Unf*cking The Republic

Ten sitting house democrats and five candidates just signed the “Promise to America” pledge ensuring the public they are not socialists. It has six banal points with no specifics, no plan, and no agenda that might actually help anyone. Of the six, five are limp, empty platitudes. The sixth is a Trojan horse to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. So either these “Democrats...

This week we asked whether 2026 is 2008 or something worse, and the answer is: different disease, same symptoms. The hiring freeze, the housing collapse, the credit stress all rhyme with the last crisis, but this time the economy is drowning in money that just isn’t moving, pooling at the top while the bottom quietly bleeds out. Then we pulled on the thread of where all that leverage actuall...

The hit series The Bear has finally concluded. The final episode is so uplifting that most reviewers appear to believe the arc of the show’s main character follows suit with a redemptive arc. But the connection to Ayn Rand’s famous book The Fountainhead might reveal the opposite meaning. The show’s main character Carmen Berzatto, portrayed beautifully by Jeremy Allen White, shows...

This week we mapped out how Wall Street has talked itself into a story it can’t stress-test—Accenture getting punished whether AI succeeds or fails, Saylor quietly selling the Bitcoin he swore he’d never sell, and the hyperscalers borrowing billions to fund a buildout that may be obsolete before it’s finished. Then we looked at the inflation numbers, which are stuck well ab...

Is private credit the pin that pops the market bubble? The short answer is no—but that’s the wrong question entirely. Private credit is now a $1.8–$3.5 trillion market, rivaling the entire U.S. leveraged loan and high-yield bond markets combined. It’s direct lending, shadow banking, and middle-market finance all rolled into one, and firms like Ares, Apollo, Blackstone, Blue...

Max and 99 are back, back, back again. They hit headlines on the Supreme Court shielding Roundup from cancer lawsuits, Stephen Miller quietly gutting disability rights, a socialist congressman who tried to abolish the Senate in 1911, and the Netherlands criminalizing conversion therapy. Then they dive into listener emails on stablecoins and the Genius Act, the “upside” of losing the Ir...

This week we said goodbye to Alan Greenspan, the man who spent two decades quietly rigging the economy for the wealthy, and encouraged working people to take on debt he knew would blow up in their faces (he would eventually call this a “flaw” ). Then we looked at housing starts, which just posted their worst number since COVID, with multifamily construction down 40% in a single month&m...

Trump lost more than the war with Iran. U.S. media tends to look at things through a bilateral or ethnocentric lens of winners and losers. The bigger story is how Trump singlehandedly altered the calculus for multiple nation states, and fundamentally shifted historic alliances. Israel stands to lose the most and is increasingly isolated now that Iran and its proxies are triumphant. But this also h...

Your host pals Max and 99 are back for another round of Omnibus! They hit headlines on AI as a political problem dressed up as a spiritual one, Carville’s prediction that Trump walks away by Easter, the new Spielberg film, and a leaked member list from Peter Thiel’s secret society, then tackle listener emails on whether there’s any coming back from this level of democratic destru...

This week we took a detour into the joy of the Knicks championship and what it says about New York, collective identity, and why Zohran Mamdani’s politics make sense in a city where the billionaire and the bodega worker share the same sewer pipe. Then we got back to the markets, where a flood of new share issuances is quietly changing the supply and demand math that’s driven equities u...

Max and 99 are here for another round of Omnibus. They hit headlines on Jared Kushner’s foreign entanglements, the screwworm outbreak threatening the beef supply, a tribute to revolutionary historian Gordon Wood, and a 77-year-old who lost his life savings to a gold coin scam. Then they tackle listener emails on stopping Musk’s grift and Bernie’s proposed AI wealth fund. They ran...

Donald Trump has already destroyed much of the global economy, but the worst has yet to hit the United States. This “resilience paradox” is the result of early stage demand destruction, something economists fear and policy makers have no defense against. There are multiple factors holding the U.S. economy together in a way that other countries cannot manage. And most of the damage is b...

This episode of UNFTR is an exclusive deep dive into the SpaceX IPO prospectus. It reveals what might be the biggest fraud and money grab in the public markets ever. The baseless $1.77 trillion dollar valuation at a list price of $135 at auction stands to add hundreds of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth, and that’s not the most outrageous part about this. The company curren...

