Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.

Here’s a brief follow up, genetically if not literally similar to my post from earlier today about AI bubbles. Axios has a report on the public comments on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to “ease” (i.e., get rid of) the requirement that public companies issue quarterly disclosure reports. The SEC has received almost a quarter million comments (orders of magnitude more than normal) and they are almost universally against it. Some of this is organized, organizations or company that represent or advocate for investors trying to get people to write in. But it’s mainly that there is simply zero constituency for this: retail investors, institutional investors, former SEC chairs, academics who study business. According to Axios, the pro side was “the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and Exxon Mobile.” As they note, the agency has to consider the comments. It’s not a vote. They can move forward regardless.

What struck me here is that it’s almost impossible to look at the current state of the U.S. economy, equity markets, trends in retail investing, the widespread public exposure to mutual funds and index funds, and the increasing inattention to white-collar crime and think that what the economy needs is less transparency. The current head of the SEC, Paul Atkins, has pitched these changes as a way to “make IPOs great again.” First of all, it’s not entirely clear why IPOs should be great again. We want new companies. New companies finding new points of market need, devising new services, finding ways to chip away at the dead wood of monopoly and bureaucratic sclerosis is important to the economy. But that’s not the same as a high-octane culture of IPOs. Indeed, to the extent there are fewer IPOs, it’s more tied to the growth of monopolies. If there are new ideas to be nurtured, it’s happening within the monopolies, or they’re bought out or snuffed out early by those monopolies to ward off future competitors.