Chris Herbert

“You said to me that this election feels momentous to you... You don’t usually say things like that. So what feels momentous? If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era, I think.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/o...

Mortgage repayments overpowered loan drawdowns last quarter. For the avoidance of doubt, this is contractionary. It means repayments going back to banks (=money deleted) is more than value of new mortgage loans pumped into the economy (=money created). Explanation here: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Since normie non-dweebs are asking for a translation, this is someone who has made a name being startlingly upbeat on markets (and generally right) taking some precautions against a setback and going like

👀 Max Kettner @ HSBC, the most reliably upbeat analyst I can think of, is spooked "We've been max OW stocks and max UW sovereign bonds since mid-March. Given the constant narrative bingo we just can't have the same level of conviction any longer. Tactically neutral equities and OW DM sovs"

The least people people to ever people have control over the means of peopling

This analyst's report from Apollo about AI uses the term "S&P 493" to refer to the "S&P 500 minus the Mag 7" - because if you take out the AI companies, the S&P 500 is tanking. www.apollo.com/wealth/insig...

lol reminder that betting markets are extremely accurate measures of conventional wisdom

OBAMA: The big trade war he's starting now is with that well-known evil empire: Canada. These are the people who gave us maple syrup and Martin Short.

You know what doesn’t matter? What Kamala Harris said on a campaign stop. You know what does? Watching Republicans pull money from competitive races in order to protect what should be easy wins & seeing Trump forced to go to deep-red territory. That’s what tells you something about the midterms.

10 days until Meta claims the right to scrape your website to develop its AI. Your consent? Apparently unnecessary. All it takes is someone sharing a link on Facebook or Instagram - or you using Meta's services. If you're a business or artist with intellectual property, watch the clock.

Hey Mayor Wayne Brown, Auckland could use the same thing to combat people running red lights. Never been in a city where it happens this often and so casually.

Chaos in Washington The new Private Eye is out now.

Do you get it now, finally. Trump doesnt give a damn about human life, be it American or Ukrainian. He is fine with Russia slaughtering defenseless civilians. This is your America, MAGA.

Can you tell what's going on yet? The economy is grinding into reverse while the media feed us meaningless 'recovery' stories - vibes surveys vs real data. [1/3]

Remember this. We are weaker now. “Trump has groomed us.” Try to hold and speak and advocate what you know is right and true. We’ve already moved so far. Don’t change your standards to accommodate their shameless incompetence & cruelty.

Say what you will about this method, but it is decisive: if you remove a vertical member and nothing falls down, you can be pretty sure that wasn't a load-bearing member. (This is a metaphor about AI.)

Let's break this nonsense down. The $300bn of debt 'anchoring down NZ' is the little red stub in image 2. Cute. See the blue above it? Yes, NZ Govt has more financial assets than debt. NZ has $4.9 trillion of debts, and $4.7 trillion of financial assets 🤷‍♂️ Don't hear about those, ae? [🧵 1/n]

The 'recovery coming nekminnit' guys should probably look at this graph of 'work ready' (aka truly desperate) jobseeker recipients and spot the early signs of fall back. We never had a recovery, things just stopped getting worse for a bit. Why? It's pretty obvious if you know where to look... [4/n]

10 / 10… no notes!

Here's how to build a wardrobe that lasts 10+ years. 🧵

Can’t wait to read @edzitron.com weighing in on this.

"... (This is likely part of the reason for the gap between benchmark performance and real-world usefulness)." -Steering AI Beyond Automation, Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan www.normaltech.ai/p/steering-a...

"Most AI benchmarks today test how good a model is at completing a task on its own, not on how well a model collaborates with a human...

‘The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,’ the Ukrainian president said in an interview with the FT in which he expressed anger at the ‘dangerous’ withdrawal of US intelligence sharing and weakening of Starlink satellite internet service. ft.trib.al/E4gAQX0

It’s good - ideal, even! - for your CFO to pull you aside and tell you repeatedly about the dire financial consequences of the potential failure of your $200 billion AI capex gamble that you recently admitted you made without knowing why you were doing it. You don’t learn this in business school!

