Money is getting weirder all the time

Plus: stupid job listings, a YouTube prankster ascends to Brussels, and remembering a much drunker America

Happy Fathers’ Day to all the dads and people with dads!

This temporarily stay-at-home dad is looking for a job while also remaining remarkably busy. I’m not expecting to find work through “normal” channels, but I can say that the job listings process is fundamentally broken.

LinkedIn is especially bad, a real ocean of slop. I get digests every day of new job listings that resemble jobs I’ve held in the past. Most listings aren’t quite real. Many are instead:

• Relistings by agencies with shady limo-company names like PlatinumEliteCEOz. They imply they’re collecting resumes on behalf of real companies, but there’s no way to confirm this. Sometimes the job descriptions are hilariously boilerplate. A lot of people imply that these are “written by AI,” but I think that’s unfair to AI.

• “Stealth” jobs where the company won’t tell you who they are. They may offer a tantalizing tease, like “we’re obsessed with revolutionizing wellness for a new generation of connected consumers,” which could be a dodgy outfit selling dubious CBD gummies on Facebook.

• Legit recruiters who always seem to leave out a key piece of information. For example, I recently saw a listing for CMO of a “philanthropic organization influencing public perception regarding immigrants and immigration.” Might you be advocating for citizenship for refugees, or mass deportation back to their shithole countries of origin? They won’t say. Write a cover letter and find out if you guessed correctly!

Fortunately, my networking efforts have recently born fruit, in the form of actual job interviews. Given the state of the Bay Area tech market, I’m no longer hunting for a unicorn. I’ll take a nice-looking pony.

Speaking of money…

People are Making Money Weird

Money is humanity’s most widely-held mass delusion. We’ve all just agreed that a dollar is worth a dollar, whether it’s a green paper slip with George Washington on it or a Venmo payment 🍕.

It gets weirder when you level up from money to finance. To buy a Honda, we might borrow $40,000 from Capital One, and then that company sells off that obligation to another company called LTKK Equity, Inc. Then that company bundles it with a few thousand more car loans, and sells it to the Missouri Teachers’ Pension Fund, which then hires a company called Freedom Liberty Providence to repossess your Honda when you miss a few payments.

You and your car have become mere abstractions in this process, but the whole bundling and re-selling process actually makes it easier for you to qualify for that loan in the first place. This has the positive effect of making something as expensive as a car available to you if you don’t have $40,000 chilling in your freezer, and the perverse effect of giving the car maker and dealership more room to raise prices, because they know you can borrow more. (For a more extreme examples, see “college tuition” or “health care” or “suburban tract housing.”)

It’s easy to understand why loans have financial value. The borrower pay some of it back every month. That cash flow has value. Factor in the odds that the borrower will default, and a discount rate, and boom, you know vaguely what it’s worth to someone.

Other things are harder to value. In 2015, Ken Griffin of Citadel Capital (a major Trump donor, more on that later) bought a painting by Willem de Kooning for $300M. It’s a lovely painting, and it’s only worth $300M instead of $30M because the buyer and seller (David Geffen) agreed on this price. He also bought a Pollock for $200M. These don’t generate cash flow. They’re just nice, unique things.

A picture of $500 million.

(Griffin also recently bought the name of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. 👎)

In between your subprime car loan and Ken Griffin’s splurges are a universe of booms and busts that affect us all. People push trillions of dollars, much of it borrowed, around global economies. Very little of this money purchases necessities for anyone; most of it is seeking “returns,” meaning more money. It sloshes into classes of assets and then out again, inflating and popping entire sectors, sometimes even entire countries. Rarely do these flows make fundamental sense except that they’re chasing other money.

My senior year of college, about a year before the Netscape IPO, a group of students organized a pyramid scheme. It wasn’t an MLM or Madoff-style trickery; it was just a naked pyramid: “Put in $50, find 5 friends with $50, have them find 5 friends with $50, and watch the cash roll in forever.” When it collapsed, the organizers were incensed at the stupidity of the people below them in the pyramid. They told the reporter from our school paper, “If people had just re-entered the program with some of the money they had already made, we could have kept it going.”

This was instructive a couple years later when we all experienced the ‘90s dotcom bubble. It was a wild era. I knew kids my age who suddenly found themselves worth “millions of dollars.”¹ Companies were incorporating with six-month exit strategies. For a couple weeks, Qualcomm stock jumped like 10% every day. A relative of mine asked me if she should buy Intel “because I heard it was one of the best stocks.”

