This Week’s British-Launch Events, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-10-13 Th
This Week’s British-Launch Events
For Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>
Brad DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia | RSA
Brad DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia | LSE
Must-Read: Twitter Toast!
This is not quite right: Twitter equity still has option value if Musk cannot immediately cut Twitter’s costs and boost its income enough to cover the interest:
William Cohan: The Elon Financial Mindfuck: ‘If the Twitter debt is worth only 50 cents on the dollar at the moment because of a combination of… cash flow, the… interest-rate landscape for leveraged loans, and… 13x EBITDA, then the Twitter equity underneath that debt—the $31 billion—is technically worthless already…. Right now, the market is telling Elon’s Wall Street banks that Twitter is actually worth around $7 billion, or 7x EBITDA, not the 44x EBITDA that he agreed to pay, since it’s at that price that the banks can sell the Twitter bank debt and it’s at that price that the buyers of the bank debt will buy it…
One Audio: And “Slouching” on The Gist
Mike Pesca & Brad DeLong: The Gist: Everything About The Economy Ever, Pithily Explained
<https://overcast.fm/+BmH778A7o>
One Image: The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level Arrives in the United Kingdom
Other Things That Went Whizzing by:
Very Briefly Noted:
Martin Sandbu: The post-pandemic recovery has been officially cancelled: ‘Taking on some lazy arguments for monetary tightening…
Justin Wolfers: ‘The CPI… xcluding food and energy… rose +0.6% in the month, so core inflation is 6.6%. Inflation is proving to be more resilient—and more troubling—than many had hoped or forecast. Both the headline and core inflation readings are about 0.2 percentage points higher than expected…
Dan Pfeiffer: How Dems Can Court Republicans without Becoming Republican-lite: ‘The term “permission structure.”… We needed to create a permission structure for voters to do what they wanted to do...
Paul Krugman: “Personal background may matter here. My macro roots are in international, where we've always known that there are long lags in the effect of exchange rates on trade flows, leading to phenomena like the J-curve…. Does u need to go well above u*, Volcker style? Some people still saying that, still talking about "sacrifice ratios", but I don't get it. The Volcker slump was an effort to squeeze out high inflation expectations. But expected inflation isn't high now…. I see a strong case that the Fed has already done enough…. You want to shoot ahead of a moving target, not behind it…
The Economist: How thinking hard makes the brain tired: ‘Cognitive fatigue is associated with increased glutamate in the prefrontal cortex. Dr Wiehler speculates that this is the result of a mechanism in the brain that is computing a sort of cost-benefit analysis, with fatigue and increased glutamate adding to the cost of mental effort…. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep…
China: Back to Authoritarianism: ‘Xi has decimated his opposition, leaving him with two choices at the upcoming party congress: risk a gerontocracy by keeping on older officials, such as the seventy-year-old economics czar, Liu He, or turn to younger men…. In the twilight of Xi’s reign he is more likely to be isolated, surrounded by fewer and fewer people who dare to tell him the truth.
• —September 20, 2022
