The Argentine midterm elections this week were not just a pure win for Milei, but also for the White House. I'm disappointed in myself for feeling disappointed.

Do I still believe that America is good? Or are the stories I tell myself about America just made-up stories, someone else’s stories, that I absorbed because they were shouted at me long enough and loudly enough? Time to answer these questions with my own eyes and ears, through the quintessential American philosophy of pragmatism.

The death of risk happened with a whimper, not a bang. Not because the market blew up, but because of an icy truth: safe havens ain't safe.

If you don't trust the meaning of risk-free, you can't trust the meaning of risk, and we have built everything on the meaning of risk.

We are in the early stages of a bank run on the United States and the US dollar, and everyone on Wall Street is heading for the exits, including domestic investors who will exit not because they want to but because they know the Not-So-Golden Rule.

The central course of our children’s lives is being mind-warped by social media and smartphones, not in some ethereal ghost-in-the-machine sort of way but in an actual neural-wiring sort of way, and this research note by Kiril Sokoloff and the 13D team shows how.

Today both Wall Street and the White House are determined to tell you a story that inflation is over and mission accomplished. Wall Street because they want a cheaper price of money and the White House because they want to win an election.

It’s not a lie, per se, but it’s not a truth, either. It’s all just story, all the way down.

And like all sclerotic institutions, Wall Street and the White House rely on their media organs to tell the story.

More than any other company, Facebook is undermining our democracy and our most integral political rights.

More than any other company, Facebook has bought and paid for political cover at the highest levels of American, Indian and European government, political cover that prevents any of the actions we might take as a society to rid ourselves of this cancer.

Facebook delenda est.

Capitalist productivity has become capitalist financialization.

Wall Street gets something to sell, management gets stock-based comp, and the White House gets re-election.

What do YOU get out of financialization? You get to hold up a card that says "Yay, capitalism!".

I can't advise you on the Answers. I won't advise you on the Answers. But I will advise you on the Process. Because that's what we do for our fellow pack members.

A refresher on the power of abstraction to devalue the real. Gresham’s Law: bad money drives good money out of circulation. Hunt’s Law: fake news drives real news out of circulation.

What if I told you that the dominant strategies for human investing are, without exception, algorithms and derivatives? I don't mean computer-driven investing, I mean good old-fashioned human investing ... stock-picking and the like. And what if I told you that these algorithms and derivatives might all be broken today? You might want to sit down for Part 9 of the Notes from the Field series.

Part 2 of Ben's Notes from the Field series, in which he considers the question: what can a bird teach us about value investing? To everything there is a season.

In which Ben introduces the concept of fiat news, which is to “real news” what fiat currencies like dollars and euros and yen are to “real money” like a gold coin.