@daveysaid
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Financial Economist; former UNSW Professor etc; Cricket fever 🏏; ALL views mine.
Sydney, Australia
Joined January 2015
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🎯
What has happened to the WSJ?
I’ve subscribed for years.
But the financial information is largely gone - and a concentration on markets, investing and economics has given way to Politico style blogging.
The Bureau Chief is a former Washington Post lefty who has hired former Politico and Huffington Post activists to cover economics.
It’s not working.
They have reporters now who don’t understand finance.
You open the app in the morning and all you see is political commentary and partisan attacks.
It’s become a paid Politico style publication and everyone knows it.
It’s fallen - and needs to go back to its roots of economic reporting. There are too many left wing political commentary outlets already.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
David R. Gallagher retweeted
The $10-$15 trillion total addressable market for AI, if it is successful, is actually "terrifying".
- The famous "Dean of Valuation", Professor Aswath Damodaran, of NYU Stern School of Business.
The reason: AI as a tool is a much smaller market; AI as a replacement for human-jobs is where the giant market story comes from.
"The best-case scenario for AI, that $10 to $15 trillion market, will happen if ONLY it replaces people.
If AI is a tool, it’s going to be a much smaller market than if AI replaces people. So, the stories we’re telling about $10, $20 or $25 trillion markets are actually terrifying stories for the rest of the world.
Why? Because if that story comes true, half of all white-collar people are going to lose their jobs. And what are they going to do instead? Who’s going to come up with the income to buy the products and services?
If AI works as well as it’s supposed to and replaces people, how do we deal with that as a society? Because people lose their jobs. Not only do you lose your income, you lose your life’s meaning.."
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Video from "Excess Returns" podcast Youtube channel (link in comment)
David R. Gallagher retweeted
Tech companies launching their own programs to train grads because they 'can't rely' on Ivy Leagues trib.al/Fi2miAG
David R. Gallagher retweeted
Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.
F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.
The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.
Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
The S&P 500 is 0.7% below a record high, yet 430 of those stocks are 21.7% below their highs. That means on average 86% of the stocks are in a bear market. Breadth has only been this bad twice, in January 1973 and in 1999/2000. On both occasions, the S&P then crashed nearly 50%
David R. Gallagher retweeted
A4 paper hides a beautiful piece of mathematics. Its sides are in the ratio 1 : √2. Fold the sheet in half, and each smaller rectangle keeps exactly the same proportions. That is why A4 becomes two A5 sheets, A5 becomes two A6 sheets, and so on.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
Fui ler o paper do NBER que tá sacudindo Singapura. Pesquisadores de Stanford e Columbia usaram IA pra varrer TODAS as transações imobiliárias do país entre 1995 e 2019 e cruzaram com o cadastro de 141 mil servidores públicos.
Funcionários compravam imóveis perto de futuras estações de metrô 1-2 anos ANTES do anúncio oficial. 60% acima da taxa normal. Não pagavam mais caro na compra, mas revendiam com retorno de 12% ao ano. Os parentes faziam a mesma coisa. S$270 milhões no total.
Pra descartar que fossem só mais espertos, compararam com corretores de imóveis e diretores de empresa. Nenhum dos dois mostrou o mesmo padrão. Rodaram 1.000 simulações aleatórias e o efeito real ficou totalmente fora da distribuição.
Quem mais operava? Gerentes médios do planejamento de transporte. Cargo suficiente pra saber, baixo o bastante pra ninguém olhar.
Em 2012, Singapura apertou a fiscalização com novas leis e punição de casos de alto escalão. O padrão sumiu, dos funcionários e dos parentes.
Singapura é top 5 em transparência no mundo. Norma social sozinha não segurou.
fonte: NBER WP 35756
David R. Gallagher retweeted
The Greenland deal is Classic Trump 101: start with the wild ask — “we should own Greenland” — get everybody freaking out, and then negotiate toward what you really want.
And what did he want? A bigger, permanent U.S. security footprint in Greenland and a way to keep China and Russia out.
You can hate the style, but this is how he deals: start huge, create leverage, then land the part you actually came for. #Greenland @realDonaldTrump
David R. Gallagher retweeted
BREAKING: Marc Andreessen just drew the clearest line in the AI policy war anyone has drawn yet.
His position: let big AI labs build as fast and aggressively as they want.
But zero regulatory capture.
Zero government-protected cartels.
Zero moats built through lobbying instead of shipping.
This is a direct shot at the OpenAI/Anthropic playbook of pushing for regulation that conveniently advantages incumbents.
pmarca is saying: compete or die, but don't rig the arena.
The most important AI policy debate of the decade just got a very loud voice.
Is he right, or does frontier AI actually need some guardrails to prevent catastrophic races to the bottom?
David R. Gallagher retweeted
"This is a Doomer Psyop and the ultimate target is Open Source."
This is the best explanation for the PR stampede to get public buy-in for government-regulated AI.
It's the same kind of fear-based PR we saw with the nuclear scare, global warming, and COVID lockdowns.
It all leads to the same "solution": More government control.
We have seen this all before. And we're not falling for it.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”
Dario makes the case to stop open source and concentrate enormous technological and economic power with Anthropic.
darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
David R. Gallagher retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
AI stocks will drop 10%+ on Monday morning
Brace for impact folks
@DarioAmodei just unwound the AI trade with a blog post
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
David R. Gallagher retweeted
🚨 DAVID SACKS: “This is a time for choosing for Anthropic — these games have to end … You're asking public market investors to underwrite your company to a value in the trillions … If they agree with Bernie Sanders [AI] is dangerous, how can they be allowed to IPO?”
David R. Gallagher retweeted
This was the most powerful speech yet from the RNC, maybe of the entire year. RFK Jr. was masterful.
Worth watching every word.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
Imagine you are 21 years old. You have played eight first-class matches in your life. You did not even have a passport a week ago.
Then you land in England.
Your first over averages 89.7mph. Every single delivery of that over is quicker than every other ball any Pakistan bowler has sent down on this entire tour. You trap the greatest Test batter England has produced before you have conceded a single run in Test cricket. You finish with four wickets.
Then you come back with the bat, score 81 from the bottom of the order in a day, and end up as the second-highest run scorer of the side. You break the record for the most sixes by a debutant in Test history. And you play an innings that wakes up an entire ground, and an entire country, in the space of a couple of hours.
That is where you tell the world that Pakistan has never had a shortage of talent. Only a shortage of people willing to look for it.
What a story. What an absolute beauty of a Test cricket session.
David R. Gallagher retweeted
Singapore's Prime Minister will earn S$3.6M a year from October 15th. That's about $2.84M, equal to a 64% raise.
Before someone feels outraged by that, let me remind that this was Lee Kuan Yew's recipe to avoid corruption. The logic was simple. If you pay ministers at market rate, nobody needs to buy them.
Personally, I've never understood why, to be an accountant reviewing and filing accounts with the State, you need a degree, exams passed, continuous education etc. To run the State itself: nothing.
Doesn't make too much sense, no?
Not to sound like a broken record, but Singapore's model is extremely reasonable: 35% of ministerial pay is variable. The National Bonus, as it's called, is set by four indicators: real median income growth, real income growth of the bottom 20%, unemployment, and real GDP growth.
So their pay is tied to how the country actually performs. Not to how well they campaign.
