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Welcome To Trillionistan; Don't Get Comfortable...

Zero Rss
2 months 3 weeks ago
Welcome To Trillionistan; Don't Get Comfortable...

Authored by Peter C. Earle via The Daily Economy,

Not long ago, the notion of trillions belonged either to the furthest cosmic reaches of the universe or the submicroscopic world of atoms. These numbers describe galaxies in the observable universe, roughly two trillion, or, at the opposite extreme, the picosecond - one trillionth of a second - is used to measure molecular motion and chemical reactions. Until recently, magnitudes denominated in trillions were almost entirely confined to the theoretical hinterlands of astronomy, physics, and schoolyard exaggeration.

Today, trillion-dollar quantities have become commonplace in economic and financial life. At least 12 American companies boast trillion-dollar market capitalizations, with Apple approaching $5 trillion. BlackRock now manages more than $15 trillion in assets. The largest technology firms, cumulatively, measure their investments in the trillions as they build data centers, semiconductor capacity, and power systems on an unprecedented scale. SpaceX's 2026 initial public offering valued the company at more than $1.7 trillion, and its subsequent surge briefly pushed Elon Musk's paper wealth above $1 trillion.

Billionistan opened its gates in 1901, when JP Morgan assembled US Steel into the world's first billion-dollar corporation. Perhaps it surrendered statehood on January 13, 2016, the day Powerball offered the first billion-dollar lottery jackpot. After ten more, Billionistan moved from a numerical destination to a waypoint. We now inhabit Trillionistan.

Governments, unsurprisingly, were early movers; they frequently are. Trillion-dollar economic figures first appeared during the great hyperinflations of the twentieth century. In the United States, the national debt crossed $1 trillion in October 1981, inaugurating an era in which ever-larger fiscal quantities gradually lost their capacity to shock. Annual deficits now exceed the entire national debt of 45 years ago, while America's current indebtedness - as measured by the fiscal gap - extends into the hundreds of trillions.

Public finance is only one province of Trillionistan. The larger phenomenon is the steady upward drift of nominal magnitudes - and our tendency to mistake financial scale for real, truly productive achievement. Prices rise, credit and money supplies balloon, economies grow, markets deepen, and expected future earnings are capitalized across ever-longer horizons. Each process quietly extends the number of zeroes layered onto economic life.

Inflation is plainly part of the explanation. A dollar simply buys far less than it once did. Even if nothing real changed - if no new factories were built, no technologies discovered, and no improvement in living standards achieved - the same collection of assets would be priced higher over time as each dollar lost purchasing power. Nominal dollar records are easier to achieve than real value-driven ones.

But inflation alone cannot explain Trillionistan. The economy has also become larger, richer, more technologically sophisticated, and more global. Companies now serve billions of customers, software scales almost without cost, and intellectual property can generate extraordinary returns worldwide. Genuine wealth creation and monetary depreciation are operating simultaneously, both enlarging the nominal quantities around us. But it's difficult for most observers to distinguish between a trillion dollars of productive assets, a trillion dollars of debt, a trillion-dollar market cap, a trillion-dollar spending bill, and a trillion dollars of future pension liabilities.

Sound economics cautions against confusing abstract money prices with the goods, services, productive capacities, and human satisfactions to which those prices refer. Additional wealth is not created merely because accountants add zeros to balance sheets, central banks expand the money supply, or financial assets are quoted at higher prices. Yet neither are such price changes meaningless. Money is a messenger: prices may reflect changes in scarcity, expected earnings, risk, preferences, credit conditions, monetary supply, or some combination of them. Wealth is created when entrepreneurs discover more valuable ways to arrange scarce resources, including capital and labor, to satisfy human wants. Market prices signal judgments about those uses, but they are not themselves the value being created.

Viewed through that lens, a trillion-dollar company is less alarming, and perhaps more inspiring. A trillion-dollar market capitalization is not a warehouse containing a trillion dollars; it is the market's continuously revised estimate of future earning power (see the price trend in SpaceX since the IPO for confirmation of that phenomenon). Stock prices condense millions of judgments about technology, competition, consumer demand, production costs, and risk into a single signal of likely value. That estimate - whether it proves accurate or wildly optimistic - is a wager, a priced forecast of the future, rather than an inventory of existing riches.

Like the trillions now being committed to AI infrastructure, some investments will transform productivity; others will become expensive monuments to extrapolation. Entrepreneurship has always involved speculation. The more important question is whether monetary policy choices have the effect of systematically warping entrepreneurial judgment and promoting malinvestment. Persistently easy credit and artificially suppressed interest rates do more than raise prices generally. They encourage longer-duration projects, inflate the present value of distant earnings, and allow financial valuations to outrun the economy's underlying productive capacity.

