Volatility...

 The Recapitulator believes the Ides of March will herald the return of volatilty, which is looking rather cheap in that context...

VIX get 19% increase today...

 ...on a holiday no less.  More pre-shocks.

Minnesota Fraud and Trust/Non-Trust societies

TLDR:  Justice moves arithmetically and retrospectively. fraud moves exponentially and contemporaneously. This is a problem for the United States.

The Recapitulator resides a town over from downtown Minneapolis, which is suffering from all sorts of issues at the moment but I will discuss "Justice" a bit here.

One of the challenges with Western Society importing immigrants is the issue of a low-trust vs. high- trust design for the prevailing Justice System.

The West is culturally a high-trust Justice System design. This is based on cultural values which assume "honesty" in the community as a whole and dishonesty as relative outliers. Because this is the assumption many safeguards and guardrails are built into the investigatorey and prosecutorial arms of the government. These act as checks against government power.

This system also relies upon rights, responsibilities, of citizens and controls upon authorities to limit power and enforcement. There is a presumption of innocence. Social enforcement of dishonesty is also purvasive. If one is known as "dishonest" in this space, one's opportunities are truncated and one risks being a pariah.

Conversely, low-trust justice systems assume transactions are arms length, fraud and deception are part of the game, and participants should dispense with long-term social punishments.

Minneapolis in particular serves as a particularly good laboratory for what happens when low-trust communities are imported into a high-trust Justice system designed on cultural norms based on honesty.
Justice moves arithmetically...and fraud (including political fraud and collusion) moves exponentially

Given the resource drain that investigations, prosecutions, and convictions demand, scaling up fraudulent operations acts as instant insulation from future enforcement. The process of gathering evidence, prosecuting, etc., etc. makes the US Justice system powerless to combat low-trust populations for the most part if efforts are coordinated and allowed to scale. A first-mover advantage.

For example, the largest RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case in US History, US vs. MS-13, the number of defendants topped a whopping 73 people. From indictment to sentencing took approximately 8 years.

The possible Defendants of the Fraud in Minnesota could number 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than this, putting immense pressure on a high-trust Justice System designed to limit Governmental power, which of course is not accidental.

All of this puts pressure on a Justice System based on high-trust cultural values. And therein lies problems, with future "solutions" that would be terrifying if they were not already in motion.

We are hurtling towards near-omniscience with AI driven surveillance systems. A possible sollution to the inherant scaleability problem above would be to eliminate some of the safeguards associated with a high-trust Justice system in the name of expedience.

The ramifications on culture are obvious. And its interesting to note the experiment of expecting instutions fo change cultures by moving populations from low-trust to high-trust locales has failed. And yet, the solution may harken a different, perhaps even more complicated and dark moment for "Justice".

I can hear the "solution" now...

"Have some issues with exponentially expanding fraud in light of an arithmetically limited Justice system? Sure we can build an app for that! But it will not involve the Courts...or Congress. All we have to do is remove the guardrails. We can always replace them if it does not work right?"

Boots on the ground Economic perspective in Venezuela...

 As a preface, all the VZ friends of The Recapitulaltor have applauded the US action.  Again, dear readers, its not like the Monroe Doctrine was not invoked before...by Democratic Presidents...

The Obama Doctrine

So this snippet is a microcosm.  On a more amusing note and as a person living in Minnesota, it does seem a strange confluence of things leading back to here (Walz, fraud, etc.  Cargill is headquartered here)

https://x.com/agrisacademy/status/2008280244105380254

Cargill was/is the leading producer of critical staple ingredients such as flour, pasta, vegetable oil, and rice in VZ. I am not saying I agree with grabbing the dictator, but I did have a front row seat to the damage a kleptocracy did to innocent people.

Capture or Rescue?

 Not to be "too" cynical, but given the ovewhelming success and obvious intelligence "assistance" (read: omnipotence) during the capture and extraction of Maduro, one has to wonder if he reached out to US assets for a "rescue".

It's a low probability, but given the nature of this administration and its proclivity for decisive action and opportunism, one wonders.

Still, the entire exercise serves notice to the world that the margin of military superiority is even further than previously thought.  VZ had fairly modern defense systems that were rendered useless within an hour.  Zero casualties and zero war assets damaged on the US side for an operation that invaded a country with Billions of dollars in military equipment and plucked its sitting president away.  Incredible.

But the fog of war creates its own opportunities, and I am curious to see what else (if ever released) was happening.  If nothing else, Trump is very, very good at simultaneity and I have always been curious if this is planned or simply evolved organically from making decisive moves and reacting/adapting to the outcomes.  Given my belief in public choice theory, I "think" its the latter.