Fed Governor Stephen Miran quietly reversed course on his mission to cut interest rates saying, “There’s been some signs of even more firming in goods inflation.” He made this admission after resigning his post at the Council of Economic Advisors, something he pledged to do if appointed to the Fed. But Miran’s position will be used to make way for the incoming Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh, which means he’ll be packing for the private sector relatively soon.
Why does this matter? In the grand scheme of war, mass deportation, tariff policy, election interference, domestic surveillance and other threats to our democracy, I suppose it doesn’t warrant the lede here.
But Miran is an ideologue. He plugs in the financial piece to the unitary executive doctrine. His prior work in private practice designing ways to undermine Federal Reserve independence and to consolidate power in the hands of the executive has been the model for this administration’s stance toward the Fed. He is the quiet Machiavellian nerd whose outdated theories on monetary policy are exceeded only by his fealty to Donald Trump. In this one simple admission—that inflation under Trump appears to be sticky—he has broken from this White House tradition of “lie then deny.”
I’ll miss my muse when he retreats back into the comfortable world of think tanks. No doubt he will be rewarded for his brief but notable tenure as the dissenting voice at the Fed with private market riches. Yet his time and his slight turn are instructive.
It’s as though the ideologues behind this America first Project 2025 experiment are surprised by their own success. The opposition to their project barely mounted a defense. The bureaucratic wing of the white nationalist movement fronted by Russell Vought has been so thoroughly successful that we can already taste the fruits of their labor. It’s almost as though they didn’t think it would happen this quickly and completely because they appear to be out of moves. Cue global war.
Of course tariffs produce domestic inflation.
Of course mass deportation leads to a decline in productive GDP growth.
Of course economic isolationism reduces dependency.
Of course tax cuts for the wealthy increase inequality and reduce middle income wages.
Of course eradicating vaccine schedules leads to outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Of course wars abroad invite instability and recrimination.
Of course voter disenfranchisement ignites political activism and engagement.
The furious pace of change during Trump’s first year served to reverse any of the gains made under Biden. Inflation was trending downward and has since heated up. Our allies are writing us off and reordering global trade. We experienced net outflows of capital from the treasury market in 2025. This was masked by net inflows into the private sector markets like equities, but even this trend wasn’t enough to boost our stock market to the levels of most other developed nations.
And now the one remaining fig leaf the Trump administration has been hiding behind is about to be blown away in the coming weeks as oil prices are set to increase dramatically. Between wage stagnation, declining labor participation and rising prices, we’re heading for some serious 1970s vibes if there’s a sudden spike in prices at the pump.
Invading Iran appears to be such an own goal that it has nearly everyone scratching their heads. After all, according to multiple sources from both sides of the negotiations, Iran had acquiesced to nearly every demand made by the United States, with Iran claiming it was more than what Obama had achieved. That alone should have been enough for Trump to spike the ball and post 1,000 memes on Truth Social. Not even Trump is so willfully ignorant as to assume that a large-scale attack on Iran wouldn’t lead to an oil crisis.
Like I said, it’s as though they’re out of moves and surprised they were allowed to even get this far. And because the blowback from their incomprehensibly stupid domestic agenda is coming like a freight train. All that’s left is to blow up the tracks.
Other things I’m obsessing over…
My out of office message for March 6: “Thank you for contacting me. I will be out of the office today, March 6, 2026, drunk on whiskey in a theater watching The Immortal Man. If this is an emergency, you can contact 99 and the Peaky Fucking Blinders will handle it.”
With the loss of credibility at CBS’s 60 Minutes, the funding cuts to public broadcasting and decline in relevance of once promising outlets like Vice, investigative journalism is at a crossroads. Given the headwinds, I’m more impressed with More Perfect Union every day.
Left worlds collide with more intelligence than MSM can handle. Danny Bessner, Matt Lech and David Griscom in discussion. Here’s Danny defining liberalism and comparing it with Cold War liberalism. Another intellectual deep dive with Danny can be found in this discussion with Nathan Robinson from Current Affairs.
-Max
Killer Left Take of the Week
Double shot because I missed last week.
KLTW one goes to David Doel, The Rational National for breaking down the NDP leader debate and pointing out the universal truth that progressive ideas are NOT outrageous. In fact, oftentimes they’re the most—dare I say—rational.
KLTW two goes to Owen Jones for giving a calm and rational dissection of western media framing over our illegal invasion of Iran and assassination of a sitting leader. The way we sell these incursions is both cynical and propagandistic at its core.
Inflation continues to brew below the surface of the economy. The latest Producer Price Index (PPI) report shows another firm gain in “core” prices—excluding food, energy—driven primarily by the service side of the economy. In simple terms, PPI tracks what businesses receive for the goods and services they sell, making it a frontline gauge of inflation in the production pipeline. It typically takes PPI 60 to 90 days to appear in goods and services prices that fall on consumers.
Goods are tangible items—everything from raw materials to finished products like cars, appliances, and food—while services capture things like transportation, warehousing, finance, healthcare, and retail margins. I find the difference can be a little misleading because there are items under service, like retail, that we would typically associate with goods. When services prices are rising steadily while goods are relatively flat or falling, it suggests that the more labor‑intensive, domestic side of the economy is where inflation is becoming embedded.
