endlessly impressed that kanji writing systems actually work

There's only one picture of my husband and I online in any English-language context, and it's not labeled as such but rather is buried in a Twitter thread and just kind of put in there as one of many photos, on purpose as an easter egg.

We like privacy, so we don't post many pictures.

But since I already showed my left ear on Nostr (likely for the first time ever in a public picture, funnily enough), I might as well give Nostr the exclusive to my husband as well. It's technically not new, which is why I can show it, but rather I can just be more specific about it. It's a picture of us from back in 2021 at Sahl Hasheesh in Egypt that we've had quietly online for three years. As readers of Broken Money know, his name is Mohamed Badran.

Mohamed is the editor of all of my long-form content, deals with the technical backend of the website, and inspires me to be better as a person every day.

Miyazaki films are so incredibly unique.

They often focus on protagonists that don’t win through action, but rather through kindness and hard work. And many of the protagonists don’t really have much inner conflict either.

The fact that this combo is going on, and yet the films are so timeless and successful, is actually kind of crazy. They should be boring, and yet they are not.

There is a deep warmth to most of the films, even as they explore some of the saddest themes.

SOMETIMES THE GLASS IS HALF FULL AND SOMETIMES IHALF EMPTY, BUT YOU ALWAYS HAVE THE POWER TO FILL IT UP. YOU ARE IN CONTROL.

I know this isn’t quite the answer to your question, but the villain that always comes to my mind is GARY OLDMAN.

The man is a CHAMELEON and nails the depth of every character:

I lived in Atlanta for the majority of my adult life so I rarely ever had connecting flights. Now living in Hawaii, I connect through LAX often and can’t fathom how a major airport could suck this bad. Is there any airport in the US that’s worse than LAX?

Today I learned that the new Surat Diamond Bourse in India is the biggest office building in the world in terms of square meters of floor space.

Until this was built in 2023, the Pentagon was the world’s biggest office building. More floor space than any skyscraper. Now this one is bigger.

But my first thought is, “why the hell does a diamond exchange have to be so big!?” Like, I can’t imagine what they need so much space for.

And somewhere in there I'd say there's a fourth decision: When you decide to change your status signaling from things like beauty, power, and material achievement, to things like integrity, competence, and helpfulness.

Almost everyone is geared toward signaling. As social creatures we're deeply wired to signal value to others.

But there's a lot of flexibility in how we signal that.

-We can signal it with shallower things like beauty, lambos, hierarchical dominance, etc. The details will vary between men and women but they have a similar short time preference that few old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.

-Or we can signal it with deeper things like integrity, honesty, helpfulness, friendliness, generosity, providing unique thoughts, or providing wisdom. The details will vary based on profession and skillset but they also have a similar long time preference that most old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.

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One of the big macro questions is when will the US banking system run into the liquidity floor, requiring the Fed to end quantitative tightening? Due to current regulations and the "ample reserve" regime, banks generally have liquidity requirements relative to their overall size, and their overall size keeps growing nominally.

-Big banks ran into the liquidity floor in September 2019 at $1.5 trillion with the repo spike, and the Fed had to end quantitative tightening and resume mild quantitative easing (which was then overshadowed by the giga-liquidity-bazooka in 2020/2021).

-Smaller banks ran into the liquidity floor in March 2023 at $3.0 trillion (the new floor) with the regional bank crisis. Both the Fed and the Treasury provided liquidity in response, although the Fed has maintained quantitative tightening. Liquidity has been maintained above that level without being greatly elevated, which is probably what would have happened post-2019 if not for the pandemic/lockdown stuff thereafter.

The New York Fed thinks the liquidity floor will be reached sometime in 2025, and that they'll go back to gradual balance sheet expansion then. Andy Constan, formerly of Bridgewater, thinks it'll be late 2025. I debate him a bit on this since both of us cover this closely, and I generally think it'll be mid 2025, although there are enough moving variables that neither early 2025 or late 2025 would surprise me, so conservatively I say "by the end of 2025."

I was talking to a large institutional investor today, and he said that his contact who is a major repo operator at an investment bank, thinks the current floor is now $3.3 trillion, which is roughly where it is currently. That basically means any further quantitative tightening has to be offset by reverse repo drainage, or they'll have a repo issue and the Fed will need to end QT. My estimate is somewhere in the $3.1-$3.2 trillion range for the liquidity floor, meaning I think there's a bit more room than that repo operator. But either way it's pretty tight.

This is all kind of rambling but generally when that liquidity floor is reached and is responded to, it tends to be good for a lot of liquidity-driven assets, including bitcoin. And it'll probably be with a whimper more than a bang, kind of like the September 2019 repo crisis that nobody other than macro nerds remember.