Trust as Invisible Asset Class
When it collapses, so does everything else.
This week, we’re talking:
Deportation without due process, and how the breakdown of legal protections threatens not just lives—but the long-term bets that make capitalism work.
Meta’s legal win on AI training data and why it doesn’t settle the copyright issue—stronger lawsuits are coming.
How AI is slipping into daily routines, quietly replacing the small decisions we used to make ourselves.
The tough job market facing new grads, and what makes this downturn different from past crashes.
Why billionaires lose touch with reality, and how too much money can erase the word “no.”
The economy shrank last quarter, but the Fed doesn’t seem especially panicked.
My Take:
In a 2018 tweet, Stephen Miller dismissed due process protections for immigrants as a relic of “Marxist judges”:
“Dear marxist judges: If an illegal alien criminal breaks into our country the only ‘process’ he is entitled to is deportation.”
The Marxist judge he was contradicting? Justice Antonin Scalia.
In 2014, Scalia wrote:
“Anybody who’s present in the United States has protections under the United States Constitution.”
Not Sotomayor. Not RBG or Kagan. Scalia.
So when I see masked ICE agents rounding up people in parking lots—faces covered, names hidden— like most, I’m morally repulsed, but more than that, I’m overtaken by dread at the erosion of our constitutional order. It’s a nightmare pulled from history’s darkest pages.
A place where the state no longer explains itself. Where citizenship becomes conditional. Where the rules shift without warning.
When power hides behind masks and skips the paperwork, we’ve already crossed the line. It’s a market warning disguised as a civics lesson.
Capitalism doesn’t work without trust.
You have to trust that a contract will hold. That the courts will enforce it. That when you pay a lawyer to draft your will, you’re betting that our legal and social systems still work decades from now. You’re basically writing a contract with the future. In wonky financial terms, you’re buying a 50-year, long-duration bond on the U.S. trust machine.
You’re also naturally assuming that your citizenship isn’t subject to interpretation, and a future dictator can’t rescind it on a whim. That a contract is durably upheld by the rule of law.
When Russian oligarchs saw Putin seize Yukos Oil in 2003, they learned an obvious lesson the hard way: wealth without rule of law is just wealth waiting to be seized. Foreign investment in Russia never recovered.
Legal uncertainty doesn’t stay contained. It spills into every long-term calculation.
Mortgage rates reflect legal stability. M&A timelines drag when regulators get erratic. Insurance premiums spike when courts go sideways.
Warren Buffett famously said he’d never bet against America. But he started investing just after WWII—when trust in American institutions was high. The courts worked. The laws held. People believed the system, however flawed, wasn’t arbitrary.
That’s what the world’s greatest investor was betting on, and what underpinned the absurd wealth he created for his shareholders. And it’s what’s at risk now.
Authoritarian crackdowns always start the same way: with the so-called undesirables. Immigrants. Dissenters. The poor. But the tools built to punish them don’t stay in their lane. Sooner or later, they’re turned on the powerful.
Ask someone who fled Venezuela. Or a Hong Kong investor trying to move their assets. The same legal system that failed to protect protestors eventually came for their bank accounts.
Every will, every long-term trust, every tax shelter—it’s all a bet on the future. On continuity. On a system that still functions when your grandkids open the envelope.
So when ICE throws a U.S. citizen in a van because their papers are “in question,” what are you counting on?
Law doesn’t just protect the vulnerable. Today it’s deportation without paperwork. Tomorrow it’s forfeiture without warning.
What you tolerate tonight could very well be your undoing in the morning.
My Stack:
Meta Wins This Round—But the War Isn’t Over
Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed the lawsuit from Sarah Silverman and other authors over Meta using their books to train. Still, the judge made clear this wasn’t a sweeping exoneration of generative AI. The case was tossed because the plaintiffs didn’t bring strong or specific enough claims. For Meta, it’s a battle won, not the war. Future lawsuits are coming, and with sharper arguments and better evidence, they might force a new take on what counts as “fair use.” Stand by.
Source: TechCrunch, The Verge
AI Is Everywhere
Hard Fork co-hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton compared notes on how AI is creeping into daily life: generating podcast prompts, checking grammar, helping moms plan anniversary slideshows. The most telling shift? It’s not that AI is smarter than you—it’s that it's suddenly more interesting than average, and it’s starting to replace tasks that once felt deeply human. Maybe taste—not intelligence—is the last line of defense.
College Grads Enter a Tough Job Market
New college grads aged 22-27 are seeing the highest level unemployment rate in a dozen years. But it’s not quite a “lost generation” moment—unlike the 2008 crash, interest rates are still high, inflation is (somewhat) cooling, and companies are more cautious than panicked. Still, if your LinkedIn feed suddenly looks like a digital Hunger Games, you’re not imagining it.
Sources: Associated Press, Vox, WSJ
GDP Shrinks, Fed Holds
The U.S. economy shrank by 0.5% last quarter, the first dip in over a year. The drop is mostly attributed to slower exports and inventory restocking, not collapsing consumer demand or mass layoffs. Still, it’s not nothing. The Fed held interest rates steady, citing "transitory" weakness and stronger-than-expected job growth.
Sources: AP, CBS News
The Billionaire Brain Melt
Tina Brown asked a simple question: why do so many billionaires go off the rails? Her hypothesis is that extreme wealth breaks the feedback loop. When you can buy your own island, your own media empire, your own version of reality, you stop hearing “no.” When everybody laughs at your jokes and nobody calls our your bull shit, you are at risk of losing the plot entirely.
You said it. We're living in very dark times.