Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

Michael Burry to shut down hedge fund, names Phil Clifton as successor
Nov. 13, 2025 11:34 AM ETNVDA, PLTR
By: Sinchita Mitra, SA News Editor

"Big Short" investor Michael Burry has reportedly closed his firm Scion Asset Management and named Phil Clifton as his successor.

Earlier in the day, several posts on X circulated a photo of a letter dated October 27 from Burry to Scion's investors saying that he was winding down his fund.

The closure of the firm was confirmed by the Financial Times, citing two people with direct knowledge of the letter Burry sent to investors.

"With a heavy heart, I will liquidate the funds and return capital—but for a small audit/tax holdback – by year’s end. My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets," the letter said.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4521592-m ... -successor

The major short-focused hedge fund that shut down at the peak of the 2000 dot-com bubble was Tiger Management, founded by Julian Robertson.

Tiger Management closed in March 2000, exactly as the NASDAQ hit its all-time high of 5,048 on March 10, 2000, marking the top of the dot-com bubble.

In his famous closure letter (March 30, 2000), Robertson wrote:
"The key to the hedge fund business is to compound money for investors. We have not been able to do that recently... As a result, we have decided to return all capital to investors."

The End of the Game; Tiger Management, Old-Economy Advocate, Is Closing
By Gretchen Morgenson
March 31, 2000

The financial markets humble ordinary investors all the time. In Julian H. Robertson Jr., head of Tiger Management, they have humbled an investing giant.

After 20 years of generating superlative investment returns by buying stocks that were undervalued and selling short those that carried excessive valuations, Mr. Robertson, 67, confirmed yesterday that he was shutting Tiger's operations. He has essentially decided to stop driving the wrong way down the one-way technology thoroughfare that Wall Street has become.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/31/busi ... osing.html

[FullMoon]

It's pretty interesting how much publicity surrounds Burry. His latest announcements have made several days of my Google feeds even though I haven't searched or clicked on any of the news. Because it's been talked about by most of the podcasts that I've seen recently. He's quite famous indeed. Maybe that's why he had bow out.

[Navigator]

Timing anything in the market is extremely difficult, if not impossible. He knows, as most of us do here, that a financial meltdown is coming. He just put too much money into that sentiment too early.

[tim]

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/what-weve-lost

What We've Lost

What we've lost are the foundations of a healthy standard of living / quality of life.

Amidst the constant drumbeat of tech “progress” and grandiose “solutions,” it’s a useful exercise to ask: what have we lost in the past 40 years despite all the “progress” and “solutions”? Put another way: what did we have in 1985 that we no longer have, despite all the “progress”?

1. We no longer have affordable, functional healthcare. As I have documented, based on what I paid as an employer and self-employed worker, healthcare insurance was still affordable in 1985; this is no longer the case. By functional, I mean universally accessible and sustainable for those employed in healthcare.

Neither condition applies today. Financially marginalized Americans don’t have the same access to the care that is available to wealthy Americans and those with gold-plated insurance. For many Americans, their access to care is little better (or worse) than low-income, developed-nation standards.

As for those working in healthcare, burnout and changing jobs to increase pay and reduce overwork are now standard features of frontline employment in healthcare.

2. Our collective health is systemically worse. These charts from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) tell the story: in 1985, relatively few Americans were classified as obese (BMI of 30 or higher). While BMI is not an ideal measure, moderate BMI levels reflect a lifestyle of moderate activity and relatively healthy diet. By 2023, the situation had deteriorated to the point that by more recent metrics, almost 80% of adult Americans are overweight/obese, conditions that generate a spectrum of health risks.

3. Our public infrastructure has crumbled even as our private wealth soared. Maybe the roadways and highways are pothole-free and well-maintained in your area, and public transit is clean, reliable and cheap, but as a general rule, public infrastructure has decayed over the the past 40 years to the point that it’s often better in developing-world nations than in the US.

