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: Well, That Was a Thing!: BULLET DODGED OF THE DAY · CROSSPOST: JOHN GANZ: American NeoFascism: Where We Are At
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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Symbols named in the headline of a post from the last 30 days, most-covered first. The number is how many of those posts mentioned it.
Read from 4 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 Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #47 today · #44 a week ago · #45 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 62 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
- −3 places
- Rank, 30 days
- −2 places
- Followers added
- +3.5K
- Posts
- 38
- Reactions per post
- 31
- Reactions tracked
- 3.1K
- Tickers covered
- 4
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 25, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 98 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
- Well, That Was a Thing!: BULLET DODGED OF THE DAY
But who are those 1/14? They are less converts than shows and no-shows. Why did they choose differently? Corruption, checks-and-balances, and prices. And who the f*** are the 13/28 of those who show up to the polls who still think it is a good idea to pull the lever for Trump-subservient candidates? southern & rural & “evangelical” & in a different and non-factual universe: My Visualization of the Cosmic All is simply not: it crashes, reboots, and then crashes again whenever I try to contemplate the 2024 next to the 2026 American electoral map. The Republican floor is still 13/28 of the…
- CROSSPOST: JOHN GANZ: American NeoFascism: Where We Are At
John Ganz distingishes between three things: (1) a fascist movement (which in the Holy Name of the One Who Is Trump certainly leads and stokes); (2) a fascist governmental executive (which Trump wants to lead, and which the corrupt partisan Republican Supreme Court supermajority is eager for him to create via the “unitary executive”); and (3) a fascist state and society (in which “coördination” has been accomplished and we see total bureaucratic and media and substantial cultural submission): John’s thesis, as I understand it: Right-wing paramilitary street violence has failed to become a…
- Anomalous Corporate Earnings Numbers?: CHART OF THE DAY
Nominal GDP growth and nominal corporate earnings growth do tend to move together most of the time, with the second being an amplified version of the first. But only most of the time, only when income distribution is stable and corporate accounting is honest: And so I think this gets it wrong: From the very sharp Torsten Slok, again (I find him arresting my attention rather frequently these days). He comments: Torsten Slok : 10% Nominal GDP Growth Coming? < https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/10-percent-nominal-gdp-growth-coming >: ‘Nominal GDP growth is currently…
- Election Night 2026
A timetable for when to watch, what to watch, and what each early result is likely to tell you as Americans vote in the context of a chaos-monkey Trump with a -23%-point net approval rating. Forecasters say Democrats are favored to win both House and Senate control. A gerrymandered map, a likely-voter screen and a $10 billion ad war are the ways it could still fall short: It is a cliché, but democracy really is on the ballot. Again. Share We have: < https://www.the-downballot.com/p/the-downballots-2026-poll-closing > Give a gift subscription And this is what you are supposed to be watching…
- CROSSPOST: NIALL FERGUSON: The [Nixon-Like] Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness
Nixon was smart. Really smart. Nixon knew where Hanoi was. Niall Ferguson has a uniquely stupidly timed grand-strategy apologia for Donald Trump. Ferguson sees a Kissinger in a man who could not find the capital of North Vietnam on a map: I must say that seeing this in my feed this morning was quite a surprise: Niall Ferguson : The [Nixon-Like] Method to Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness < https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-method-to-trumps-foreign-policy >: To understand Trump’s… foreign policy… you have to understand the debt he… owes to…. Richard Nixon…. We’re seeing a wave of Nixon…
- CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Anthropic’s Moat Is Claude
Noah Smith’s bull case for Anthropic’s valuation in a nutshell: To justify a $2 trillion IPO, Anthropic can’t just win the AI market. It has to win every market. The road to that is to buy a firm in an industry, feed that firm’s data to super-claude, outcompete all rivals using general intelligence and smarts, and then do it again in the next industry. And again. The talent-concentration moat that was (part of what was) behind Google and Facebook, rebuilt in the datacenters… The conventional wisdom in the circles that I travel in is that, should Anthropic undertake an IPO at anything close to…
- Not a Good Use of My, or Your, Time, But: CHART OF THE DAY
Nearly all of us are cognitively-compromised readers of polls the day before an election. Nate Silver is the exception, and that’s exactly why you should listen to him today: Do anchor your beliefs to this fact: Pollsters share the same problems with who answers the phone. If the polls are off, they'll likely be off in the same direction everywhere, so seven good Senate polls aren't seven separate pieces of evidence. Via Greg Sargent: Greg Sargent : < https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3mzc5don3wc2d >: ‘Whoa. Final NYT polls of Senate races just dropped. I can’t believe…
- The Visual Æsthetics of Cheesecake Factories: (LATE) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
The Cheesecake Factory look: fine for avocado egg rolls; terrible for the public buildings of a Great Republic. Trump (and the Wall Street Journal ) did not dare say a peep at Obama’s comparison of him to a dictator, but it was the claim that his æsthetic taste thought a chain restaurant was the height of luxury appears to have stung: Barack Obama is not a very nice guy these days. Share But I do not think a nice guy is what we need right now: Barack Obama : ‘I had heard the president was not happy when I joked over the weekend that he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened…
- CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: TNG: Farewell, My Captain
In memoriam, Patrick Stewart 1940-2026… Patrick Stewart died this week at 86. Share The world is mourning the actor. The actor matters for his humanity, his excellence, and his craft. But this also marks a moment for us to reflect more deeply on the character he made real: Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. For Star Trek: The Next Generation was and is, as Noah Smith says pure crystalized optimism made into drama: Gene Roddenberry's banned internal conflict as a plot engine That forced ST:TNG’s writers to imagine how genuinely better people would face the unknown…
- Trump & Co. Do Not Claim to Be Angry at Comparison to Saddam Hussein: LAUGH OF THE DAY
The Cheesecake Factory has a look: that is part of its branding as a friendly carbmaxxxing chain restaurant, and it is successful, and indeed appropriate—for a carbmaxxxing chain restaurant. But is that look appropriate for the public spaces of a Great Republic? Only the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board thinks so. Or pretends to think so. Even Donald Trump thinks it is an inappropriate look. But Donald Trump believes that his White House redecorating looks nothing like a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, and is offended by the comprison. The problem is: It does look like a Cheesecake Factory…
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, & Co.: They Are Not Brains, They Are Kernel-Smoother Functions: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
In early 2025 I said LLMs are kernel smoothers, not brains, and a confidently wrong Machiavelli link was my evidence. Eighteen months later the kernel smoother is still there, but it now runs in a loop that grades its own work, and that changes much: How well does this hold up after a year and a half, after the Year of Claude Code? Share Well, my warning that anthropomorphizing is dangerous has held up. My description of what these systems are has not. What changed during the Year of Claude Code is that the model now runs in a loop that checks its work against the gate of having to produce…
- CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Agentic AI Is Myth Set in Motion
In the Economist , Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi argue that AI is not incipient Digital God god but rather a "condensate of human culture": a statistical floor plan of Jacques Barzun's "House of Intellect," animated the way an oral bard's repertoire of tropes is. Hooked up to software "harnesses," it can act out its narratives in the digital world, checking proofs in Lean or joining a hacking attack. Well, yes. But the human House of Intellect we have constructed over the past five thousand years is the real ASI, the true Anthology Super-Intelligence. So what then follows from the…
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