Then we experienced the post-Y2K market crash that destroyed the companies that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. FuckedCompany became a must-read message board about companies you never heard of firing inconceivable volumes of people. “Weeblooz.com has laid off 1,782 of its 2,230 employees.”

People were understandably mad about losing their jobs, but the jobs were themselves fantasies conjured by finance. A guy I had previously worked with (we’ll call him “Conner”) had left our big, stable company to seek dotcom millions. His new company IPO’ed months after he joined as COO (lol), and he was fond of letting everyone know that his options were worth $13 million. I think I heard him say “13 million dollars” 13 million times. (I should mention Conner was a real dickwad!)

The fun didn’t last long. Over the course of a bad week, Conner’s stock options crashed to almost nothing, which was what his efforts were really worth. At a bar that weekend, Conner complained loudly about how the stupid CEO didn’t know what he was doing, the board was a bunch of greedy assholes, and the investors were just terrified sheep.

Finally a courageous woman we’ll call “Roberta” shut him down: “Conner! Shut up. You took a job you weren’t qualified to do, at a company that should never have existed, for the sole reason that you thought investors were dumb enough to believe the company was worth billions of dollars. Go get a real job.” Conner didn’t like that. But the rest of us did. We bought Roberta some drinks after Conner left the bar.

NASDAQ crashed weeks after I got into business school, a lucky bit of timing that made me feel Very Smart, because applying to MBA programs in 1999 seemed like building an ark in the desert. It was actually fascinating to be in business school 2000-2002 as we witnessed some of the most monumental money-is-weird events of our lifetimes: Not just the dotcom collapse, but California’s man-made electricity crisis, the exposure of Enron and the collateral destruction of Arthur Andersen, accounting scandals at Worldcom and Tyco, an era-defining economic meltdown in Argentina, and also a major event on September 11, 2001.

A few years after we graduated, the housing bubble felt like a rerun. It was fueled by people thinking house prices would go up forever, so borrow and buy more. A lot of people lost their homes in the housing crash, which was traumatic for them. But it also wasn’t terribly different from how Roberta described Conner’s situation. “So you bought a home you couldn’t afford, with money from a lender nobody ever heard of, based on the premise that future lenders would keep letting you borrow more until you sold the house at a massive profit.”

In fact, from interviews with people who lost their homes, many thought about their homes like the college pyramid schemers — why wouldn’t the stupid lenders just give them more money to pay their interest-only loans?

And this gets into the core issue of this stage of capitalism. It used to be that borrowing and investing were the purview of elites and merchants, but at some point we “democratized” finance, which means people need to borrow to live. It was less than two generations ago that most people could pay for college with a part-time job, and using a credit card for fast food was considered profligate. Today, nearly everyone has debt, and what used to be the middle class is now teetering on the edge of insolvency.

But investing has also been democratized. We saw the early stages of this in the dotcom era, as every FOMO sufferer with an extra $100 could open an E*Trade account and buy a couple shares of Weeblooz.com, a company I made up for this essay but could be one of thousands of ill-conceived startups that went public with no revenue and heavy losses.

The 2007-08 financial crisis inspired some excellent books and movies, and my favorite is probably 2011’s Margin Call. The whole movie is really worth watching (if you can handle pre-scandal Kevin Spacey), but especially the movie’s pivotal scene, where CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) agrees to fire sale his firm’s distressed assets before others figure out that the entire mortgage-backed securities market is built on lies.

Tuld reminds everyone that firms only survive by either being first, being smarter than everyone else, or cheating. “And I don’t cheat,” he insists. Spacey’s Sam Rogers protests that this sale will destroy the bank’s reputation, but Tuld is unmoved.

Rogers: “You’re selling something that you know has no value.”

Tuld: “We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price, so that we may survive.”

Today’s investments, by ever less and less learned hands, make mortgage-backed securities look like solid gold bars. Many of our retail holdings have become evermore divorced from reality. A perfect example is Trump Media & Technology Group ($DJT), a company that is worth almost $8B in spite of minimal yet also declining revenue, an auditor that’s itself a criminal enterprise, and massive losses that call into question its ability to operate for very long.