Max and 99 are back after a week of colds, poison ivy, and Knicks supremacy. They hit headlines on the left’s idea problem, Google’s water pledges and data center backlash, Meta embedding face recognition into its smart glasses app, and Phoebe Bridgers playing MSG. Then they tackle listener emails on Democratic double standards, Israel and the hypocrisy talking point, and keeping Gaza...

This week we made the case that AI breaks a fundamental economic law: the bigger it gets, the more expensive it is to run, which is the exact opposite of how transformative technologies are supposed to work. The IPO trio of OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX looks less like the next internet and more like the last big exit for early investors before the whole thing deflates. Then we looked at the manuf...

Max and 99 return to close out the month with another Omnibus. They hit headlines on the Jacobin AI debate, U.S. complicity in the flotilla torture, and USDA plans, then tackle listener emails on financial repression, mortgage rates, and a stablecoin question from the crypto heist episode. They rank their Top 5 fictional characters you'd want on your side in a crisis, and close out with some movie...

This week we looked at the AI capital black hole—three companies with a combined $3 trillion in prospective market cap preparing to go public while public R&D budgets get gutted and the rest of the economy gets starved of investment. Then we checked in on consumer sentiment, which has basically fallen off a cliff, because when gas hits $5 a gallon and inflation keeps eating your paycheck...

Max and 99 are back, again! They hit headlines on Cuba, prediction markets, AI getting booed at graduations, and James Murdoch. Then they tackle listener corrections, emails on data centers and why Americans cling to empire. Plus, they rank their Top 5 things we all pretend are normal but are absolutely ridiculous. Enjoy! Chapters Intro: 00:00:23 Max Is Tweaked: 00:07:54 Headlines: 00:27:57 Emails...

The charges against Raúl Castro are the pretext for another invasion into a neighboring country in Latin America. Our sick paternalistic attitude toward the LAC region is a cancer on the world, and it’s clearly not in our own power to put an end to it. In this episode, Max discusses the charges, speaks to the Castro regime, the history between our nations after the ‘59 revolutio...

The Trump family crypto grift moved into high gear by clearing an important legislative hurdle this week. The CLARITY Act officially moved out of committee and now goes to the Agriculture Committee before being paired with the House version and going for a final vote. Despite valiant attempts by Elizabeth Warren to put some guardrails and ethics provisions in place, the GOP shot them all down. Hun...

This week we dug into the Treasury’s TIC data—the report nobody reads but everybody should—which shows central banks quietly stepping back from U.S. debt while private money fills the gap. That’s a problem when you’re carrying $39 trillion and yields are climbing. Then we looked at what that actually means at the kitchen table: record household debt, credit card rates...

Inflation figures came out this week and they were absolutely brutal. April CPI was startling enough, but the Producer Price Index (PPI), which is an indicator of inflation in the pipeline was shocking. Oil reserves are running down to dangerously low levels and it’s clear now that there’s no immediate resolution to the oil crisis, so we’re about to realize our worst economic fea...

Economics is too often weaponized by jargon. High concept terms of art to explain basic behaviors or circumstances that should otherwise be accessible. Socioeconomics takes the math off the page and puts it into a human context. It helps us break from specific doctrines and be slightly less dogmatic. So today I thought we would take a break from the doctrine and dogma to bring certain concepts dow...

Max and 99 are back for another episode of Omnibus. They hit headlines on vitamin K refusal, abortion pill access hanging by a thread, Germany asking Israel for jet fuel, and a robotic companion with AI surveillance built in, then tackle listener emails on deflation, data center slowdowns, and book recommendations. They rank their Top 5 brands to support and close with some light bullshit. Enjoy!...

Javier Milei is brash and audacious, and he loves Donald Trump. But in many ways Donald Trump is the one who is following Milei. Argentina has an 18 month head start on Russell Vought’s wet dream of implementing a harsh libertarian doctrine. For a while it looked like everything Milei did was succeeding. He tamed inflation, created an export surplus and got back on track with debt service. E...