economist Felix Huefner sees Germany hitting 65% in November, compared to the government target of 80% and the EU's target of 90%. This generates a number of risks. 

A surge in demand and hence gas prices if Germany attempts to achieve its targets; increased pressure on Germany's fiscal position if the government needs to use Trading Hub Europe (THE) to replenish stocks; pressures elsewhere in Europe as German demand crowds out other national buyers; Germany's regasification facilities are limited which means even if it can find LNG supply, it can't necessarily convert that to stored gas. Hence, a gas shortage could ensue late winter anyway. 

The ECB estimates that a 10% increase in wholesale gas prices adds 0.6pp to Eurozone headline inflation. In addition, all that is likely to place downward pressure on German GDP, which is already threatened by the consequences of a near-dry Rhine river. There is now a mere 10cm of navigable depth at the Kaub pinch point - in February it was 400cm and a year ago 200cm. Cargo barges are down to 10-20% of capacity to stay afloat.

Circling back to our Aug. 7 "Winter Is Coming" note, we warned that it is not just a global diesel crunch keeping Goldman's Samantha Dart up at night. NatGas is another mounting concern.

Continued disruption through the Strait of Hormuz, compounded by historically low Rhine River levels, is slowing Europe's effort to rebuild NatGas stockpiles. That risk is now materializing in the inventory data.

Here is where Europe stands in terms of NatGas storage:

At this point, Europeans had better hope that a strong El Niño would produce relatively mild weather. Otherwise, the continent could face a cold and extremely expensive winter.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/18/2026 - 02:45

Europe's Looming Existential Crisis

Authored by Kenneth Timmerman via American Greatness,

Americans pay little attention to Europe, other than to sneer at the Euro-elites and bemoan the fecklessness of European leaders.

I am guilty of both sins. Mea culpa.

But I am also aware of the coming existential crisis facing Europe as a whole and the European Union quite specifically.

It comes in several flavors, and all of them are bitter.

First is the shock and embarrassment posed by the influx of 72,000 North African Muslim wannabe migrants into Ceuta, one of two tiny Spanish enclaves in Morocco, just miles away from the Spanish mainland near Gibraltar.

The inability—or unwillingness—of the Spanish authorities to repulse them has provoked a Europe-wide reaction, prompting Italy’s center-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, to impose passport controls on visitors from Spain for the first time since the Schengen accords of 1995 created a “borderless” European space.

Spain retaliated last week, imposing controls of its own on visitors from Italy.

This week Meloni teamed up with her center-left Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, to jointly condemn uncontrolled migration.

“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it,” they said on Monday. “We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.”

Meloni drafted a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemning lax EU immigration policies, which was joined by Frederiksen and 21 EU leaders.

Immigration has been a long-simmering issue since German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of Syrian “refugees” in 2015. The Ceuta stampede is just the latest chapter.

Fabrice Leggeri, a Frenchman who was executive director of the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency from 2015 to 2022, fought tooth and nail to standardize EU immigration procedures and to transform his bureaucratic backwater into a real law enforcement agency.

He was stymied by the European Commissioner in charge of Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson of Sweden. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You don’t need guns and uniforms because migrants come in search of love. Europe is an aging continent, so whether you like it or not, it is your job to welcome migrants.”

Next comes EU enlargement.

Standing at the gates to join the EU’s 27 member states are tiny Montenegro and Albania. Then comes Iceland, should its citizens approve a resumption of EU membership talks in an upcoming referendum.

While only Albania, which is predominantly Muslim, is controversial, their accession could open the door to membership talks with Ukraine and Serbia.

Ukraine would require a peace deal with Russia, which would be less likely should Ukraine be rewarded with EU membership. Serbia, a Russian ally and gateway to the Russian economy, poses its own problems.

And finally, there is the whole question of democracy and freedom.

EU citizens rail incessantly over the often ridiculous regulations enacted by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission that affect their daily lives.

Many of these are motivated by Europe’s powerful “Green” parties and lobbyists. Others stem from the left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-farmer bias of the Eurocrats.

One case in point: the reintroduction of wolves onto agricultural lands where the predators had been eradicated generations ago. Today, the wolf packs are protected as endangered species even as they devastate sheep herds from Sweden to southern Italy.

I know farmers who brave the authorities and secretly hunt down wolves endangering their livelihoods. They operate as a veritable underground resistance movement, communicating using coded texts, always watchful of the police.

It’s a running joke that a young Swedish girl could get gang-raped by Syrian immigrants, and the police wouldn’t lift a finger. But if a farmer got caught killing a wolf, they would exhaust every investigative and prosecutorial resource to put him away for years.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is certainly aware of the dissenters among the European Parliament, mainly from the populist or center-right parties.

But instead of accommodating them, she is attempting to reinforce the powers of the unelected Commission by doing away with the existing rule of unanimity when it comes to foreign policy decisions.

For years, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán vetoed European Commission policies that invariably criticized Israel, supported the Palestinians, or criticized the United States.

His election loss only emboldened Ms. von der Leyen, who frequently clashed with Orbán personally and in public.

Now she wants to allow a simple majority of member states to approve foreign policy dictates, a shift that would essentially create the “tyranny of the majority” America’s founders warned about 250 years ago.

Former Belgian Prime Minister and European Council President Charles Michel is scathing in his criticism of von der Leyen. “Today, the Commission is trying to take control. That’s not in line with the [EU] treaty,” he told a Belgian magazine in April. “There is super authoritarian governance.”

Much but not all of those new powers came during the COVID years and in response to the war in Ukraine. But the anti-democratic gene runs deep among the Eurocrats.

Former Czech President and Prime Minister Václav Klaus lived through decades of Soviet Communism imposed on his country after World War II. Already in 2009, he was warning about the lack of democratic institutions within the EU.

“The present decision-making system of the European Union is different from a classic parliamentary democracy, tested and proven by history… Here, only one single alternative is being promoted, and those who dare think about a different option are labelled as enemies of European integration.

“Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. It was through this experience that we learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist.”

Europe and the EU are at a crossroads.

Down one road, Europe will become increasingly authoritarian and increasingly centralized, while its founding cultures will be increasingly marginalized and demeaned in favor of Muslim immigration and multiculturalism. These were the faults that led to Brexit, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Down another road, Europe will return to its roots, celebrate its diverse cultures and its Christian and Jewish heritage, and honor the wishes of its member states and their people.

Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that democratic alternative on the horizon, at least not yet.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/18/2026 - 02:00

What's Behind Trump's Unexpected Favor To Kim Jong Un?

Authored by Andrew Korybko,

He might be flirting with a radical policy recalibration even if he soon changes his mind...

Trump unexpectedly announced that the US will “substantially reduce” its participation in the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield large-scale joint military drills with South Korea that he was apparently unaware of till just recently and which began this week. He described his decision as being “Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” and aimed at not “send[ing] a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile”. He also complained about its costs and South Korea’s refusal to help the US fight Iran.

Trump’s favor to Kim was unexpected because he mentioned North Korea alongside Russia, China, and Iran as “US adversaries” just last month who have the ability to manipulate US elections. His Under Secretary of War Elbridge Colby was also in Southeast Asia in early August, where he was replicating the NATO 3.0 concept through what can be called AUKUS+. While it’s mainly aimed at containing China, fearmongering about North Korea could raise its appeal among some South Koreans and Japanese.

On that topic, those two states are US mutual defense allies, and they share similar threat perceptions of China and North Korea. They’re also rapidly militarizing, with South Korea planning to build its first nuclear submarine with American assistance and Japan considering abandoning its Three Non-Nuclear Principles, both of which have heightened regional tensions to the US’ divide-and-rule benefit. The same goes for the latest Russian-Japanese tensions over the Southern Kurils in which the US backs Japan.

It was therefore completely unexpected that Trump would do Kim a favor as significant as “substantially reducing” the US’ participation in its annual large-scale joint military drills with South Korea since this goes against all of the abovementioned policies. While only he can account for his reasons, and it’s possible that he simply felt like it and there’s nothing deeper, it can’t be ruled out that he has some plan in mind. His South Korean counterpart’s recent call to resume talks with the North could provide a hint.

Trump might thus be considering the resumption of his own talks with Kim, whether bilaterally like during his first term and/or somehow connected with his “Board of Peace” initiative, the motivation of which could be a blend of personal and geostrategic calculations. As regards the first, he might want to cement his legacy as a “president of peace” like he’s previously described himself as while also distracting from the political-military debacle of the Third Gulf War that he initiated earlier this year.

On the geostrategic front, Trump might fear that Russia, North Korea, and China could strengthen their military-security ties to the point of a de facto alliance in the face of the challenge that AUKUS+ poses to them all, which could risk World War III by miscalculation if North Korea carries out more nuclear and/or missile tests amidst worsening regional tensions. Essentially, the speculative resumption of Trump-Kim talks could therefore be for escalation-control purposes, though only if they’re successful.

