SIROTA’S SIGNALS: The Lost Memos That Predicted This Era

Who wrote a series of Nostradamus-like Wall Street memos predicting the era we now live in? Why are the president’s emergency powers kept secret? How much are taxpayers paying to subsidize factory farms? What do AI data centers have to do with destroying your home’s electrical appliances? When was America’s first electric-vehicle era?

The answers to these questions and more can be found below in today’s edition of Sirota’s Signals, a regular dose of must-read stories, missed nuggets, and worthwhile distractions from Lever founder David Sirota, exclusively for paid subscribers.

THE PLUTONOMY MEMOS: As we welcome in 2025, it’s worth noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the so-called Plutonomy Memos — a series of Nostradamus-like reports that predicted much of the world we live in today. 

The memos written in 2005 and 2006 came from Citigroup, and they effectively admit that Wall Street and its neoliberal political allies were creating a feudal American economy. These documents — which you can find here, here, and here — survive on economist Brad DeLong’s blog and in a few old media mentions, book references, and tweets but barely exist on the internet (Citigroup reportedly worked to get them memory-holed off the Internet).