Certainly not every trillion dollar valuation is a bubble. Monetary distortion and genuine innovation frequently coexist. Railroads truly transformed nineteenth-century Millionistan - the impressive Mohawk and Hudson Railroad was built for just $600,000 - though many fortunes disappeared in speculative railroad manias. The internet continued to power our economy well after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Artificial intelligence may likewise reshape civilization while simultaneously destroying vast quantities of invested capital. Entrepreneurial ventures, especially at the cutting edge of technology, are entrepreneurial wagers. Profit and loss exist precisely because no one knows the outcome beforehand.

Life in Trillionistan has rewired our perceptions. Large numbers anesthetize. A million dollars once represented unimaginable wealth; a billion eventually replaced it; today even the billion is becoming commonplace. As each numerical frontier becomes familiar, it commands less wonder and less scrutiny. We experience reflexive suspicion of individuals who command great fortunes, but slip into complacency toward inflation, debt, and public liabilities. In both cases, the magnitude obscures the institution that produced it.

Not all trillions are created equal. A trillion accumulated through entrepreneurial discovery differs fundamentally from a trillion generated through monetary expansion, leverage, or habitual political can-kicking. Most modern trillions contain elements of both: genuine productive achievement expressed through a steadily depreciating unit of account. The trillion has migrated from cosmology and quantum mechanics into ordinary economic discourse because the economy has genuinely grown, but also because the monetary unit has contracted precipitously.

The important question, then, is not whether another company, fortune, industry, or balance sheet will cross the trillion-dollar threshold. Many will. The more interesting and relevant question is what kind of trillion it will be: one representing genuine wealth creation, one reflecting the capitalization of future possibilities, one inflated by monetary expansion, or some unstable mixture of all three. In Trillionistan, the zeros hint at the scale, but they do not tell us the actual story. And even as we acclimate ourselves to the trillion, the foundations of Quadrillionistan are quietly being laid.

Peter C. Earle, Ph.D., is Senior Director of Research at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which he joined in 2018. An economist and financial market practitioner with over 30 years of experience in financial markets, macroeconomics, and economic analysis, Dr. Earle holds a Ph.D. in Economics from l'Universite d'Angers, an MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA in Finance, and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 21:00
Tyler Durden

Lamine Yamal is ready to play for Spain —not against his childhood hero, Lionel Messi

NY Post
2 months 3 weeks ago
Spain’s Lamine Yamal is one win from placing himself in soccer immortality. But with immortality comes the cost of dethroning his childhood hero, Argentina’s Lionel Messi. Yamal spoke about facing his childhood hero in the World Cup final Sunday and said, “It’s difficult to put into words.” Spain’s Lamine Yamal has idolized Lionel Messi, but...
Thomas L. Murray

Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists

Zero Rss
2 months 3 weeks ago
Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists

Plymouth, Minnesota - Automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were detained by multiple police officers in a coordinated stop while driving a Jaguar Land Rover press vehicle, after Flock Safety's automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras flagged the car based on a flawed database entry.

Screenshot Plymouth Police Department via The Drive

According to Feder's detailed account in The Drive, officers boxed in the $155,000 Range Rover in a Kohl's parking lot after the vehicle triggered alerts via Flock's network. Police had been tracking it for days, believing the New Jersey manufacturer plate (34 10 DTM) was stolen. Officers approached with hands on their weapons, ordered the couple out of the vehicle, and conducted pat-downs before verifying the car's legitimacy through Jaguar Land Rover. Feder subsequently obtained and published the body camera footage of the encounter.

The incident stemmed from an incomplete report of a similar plate (34 03 DTM) lost during a photo shoot in California, which was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database simply as "34 DTM." Flock's AI system matched Feder's plate - ignoring the smaller middle digits - and generated alerts. Local officers did not fully verify the complete plate visible in Flock's own images.

The problem was not confined to one vehicle. Last Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport loaned to him by Jaguar Land Rover for review. Its plate: New Jersey 34 08 DTM. Jaguar Land Rover has been working to correct the underlying reports.

Flock Safety maintains that its cameras performed as designed, matching partial plates per law enforcement preferences for hotlist alerts. Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive the system was asked whether those characters were present and correctly answered that they were - it simply was not built to flag that additional characters existed. He conceded that for alerts originating from NCIC rather than an individual agency's custom list, the system arguably should test for an exact match rather than mere presence, and called that fair feedback to take back to his team.

