Item #1: Bitcoin continues to fall
Recall last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refuted the possibly of the U.S. buying Bitcoin to fund the crypto reserve. This led to an immediate selloff of the price of Bitcoin from $120k to $118k. A lot people assumed the selling would temporary, but it has continued to fall. They failed to grasp how negative this news really was. It torpedoes the entire post-Trump Bitcoin narrative. The widely-held belief was the U.S. would fund the reserve with purchases. Now that possibility is out the window.
I was correct about shorting Bitcoin to hedge my tech tech stock positions, as the divergence of performance between QQQ and Bitcoin has continued to widen in recent months.
AFIK I was the first person to come up with this hedging idea. This is consistent with the ‘some guy phenomenon‘, which describes how random individuals can make discoveries that elude the masses and experts. A famous example is how a single individual, financial analyst and whistleblower Harry Markopolos, by using sophisticated options calculations, proved Madoff’s fund was a fraud and that his claimed returns were impossible, but was dismissed by the SEC after he presented his findings in 2005.
Item #2: I saw this going viral: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.
It’s disingenuous for him to say his funding has been cut when he’s earning a whopping $700k/year as a tenured professor:
Terence Tao, a renowned mathematician and UCLA professor, earns a salary that includes base pay, other pay, and benefits, totaling over $700,000 annually, according to OpenPayrolls and Transparent California. In 2022, his total pay and benefits reached $712,532, according to Transparent California. His base salary alone was $529,113, according to Transparent California.
To put this in perspective, his salary is comparable to even FAMNG+ senior staff, or senior quants or investment bankers–but for life due to tenure. Hundreds of other math professors are able to do their jobs on far smaller salaries and without special grants. Others have framed it as a free speech issue, but he has tenure. A government contract however is not protected and can be terminated at will.
In 2020, he was a signee of a UCLA open letter to “condemn acts of racist violence:”
Many have tried to establish a causal link between the letter and UCLA’s funding cuts. But would it have made a difference had he not signed it? The stated justification by the Trump administration has to do with UCLA failing to adequately police antisemitism on its campus, not wokeness.
But nonetheless, time to put to rest the notion of STEM as somehow being uniquely resistant to wokeness. It’s not. Everything is compromised, except maybe economics. The rejection of Marxism axiomatically follows from theory and empirical evidence. You cannot be an economist and a Marxist, unless a very bad economist I suppose. From my own experience and empirical observations on forums, I cannot find strong evidence that people who are employed in tech, finance or related fields are disproportionately anti-woke. Except for maybe certain opensource communities, I don’t really see disproportionate pushback against wokeness.
Item #3: Judge declines to unseal grand jury material in Jeffrey Epstein case.
Washington — A federal judge in New York on Wednesday declined the Justice Department’s request to unseal grand jury material in the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, saying prosecutors had failed to demonstrate that “special circumstances” warranted the disclosure.
This is not anything close to the files. It’s a transcript from the grand jury, which does not contain any new names. And still it was denied. This agrees with my earlier post predicting that there will be no transparency on the Epstein case.