But the little people who are buying DJT aren’t looking for dividends; they’re literally just buying shares in their God-King Donald Trump. (Barry Diller kindly calls these investors “dopes.”) Many media stories have already covered DJT retail investors the way they cover MAGAs in rural diners. “I pray for My President daily, and I’ve put my entire portfolio in His care.” For some, prayer isn’t enough and so they’re complaining to the feds about their losses.

But the big guys have a more pragmatic objective — paying Trump a bribe.

The largest institutional investor of the shell company that merged with Truth Social is Susquehanna International Group, the trading firm owned by GOP megadonor and billionaire Jeffrey Yass…

After the two recently met, Trump reversed his position on legislation that could lead to a TikTok ban. Yass’s investment company has a 15% stake in ByteDance, the China-based firm that owns the popular video-sharing app. Trump also recently struck a rapprochement with the conservative anti-tax group Club for Growth, of which Yass is its biggest benefactor. “We’re back in love,” Trump told a gathering of its donors, according to Politico, after the organization spent millions over the primary cycle in a failed attempt to crush his campaign.

So thinking about Trump Media as a real stock with underlying fundamentals is all wrong. Just to be priced like a ZIRP-era bubble tech stock, Trump Media would need to increase its revenue by 250x. Repeat, it would need to be two hundred fifty times bigger even to be priced like a stupid bubble stock! Because stock prices are illusions!²

This couldn’t be clearer with the recent meme stock craze. As a company, GameStop is a clearly doomed physical media business, another Tower Records, Borders, or Blockbuster. But a Reddit mob and a few social media posts can drive GameStop to gain or lose billions in market value, with no connection whatsoever to the underlying business.

And then there’s crypto, which is essentially useless. But it exists as a store of value. Why? Because people believe it does. And Wall Street has “validated” crypto through easy-to-buy ETFs, because Wall Street will sell anything “to willing buyers at the current fair market price so we may survive.”

When normal people point out that crypto has no inherent value, crypto boosters go full Nihilist. They point out that paintings, baseball cards, and ancient relics also produce no cash flow. In fact, everything that exists, both real and virtual, only has financial value because we hold common delusions. Maybe the whole world is just a pyramid scheme of pyramid schemes. Maybe a crypto metaverse fund’s CEO can be a fictional character. Ve believe in nuzzing, Lebowski!

So money is weirder than ever. And the biggest reason is that capitalism’s massive booms and busts are now being supplemented by smaller bubbles with regular-people money. But the one thing that’s constant is that the little guy rarely wins. Like John Tuld says in Margin Call, you can be first, you can be smarter than everyone else, or you can cheat. Most people never have a shot at the first two.

In early 2022, I did a guest lecture for an undergraduate Marketing class at Berkeley. It was a couple months after the “Crypto Super Bowl,” and the students were excited that blockchain might be their wave to surf. So I showed them the Matt Damon “Fortune favors the brave” ad, and asked what it was all about.

It was clear that these kids didn’t understand the economic history of the prior 25 years. Why would they? So I explained it: “They made an ad with a Gen Xer saying don’t be scared of crypto. Why? Because Gen Xers have already seen this movie twice, and they remember how it ended both times.” (That Super Bowl also had a very funny FTX ad starring Larry David, that had essentially the same message but for Boomers, and it has an ending that has aged like sun-ripened mayonnaise!)

That room full of Berkeley juniors didn’t love hearing this Gen X guest lecturer explain that their golden ticket probably was just a Wonka Bar. I may still be proven wrong about crypto, and in 10 years it could remain as useless as a Picasso, a Honus Wagner card, or a Gutenberg Bible.

The modern weirdness of money is perhaps the greatest legacy of the dotcom 1.0 era. Qualcomm and AOL and marchFIRST and Geocities.com were meme stocks before that was a term, and the skyrocketing NASDAQ generated demand to make trading quick and cheap. (And badly rigged against the investor.)

I’m not a gambler, but about 15 years ago, I found my casino game: Craps. What I really love about Craps is that deep within that chaos of hard-eights, Fire bets, and The Field, is a game you can win. In fact, if you play it the right way, it has the best odds in the casino. The casino still wins in aggregate because most of the board is full of bad bets that promise big wins, but rarely hit. If you can tune out the distractions, you can often walk away with more than you started.

And investing is like that too. Nobody has yet come up with a system that beats spending less than you earn, not buying dumb shit, managing your taxes, and investing in low-fee index funds and cash-generating businesses. You may get jealous of the people hitting home runs, but you’re more likely to win the game with singles and doubles.

