There is a number on the sign outside every gas station, and almost nobody knows what is inside it. I have wanted to take one apart for a while. Not the national average, not a chart of prices over...
The federal government now spends more than a trillion dollars a year on interest. That number got a lot of coverage when it crossed, and almost all of the coverage stopped at the number. Nobody sp...
Twenty-five years ago, the biggest fiscal problem in Washington was what to do with all the money. That is not hindsight snark. In January of 2001 the Congressional Budget Office published a ten-ye...
You click the green button, $100 leaves your card, and somewhere between that moment and an ad appearing on a television in a swing district, roughly sixty of those dollars get spent on something el...
The United States government needed 205 years to borrow its first trillion dollars, crossing that line in October of 1981. It added its 38th trillion in 70 days last fall - with no war, no pandemic an...
With the November 2026 midterms roughly 15 weeks away and President Trump polling between 37% and 41% approval, we pulled the 10 lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded heading into a midte...
We are about to watch the United States turn 250, and every July it is the same flags, fireworks, and founding-era quotes on coffee mugs. So this year I went looking for something nobody puts on a mug...
The Supreme Court has decided thousands of cases over its 235-year history, but a small handful genuinely changed the country. From the 1803 ruling that gave the Court its power to strike down laws, t...
In 2026, the country is debating a 250-foot triumphal arch that President Trump wants built before the July 4 sestercentennial. The legal justification the administration is using is, of all things, a...
Sam Bankman-Fried is currently serving 25 years in federal prison for one of the largest financial frauds in American history. He also happened to be, by the cold math of venture capital returns, one ...
SpaceX just filed its S-1, and the document is exactly what you'd expect from a 24-year-old company that has become the most important private business in the world: enormous, ambitious, frequently su...
Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund Situational Awareness LP posted its Q1 2026 13F to the SEC on Monday, May 18, 2026, and it was the most-watched institutional filing of the quarter. In a single thre...
On June 13, 2025, the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump's annual financial disclosure (OGE Form 278e) covering the 2024 calendar year. The filing ran 234 pages, including 145 pages...
On May 12, 2026, two of the most consequential financial disclosure documents of the Trump presidency landed on the U.S. Office of Government Ethics' desk. Both were OGE Form 278-T periodic transactio...
Stock market bubbles are easier to identify in retrospect than in real time. We are sitting in May 2026, with Nvidia having crossed a five trillion dollar market capitalization, with the Magnificent 7...