Another very worthwhile, recommended read from Tindale...
Feb 20, 2026
Highlights:
The Amputation Algorithm - How the Fed’s Models Are Financing Western Defeat
Craig TindaleFeb 20, 2026
Highlights:
- "[The Fed] ... relies on models that translate a complex economy into a tractable system... the framework's calculus fails. Heavy industry is outside the model, a huge blind spot."
- "It's basically a monetary design built for a service economy, applied to an era in which sovereignty/rivalry rides on minerals, power, and midstream chemistry."
- "A central bank that targets a constructed index must choose what the index stands for. In practice, CPI and PCE stand for household purchasing power within a consumption basket. They don't account for the cost of rebuilding productive capacity..."
- "A balance-sheet regime can be “ample” in reserves and still starve industry. The monetary system can be liquid while the industrial system dies. Frame this concept in your lens because it is essential and somewhat inevitable that this lens be adopted broadly. It's better if we adopt this lens asap. It draws a line between financial liquidity and industrial liquidity. The Fed manages the former. China’s model is built to command both."
- "A market system prices risk in terms of volatility and uncertainty. It demands high returns to compensate. A state system prices risk as strategic exposure and treats supply security as the return. ... The West reads stress as a signal to retrench. China reads distress as a signal to accumulate."
- "{R}ivalry forces an existential question: what must be priced explicitly because markets will not? Why can't "markets " price it? Because the rival is exploiting the pricing signal implicitly and explicitly. "
- "A consumption-index central bank, operating with reversible-capital models, will keep tightening into conditions that permanently erode industrial capacity, and rivals with state-anchored capital will buy the wreckage. ... the Fed is unknowingly selecting for sovereign defeat."
