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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What they write about
An economist's weblog mixing economic history with current commentary. Recurring features include a chart of the day and crossposts of other writers, alongside essays on fiscal and monetary expectations, technology valuations, defence and naval affairs, and the state of universities.
- economics
- economic history
- monetary policy
- technology
- academia
- charts
Recent examples: The Ten-Year Treasury Bond: CHART OF THE DAY · CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: The Beclowning of Scott Bessent
Written from DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
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Read from 2 post headlines in the last 30 days. A newsletter that names a company only in the body of a post will not appear here, and a mention is not a recommendation — it only means the symbol came up.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
48K on Sep 10, 2026 → 48K on Sep 30, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #44 today · #43 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 9%
- Best rank seen
- #42
- Rank, 7 days
- −1 place
- Followers added
- +1.1K
- Posts
- 42
- Reactions per post
- 36
- Reactions tracked
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- Tickers covered
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of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 25, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 42 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: CROSSPOST: JOHN QUIGGIN: US Navy Defeated Again — 78 reactions on Sep 8, 2026.
Recent posts
- The Ten-Year Treasury Bond: CHART OF THE DAY
Everyone wants to blame the Iran War for 5% yields. But the inflation-breakeven line on my chart that should have jumped if they were right never moved — and that changes the diagnosis. I think we are driven back on (a) the “AI” investment book, and (b) a pronounced expectations-based tail-chasing non-linearity in transformation of the safe-asset shortage into a safe-asset glut: Why have ten-year US Treasury interest rates jumped to 5.25%? The lazy answer blames the Iran War and the resulting inflation surge. I suspect otherwise. We have the extraordinary “AI”-driven investment boom. We have…
- CROSSPOST: PAUL KRUGMAN: The Beclowning of Scott Bessent
A Treasury Secretary who controls neither the budget deficit nor the money supply nor international capital flows is never the “House"“ in financial markets, and anyone who claims to be such is, as Paul Krugman says, beclowning himself: Paul Krugman sees that Scott Bessent—whom we all remember claimed with confidence and authority in the fall of 2024 that Donald Trump was really a free trader, and that his talk of tariffs was “escalating to deëscalate”—as having has destroyed his reputation by becoming a Trump lickspittle. Thus he is another example of the iron law that anyone who serves…
- Did a Fat, Laughing Barbarian General Divert the Industrial Revolution Away from China a Thousand Years After His Death?
In 756 the richest, most advanced polity on Earth nearly dissolved at the hands of one of its own frontier generals. Having survived, its rulers spent the next thousand years making sure no general could ever try again — and may have surrendered the Industrial Revolution in the bargain. Do I let this, one of the hundred things worth thinking about in the firehose-flood of my feed this morning, take over my brain and attention for a while? And what would be the best durable product if I do let this command my attention for a while? There is an enormous absolute wealth of plausible historical…
- CROSSPOST: SINEAD O’SULLIVAN: SpaceX Pivots Away from Space
Broadband telecom is not an easy business to earn a high return in. SpaceX’s revenue is now 55% StarLink—broadband telecom—and 33% “AI”—which means renting out Colossus datacenters to Anthropic—and only 12%, you know, space launches: Sinead O’Sullivan tells us that “Morningstar, the loneliest bear in the world, puts [the] fair value [of SpaceX] at $780B, of which about… [$60B] launch…[$550B] Starlink”, and $170B xAI. $1.75T of market capitalization on a 2025 revenue of $20B—$$11B StarLink, $6.5B renting Colossus to Anthropic, and $3.5B launches—and a net loss of $5B. Share Thus: “The real…
- Yes. We Loathe Trump. We Really Loathe Trump. For Very Good Reasons. And We Are Many: CHART OF THE DAY
Nate Silver calls it his most underrated chart, and he well be right. Trump’s approval is a wall of people who don’t feel it strongly. The disapproval is hot and fierce: From Nate Silver: Nate Silver : < https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/2102884250400014633 >: ‘ feel like this has been one of our more underrated charts. If you throw out voters who *weakly* approve or disapprove of Trump's performance and only look at *strong* approval/disapproval, his net approval rating is -29, even worse than his overall -22: In other words, even though Trump's approval rating isn't good (now 37.6%)…
