Writing & Analysis

Articles

Systems thinking applied to political economy, industrial operations, monetary architecture, and the structural forces that shape outcomes before most people notice them.

Published articles  —   8
AI collaboration disclosed on all published work
Sep
2026
Political Economy  ·  Labor & Wages  ·  Monetary Policy

Why the Numbers Say "Fine" and Nobody Feels Fine

Consumer sentiment just hit 47.8 — the second-lowest reading since 1952 — while official data says the economy is fine. Ten mechanisms explain the gap: a permanent price level hiding behind a falling rate, wages that arrive in once-a-year steps, an unmeasurable AI wage-bargaining tax, a minimum wage frozen for 17 years, a 62x asset economy riding on top of a 5x wage economy, and a safety net gutted at the exact moment its job description came due.

Power & Prosperity Series ~16 min read
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Aug
2026
Fiscal Policy  ·  Monetary Policy

The 3-3-3 Illusion: When PR Replaces Arithmetic

Scott Bessent spent his career reading the gap between what governments promise and what markets will bear. His own "3-3-3" plan — 3% growth, a 3%-of-GDP deficit, +3 million barrels of oil — asks the Fed, the bond market, and tens of millions of retirees to act against their own interests simultaneously. No conspiracy required. Just convergence, closing the trap from every side at once.

Power & Prosperity Series ~7 min read
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Aug
2026
Fiscal Policy  ·  Political Economy  ·  Taxation

The Ledger We Never Kept: Two Unbooked Liabilities, One Set of Rules

Social Security's $29.7 trillion founding-era legacy debt and the federal tax expenditure budget's $11.7 trillion five-year cost are the same species of liability — a government declining to book a transfer as debt. One gets called a crisis. The other gets called baseline policy. A coherence test applied to both, and to the four estate-planning architectures that mirror the same asymmetry at the individual level.

Power & Prosperity Series ~14 min read
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Aug
2026
Brazil  ·  Political Economy  ·  Institutional Capture

The Unbroken Chain: Brazil as the Living Laboratory of Capture

Seven and a half centuries, from the Portuguese Reconquista of 1249 to the orçamento secreto of 2022 — a historical spine, a five-dimension present-day diagnosis, and a full counter-architecture for reform. Why Brazil is the clearest, longest-running case study of state capture anywhere, and what actually breaking the pattern would require.

Power & Prosperity Series ~65 min read
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Aug
2026
Fiscal Policy  ·  Data & Analysis

U.S. National Debt by Presidency, 1797–2026

Two hundred and thirty years of borrowing, stripped of inflation's distortion and measured against the size of the economy that carries it — plus a chart of exactly how much each presidency added to the total, in real terms.

Power & Prosperity Series ~10 min read
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Aug
2026
Automotive  ·  Institutional Decay  ·  Industrial Strategy

How to Destroy a Giant — The Volkswagen Story

Volkswagen was not destroyed by a competitor. It was destroyed by a sequence of deliberate choices over five decades — the Piëch upmarket pivot, €31 billion in dieselgate fraud, and the affordable EV it still cannot deliver. A forensic analysis of how an institution destroys itself from the inside while the people making the decisions collect their bonuses and move on.

Industrial Strategy ~20 min read
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Jul
2026
Automotive  ·  Industrial Policy

The Price of Progress Nobody Wants to Pay

Toyota, BYD, and the coalition of vested interests blocking the future. How oil and gas, legacy automakers, and the ICE ecosystem use political and regulatory machinery to externalize the cost of their own obsolescence onto everyone else — and why history is not repeating itself. It is compounding.

Power & Prosperity Series ~12 min read
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2026
Brazil  ·  Operations  ·  Political Economy

The Invisible Cost of Operating in Brazil

What foreign executives don't see — until the capital is already in. A forensic map of Brazil's true operating cost: taxation, labor encargos, logistics infrastructure deficit, software tax stack, transfer pricing exposure, and the retroactive legal environment. Composite difficulty score: 9.2/10. Cost premium over the US: ~30%.

Power & Prosperity Series ~18 min read
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In Development
2026
Political Economy  ·  Finance

The Arithmetic of Capture

A forensic examination of how money is created, captured, and concentrated — and why the people who pay the most taxes benefit the least from the system they fund. Includes interactive data presentation across six economic indicators.

Coming soon Power & Prosperity Series
2026
Brazil  ·  Education  ·  Inequality

The Architecture of Educational Inequality in Brazil

How the Brazilian education system succeeds at reproducing the class structure that funds it. The poor pay taxes that fund federal universities their children statistically will never attend. The mechanism is legal, documented, and deliberate.

Coming soon Power & Prosperity Series
2026
Finance  ·  Markets

$75 Trillion on Air — What the Stock Market Actually Requires to Be Worth What It Claims

The US stock market at 237.9% of GDP is not a measure of economic reality. It is leveraged belief priced as fact — backed by earnings that have not yet been generated, resting on a productive asset base roughly half the size the valuation implies.

Coming soon
About the Power & Prosperity Series

A multi-part analytical series examining the structural forces that concentrate wealth, capture institutions, and shape political outcomes — across monetary systems, education, taxation, and industrial policy. Each piece is grounded in primary source data. AI collaboration with Claude (Anthropic) is explicitly disclosed on all published work as a matter of principle.