4 posts and 3 podcasts to begin 2025

...running to keep up in a mad and fast changing world.

It’s only (just about) the first fortnight of 2025 but already things are shaping up for it to be an extraordinary year. Trump isn’t in office yet but he is in power, albeit as a convicted felon. We have an unexpected co President-elect. It remains to be seen how long Moscow Musk’s reign will last.

We began the year with a post examining the rise of the new plutocracy and the associated enshittification of the internet. Everyone is either anxious or angry. Or both. One simple answer: give up social media. Another: go for a walk.

That post was written before Zuckerberg took Meta (Facebook) into an ever deeper cesspit, abjuring truth while kneeling before Trump. Zuck probably reckons there will be a vacancy for deputy king of the world some time this year when Trump realises that Musk is Xi Jinping’s number one fanboy. The Space Cowboy is living up to every sense of his nickname.

Our first post was also written before Trump-backing tech baron Peter Thiel paid homage to every bat-shit crazy conspiracy theory that you have ever heard of. Maybe he didn’t mention the moon landings but everything else was contained in this truly nuts piece in the FT. It is jaw-droppingly bonkers. Writer Rafael Behr described it succinctly and pithily:

[Thiel sees] sees all analogue-legacy institutions and culture [so anything pre-Twitter] as obsolescent and morally corrupt. Also, prose style of a serial killer manifesto

What is it about apartheid-era South African refugees in the US? Is there something about their past that they miss?

Next up on our Substack site was another wrttten piece, this one again riffing on plutocracy but with a focus on Musk’s attacks on the UK government. Sadly, Starmer is vulnerable, but not for the reasons suggested by regime-changer in chief Musk.

Our first three podcasts of the year began with a discussion of the threats posed by the Musk-Trump administration to the EU. Yes, there is all the usual stuff about tariffs but there is also a deeper problem. Trumpism is essentially a belief in life as a zero-sum game: I can win only if you lose. It’s about the primacy of confrontation. A belief that cooperation is for wimps.

The EU’s founding principle is that peace flows from cooperation. Trump clearly disagrees: witness his military threats directed at Greenland and Panama and his aggressive attempts to make Canada the 51st State. This is not ‘Trump being Trump’, the phraseso beloved by his apologists. This is sinister in the extreme and, if it continues, means the West is finished.

Two more written pieces, this time with a focus on Ireland - not a plutocrat in sight. It is truly remarkable that in a year which finished with Justin Trudeau joining a long list of incumbents swept from office, Ireland’s election signalled continuity. Well done Ireland. Even if that was a little boring

That said, the myriad threats to Ireland’s success story are well-known. One glaring vulnerability is the relative weakness of the SME sector. Time to put that right.

Our most recent podcast looks at MAGAnomics and how it has tossed out centuries of thinking about free trade. Will financial markets provide much needed adult supervision of our politics?

Economists have sung the praises of free trade forever. But, today, nobody that matters believes that free trade is good. The new religion has taken us into the unknown.

Free trade laid the basis for post WW2 prosperity. On average we became a lot better off. But some people did not. Free trade's dirty secret is that it creates both winners and losers. Economists have been frightened to talk about the losers, partly through a disgraceful lack of interest but also because of a key belief: give a bad or thick politician the slightest excuse to become full-on protectionist and they will grab it with both hands. Acknowledging the simple fact that not everyone benefits from free trade in no way justifies a tariff war. But talking, even softly, about the nuances of free trade is enough to give the policy hacks and charlatans a free pass. In their heads anyway. Tariffs harm almost everyone. Only the plutocracy wins. Cue 2025.

Neo-liberalism was about many things but a big feature was the emasculation of trade unions. Economists - particularly of the Chicago variety - encouraged Reagan and Thatcher to remove power from unions and hand it the market. Economists are taught - with very good reason - that allowing markets to function is a splendid idea. Maybe that worked for 10 minutes or so. Today, the monopoly profits of the big corporation and the rise of plutocratic tech barons are evidence of neoliberalism’s singular success: taking power from workers and handing it to Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and a short list of other familiar names.

Over in the UK, things are going from bad to worse. The stark conclusion from the bond market crash: the government has run out of money. Or, at the very least, easy money. The Starmer-Reeves administration risks failure.