This is long, even for Ed. But you have to admire the legwork.

One time, a good friend of mine told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I’d get.

He was right.

There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can “do AI,” whatever the fuck that means.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later.