The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13,421 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 112 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gave: As Energy Prices Rise, Europe Will Go Bust
“As the energy price goes up, Europe will go bust.
The only question is at what price?”
Sethi: Social Capital marketed data capabilities ahead of actual execution
“I don't think we successfully did that, but I think we did successfully marketed it ahead of what we could do, but we did bring some of the brightest minds around the table.”
Sethi: VCs demand high ownership targets because they are bad pickers
“A lot of the reasons why people focus on ownership, it's a hard thing to say is that they're just bad pickers. So if you say I can focus on 20, I want 10, 15, 20% ownership in this company. It's because they believe that if they make failure somewhere else tha…”
Sethi: Startups like Terra and FTX could reach hundreds of billions
“These companies will probably at some point, if they continue to grow at the pace they're growing, could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Papic: Commodities offer the best downside portfolio protection in stagflation
“And ironically, I think the best downside risk protection is commodities, which is weird because commodities should be correlated to growth. So when growth suffers, commodities should suffer with them. That's not really a good hedge the way bonds were. But I t…”
Papic: China has peaked as a geopolitical power for the next decade
“So I think that China has peaked as a geopolitical power for the next decade.”
Papic: China will fail to transition away from export dependence
“I'm in a camp that says they're going to fail. They're not going to be able to do it, and they're going to remain as export dependent, if not more.”
Papic: China will run a current account deficit over the next decade
“Which means that over the next decade, China will also be in a current account deficit.”
Papic: The Ukraine war will cleave the Western alliance further, not unite NATO
“There's a view out there that this will help NATO unity. And I really don't think so, Ted. I think that this will actually cleave the Western alliance further.”
Papic: China's CCP legitimacy depends on living standards, not Taiwan
“The Chinese Communist Party can be a legitimate domestic political force without reunifying with Taiwan. We know that because they haven't, and they're legitimate. They continue to rule China. Whereas we don't know what would happen to the Chinese Communist Pa…”
Wolfe: Geopolitical Rivalry with China and Russia Eclipses Climate Change
“So I think that those two forces are really going to be probably the most important thing to me, more important than climate change, more important than a lot of the things that have captured the current zeitgeist.”
Wolfe: The Sahel and Maghreb Will Become Europe's Next Afghanistan
“I believe that that will be the next Afghanistan, particularly for Europe. I think that you will have Mali pulling France in. You will have Belgium being pulled in, you will have the UK and other EU countries adjacently being pulled in, the US being pulled in,…”
Hamed: Early-stage venture capitalists are effectively just merchant bankers
“The term that most people in venture capital wouldn't want me to use Is that we're sort of merchant bankers. We run around, we invest some of our own capital. And then our job is to tell the rest of the market that they should invest at a higher price. And so …”
Hamed predicts Instagram risks obsolescence due to poor creator monetization
“And we think Instagram is really at risk of going away because the creators on Instagram aren't making enough money to actually make good content.”
Grinda: Employer reference checks on startup founders are a negative signal
“We tried doing reference checks on founders and realized that they were a negative signal. Some of the very best founders were horrible employees. They would talk back to their bosses. They would work on their startup at their job. They had the worst reference…”
AngelList's high-volume seed indexing strategy functions like buying lottery tickets
“Portfolio construction is an underappreciated yet important art, but a lot of the new entrants just want to buy lottery tickets, and then you, everybody bows at the altar of power law, and you've got AngelList putting out reports saying the secret is to invest…”
Black: Buying wide-moat businesses cheaply is flawed today
“That whole notion, and we've talked about this before of buying wide moat businesses cheaply, I think is flawed today because everybody's trying to do the same thing.”
Trigg: Hiring a head of HR leads leaders to outsource vital duties
“When you hire someone to be the head of HR, what do you do? You start outsourcing, I think, very important duties as a leader. You know, if I suddenly need to let somebody go, I'm not going to go do that. Or if I do have a difficult conversation with somebody …”
Samani: Fundamental long-term crypto investors should reject mean reversion on principle
“I reject kind of the notion of mean reversion as a point of principle, given our mandate to be long-term fundamental investors.”
Samani: Long-term technical and social gravity trends toward one single chain
“Given both the explicit technical costs and then the softer, squishier social developer experience costs, I think gravity trends towards one chain.”
Jain: Ethereum 2.0 requires unsolved computer science; Solana only required engineering
“Whether we're talking about Ethereum, two point O near Polkadot, those are sharded blockchains and they require some meaningful Computer science breakthroughs to happen in order to actually function and deliver what they needed. Solana did not need that. Solan…”
Jain: Solana is high-speed broadband compared to Ethereum's dial-up infrastructure
“And now we have Solana, which is like broadband, To Ethereum's dial-up.”
Visser: Interest rates will remain lower forever, pressuring allocators
“My belief has always been that rates would be stuck at low levels. We're still at that space, and I continue to believe that they'll be not only lower for longer, but lower forever, and that's putting more pressure than ever on allocators”
Visser: Reading books is a waste of time compared to web surfing
“I no longer think books are a good use of time in any way, shape or form. They're a waste of time, but they have a content, but you're not going to consume as much content with a book as you will with surfing, 20 different web pages on the same topic where you…”
Visser: There will be no bond market in 30 years
“Well, for governments carrying the interest cost for years, I joked behind closed doors and occasionally on stage where it wasn't being videotaped that there'd be no bonds in 30 years. I still believe that.”
