Markets, Manipulation, and the Cost of 'Freedom'
The Monday Blueprint 2.17.25: Essays I've read and last week's market report
Here are some financial resources for wildfire victims.
Why You Should Care About “Protecting the Free Markets”
Look, I’ll be honest—I don’t feel like writing another economy/finance essay today. Markets are volatile, mortgage rates are a mess, and tariffs are throwing global trade into chaos. Just the run of the mill usual going on.
This week, however, I’m working on an essay titled "Protecting the Free Markets." And trust me, this isn’t your typical Econ 101 snoozefest. This is about how free markets are being hijacked—not by regulation, but by disinformation, manipulation, and a new breed of economic warfare.
Here’s a preview of what’s coming:
From a Tweet to the White House: How Disinformation Shapes Economic Policy
One false claim goes viral. It’s picked up by media outlets, spun by politicians, and suddenly, a completely fabricated narrative is shaping public policy. You’ve seen it happen—over and over again.
The latest example? A random X user falsely claimed that AOC had amassed a $30 million fortune through USAID kickbacks. No proof. No sources. Just pure fiction. But within six days, that baseless claim had jumped from a late-night tweet to the Oval Office, where Trump and Musk casually referenced it in a press conference—without ever saying her name.
This isn’t just political gossip. It’s economic warfare. When false narratives shape policy, they distort markets, drive investors into panic, and push real businesses into turmoil.
The Illusion of Transparency: Is DOGE.gov Just State-Controlled Media?
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) promised to cut waste, expose fraud, and bring financial clarity to Washington. Instead, it’s a Twitter feed masquerading as a government transparency initiative—and if that doesn’t sound dystopian, I don’t know what does.
Instead of publishing full salary breakdowns, it highlights selective data to manufacture outrage.
Instead of raw financial records, it pushes cherry-picked numbers designed for headlines, not accountability.
Instead of actual independent audits, it’s propaganda disguised as efficiency.
It’s not full-blown Soviet-style state media—yet. But it’s a step in that direction. And if the government controls the flow of information while manipulating markets behind the scenes, can we really call it a “free market” anymore?
Who Actually Pays for “Free” Markets?
The 2017 tax cuts are about to expire in 2026, and Congress has a $4 trillion gap to fill. Instead of making corporations pay their fair share, the budget proposals overwhelmingly shift the burden onto students, retirees, and the working class.
✅ Pell Grants? Might become taxable income.
✅ Medicaid? Set for budget caps.
✅ Social Security? Reduced benefits for higher earners.
Meanwhile, corporate tax cuts stay permanent. The tax code isn’t about fairness—it’s about priorities. And right now, the priority is keeping profits high while shifting costs downward.
Why This Matters (And Why You Should Read It When It Drops)
Yeah, it’s kind of a monster of an essay. But the biggest threat to free markets isn’t socialism. It isn’t regulation. It’s manipulation—by tech billionaires, political operatives, and an information ecosystem that launders fiction into policy.
“Protecting the Free Markets” is about how the game is rigged, who benefits, and what comes next.
📌 The essay drops this week. If you care about markets, money, or just the truth behind the headlines, you won’t want to miss it. But listen, this essay will be for subscribers only. If you don’t subscribe, you won’t see it. But there’s an absolutely free subscription tier, so sign up for that one.
IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
Essays I’ve Read
The Elegance of Selective Truth: A Review of Joseph Monninger’s Final Essay
In My Final Days on the Maine Coast, Joseph Monninger offers what appears to be a meditation on solitude and mortality. Published weeks before his passing, the essay presents an image of a man at peace with his own impermanence, content in his chosen isolation, engaged in the small, elemental rituals of watching eagles, stacking wood, and swimming.
Like E.B. White’s Once More to the Lake and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Final Days is a masterfully curated version of the self—an act of storytelling rather than straightforward documentation. Monninger frames himself as a man “fading into mist,” withdrawing into the natural world, embracing a life of deep solitude. Yet, the essay betrays his continued connection to others—his phone calls with his son, his visits with his doctor, his conversations with local fishermen, his outings with a neighbor, his meals at a diner.