It’s admittedly premature to analyze anything beyond what was already mentioned in this piece, and even that which was written is reasonable conjecture, but it’s nevertheless notable that Trump unexpectedly did such a significant favor for Kim in spite of the rising regional tensions that the US is responsible for. After all, this single move goes against all of the US’ policies in Northeast Asia, so it’s not far-fetched that he might be flirting with a radical policy recalibration even if he soon changes his mind.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 23:50

Deep Capture: The Administrative State's Intellectual Origins

Authored by Sofia Karstens via Brownstone Institute,

Woodrow Wilson holds a distinction no other American president has: he earned a Ph.D., completing his doctorate in political science and history at Johns Hopkins University in 1886. That same year, he wrote an essay called "The Study of Administration," later published in the inaugural volume of Political Science Quarterly. Historians widely credit this essay as the founding document of public administration as a formal academic field, and Wilson himself as the father of that discipline.

Wilson's central argument was that government should be split into two separate domains: politics, where elected officials set broad goals and policy direction, and administration, a technical, expert-driven sphere that should be run with "large powers and unhampered discretion" and insulated from day-to-day political interference.

Wilson suggested that government ought to be removed from the political process...in other words: "Democracy is too important to be left to voters." He explicitly encouraged American reformers to study European administrative models - including Prussia's - for lessons in efficiency, arguing that the US had fallen behind other nations in developing a science of government administration.

Later scholars have debated how far Wilson actually intended this separation to go, and some interpret his argument as calling for administrators to be almost entirely removed from political accountability. His essay laid the intellectual groundwork for what would become the modern professional civil service - insulated from patronage and run by career administrators rather than political appointees or elected officials.

The Frankfurt School's American Exile

Nearly 50 years later, a very different intellectual tradition found refuge in the same city that Wilson's ideas would eventually help administer. Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany in 1930, leading a group of thinkers who developed what became known as Critical Theory. Its core members included Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Leo Lowenthal. Critical Theory is a philosophical framework that analyzes power structures and social inequalities.

Developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s, it shifted Marxism from a strict economic focus to a critique of culture, media, and modern society. Critical Theory was a different way of looking at philosophy; where philosophy was a search for truth - trying to explain phenomena and things that were not easily proven by science (ethics for example) - Critical Theory shifted to look at philosophy specifically through the lens of Marxism. It became no longer a search for truth but a means of propagandizing, which some would argue was a betrayal of philosophy.

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Horkheimer was forced to relocate the group first to Geneva and then to New York, where it formed a loose affiliation with Columbia University in 1934-35. Horkheimer's actual scholarly project - laid out in works like Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason - described how instrumental reason, mass culture, and authoritarianism are able to take hold in modern societies.

It was also between 1933 and 1937 that several regulatory agencies were established that would come to form the backbone of the modern Administrative State.

Port Huron and the Old/New Left Split

By the early 1960s, the American left was largely defined by an older tradition: labor unions, industrial organizing, and class-based politics rooted in the fights of the 1930s and '40s. In June 1962, a group of Socialist Organization representatives, student activists, organized labor unions, civil rights leaders, and foreign observers gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, and produced a document that would come to mark a generational break from that tradition.

Students for a Democratic Society had grown out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of an older Socialist educational group called the League for Industrial Democracy, which itself traced back to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society founded in 1905. In early 1960, that student branch renamed itself Students for a Democratic Society.

The manifesto produced at Port Huron was drafted primarily by Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student and former editor of the Michigan Daily, working from ideas that blended the sociology of Columbia's C. Wright Mills and Walter Reuther with the direct-action tactics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The week-long meeting brought together groups who wrote, debated, and voted on a 60-page document. Notably, it took place at a United Auto Workers retreat, with the UAW under Reuther's leadership covering a range of the convention's costs. Inside circles among Reuther's contemporaries referred to it as "The Long Journey."

The statement opened with a line that became its signature: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." Its authors argued that two forces had shaken them out of complacency - the civil rights struggle against racial bigotry in the South, and the threat of nuclear war under the Cold War's shadow.

Where the Old Left had organized around labor and class struggle, Port Huron's New Left shifted the terrain. It called for a "participatory democracy" in which ordinary people - not just union leaders or party bosses - would have a direct hand in the decisions shaping their lives, workplaces, schools, and government. It criticized both American Cold War policy and Soviet communism, explicitly opposing the Soviet system's suppression of organized dissent. And because the statement judged the civil rights, peace, and student movements too poor and marginalized to drive change on their own, and organized labor too quiet, it looked instead to universities - which it saw as institutions open to people of nearly any viewpoint who could be recruited as "useful innocents" (often mistranslated as "useful idiots") to carry the water - as the engine of a new movement. Media, unions, high schools, and elementary schools were to follow.

The Port Huron Statement went on to shape the framing of Great Society-era politics, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the broader counterculture that carried into the early 1970s. Historians and participants alike have described it as the founding document of the New Left and a turning point.

The Modern Left's Long March

The strategic logic for how a university-centered movement might expand its influence beyond campus came from Germany. West German student movement leader Rudi Dutschke, nicknamed "Red Rudi," coined the phrase "der Lange Marsch Durch die Institutionen" (the long march through the institutions), borrowing the "long march" imagery from Mao's Chinese Communist Red Army march of 1934-35. The idea was that instead of pursuing a frontal revolutionary confrontation with the state, radicals should embed themselves inside existing institutions and overtake them from within over time. The name (and indeed his nickname) was a deliberate echo of the Chinese Communist Party.

Herbert Marcuse (The Frankfurt School) explicitly endorsed the approach of pursuing radical change not through revolution but by working patiently inside the institutions of government and civil society until they were captured and transformed from within. Writing to Dutschke in 1971 he intoned: "Your notion of the 'long march through the institutions' is the only effective way" forward for the movement. Marcuse became an enthusiastic backer of the strategy, and summarized Dutschke's strategy in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt as "working against the established institutions while working within them."

He described infiltrating while learning their actual skills and functions rather than simply obstructing them; by "not simply 'boring from within' but by 'doing the job'...learning how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence.

Writing nearly three decades later, cultural critic Roger Kimball invoked this same Marcusean formulation to explain how the radicalism of the 1960s ultimately achieved its aims not through revolution but through patient institutional capture - "by insinuation and infiltration rather than by confrontation" (The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America). The result, as later commentators (The Successful Long March Through the Institutions, The American Vision) have characterized it, was a transformation accomplished without open conflict: "Not a shot was fired. No one was forced into concentration camps. Millions of parents willingly sent their children into public schools and universities systems..." that had, by then, been reshaped from within. Effectively replacing "bloody revolutions from without" with institutional capture from within.

Dutschke's thinking is often linked to the earlier work of Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian Marxist theorist who argued that revolution in developed Western societies wouldn't come from a single decisive uprising but from a slow "war of position" - a patient campaign to win cultural and institutional influence over time. While there's no direct evidence Dutschke had read Gramsci when he coined the term, notably, his diaries and biography reference other influences, including Georg Lukacs, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong.

Khrushchev famously said "We will bury you," which he later clarified to mean that communism would trounce capitalism. The Long March Through the Institutions is reminiscent of the Marxist/Communist concept of the "Vanguard State" as the "bridge" between a Capitalist state and a Socialist/Communist state.

Marcus Raskin and the Institute for Policy Studies

One American figure who embodied this institution-building, infiltrating strategy was Marcus Raskin. Born in Milwaukee in 1934 to Russian immigrant parents, Raskin studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned his law degree in 1957. During his time at Chicago, Raskin studied under Rexford Tugwell, who was a Columbia economist and a key member of Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust."

It was Tugwell who had suggested that it would be necessary to collect money (from the American people) to begin the process of creating an Administrative State.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, requiring most Americans to surrender their gold coins, bullion, and certificates to the Federal Reserve in exchange for paper dollars, citing that private gold hoarding was worsening the Depression. The following year, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 revalued gold from $20.67 to $35 an ounce - a roughly 69 percent devaluation of the dollar against gold - which meant the government profited handsomely on the gold it had just collected at the lower price. Tugwell was among the New Deal's most influential architects of expanded federal planning, helping design agencies like the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Resettlement Administration. The devaluation, paired with an expanded money supply, gave Washington greater fiscal room to fund Administrative State projects.

After Chicago under Tugwell, Raskin went on to work as legislative counsel for several Congressmen in the late 1950s, then joined the Kennedy administration's National Security Council in 1961 as an aide to McGeorge Bundy. He resigned in 1962, citing his opposition to the Cuban Missile Crisis response. In 1963, alongside fellow Kennedy-administration alumnus Richard Barnet, Raskin co-founded the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. - widely described as the first independent progressive think tank, built explicitly on the idea that the systemic change they wanted couldn't be achieved from inside government, and would instead have to come through social movements and infiltrating institutions.