Thomas said Flock is working to get the original police report corrected and is meeting with the FBI officials who curate NCIC to develop a way for incomplete data to be flagged as such for officers seeing automated alerts in the field. He emphasized that a camera alert "does not equal probable cause," comparing it to an alarm going off, and stressed that the system depends on both valid inputs and humans verifying outputs.

But the scale is what makes the error rate consequential. Thomas said the system is roughly 99 percent accurate while performing approximately 20 billion reads per month - arithmetic that leaves on the order of 200 million misreads every month. How many of those escalate into armed stops is unknown.

Plymouth police acknowledged shortcomings in verification but pointed to the challenges of varying license plate formats nationwide. According to the department's Flock transparency portal, the city operates 18 cameras that read more than 580,000 license plates in a recent 30-day period, generating over 14,800 hotlist hits - one of which was Feder.

Broader Concerns Over Flock's Expanding Network

This case adds to a growing list of incidents underscoring the privacy implications of Flock Safety's widespread ALPR deployment. As we have previously reported on ZeroHedge, these camera networks - now operating in thousands of communities across dozens of states - create detailed movement logs of vehicles with minimal oversight, raising serious questions about unwarranted surveillance of law-abiding citizens.

Critics, including privacy advocates, have long warned that reliance on partial matches, inter-agency data sharing, and integration with other surveillance tools can lead to false positives, chilling effects on daily movement, and potential misuse. While proponents highlight their value in recovering stolen vehicles and aiding investigations, the aggregation of location data over time effectively enables broad tracking without individualized suspicion.

Joel Feder via The Drive Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 20:25
Tyler Durden

White DSA Member Inadvertently Exposes Socialist Playbook: "Secret Nazis" Are Fine If They Advance Agenda

Zero Rss
2 months 3 weeks ago
White DSA Member Inadvertently Exposes Socialist Playbook: "Secret Nazis" Are Fine If They Advance Agenda

Far-left podcaster and Democratic Socialists of America member Emma Vigeland appeared to inadvertently expose the far-left movement's ends-justify-the-means political calculus: Even a "secret Nazi" would be acceptable if the candidate advanced a national socialist agenda.

Vigeland, a former field reporter, producer, and commentator for The Young Turks and identified as a DSA member, also co-hosts The Majority Report with Sam Seder. She explained on a separate Vox podcast that she doesn't care if a progressive or socialist candidate has "Nazi" skeletons in their closet.

"I am wary of over-focusing on an individual's personal character over their platform. You know, I've said this before. I don't really care if say like Bernie Sanders or AOC go home and they're a secret Nazi, but they go out and they vote for the right things. Like we're talking about politician," the DSA member said earlier this month.

Vox host Astead Herndon was astonished by Vigeland's remarks, and asked: "You don't care?"

DSA's Emma Vigeland says she “doesn’t care” if the candidates she supports are "secret Nazis" as long as they vote for their extremist agenda. pic.twitter.com/ukjBuKvGgW

— Canary Mission (@canarymission) July 16, 2026

Why is anyone surprised anymore? This comes after the political collapse of DSA's Graham Platner, who had a large "Totenkopf" tattoo- a symbol associated with the Nazi SS.

🚨 Graham Platner, a far-left Democrat candidate running for U.S. Senate in Maine, has a NAZI tattoo on his chest

The skull and bones on his chest is called "Totenkopf" and it was used by Hitler's SS pic.twitter.com/IpZaO0Fdi4

— Ryan Saavedra (@RyanSaavedra) October 21, 2025

What the internet had to say:

I'm confused. Who are the nazis? Is it the MAGA? or is it the DSA? The nazis were "National Socialists" that was the name. So the DSA are the nazis, right?

— Igg-norancesbliss (@IgnatzDeZoobnar) July 16, 2026

Is there really any difference between Democratic Socialists and National Socialists?

— Ariel (@Ariel72331325) July 16, 2026

The indoctrinated millennials getting into politics are the expected result of the “Marxist Academics in Charge”.

Good luck to all in rooting out this mental cancer.

— Frank Lynn (@franklynn059) July 18, 2026

Its because they are the REAL NAZI'S.

— MagicSword 23 (@MagicSword23) July 18, 2026

DSA is telling us the playbook.
It doesn’t matter if someone is “a secret Nazi” as long as the rhetoric sounds good and pure!

Sell poison but make it taste like candy. pic.twitter.com/9fyv5UbRtH

— Booker G. Washington (@BookerGWash) July 16, 2026

DSA's End Goal: 

DSA's nation-killing agenda to collapse America:

The DSA is such a liability for the Democratic Party that a prominent Bill Clinton insider took the time to write up a Wall Street Journal op-ed that said: "Lawmakers, law-enforcement agencies and journalists should investigate the DSA to see if it is being funded by foreign governments and interests."