Open to all immediately. Both National and Labour are committing the economy to more stagnation. Here’s why. #nzpol thekaka.substack.com/p/national-a...

NEW: Prime Minister Andy Burnham finally breaks a decade of UK govt silence…& reveals there was ‘clear’ Russian interference in the Brexit vote. 1/

"[Trump is not just] repeating a call to get rid of Zelensky, it was a wholesale repeating of his pro-Russian narrative and mindset." "It is pure, unadulterated (and unfiltered) Russian messaging, being spoken with conviction by the President of the USA."

One of biggest economic surprises upon moving to NZ from U.K. (States before that). Granted, I hadn’t been in housing market before moving here but growing up American (yes, I appreciate that privilege), 30-yr fixed mortgages are norm. Family couldn’t believe I was having to refix every few years.

I am not saying a scheme like this is some kind of nirvana, but it is big cog in the wheel of running an economy for the 99% of people that just want to be able to live, love, work and play. The 1% can buy desert islands and knock themselves out with ket. We don't need their money. [Ends]

Hiking or dropping interest rates takes 12 months to have a real impact and RBNZ are renowned for going overboard on the way up and on the way down. Couple that with lagging indicators and the whole thing is a shit show. It's just a *really bad* price stabilisation method, and... [3/n]

Sorry, I'll explain. We currently react to inflation by reducing the disposable income of spenders so that demand falls and unemployment goes up. We use a bufferstock of unemployed people to keep workers desperate, so wages are suppressed and we don't get a feedback loop (wage 🔄 prices) [🧵 1/n]

So we are warring with Iran And Russia is supplying weaponry to Iran. And we are paying Russia to send us diesel fuel. Because we are warring with Iran the ships with the diesel can't get to us. So we are buying it from Russia, which... Yeah, this is some three-dimensional chess right here.

Bruce soon gets into the bar room rant on the need to shrink the state to grow the economy - ignoring the basic maths. Govt deficit spending is about the only thing keeping the economy moving atm. Cut it without a plan to increase private sector investment, and we're dead in all three waters. [7/n]

“It’s not how much time children spend on screens that raises risk of the most severe mental health outcomes, including suicide, but whether use becomes addictive. It’s specific activities, such as using social media in a compulsive way, that harm mental health.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/o...

If Govt reduces spending from 32% of GDP to 30% of GDP and the private sector doesn't grow, what happens to GDP? Anyone know?

Not that mind-boggling mate.

make no mistake: anyone telling you AI is “just like the dot com bubble” or “just like Amazon web services or uber” is beyond misinformed, verging into the realms of actually wanting to know less about the world. It means they have never actually looked at any of the numbers. Or they can’t count.

AI has lost the Mandate of Heaven I’m afraid. WSJ saying it’s a “when” the ai bubble bursts. SNL dabbing on their biggest names for being weird. FT says 50% of chips sold in 2026 and 2027 have nowhere to go. Hundreds of billions short on revenue for even 10% ROIC. A disaster.

Cannot insist you listen to this enough, this conversation condenses everything going on with AI and its wider economic effects tightly. One of the best in the show’s history.

This is a very cute clip, but I love it for reasons that the episode doesn't really explore: *All networked technology comes down to chat* Talking to each other is either the foundation of all new networked technology or becomes inexorably tied up with it-- since the early days of the Internet 1/

Fidelity’s Director of Global Macro saying that the AI trade has been “dead money” for three months, and that it’s inflationary, meaning (as I’ve discussed multiple times) that the more debt they raise the more expensive debt becomes and the more they build data centers the more expensive it gets

Nikole Hannah-Jones w/ a sobering follow-up on her decision yrs ago to enroll her daughter in a poor, majority-Black public school rather than a wealthier, whiter private school. You leave heartbroken for the kids being failed by this grossly unequal system. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/m...

“A major theme of Bergen’s book is the repeated failure of American leaders to plan for “the day after” a military action is taken, but in Iran, he makes clear, Trump didn’t even plan for “the day of.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/b...