- Sana’a Café: Dwight & Telegraph: FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
Annals of Technologies of Cognitive Alertness: Qahveh Khaneh Comes to Telegraph Avenue: How Coffee’s 600-Year-Old Birthplace Has Filled a Peet’s-Shaped Hole: There is a Peet’s-shaped hole in my memory of the corner of Dwight & Telegraph, Peet’s! The ur-roaster. The place from which the founders of Starbucks learned their trade in the early 1970s. The fountainhead of the entire American specialty-coffee revolution that the—alas! now-late but then-assistant economics professor Suzanne Scotchmer introduced me to, back when I was a undergraduate junior in 1980-1981 at George Howell’s Coffee…
- Gerard Baker: BULLSHIT ARTIST OF THE DAY
My interpretation of what is going on here: Gerard Baker saying “I am anti-Trump too!”, in the hope of shifting to firmer ground on which he can argue that he and his friends should get to keep all their ill-gotten gains from the Trump tax cuts. After all, aren’t the only things that matter (a) that, (b) making liberals sad and (c ) keeping non-”white” non-male non-elderly people in their place?: So how come Google Maps now calls the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario the Gulf of and Lake America, but does not yet show New Mexico relabled as “New America” anyway? Share Trump calling for the…
- Real Price of Diesel: CHART OF THE DAY
But two observations: (1) the spike is not that big, and (2) from an “affordability” perspective, this is the last thing one would want to generate from one’s foreign policy: A real price series that I have been watching: And we have a related observation from Matt Yglesias: Matt Yglesias : The Republican Urge to Start Wars in the Middle East < https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-republican-urge-to-start-wars >: ‘Despite Trump’s anti-war rhetoric on the campaign trail, the national security team he announced shortly after the election was “an extremely hawkish group that screams ‘hot war with…
- CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Machine God Metaphors Eat Your Brain
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land may now be the two most influential intellectuals in America's AI debate—and that tells you how badly the conversation has gone wrong. When "machine god: good or evil?" is the only question on the table, every question actually worth asking gets thrown away. Contra Scott Aaronson, accepting the coming machine god is not now "the epistemic bare minimum" any more than is accepting Friedrich Engels’s belief 150 years ago that the SteamPower Economy was the real singularity that would in short order deliver a classless utopia of universal abundance: I disagree with…
- FaceBook’s Muse on the Apple iOS App Store: CHART OF THE DAY
My experiences with FaceBook products have always been that time spent getting up to speed on them is time wasted, and that time spent using them is time regretted. But if that is representative of anything, then there are hundreds of millions of addicted regretful regular users whose brains have been successfully hacked and hijacked and who then buy things based off of FaceBook/Instagram/WhatsApp ads. The market verdict is one of extraordinary success, with ads but only with ads: All this is prelude to noting the sudden emergence of FaceBook Muse: an agentic AI system that has underlying…
- READING: BARRY RITHOLTZ: How I Build My Reading Lists
Barry Ritholtz has a personal solution to this problem of the firehose of worthwhile and important “content” that floods in not every day, but every hour. But his solution to the problem increases the burden imposed by the additional force he adds to an already overwhelmingly strong jet. Don’t get me wrong: I do not wish he would stop. I value it. Greatly. But it is a problem: 90% of everything is crap. So how do you find the other 10%? And how do you process it when even what is freshest and newest in that other 10% is 50x what you could possibly read? Share Barry Ritholtz has good advice on…
- CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: Questions for the [Fed] Chair [Kevin Warsh]
Claudia Sahm is in the business of trying to coax Fed Chair Kevin Warsh to behave better, that is to say: more like a Fed Chair and less like a Trump Lickspittle. Such pressure is useful, but I think we have to be clear-eyed about what is going on. What is going on is that Warsh has told different things to Trump and to the bond market, and so his principal concern now is to minimize the attack surfaces he leaves open to either. Hence, interpreting what he says as statements of policy or attempts to convey information is fundamentally misunderstanding Warsh’s intentions: Claudia Sahm’s bottom…
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