The average European energy company earns a 9% net margin after investing billions and creating jobs. The state takes: 21% of its profits 30% of its revenue 45% of total employee labour costs. 50% of the final energy price. And some people still want more government.

Euro area stagnation after chains of so-called public stimuli and Next Generation funds. Spain "grows" adding migrant population and bloating political spending. France in contraction, showing what happens after you do that for decades. Big government, mass migration and high taxes: Decline.

Spain’s economic “miracle” is a statistical mirage. Less miraculous per person. GDP grows 2.7%, but household consumption and investment slow while government consumption accelerates (INE). The IMF’s figures show just 1% annual real GDP per capita growth over 2018–2027, including forecasts. Exactly the same as the sluggish euro area (IMF table). Meanwhile, inflation stands at 4.9%. Spain has spent 17 consecutive months above euro-area inflation through September, with a 1.2-percentage-point gap that month. More people and more public spending can make an economy bigger. They are not more prosperity per person

Debunking the myth of "the US only grows because of AI": GDP already subtracts imports, so imported chips and servers largely cancel out. Headline number: 3.4% Q3 real GDP growth, against 3.2% expected, measured after every imported chip is deducted. Consumption grew 3.8%. Imports took 2.64 percentage points off growth. Computer investment of $365bn is almost matched by net imports of the same hardware, per J.P. Morgan. Subtract AI capex without its imports and you count them twice. AI matters. It is not the whole economy. Stop hating America.

The people who say "AI is the only thing fueling the economy" 🙄because of investments should take a hard look at the Tech goods coming in from the import sector. Furthermore, they are the same people praising the Chinese growth without ever deducting Tech and AI.🤣 The vast majority of investments in AI are from imported goods and therefore have no net effect on GDP. Excluding AI investment, the US is growing at double the rate of developed peers. And without bloating government spending and immigration. Stop hating America.

The US is the only developed economy delivering strong growth. US GDP grew 3.4%, beating 3.2% expected. Consumption and investment power ahead. Inflation remains elevated, but mostly due to refined products. considering 2.5% in Q1, 2.2 in Q2%, and 3.4% in Q3 the annualised real growth rate is coming in at 2.7% for now, with most yearly expectations for GDP 2026 being at 2.5% (IMF) Core PCE in line with expectations, at a 0.3% MoM and 3.1% YoY Headline PCE in line at 0.5% MoM and 3.6% YoY The jump in refined products in september is driving most of the spike.

No country has ever reduced energy prices and improved affordability taxing the companies that invest in energy supply security and subsidizing the political groups that create regulatory burdens. You are welcome.

At least 68 dead in Spain’s train disaster. A second fatal rail collision this year. More than 114 dead this year. Grief demands more than official condolences. We need an independent investigation and accountability at the top. Passenger safety is a duty, not a slogan.

I've been pointing out since the early 2010s that Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman have a bad habit of biasing their data construction to fit their politics. Whenever they make a suspect call in how to handle stats, it ends up showing that inequality is on the rise. They almost never go in the other direction. The errors are non-random and almost invariably reinforce their political claims about rising income and wealth concentration since 1980. Piketty did this throughout his book Capital in the 21st Century. Piketty and Saez did this throughout their famous 2003 paper on inequality in the US. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman Saez and Zucman did this in their Distributional National Accounts paper that Auten and Splinter dissected. Saez and Zucman did this in their 2019 book on tax incidence and inequality. Saez and Zucman did this in their flurry of "studies" and white papers to support Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax proposal, California Prop 40, a new wealth tax in France, and dozens of other similar examples. A new AI report (linked below) audited 138 papers by Saez and Zucman. It found thousands of errors, 194 of which were serious. A whopping 97% of the serious errors went in the same direction: they showed inequality rising faster or made it higher. But there's a bigger scandal at play here. Despite these clear biases, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have enjoyed a stream of praise and prestige within the economics profession. They get expedited and friendly reviews in top econ journals even though a more serious peer review should have caught many of these errors (the Quarterly Journal of Economics is a recurring offender in this regard). Journals regularly give them a pass after the errors in their old work come to light - they're never expected to correct any of it, and just keep on using it as if nothing changed. Their non-peer reviewed data claims are also treated as gospel by major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. And they get showered with prizes - Saez and Zucman are both Clark Medal winners from the AEA, and Zucman got his prize in 2023 after evidence of major data shenanigans in his work came to light in 2019. Until now, those of us who have been trying to correct the record have had to wade through the PSZ trio's cluttered, disorganized, and often non-transparent replication packages (almost all of which are convoluted piles of Excel spreadsheets) to find the problems. I did a line-by-line replication of Piketty and Saez's entire 2003 US income inequality series to use one example, and found it was riddled with errors - almost every single one of which biased their results in favor of their political story. We had the means to catch this stuff as it was happening, but the economics profession failed to do its job. And it failed precisely because its elite ranks wanted to believe the Piketty-Saez-Zucman story for political reasons.

US CPI shows the stupidity of rate hikes. The entire impact comes from refined products. Rate hikes will not create more barrels nor increase refining, but they damage families and businesses.