To be clear, Thoreau did not live isolated in the wilderness but within walking distance of Concord, MA—where he regularly dined with friends, had his laundry done by his mother, even got thrown into jail once. Walden was never a factual account of absolute self-reliance but a narrative experiment, omitting inconvenient details, and sculpting a Thoreau persona that embodied his thematic preoccupations of solitude, simplicity, and communion with nature.
White’s Once More to the Lake is praised for the essay’s simple, reverent attention to place and the way White layers past and present, father and son, memory and inevitability, all without explicitly announcing the essay’s real subject. On the surface, White writes about a simple lake. What White truly shows us by evading the topic altogether is the inevitability of time and death. And the essay’s final moment, the chill realization that White has become his father, is among the most hauntingly understated conclusions in American letters.
Like Thoreau, Monninger chose what to emphasize and what to omit and in so doing shaped an experience into something larger than a mere diary of his final days. And like White, Monninger’s essay is full of small evasions—talking around death rather than through death. His son does not ask him how he is feeling; he asks if he has seen the eagle. Nor does Monninger try to define the meaning of his declining health. He instead studies the weather “both in the sky and in my chest.” These are the gestures of a writer who understands the power of restraint.
If Monninger had written Final Days as purely confessional—no careful omissions, no sense of curation—at best, the writing would have been sentimental and self-indulgent. Monninger has given us instead highly controlled elegance that moves with the precision of an author who understands that truth in writing is never just a matter of fact, but of selection, arrangement, and tone.
And crucially, Monninger’s own chill of realization comes within the very act of writing itself, and not because of any grand pronouncement, but because he refuses to grant us any meaning at all beyond just simply being.
The Haunting Structure of Swift’s Murder on the Appalachian Trail
Earl Swift’s 2015 essay Murder on the Appalachian Trail is ostensibly about the 1990 murder of Geoff Hood and Molly LaRue, and he begins in third person, setting the stage like any traditional journalist would, giving us the Romeo and Juliet prologue: This is a tragedy. You already know how it ends. Think modern-day true-crime podcast. But then, he drops into first-person, gonzo style because he too was on the trail that summer, and met Geoff and Molly. And almost camped where they were killed.
I almost hiked the Appalachian Trail myself when I was eighteen—start in Georgia in the spring, take my time heading north to Maine. Instead, I flunked out of college and spent my twenties floating without direction. Now, pushing fifty-two with a shoddy ankle, I’m watching my youngest prepare for her own hikes—a 5000-footer this summer, and she’s already talking the AT. With no prompting from me, of course.
Swift’s switch in perspective is jarring, but seamless enough you go with the first-person and allow Swift to shape the narrative as he pleases. The essay at this point feels less about Hood and LaRue and more about Swift himself, about the people he hiked with, the way memory and narrative shape each other.
When Swift describes Rubin, a strange, unsettling person who keeps everyone awake with loud, erratic prayers, the way true crime works, we expect Rubin to be dangerous. But, of course, he isn’t, and disappears from the story.
Except Swift doesn’t let us forget Rubin. When he calls fellow hiker Animal at the end of the essay, they talk about Rubin again, a small, almost throwaway moment that subtly reminds us of him.
Then Swift delivers his final scene: Animal, alone at the shelter, watching the sunrise in the quiet, finding God. Rubin’s faith was loud, chaotic, performative. The juxtaposition is deliberate. Swift never says this explicitly, but he arranges the essay so we feel the comparison.
There’s an undercurrent of unstated regret in this essay. And Swift keeps circling back—not just physically, but narratively—like a man still searching. He writes about Geoff and Molly’s fate as if destiny, but does he really believe that? Or is he trying to convince himself? Because he’s the one who survived, the one who wasn’t there, the one who kept walking while others didn’t. That lingering “what if?” is all over this piece.
AT fifty-one, quickly pushing toward fifty-two I watch my youngest preparing for her own hikes—5000-footers this summer, maybe the AT someday. But I don’t want to live through her experience, don’t want to become the kind of parent who uses their child’s ambitions as a substitute for their own unfinished business.
Swift reconstructs Animal’s experience in excruciating detail though—and that’s the tension of nonfiction: as much as we like to think the truth is being told, the truth is always filtered, structured, curated for effect. Or perhaps in this case, Swift vicariously lives through his imagining of Animal’s spiritual awakening as a substitute for his own unfinished business.
