Want to Fix Money And Power? Here’s How
Money Printing and Electricity
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This week’s newsletter is going to be…more of a newsletter.
I will give you lots of links, so there is a chance you will click through and never return - at least until next week.
If you come back, though, I’ll show you something self-revealing…because it’s that time of year when Apple shows you what you’ve been listening to!
The last two weeks have been heavy on Bitcoin. I want to go further down that rabbit hole, and I will, but not this week.
Except…well, Microstrategy $MSTR. The company has a business apart from being the biggest corporate holder of Bitcoin. You wouldn’t know it unless you dug into its Financials.
The company is a wonder of corporate finance. The best introduction I found is an X-thread written by Wolf, which gives an outstanding overview of what Michael Saylor is up to. (Click the image).
Some of you (yes, you pards - you know who you are) probably don’t like X because you hate Elon. Get over it! Really. You can filter out all the trashy people. You don’t want to miss out on so much good information.
One of you touched on but didn’t push back about the Bitcoin reserve is how the government could buy over 1 million BTC without massively moving the market.
I’m investigating. When I find out, I’ll let you know.
If you didn’t read that piece, here it is:
Grid Fragility and FIAT Money
Next up is one of my favorite writers on electricity and grid regulation -
.Meredith, upstanding Substack citizen that she is, started re-stacking some excellent articles by others.
This one, by
, is an article drawing an insightful parallel between the Federal Reserve's multi-year abuse of the monetary system and the Regional Transmission Operators' (RTOs) multi-year abuse of the electric grid.So, that’s what my title today is about: how the Fed broke money and the RTOs broke the grid - or at least made it more fragile.
This time, you can choose between a link to a Substack article and the TLDR X-thread I wrote this week summarizing it. (This is a beautiful thread; you should look at it - click the image).
Or, you could open the Substack article on your iPhone, copy it into an email, select it all, and use Writing Tools to summarize (thanks, Apple Intelligence).
Delay, Deny, Deduct
For those of you NOT living in America and wondering what the heck is happening when a healthcare CEO is fatally shot at 6:45 AM before his conference in New York City, here’s a great article by someone prolific beyond belief on Substack and X.
His name is
. His articles run on a bit, but the content is so good it will hurt to click away. You might want to use that Apple Intelligence technique I just mentioned. If you haven’t done this before, it also works on Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Chat GPT.Here it is.
The argument is that the providers are to blame, not the insurers.
The problem is that the patients get the care from the providers and tend to feel great about those that heal them.
Then, they get a denial of payment from their insurer and hate them.
So, how should we run our healthcare? Is anyone from France, Germany, Switzerland, or the UK? Please post answers in the comments, and I will send them directly to RFK.
Something Completely Different
I’m not sure how to include this, so I’ll get right to it: I listened to an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience this week. A subscriber recommended it so, of course, I had to listen!
He spent three hours interviewing Marc Andreessen. I listened at 1.5x. Rogan sounded normal, so he must be super chill at regular speed.
Andreesen, though, sounded kind of nuts. I guess that’s what happens when a lifelong Democrat becomes so disillusioned that he turns 180 degrees and drops a chunk of cash into Trump’s campaign.
It’s a couple of hours, even at 1.5x. A couple of good gym sessions.
It’s hard to summarize, and if you don’t go on X because of Elon, you may not want to listen to Rogan because he played a part, too…
Rogan is like Zelig, the Woody Allen character who can mimic anyone he’s with.
Andreesen, though! His brain is twice the size of the average human, and it’s on fire during this podcast. He has reasons, and they’re hard to disagree with.
Here’s the podcast. If you like company in the gym—or if you’re planning a long drive (I am)—give it a listen.
And Something Different-er
If you are looking for a Democrat pundit who isn’t so wrapped up in identity politics that she can’t see where the party Andreesen used to support went wrong, check out Julie Roginsky.
She used to be a regular feature on Fox and has some good inside baseball on the nominee for Defense, Pete Hegseth.
Her name is Julie Roginsky and her regular feature is Salty Politics. Fair and Balanced - give it a read.
So, here we go:
I think it was heavily Taylor Swift this time last year. That had to be fixed. I greatly respect TS, but the Kansas City Chiefs connection was too much for a Broncos supporter. It’s a new Era.
Now for the song list:
And, for a little variety - and this is a fantastic Joni Mitchell album - here’s the last stat:
There you have it —more than you bargained for, but if you stayed—or came back after clicking those high-value links—the promise was kept!