LynAlden on Nostr: Around 2016, the fiscal deficit as a percentage of gdp began widening even as the ...

Around 2016, the fiscal deficit as a percentage of gdp began widening even as the unemployment rate was falling, aka a decoupling, which hadn’t really happened in the US since the Vietnam War. I realized that macro would be a big deal in the decade ahead.

I researched how sovereign debt cycles tend to end, came across Dalio’s long term debt cycle framework, and built upon it by digging up the source data and finding various quantitative relationships, along with studying past eras of sovereign debt resets.

My masters degree focus and later engineering work in practice was in systems engineering- the method of analyzing and designing multidisciplinary systems (via teams) that are more complex than any one mind can fully grasp. Along the way, I realized that macro was basically systems engineering- mapping out major inputs and outputs, governing logic, identifying and learning from experts in disciplines that understand a key part of it, etc. So along with some economics training, I use a systems engineering analysis approach for macro.

I had been collecting gold and silver coins since I was a kid, knew about inflation and the importance of free markets, etc. I don’t know where I absorbed it from. I later found out that much of how I view things aligns with the Austrian school and so I researched it. I think that’s a compliment to the Austrian school because basically if you reason from first principles, it’s pretty easy to land on or adjacent to Austrian economics. I had taken some economics classes as electives in my bachelors, plus some financial modeling and engineering economics classes in my masters, but I was never really deep enough to be indoctrinated into mainstream/academic economics, and instead was mainly self taught from the perspective of a systems engineer, which just kind of landed on Austrian economics.