Dan Cohen

Here's a link to the episode and a screenshot of my reaction while listening to it: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...

So you do what you have to do. If we had a cry is like that, you would 13:02 have to sort out the banking system. Now you can want to bring them up and trial and kill them. You do whatever you want to do it. But at the end of the day, governments don't lend money to people, and central banks don't lend money to people. The transmission for economic policy and for monetary policy and getting money out into the public is the banking system. And if the banks are distressed, if you gave them money, they husband that money to increase their reserves so they could 13:35 be solvent. And in fact they have to do that, the regulation requires that they do that. And so it's very very hard to get money and resources and get people going and provide that stimulus to the general public with a distressed banking system

You bought something from him, he bought it from me, and that goes around in a credit where you don't know the sovereignty of your counterpart. You're not going to pay me until I pay you, so you're waiting. But I can't pay him unless I get my money from you. So I'm stuck and he's stuck, and he's stuck and he's stuck. So the system is frozen. You need somebody with a big back sheet, and it's usually a government to say we will for this short term cover it, so all of you will get paid. Now go in.

I've never as clear an insider description of the infrastructural power of finance as this Odd Lots episode with Lloyd Blankfein.

He channels @benbraun.bsky.social and @danielagabor.bsky.social in saying the state needs finance to transmit policy so are over the barrelhead to support it in crises.

Did you take them on a really long hike to tire them out?

The Infrastructural Geography of the US/Israel War on Iran…

…From data centres to logistical bottlenecks, supply chains to real estate markets, shipping to petroleum networks

globalcorridor.substack.com/p/global-cor...

‘It means missile defence on data centres’: drone strikes raises doubts over Gulf as AI superpower Iran’s targeting of commercial datacentres in the UAE and Bahrain signals a new frontier in asymmetric warfare

As data and compute power become spatially fixed as expensive and integral infrastructure, it won't be surprising when the dynamics of violently securing its logistics emerge in ways geographers have documented in sectors like fossil fuel extraction and shipping.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The Section 8 (F)influencer economy The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV, colloquially known as “Section 8” vouchers) program is one of the largest affordable housing programs in the United S…

I have a new open access article in Geoforum, looking at how abrasive online “finfluencers” promise riches through buying cheap properties to rent to Housing Choice Voucher (“Section 8”) holders, using outdated spatial arbitrage strategies and AI automation: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very low on the list of concerns, but why are data centers so ugly? You are spending untold billions on these things, spend a bit more and at least make them vainglorious monuments to our tech oligarchy rather than drab rectangles. We used to be a society - do our elites have no pride!?!

I once completely faked out an active NBA player on the fast break during a charity basketball tournament.

“Right to the Discipline” grants - Antipode Online Call for Proposals, November 2025 Last year we received 169 strong applications with a success rate of 5.9%. We anticipate funding a similar number of 10-12 grants in the next application year. Antipo...

Call for applications -- Antipode Foundation "Right to the Discipline" grants -- due date 10 April 2026 -- funding available for imaginative, daring, and unruly scholarship and praxis, including scholar-activism, workshops, and much more antipodeonline.org/a-right-to-t...

Text excerpt from NYT article linked in second skeet saying: “Most of the profits are flowing to the very affluent Americans, who are not subject to this cost-of-living crisis anyway because they’re so rich. They’re getting richer, and everyone else is dealing with inflation,” said Gregor Semieniuk, associate professor of University of Massachusetts Amherst who led the study. The United Kingdom responded to fossil fuel companies’ bumper year by adding a windfall tax designed to capture some of the excess profits and use the money to ease the burden on households facing higher bills. Semieniuk’s team calculated what would have happened if the U.S. government redistributed the portion of the fossil fuel industry’s 2022 profits that exceeded its 2021 returns. They found that the move would send $1,715 to every American household, which, they argued, could have helped ease the burden of inflation on lower-income households.

Text excerpt from the FT article in the second skeet saying: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/43fe2f44-d3ea-45c9-a641-e6f0e68949af?accessToken=zwAAAZy4l4RPkc9D_i9E0-pFydOmQebw5olJrw.MEUCIH4nsXTramXEOh6tWM6n9rrMqI0FnMfHQsz7tU0HufXAAiEAx8x5MmOYujURIqdhdxGDYHysYSEB2eVuSpM9n1iDuhA&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise&shareId=a96149bb-d68a-4bc5-b023-2174a60fd9c5 Research on the oil and gas crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that the gains of the boon on energy producers were not equally shared. The wealthiest 1 per cent of the US population eventually received more than 50 per cent of energy companies’ windfall from that particular surge in prices, according to a paper published in September 2025. “If anything [the US has] become a more powerful exporter and producer of fossil fuels since 2022. And of course, their oil majors are active globally. So I think [US shareholders] are poised to take advantage even more [now],” said Gregor Semieniuk, a professor at the University of Massachusetts who was one of the authors of the research. “Wealth distributions don’t change overnight.”

