Substack Library

Glossary

Debt Limit Jihad

If someone forwarded this to you, you can read about who I am here. I was a strategist and equity partner at the biggest hedge fund in the world. Now I make those thoughts available to you. This Substack grows via word-of-mouth, so please forward to your friends. If you like this writing, you will enjoy my books Master, Minion, and Raising a Thief. This is not investment advice. Investing is risky and sometimes painful.

It’s the Followers that Scare Me

If someone forwarded this to you, my name is Paul, you can read about me here. This Substack grows via word-of-mouth, so please forward to your friends. If you like this writing, you will enjoy my books Master, Minion and Raising a Thief as well as the podcast. Subscriptions are a vote of confidence, book reviews help lead others to my books.

Four Stories

First headlines, then specifics.

Author, Arabist, Son, Spy

If you are new to these essays, welcome. My name is Paul Podolsky and I am an author (Raising a Thief), investor (former Bridgewater Associates), journalist (Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, others) and Russia and China specialist. You can read more about me in the “about” section.

Undermoney

Undermoney is both the name of a new novel and a term invented by this week’s podcast guest, Jay Newman. Jay defines the term as money “which is unknown publicly but that controls individuals and events.” Given the theme of this Substack, I was of course intrigued to speak with him. You can hear the full episode here.

Crossing the Rubicon

Things I Didn’t Learn in School has two parts—writing about what is going on in the world (macro) and podcasts of individual life stories (micro). To understand, it helps to both zoom in and out. The very best novels—Les Miserables or War and Peace—do exactly that.

The Physics of Story

I like a good framework. For instance, an equity (a stock) has just two moving parts, earnings and the price paid for those earnings. Earnings, in turn, are spending. A framework puts individual observations, like the price investors are willing to pay to own a company’s earnings, into logical context.