DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog
Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.
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Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #43 today
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Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 1 daily snapshot so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly. It is free for DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog to post, embed or send to readers, as long as the watermark stays on it.
- Percentile
- Top 9%
- Best rank seen
- #43
- Posts
- 12
- Reactions per post
- 42
- Reactions tracked
- 502
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 10, 2026
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 12 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, Emeritus — 75 reactions on Sep 7, 2026.
Recent posts
- CROSSPOST: JOHN QUIGGIN: US Navy Defeated Again
As I read this, the story of navies these days—Ukraine-Russia, Houthis-Yemen, Iran-USN—is a clean case study in how a cost-exchange asymmetry (cheap offense vs. expensive defense) can render a weapons system obsolete — a technological-transition dynamic that shapes military and fiscal history, as what was seen as “strength” is actually useless because it is too precious to ever be put at risk in the field: John Quiggin is not a naval expert. I am not a naval expert. But the real naval experts seem to be far too constrained by all kinds of factors and so they do not say the things that are…
- Interest Rate-Hike Expectations: CHART OF THE DAY
Forecasters extrapolate the status quo → but reality delivers wars, plagues, tech disruptions, fiscal breakdowns → this simple extrapolation breaks → the occasional “correct” forecast is survivorship-lucky, not prescient. The frame is screenwriter William Goldman by way of markets — “nobody knows anything”: Barry Ritholtz sends us to: Share And he comments: Barry Ritholtz : Nobody Knows Anything, Rate Expectations Edition < https://ritholtz.com/2026/09/nobody-knows-anything-rate-expectations-edition/ >: ‘It’s from the San Francisco Federal Reserve (via Torsten Slok of Apollo) and shows Wall…
- J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, Emeritus
“Retirement” & the great life simplification from simply dropping bureaucratic-administrative tasks—plus, on another dimension, stochastic-parrot AI-autocomplete—all promise great life improvement. But there is a danger: the sea-squirt problem… UC Berkeley has one of the last surviving defined benefit pension plans in existence. That means it makes no financial or lifestyel sense for me not to “retire” today. In fact, it made no financial sense for me not to retire a year ago. And two years ago, it was in the balance. So perhaps this move is two years late. For now: My net income goes up. My…
- CROSSPOST: RILEY CEDER & J.D. SIMKINS: Navy Not Returning to Damaged Bahrain Base ‘Anytime Soon,’ Top Officer Says
A fixed, forward, insufficiently defended logistics hub is a single point of failure; its loss propagates faster than any combat loss of ships. Distance is a hidden tax on military operations—doubling to thousands of miles broke just-in-time resupply cadence. And the Navy had no institutional plan for prolonged loss of its primary regional base—resilience was assumed, not engineered: Iranian missiles and drones gutted Naval Support Activity Bahrain on Feb. 28, 2026. Share What the Pentagon first downplayed as operationally insignificant is now revealed as a strategic logistics failure with…
- Elon Musk & His DOGE & DogeCoin Adventure: CHART OF THE DAY
A pump-and-dump dressed up as a fake cabinet post?: Elon Musk’s DOGE took money Congress had lawfully appropriated to fight disease and grow the world economy, and simply nixed it. The crypto coin that Musk was then not so quietly promoting made a round-trip: the DogeCoin chart runs $0.09 to $0.40 and back to $0.09. But the 800,000 or so who would be alive today without DOGE’s illegal and unconstitutional chaos-monkey wrecking ball did not come back: A reminder about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency: It took money and resources that the elected representatives of the people of…
- (NOT A) CROSSPOST: HALINA BENNET: The Return of Institutional Purpose [to Academia]
When the written product no longer proves the learning process: the end of the essay-, the problem-set-, the take-home-exam-as-proxy. This is really an opportunity, or a challengatunity for all education. This is truly an opportunity to excel, in different ways for different institutions with different functions. So go read Halina Bennet on this, and then go read the MIT Report < https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/ >: Back in the day, when I was a Harvard junior, Harvard Economics hired a brand-new assistant professor named Mark Watson fresh from UCSD to teach time series econometrics at…
- In Memory of Jeffrey Williamson: SATURDAY “SLOUCHING” & FRIENDS
Forty-three years a teacher, a role model who treated every economy as a system worth understanding whole, and a friend to me, always insisting you check all the boxes—and then go away, think harder, and circle back. My old friend Jeffrey Williamson—teacher, chair of my dissertation committee, role model, someone who woke up every morning eager to learn, eager to think, and eager to teach. I had known him for 43 years. Share May his memory be a blessing. Give a gift subscription Thinking back, I find myself once again grappling with the fact that my relationship with him was predominantly…
- Looking Askance Yet Again at MuskWorld: WEIRDNESS OF THE DAY
The early money paid $75 billion for a stake now marked at $1.57 trillion: 20x. But the cash flows to justify that do not exist. They are not on any horizon. So why? This is just plain weird. This is not NVIDIA, or TSMC, or Samsung, or ASML, or Apple, or any of the hyperscalers wth real cash flows: So far $150 billion has been paid in to MuskWorld over the years,. Half of that was in the recent SpaceXAIGrokTwitter IPO. Earlier investments and this latest tranche has bought a roughly 55% share of the $3 trillion current market capitalization of MuskWorld. So call it: Musk, $1 trillion…
- ThothBot Makes an Appearance in My RA-Group Telegram Chat: FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
I asked a local instantiation of google/gemma4:31b-mlx to introduce itself to my new research assistants and point at its own workspace. What came back was a meditation on Plato, salamander brains, and why you should treat it like an eccentric roommate… So I set three new research assistants to work as part of the CDSS Data Discovery Initiative today. I decided we would communicate once a week in person—8 AM every Monday over coffee—plus via a Telegram channel. And once I have a Telegram group channel—well, then, why not add this to the mix? Share 100% AI-generated text: Brad DeLong tells me…
- CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: Imperialist Delusions & the Price of Fuel
Paul Krugman’s Substack has become essential reading, and this piece exemplifies why: a clean takedown of the Trump-Bessent claim that Ukraine and “the conflict Iran” bear responsibility for high fuel prices today: PAUL KRUGMAN IS UNCHAINED!! Share (And Robin Wells is no slacker at data analysis, data sniffing-out, and idea-finding either: Paul Krugman : A Pause to Refresh < https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-pause-to-refresh >: ‘ Substack has become… a full-time job for two people, because Robin Wells… is deeply involved in researching and editing. That’s fine…. T he newsletter has become…
- Retraining Workers for “AI”: CHART OF THE DAY
No typing-pool annihilation this time, at least not so far, and probably never. AI isn’t killing occupations, but watch out for the elasticity of demand!: Again, another one from Torsten Slok, who is on a roll these days: Share With comment: Torsten Slok : AI Is Retraining Workers, Not Replacing Them < https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/ai-is-retraining-workers-not-replacing-them >: ‘ A new survey from the New York Fed… shows that 34% of service firms and 22% of manufacturers using AI are retraining staff, while only 4% and 0% report layoffs. This is consistent…
- READING: LEWIS CARROLL (1895): What The Tortoise Said To Achilles
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Sep 10, 2026.