Paul Vigna

Pub Day! My new book The Almightier is out today and is already the top new release in Amazon’s money section. It’s a history of money from a unique angle: how money came from religion, how money broke free of religion, and how money eventually became its own religion. That’s a timely story.

“It’s a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look at me.” My man, you just got done telling me you’ve got seven women complicating your life, and now you want to add an eighth? You are your own worst enemy. Take it easy indeed.

This is like a McDonalds executive warning employees not to eat Big Macs.

"Took the bar exam in China" is the new "dated a girl in Niagara Falls."

The best thing we could do today is build an economics around this one basic fact: we are all members of the same species, Homo sapiens, each with an equal claim on the Earth’s resources. paulvigna.substack.com/p/on-buildin...

He's right, you know...

I’ve shared this before, but it bears repeating. A lot.

What first separated humans from other animals was our ability to make and use tools. It would be quite the irony if one of those tools became the thing that ended us, too.

The US is in total almost $80 trillion in debt. There is no normal solution to that problem. We need an un-normal solution. I wrote about one for The New York Times: cancel the debt. All of it. That's what they used to do in the ancient world. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/o...

10 yrs ago I saw a demo for a digitized securities platform that convinced me the finc'l system was going to be rewired into a blockchain-based system. There is still a long way to go, but we are starting to see tangible evidence that it's happening. www.americanbanker.com/news/tokeniz...

Wait, can this really work?

The dean of science at Stellenbosch could’ve avoided all of this if he just wrote his own essays. I get why civilians want to use Ai for writing. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. A professional never should. Ever.

There is something extraordinary going on in the debt markets. The US gov't and AI industry are both raising trillions in debt and because the amounts are so huge, they are actually competing for the same buyers, driving up yields. www.americanbanker.com/news/who-wou...

I’m watching Terminator 2 for the first time in a long time, and it’s amazing to me how much of it is just practical effects. Yes the T-1000 is CGI, but a lot of it are real people doing stunts in the real world. It’s a stark comparison to all the green-screen stuff today.

The Cardinals have to be the most-successful bad franchise in sports history, right? They’ve been around since 1898 - yes, across 3 centuries - have 3 home cities, have won only 2 championships and have the longest current title drought, 78 seasons. That’s awful. And yet, they’re still around. #NFL

There is great demand for manufactured products from the moon-rock aliens discovered by Apollo 18. We need to meet that demand.

Written by someone whose profession is dying in a dying industry. :)

I don’t use AI to write. It does shoddy, incomplete research and it produces bad prose. But most importantly, I *like* writing. Why would I ever give that up? open.substack.com/pub/paulvign...

Taco Hell. apnews.com/article/cycl...

A trillion dollars so Meta’s AI bot can write “happy birthday” with some emojis for me. What’s worse? The money and resources wasted on this drivel, or the assumption that I couldn’t come up with “happy birthday” on my own? Happy. Birthday.

🎼 “Freedom (fuel) isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me, and if we don’t chip in, we’ll never pay that bill. “Freedom (fuel) isn’t free, now there’s a heavy f$&@ing fee, and if you don’t chip in your $3.47, who will?”

Kruse might have the best followers on the web. The replies to this are blistering.

Sounds like he’s post-mull.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Anchorman

Canada gone, Mexico gone. The U.S. is the last host nation standing.

Replace every instance of the phrase “prediction markets” with “online gambling” and see how the conversation changes.

“Even if you earned it, you still owe.” Adam Smith and Tupac would’ve gotten along great. They both implicitly understood the morality of economics. open.substack.com/pub/paulvign...

This is the line I was going to highlight as well. Elon’s Mars plan is more grounded than this line. It’s losing billions. The cash cow, Starlink, is just a small ISP. Its AI business is a joke. You’d think the ratings agencies would’ve learned some lesson from 2008. Something. Anything.

Pretty amazing for what is essentially a small, unprofitable internet service provider.

This is not the first time we’ve had to coin a new word to describe a new class of wealthy. And the first time we did it, it ended very, very badly. open.substack.com/pub/paulvign...

I just saw a Polymarket ad where the guy says “paying off my parking tickets by betting on sports.” What are we even doing anymore, America?

In the history of arguments, nobody has ever won an argument doing it this way.

Greed is the foundation of capitalism. I don’t mean that pejoratively, I mean it factually. What we today call capitalism began as an ethos that encouraged common people to indulge their greed. And nobody was more instrumental in doing that than Cosimo de’ Medici.

SpaceX: We make reusable rockets. We want to put a million people on Mars. Our valuation should be about $90 trillion. Also SpaceX: 70% of our revenue comes from broadband service. Okay, I'll admit, it's extremely broad broadband. But, still.

I have never, ever seen that dude rendered speechless and I’ve probably been watching him for 30 years or something.

"There really isn’t any need to venerate a small percentage of the wealthy and powerful and hope they shower us with their largesse. We have the means to take care of ourselves. Capitalism was...built for another world, not this one." open.substack.com/pub/paulvign...

“Deficits don’t matter.”

If only there was a book that explained how greed became our highest virtue. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-almigh...

That ain’t even old timey!

The resilient consumer is a myth. What keeps the economy afloat is an endless stream of credit being force-fed to consumers like foie gras ducks, with spending habits conditioned by an absolutely constant stream of advertising: www.americanbanker.com/opinion/the-...

We are driving ourselves into an economic crisis that doesn’t need to happen. All we need to do to avoid it is change our economics. open.substack.com/pub/paulvign...

This thinking runs throughout our culture. Sopranos or The Wire. Beatles or the Stones. Star Wars or Star Trek. And it’s not just pop culture. Democrats or Republicans. Liberal or conservative. Trump or anti-Trump. We seem to be hard-wired into finding a tribe. We’d be better w/out this mindset.

Inflation is always and everywhere a psychological phenomenon. www.americanbanker.com/opinion/how-...

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, DC, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Spielberg, Cameron, Wachowskis, or Ghibli.

Jets wanted to get this pick in before the second half of the Knicks game starts. #nfldraft

Does Mendoza know there’s no transfer portal in the NFL? That he’s stuck in Vegas for five years? #nfldraft