Who stands to profit as energy prices are rising due to the escalating war in the Middle East? NYT and FT quoting our research on the 2022 energy crisis! Spoiler: in the West it's mainly affluent shareholders.
High time to dust off the discussions on excess profit taxes & strategic price controls.

Hi friends - I'm working on article about efforts to measure, track, and adjust WORKLOAD in higher ed, both for staff and faculty.

I'm interested in talking to people who have experiences w/:
-Workload management gone wrong
-Exemplars of workload measurement
-True tales of workload being adjusted

Can a PM cross the floor to join another party? Because Carney might as well just merge the Conservatives and the Liberals at this point.

These are “low enrollment” majors but the classes are regularly at capacity. They changed the funding structure a few years ago here, switching the allocation from course enrollments to majors then blamed these departments for a structural, top-down change. This is entirely a political choice.

A hell of a graphic from the Economic Policy Institute

How many times per month is this going to happen?

Great event on March 3: How powerful corporations — including Amazon, Instacart, and major landlords — are using pricing algorithms to inflate prices and undermine competition. With Doha Mekki, Katie Wells, Ted Tatos, and moderator Geoffrey Fowler. Register here: ilsr.org/article/inde...

Private credit stocks slide after Blue Owl halts redemptions at fund Investment group’s decision sends shivers through industry

the democratisation of private markets is going just great www.ft.com/content/cdca...

A jar of change on a desk with a computer keyboard and financial documents. Text on a teal background reads: Ontario students need more grants, not more loans, to make university more affordable. Ontario universities need stable, long-term government funding. These are the keys to a thriving postsecondary sector.

At a minimum, cuts to OSAP grants will have paid for 43% of announced university funding increases—and possibly more. These changes exacerbate the affordability crisis and risk putting a university education out of reach for many students. tinyurl.com/yjccsa9r

The Quintessential Epstein Files Email - The American Prospect Jeffrey Epstein and his friends standing up for Mary Jo White against Elizabeth Warren tells you everything about the class war at the heart of the files.

Guys I found the best Epstein Files email. The one that illuminates an elite class that's cocooned themselves into an unaccountable shell of wealth and privilege, fighting to protect their secrets and offenses.
I could write a novel about this email.
prospect.org/2026/02/17/e...

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering

The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

Opinion | How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails

“That people move from representing the presidency to representing banks is so normal that we forget the costs: the private job done with the savvy to outfox one’s former public-sector colleagues, the public job done gently to keep open doors” @anandwrites.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/o...

Between the announced provincial cuts to student aid and the apparent reduction in federal aid back to pre-covid levels (which the feds claim they are still undecided on but come on), low-income Ontarians are looking at an aid cut (or net tuition increase if you prefer) of about $2500 next year.

Thread worth checking out on how the Government of Ontario has paired their long-needed increase in funding for higher ed with a corresponding decrease in student aid grants.

We forestall the burgeoning crisis and decline in higher ed quality on the backs of equitable, accessible education.

I'm particularly impressed that when Ford reduced/froze tuition fees, he decided that the policy corollary was "let's cut student aid"

Now that tuition fees are going up again, the policy corollary is "let's cut student aid!"

Nothing if not consistent.

Wonderful interview with Harvey. Starts off with a great reflection on the importance of geography on Marxist political economy and (close to my heart) touches on the importance of studying finance to understand capitalism and the role of the Fed / central banks in addressing its contradictions.

With this and the Oren Cass financialization piece in the NYT, I'm beginning to think the chattering capitalist class is trying to undercut political economists by stealing all our takes to troll us: "What if we admit they are right and just change absolutely nothing?"

You know things are bad when the WSJ puts it this plainly:

"The rewards are going toward capital instead of labor. Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more. The result: Capital is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains."

The more I think about this problem, the more it seems like one of those fundamental Marxist contradictions — and it’s going to generalise. Coding is just the canary in the coalmine.

Opinion | How the Capitalists Broke Capitalism

Absolute anti-financialization screed by Oren Cass in NYTs (paywall). I wish populists would start to take these arguments (which many of us in the academy have been making for years if not decades) more seriously. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/o...

Market be like