Macro: Trust, Regimes, and How to Position Across Them
Macro: Trust, Regimes, and How to Position Across Them I. Trust is the substrate of growth Start with the thing that is so obvious it usually goes unexamined: growth happens almost exclusively during periods of high trust. Not high resources, not high talent, not even high technology — high trust. Trust is the quiet precondition that makes everything else convertible into output. The reason is mechanical, not sentimental. Trust is what lets strangers coordinate without each pair having to bilaterally establish, from scratch, that the other won’t cheat them. When you can assume a contract will be honored, a deed will be recognized, a currency will still mean tomorrow what it meant today, you can spend your energy building. When you cannot, you spend it defending — guarding what you have, verifying every counterparty, settling disputes yourself, hedging against expropriation. That defensive expenditure is pure overhead. It produces nothing. It is the friction that a high-trust society has quietly removed and a low-trust one pays in full. ...