IPS was closely tied to the New Left from the start. Historian Brian Mueller has written that IPS "epitomized the ideals of the New Left, especially those found in the 1962 Port Huron Statement" and, in fact, a 1962 prospectus Raskin wrote for IPS contained ideas strikingly similar to Port Huron's. Fellow IPS founder Arthur Waskow joined SDS in 1963, and both men wrote for the New Left magazine Ramparts.

IPS drew sustained scrutiny throughout the Cold War for its foreign-policy positions. The House Committee on Internal Security and later conservative critics documented Raskin and Barnet's contacts with North Vietnamese communist officials during the Vietnam War, Raskin's board membership at Ramparts (which the same committee called "pro-Hanoi, pro-Castro") and, later, in the 1980s, IPS-organized conferences with Soviet officials that a bipartisan group of roughly 80 members of Congress warned could be used for Soviet intelligence purposes.

Carter, Ink, and the Reshaping of Federal Administration

The administrative machinery Wilson had theorized decades earlier took its modern shape under President Carter. By 1977, Carter had concluded that the federal civil service system needed its first comprehensive overhaul since the Pendleton Act of 1883. The opportunity came in the aftermath of Watergate and amid broader public distrust of government institutions. In March 1978, he sent Congress his reform proposal; after 13 days of hearings and testimony from more than 200 witnesses, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act, and Carter signed it into law that October - just over seven months after it was introduced.

The Act abolished the US Civil Service Commission and split its functions among three new agencies: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which handles federal personnel policy; the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which adjudicates federal employee appeals; and the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), which oversees federal labor-management relations.

The reform's chief architect and implementer was Dwight Ink, a career federal executive who had served in every presidential administration since Eisenhower. Ink had already built a formidable reputation of cutting through red tape and quickly executing major government overhauls, earning him the nickname "Mr. Implementation." Ink himself later wrote that he couldn't recall any other government-wide management reform as broad as the 1978 act being enacted so quickly. The transformation was praised by Marcus Raskin's intellectual incubator, IPS, which has documented ties to the American Communist Party and drove DNC capture between 1972 and 1978.

That same year, Carter signed a second landmark law. The Inspector General Act of 1978 established 12 statutory offices of Inspector General across major federal departments and agencies, giving each the authority to audit internal agency documents, investigate fraud, and report findings both to their agency heads and directly to Congress every six months. By 1988 additional IGs had been added for smaller independent agencies, and there are now 73 statutory Inspectors General across the federal government. By systematically replacing public servants with IGs and positions functioning as commissars who decide investigative targets, including the US elections commission, the landscape for a coup became fertile.

Marching Along

CIGIE, created in 2008, was established by the Inspector General Reform Act by merging two earlier coordinating bodies: the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE) and the Executive Council on Integrity and Efficiency (ECIE). Those two predecessor councils themselves went back to 1992, created by executive order under President George H.W. Bush. Between the original 1978 IG Act and the 2008 creation of the unified CIGIE structure are three decades of Long March institutional groundwork.

CIGIE functions as a coordinating and standard-setting body for the IG community - running training, setting audit and investigation standards, and housing an Integrity Committee that investigates allegations against IGs themselves. Its voting members include not just the Inspectors General of individual agencies, but also representatives from the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Office of Special Counsel - a genuinely broad cross-section of oversight and intelligence-adjacent offices sitting on one council, which could be described as a "control layer."

The IG Act has continued to evolve since 1978: notably, the 2022 Securing Inspector General Independence Act added new protections against politically motivated IG removals, requiring the President to give Congress 30 days' notice and a substantive, case-specific rationale before removing an Inspector General.

CIGIE today represents a sui generis entity where one office effectively oversees software integrity across 3,143 counties. This structure echos Woodrow Wilson's administrative state-framed government as "too important to be left to the voters," relying on a political-technocratic elite and completes the Marxist Commissar model.

The GAP

In 1977 the Institute for Policy Studies formed the Government Accountability Program (GAP). On its surface it looked like a place for whistleblowers to find shelter, especially after the Pentagon Papers, and indeed many whistleblowers from the intelligence community and national defense program gravitated there. Critics suggest, however, that it was actually used as a honeypot to entice, contain, and control the whistleblowers, even as it collaborated and often even worked directly with the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC).

The Office of the Whistleblower Ombudsman was created in January 2019, as part of the House rules package adopted at the start of the 116th Congress (when Democrats took control of the House). It established, within the House of Representatives, a mandate to develop practices for House offices receiving confidential information from whistleblowers about government wrongdoing - including setting up reporting systems, maintaining confidentiality, and training staff.

It sat without a director for about a year. Then in February 2020, shortly after the conclusion of Trump's first impeachment trial (which had been sparked by a whistleblower complaint), Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she had appointed Shanna Devine as the inaugural director of the office. Devine had previously worked at GAP.

Critics questioned whether someone from an advocacy group could serve a "nonpartisan" role, citing concerns that the position could function as a filter protecting officials from exposure, and worrying whether this infrastructure meant this office could effectively legally spy on everyone - including Congress.

GAP also had a prominent role in advocating for the office's creation. Samantha Feinstein, GAP's senior legal and international analyst, testified before Congress to request the creation of the Ombudsman Office, which meant GAP was influencing policy from the outside as well.

The Modern Left's Electoral Rise

Decades after Port Huron, the left flank that it and IPS helped seed has grown into an electoral force. The Democratic Socialists of America was formed in 1982 through the merger of two left-wing organizations: the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, founded in 1973 by socialist Michael Harrington, and the New American Movement. For decades it remained small and aging - its median member age was 68 in 2013.

That changed after 2016. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign highlighted disaffection with mainstream Democratic politics and helped consolidate a younger left wing, and DSA's median member age dropped to 33 by 2017. One commentator described the shift as transforming the group from a "musty debate club for retired social democrats into an electoral powerhouse of young, ecumenical radicals."

Electoral wins followed quickly. In 2017, fifteen DSA members won local and state offices, including Lee Carter's election to the Virginia House of Delegates. The breakthrough came in 2018, when DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated incumbent Congressman Joe Crowley in a primary upset in New York's 14th District, becoming a national figure. She and Rashida Tlaib became the first two DSA members elected to Congress that year.

The organization's footprint in elected office has continued to grow, with Ashik Siddique, a research analyst at one IPS program (National Priorities Project) who is also separately, and much more significantly, the current national co-chair of the DSA. That means that a sitting IPS staffer simultaneously holds DSA's top elected position.

Notable DSA-linked officials now include Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, elected in 2025. By 2025, more than 250 DSA members held elected office across 40 states, with 90% of them elected after 2019. As of mid-2026, DSA has grown to more than 120,000 members and now plays an influential role within the Democratic Party, and the group and its local chapters have endorsed 150 candidates this year, claiming 38 wins so far.

The group draws sharp fire from opponents. President Trump has characterized Mamdani and other DSA-backed candidates as "communist," exposing their links to adversaries like the CCP - though DSA describes itself as aiming for "democratic socialism."

Expert Colonel Tim Shindelar describes The New Left's methodical inching into the Modern Left as "The Final Mile." The Old Left (Marxism, 1908-1962; 54 years) was about class struggle and establishment of unions. The New Left (Social Justice, 1962-1982; 20 years), focused on issues like abortion, capital punishment, civil rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights and gender roles, and immigration. The Modern Left (Final Mile, 1982-present; 44 years) has evolved into policies like the Green New Deal, making higher education free, social ownership of the American economy (placing governors on true free market capitalism), national defense reduction, a Democratic Party shift into the progressive far left, along with pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist causes.

The Media and The Last Mile

This shift to administrative power effectively renders elected officials powerless. Just because someone is elected to office doesn't mean they have any real power; the administrative state will allow elected officials (even executive ones) to ride in the back but they cannot drive the car.

Which means that voters are at the kids table, because it doesn't matter who the elected official is if the power lies with the Administrative State...thus embodying and defining Wilson's vision of keeping politics out of government because democracy is too important to be left to voters. The politics in which we all engage is merely a rubber match, and is unconnected to the outcome; the real match is occurring in a different stadium entirely.

Much of this neutralization and marginalization of the actual people (voters), while maintaining the illusion that it is neither by validating the scrimmage to its participants, traces to mid-20th-century globalist planning (1952-1956), building on Wassily Leontief's 1953 work aimed at phasing American labor to China while addressing excess human labor and galvanizing wealth concentration among a technocratic elite. Individual self-interest via game theory was expected to align populations toward what we now describe as the Singularity, but Marx's framework did not anticipate AI collapsing labor demand to zero - accelerating the need for focused population control programs. But there would be no buy-in unless a different diorama was presented.

The 1928 book Propaganda was written by the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays (1891-1995). Bernays was the son of Freud's sister and also related through his mother, who was Freud's sister. His father was also the brother of Freud's wife Martha.

Bernays is often called the "father of public relations" and Propaganda argued that manipulating public opinion is a necessary part of a functioning democracy. It drew heavily on his uncle's psychoanalytic theories to explain how to influence mass behavior through unconscious desires rather than rational argument.

