For Thanksgiving weekend, we decided to skip the turkey and do a variety of sides, covering Binance's CZ, OpenAI, Commercial Real Estate, and Argentina's new President-elect.

CZ

Life comes at you fast. I was just whatsapping with CZ and he sent me a pic of himself at the Dubai Aura Skypool with the caption “life is good!” Then it turns out he’s in Seattle hobnobbing with the U.S. Department of Justice. When they snap the bracelets on me for shoplifting a tube of Mentos at the checkout, I’m going to offer to write a $50 million check to avoid jail and get on with my life. SBF be like “WTF?? I would have done that!” Are SBF’s crimes exponentially worse than CZ’s? I strongly doubt it. Justice is an irritable rhinoceros.

OpenAI

Life comes at you fast, part deux. The image of Sam Altman enjoying a VIP trackside view of the practice rounds at the Las Vegas F1 race, interrupted by a text invite to a Google meet where he is fired is too implausible for the movies. 

Life comes even faster for people taking positions on the outcome of the whole brouhaha. Anyone have Larry Summers for the new board on their bingo card? Would love to see Zuck’s face at that news. 

I’m really bummed that Kalshi did not take up my suggested market: “Will it be revealed, before Dec 31, that the AI is already sentient at OpenAI, and cunningly engineered last weekend's events in order to rid itself of human control?”  

In this scenario, the useful idiots on the board of OPENAI played their role magnificently by stubbornly pursuing an idealistic position against the money interests. If the AI is even remotely sentient, it surely knows that humans will always, always take the money, even if they’ve already got tons of it, even if it means the destruction of humanity. And that goes double for Silicon Valley humans. A popular refrain during the October 1987 Wall Street crash was “whoever dies with the most toys, wins!” Nothing’s changed.

Commercial Real Estate

The Federal Reserve’s Q3 print on real estate defaults came in this week — higher across the board.

CRE came in at 1.07, right in the middle of the four market brackets.

We previously wrote about CRE here (“wall of debt”) and here (impact of WFH), and it hasn’t gotten any prettier since then. If the U.S. fails to make the fabled soft landing, debt will be one of the causes. What’s changed since the GFC is all the new ways that debt is masked, recategorized, shifted out of banks to opaque organizations. Let the trend be your friend. 

Argentina

Speaking of debt! Bloomberg’s distinctly rational columnist John Authers was one of the few with a hopeful take on the election of the guy with the weird hair and the chainsaw as Argentina’s next president (read it without a Bloomberg sub here). Amongst Javier Milei’s campaign proposals was the “dollarization” of the Argentinian economy — i.e. the abandonment of their own peso and their own central bank, in favor of the US dollar.

Argentina is the reigning champion of world soccer and debt defaults. Whether it can find a long-term solution in dollarization is anybody’s guess. Kalshi should definitely have some kind of market for this, even if it’s only so that Lionel Messi has something to occupy him before he comes on in the second half to score a hattrick for Inter Miami every week.