While our public infrastructure has decayed, private wealth has soared from $60 trillion in 2010 to $167 trillion in 2025. Measured by overall health and security, the top 10% are doing splendidly, having accumulated the majority of the $100 trillion in private wealth gains, while the bottom 60% are experiencing decay and decline.

4. Housing is no longer affordable. By any legitimate measure--for example, the number of hours of work needed to buy a median-priced house--housing is no longer affordable for the bottom 80% of the populace.

5. Moral decay has rotted the foundations of our society and economy. Self-interest is now the exclusive pursuit and measure of “success”: consequences have no bearing on decisions unless they detract from one’s private gains. Since a truthful accounting of consequences is detrimental to self-interest, artifice is now the norm. Authenticity has been replaced by curation--everything is gamed, massaged, managed to present a fake image or spectacle.

Here is a chart of healthcare insurance costs. This doesn’t reflect the erosion of value generated by the expansion of co-pays, deductions and exclusions.



Here is the CDC map of obesity from 1985:



Here is the CDC map of obesity for 2023:



Private wealth has skyrocketed...



... but not everyone gained ground. As I have often noted, the bottom 50%’s share of household wealth has declined. Only the top tier benefited from The Everything Bubble.



Measured by wages, housing affordability is now worse than at the peak of the 2005-07 Housing Bubble #1.



As for moral decay, since honest appraisals are anathema, there will be no admission that the status quo is far more corrupt than it was in 1985. We all know it, but it cannot be admitted publicly, or ours is now a culture of excuses, prevarications, rationalizations, empty slogans, distractions and grandiose claims. The inability to admit that the status quo is corrupt is a measure of the depth of systemic moral decay.

What we’ve lost are the foundations of a healthy standard of living / quality of life.

[tim]

https://www.collapselife.com/p/what-hap ... as-nothing

What happens when Gen Z has nothing to lose

A young generation who feels the future has been denied to them can topple the old order. But they rarely control what rises in its place, making them useful pawns as a new order emerges.

Generational change is often understood as something slow and gradual — an evolution shaped by institutions, softened by time, and guided by norms that hold society together. Yet a quick look at history tells a different story.

When a large cohort of young people comes of age, believing the world ahead of them is unequal, corrupt, and offers little of value to their future, the results are rarely gentle. A youth bulge with no future becomes a fuse, and once lit, it doesn’t burn slowly.

This pattern is older than nation-states themselves, and it reappears whenever the same pressures converge: too many young people, too few paths to a life of meaning, too much corruption at the top, and a political order determined to protect its privileges rather than adapt. When those forces collide, the young stop believing the system can be repaired. They begin to imagine that only rupture can open a path forward.

Where they hold demographic power, revolt often takes to the streets. Where they do not, it can often surface as an ideological insurgency at the ballot box.

Nepal reached its breaking point earlier this year, when the government abruptly banned 26 major social media platforms. For the country’s young people — nearly a third of the population — the ban was not an isolated act but the culmination of years of corruption, stalled mobility, and elite privilege.

The September 2025 protests grew with astonishing speed. Tens of thousands poured into the capital, Kathmandu, demanding accountability. When demonstrators attempted to breach parliament grounds, police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. Government buildings were vandalized or set ablaze, dozens were killed, and within days the government lifted the ban and the prime minister resigned. The uprising was not just about digital censorship; it was the eruption of long-suppressed frustration among a generation that sees no future in the system they inherited.

Mexico now stands on a similarly unstable threshold. One-quarter of its population belongs to a generation raised amid inequality, cartel violence, and institutional decay. Over the past several weeks, protests under the banner “Generation Zeta” have spread from Tijuana to Oaxaca, fueled by anger at corruption and the sense that political systems no longer serve them.

The immediate spark was the November 1 assassination of Carlos Manzo, the vocal, anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan — a killing that shocked even a country accustomed to violence. For many young Mexicans, Manzo’s death was proof that the political system could no longer even protect those who governed it, let alone the people it claimed to serve. Protests escalated into ongoing violent clashes in Mexico City, where police have deployed tear gas, more than 100 officers have been injured, and dozens of civilians detained.

