Explore the Music

Explore the Music

Hi there. Thanks for stopping by. Here are a few pointers to help you get started:

  • Explore music I’ve recorded or collaborated on since this blog’s inception.
  • Read articles and various musings on economics, audio production & social theory.
  • Or, just scroll through the posts below in chronological order.
The Veneer of Affluence

The Veneer of Affluence

The consumer credit crisis has created a lag in recession signals by temporarily inflating credit scores and spending power, masking underlying financial distress. Similar dynamics preceded the 2008 financial crisis, where easy credit defaults led to a sudden collapse of the bull market.

New Order of the Ages

New Order of the Ages

“Trees don’t grow to the sky,” they say. But there are substantial reasons to question whether the “new market” is like the old market, and redress its underlying mechanisms.

Democratization & DeFi

Democratization & DeFi

Will the underlying technologies of DeFi live up to the fervor and marketing hype, or will the technology inevitably be cast aside, a hollow shell of its ethos, living on in name only as its “brand power” is strategically co-opted by dominant interests?

The Story of Target Date Funds

The Story of Target Date Funds

The Target Date Fund, now a staple of 401(k) plans, has a surprisingly colorful origin—emerging from academic theory, shaped by pension consulting, and even brushing up against Star Wars and Kubrick. Behind its quiet ubiquity lies a story of mathematical elegance, financial innovation, and unexpected creativity.

Greater Fools

Greater Fools

The greater fool is an economic term. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool — someone who will buy high and sell low.

Price Illusions

Price Illusions

While passive investing offers cost efficiency and broad exposure, its growing dominance may cause illusory distortions in prices and leave markets more vulnerable to abrupt dislocations when the tide turns.

Tactical Sector Investing

Tactical Sector Investing

A sector investing strategy is like a well-designed oil tanker navigating volatile seas. Just as an oil tanker is built with separate compartments to keep liquid cargo from shifting and destabilizing the vessel, a portfolio made up of sector ETFs can isolate risk and limit damage from downturns in any one part of the economy.

The Squiers of Foots Creek

The Squiers of Foots Creek

As young boys growing up in rural America, Michael Rawlins and Jacob Williams spent much of their time playing in the woods, swimming in creeks and discovering the wonders of nature around them.  The forest that bordered their family farms seemed an endless expanse of wilderness frontier… 

The Great Hollowing?

The Great Hollowing?

In the elegant machinery of economics, supply and demand form a perfect circle—each feeding the other in a self-sustaining loop, like the smooth symmetry of a donut. In the new world of AI, the donut isn’t just missing its center—it’s crumbling from the inside out.

The Second Life of James Lyons

The Second Life of James Lyons

It happened in a bookstore café in Midtown—of all places. James had wandered in while visiting a friend. He was sipping black coffee and thumbing through a used copy of Leaves of Grass when a voice rang out: “Lyons? Is that really you?”

Cogs?

Cogs?

We are social animals. Our sense of self-worth is deeply tied to how we’re valued by society. While fear of economic insecurity is certainly real in modern society, most of us have a deeper anxiety of becoming irrelevant, of having nothing meaningful to offer in return for recognition or belonging. Despite what we think makes for a successful career, what we really crave is fairness and social validation; it’s a primal need to feel useful to the collective.

Bancor

Bancor

Bancor was a supranational currency proposed in 1944 to facilitate international trade by balancing global liquidity and preventing chronic trade deficits and surpluses through an International Clearing Union.

Finfluence

Finfluence

Social media influencers have not only altered the way financial information is consumed, but the markets themselves.