Writing

The 100% threshold: how government debt fundamentally changes the link between money supply and inflation. A regime-conditional study of 1,891 weekly FRED observations from 1990 to 2026, finding that the M2 coefficient on consumer prices changes sign once federal debt passes 100% of GDP, and that inflation expectations pass through 4.6 times more strongly above that line.

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Powell's Predicament in the Context of Behavioral Economics. Thoughts on the decision to keep rates steady.

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One of the areas I find myself most drawn to academically is the relationship between income and wealth inequality and the real economy. Not inequality as an abstract moral question, though that matters too, but rather the concrete macroeconomic mechanics of it. Specifically, I am interested in how consumption, investment, growth, and employment change as wealth concentrates. How does the composition of who holds assets shape the transmission of monetary policy? These are questions I think about a lot, and much of what I've learned in my research on the topic has helped me better understand seemingly distinct topics like geopolitics and contemporary market movements.

A lot of that interest was sparked by the kind of content I grew up watching. I've spent considerable time with voices like Scott Galloway and Ed Elson of Prof G Markets, who are not only good at making the structural forces behind markets feel urgent and personal, but also excellent at grounding their audience in what really matters for the market.

Gary Stevenson is another amazing source for information on this topic. His simple framework around wealth concentration and stagnation helps make clear how these under-studied relationships play out, without falling into traps of obfuscation that more traditional economists seem to fall into. What I appreciate about his communication is that he connects the involved numbers to lived experience in a way that most economics education frankly doesn't bother to do.

At the same time I'm equally drawn to the rigorous, quantitative side of financial analysis. Ben Felix and Patrick Boyle both do something I find genuinely rare, which is bringing serious academic financial expertise into formats that are actually digestible without dumbing anything down. Felix in particular has shaped how I think about factor investing and the gap between what retail investors believe and what the evidence actually supports.

Boyle is a professor and former hedge fund manager who approaches markets with a kind of dry, forensic skepticism that I find really compelling, especially when he's pulling apart a narrative that everyone has decided is true. I appreciate his video case studies most, as he is uniquely qualified to speak on the more complicated forces that influence financial decisions for large market actors. His humor and experience help bring his viewers along for the lesson, and in the end they come away with a good understanding of what is often an opaque topic.

In my own experience, one of the most interesting parts of this topic has been the expenditure habits of individuals up and down the wealth distribution. Gary Stevenson specifically does a great job at explaining how top earners' and wealth holders' spending, while accounting for a large portion of personal expenditure spending, is likely not to be the major driver of a country's economic success because they are able to adjust their consumption to a level they "want," while low and middle earners' and wealth holders' consumption largely scales to the size of their disposable income. It is my personal belief that this fact specifically is the key to reversing some of the worrying trends we've seen in modern macroeconomic indicators. An increase in lower and middle brackets' disposable incomes will lead to a larger and more predictable increase in aggregate consumer expenditure than if we target the top bracket. This increase in spending will have rippling effects throughout the economy and in aggregate health outcomes in places like unemployment and could potentially lead to decreased rates of crimes of poverty.

Obviously, the money has to come from somewhere, and there are many policies which target a number of sources of liquidity at different levels of aggression. The most obvious source policy makers have identified are taxes on the wealthiest individuals in the country. While the argument for such policy makes sense in the context of Stevenson's point that top earners will be able to adjust their consumption without adjusting their lifestyles, there are a number of reasons current policy suggestions may not work in their current forms (see France, Sweden, Germany, and India). To minimize shortcomings like low yields from taxation or capital flight, in tandem with these efforts policy makers should look to current United States large budget items for inefficiencies. For example, it is estimated that nearly $60 billion is wasted every year through improper payments throughout the Medicare and Medicaid sections. Also, Social Security faces many issues in the coming decade as it faces a shrinking worker-beneficiary ratio and trust insolvency worries even now. In sum, there are many flows contributing to this trend, and the answer to reversing it may need to combine a few of them.

I'm still forming a lot of these views, and one of the things I'm most excited about as I get further into the economics side of my degree is being able to engage with this literature more formally. The intersection of distributional economics, asset pricing, and policy transmission feels like one of the more important and under-explored areas in applied economics right now, and it's somewhere I'd like to do real work eventually.

Here are some of the places I go to for reporting on these topics.

1. Patrick Boyle — Patrick Boyle's YouTube — Great informative dry humor from a hedge fund manager turned professor
2. Gary Stevenson — Gary Stevenson's YouTube — Former Citi Bank trader turned wealth and income inequality political figure
3. Ben Felix — Ben Felix's YouTube — Very interesting quantitative analysis from a Canadian portfolio manager
4. Scott Galloway — Prof G Markets Podcast (with Ed Elson) — Good daily listen for market vitals
5. Ed Elson — Ed Elson's LinkedIn — My favorite young economist

I've been playing piano and guitar for many years, and have been using music production software for almost a decade now (back in the Live 9 days).