UK

The Party explained that it was targeting inequality, monopoly, and excessive financial risks, but some of the arrests seemed personal. Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate tycoon, received an unusually harsh sentence of eighteen years on corruption charges, after someone leaked an essay in which he mocked Xi as a “clown stripped naked who still insisted on being emperor.” None of the targets showed any organized political intentions. The only visible pattern is that Xi and his loyalists appeared intent on snuffing out rival sources of authority. One after another, he got rid of anyone with power, the entrepreneur said: “If you have influence, you have power. If you have capital, you have power.” Xi is said to have spoken bitterly of watching Boris Yeltsin contend with Russian tycoons in the nineteen-nineties. Joerg Wuttke told me, “When Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000, he assembled the oligarchs and said, basically, You can keep your money, but if you go into politics you’re done.” He went on, “In China, the big names should have learned from that meeting, because in this sense Putin and Xi Jinping are soul mates.” ... Local governments, short of cash, have adopted a subtle extortion method that lawyers call “taxation by investigation.” A factory owner in Shanghai told me that Party officials used bank records to identify residents with liquid assets of at least thirty million yuan—about four million dollars—and then offered them a choice: hand over twenty per cent or “risk a full tax audit.” Recently, the Party has signalled that the purge of the private sector is over, but many have grown wary. A former telecom executive cited an ancient expression—“shi, nong, gong, shang”—which describes a hierarchy of social classes: scholar-officials, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. “For two thousand years, the merchants were the lowest,” he said. “What Xi is doing is just a reversion to the imperial Chinese mean.” The big winners, in the current era, are officials with deep personal ties to Xi; he has stocked the Politburo with trusted aides, and has cultivated the military by boosting investment and replacing top leaders with loyalists. ... In the Xi era, that principle has become, in effect: It doesn’t matter if the cat catches mice, as long as it’s red.

https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/ Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”

This was the line I wanted to doublecheck:) Also: "Well, I've never liked Jum Malone's extreme manipulations. I don't wanna be known as the great manipulator like Jum Malone is. He paid less income taxes than anybody. He just pushed everything to the dry extreme." Somebody should ask Charlie what he thinks about Brookfield, since it is in a competition with Berkshire and Fairfax in other thread of this forum.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-31/uaw-strike-ups-drivers-writers-union-mark-record-wins-for-us-labor-movement?srnd=premium-europe&leadSource=uverify wall Workers in the US are getting record-breaking wage hikes this year thanks to strategic strikes and stunning contract wins. The result is a boost in middle-income wages and a shift in the balance of power between companies and their employees. Even before the United Auto Workers reached historic contract deals with carmakers, unions across the country had already won their members 6.6% raises on average in 2023 — the biggest bump in more than three decades, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Law.

I guess probability of all living hell in treasury market is still very low, but as soon as something happens (not necessarily something as serious as all living hell) I would expect abrupt end of QT and maybe start of QE4?

Thank you very much! I listened to it, very good interview with some really interesting tidbits, just wanted to check some places on transcript to be sure I understand them correctly:)

Does anybody know if there is transcript of this interview available? Tried to search and did not find find any, yet this is whar google shows on it's search page:

Thanks!

True:), but it is also good to know that the general market thinking is:)

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/wars-push-up-demand-for-weapons-sparking-fears-of-shortages-57d664ad?mod=hp_lista_pos1 With demand increasing faster than production, prices of some supplies have soared. NATO-standard 155-millimeter artillery shells, one of the West’s most basic armaments, had cost governments about $2,100 apiece before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, said Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, Stoltenberg’s top military adviser, at the NATO forum. The price of those shells, which Bauer dubbed “one of the most coveted objects in the world right now,” has increased fourfold, to about $8,400, he said. ... General Dynamics said it has been able to boost production of artillery shells and other munitions faster than expected, boosted by Pentagon investment in new facilities. The company is targeting annual production of one million shells, a fivefold increase. Sales at its combat unit, which employs more than 2,000 staff in Europe, had been expected to be flat at best this year. They are up 15% so far this year, stoked by orders for shells, as well as for armored vehicles and military bridges. “Frankly, we don’t see that demand signal slowing down,” Aiken said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/bank-stocks-sink-past-svb-crisis-lows-as-rates-upend-business

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/worst-october-in-five-years-is-chasing-stock-bulls-out-in-droves?srnd=premium&leadSource=uverify wall “It’s troubling that a market setback as internally deep as the current one hasn’t resulted in more improvement” in sentiment, said Doug Ramsey, chief investment officer at the Leuthold Group. “The ‘wall of worry’ accompanying much of the 2023 market action has morphed into a ‘slope of hope.”’

It is the direction China is moving. I do not disagree with you on this from the point of the dwellers:), but why would it be a bad for a country? Isn't it just much more productive way to house you population? Much more resources left for other/more productive sectors or just carrier ships and nuclear weapons:)? This is a good article on the whole topic: https://www.economist.com/international/2023/09/06/the-growing-global-movement-to-restrain-house-prices In many English-speaking countries, inspired by Victorian worries about “slums”, planning laws tended to prioritise detached houses. For urban planners, such as Ebenezer Howard, density was seen as akin to crowding. In packed industrial hotspots, “downzoning” and slum clearance were used to flatten cities and spread them out by force. The writer George Orwell was sceptical of the proceedings: “If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another,” he declared. But he reckoned that many workers in Britain did not “take kindly to flats”.

I agree. The only major difference this time is so far market is down only some 10 per cent (not yet fully) vs almost 30 per cent last year. Nothing special yet.

Read somewhere recently: “Far more money has been lost by investors in preparing for corrections or anticipating corrections than has been lost in the corrections themselves.”

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/sam-bankman-frieds-prof-mother-penned-2013-essay-shredding-philosophy-personal-responsibility

https://www.reuters.com/legal/buffetts-berkshire-is-sued-by-haslam-family-over-pilot-truck-stop-takeover-2023-10-27/ The complaint said the family objected repeatedly, but Buffett refused to commit not to use pushdown accounting. It said he instead told Pilot founder and Jimmy Haslam's father James Haslam II this month: "I said that Berkshire will comply with the terms of the contract. That's exactly what will happen." Buffett's assistant did not immediately respond to a request for comment after market hours. Kristin Seabrook, Pilot's chief legal counsel, in a statement said the lawsuit concerned "a narrow issue between owners," and declined further comment about it.

Thanks everyone for comments!

Indeed. Not sure what to think about it? Maybe some kind of misunderstanding which will be yet explained. I doubt Greg already has changed BRK's acquisition policy to hostile/active/aggressive:)

I am not sure I understand his comment either, but this logic you have described I think would work only for insurers with short duration bond portfolios. It would be interesting to know what is the average duration of bond portfolios of the whole insurance industry, but assuming some other companies own much more longer term bonds, increase in yields would not do much good for them for quite a while?

https://www.wsj.com/video/series/shelby-holliday/how-chinese-aggression-has-pushed-the-philippines-closer-to-the-us/15A5C436-F3FD-4929-A048-0A9DBE5E32B0 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-26/biden-warns-china-not-to-attack-philippine-ships-after-incidents?srnd=premium-europe&leadSource=uverify wall “I want to be very clear: The United States’ defense commitment to the Philippines is ironclad,” he said. “Any attack on the Filipino aircraft, vessels, or armed forces will invoke our Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-24/finland-recovers-ship-anchor-at-baltic-pipeline-damage-site?srnd=premium-europe&leadSource=uverify wall

Sopranos and Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul? These two, plus Fargo, are basically the only series I have watched or remember:)