What a year: 203 essays about degrowth in English since the beginning of March. Here is a selection of some of my favourites. Thank you @fem_degrowth, @beth_stratford, @thedownshifters, @corbinkbarthold, @degrowth_info for these brilliant texts.

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A thread on an interesting report by Goldman Sachs' Peter Oppenheimer, the bank's chief global equity strategist. He points out that Goldman's "Bear Market Risk Indicator" is looking ominous.

There are three factors that suggest that the recent stability could evaporate and that equities are "about to enter a sustained bear market", Oppenheimer says.

First is the fact that growth, inflation and interest rate outlook is unfriendly for equities.

Second is that greater volatility, such as multiple corrections and new peaks (which we've seen in 2018) tend to presage a full bear market.

Here is Goldman's data showing how falls and bounces tend to come ahead of "the dramatic final fall".

Why do we track institutional footprints? 🐘 (Thread)

Large institutions like mutual funds, hedge funds, banks, insurance companies, trusts, etc. amount for over 75% of all volume. These institutions move the market, not you and I.

It makes sense that if these guys are moving the markets, we would ideally want to buy the same stocks they are buying, but before they buy them? Right?

So, let’s get a clear understanding of how and why this is so important and what this might look like behind the scenes.

For starters, let’s discuss what we mean by a large institution. In this case, we are referring to the many funds, pensions, trusts, etc. that are responsible for managing tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

Hence, they easily attract and can afford to retain the planet’s top talent, not to mention, their research budgets are enormous.

They have access to information and resources that the retail crowd simply does not, and if they did, it would likely be extremely unaffordable.

I keep hearing people complain that the ‘mainstream media’ does not understand economics and that we’re talked down to as if everything must be explained as if the economy is a household. In this thread I explain all you (and they) need to know. Economics in one thread then....

Very few people seem to understand how money is created. Mainly that’s because when they’re told it seems so simple that they can’t believe something that’s so important that we’re willing to pay a lot to get it is created so easily. This thread explains how money is created.

What this thread also explains is that if we understand money we can completely reimagine how the economy really works, which is the pathway to rebuilding from the mess we are in. Which makes this a pretty big deal. I make no apology for its length as a result.

Let’s start at the very beginning. A person goes into a bank and asks for a £1,000 loan. The bank checks them out, and agrees. And that is all that it takes to create new money. Money is just a promise to pay. That simple exchange of promises is all it takes to create it.

Most people think there must be something that backs up the value of money. Gold, most likely. But there isn’t. Money is just a promise to pay, and has been for almost 50 years now. Mutual promises to pay creates all the money we have.

This is premature, but I want to walk you though why some of the charges coming through are incredible significant. This is one of the recently unsealed complaints.

1512(b) is a very, very strong crime. Section 1512 is about obstruction of the administration of justice. The statute is supposedly about disrupting court proceedings, but it's broader. The way it's written, Congressional Proceedings count.

The statutory maximum for a single violation of 1512(b) is 20 years in prison. That's a lot. Most related federal crimes—231 civil disorder, 2101 riots—are only 5 years on the top end.

But that's not all.

See, federal sentencing is done via a complicated formula that computes sentencing guidelines.

Sentencing guidelines are based on the statute, the elements of the criminal offense, and the defendant's criminal history. It also factors in things like if the defendant takes responsibility, and takes a plea deal, etc.

has anyone covering the Wall Street GME reaping and sowing gone into the fact that a lot of the GameStop and directly associated trades have been largely amplified by social listening powered mega firms doing machine learning automated trades because the “idea” of GME is popular?

like I thought this was a thing investor people & press just knew & instead it’s all just focused on the message of redditors clowning short sellers and not “the computers saw the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters and decided That Would Be A Cool Thing To Emulate” for $$$

for those new: finance social listening is a marketing “science” that involves advanced web & social network data collectors scraping everything for nuance on companies, purchasing behavior & language, investor & finance sentiment, etc & using it to make billions of trades for $$

Musk & his core investor clique is notorious for doing this as are some other big hedge firms & finance firms - you take the raw off Bloomberg Terminal, Superdata, public social networks and headlines etc etc, machine learning the fuck out of it, collect money. A hype machine.

This has been going on for about 8 years but only got popular & competitive in the past 2, when firms realized the machines could do a better job with these data flows in setting up short term shorts & holds vs people - & they could also “game” media to effect other hype machines