Remember guys, consistency is key:
Be sure you are thinking about:
Roman Empire - Daily
Bronze Age Collapse - 3x a week
What would have happened if Hero’s engine had been used industrially - Weekly
That the Sphinx may be way older than the Pyramids - At least twice a month
Really interesting point, probably with a lot of truth. However, it this tees up another question - if the minimal viable state is sufficiently large and powerful to be a threat to liberty, how do you keep it on its leash? Not sure Hamilton was right on that question.
Yesterday, I lectured on Alexander Hamilton’s economic program for the U.S. I always look forward to this lecture, both for the content and because Hamilton is my favorite founding father. I was never a Jefferson man.
Hamilton understood that “libertarianism in one country” is not feasible. Assume, just for this paragraph, that libertarian economic policy is right: that a minimal state is the best recipe for growth. A country that adopts it will grow much richer than its neighbors. But then its neighbors will want to invade it to seize its wealth or, at least, use the threat of violence to turn it into a tributary state and extract rents. And a libertarian state cannot defend itself (no, Switzerland was never a libertarian state; it always spent heavily on defense, for example in the service it required from its citizens). The more you believe in libertarian economic policy, the more you should fear your country adopting it (unless, by some miracle, the whole world adopts it at once).
Hamilton instead foresaw that the U.S. would live in a world of competing empires, where constant war requires professional armies, not militias. The Revolutionary War was not won by militias, however much the myth of the well-regulated militia survives among some Americans, but by the professional armed forces of the U.S., France, and Spain. No “la Royale” under the Comte de Grasse, no victory at Yorktown.
Hamilton therefore anticipated that the U.S. would need a powerful fiscal-military state and a prosperous economy to ensure the survival of freedom and the republic. Economic and military strength go hand in hand: like the god Janus, they are two faces of the same phenomenon.
For some decades, the U.S. fiscal-military state could stay small: two oceans and luck with neighbors (a quasi-balance with the British Empire to the north after the War of 1812, where neither side had much incentive to deviate, and a quasi-failed state to the south). But by the early twentieth century, reality kicked in: Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, China. This is an important and often underappreciated mechanism behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and its survival thereafter, as shown by the way it floated the Liberty Loans of 1917 (no, the U.S. could not have fought in France on tax revenue alone; no great power ever has).
This was not the first case. Central banks were not born from monetary theory but from war. The Bank of England was created in 1694 to finance William III’s war against France. Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States was established to consolidate Revolutionary War debt. The logic is simple: the state that borrows cheaply and at scale outlasts its rivals on the battlefield, and a credible central bank is what makes such borrowing possible.
This is why central banks survive even in republics deeply suspicious of concentrated financial power. Presidents could campaign as Jeffersonians as much as they wanted; the first serious war turned them into Hamiltonians. Hamilton understood how the world works; Jefferson did not. And the causality also runs in the other direction: by lowering the cost of mobilizing resources, central banks made war on a modern scale possible.
To paraphrase Charles Tilly: war made the central bank, and the central bank made war.
I know I'm late to this, but I very much enjoyed the @TheRestHistory episode on one of the greatest men of all time - George Washington. I particularly enjoyed listening to @dcsandbrook struggle not to express the begrudging admiration of Washington he was clearly feeling.
Brian Knight retweeted
I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.
I have watched this video no joke about 15 times. If you like hard sci-fi check out @sadfrontier on YouTube.
(My only critique is that the ship naming conventions are exclusively British/European. We need an Enterprise or Ticonderoga or Hornet)
youtu.be/sawCJESqqeU?is=qsLt…
Brian Knight retweeted
The Journal of Financial Economic Policy published my paper called "Bank Capital Regulation, ABS-CDO Exposures and the Cost of Restoring Solvency" (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…). It revises (and shortens) an earlier working paper called "Regulation, CDO Exposures, and Debt Guarantees through the Financial Crisis."
To understand the motivation, I've long been skeptical of "deregulation caused the crisis" claims. It's because people making this claim tend to overlook the lengthy regulatory notices that permitted the activities at the heart of the crisis in the first place. These regulatory notices reflect banker preferences to fund assets with debt rather than equity capital. The 1996 Market Risk Amendment (govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1…) gave large commercial bank holding companies (BHCs) incentives to hold ABS-CDO tranches in their trading book as it lowered required capital to almost zero. The 2001 Recourse Rule (govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2…) created incentives to hold the collateral for ABS-CDO deals by reducing capital requirements on the highest rated tranches in their banking book. In simpler economic terms, the Market Risk Amendment directly affected demand to hold ABS-CDO tranches. The Recourse Rule indirectly affected demand, through what Erel et al. (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…) called the "Securitization Byproduct" effect, as ABS-CDO issuers had incentives to hold parts of their own and other banks' deals.
