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An independent authority on economic power

Our work investigates how strategic advantage is created, constrained, and compounded.

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Mechanics of strategic advantage

The Power Curve tracks where economic advantage is compounding and how it alters the operational landscape for decision-makers. We isolate the vectors reshaping capital allocation, global competition, and state capacity.

Our framework is structural and strategic. We map incentives—what capital and institutions are actually rewarded for doing—against industrial resources, technology, and constraints that govern what they can execute. The gap between the two separates stated ambition from durable economic advantage.

Each intelligence publication and macroeconomic report isolates the primary driver of a shift, traces its compounding effects, and assesses where constraints create bottlenecks. We rigorously separate structural realities from market noise, and ground truth from consensus.

The objective is to make structural shifts legible before they price into the market. For capital allocators, that means identifying mispriced risk and concentrating returns. For policymakers, it means defining the limits of state intervention. For executive operators, it means establishing a rigorous baseline to commit resources, preserve optionality, and execute a pivot.

Brendan Hart, founder of The Power Curve
About Brendan

Brendan Hart

Brendan Hart is an economist and entrepreneur who studies how economic power is created, compounded, and constrained. He has spent two decades building teams and organizations across industry and government.

As publisher of The Power Curve, Hart analyzes strategic competition, economic infrastructure, and institutional resilience for leaders who run organizations, develop policy, and allocate capital. His work combines an economist’s discipline about incentives and constraints with an operator’s experience founding ventures in defense, technology, and workforce development.

Hart served as a team leader in the U.S. Marine Corps Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team before co-founding BMNT, a defense innovation accelerator that created a commercial bridge between Silicon Valley and Washington. BMNT helped emerging technology companies win government funding, including companies later acquired by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. He also co-founded Student Veterans of America, which has served more than 750,000 members across 1,500 chapters since founding and helped secure the passage and implementation of the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

Hart participates in global forums such as the Milken Institute Global Conference and the Aspen Security Forum. He was a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and a member of the Aspen Institute’s Society of Fellows. His work has been featured by ABC News, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and U.S. News & World Report.

Hart holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

Disciplined Tradecraft

  • Systems over snapshots

    We map the structural mechanics and compounding feedback loops that dictate long-term outcomes.

  • Base rates over narratives

    We anchor our assessments in historical baselines, probabilistic modeling, and empirical data.

  • Incentives over intentions

    We evaluate what markets and institutions are financially and structurally rewarded for doing, testing stated intentions against operational reality.

  • Second-order over first impressions

    We isolate supply chain ripple effects, operational bottlenecks, and systemic unintended consequences.

Intelligence Standards

  • Structural independence

    Funded entirely by our member base. Zero corporate underwriting and zero pay-to-play access.

  • Verifiable evidence

    We systematically cite primary sources, describe our analytical models, and invite institutional scrutiny.

  • Executive clarity

    We produce detailed intelligence plainly, and favor evidence-backed conclusions over academic indecision.

  • Accountability and calibration

    We systematically update our models and recalibrate our assessments as the ground truth changes.

Advisory Firewalls

Private advisory clients do not commission, review, or fund published research. We disclose any client relationship relevant to an intelligence publication within the publication.

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