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Mike
@misaligned.markets

Lately I've been writing about the political economy and ontology of LLMs, but normally write about markets. Over the past year I've worked towards the idea of markets as interfaces. Systems that translate legal/political rules and objects into states that determine how transactions resolve.

Mike@misaligned.markets

3/ Markets always assign actions to participants based on their role. A market maker or adversarial participant can condition an assigned action on missing context or some other structure of the market. The result is an enforced action asymmetry where the counterparty must “take it or leave it.”

misaligned.marketsThe geometry of rules (or how to "game the system")The way players cheese games reveals how markets, networks, and other systems are exploited.
Mike
@misaligned.markets

Markets as interfaces is an idea I've started writing about specific cases, the most recent is about Urner Barry a company providing a benchmark that egg contracts were based on. Egg companies with "write-access" spoofed benchmark singals to directly affect prices across the entire market.

Mike@misaligned.markets

Why were egg prices so high after COVID? Turns out the biggest egg producers colluded. Not through explict agreements but by gaming a market benchmark. Read my recent post outlining how markets do not always have access to pricing inputs like supply/demand: misaligned.markets/bad-eggs-mar...

misaligned.marketsBad Eggs: How Big Egg cracked the market interface and scrambled pricesA recent DOJ complaint gives a masterclass in how to use market position to exploit market mechanisms.
Mike
@misaligned.markets

Earlier I talked about the SpaceX IPO which shows how market actors closest to the mechanisms of market formation can create chains of structural asymmetries that preserve their options over anyone else's.

Mike@misaligned.markets

Sadly, we live in a world where script kiddies get rewarded for exploiting basic trust boundaries. At every layer it seems like the SpaceX IPO damped market mechanisms. But that shouldn't be surprising. In market capitalism, those closest to market formation can influence market structure.

misaligned.marketsRapid unscheduled devaluation: The geometry of the SpaceX IPONo rules were broken in the making of the largest IPO ever, revealing a deeper flaw than critics realize.
Mike
@misaligned.markets

At the beginning of the year I wrote about Plutonomy referencing a Citi report from the early 2000s that predates and predicts the "k-shaped economy."

Mike@misaligned.markets

GDP's purpose is to check if the economic faucet is running. It was invented at the height of the Depression when this very much wasn't happening. Today we've moved beyond an industrial economy driven by middle income consumers, but GDP-centrism results in policy and media analysis blind to this.

misaligned.marketsIt’s the plutonomy, stupid!The economy's composition changed over 20 years ago, but economic reporting hasn't caught up.

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Mike
@misaligned.markets

The entire year I've been teasing a follow-up to the Plutonomy blog post called Plutonomy and the three pillars of the new social contract. Normal people are being crowded out of "fair" deals in their interactions with the economy. One response to this is nihilism (gambling, doom spending).

Mike@misaligned.markets

Citigroup said it was the Plutonomy over 20 years ago. Everything we're experiencing was part of their description. Working on a follow-up piece that attempts to measure other dimensions of this transition. See it everywhere from dynamic pricing, right-to-repair battles, workers burning warehouses.