Doer of random things, diver of weird rabbit holes,
sharer of fascinating things, writer of things nobody reads.
If you support the ruling party and think the protesters are idiots, you should still defend their right to protest. Time is a flat circle: it's them today, it may very well be you tomorrow.
Read the essay Written between filter coffees.I woke up to the news that the great Perry Mehrling has passed away. He was 67. I was shocked. It feels unfair that all the cool and awesome people keep getting taken away while assholes still roam free on Earth.
Perry was brilliant. A lot of what I understand about global macro, the dollar and the global financial system comes from listening to him. The very first time I heard him, I fell in love with his heterodox view of the global financial system. It was refreshing. I was sick and tired of the same old takes from people in macro, mostly academics.
Perry’s view was different, and you could see the insane amount of work that had gone into it. His “money view” was sophisticated and built on the work of Hyman Minsky, Charles Kindleberger and others. His last book, Money and Empire, was about Kindleberger and the dollar system.
Predictably, everyone is sharing his famous INET videos, and rightly so. If Perry is in a video, it’s worth watching. But for me, most of what I know about the dollar-based financial system and the centrality of the dollar comes from his many interviews and podcasts over the years.
What struck me most was how intellectually honest and open he was. He was generous in sharing what he knew and, more importantly, willing to admit what he didn’t. That was the first thing I felt grateful for when I heard the news. Plenty of academics love sharing their research, but you’d be surprised how many have an “oh my precious baby” syndrome about their work. Perry just wanted to teach people.
At the very least, I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. A large part of how I understand money has been shaped by listening to him.
Perry, I wish you were still around, doing all those podcasts and interviews so I could keep learning from you. Rest in peace, and thank you for so graciously sharing everything you knew.
Some of my favourites:
If you want to go deeper:
I learned that the famous line “The heart wants what it wants” is from a famous letter by Emily Dickinson and not Woody Allen.
The full line:
Dear Mary -
When the Best is gone - I know that other things are not of consequence - The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care -
You wonder why I write - so - Because I cannot help - I like to have you know some care - so when your life gets faint for it’s other life - you can lean on us - We wont break, Mary. We look very small - but the Reed can carry weight.
I built Paper Trails to aggregate RSS feeds from some of the blogs and newsletters I enjoy reading. It’s become a wonderful place for me to find new rabbit holes 🐰 🕳️ and you may too. Check it out and let me know if you have any suggestions.
I add a possibly dumb yet genius new feature called “Random Digest.” Twice a week, the site automatically pulls 10 links randomly from different categories and creates a digest in case you want to randomly read something.
What do you think?
A beautiful digital collection of Stoic philosophy. All 124 moral letters to Lucilius, designed to be read the way Seneca intended — slowly, carefully, one at a time.
Using OCR and LLMs to digitize Indian public domain books — Kannada, Sanskrit, texts that exist in exactly one crumbling copy somewhere in a government archive.
A curated archive of historical letters, speeches, and essays from the public domain. Nehru writing to his daughter. Gandhi's midnight letters. Speeches that changed the course of history.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
We are made of stories, not atoms.
We are all flukes — the product of an unfathomable number of unlikely events.