Running the MAGA economy hot. Precarious Palantir. Modern man, a yellowed old tiger & progress against dementia.

Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze

Jul 13, 2026

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Bai Yuping 1960 风景, 2002

One way of reading the current US economic situation is that it is an exercise in running the economy hot, MAGA-style.

The fiscal taps are open:

M2 is expanding rapidly.

Meanwhile, the crackdown on immigration has slashed labour force growth

The FT story on Palantir’s precarious rise is hard-hitting, by: Joe Miller in Washington, George Hammond in San Francisco and Chris Cook in London

The week after a US immigration enforcement officer killed an American mother of three on the streets of Minneapolis in January, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” posted on social media a slickly produced, AI-generated video set to a music track called “Clubbed to Death”. In a series of flash frames, it featured the logo of the company — whose data intelligence platforms are used by the Trump administration to detain and deport migrants — in the midst of a cultist circle, alongside images of the grim reaper, a blood-soaked crucifix, all-seeing eyes and the mysterious slogan “Recon is watching you”. Some Palantir staff, already concerned about their employer’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump’s policies and its defence of Israel’s war in Gaza, were appalled. “The company had an absolute internal meltdown,” recalls one former employee, who watched the dispute erupt on an internal messaging platform. “You had people being like: ‘My customer is a children’s hospital — how am I supposed to explain this to them?’”

Palantir’s stock, which skyrocketed in the first year of Trump’s second term as president, has lost a nearly a quarter of its value so far this year amid an assault by short sellers who believe that the company is vulnerable to increased competition from AI labs, could lose more top-level talent to the likes of OpenAI and is massively overvalued.

Source: FT

After Rain, by Bai Yuping

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‘We Cannot Choose to Become Idiots’

A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.

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