In the most recent PPI release that pattern is increasingly pronounced: prices for many goods are being held in check by deflationary energy and softer food categories, while services and trade margins move higher. Low energy costs have been a saving grace for the Trump administration, providing cover for the larger impact of tariffs. Deflationary energy means that producers are paying less for inputs like oil, natural gas, and refined fuels, which has the dual effect of directly lowering energy-related components and indirectly dampening costs across the supply chain. Without the drag from cheaper energy, the underlying PPI trend would be hotter, especially once you focus on core measures and the “stage of production” indexes that track prices at different points in the supply chain. Those upstream measures, particularly in business-to-business services, point to a slow but steady build-up of cost pressure that has to be fully realized in consumer pricing.
That’s why this PPI release should be read as a cautionary signal for consumer inflation over the coming months, especially given rising geopolitical risks. If oil and gas prices begin to accelerate in response to this illegal campaign against Iran—whether through supply disruptions, shipping constraints, or risk premia in futures markets—the key deflationary force that has been masking underlying price pressure could evaporate. It’s like Trump is trying to will the ‘70s back into fashion.
Headlines
Bombing Is the Easy Part
Now what, tough guy? Iran is not Iraq. Nor is it Venezuela, Cuba, Afghanistan or any other country we seek to destroy (partial list). Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was there from the start. No matter your opinion of Iran and the clerics who direct the regime, we have created a martyr who will be celebrated for generations to come. Iran might be destabilized and on the ropes, but it will not collapse. Its citizens will not rise up to take power no matter how nicely Donald Trump asks. There will be no power vacuum as there was after Assad or Sadam. There will be only a hardened resolve and determination among Iran’s ruling elite to tighten its grip on power and exact revenge. No one knows what comes next, most especially the man who set all of this in motion.
From the article:
“There’s no sign that the Trump administration has spent months—or even days— working out what should be done after this military operation. Instead, his Pentagon spent the hours leading up to the attack feuding with an American AI company, various ‘woke’ universities, and Scouting America. Trump appears to be winging it, letting loose the dogs of war and then seeing what the hell happens.”
Larry Ellison Making Rupert Murdoch Look Like Bruno Tattaglia
If the deteriorating coverage with ratings to match over at CBS are any indication of what’s to come, we’re in for some shit infotainment in the years ahead. Larry Ellison is consolidating his media empire quickly but it’s a lesser known Oracle play that should be of greater concern. The Drey Dossier is putting the pieces together of Oracle’s takeover of systems as it uses Elon’s Grok to review and synthesize all of our medical data.
From the article:
“Here is what happened in the last seventeen days: On February 11th, Oracle won a landmark contract from CMS to host Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and ACA marketplace data for more than 150 million Americans. On February 12th, the Air Force awarded Oracle an $88 million task order for Cloud One, its classified cloud platform spanning Top Secret and Special Access Program workloads across the entire Department of Defense. Yesterday, February 27th, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery signed their merger agreement — $111 billion, the largest media deal in American history, with Oracle as the cloud infrastructure the entire combined company will run on. And today, February 28th, Oracle published the blog post authorizing generative AI to process federal government data at the highest civilian and DoD security clearance levels.”
I’m sure the DOJ will look into this as critically and expeditiously as they have the Epstein files.
From the article:
“Bloomberg reported that six accounts on Polymarket, all newly created this month, ‘made around $1 million in profit’ by betting on the timing of the US attack on Iran. The accounts, according to Bloomberg, ‘had only ever placed bets on when US strikes might occur,’ and ‘some of their shares were purchased, in some cases at roughly a dime apiece, hours before the first explosions were reported in Tehran.’”
99 Turned me onto Acquired. It’s a very popular mainstream show so don’t expect any thoughtful political critiques. But the storytelling and research is undeniably strong and detailed. As we build our chops and resources for some upcoming AI episodes, I found this one incredibly valuable. It’s 4 hours long so you have to really be into this.
“Google faces the greatest innovator’s dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei — more or less everyone who leads modern AI worked at Google circa 2014. They built the best dedicated AI infrastructure (TPUs!) and deployed AI at massive scale years before anyone else. And yet... the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 caught them completely flat-footed. How on earth did the greatest business in history wind up playing catch-up to a nonprofit-turned-startup?”
“In the mid-twentieth century, Cold War liberalism exerted a profound influence on the US state, US foreign policy, and liberal thought across the North Atlantic world. The essays in this volume examine the history of this important ideology from a variety of perspectives.”
“The Environmental Voter Project identifies millions of non-voting environmentalists and turns them into consistent voters. We estimate that 11.2 million environmentalists did not vote in the 2024 presidential election, and we know that many more skip midterm, state, and local elections. We are a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on a simple, high-leverage solution to this problem: with an 9-year track record of success, we are accurately identifying these non-voting environmentalists and efficiently converting them into a critical mass of consistent voters that will soon be too big for politicians to ignore.”