George Orwell didn't invent the world of 1984 out of thin air - he drew it directly from Stalinist Russia, where erasing and reshaping history was institutionalized state policy. Not long after Stalin consolidated control, images of Leon Trotsky, the driving force behind the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, started vanishing from public life. In their place came grand, fictionalized depictions of Stalin standing shoulder to shoulder with Lenin as co-architects of the Bolshevik uprising, while Trotsky, despite having founded the Red Army himself, was written out entirely. These doctored scenes became fixtures of Soviet propaganda, plastered across office walls, towering billboards, museum halls, and postage stamps.

The effect on public memory was profound. Younger citizens absorbed the fabrication as historical fact, while older ones who had lived through the actual events found their genuine recollections gradually blurring with the state's preferred narrative - a strange kind of political false memory syndrome. People who reconciled what they actually remembered with that which the government insisted they believe developed what Orwell described as "doublethink." Those who refused - old revolutionaries who knew firsthand - were branded traitors, class enemies, or fascist sympathizers; they faced arrest, torture, forced public confessions, and execution.

With total command over media and law enforcement, it is possible to rewrite the collective memory of an entire population if you have one generation in which to accomplish it. With fully infiltrated and captured institutions it is possible to take control over an entire country without firing a shot if you have two. We are in the final mile, and the ghost in the machine has a government ID.

Sofia Karstens is an activist in California who worked closely with publisher Tony Lyons and Robert F. Kennedy Jr on several projects, including Kennedy's best-selling book: The Real Anthony Fauci. She collaborates with several organizations in the legal, legislative, medical science, and literary spaces and she is co-founder of Free Now Foundation, a non-profit preserving medical freedom and children's health.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 20:55

Peter Thiel Makes $76 Million Bet On Argentina's Top Shale Exporter Amid Milei Reforms

Vista Energy SAB's American depositary receipts are up 5% Monday on news that Peter Thiel's hedge fund disclosed a $76 million stake in Argentina's largest oil exporter.

Thiel Macro LLC reported owning almost 1.2 million shares of Vista at the end of the second quarter, valued at about $76 million. This was the fund's second-largest disclosed holding after Amazon.

Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, has deepened his ties to Argentina. He recently bought a home in Buenos Aires and met President Javier Milei in April, fueling speculation about increased investment in the country, which is undergoing a radical shift from failed socialism toward free-market capitalism.

Vista Energy is a Mexico-incorporated independent producer focused almost entirely on Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale formation. Latest data show that the formation's combined oil and natural gas output has surpassed 1 million barrels a day.

Bloomberg noted:

Under Milei, Argentina has removed controls on oil prices and exports, and regained access to global financial markets, jump-starting growth in its Vaca Muerta shale patch in Patagonia, where combined crude and natural gas production has already surpassed 1 million barrels a day. The boom is starting to transform Argentina's economy.

Since Milei was sworn in on December 10, 2023, taking the oath of office in Buenos Aires, Vista ADRs have risen 139%.

Bloomberg data show that Theil now ranks as the 15th-largest shareholder. 

Milei's economic reforms are aimed at attracting foreign investment, particularly in the country's natural resources, including oil, rare-earth minerals, and lithium.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 20:30

Iran War Pushes Middle Eastern Airlines Towards $4.3BN Loss In 2026

Via Middle East Eye

As the US and Israel launched air strikes on Iran on February 28 2026, Iran struck back near US military installations in the Gulf, including in Qatar and the UAE. Several international airports were hit by Iranian strikes, including Dubai, the world's busiest for international passengers, as well as Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Bahrain. 

The UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait closed their airspaces due to safety concerns, gradually reopening them a week later as hostilities lessened. The war has had long-lasting consequences for regional aviation: falling passenger and cargo demand, fewer private jet flights, and global repercussions from high jet fuel prices. 

via AFP

The International Air Transport Association's (IATA) June outlook estimated that airlines operating from the Middle East will see a $7.2bn net profit in 2025 become a $4.3bn net loss in 2026.

Most major regional carriers have resumed operations, including Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways, but not at full capacity. Emirates CEO Tim Clark told the Financial Times in June his planes were flying at three-quarters capacity. 

Conversely, most European and Asian airlines' flights in the region remain suspended. Air France expects to resume in late August and Lufthansa in September, while British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines are all targeting late October. 

Air Canada is not planning to resume before mid-January 2027, and many others have not announced a restart date at all. Regional airspaces have reopened, but are still facing intermittent closures and disruptions. 

The EU Aviation Safety Agency’s most recent bulletin advises operators to "avoid the airspace of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and part of the Gulf of Oman until 31 August 2026".

The result is limited choice for travelers. For a one-week round trip between the UAE and London in September, the only options are Emirates to Dubai, Etihad to Abu Dhabi, or Air Arabia to Sharjah, while to fly between Doha and Tokyo on those same dates, only Qatar Airways is available.

Business under threat

Gulf airlines organize their activity around a hub-and-spoke model concentrating traffic at a central base and operating flights worldwide from there. Passengers connect onward from the main hub, offering connections that are otherwise unavailable or sometimes cheaper fares than direct flights. 

This model has long relied on the Gulf’s strategic position between Europe and Asia, forming what analysts describe as a "bridge" between the two continents. But the war has put this model at risk.

Naveed Kapadia, an aviation lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University, told Middle East Eye that while competition for airlines such as Qatar Airways and Emirates is “greatly reduced”, allowing them to “capture market share and maintain stronger fares”, they remain “connecting carriers whose economics depend on moving large volumes of passengers efficiently through Dubai and Doha”.

Kapadia said IATA’s June data showed Middle Eastern passenger demand fell 13.9 percent year-on-year, while direct traffic between Europe and Asia rose 11 percent, already revealing a strain on the Gulf carrier’s model.

This leads to cost increases across the board. “Where flights must use longer or less efficient routings, airlines face higher fuel burn, longer crew duty periods and reduced aircraft utilisation,” Kapadia said. The extra fuel many now carry in case of disruption also directly limits “passenger or cargo payload that can be carried”.

The hub-and-spoke model leaves airlines susceptible to disruption, as aircraft and crews can be stranded far away, causing cascading delays and cancellations across the entire schedule.

Emirates innovates  

Emirates has been innovating to win back the customers it had before the war, as many are hesitant to book flights connecting through Dubai in case hostilities resume.

One measure is an unprecedented travel insurance policy, offering comprehensive coverage even in case of conflict-related cancellation. Until now, most travel insurance voided cover in the event of war-related disruption, leaving passengers to absorb the costs themselves. 

The policy aims to prevent passengers from being stranded, with Emirates offering to fly them home on other airlines if needed. CEO Tim Clark told the Financial Times the aim was to guarantee “we would get you back irrespective [of whether it's] on Emirates or not”.

Iran war hands Syria windfall as airlines reroute over its airspace https://t.co/cVX6ipeefi pic.twitter.com/UjNM6FbOAW

— Mutlu Civiroglu (@mutludc) June 2, 2026

Dubai has also been trying to reboost tourism more broadly, offering complimentary packages for visitors invited by Emirati nationals and free hotel stays for long connecting flights.

Cargo demand lags 

Cargo carriers have also been impacted by regional disruptions. Kapadia said Middle East cargo demand grew roughly a third slower than the rest of the industry’s, at 5.6 percent year on year, behind the global rate of 8.5 percent.

Citing IATA figures, Kapadia said traffic between Europe and the Middle East remained 41.1 percent below the previous year, while Asia-Middle East traffic was down 4.1 percent.

He added that while “disruption to maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is creating demand for faster alternatives, particularly for urgent, high-value and time-sensitive shipments”, this was not a "straightforward windfall" for Gulf-based cargo airlines.

Middle Eastern carriers such as Qatar Airways Cargo and Emirates SkyCargo account for around 13 percent of global air cargo traffic.  “The more important question,” he said, “is whether they can convert short-term urgency into sustained and profitable cargo flows.”

Private jets staying  

Similar disruptions have also been observed in the private jet sector. Nick Koscinski, an aviation analyst at WINGX, told Middle East Eye that as of 10 August, overall private jet traffic originating in Gulf countries was down 46.5 percent since the war began. 

“The vast majority of flights stayed within the Middle East region,” he said, though volumes there are “still down considerably”. Europe remains the second most common destination from Gulf origins, but Gulf-to-Europe flights are down 41.0 percent.

Koscinski said Qatar Executive, one of the top Gulf-based private jet operators, had been more resilient than UAE or Saudi Arabia-based competitors.  Total flights are down 6.7 percent since the war began, against 28.7 percent for a comparable UAE-based operator and 39.0 percent for a Saudi one. 

Koscinski said operators “likely have some ability to pass increased operating costs, like fuel spikes, through to the consumer via surcharges”, but lags in repricing and “softer demand overall” mean they will still take a financial hit.

Fuel costs squeeze margins

Jet fuel prices fell 20 percent in June as Gulf oil flows temporarily improved, Kapadia said, but remained “45.8% higher than a year earlier”. IATA forecasts the 2026 jet fuel price average will run 70 percent above 2025 levels.

