Also to the extent that agency duration hedging creates excess volatility that should drive long-term government borrowing rates *down*, not up: the convexity premium in risk-free bonds makes them more valuable because of volatility, not less

There’s no evidence that there’s a glut of USD safe assets and creating a couple dozen trillion of agency debt for China to stabilize their currency with is better for everyone involved than having them buy e.g. shitty corporate debt and fuel random bubbles in shale oil or AI or whatever

I agree with everything mechanically argued in here but I don’t agree with the conclusion. Excess treasury volatility is a small price to pay for creating a direct linkage between interest rates and consumer spending, so US monpol is vastly more effective than eg ECB policy in fighting a recession.

If your home price is up you get the same price appreciation regardless. If they are flat/down you eat the same loss. The excess equity is a result of the differential in payments, which for an apples to apples comparison would need to be invested elsewhere (even in eg a savings account).

They’ll call them the Jos A. Banks Riot (can’t afford Brooks Brothers on a BAML IBD salary)

Not really, given that "mortgages" are basically a form of state debt accessible to consumers (unlike eg credit card or car loans)

The financial choice is basically:
1. Do you rent and invest the rent-payment delta into stocks/bonds, accepting you are essentially short housing prices?
2. Do you borrow to buy and forgo that extra savings to fix your payments and get long housing prices (or flat, depending on your perspective)

That's what the government subsidy is for!

You occasionally see a variant of this in econ discourse where people fret that issuing long-duration bonds will increase borrowing costs when they massively decrease it because investors recognize the rate convexity is very valuable (see, eg, Austria's sovereign curve with the century bond)

The point of a mortgage isn't to build equity by paying down the loan, it's to give you upside exposure to the value of the home going up you never get as a renter. A 10,000,000 year fixed rate loan gives you the same equity as a 5/1 ARM if your house appreciates 10% on Day 1.

Blazing Saddles still holds up the best, followed by History of the World Part 1.

Humans can outrun horses over very long distances if they’re marathoners/ultramarathoners, and any reasonably athletic person can outpace a horse on a bicycle. They’re really sprinting animals.

More concerningly: you buy a car for $28k. You had hoped to drive it for 10 years, so that's $2,800 per year. Next year Waymo unveils a driverless car that's a zillion times better and now you need to buy that instead, so now you have to cough up for the new car *and* your used car is worthless.

Total collapse of democratic norms: I sleep
Gold leaf in the White House: AH CA IRA CA IRA CA IRA

I don't think I've seen finance guys complain about Lina Khan specifically outside of a few niche merger arb guys. The people who really hated Khan's guts were always big tech guys and VCs; finance and crypto was mostly busy being mad at Gensler and the SEC since they were their actual regulators.

This is just GPT slop, right? Has all of the tells

There is I think a story to be told about how the crypto narrative vehicle in public markets went from miners (pre-COVID), which is a real business, to trading (during COVID), a financial business, to treasury companies (post-COVID), which are not a business, and now are pivoting to non-crypto.

The thing about crypto is that most people involved in the space are naked opportunists disguised as true believers, which is why so many crypto miners have executed an instant pivot to AI (Coreweave being the most prominent). They are clearly not enthusiastic about the relative potential to scam!