About

Explain Capital explains important developments in business, finance, economics, markets, technology, accounting, and policy from first principles. The point is understanding: what happened, what it means, how the mechanism works, and what is still unknown.

The reader is assumed to be intelligent, and not assumed to arrive with the vocabulary conventional business journalism leaves unspoken. An explanation should be readable by a serious generalist and still accurate for someone who already lives in the material.

Assume intelligence. Remove assumed knowledge.

Every explanation is built to answer a fixed set of questions, and to stop when the evidence stops.

1. What happened?
2. What does that actually mean?
3. How does it work?
4. What is the economic mechanism underneath it?
5. How does money, ownership, value, risk, or resources move?
6. Why does it matter?
7. What concepts do you need in order to understand the event?
8. What remains uncertain?

Primary evidence is preferred when it is practical to obtain. That includes:

• SEC filings and other company disclosures
• Investor-relations materials and earnings documents
• Regulatory releases
• Federal Reserve, BLS, and BEA publications
• Other government statistics and official statements

Credible secondary reporting may supplement primary evidence. It does not replace it, and it is labeled as secondary. A sample explanation in this edition says so in the source list. It does not invent a filing.

These categories stay separate. They are not collapsed into a single confident paragraph.

• Reported factTaken from a primary document or a directly observed record.
• Derived factArithmetic or logic that follows from reported facts, with the steps recoverable.
• EstimateA number that depends on a method, a model, or an incomplete observation.
• AssumptionA condition the explanation needs, stated rather than smuggled in.
• InterpretationA reading of what the facts imply. It can be reasonable and still be disputed.
• HypothesisA claim about what might be true, offered as a claim, not as a finding.

AI systems may assist with research, analysis, drafting, organization, and visual explanation. Assistance is not authorship, and it is not a source. Facts, derivations, estimates, assumptions, and interpretation still have to be labeled. A model’s fluency is not evidence.

Work in this edition is published under Explain Capital. There are no staff biographies, because none are being claimed. Later, a piece may be labeled by desk — Markets, Deals, Accounting, Policy — as a description of subject, not as a fictional person.

The event explanations currently on the site are samples. Northline, Harbor & Co., Marlow Freight, and Halden Health are composite companies. Their figures were stipulated so the mechanisms — capital expenditure, enterprise value, dilution — could be shown exactly. They are not reports about real firms.

The concept pages are explanations of the ideas themselves. Where they use those composites, the example is marked as an illustration.

Business, Economy, Accounting, and Policy are not public sections yet. A topic appears in the navigation only when an explanation exists to put there.

A factual error should be corrected in the explanation, with a note of what changed. The intended address is corrections@explaincapital.com. That inbox is not connected in this version. The form below shows how a correction would be submitted. It does not store or send the note.