Young Mexicans have been losing faith in the existing order for years. According to OECD figures, nearly one in five were not in employment, education, or training in 2023 — a striking measure of social stagnation. Their support for sweeping change is a fight for survival. They do not believe the institutions built by their elders can deliver safety, dignity, or hope. And, increasingly, they are no longer willing to wait for reform.

Even in the United States — where revolt looks different — the same generational logic is taking hold. The 2025 New York City mayoral race revealed a quiet but unmistakable insurgency. Youth turnout surged to levels rarely seen in municipal elections, and young voters overwhelmingly backed a candidate who offered not only policy shifts but an entirely different language for describing their lives. Similar patterns appeared in New Jersey, Virginia, and California, where young voters embraced structural reforms by decisive margins. Their choices reflect a rising willingness to abandon the assumptions that shaped American life for the past century.

The real question, however, is not whether the young can break a political order — they clearly can — but who steps into the vacuum afterward? The French and Iranian revolutions both offer instructive warnings. In 18th-century France, the vast youth cohort that filled the streets with demands for liberty, equality, and fraternity ultimately cleared the way for Napoleon, whose rule proved more authoritarian than the monarchy he replaced. In 1970s Iran, the young activists who risked their lives to topple the Shah saw their revolution captured by the clerical establishment, which built a system even more restrictive than the one they had destroyed.

Youth-driven revolutions excel at dismantling the old world, but rarely at planning and executing the governance of a new one. Their energy opens the breach, but that void is almost always filled by those better organized, more disciplined, and less sentimental (or perhaps naïve). The world that emerges afterward is usually shaped by groups who have long been waiting in the wings, ready to seize the moment and move history forward, but not necessarily in the direction envisioned by those pushing for change.

The United States is not exempt from these forces, though its youth revolt currently expresses itself through ideology rather than street upheaval. American Gen Z does not have the demographic weight of young Nepalis or Mexicans, and the country is not yet brittle enough for the kind of rupture seen in Kathmandu. But the system still offers the young a narrow channel — the vote — and they are using it with increasing determination.

The ideological shape of that vote reflects the same emotional and material pressures driving youth unrest elsewhere. As Patrick Wood observed in a recent Collapse Life interview, younger generations are turning toward technocracy or socialism not just because they’ve been indoctrinated in school to believe in the evils of ___X___: fill in the blank: capitalism, white supremacy, transphobia, toxic masculinity, or some combination thereof. It’s also the profound sense of abandonment.

“They have no hope at all,” Wood said. “They’re looking to the future to provide something for them, and they can’t find it. Capitalism is on the chopping block. Democracy is on the chopping block… They see no hope in these things, so they’re going to try something new.” His assessment captures a mood that voting patterns only faintly reveal: young Americans are not just becoming radicals for the sake of ideology; they are responding to a future that feels structurally closed.


The difference between the United States and places like Nepal or Mexico is not that American youth are more gratified. It’s that the American political system retains just enough elasticity to absorb some of their anger, giving them a place to channel frustration before it becomes more explosive. But elasticity is not permanence. When economic mobility continues to erode, when housing and healthcare remain out of reach, when work loses its promise and institutions lose their legitimacy, ideological revolt can sharpen into something the existing system can no longer contain.

Every era believes its institutions are sturdier than they actually are. Yet history is clear: when a large, frustrated generation concludes that the future is being withheld from them, they’ll find a way to pry it loose. Sometimes the breach is violent, sometimes electoral, sometimes ideological. But once a generation stops believing the old world will deliver a place for them, the old world rarely survives intact.

[tim]

https://www.collapselife.com/p/borrowed ... en-society

Borrowed trust in a broken society

In the West, we used to live in a genuine high-trust society. No longer. Today, we're a low-trust society, masquerading as a high-trust society, fueling a booming 'trust industrial complex.'