Kapadia expects “Gulf airfares to remain elevated and volatile rather than rise uniformly” because “airlines will try to recover higher fuel and disruption costs through fares to some extent, but they cannot pass on every additional cost without weakening demand, particularly among price-sensitive leisure travellers.”

Low-cost carriers around the world have been particularly vulnerable to the jump in fuel cost: US-based Spirit Airlines ceased operations on 2 May 2026, while Air Baltic and Wizz Air face growing bankruptcy risk and are forced to restructure operations. 

A McKinsey report found that around 70 percent of jet fuel surcharges are passed directly to consumers, with airline margins recovering only briefly when fuel prices fall. It said the economic pressure will force airlines to retire older aircraft, cut less-booked routes, and further trim overhead costs.

Not every carrier is equally impacted. Israel’s national airline, El Al, has recently reported record profits, more than double the previous year.

Many passengers have criticized the “outrageous” fares, as the continued flight suspension by international carriers leaves the airline in a near-monopoly.

Harsha Jaison, an aviation consultant at ICF, told Middle East Eye the conflict has set a precedent that will probably outlast it. “Airport investment deals, geopolitical risk is increasingly being reflected in downside scenarios, valuation assumptions and risk premiums,” she said.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 20:05

Record Ground Beef Prices May Finally Be Breaking Consumer Demand

Last week's retail sales report provided fresh evidence that the K-shaped economy is buckling, with national average gasoline prices still printing above $4 a gallon and discretionary spending weakening. Consumer stress is now surfacing in the grocery aisle: as beef prices hover near record highs, Americans are beginning to trade down to cheaper proteins.

Bloomberg cites new data from Chicago-based market research company Circana, showing that beef sales volumes declined .3% during the 13 weeks through mid-July. Volumes had risen about 5% during the same period in each of the previous two years. The decline is notable because it occurred during the peak grilling season around Memorial Day and July Fourth.

Source: Bloomberg

Data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) show that the national average price of ground beef in the supermarket is hovering just below $7 per pound, a record high, as a prolonged cattle shortage shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

The Trump administration has focused on easing elevated beef prices through increased imports, but any meaningful relief will take years. The US cattle herd remains near its lowest level in more than five decades, while imported animals must be raised for months before entering the food supply.

Bank of America analysts recently cited Oklahoma State University agricultural economist Derrell Peel, who warned that the US cattle cycle is unlikely to improve anytime soon and that beef prices are poised to remain elevated through at least next year.

Read:

• When Will The Cattle Cycle Turn? BofA Has Answers For Beef Lovers

We noted in late July that one of the most overlooked affordable proteins is pork, which averaged $4.81 per pound in mid-June, compared with $7.95 per pound for ground beef, while pork chops cost roughly one-third as much as beef steak, according to Bloomberg, citing NielsenIQ data.

"Consumers are stretched," Chris DuBois, an executive vice president at data-analytics firm Circana, told Bloomberg. "It's not always just about the price of food, there's the price of life that hits, so that puts some of the pressure on total volume in the store."

Last week (view report), retail sales in July were a big disappointment, with discretionary categories seeing spending pullbacks. Notably, lower-income spending held up well, while higher-income spending cooled modestly.

July retail sales weakness was driven by a plunge in non-discretionary spending by higher income households https://t.co/TbbJ6WB81K pic.twitter.com/dDUdAOGawX

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 14, 2026

With that said, demand destruction levels for beef may finally be hitting, which is a promising sign of early rebalancing. However, consumers will not be thrilled, as they will have to trade down to cheaper proteins such as chicken and pork.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 19:40

Charges Against Palisades Fire Arson Suspect Revised

City News Service via The Epoch Times,

LOS ANGELES - The man accused of setting a blaze that grew into the deadly Palisades Fire, the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history, is facing one less criminal charge, with federal prosecutors obtaining a revised indictment in the case.

Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, is posed after his arrest on charges that he intentionally ignited the Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles, before his first court appearance in Orlando, Fla., on Oct. 8, 2025. Department of Justice/Handout via Reuters

In June, a federal court jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of acquitting Jonathan Rinderknecht on three arson-related charges stemming from the 2025 firestorm, which prosecutors say began on New Year's Day as the Lachman Fire, which smoldered for a week before Santa Ana winds re-ignited it into the Palisades Fire. In light of the deadlock, a judge declared a mistrial, but prosecutors vowed to retry the case.

The Palisades Fire killed 12 people, burned 23,448 acres, cost billions in damage and insurance claims, and ruined much of the exclusive Pacific Palisades community, destroying about 6,800 structures.

Rinderknecht was originally charged with three federal arson counts: destruction of property by means of fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce, and timber set afire. On Aug. 13, however, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment with only two charges - destruction of property by means of fire and arson affecting property used in interstate commerce.

In the new indictment, the first charge refers only to Rinderknecht's alleged setting of the Lachman Fire, rather than the Lachman and Palisades fires.

Rinderknecht is due in court for a status conference this week, with a re-trial tentatively set for October.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli insisted after the mistrial was declared in June that prosecutors would eventually win a conviction.

"The evidence is strong that Jonathan Rinderknecht is responsible for igniting the fire on January 1, 2025, which eventually became the Palisades Fire," Essayli wrote on X. "We fully intend to retry this case before a new jury and obtain guilty verdicts on all charged counts."

Defense attorney Steven Haney told reporters outside court, however, that his client is innocent, and a retrial won't give prosecutors a better result. He said prosecutors "failed miserably" in their efforts to prove their case.

"If they want to re-try it again, we can re-try it again," Haney said. "If Bill Essayli wants to cheerlead from the sidelines, maybe he should come in and try the case himself next time."

He said a re-trial would likely end up with Rinderknecht being acquitted.

"Ten-to-two is an overwhelming message from the jury that the government failed and did not have enough evidence to prove their case," Haney said.

Rinderknecht remains in federal custody pending the new trial.

During the 10-day trial earlier this year, the jury heard evidence that the deadly Palisades Fire was a "holdover" fire - a continuation of the Lachman Fire that began early in the morning on New Year's Day 2025. Although firefighters quickly suppressed the Lachman Fire - named for a street near the Skull Rock Trailhead - the fire continued to smolder and burn underground within the root structure of dense vegetation.

On Jan. 7, 2025, heavy winds caused the underground fire to re-surface and spread above ground in what became known as the Palisades Fire, which caused widespread damage in Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

Prosecutors used witness statements, video surveillance, cell phone data, and analysis of fire dynamics and patterns at the scene to try to show Rinderknecht intentionally set the Lachman Fire and then lied about it to investigators. The evidence was largely circumstantial.

Haney argued that no hard evidence tied his client to arson, and the Lachman and Palisades fires were two separate events. The first fire was likely caused by errant New Year's Eve fireworks, he told jurors, and the second blaze could've been arson.

According to Haney, Rinderknecht was on the trail near the Hidden Buddha clearing where the Lachman Fire was thought to have started, but the part-time Uber driver did nothing more than call 911 to report it.

Haney insisted the Lachman Fire "could've started before Jonathan even arrived [on the scene]. Nobody knows for sure when it started. Everyone is guessing. A man's on trial and nobody knows when the fire started."

Prosecutors told jurors Rinderknecht, driven by anger, loneliness and a thirst for revenge against the wealthy, used a grill lighter to ignite hilltop vegetation around midnight on Dec. 31, 2024 at a remote, deserted area adjacent to the Pacific Palisades' Summit neighborhood. That fire ultimately exploded into the deadly conflagration that wiped out much of the upscale community six days later.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 19:15

Parents Are Paying Thousands For Sorority Rush Coaches

SAAS is starting to mean sororities as a service.

Parents are spending thousands of dollars on consultants to help their daughters navigate sorority recruitment at major Southern universities, turning rush into a process with its own coaches, preparation packages and, in some cases, five-figure services, according to Bloomberg.

The consultants advise prospective new members, or PNMs, on what to wear, how to introduce themselves, which photographs to remove from social media and how to handle conversations during recruitment. Some help prepare résumés and introductory videos, secure recommendation letters and remain on call throughout rush week.

The business is expanding as Southern universities attract more students from the Northeast, Midwest and West, including families with little familiarity with the region’s Greek-life traditions. “Until very recently, people didn’t even know this industry existed outside of the South,” says Trisha Addicks, founder of Atlanta-based consulting firm It’s All Greek to Me. Her one-year program costs $6,500, and this fall she is introducing a two-year Legacy Mentorship package for $12,000.

Bloomberg noted multiple examples in its report. Lorie Stefanelli, founder of New York-based Greek Chic, says she has gone from about five clients a season to nearly 80. In 2024, she left her job as a human-resources manager to run the consultancy full time. On the eve of this year’s University of Alabama rush, six of the eight families she was working with were from New York, New Jersey or Connecticut. Many of her Auburn University clients come from the tristate area and Illinois.

