Recommended by Scenarica
Govcon Weekly turns the opaque world of government contracting into something operators can actually act on, written by someone who clearly works the terrain rather than just observing it. Practical, specific, and refreshingly free of theory.
Institutional macro thinking applied to the intersection of AI, digital settlement, and market structure. Jordi Visser bridges thirty years of Wall Street experience with the structural shift that most macro commentary treats as noise rather than signal.
Sahm is one of the few macro writers who can hold a public position, watch it get pressure-tested by the data, and update without performance. A Year With No Jobs But No Recession was an exceptionally clean piece of cycle reasoning. If you want the Fed read without the chest-thumping, this is it.
Ziemba writes the intersection of sanctions and sovereign balance sheets better than anyone working independently. Her Spring Meetings questions piece was a clean reset of what to actually watch in 2026 EM debt. A practitioner’s voice that has covered this through several cycles.
Jordana’s daily is the only Latin America briefing I have on rotation that consistently picks the right items. The Cauca attack coverage and the Bukele deal-within-a-deal piece were both clean reads. The right first stop for the region.
Saifedean writes the Austrian economics frame on Bitcoin with the discipline of the original work. Posting cadence varies. Each piece lands like a chapter.
DeLong is the rare academic who actually publishes daily and still says useful things. The Slouching Towards Utopia digressions are a feature, the data discipline is the substrate. If you want economic history written by someone who actually reads it, this is the one.
Jack writes defense-tech accountability the way it should be done, FOIA-driven and structurally honest about who profits from which contract. The cadence is fast enough to be useful and disciplined enough to trust. A useful corrective to vendor-led natsec coverage.
Packy McCormick writes about technology and business with infectious optimism and real analytical depth, the rare combination that makes you smarter and more ambitious at the same time. Not Boring lives up to its name better than almost anything on Substack.
Decades of firsthand market experience distilled into clear, actionable options and market analysis. The kind of perspective that only comes from having lived through every cycle since the 1970s.
Sharp capital markets writing with a contrarian eye on the trades the consensus is already pricing wrong. One of the few small Substacks worth following before everyone else does.
Fred writes the policy-document decode that English-language readers usually have to wait weeks for. The 2026 anti-involution piece was the best single read I have seen on the topic. Subscribe if you care about how Chinese economic policy actually gets made.
Roberts has been on the China beat long enough to remember the last three rounds of US-China narrative whiplash, and it shows. The recent rare-earths and Section 122 coverage was sourced from people, not press releases. A working journalist’s weekly, in the best sense.
The deepest AI infrastructure equity research on Substack. Daniel Romero goes past the GPU headlines and into the physical layer, datacentre economics, power architecture, and vendor selection, where the actual margins are decided.
Daily leadership thinking you can read in a minute that actually changes how you operate. Admired Leadership strips management advice down to the specific behaviours that move the needle.
The Treasury Market Dark Spot is the kind of post that reads like someone who has actually traced a coupon settlement through a tri-party book. Conks does monetary plumbing without showing off, and the Friday cadence means you actually read it. The Pozsar comparison gets thrown around too easily, but here it earns the comparison.
Clear-eyed valuation analysis that builds frameworks rather than chasing headlines. One of the more disciplined approaches to asset pricing on the platform.
Institutional-grade global macro research built for futures traders. Global Macro Method reads the policy regime and cross-asset signals with the precision of a prop desk and the transparency of publishing every trade alongside the thesis.
Data-driven political analysis from one of the sharpest election forecasters in the country. Rachel Bitecofer maps the structural dynamics of American politics with the precision of a political scientist and the clarity of someone who understands that elections are won in the framing.
The Scowcroft Group publishes institutional advisory-grade geopolitical risk analysis on Substack. The 2026 Geopolitical Risk Outlook and the weekly Week Ahead series are the kind of structured output that risk desks and family offices pay for. Subscribe for the advisory-firm lens on geopolitical risk.
Entrepreneurship and AI content with strong community energy. Connects builders across industries and disciplines.
Import AI remains the cleanest weekly survey of frontier research from someone who actually trains models. The Issue 441 essay on managing agent fleets while hiking, paired with sober coverage of METR time horizons, is the rare lab-adjacent writing that does not collapse into either marketing or doom.
Data-driven economics writing that makes structural inequality visible through sharp visualisations. Visualising Economics turns ONS data and policy research into stories that actually land.
Kishore covers Asian central banks and growth dynamics with the discipline of someone trained at Oxford Economics, without the institutional throat-clearing. The recent RBI and PBoC pieces were tightly argued and properly sourced. A good complement to anyone reading West-skewed macro.
Jill writes macro-financial analysis with the weight of a former Fed regulator behind it. The differentiated insights on the global political economy and markets have been consistently useful. Subscribe if you want the institutional perspective most macro newsletters lack.
Millennial Masters is for the builder-minded reader, the moat-aware, track-record crowd. Daniel Ionescu writes about how durable things get built, and how to tell real edge from luck. If you read us for how the odds move, read him for how the winners are made.
ChinaTalk pairs the tech-policy beat with the kind of historical detours most newsletters cannot pull off. The Market Garden piece earlier this month was a characteristic example of how Jordan keeps the register both serious and readable. The most influential China-tech newsletter on Substack.
Johnston runs the Friday oil wrap that holds up against any sell-side desk note. He resists the perma-shortage and perma-glut tribes with equal energy, and the chart work is genuinely original. The single best independent commodity read for someone who cares about macro, not narratives.
Steve Byrnes is the rare AGI safety researcher whose threat model isn’t about LLMs at all. His “Foom and Doom” series and the brain-like AGI safety posts walk through actor-critic reinforcement learning and what it implies for alignment. Technical, patient, and one of the most original voices in the field.
Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan rebranded from AI Snake Oil to AI as Normal Technology to push the thesis that AI follows historical general-purpose technology diffusion patterns. Whether you agree or not, the framework is one of the few that lets you actually price disagreement. Princeton CITP rigor, accessible writing.
The Innermost Loop is Alex Wissner-Gross's daily map of the AI and frontier-tech edge, the day's real developments compressed into one briefing with a scientist's eye for what moves the curve. Rare signal-to-noise, and it reads like literature.
Willy’s Bitcoin Vector Lite is investor-flow analysis from one of the few people who actually built the original on-chain stack. Regime calls are honest about uncertainty. Quietly useful.
SemiAnalysis is the source for AI hardware economics. The InferenceX v2 piece comparing Blackwell, Hopper, and AMD MI355X across SGLang, vLLM, and TRTLLM is the kind of benchmarking work nobody else publishes openly. The CPU landscape piece reset my priors on Intel Diamond Rapids.
Macronomics decodes global macro through a credit and rates lens, and Martin Tixier has a gift for finding the threshold the rest of the commentary walks past. His "Crossing the Rubicon" piece on how much interest cost the US can carry, with Turkey as the cautionary parallel, was the sharpest macro-credit framing we read this year. If you want the number that decides the regime instead of the noise around it, read him.
Sharp geopolitical analysis that reads the signal underneath the headline. Consistently ahead of the consensus narrative on great power dynamics.
Nico writes Bitcoin mining the way an operator would. Hashprice context, ASIC market reality, public miner balance sheets. No drama, useful weekly.