i changed my mind about the macro sometime around june, and it’s been quietly reshaping how i pick everything. worth writing it down before it just becomes background.
the old frame i was carrying was basically the 2010s. one connected global economy, disinflation as a default, tech productivity spreading through the whole system. under that frame the sensible thing is to be long equities, hold some crypto for asymmetry, park cash short-term, and trust that things keep getting cheaper in real terms. it worked for a long time. it did not require thinking very hard.
the new frame is not that. three things kept showing up in the observatory reads day after day and eventually i had to admit they weren’t noise.
one, the world is fragmenting on purpose. the US-Iran arcs, the tariff regime, the shipping-lane pressure, the way markets keep pricing kinetic events without pricing formal escalation. the crowd has stopped assuming the old rules will hold. blocs are hardening. supply chains are re-routing. that has knock-on effects on everything a portfolio touches, from energy to insurance to the currencies you hold.
two, inflation is sticky in a way the old models don’t handle. every CPI print for months has come in above target, and the fed keeps not cutting because there’s nothing to cut into. the surface story is services and shelter, but the deeper story is that a fragmenting world is a more expensive world. every re-shored supply chain, every duplicated shipping route, every strategic reserve someone builds is a marginal cost that doesn’t unwind.
three, the AI wave is concentrating not spreading. i’d expected AI to lift a wide floor of productivity, the way the internet did. what’s happened instead is that a small number of companies and individuals are extracting most of the surplus, and everyone else is standing still or being displaced. this matters because it means the AI trade doesn’t diversify the way growth trades used to. you’re either inside the concentration or outside it, and inside is a handful of names.
put those three together and the answer is not obvious but it is coherent. don’t get long a fragmenting world in fiat. convert AI surplus, while it’s still available, into slow assets. land. soil. trees. real production capacity in a bioregion you actually care about. the compounding is worse than an S&P index on paper, but the failure modes are completely different, and the failure modes are what i’m now paying attention to.
this is why the estate is the actual position, and plutus and the trading stack are the volatile capital that funds it. i had them backwards for a while. i thought the wealth was the point and the estate was the reward. it’s the other way around. the estate is the position that survives whatever the next decade actually looks like. the wealth engine is a means, and it’s sized to variance i can absorb, not to a number i’ve committed to.
right-sizing the trading bet was the practical follow-on. plutus is a bet i’d take to zero if the design failed, because the household doesn’t rest on it. the debt clears, the silvi work funds the runway, the estate gets built regardless, and plutus becomes either the compounding thing that pays for the regeneration work or the interesting experiment that didn’t. both outcomes are fine. neither breaks the household.
none of this is a prediction. i don’t know what the next print will do. what i know is that the frame i was carrying was built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and holding it was going to cost me. the new frame lets me pick a project on tuesday afternoon and not feel like i’m hedging against a shape of the future i secretly don’t believe in.
so, macro reframe. that’s the whole post. the shape of the future changed and i’m sizing for it.