It is a linkblog and digital garden for the weird, wonderful, and unexpectedly useful things I find on the internet. Read what I have kept below, wander through a subject, or visit Small Web, my directory of independent blogs.
Brad Setser is one of the go-to experts if you want to understand global imbalances, the political economy of China, and the complexities of currency movements. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he always backs up his assertions with data—which sets him apart from a lot of other commentators in…
keep reading — 8 min ↗keep reading — 1 min ↗Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership…
keep reading — 5 min ↗A country that suppresses household consumption while simultaneously facing a collapse of property investment will run persistent current-account surpluses and will, other things equal, have a weak currency. A country with insufficient private savings and unsustainably large fiscal deficits will run persistent current-account deficits and will, other things equal, have a strong real exchange rate against other other…
Cool site to visualize tariffs, sanctions, and global trade deals.
keep reading — 1 min ↗Lots of new inequality statistics from the World Bank's PIP on Our World in Data: Inequality statistics are heavily contested and rightly so, but read the right way, they still have some use.
keep reading — 1 min ↗keep reading — 2 min ↗I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing…
keep reading — 1 min ↗The WhatsApp uncles and aunties generation that have seen the benefits of the two decades after liberalisation are content with their “settled” lives, their garba in Vietnam and their misguided belief about India’s standing going up in the world because of this government. But the reality confronting the Insta generation is that their future isn’t as rosy and the correcting and disciplining mechanism of the political system…
One older leaf, brought back into the light.
keep reading — 1 min ↗Iran’s crypto ecosystem was valued at more than $7.78bn last year, growing at a faster pace compared with 2024, according to crypto transaction monitoring firm Chainalysis. But the data suggests it is not just Iranian citizens who have turned to crypto in a bid to offset the impact of rampant inflation and a weakening currency. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accounted for about 50 percent of on-chain activity in…