Not long ago, economic reporting was the most primitive of news scams. Few campaign reporters understood much about finance and campaign aides and Hill staffers could often successfully convince them “the economy” was up or down based on a handful of indicators: stock prices, unemployment rates, and inflation stats. The economy might be “booming” or “sluggish,” but there was seldom any effort to connect financial fads to real-world problems. When newspapers finally began offering “business sections,” there was some early coverage of the dirty underbelly, but these pages soon became cheerleading sections, written not for broad audiences but people in finance.

Since 2008, this weakness in the media landscape has become more apparent, and sites as different as Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, The Bear Traps Report, and Thoughtful Money attracted wide audiences by mixing nontraditional economic analysis with political commentary. Chris Irons, a.k.a ’s “Fringe Finance” is a classic Substack response to the gap-filled financial news landscape, taking on subjects from inflation to the Fed’s balance sheet to Bitcoin mining, from the perspective of the general public. As Irons writes:

As part of Racket’s ongoing effort to get acquainted with fellow Substack sites, we pinged Chris with a few questions:

Racket: What can you tell us about yourself?

Irons: I’ve been involved in markets for over 20 years and have been doing investigative work related to finance for more than a decade. I’ve been active on Twitter for over a decade (@QTRResearch) and started my own podcast about six years ago when I noticed that financial commentators who I thought made the most sense were getting less and less airtime on mainstream financial media. A full primer on my story and what drives me can be found at this presentation I gave back in 2018:

I live in Philadelphia and otherwise enjoy playing chess, running, and practicing Jiu-Jitsu.

Racket: Are you a Poe fan? Or does a raven give you advice on which stocks to pick?

Irons: The name started over a decade ago when I began writing under the Quoth the Raven moniker to stay anonymous at the time. I was a literature major in college and I’m definitely a Poe fan, but at the time I was just using it as a placeholder—I never thought it would become a name that people eventually would recognize me by. It just stuck, and I just kept it.

Racket: Traditionally, high finance has been inaccessible to ordinary media consumers because most financial coverage is written by or for people in the financial services industry. What will a financial novice learn at Quoth The Raven?

Irons: You’re definitely right, and this inaccessible gap for the average mom-and-pop investor is where I hope to pull back the curtain and explain some of the jargon used on Wall Street on my blog. Most of what happens on Wall Street is as simple as balancing your own checkbook at home, except the entire industry is cloaked in fancy sounding bullshit that is used to pull the wool over the eyes of everyday citizens and baffle them so much so that they don’t believe they have the patience to figure it out. Then, as Matt knows well, when an event like 2008 happens, everybody scrambles to try and find answers—and most people are horrified at how simple and nefarious the wrongdoing was that caused the catastrophe to begin with. Most of the time it comes down to greed, but that is to be expected in the financial industry. It is our government and the Federal Reserve creating the moral hazard of ensuring that bad actors will be bailed out that allows bad behavior to gestate even more and serve up a larger and larger shit burger to the middle and lower class every decade or so. Sadly, this next shit burger may be a sovereign debt crisis. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s only math.

Racket: After 2008 and when programs like Quantitative Easing began, some on Wall Street warned that such aggressive monetary policy would lead directly to a widened wealth gap, with excess liquidity funding LBOs and buybacks while jobs might be “streamlined” or offshored. What’s been the impact of the crash politically?

Irons: It is a certainty that quantitative easing widens the inequality gap. In an event where large banks are bailed out or the Federal Reserve decides it wants to spray money into any financial asset, including stocks, mortgage-backed securities, or the like—it always disproportionately helps those who held a majority of those assets beforehand. If the Federal Reserve really thought that money printing was the key to productivity, which it isn’t, they would be taking the trillions of dollars that they inject into capital markets and simply dividing it up evenly amongst every single citizen in the United States. Over Covid, this would’ve resulted in something like $17,000 per person in additional stimulus—but then, all of the banks in a crunch and all of the bondholders in a crunch would not have gotten bailed out. So instead, everybody else got checks for a paltry $600 while trillions were injected to prop up a stock market that then increased the wealth of the richest people in the world (Bezos, Musk, etc.) by tens of billions of dollars. Again, even if you think money printing is the answer, which I do not, why wouldn’t the Federal Reserve just print an equal amount of money for every single person and distribute it without favoring businesses in the financial sector or financial assets? It’s the same reason that Target and Walmart were allowed to stay open during Covid while mom-and-pop stores were shut down: privatizing profits and socializing losses — the crony capitalism that gives free market capitalism a bad name, which then seduces idiots into thinking that socialism is the answer, when that would be an even worse catastrophe.

Racket: Everyone is talking about inflation, but the public and the economists don’t seem to agree. Why is that? 

Irons: Economists are generally inflation apologists, which means that they have to defend the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target —and the idea that inflation is a good thing, for some reason—no matter what, publicly. This generally stands at odds with the middle class and (anybody else that exercises a modicum of common sense) because it’s difficult for the average American consumer to understand why prices need to go up. It doesn’t help when you’re at the grocery store, it doesn’t help when you’re a first-time homebuyer, and it doesn’t help when the cost of goods to run your business goes higher. So, what the fuck? Not only does the public understand that rising prices aren’t necessarily a good thing, they also understand that the value of money they have saved decreases as a result of inflation, which disincentivizes people to save in the first place. This is part of what fuels our asinine economy based on spending at all costs, instead of saving and underconsumption. Inflation is, in essence, a silent tax that, in secret works cloaked by the dark machinery of the night, eating away at the purchasing power of those who don’t understand it. It is the centerpiece of modern monetary theory and modern Keynesian thought, which is generally the idea that central banks should manage economies and markets to reduce volatility. People like me, and those that I interview on my podcast, argue that staving off volatility is a fool’s errand, and that the longer we do it and prevent the free market from correcting in the way it needs to, the worse the catastrophe will be. I worry deeply about the precarious financial position that I believe the country is in and my blog is a cathartic place for me to put those thoughts down.

Racket: Why is Tesla’s Robotaxi “Obviously Bullshit”?

Irons: I really have no idea how Tesla believes they are going to bring a Robotaxi to market anytime soon. They have minimal test miles under their belt compared to peers, according to the California DMV, and are nowhere near the Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy necessary for it. My most recent podcast with Mark Spiegel explains all of the reasons that I still believe them to be years away from implementing such a product. I also wrote recently about how I believe Elon Musk is starting to get desperate with his proclamations of product launches. You can read that here:

Racket: Who doesn’t love a heat check? Are you still having the same feelings about the “hard money heat check”? 

Irons: I think for as long as the system that we are in persists, where inflation is at its core, hard money is the safest bet out there. But again, I don’t give financial advice, I just opine on my personal thoughts and opinions.

Racket: We all know how our government’s decisions to fund wars overseas could go sideways politically — what’s the impact financially, here at home, if there is any?

Irons: Funding wars is part of a larger spending mistake that our government is making. I wrote about that today in this article that highlights how our fiscal and monetary situation in the US is precarious and unprecedented. We have an addiction to spending and just because it hasn’t caused the catastrophe yet doesn’t mean that it won’t. Now we are running the largest debt-to-GDP figures almost in our country’s history and, even more worrying, we are showing no signs of letting off the gas or even telegraphing any type of conservative changes to monetary and fiscal policy. I discussed this in my podcast with my friend Jack Boroudjian, which you can listen to here.

Racket: Thank you!

QTR’s Disclaimer: I am not a registered investment advisor and hold no licenses or registrations with FINRA, the SEC or any other financial regulators. I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts on my blog have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR, reprinted under a Creative Commons license or with the permission of the author. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.