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Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🏦 Bond vigilantes hit Western Europe: French OATs to 5.5-6%, UK gilts to 6% E294 · 2026-10-23 ▶ 53:52

France today is operating its national government spending deficit is 5.4% of GDP. The US is actually 6.2% of GDP. France is, I think, probably the first to go, because they're only growing their economy at half a percent while the US is growing at 2.3%.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 🏦 Bond vigilantes hit Western Europe: French OATs to 5.5-6%, UK gilts to 6% E294 · 2026-10-23 ▶ 47:17

I think what's happening now is that France is going to be in an incredibly difficult economic position. We've already talked about this before, that France is this critical country that's going to set the tone for the rest of continental Europe in terms of how it finances its long-term debts. It's already proposed 50 billion euros of austerity. That's going to have to go up.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 🏦 Bond vigilantes hit Western Europe: French OATs to 5.5-6%, UK gilts to 6% E292 · 2026-10-10 ▶ 1:16:50

if France has to implement severe austerity, and they bring 10-year French bonds into five and a half, six percent range, UK gilts are going to be at six percent. And unfortunately, US rates could be just as high. It all goes together.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E234 · 2025-07-04 ▶ 44:32

And that's why I'm so convinced that there's a rise in socialism in this country because in this sort of an inflationary environment, like we're seeing so far this year, you don't see it in the dollar inflation numbers. You see it in the dollar currency numbers. You're going to say, man, I need an alternative.

Chamath support ×1 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E234 · 2025-07-04 ▶ 32:11

And I think when everybody realizes that the alternative is essentially some insane form of socialism and redistribution, I think the alliance will hold and that they'll find some common ground.

Chamath oppose ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E233 · 2025-06-28 ▶ 56:10

I think the three of you guys are a little exaggerated, to be quite honest. I mean, all the rhetoric sounds very clever, but I don't think it's accurate. I think the way that I see it is more nuanced than this.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E233 · 2025-06-28 ▶ 48:13

they don't see that socialism always fails wherever it's tried. San Francisco went through this. I mean, it was a doom spiral. Now, I think we've turned the corner. LA is in the midst of going through it, and a large portion of LA just burned down because there's no water in the fire hydrants. Basically, all the public services have been looted. And New York is about to learn this for themselves.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E233 · 2025-06-28 ▶ 42:02

For me, it feels like actually a little bit of a beginning of a wave that's going to continue to sweep over this country starting in cities. And I think that we're at the very early stages. I think we'll look back and I jokingly say that Kamala Harris is going to look like a conservative candidate pretty soon.

Friedberg support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E222 · 2025-04-05 ▶ 1:34:11

And that's why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in socialist policy and the response to some of the actions the administration might take. But we'll see how it goes out.

Chamath support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E218 · 2025-03-08 ▶ 1:18:01

The individual governments of Europe are vibrant and powerful. The European Union itself was created almost without any real teeth. And so what happened is the folks there started to pass inordinate numbers of laws. And that has made it really complicated to be a European company, a European citizen. And that has to get sorted out.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E215 · 2025-02-15 ▶ 33:23

You know, GDP per capita in the EU, $60,000 a year, GDP per capita in the United States, like $82,000, but GDP per capita in India is $2,500 and China's $12,600. There's a greater incentive in those countries to manifest upside than there is for the United States and the EU who are more worried about manifesting downside. ... And the countries that are more techno-pessimistic are unfortunately going to find themselves asking for greater government control, government intervention in markets, government's creating jobs, government making payments to people, government's effectively running the economy.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E204 · 2024-11-16 ▶ 36:11

I think that we've talked about on previous pods that perhaps there was not as targeted and surgical an approach was used. And as a result of that, it did have a chilling effect on M&A. And so it hurt the small tech environment. And so I think that we need to fix that part of it.

Chamath oppose ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E204 · 2024-11-16 ▶ 24:19

Then on the M&A side, if all you're doing is waiting for Lina Khan to not be there, to me, I think that that betrays what M&A is supposed to be, which is you're supposed to underwrite some industrial logic from first principles where things are very accretive and very accretive things should not hang by a thread on the emotional regulation or dysregulation of the FTC Commission.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E204 · 2024-11-16 ▶ 21:39

So the backroom buzz is that Donnie from Queens is going to make M&A great again. Couple of reasons there, Sacks, the wrath of Lena Cohn's coming to an end, Mag-7 sitting on massive amounts of cash, and that cash is growing as people have laid people off and they're focused on getting fit.

Friedberg reversal ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E203 · 2024-11-08 ▶ 1:34:40

My big prediction over the next few years is you will see a more centrist Democratic Party as they try and re-incorporate.

Chamath support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E203 · 2024-11-08 ▶ 27:26

They're not going to attack. If you think that the intelligentsia, quote unquote, the Bill Gates, Reid Hoffmans of the world that funds, Dustin Moskovitz that funds the Democratic apparatus at the highest level, if they can't change, what are the odds that the state infrastructure or the local infrastructure changes?

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E194 · 2024-08-30 ▶ 35:18

I agree that her approach has been overly broad, and has had a chilling effect on M&A.

Reid Hoffman support ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E194 · 2024-08-30 ▶ 32:40

her theory is you got to prevent the aggregation of powers, you got to fight every acquisition of note. And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E194 · 2024-08-30 ▶ 31:07

I don't know what happened to the single and double M&A market, but it seems to be completely gone. Everything from Adobe and Figma to other mergers that could be happening are essentially frozen.

Friedberg support ×3 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E193 · 2024-08-23 ▶ 1:17:41

And I was looking at the total GDP of the United States is $25 trillion. The federal budget for next year is proposed to be $7.2 trillion. And state and local budgets combined is about $4 trillion. So if you look at government spending, it's about half of GDP now

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E193 · 2024-08-23 ▶ 1:04:28

I think that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie sanders are now the thought leaders and really the beating heart of the Democrat Party. I think what's happened is the Republican Party has moved to right-wing populism, and the Democrats in response to that have concluded that they need to basically move to left-wing populism in order to compete with that. So both parties are becoming fairly populist. Now, what does left-wing populism mean? It basically means soak the rich, right?

Friedberg support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E189 · 2024-07-26 ▶ 9:59

Google wants to accelerate beyond AWS. They want to become the leader and they're going to look for other sizable transactions that will pass antitrust muster.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E189 · 2024-07-26 ▶ 7:49

On Wiz, I think the most likely explanation is that they just want to keep building this as a standalone company. I think they're probably also worried that they can't get the deal through.

Sacks support ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A E188 · 2024-07-19 ▶ 1:09:53

I don't think that she should stop some of these, what I would call R&D acquisitions, from taking place where there's no accretion of market share, but rather starts being bought because they contribute a useful piece of technology. I don't think you want to shut down that part of the market. Lord knows we don't have enough exits as it is

Chamath oppose ×2 ▼ on 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies E187 · 2024-07-12 ▶ 1:01:58

I do think Friedberg is touching on something, but I think the explanation doesn't have to be this idea that people are embracing socialism.