John Burn-Murdoch

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Despite a massive head start, BlueSky has now overtaken Threads in the US 👇

NEW 🧵

The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.

Story: www.ft.com/content/6dc1...

NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).

My column: www.ft.com/content/3046...

The key chart right now:

Usually US economic pain is cushioned by falling bond yields and a strengthening dollar, which mean lower interest rates and more spending power for consumers.

This time we’re seeing the opposite, meaning the pain will be amplified.

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left.

www.ft.com/content/29fd...

This is really getting quite remarkable

• BlueSky user numbers have doubled in the past week and now total 3.5 million across US & UK 🚀

• Number of people deleting their X/Twitter account remains way up

And the next chart is particularly notable...

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

2) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic.

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Striking stat from @kellycnbc.bsky.social on this:

The rise in treasury yields since Trump’s tariffs were announced leads to an increase in US debt interest payments that is larger than all the DOGE savings.

NEW 🧵 Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s

What should we make of this?

www.ft.com/content/a801...

We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇 

British NIMBYism is truly a sight to behold.

“We are rejecting this solar farm, because one time I saw an electric vehicle on fire, which reminded me that decades ago a coal mining disaster killed lots of children”.

Oxford Clarion @oxfordclarion.bsky.social

A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. Councillors were concerned about the risk of fire, one drawing parallels to the 1966 Aberfan disaster: “Until someone can guarantee it is safe, I can’t support it.”

Quick thread on the BBC and the political and societal significance of recent developments:

One of the main reasons the UK has historically been so much less polarised than the US, is that Britain has a shared source of information, consumed and trusted by most people regardless of their politics.

The website vs app split for Bluesky vs Threads captures the difference in user base and usage patterns beautifully.

Bluesky = knowledge sector workers who have it open all day in a tab next to their emails. “Wait what was I doing again?”

Threads = normies watching recipe videos on the commute.

NEW from me:

Political hostility, high visa fees and (in the case of the UK) stagnant incomes are making the UK and US less attractive destinations for top international talent.

That steep decline in the appeal of moving to the US after 2016 is 👀

Here are UK & US BlueSky numbers separately, to show what’s driving the trends:

• Aug 3rd: Musk says ‘civil war is inevitable’ in UK during far right riots

• Oct 17th: Musk changes the block function on X, prompting a massive exodus

• Nov 7th: thousands more migrate in aftermath of Trump victory

Grimly crisp illustration of the mechanism whereby toxic and unrepresentative social media shapes mainstream coverage.

Prominent journalist logs onto X, sees claim, assumes truth, repeats in national broadcast from trusted mainstream news org.

Happens all day every day, just especially stark here.

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding:

Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere.

samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

New consumer sentiment data just out for April:

Americans’ expectations for how the economy will fare over the next year are now at their worst in 45 years.

Consumer confidence is down 40% since Trump’s inauguration, including a 20% drop among Republicans.

South Korea gender divide update 😲

Young men lean right by 50 points
(74% conservative vs 24% centre-left)

Young women lean left by 22 points
(58% centre-left vs 36% cons)

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words:

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.

This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.

The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.

Reply to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com

3) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record.

Economic uncertainty update:

The thing about veering wildly between policy positions, favouring and then discarding a new maverick advisor each week, and using contradictory justifications at every turn, is that even if one particular pivot is in the direction of sanity, chaos is the constant.