Maximillian Garely

Maximillian Garely works on special projects at the advisory firm Quince Strategy. He has formerly held roles in finance and tech.

Yesterday

Maximillian Garely

AI is cosmic justice for the professional classes

For decades the road to success in the developed world has been straightforward. A university education, increasingly treated as a sort of white-collar trade school, offered people the chance to acquire specialist knowledge which could be used to secure a position lingering at a desk for 40 years. For those of us who grew up watching machines replace men on the assembly line, acquiring a degree was the way to escape this fate. In the digital age, however, the automation of cognitive labor has forced many professionals to confront a threat that once seemed confined to workers on the factory floor.

AI robots

Friday

Maximillian Garely

Are the bond markets finally turning on the US government?

Donald Trump has spent much of his second term probing the limits of presidential power. This week, he has discovered another means by which to test them: by promising every American adult $5,000 in the event Republicans retain both houses of Congress. The proposal would cost around $1.2 trillion: representing around 3 percent of America’s $40 trillion in national debt. Washington is likely to reject the idea, but even if they approve it, there is one constituency who is likely to ensure that it remains untenable. That constituency would be the people and institutions expected to lend the United States money. As a deficit mushrooms to a projected $1.9 trillion, there is still little appetite in Washington for any sort of fiscal course correction.

Bond markets

Wednesday

Maximillian Garely

Mamdani is learning how to rig the system

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on freezing rents for rent-stabilized tenants. Since taking office earlier this year, he has done just that. How? By appointing two-thirds of the supposedly independent Rent Guidelines Board. Last month, the board voted to freeze rents on one and two year leases, affecting a million properties. It’s the biggest NYC rent freeze in living memory.  Right-wing populists have long been accused of attacking independent institutions and undermining their credibility. Their left-wing counterparts appear to have developed a subtler, more insidious approach. Instead of attacking institutions, they capture them. In doing so, they predetermine outcomes and present the result as an independent judgment.

mamdani

Tuesday

Maximillian Garely

Has China cloned your congressman?

Speaking at The Hill’s Nation Summit last week, Florida Republican Kat Cammack claimed that the Chinese government was deploying “digital twins” of every member of Congress. These twins, digital replicas of individual lawmakers, are reportedly built from publicly available data and used to manipulate American politics. Cammack offered no evidence for this allegation, while the broader media largely ignored it. American academics had already published a proof of concept Yet, Cammack’s statement is more interesting than critics might recognize. China may or may not have built 535 virtual legislators. But it easily could. More importantly, somebody almost certainly will.

Tuesday

Maximillian Garely

Trump Accounts are good economics

The most interesting piece of economic policy from the Trump White House is not a tariff, nor is it an AI export restriction. It’s a brokerage account for babies. Under the new Trump Accounts program, eligible American children born between 2025 and 2028 will receive $1,000 from the Treasury, to be invested in a broad index of American companies. Parents, employers, and other benefactors can contribute up to $5,000 more annually. Before these children can walk or speak, they will own their slice of corporate America.  At first glance, this seems uncharacteristically left wing – as if a fever dream from Andrew Yang’s presidential platform had escaped and somehow convinced the Trump administration of its merits.

Sunday

Maximillian Garely

Trump is treating AI like a nuclear bomb

Initially, AI’s critics insisted that artificial intelligence was just another software product. AI was presented as a huge commercial opportunity, sure. It was presented as a tool through which humans could enhance their lives, but ultimately it was still understood as a statistical program that knew how to spell. Thanks to the Trump administration’s Anthropic export ban, that illusion is dead. The more powerful the technology becomes, the more determined governments are to control who can access it The United States government ordered Anthropic to suspend access for non-US persons to Fable and Mythos 5, its most advanced models, after officials raised national-security concerns. Whatever one thinks of the decision itself, its significance is hard to overstate.

Maximillian Garely

Trump’s birthday UFC fight is a seminal moment in US politics

The UFC event today at the White House has been widely dismissed as an absurdity. Inevitably, the administration’s critics have portrayed the event — officially part of America’s 250th celebrations but curiously taking place on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — as an odious example of Trumpian excess. Supporters, meanwhile, celebrate it as evidence that Trump is uniquely in touch with ordinary Americans.  Politicians are increasingly asked to function as cultural icons But what media commentators think of the UFC event is beside the point. The significance of this event lies not in the UFC itself, but in what it shows us about the changing nature of political authority. Beneath the headlines and Reddit threads, American politics is undergoing a profound change.

Friday

Maximillian Garely

How warfare became welfare

As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American military engagement abroad. Politicians as ideologically diverse as Thomas Massie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now openly criticize interventionist foreign policy, while public fatigue with the post-9/11 wars has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum. Yet even as Americans tire of foreign interventions, cuts to the defense budget are politically untouchable. Wars end, defense spending does not.

US military