If you want insight into what’s happening with the social technology we call global financial markets, pay attention to what Nathan Tankus calls the “Trump-Musk payments crisis” and the related idea that the stock market is “a conventional wisdom processor.”

Is this directly related to Trump’s attack on higher education? Yes, because the range and intensity of the grabs for power are all of a piece. The conventional wisdom seems to be that markets will constrain Trump.

Tankus points to an underappreciated aspect of the current crisis: the payments system is on the verge of breaking. If that happens, we truly have no way to gauge the effects on any of our social institutions.