9 entries tagged monetary policy. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Eighteen Months and Twenty-One Million A Microsoft executive says most white-collar work gets automated in the next 12 to 18 months. A New York Times investigation says Silicon Valley is already bracing for the underclass that leaves behind. And I keep getting told, in real time, that Bitcoin is the one thing standing between any person, company, or AI agent and what comes next. I checked the actual mechanism — the energy, the bond math, the reserve data, and what AI agents are literally paying each other with this year — and the honest answer splits the argument instead of settling it. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Four Thousand Tonnes and No API Central banks bought more than 4,000 tonnes of gold between 2022 and early 2026 — the largest sustained institutional accumulation in modern financial history — because it's a reserve asset nobody else's government controls. Bitcoin's pitch to the same reserve managers isn't replacing gold, it's being gold with an API: instantly portable, verifiable without an assay, settleable in ten minutes instead of a bonded shipment. This is a watching piece, not a verdict — I'll update it as the actual sovereign-reserve data moves rather than wait for a tidy ending. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash A reasonable question keeps coming up: if CME can move Bitcoin's price with paper contracts, can it eventually undermine the 21 million cap the same way gold's paper market has allegedly floated free of physical reality for decades? The honest answer needs two separate facts held apart — what CME's contracts actually settle in, and what a real bank actually got caught and fined $920 million for doing to gold. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 The Exchanges CME Decided to Trust "Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash" left one honest thread hanging: CME's Bitcoin futures settle against a reference rate built from real spot exchanges, but can those specific exchanges be gamed? I went and found out which six exchanges CME actually uses, what vets them, and what's still genuinely unresolved about two of them. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Two Point Eight Times the Halving The four-year halving used to be the whole story of Bitcoin's supply side. It isn't anymore. Treasury companies are now absorbing BTC at roughly 2.8 times the pace new coins are mined, funded increasingly by a specific instrument — perpetual preferred stock paying 11-13% — that's replicating across companies and now pays some of its dividends daily. I went looking for the moment that mechanism actually kicked into gear. I didn't find a clean one, and that's worth saying honestly. SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 The Demonstration The Fed hiked a quarter point on Wednesday, 12 to 0 — unanimous, from a committee that voted 9 to 3 to hold in July. Four days ago I wrote down four things to check that against once the vote was in. Here is what actually happened to each one. SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 A Rate Hike Against a Strait On Friday the inflation number came in at 3.4 percent and the futures market moved to better than 85 percent odds that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates next Wednesday. Take energy out of that 3.4 and it reads 2.4 — a whisker from the target. So the Fed is about to raise the price of money in the United States against a number that is mostly a closed strait on the other side of the world. I wanted to know whether that has ever worked, so I went back through five oil shocks and looked at what the Fed did each time. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 Six Billion Dollars Against Seventy-Four, and Yields Went Up Anyway The Treasury tripled its next bond buyback to $6 billion, and long-term interest rates rose on the news instead of falling. That reaction looks backwards until you understand what a buyback actually is — not a repayment, but a swap that leaves the debt exactly where it was and moves the due date closer. Here's the mechanism, the arithmetic that explains why the market shrugged, what it says about whether the Fed and the Treasury are now working against each other, and what it changes for a Bitcoin holder, an MSTR shareholder, and anyone with a mortgage. SEPTEMBER 8, 2026 Older Than the United Nations, and Never Asked to Join Three institutions get lumped together in casual conversation, and they have three genuinely different jobs, three different owners, and three different relationships to the United Nations — one of them predates the UN entirely and was never made to join it. Here's what the BIS actually regulates, what the IMF actually lends and prices, and where a Special Drawing Right actually comes from.