Unf*cking The Republic

This week we went deep on debt—all $72 trillion of it—and made the case that the bond market is the real economy, that the Fed has already lost control of the entire curve, and that when the AI trade unwinds, the flood into Treasuries won’t save anyone the way the textbook says it should. Then we watched Japan demonstrate in real time what happens when you don’t have the ex...

Max and 99 are back again! They dive into headlines on school choice draining public education, a for-profit hospital disaster, young adults moving back home in record numbers, and nonprofits positioning themselves for the IPO windfall. Then they tackle listener emails on teaching the New Deal, the royal “we” of collective blame, and how not to hate Republicans. Enjoy! Chapters Intro:...

This week we dug into the Maduro kidnapping as the entry point for something much bigger—the Cold War racism and corporate vengeance that has driven U.S. Policy toward Venezuela for decades, why there has never actually been a socialist government anywhere on earth, and why the American left needs to get its definitions straight before the right keeps winning that argument by default. Then w...

The New York Fed released a troubling report detailing the risk of Collateralized Loan Obligation (CLO) exposure in the insurance industry. Over the past several years, private equity has taken larger and larger stakes in insurers who are historically risk averse. But now they’re acting more like hedge funds in their investment strategies and have more than $2 trillion in corporate debt expo...

Max and 99 are back for another round of Omnibus. They hit headlines on the Trump administration restricting visas for foreign journalists, tribes suing to block the gutting of the Endangered Species Act, SpaceX’s massive share unlock, and a defense of reading books in an era of mass literary abandonment. Then they tackle listener emails on coordinating progressive media against AIPAC, wheth...

Everything is getting worse, but the country hasn’t collapsed. This is all by design. Donald Trump is a useful idiot for the people behind the scenes and Project 2025, most notably Russell Vought. The Trump administration is using the nation’s finances like a personal piggy bank for themselves and large corporations while gutting agencies that provide critical services. The misconcepti...

This week we went to see The Odyssey and came out thinking about Bronze Age collapse, because Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted by the wreckage of a civilization that mistook conquest for strength—and the parallels basically write themselves. Then we checked in on the Leading Economic Index, which has been declining for years while the coincident index keeps climbing, and the gap between tho...

This week we read the federal budget the way it’s meant to be read: as a moral document. What it shows is individuals paying more, corporations getting refunds, classrooms getting gutted, and the pentagon getting fed, all while the deficit stays exactly where it always was. The “fiscally responsible” costume is just that. Then we looked at the strategic petroleum reserve, which i...

Max and 99 are back for another round of Omnibus. They hit headlines on the left’s role in silencing Platner’s accusers, the ICE shooting of a Houston father, a parasite outbreak causing explosive diarrhea, and Meta using your Instagram photos to train AI. Then they tackle listener emails on the difference between socialism and social democracy, and creative vision versus collective co...

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...