The geographic shift reflects broader enrollment changes. Since 2004, Louisiana State University and the universities of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee have more than tripled their percentage of incoming first-year students from outside the South, according to National Center for Education Statistics data. Large football programs, scholarship offers, school spirit and active Greek systems have helped draw students from elsewhere in the country.

For families unfamiliar with Southern sororities, consultants sell knowledge of a recruitment process that can begin months before students arrive on campus. PNMs may record introductory videos, assemble résumés and professional headshots, seek letters from sorority alumnae and describe their philanthropic interests. Consultants review social-media profiles, recommend outfits and coach students on making conversation, maintaining eye contact and avoiding subjects such as politics, religion and partying.

Social media has added another layer to the preparation. A 2022 University of South Carolina analysis found that the average #RushTok video received about 66,000 views. Consultants say the attention has increased the focus on expensive outfits, highly sought-after houses and the possibility of social-media exposure or brand partnerships.

The coaching comes on top of tuition and the cost of Greek membership itself. Lindsay Lookingbill, a Maryland teacher whose daughter Reagan was heading to the University of Mississippi, initially dismissed a friend's suggestion that she hire a rush consultant. The family was already paying about $21,000 in out-of-state tuition, while sorority dues could add at least $3,000 per semester. They eventually hired Mindy Farr, founder of Alabama-based SororitySolutions, and Reagan later received a bid from Alpha Delta Pi.

Other families are making similar calculations. Alabama sophomore Brooke Goodrich, from Massachusetts, paid Stefanelli $3,000 for four individual preparation sessions and on-call help during rush week. She later joined Alpha Chi Omega. “I knew nothing about Southern sorority rush before I hired Lorie,” Goodrich says. “By the time I got to campus, I felt confident.”

There is a large potential customer base. More than half of undergraduates at Mississippi and Auburn are affiliated with fraternities or sororities, while roughly 40% of undergraduates at Tennessee and Alabama participate in Greek life. Clemson University reported 1,869 new sorority members in 2025, more than twice the 905 recorded in 2017.

“Most of my clients are looking for sports culture, school spirit and a place where the community really rallies around the university and their students,” Stefanelli says. “And if you’re going to go to a school like that, you may as well go all the way and join Greek life.”

Demand is also attracting new consultants. Auburn senior Marisa Mathson, who grew up in Iowa, started Refined Presence this year and sold out of $315 and $550 packages offering wardrobe consultations, social-media audits and interview coaching. She says she was in contact with about 70 students before rush, many from California, Chicago and the Northeast.

What was once largely advice passed among relatives, alumnae and friends is increasingly being sold as a professional service. For families without connections to Southern Greek life, rush consultants are offering a way to learn its expectations before their daughters arrive on campus—and some parents are willing to pay thousands of dollars for it.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 18:50

Half Of Typical US Family's Paycheck Swallowed By Housing, Childcare

Authored by Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times,

Typical families in the United States spend half of their income on housing and childcare, according to a report released on Aug. 17 from the real estate platform Redfin.

A man holds a baby outside a coffee shop in Washington on March 11, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Based on data from Redfin and childcare marketplace Winnie, the typical working family purchasing a home today spends 52 percent of their annual income on housing and childcare combined.

While these costs can decrease as children enroll in public pre-K or kindergarten, researchers say that where a family resides can significantly influence these costs.

Among the 100 most populous U.S. metros, working families residing in Little Rock, Arkansas, would spend less than 40 percent - the least in the country.

Annual housing and childcare costs would total $29,151 for the typical Little Rock working family, compared with a median local income of about $73,000.

The next two most affordable metros include Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (40.8 percent) and Des Moines, Iowa (41.8 percent).

Conversely, Los Angeles had the highest cost nationwide: 96.8 percent. Families spend a combined $94,613, about $3,000 less than the median local income of almost $98,000.

The next least affordable were New York City (95 percent) and San Francisco (94.2 percent).

The numbers indicate that families need to factor in childcare and early childhood education into their affordability calculations, says Sara Mauskopf, co-founder and CEO of Winnie.

"Families considering a move should weigh both of those big costs - as well as job opportunities - when deciding where to put down roots," Mauskopf said in a statement.

"Families should also make sure childcare is actually available near where they want to live. If care is scarce or unaffordable, an otherwise affordable area may not be a practical place for a family with young children."

Another challenge for families may be that home prices are modest, but childcare costs account for a sizable share of household budgets.

In Buffalo, New York, for example, childcare can make up nearly half of the combined childcare and housing price tag.

Other cities have far lower ratios, Redfin reported.

A man with children walks in Washington on July 13, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Dallas had the lowest share of family income going toward childcare, at 11 percent. This was followed by Charleston, South Carolina (11.4 percent) and Austin, Texas (11.6 percent).

Labor Shortage Cited

Families across the country have endured immense childcare costs for years.

Care.com released its 13th annual Cost of Care Report for 2026 in January. It found that the average weekly cost of daycare or a family care center for one child exceeded $300 last year. For families with two children, the number was slightly below $600.

Zooming out reveals a more financially dire picture of childcare costs, which even outpace general inflation, according to a report by the tax firm KPMG.

Between 1990 and April 2024, the cost of day care and preschool climbed 263 percent. By comparison, the consumer price index rose by 133 percent over the same period.

A key contributor, KPMG researchers say, is a labor shortage in both childcare and eldercare, which is pushing prices up faster than inflation.

"In 2026, growing challenges in the care economy will increasingly affect workforce outcomes, employer costs and overall economic performance. Though all states and industries are impacted, some are more at risk than others," the report stated.

The federal government and states need to implement reforms to adapt to changing conditions and ensure working families can afford childcare, says Glencora Haskins, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution.

Some measures could consist of bolstering federal subsidies and states imposing price caps.

"The fact that there is no U.S. state that meets HHS's affordability standard for childcare demonstrates that the need for federal relief is both widespread and severe," Haskins said in a July paper.

"In sum, the potential benefits of federal childcare subsidization are being hamstrung by three main factors: insufficient funding, prohibitive eligibility standards, and misaligned affordability thresholds."

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 17:40

Reddit's Woke WNBA Forum Just Banned Sophie Cunningham's Name Amid Trans Row

The biggest unofficial WNBA fan forum on Reddit just made it nearly impossible to type the name of one of the league's own players.

On Sophie Cunningham's 30th birthday, users trying to post a simple "Happy Birthday Sophie" on r/WNBA ran straight into an automated brick wall. The community doesn't allow "Sophie" in post titles. Same goes for "Cunningham," "sc," "scunningham," "soph," and a handful of other variations. The Indiana Fever guard's name had effectively been filtered out of the main discussion space.

One user pushed back in a private message to the moderators, asking the obvious: Why ban talk about an actual WNBA player?

The reply was blunt. "We filter content based on Sophi because it tend to bring out trolls and people that aren't fans of the W," a mod wrote. When the user kept pressing, the response got sharper: "We have chosen to filter content. If you want to post freely about Sophie you can go to different sub... You aren't even a contributor to this sub, so I suggest you go back to the other WNBA subs. This is our decision. If you keep messaging about this you will be banned."

Screenshots of the exchange spread fast. Conservative media and sports accounts on X framed it as straight-up erasure. Outlets from the New York Post to OutKick and the Mirror ran with versions of the story, calling it a name ban on Cunningham's birthday.

pic.twitter.com/PXM2RdCFbX

— Johnny Connolly (@XJohnnyConnolly) August 16, 2026

Then, there was an 'update' to 'clarify' (i.e. 'we're sorry we got caught and this is going viral') - with mods insisting Sophie Cunningham content is not banned. Basketball-related posts - games, highlights, stats, interviews, injuries - are still welcome. Off-court material can land too. What's getting filtered, they said, are the politics, culture-war debates, and drama that have been attracting brigades and low-effort trolling. The mods also said they had raised the community karma threshold required to post and turned up Reddit's Crowd Control tools to keep the sub from getting overrun.

Cunningham became a culture-war flashpoint after a July 21 ESPN profile published her comments about protecting women's sports. She said she wanted to "protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men," while insisting she doesn't hate transgender people and describing herself as politically "in the middle." Her remarks were about youth sports, not her own league. She doubled down days later: "I said what I said. I think it's kind of common sense."

The fight moved to the WNBA anyway. The league's collective bargaining agreement says only players who are women are eligible - and across 409 pages, never defines "woman." Two former NBA players took the opening. Royce White declared for the 2027 WNBA draft on Aug. 4, and Enes Kanter Freedom followed on Aug. 7, both citing the league's own language on self-identification. "If simply declaring who you are is all that's required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA," Freedom said. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert responded in a memo to teams and convened a task force of presidents and general managers to review eligibility.

EXCLUSIVE: Former NBA first-round pick Royce White says he's declaring for the 2027 WNBA Draft, claiming he now identifies as transgender for the purpose of playing professional basketball.