Ultimately, Murder on the Appalachian Trail isn’t a crime story, but about how we frame unbearable events to make them bearable, and how we choose to create meaning from the meaningless.
LAST WEEK IN THE STOCK MARKET
The stock market continued its volatile streak as investors wrestled with persistent inflation, Federal Reserve uncertainty, and renewed geopolitical tensions. The S&P 500 dipped 0.01%, the Dow Jones lost 0.37%, and the Nasdaq managed a 0.41% gain, reflecting the ongoing divergence between high-growth tech stocks and the broader economy. The Russell 2000 remained under pressure, dropping 0.10%, as small-cap stocks continued to struggle with higher borrowing costs and slowing consumer demand.
The markets are still searching for stability, but the reality remains clear: sticky inflation, uncertain trade policies, and a tight labor market are keeping investors on edge.
Big Themes to Watch:
Inflation Hits the Breakfast Table – And Consumers Are Feeling It
The latest CPI data confirmed what many already knew—inflation is far from over.
Egg prices hit record highs (+53% YoY) as bird flu and supply shortages squeezed production.
Coffee futures surged to near all-time highs, driven by supply issues in Brazil, Vietnam, and Colombia.
Orange juice prices spiked due to hurricane damage and citrus greening in Florida.
While the Fed may be done hiking rates, these price spikes complicate the case for rate cuts anytime soon. Rising food costs are another hit to consumer sentiment, especially for lower-income households that are already stretched thin.
Markets Digest Powell’s Next Move
Mortgage rates remain stuck near 7%, and consumer confidence in future rate cuts is slipping. Only 35% of Americans now believe the Fed will lower rates this year, down from 45% in November.
The impact is clear:
Pending home sales dropped 5.5% in December, showing that affordability concerns continue to keep buyers sidelined.
Cash buyers and institutional investors remain dominant, taking advantage of weak demand.
The Fed is still trying to walk a fine line—cooling inflation without triggering a recession—but Powell’s recent remarks suggest rates could stay higher for longer than the market wants to admit.
Elon Musk, Immigration, and Labor Contradictions
A major Bloomberg report revealed that Tesla and SpaceX relied heavily on undocumented workers to build their Texas factories—despite Musk’s vocal support for tighter immigration policies.
This underscores a broader trend in the U.S. economy:
Construction and manufacturing rely on immigrant labor to function, yet political rhetoric continues to push for crackdowns on the very workers who keep these industries afloat.
The labor market remains tight, especially in construction, with a projected 500,000+ worker shortage in 2024.
Big business benefits from undocumented labor while publicly aligning with anti-immigrant policies to maintain political capital.
For investors, the key takeaway is continued labor disruptions in industries like real estate development, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Expect higher costs and ongoing workforce challenges.
Defense Stocks Are Booming as Geopolitical Tensions Rise
While U.S. markets remain choppy, European defense stocks surged after EU leaders signaled plans to ramp up military spending in response to ongoing Ukraine tensions.
Rheinmetall AG and Saab AB surged double digits, while BAE Systems climbed 6.9%.
The German 10-year bond yield spiked, reflecting rising expectations of increased government spending on defense.
With U.S. defense budgets also set to rise, defense contractors could see strong demand through 2025 and beyond.
Looking Ahead: Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel
Brace for More Volatility
Between rising inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, and shaky consumer sentiment, the market remains at a crossroads.
This week, investors will be watching:
Earnings reports from Nvidia, Walmart, and Home Depot – key insights into tech strength and consumer spending habits.
Further signals from the Fed on when (or if) rate cuts are coming.
The fallout from Musk’s labor controversy, which could have regulatory implications for Tesla and the broader labor market—but really, in my humble opinion, this will be hardly a blip for The Oval Office Ventriloquist.
Markets are juggling competing forces—persistent inflation, corporate earnings pressure, and Fed uncertainty—and investors should brace for continued turbulence.
Question of the Week
📺 TGIF Finance Edition: If your budget was a classic 90s sitcom, would it be Full House (packed with obligations), Boy Meets World (learning as you go), or Family Matters (held together by sheer determination and maybe a little Urkel-style luck)? And, would you say that your budget is more like Carl Winslow (stable, reliable, holding it down) or Steve Urkel (chaotic, unpredictable, one disaster away from total collapse)? And what’s your financial “Did I do that?” moment?