In a high-trust society, the machinery hums quietly. People know the guardrails are intact, the institutions (mostly) work, and the people operating them, flawed as they may be, act in good faith. You don’t need to second-guess every contract, every handshake, every oral promise. You assume the wheels won’t come off.

Many people in the West still live inside that assumption. But that façade is long gone.

We no longer live in a high-trust society. Instead, we’re living in a low-trust society with trust industry scaffolding — an entire ecosystem of highly-paid intermediaries whose full-time job is to simulate the trust we no longer have in each other.

Before going any further, credit where it’s due: this line of thought belongs to Limina of The Human Responsibilities Tribunal and Riff Raft podcast. She mentioned flawed trust in an email after she got soaked for $5,000 on a real estate deal that went sour. Her conclusion was stark: whole classes of professionals (real estate agents, lawyers, title companies, home inspectors) exist today not because trust is strong, but because it has utterly collapsed, and we’re patching the void with contractors, paperwork, fees, and legally drafted repair clauses.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The realtor who stands between two people who no longer take each other’s word, working just hard enough to secure the commission.

The lawyer turning human betrayal into billable hours, stretching a 15-minute phone call into an invoice. Don’t forget the fax charges (yes, they still exist) and ubiquitous “document fees.”

The inspector issuing a certificate of safety not because the structure is or isn’t sound, but because the ritual demands documentation.

The insurance adjuster who arrives after disaster not to help you rebuild, but to determine how little their employer will have to pay.

The mediator whose very presence signals that a community can no longer bear the weight of resolving its own disputes.

In a truly high-trust culture, most interactions run on norms — shared values and clear consequences for betraying those. You don’t need a 70-page contract to buy a house from someone you grew up with. You don’t need a platoon of compliance officers to make sure employees aren’t laundering money or gaming the system in your mom-and-pop shop. You don’t need five layers of sign-offs to hire someone whose character your community can vouch for. And if you’re the one being hired, you don’t torch your reputation by acting badly, because people will remember — and that memory has weight; behaving badly isn’t just a reflection on you, it’s a reflection on your family, too.

We’ve traded human bonds for institutional girding in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘convenience.’ And like every substitution, it comes with a cost. When trust becomes something you rent rather than something you grow, the center of gravity shifts. The relationships that once held people together are replaced by nameless, faceless intermediaries who, more than any reputational or community motivation, exist to fatten themselves on the transaction.

The irony is that the more we hire brokers, gatekeepers, and credentialed middlemen, the less we trust. The bigger the trust industry grows, the more brittle the society beneath it becomes. And when the notaries and lawyers and inspectors and regulators prove to be no more reliable than the people they were supposed to replace, societies rarely return to organic trust.

They turn to surveillance instead.

You can already feel the pivot: digital IDs to prove who you are. Biometrics to prove you belong. Social scoring to prove you deserve access. Programmable money to prove your intentions are pure. Everything verified, everything logged, everything tracked — not because trust has been rebuilt, but because its absence has become intolerable.

Low-trust societies don’t drift gently into collapse. They lurch toward total control, mistaking monitoring for safety, renaming restriction as ‘responsibility,’ building a panopticon and calling it public service.

What Limina grasped — and what so many miss — is that we’ve forgotten what real trust even feels like. We’ve lived so long with synthetic trust that the original has become almost unimaginable. Worse, a sizable portion of society doesn’t even realize the rupture happened. Or they do, but their own mortgage and car payments require just the right amount of ‘blind eye’ to get through the day.

The trust industry is a monument to what we’ve lost — and like all monuments, it is both a tribute and a warning. A tribute to something gone that perhaps we should have preserved, and a warning that the more we rely on figureheads instead of one another, the faster what little trust exists begins to fade.

In our age of convenience, there’s an app for everything — except the glue that actually holds a society together. Real trust comes from time spent in the real world, with real people, really talking, laughing, forgiving, sharing, carrying a little weight for each other. It’s slow, it’s human, it’s sometimes messy and even a bit inconvenient.

We should all get back to trying it sometime, ‘cause it sure beats a ‘thumbs up’ on Facebook.