The 6-foot-8 former Houston Rockets draft pick follows fellow former NBA player Enes… pic.twitter.com/yUI8NdoiaX

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 8, 2026

After careful consideration and reviewing the current eligibility guidelines,
I’m officially declaring myself a @WNBA prospect.

If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.

My team and I have… pic.twitter.com/msncUZUT1J

— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) August 7, 2026

LFG!!! 

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 17:20

Geopolitical Reality Has Ended The Rush To Renewables

Authored by Rashid Hudain Syed via The Epoch Times,

The world is quietly abandoning the fantasy that renewables alone can guarantee energy security.

The U.S.–Israel war on Iran exposed how vulnerable the global economy remains to disruptions in fossil fuel supply chains. Any disruption in the Strait of Hormuz quickly affects global fuel prices, inflation, and energy costs worldwide.

For years, Western governments pushed rapid decarbonization and a transition away from oil and gas. But war and supply disruptions have exposed how difficult that transition really is. Countries are once again looking to stable producers for reliable fossil fuel supplies.

Oil is once again a precious commodity, and producers are benefiting.

Canada is no exception.

Surging global oil prices, the expansion of export infrastructure like the Trans Mountain pipeline, and improving relations between Ottawa and Alberta on carbon pricing and energy policy are helping drive renewed growth and investor confidence in Canada’s oil sector. Massive resource windfalls and record free cash flows are flowing through the industry.

Canada’s vast reserves and political stability are becoming increasingly important as geopolitical tensions grow. Canada holds the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, behind only Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Policy changes have also made Canada more attractive to long-term investment. Major producers are aggressively returning capital to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, while benefiting from narrower discounts for Western Canada Select crude relative to U.S. West Texas Intermediate benchmarks.

Oil and gas companies, which have long argued that federal regulations and environmental policies have crippled industry growth, cautiously welcomed the recent agreement between Ottawa and Alberta. Reuters reported that ConocoPhillips Canada president Nick McKenna said the deal significantly improves the risk profile for oil and gas investment in Canada.

The shift is global.

U.S. oil companies are ramping up production as rising prices revive energy security concerns. Companies, including Diamondback Energy and Continental Resources, are expanding drilling operations.

Veteran oilman Harold Hamm, who owns Continental, told the Financial Times he planned to increase capital expenditures by roughly $300 million to $2.8 billion in 2026 because of higher oil prices.

“We don’t expect prices to go back to where they were prior to the Iran war,” Hamm said.

That marks a dramatic reversal. Earlier this year, Continental planned to halt new drilling in North Dakota because oil prices had fallen below US$60 a barrel. Hamm is now reconsidering that decision.

Publicly traded U.S. shale producers increased their capital spending forecasts by nearly $500 million in first-quarter reports compared to projections issued just three months earlier, according to energy consultancy Enverus.

Low oil prices at the start of the year caused U.S. production to slip to 13.53 million barrels per day in the first quarter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But soaring prices are now expected to push production to a record 14.21 million barrels per day by the end of next year.

Even Norway, one of the world’s leading advocates for aggressive climate policy and renewable energy, is expanding fossil fuel production again. Oslo plans to reopen three North Sea gas fields—Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk, and Tommeliten Gamma—by 2028, nearly three decades after they were shut down.

“We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf,” Norwegian Energy Minister Terje Aasland recently declared.

Equinor, Norway’s state-owned energy giant, plans to invest US$6 billion annually through 2035 to maintain production levels and prevent output declines.

Norway pumped 2.31 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the first quarter, nearly 9 percent more than during the same period last year.

Critics argue the policy undermines Norway’s climate goals and delays Europe’s transition away from fossil fuels. Lars Haltbrekken of Norway’s Socialist Left party condemned the move as “greenwashing through and through.”

But the Iran crisis exposed how deeply the world still depends on fossil fuels. Governments are once again turning to dependable producers to protect their economies.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 17:00

Rand Paul Goes To Fort Knox To Verify That US Gold Stockpile Still Exists

In September 1974, amid public and congressional concerns, a high-profile inspection occurred at the U.S. Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. In a rare exception to the "no visitors" policy, members of Congress and the press were invited in.

This was followed immediately by a special audit conducted by the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) in cooperation with Treasury auditors. It covered roughly 21% of the gold bars stored there at the time and found that the holdings matched the depository records.  Since that event, there has been no independent audit of federal gold stores.  The contents of Fort Knox has remains a mystery.  

In 2024, the US treasury Department stated that Fort Knox held 4580 metric tons of gold in the vaults, but many fiscal conservatives have been skeptical.  It makes sense to be suspicious; why would the federal government avoid independent audits for over 50 years unless there's some kind of problem? 

The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 presented a rare opportunity for the public to press for verification that Fort Knox is, in fact, still holding gold.  We are seeing some indication that the Trump Administration is taking these concerns seriously, with Senator Rand Paul being given access to Fort Knox vaults last week. 

I have been asking to see the gold at Fort Knox since February of 2025. This week I finally went deep underground and looked for myself. Yes, the gold is there, roughly 147 million ounces.

The real lesson is not the gold itself. It is what happened to the dollar after 1971, when…

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 14, 2026

Rand Paul's inspection of the gold stores does not constitute a true audit, but it is the first outside verification of the US gold stockpile in decades.  The audit of 1974 started with visual inspections, so this could potentially lead to a more thorough inventory down the road.  Rand Paul notes that the gold is, indeed, still sitting at Fort Knox.

"Yes, the gold is there, roughly 147 million ounces..."

After seeing it himself, Paul quickly moved past the question of whether the gold exists. "It is impressive, but the real point is what it still teaches in 2026," he wrote.  Paul pointed to 1971, when the U.S. ended the dollar's convertibility into gold, and said the currency has lost roughly 85% of its value since then.

Public worries have grown over the stability of the US economy since the credit crash of 2008-2009.  The Federal Reserve's massive bailout programs pumped trillions of dollars into the global monetary system and created the catalyst for an inflationary crisis.  Ron Paul's limited audit of the bailouts in 2011 found over $16 trillion in emergency loans at 0% interest over the course of 3 years.  A large portion of these loans went to foreign banks.  

Ron Paul's audit was not a full accounting of central bank activities.  We still don't know for certain how much dollar devaluation occurred. 

Since the credit crisis, the Fed has engaged in multiple QE measures and bailouts, keeping interest rates near 0% for approximately 7 years.  The pandemic bailouts in 2020-2021 were the straw that broke the camel's back, triggering the inflation crisis that alternative economists had been predicting.

Any reversal of long term inflationary pressures will likely require a return to a commodity backed currency standard, otherwise, the trend will continue until the dollar eventually breaks and the system crashes.  The confirmation by Rand Paul of the Fort Knox holdings offers hope that a return to the gold standard or a mixed commodity standard might one day be possible and that the US economy can still be saved from an inflationary spiral.  

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 16:40

"Both Parties Are Whirling Around The Drain Of Extinction..."

Authored by Jim Kunstler,

“A sane society cannot debate its way out of psychosis. It must diagnose the patient with lethal precision and restore the ancient boundary between the mad and the free.”

- LHGrey on “X”

Back in the days of sailing ships, a certain subtropical zone of the ocean became known as the “horse latitudes.” There, an eerie windless calm prevailed, sometimes for weeks, stalling the progress of ships in mid-crossing. In desperation to save water on-board, captains ordered the horses being transported to America to be cast overboard, and the animals’ bloated carcasses drifted in an ominous cortège of warning to other mariners entering the zone of stillness and death.

This stretch of weeks in late summer has become the horse latitudes of human affairs for American politics. The primaries are mostly over, at least the ones that mattered. Congress has departed the Potomac swamp for the lakes, seashores, and the county fairs out where the corn grows high. The heat in the Arabian Sea must turn the deck of an American aircraft carrier into a giant hot-plate sailors fear to tread. Even the country’s multitude of lawyers turn off their cell-phones and contemplate the blank, watery horizon with heads full of iced brown liquor.

We civilians are stuck between that old rock and a hard place... two political parties whirling around the drain of extinction in a nation seeming to drift toward the edge of the known world.

In the background, a massive realignment grinds away.

The old parties of labor and of property have forgotten their reasons for existence. Labor vamoosed to Mexico, China, and obscure faraway lands decades ago. Property is still here, but it’s all been collateralized into grift and fraud.

In the absence of working people to defend, the Democrats became a party of racketeering race-and-gender hobgoblins, now marshaling into an insectile host of predatory Marxists, and altogether their antics present as a spectrum of mental illness. Voters who somehow managed to preserve some sense of mental decorum increasingly abandon that lunatic coalition — but where to go? This is exactly what is happening in the state of Michigan with the rise of Abdul el-Sayed, who adds a caboose of jihad to his choo-choo train of Bolshevik nuttery. Long-time Dems like Democratic attorney Julian Epstein are publicly jumping ship to support el-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers.

