Each Sunday I compose a list containing the most thought-provoking and interesting content I’ve consumed during the past week. Primarily as a way to keep inventory of material that influenced me and my way of thinking.
Papers/Notes
An Update from Our CIOs: Transitioning to Stagflation by Bob Price.
”It is important to recognize that nominal GDP is a money phenomenon—it’s just how much money you spend, not what you got for your money. In the big stagflations of the ‘70s, nominal GDP never grew by less than 5%, even during big real GDP contractions. What happened is that the spending was absorbed by higher prices, leaving a contraction in real GDP. The same has also happened recently in some sectors—gasoline, for example.”
The Anti-Bubble Report – Issue #16 by Diego Parrilla.
”Another important development is the effective elimination of forward guidance. With his statement, ‘we will be much more data dependent going forward’ Jerome Powell presents the implicit elimination of forward guidance, a tool the Fed has used to manage expectations around monetary policy, which has significant implications for volatility in our view. Removing forward guidance is likely to increase volatility in the bond market as every piece of data becomes more important. As we know, volatility is an anti-bubble of risk and thus why higher implied and realized volatility in the bond market is likely to translate into higher volatility across all assets, which is consistent with higher levels of risk premia, and not lower, as the market has been pricing.”
Essays/Writings
The Reality War by N.S. Lyons.
”While there were many variations of Gnosticism, all of them consistently revolved (and – spoiler alert – continue to revolve) around the same set of fundamental beliefs: the material world is a falsehood, or matter has otherwise been corrupted; human beings have been flung into this false world against their will, wherein they suffer; the material world can be escaped, transcended, or corrected by those with a special connection of the soul to the spiritual realm (Pneuma) and access to secret knowledge (Gnosis). Because the perceivable world is evil, this knowledge necessarily can’t be derived from empirical observation; it can only be gleaned from interior perception and the development of a special consciousness, or reached through purely abstract reasoning.”
”Authored by an anonymous transwoman, the paper rages against the assumed masculinity of the physical world, the gender binary, and the suffering it allegedly produces. Then, directly citing ‘the Gnostic view of the God of the Old Testament as an evil imposter, a Demiurge,’ it declares that, ‘To be human in the service of humanity and human civilization, to seek for peace, equilibrium, and the continuation of the species [in the world as it is]… is merely orthodoxy in service of a fragile and self-righteous tyrant.’ Therefore, it proclaims, ‘The Body without Sex Organs [as] the project of [Gnostic she-demon] Lilith on Earth made manifest to break free of the repressive ordering of Man and God and accelerate fragmentation and individuation,’ by which, through the accelerating knowledge of biomedicine and cybernetics, the body can become ‘free to plug its desire into the matrix of technocapital, towards pure production, the production of difference.'”
”What makes Scientific Gnosticism different from science is that it inverts the above process: it puts the conclusions of Theory (its Gnosis) ahead of empirical observation of the world. . . . And if the world does not accord with Theory, then the world is wrong, and it ‘must seek to call truths things which are not.’ Hence why George Orwell explains that 2+2 had to become 5 for the Party in 1984: because ‘the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.'”
”Meanwhile the sweet seductions of Luxury Gnosticism don’t yet seem to be producing the boundless prosperity, liberation, and happiness promised. Instead the digital seems perfectly designed for disempowerment and totalitarian control. The connection between politics and the actual direction of life often seems meaningless. Authorities’ incoherence is covered up by deflection, misdirection, and further falsehood. The constant shifting of narratives and norms, and the demolition of any established boundaries, even logical and conceptual boundaries, has left nothing with any fixed definition. Two and two now equals five; maybe tomorrow it will equal three. Even what it means to be human is now without any firm basis.”
”The predictable result has been the recent (if now already old by internet time) emergence of an anti-Gnostic reaction that I expect will continue to accelerate, with unpredictable consequences. . . . Memes like the now common use of the term ‘Based’ – which originally meant basically being willing to speak the truth without fear, then evolved to have a more general meaning of being well grounded in reality and therefore unshakable and enduring, and can now be used to refer generally to traditionalist concepts and practices. Or the even more explicitly anti-Gnostic meme of ‘Touch Grass’ – meaning to reconnect with reality, including by literally disconnecting from the online world and going outside, but also by regaining emotional grounding and reordering one’s priorities in life.”
”Despite writing elsewhere that his goal is to ‘bring into view, unapologetically, the reality of nature that is denied by our regime; a reality that it seeks to repress, increasingly with coercion and violence,’ the vitalist romanticism of BAP, with its vision of the destruction of the cities in fire and a return to a simpler, more primal Hyborian age, could equally be seen as a form of Dionysian Gnosticism – in reaction to the Apollonian Gnosticism that rules our age through liquid modernity’s clerisy and their alliance with ‘technocapital.’ But it would still be Gnosticism, still an attempt to escape the world as it is by burning it down and forging a new one.”
Podcasts/Conversations
Russ Roberts, The Tim Ferriss Show.
Harel Jacobson – Trading FX Volatility, Flirting with Models.
Diego Parrilla on High Inflation, Anti-Bubbles and the Problem with Stop Losses, Macro Hive.
Long vol, short prediction models 