A Socratic letter on how money actually works — and why the answer is more disquieting than the textbooks suggest. Written for those who would rather understand than be reassured.
Interest rates are not a technical adjustment. They are the price of your future. And someone else is setting them.
→ Read the latestA 210-issue Socratic arc on monetary dysfunction. Each issue stands alone. Read sequentially and the argument compounds toward something the textbooks won't tell you.
Read on Substack →Companion video essays for each Letter issue. The same arguments, made visible. Short long-form for those who think with their eyes as well as their reading.
Subscribe on YouTube →Editorial instruments built to make the Letter's arguments empirically visible. The first asks a simple question: what does inflation actually look like, sector by sector, dollar versus Bitcoin?
Open the tool →The Cantillon Letter takes its name from Richard Cantillon, an 18th-century economist who observed that newly created money does not arrive evenly. It enters the economy at specific points, benefits specific people first, and reaches everyone else only after prices have already adjusted upward.
This is not a historical curiosity. It is the operating logic of every modern financial system. Most of what you have been taught about money — what it is, where it comes from, who controls its supply, what inflation actually measures — is incomplete in ways that are not accidental.
The Letter is a 210-issue Socratic arc that develops the full argument in sequence — from the nature of money, through the mechanics of debasement, to the question of what comes next. It is written for readers who would rather understand than be reassured, and who suspect the textbook account leaves something important out.
Each Thursday: one issue, one argument, one step further into a system most people inhabit without ever understanding. Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.