Substack Q&A: Quoth The Raven's "Fringe Finance"
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</picture>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:
I have spent years reading news that, in my opinion, often missed the point and buried the lede. Up until a couple years ago, I just thought it was because the mainstream media needed to be careful. Now, it has become clear that it is likely due to the mainstream media and financial media’s purpose to drive a narrative which serves the interests of a small minority, rather than the common citizen.
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
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