The clueless old gorks in charge of the Democratic Party — the likes of Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Warner, Liz Warren, Chris Murphy, Sheldon Whitehouse — are suddenly nowhere to be seen (or heard). They don’t dare denounce this latest onrush to new-and-improved insanities because, apparently, insanity is all the party has left — stealing other peoples’ property. . . pretending to change sexes. . . organizing giant frauds. . . demanding payoffs for hallucinated affronts. . . and feeding the vicious Leviathan they want government to be.

And don’t be too sure that coalescing around the figure of one AOC in 2028 is going to save this outfit. Sandy is trying to pretend she’s somewhere in the middle, between the feckless old official leadership and the outright commies, but she’s still a member of the odious “Squad” composed of Somali fraudster Ilhan Omar, jihadist Rashida Tlaib, and race-hustler Ayanna Pressley — meaning, its just the same brand of crazy the party has been cultivating for more than a decade. What remains for America to discover about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that she’s a mere opportunist with nothing inside except some skill at middle-school girl games. . . Eva Peron without the savvy.

On the other end of the political transect stand the Republican phantoms of Congress busy getting nothing done for the past year and a half despite holding the majority in both houses.

They’re personified perfectly by Senator Mitch McConnell, quite possibly dead for all that anyone really knows. In John Thune you have something like an anti-leader, doing everything possible to evade his duties, squashing election reform under arcane procedural bullshit, obstructing the confirmation of important agency nominees and federal judges, and “gaveling-in” ghost sessions of his chamber to prevent the president from making recess appointments. And why? Probably for no better reason than he just wants to dissociate himself and many of his fellows from the president because he’s seen as too gauche for their club.

Speaking of whom, you see Mr. Trump and his faction stand apart, but not alone, in this big game. He’s going through a rough patch in these horse latitudes of summer. But despite some appearances, and despite the bluster emanating from Tehran, he has already succeeded in neutralizing Iran while Secretary Bessent keeps the maniac IRGC in an ever-tightening economic squeeze. There’s reason to believe this well end well for the Middle East, actually in an epic realignment of actual interests, rather than obsolete tribal animosities.

Mr. Trump is also working hard to realign American interests at home into an economy based on making things of value instead of just taking profits on financial shell-games. It’s a gigantic task and one that will take time to get working because factories can’t be built overnight and the demoralized working class can’t be instantly realigned to opportunities that are months from materializing. In the meantime, have a little faith if you can, even though these have been notably faithless decades for our sore-beset nation, and we are too accustomed to bad faith.

Just power through these listless, torpid dog days of August and gird your loins for action in the fall because it’s coming. And that includes a long-awaited accounting for the many crimes against the people of this land by some of our own people. A new permission structure is building out there in the foggy gloaming: you will be set free to stop pretending about a lot of stuff that matters.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 16:20

 

Well, that was no fun…

I have been testing negative since the weekend; maybe it’s the availability heuristic talking, but I have been hearing about (many? some?) other people catching it. (See this overview of the surge)

The fog is annoying as is the FOMO for several events I had to miss.

The one thing I did manage to do was catch up on a mix of meh streaming series and movies I would be too bored with had I not had fog brain or otherwise been meaning to watch.

These include:

Movies:

The Dink
Wrecking Crew
Fast Charlie

ReWatched

Atomic Blonde
Beekeeper
High Fidelity
The Hitman’s Bodyguard
Lady Eve

Streamers:

Blackish
Clarkson’s Farm (Season 5)
The Hawk

Stand Up:

Mary Beth Barone, Galaxy Brain
Jordan Jensen, Take Me With You
Langston Kerman, Bad Poetry

~~~

Back to the real world starting tomorrow.

The post Negative. Yay! appeared first on The Big Picture.

"Cash Crunch" Deepens? Mark Walter Explores Chelsea FC Stake Sale To Clearlake

The latest developments surrounding Mark Walter's empire appear to reinforce Yahoo Sports reporter Jack Baer's warning last week of a potential "cash crunch" following the abrupt $12.5 billion sale of the Los Angeles Lakers to Josh Kushner and former Disney chief Bob Iger. The Financial Times also reported last week that the FBI seized phones belonging to Walter and Guggenheim Investments President Dina DiLorenzo last year as part of a federal investigation into entities controlled by Walter.

Bloomberg reported Monday that Walter has explored selling his stake in Chelsea FC to Clearlake Capital, the London football club's majority owner. The report is based on information from people familiar with the matter and has yet to be officially confirmed.

Walter's family office approached the Santa Monica-based alternative asset manager, led by Behdad Eghbali and José Feliciano, in recent days, the report said.

For context, Clearlake is Chelsea FC's majority shareholder, holding more than 60% through the BlueCo consortium formed to acquire the club from Roman Abramovich in 2022. The remaining interest is held by Todd Boehly, Mark Walter, and Hansjörg Wyss, each with a minority stake.

The report noted that potential divestment comes as Walter's TWG Global pursues deals to address loans on its insurers' balance sheets that have sparked a federal investigation.

Last week, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record $12.5 billion.

Yahoo Sports reporter Jack Baer said last week, "Mark Walter is reportedly facing a cash crunch."

The Wall Street Journal noted the same:

Review last week's developments:

• FBI Seized Mark Walter's Devices Months Before Record $12.5 Billion Lakers Sale

TWG Global's sports portfolio extends well beyond Chelsea and the Lakers. The company notes on its website that it owns:

• Los Angeles Dodgers: Walter is the MLB franchise's controlling owner and chairman.
• Los Angeles Sparks: An ownership interest in the WNBA franchise.
• RC Strasbourg: Indirect ownership through BlueCo, the holding company that also controls Chelsea.
• Professional Women's Hockey League: TWG founded and financed the league, which recently added its first outside investors.
• Billie Jean King Cup: TWG owns 49% of the joint venture operating the women's international tennis competition.
• Cadillac Formula 1 Team: TWG Motorsports holds a majority interest alongside General Motors.
• Andretti Global: Teams competing in IndyCar, Indy NXT, and Formula E.
• Spire Motorsports: A NASCAR Cup and Truck Series organization.
• Wayne Taylor Racing: An IMSA sports-car racing team.
• Walkinshaw Andretti United: An Australian Supercars team.
• Teton Ridge: A Western sports, media, and entertainment platform.

The Los Angeles Lakers remain listed on TWG's website despite Walter's deal last week to dispose of the team.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 15:40

Almost 60% Of Democrats Have A Favorable View Of Socialism

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Recent polls show steady growth in support for socialism among Democrats. A new CBS poll shows how popular it is, with 58 percent holding a positive view of socialism—26 points more than the 32 percent with a positive view of capitalism. This may explain why House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, while rejecting core parts of its platform, embraced Democratic Socialists this week as part of the Democratic Party. In addition to a variety of anti-Semitic figures within its ranks, the DSA wants to get rid of the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and other institutions (as well as borders, immigration enforcement, and much of private property).

Yet, Jeffries still believes they share values and wants them to be part of the Democratic party.

In other words, there are many “fine people” in the DSA despite being committed to the destruction of our core institutions.

The poll also found that 24 percent of Democrats have “no opinion” of socialism, while 18 percent have no opinion regarding capitalism.

Other polling shows similar results.

An Economist/YouGov survey recently found that 62 percent of Democrats said they would vote for a “Democratic Socialist” candidate.

At the same time, Democratic Socialists have been spinning fables about the Framers not opposing those who acquire too much wealth. They also repeat the mythology that socialism has worked in other countries. It destroyed the economies in France and Great Britain.

Nevertheless, British prime minister, Andy Burnham declared that he wants to restore the policies of 40 years ago, before the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.

In his own version of promising the “warmth of collectivism,” Burnham declared, “The country surrendered control of the essentials — housing, water, energy, transport — and left people exposed to higher costs.”

Burnham’s account leaves out that the supposed golden age under Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, which he was referencing, led in 1977 to the so-called “winter of discontent.” Those policies destroyed the British economy, and the nation was faced with the humiliation of being rescued by the International Monetary Fund as if it were some banana republic.

Ultimately, capitalist policies were restored by Margaret Thatcher and the economy rebounded.

In “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss the economic philosophy of the Founders in exploring the history and future of this unique Republic.

Notably, this is also the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith’s free-market theory was an instant hit with the founding generation. These men had just created the first major Enlightenment Revolution based on a belief in natural rights that came from God, not governments.

Yet, they knew that true individual liberty could not be achieved without economic freedom. Smith’s economic theory was the perfect companion for their political theory. Rage and the Republic discusses the rise of socialism in the United States and around the world. It calls for a recommitment to what I call a “liberty-enhancing economy.”

The Democratic leaders from Harris to Buttigieg to Newsom believe that they can ride this rage wave into power by offering up core American institutions. They wrongly believe that the mob will destroy their enemies, but not themselves. 

History has proven them wrong time and time again.

This election is shaping up to be arguably the most important in our history as we fight for the identity of this Republic on its 250th anniversary. We have come face to face with Benjamin Franklin’s warning that this is a Republic if we can keep it.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/17/2026 - 15:20