Rangelife Shorts

The G7 meeting is happening, and none of the leaders there are doing great at home. The Pope is there for some reason. I guess he’s also a supreme leader of a country that’s inside a G7 country. Anyway, I only mention the G7 meeting because it produced this meet-cute between Sunak and Meloni.

Top Reddit caption: “Italians malfunction when you don’t let them move their hands.”

Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play European Parliament. Last week, several European countries sent batty far-right parties to Brussels. But it wasn’t all bad news. Cypress elected Fidias Panayioto, a 24-year-old YouTuber who makes stunt and prank videos, including an especially shitty one where he stole train rides and meals from around Japan. What kind of public official will Fidias be? “Appearing on Cypriot TV - where he wore trainers, shorts, a suit jacket and three neck ties - he admitted that he had never voted, knew little about politics and the EU, but that he could no longer stand the continued rule of ‘nerds’ in Brussels.” Just go ahead and elect a cute dog, Europe! You know you really want to.

America used to be a chaotic, drunken shitstorm. Last week marked the 50th anniversary of 10-cent beer night at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. I know it’s always easy to believe that everything is going to hell these days, that society used to be decent and well-behaved. But anyone who lived in the 20th century remembers that America used to be much drunker, both in our homes and in public. The Cleveland Indians’ dime-beer promotion led to streakers, fights, lit firecrackers tossed into the bullpen, and eventually hundreds of fans storming the field and violent attacking players from both teams.

Epoch Times is a money laundering operation. Epoch Times is one of the last free newspapers you can still get on the street. Their billboards across the country claim the title of “#1 Trusted News.” (That claim is unsourced, like most of what they publish.) Epoch isn’t a normal newspaper, but an outlet of Falun Gong, the banned-in-China cult that also promotes itself via the beloved Shen Yun. Their slant is also intensely pro-Trump and pro-conspiracy theory, and members of Congress (guess which party! correct!) have entered Epoch’s content into the Congressional record. Well, by now you’ve probably figured out that being intensely pro-Trump is almost always a cover for illegal activities, and guess what. Their CFO was arrested for using Epoch’s business to launder $67 million. Now guess if this crime was committed using cryptocurrency! Correct!

The race to be MAGA’s next target. The NY Times has a breakdown of the competition to be Trump’s VP (gift link). A lot of people think that the media should always mention that Trump is a convicted felon. (Or that he’s clearly sundowning.) And I agree, but also every article about his VP selection process should mention that he tried to have the last one killed by an angry mob, and he is still so messed up about it that he won’t even recommend people vote for his old boss this time. Why in the Freshest of Hells would you want this job, Doug Burgum? You’re a billionaire, go do literally anything else. By the way, the aforementioned billionaire painting-buyer Ken Griffin is waiting to approve the VP pick before he decides whether to buy Trump.

Cancel the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest! As I mentioned here last time, the Michael Jordan of hot dog eating, Takeru Kobayashi, has retired from competitive eating because it turns out this sport is really rough on your body. Well, it gets worse: Joey Chestnut, the LeBron James of hot dog eating, was disqualified from the competition for endorsing a “competitor.” The competitor was Impossible Foods, so Joey figured, a vegan hot dog wasn’t really a competitor. Most people probably agreed a vegan product couldn’t be a hot dog. Nathan’s, however, has generated a news cycle that vegan links are in fact hot dogs, which is a huge PR win for Impossible Foods! The head of marketing at Impossible deserves a raise for this.

Too much everything? Nobody has ever associated Germany with sunny skies or sunny spirits, but they built so much solar capacity that electricity production outstrips demand during daylight hours. That makes the price of energy negative. If you’re wondering about the logic of AI computing companies and Bitcoin mining operations branding themselves as “climate tech,” this is exactly the use case. If nobody takes the excess energy, the solar plant loses money. Meanwhile, in “I don’t know how we’re supposed to feel about this” news, the International Energy Agency says the world faces a “staggering” excess of oil production capacity by 2030. We may have already hit peak oil demand, just as massive new supply sources are coming online. Did Biden break OPEC? (No, but whatever.)

Now please call all the dads in your life. Cheerio!

1. It was fake money unless (1) their stock was still worth something when they were finally free to sell, and (2) they actually sold it, and (3) they had the sense not to plow it all back into dotcom stocks. Relatively few people pulled it off. Shout out to Mark Cuban, and later Tom from MySpace.

2. unless the stock pays dividends