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 20:00
Tyler Durden

The View's Sunny Hostin Hates 'Privilege'... Except For Her Own

Zero Rss
2 months 3 weeks ago
The View's Sunny Hostin Hates 'Privilege'... Except For Her Own

Authored by Andrea Widberg via AmericanThinker.com,

No one hates “privilege” more than Sunny Hostin.

The slightly black co-host of The View, who earns $2 million annually and lives with her orthopedic surgeon husband in a 12,000-square-foot New York City apartment, repeatedly castigates those—usually white—who exercise their “privilege.”

However, when it came to throwing her weight around with the cops to protect her son from allegedly illegal conduct, the whole idea of “privilege” vanished from Hostin’s mind.

Hostin, a former federal prosecutor with a pretty face, landed herself a gig on The View, a show that is aggressively woke. In that context, Hostin often complains about privilege—all kinds of privilege that imply that talent and hard work are meaningless. Here are some notable examples:

In April 2019, when he was running for the Democrat nomination, Pete Buttigieg made obeisance to the race and sex hustlers by reflecting on his “white privilege or male privilege.” Hostin was thrilled that Buttigieg had this empathetic insight into his privilege.

In May 2024, while the shrews...er, hostesses were discussing Caitlin Clark, Hostin stated, “I do think that there is a thing called pretty privilege. There is a thing called White privilege. There is a thing called tall privilege, and we have to acknowledge that.

Most tellingly, though, for purposes of this essay, in September 2019, when actress Felicity Huffman was trying to get a more lenient sentence for her role in a college admissions scandal, Hostin was outraged that someone prominent, wealthy, and generally in a better (presumably whiter) situation than other people, would dare ask for leniency: “She had wealth, privilege and a platform, and she didn’t use it appropriately.”

I couldn’t help thinking of these (and other) attacks on privilege when I read about Hostin throwing around her privileged weight as co-host of The View when she tried to stop police from arresting her son who had allegedly been caught walking along the railroad tracks in chi-chi Westchester County last month:

“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin tried to talk cops out of issuing her Ivy League-educated son a trespassing citation — telling them he “has no criminal record” and repeatedly citing her legal background, according to newly released police bodycam footage.

The TV personality and former federal prosecutor was on the phone with her 24-year-old son, Gabriel Hostin, when he was stopped by police along Metro-North Railroad tracks in Westchester County last month.

“My name is Sunny Hostin and I’m one of the co-hosts of ‘The View’ and I’m a former federal prosecutor,” the 57-year-old mom can be heard saying to the responding officers in the bodycam footage obtained Friday by The Post.

You and I both know that she talked about her role on The View as a subtle threat to the police: I’m powerful, I know people, and I can use my show to destroy you is the privileged subtext of that statement.

And then more privilege: “That’s my son. He’s a Harvard graduate, he doesn’t have a criminal record.” In other words, Harvard grads, among the most privileged people in America, shouldn’t be arrested. That was such an important point to Hostin that, when she raced down to meet the cops personally, she reiterated his privilege: “He’s a Harvard grad...” And then, to assure the arresting cop that her blackish, Puerto-Rican-ish, white-ish son was a good person, she added that he “teaches 4th grade geometry to South Bronx kids.”

Thankfully, the cops were unmoved by the claimed privilege and the virtue signaling. They noted that Gabriel Hostin could not have missed clearly posted “no trespassing” signs, and that they had no option but to detain him. As it was, they limited themselves to issuing a trespass violation, rather than arresting him.

Here’s the full bodycam video:

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Sunny Hostin and son seen on police body cam in trespassing incident. https://t.co/JAMUKRJD7p pic.twitter.com/m25cxe3B1E

— TMZ (@TMZ) July 17, 2026

Those were very nice cops. If they hadn’t been so polite, they could have told Sunny and Gabriel that being a Harvard graduate doesn’t mean you’re not too dumb to live if you think running on a railroad track is a good idea. But apparently being a mixed-race Harvard grad who’s the son of a famous mother makes you think your privilege leaves you immune to the laws of physics. Those immutable laws say that, when a train hits a human, the human loses.

I fully understand Hostin’s impulse to go full Mama Bear when she felt her son was under attack. That’s a very human emotion. But her approach—which basically boiled down to a politely expressed version of “do you know who I am and do you know who my son is?”—is still a stinking bit of leftist hypocrisy when you consider Hostin’s long history of identifying and attacking any type of so-called “privilege,” especially those attached to wealth and prestige.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 19:50
Tyler Durden

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