Sternlicht: Marriott lobbied Washington to outlaw Starwood's paired-share REIT structure
“Bill Marriott had been at this for
40 years, and I've been at it for three.
He decided that this enough is enough, and they're gonna get rid of our paired share structure.
So he went to Washington, and in the budget reconciliation bill of that year, they threw…”
Sternlicht: Amazon subsidizes $4B-$5B retail losses with AWS to destroy small retailers
“It's fundamentally destroying mom and dad retail across the country, and it's one of my pet peeves because they were allowed to sell product retail-wise for less than the cost of, they're losing four or five billion a year in retail, which they subsidize with …”
Sternlicht: Amazon Prime will hit $500 once competing retail is gone
“They charge us 75 dollars, and now I think it's a hundred. They'll go to 500 when there's nothing left but Amazon in this country.”
Whalen: Mega private equity funds act as misaligned coupon clippers
“The large, huge funds that are raising that are, we call them the coupon clippers that are raising, sure, I'm going to offend some people, but too much money, and it's misaligned”
Seides: Immediate push to back new diverse-owned funds is structurally misguided
“A lot of the response that I've seen from the people I talked to is we're going to go invest in a diverse manager, a diverse owned manager and my contention all along is that's incredibly misguided because the structure of the industry today was created based …”
Tian: Alibaba's asset-light business model is an "original sin."
“That's exactly the way that Alibaba did the business, and I actually, I think it's potentially an original sin. It's the way that eBay thought, and it didn't really work out that well for them versus, let's say, an Amazon.”
Martin: Tesla is worth only $40 to $50 per share on cash flows
“I think, wherever Tesla is now, 500 plus a share, 600. It's probably, in our brains, I'd pay 40 or 50 bucks a share, but as a multiple Of the cash flow.”
Elliott secured Caesars bankruptcy date agreement to trigger CDS payout
“And he had been running very tough negotiation with Apollo and struck a very, very tough deal because he knew that Apollo needed an ally really badly. And so he got all sorts of goodies, including a convertible preferred security, as well as one of these well-…”
Jensen: Very high chance humanity fails at superhuman AI development
“We only get one chance to develop an intelligence greater than us, and if you do it wrong, it's the end of things, and there's a very, very good chance we're going to do it wrong, just judging by how rarely we as a species get things right the first time.”
Bonafede: Only reinforcement learning can dynamically moderate portfolio risk
“As it learns to maximize the reward, the model, I don't mean to give it human characteristics, but it will moderate risk because it can see that taking full advantage of the underlying patterns may not lead to the best reward, and there's No other optimization…”
Ford: San Francisco lost 100,000 residents due to progressive policies
“I'll probably get in trouble for this, but San Francisco has moved so far to the progressive end. They've lost a 100,000 residents out of 900,000 people.”
Ford: China is an ambitious strategic competitor, not an enemy
“I'm pro-China. I'm open about it in the sense that I admire what they've accomplished in the last 34 years. I admire where they're going as a country. They are ambitious, just like the United States is ambitious, and they are a very strong strategic competitor…”
Grantham: African migration to Europe will be society's primary political risk
“So I think it will be stress on those areas, and immigration, and the pressure on Europe of millions of Africans attempting to migrate will be the main political risk that we face, and a real threat to the well-being of society.”
Grantham: Diversified venture capital has stock-market-level risk with higher returns
“Venture capital, not surprisingly, has a higher return than the stock market because of the riskiness of each individual unit. But if you have a diversified portfolio, you have no more risk than the stock market, but you have a higher return.”
Grantham: Investors should own as few U.S. equities as possible
“I do recommend owning as few US equities as you can face.”
Grantham: Moderate inflation supports faster growth and better worker treatment
“A moderate amount of inflation is completely compatible with a healthy economy, faster growth rates, and better treatment of the workers who have been sadly neglected in the US in particular.”
Monk: Public pensions contrive asset allocations to hit aggressive return targets
“In the case of public pension funds, yes, like you'll have actuaries come along and do a pretty rigorous Examination of the liabilities. They'll tell you what your asset allocation strategy would be, but then it gets complicated because the assumptions underpi…”
Monk: Allocators hide data fearing stakeholders will block high-fee strategies
“I think there's a lot of investment professionals at these organizations that believe that if they reported it to the stakeholders wouldn't let them pursue the strategy that they believe in their heart of hearts is needed to meet the obligation of the plan. So…”
Ariely: Token female leadership appointments make female employees feel worse
“We found that some companies, when they assign women to high positions, The women within these companies feel worse. Why? Because they take it as an indication that the company doesn't really care about them, that they're only doing things to appeal to PR, lik…”
Garcia: Bitcoin will drop to its underlying tech value without government backing
“If governments are not going to embrace it honestly, it should go down to just the technology value of it.”
Seides: SPAC Sponsor Equity Offers Best Risk-Reward Since Subprime Short
“The sponsor equity in a SPAC is the best risk reward available in the markets anywhere that I've seen since the subprime short.”
Paul: 10% Chance Bitcoin Suffers Disabling Attack By 2026
“I put it at maybe 10% over the next five years that there is a successful attack on Bitcoin that effectively renders the network temporarily unusable, but unusable in a way where we don't know when the next attack will be.”
Long-horizon retail retirement savers need private equity the most
“Let's think about a target retirement fund, 50 year horizon, multi-asset class, single nav, rebalanced with return premiums that could be somewhere two to 400 basis points over public markets. I would argue that those investors are the investors who need priva…”