The market for ABS-CDOs emerged in 1998, after the finalized Market Risk Amendment but before the finalized Recourse Rule. In the paper, after constructing my own total global, US BHC and US investment bank ABS-CDO issuance series from Green Street's deal-level data, I find a structural break near the finalized Recourse Rule's public release date for US BHCs and globally, but not for US investment banks. That's not proof. But it's consistent with evidence from an earlier paper (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…), in which I showed that BHCs with subsidiaries that commented on the 2001 Recourse Rule, on average increased holdings of the highest-rated tranches that could be used as collateral in ABS-CDO deals; those BHCs substituted away from holdings of lower-rated tranches. The control group on average kept holdings of the highest-rated tranches low and constant. In this paper, I also find that large BHCs with subsidiaries that commented on the Recourse Rule had spikes in estimated debt guarantees, used as a measure of the cost of restoring solvency, during the crisis, not before. The control group shows no changes in the cost of restoring solvency. Lastly, I find that the cost of restoring solvency has a large association with CDO tranche holdings; the associations with the original 2013 and revised 2019 measures of Volcker Rule trading asset measures and other control variables are relatively small.
I still conclude that the role of the ABS-CDO market in that crisis remains under-examined and under-appreciated in policy debates. Early on, popular writings such as Michael Osinski's 2009 New York Magazine piece (nymag.com/news/business/5568…), the Afterword in Frank Partnoy's 2009 re-release of his book F.I.A.S.C.O. (wwnorton.com/books/978039333…) and Michael Lewis's The End (www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~…) clearly laid out why they mattered. Larry Cordell and coauthors (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… and papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…) did fantastic technical work to reconstruct the deals to show why they lay at the heart of the crisis. While Cordell et al. touch on the regulatory angle, the link to regulation has been downplayed in policy debates.
After the crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report (govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-…) devoted about a page each to the Market Risk Amendment and the Recourse Rule. Among many other things, Dodd-Frank called for changes to bank securitization activities, without acknowledging the regulatory changes that incentivized them in the first place - agencies could have just rolled back the parts of the Market Risk Amendment and Recourse Rule that lowered capital requirements. Rather than eliminating risk-weighting after the crisis, the Basel III regulatory framework became even more complex, as Jim Barth and I showed (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…). We also showed (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…) that a simpler regulatory capital framework has benefits that outweigh the costs. Risk-based capital regulation remains in place because the industry and rulemakers want it that way, but that comes with a high cost of doing business from all of the required compliance staff (e.g., accountants, lawyers and quants) and plenty of unintended consequences.
Brian Knight retweeted
Professor Lakier lauds NRA v. Vullo's embrace of a categorical First Amendment rule against informal censorship, exploring the muddled landscape from which the decision emerged, the significance of its intervention, and its profound implications.
(I’m sure there is a catch, but for now)
As the calendar soon turns from May to June — marking the start of meteorological summer — it won’t feel particularly summerlike in the East.
An extensive marine heat wave and potential super El Niño will bring unseasonably mild temperatures. wapo.st/4uDryNQ
Congratulations to @RegentLaw on the hiring of @HesterPeirce! (And vice versa!) Hester is one of the smartest, kindest, and most thoughtful people I know, a fantastic boss, and a devoted servant of Christ. This is a wonderful match.
🚨NEW: SEC Commissioner and head of the Crypto Task Force @HesterPeirce will join Virginia’s Regent University Law School as an Associate Professor in November, according to a university press release circulated today, signaling her tenure at the agency is nearing an end.
In the new role, Peirce, also known as “Crypto Mom,” will teach subjects including securities regulation, financial markets, digital assets and public policy.
Coke Zero is what you drink if you like Coke. Diet Coke is what you drink if you like Diet Coke.
Coke vs. Pepsi was once the big soda debate. Now there’s a Coca-Cola civil war. 🔗 on.wsj.com/4eYLEx6
Brian Knight retweeted
missed this earlier. dear @patio11 with a characteristically-excellent reported history of SPLC's advocacy to shut its enemies out of public commercial life
somehow nothing here surprised me but it's still breathtaking seeing the 2016-2022 behind-the-scenes laid bare
do read it
I don't remember who (Will Durant?) argued that Greek philosophy shifted after the Macedonian and then Roman conquest away from a focus on the external, especially how to govern a polis, to the internal because self governance was stripped away.
In the center of Nahwa there is an apartment building that is loyal to Oman, but Apartment 3C is loyal to the UAE, except the room of a teenage son who is feeling rebellious and is loyal to Oman.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Brian Knight retweeted
WATCH: "We've won 17 cases at the Supreme Court since 2011. The SPLC slings mud. You decide who the serious organization is here."
ADF's @Jeremy_Tedesco spoke with @FoxNews this morning discussing the SPLC indictment.






















