Research Round Up – Week of April 21 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

Another halving in the books, eh? So many of you probably went to outstanding parties, celebrated with friends, or sat in your basement watching mempool.space on your phone while playing video games (me). Halvings are great – they remind us why we’re in Bitcoin: the predetermined nature of the issuance policy, the steadfastness of the code base, and the separation of emotional whims from money. All good things, and things we have to continue to share with others during this new epoch.

On to the news – just two this week, since I’m hungover after winning yet another beer league championship this weekend.

 

The US is Making Up Data

We know this, obviously, and have discussed it at length on the CBP over the years. The idea that any government has the tools to accurately report data – like jobs data, in this case – is laughable. The best case scenario is that the data is collected through a survey, which is basically just notoriously unreliable self-reporting. The worst case, on the other hand, is thatthe data is so clearly made up, that the people doing the inventing don’t even have the chops to do a good job fabricating the numbers, and that CNBC has no choice but to look at the data – having determined that something is wrong – and write an article about “something strange” in the numbers. It’s not strange guys, its fiction. Even the small variance that sometimes looks to be ebbing and flowing isn’t enough to represent the randomness you’d expect to see in the reporting. Fake, all of it.

Now you have to ask yourself, anon: If this data is made up, is the other data real? Inflation? GDP? No sane person believes that with approximately 330 million people, some legal and some not, some working and some not, some pretending to work and some not, etc, that there can be any real, actionable data coming from reporting efforts. Now, everyone can see it. How fun!

 

 

 

2024 Budget Met With Disdain

Anytime Derek Holt (Economist, Scotia Bank) gets on the keyboard, it gets everyone talking. That’s when he’s contained to the Scotia Econ pages, but this week he’s in the Globe and Mail dropping bombs on a budget he says will “…cement structural deficits forever” as federal debt interest costs explode to over $65bn per year in Canada. In his words, since I’m hungover and don’t feel like paraphrasing:

That, folks, is not being generationally fair. Trudeau and Freeland are ripping off Canada’s youth who will be the ones left to face the bills for many years to come. It’s an insult to portray such a Budget as being in the best interests of Canada’s youth who have fled from the Liberals in droves.

Spicy! And he’s correct – the disaster will continue to unravel as spending continues to rise and the resistance to discussing anything related to cuts remains firmly entrenched. I really can’t recommend this article enough – its a pretty strident take-down of the new capital gains changes, among other things, so take some time and read it.

There’s also a nice chunk of change in the budget for “online harms” – this of course in relation to Bill C-63, which we’ve discussed both on CBP and Axis of Easy in the past few months. As noted in the tweet, budgeting for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission and Digital Safety Ombudsman is likely not going to be a good thing for freedom of expression in Canada. For the moment, this is only something to keep an eye on but, as I’ve noted before, I think the move toward more surveillance, more restrictions, more chilling-effect, etc is a guarantee regardless of who lives at Sussex.

 

 

See you Monday night.