mcliu
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Posts posted by mcliu
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7 hours ago, cubsfan said:
A strong USA gives you the best opportunity for peace in the developing world. There has never been a military power like the United States. Paired up with Europe - and now you have a real chance to continue peace for a long, long time.
What peace? Since the end of WW2, the US has been continuously involved in multiple wars around the world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change#1945–1991:_The_Cold_War7 hours ago, cubsfan said:NATO or fear of a United Europe/America by the Soviets - kept Russia in check for 75 years.
It is not fear of US or USSR that kept either side from war. It is fear of mutually assured destruction. In a war between superpowers, everyone dies. People seem to have forgotten this.
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On 4/15/2023 at 11:02 PM, cubsfan said:
I can’t argue with what you just said. The death and decline of the US will come from within.
Just like the Roman Empire
It's not too late for the West because there's such a head start, but we need to stop focusing on frivolous/fringe issues and wars and start fixing the core like addiction/healthcare, education, infrastructure.
6 hours ago, Castanza said:It is still mind boggling to me that the West is not collectively pushing for peace negotiations.
Totally agree. Nuclear war is THE biggest threat to humanity and this whole proxy war is pushing us closer. The US needs to stop all its wasteful foreign adventures and start fixing domestic problems. Vietnam, then Afghanistan & Iraq were a colossal waste of resources. Is it really a coincidence that shortly after you exit Afghanistan the Ukraine war starts? Or is the military-industrial-political complex pulling strings to create the next conflict?
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Trump is a brilliant politician:
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4 hours ago, Spekulatius said:
If we are going to tangible book including AOCI, then BAC is undercapitalized too with only ~$80B in tangible capital for a $2T balance sheet banks. Then you can write the entire thesis with BAC instead of USB which i think wouldn't make much more sense either, imo.
I think BAC's CET1 of $185B already includes AOCI losses from AFS but not unrealized HTM losses ($85B including).
If you include AOCI USB is at $43B and maybe ~$35B with unrealized HTM losses.
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5 hours ago, Gregmal said:
Man, every Tom, Dick and Harry now knows how to play the game. Just proclaim that the Fed won't have any credibility unless they do what we want them to. Dont mind our positioning LOL
"Until the Fed corrects its errors with respect to the country’s fifth largest bank, it cannot be credible as a banking regulator"
Too hard pile for me.
It's not really a short thesis (despite the dramatic title) but more of a pair trade.
I think it's fair to question why USB should be valued higher than WFC when it's far more capital constrained.
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http://www.holdcoam.com/wp-content/uploads/Presentation.pdf
The Unsafest and Unsoundest Of Them All –
U.S. Bancorp (Ticker: USB)
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9 hours ago, zippy1 said:
It indeed is not clear how China will turn out if KMT won.
However, there are many places in East Asia that one can benchmark. South Korea and Japan were both sort of bombed back to stone age in late 1940s-early 1950s.
If we compare Japan and South Korea against China from 1949 to 1980, it is not clear that China's progress in this period was that impressive.
It seems that the great progress that China made since 1980s was really made more impressive by the serious mismanagement in 1940s-1970s. If one examines the overall progress from 1949 to today as a whole, it seems much less impressive when compared against Japan and South Korea. And there is only one ruling party in China during this period. One should not only look at the period after 1980s.I think there's a degree of hindsight bias in using Korea and Japan as benchmarks since we already know they were the best performers. Wouldn't India (similar population) or Russia (similar ideology) or a basket of Asian countries (Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) be a better benchmark? It's like using Apple or Google as a benchmark instead of the S&P 500.
I agree with you that China might have gotten here sooner without the 50-70s. However, once again that's with the benefit of hindsight. In the 1950s, communism was a relatively new experiment and nobody knew the outcome. USSR was a superpower then and China sought to emulate that model. But even prior to the CCP, China was poorly managed for hundreds of years, latter half of Qing to end of KMT, which might be why people turned to the CCP in the first place.
Obviously the data is very sparse prior to the 1900s, but the trend shows that China was in decline for a long time.
4 hours ago, Spekulatius said:I am not implying that China Kai Shek was great, but we do have the natural experiments of Taiwan- China, South Korea- North Korea (and West Germany- East Germany ) showing us how good communism really worked. Now the CCP is evolving obviously after Mao but I think under Xinping, they are taking a huge step backwards, because after all, he is a Neo Maoist.
This is possible but it's too early to judge.
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On 4/17/2023 at 11:55 AM, Spekulatius said:
China without the CCP does exist, it’s called Taiwan. There is no reason to believe that China couldn't look like Taiwan’s economy if Mao had lost the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek.
I don't think it's comparable. Taiwan is China without CCP is like saying USA is UK without the Monarchy. No idea how China would have turned out if KMT won, possibly far worse. As Xerxes pointed out, Chiang was a fascist dictator not much better than Mao. (Turns out Azov is not the first facists that the US has supported lol.)
Excess Mortality under Nationalist rule[edit]
Historian Rudolph Rummel documents that from its founding down to its defeat in 1949, the Nationalist government under Chiang's central leadership probably caused the deaths of between roughly 6 and 18.5 million people. The major causes include:[83]
- Thousands of communists and communist sympathizers were killed during and in the year after the 1927 Shanghai massacre.
- In 1938, to stop Japanese advance, Chiang ordered the Yellow River dikes to be breached. An official postwar commission estimated that the total number of those who perished from malnutrition, famine, disease, or drowning might be as high as 800,000.[84]
- In 1943, 1.75 to 2.5 million Henan civilians starved to death due to grain being confiscated and sold for the profit of Nationalist government officials.
- 4,212,000 Chinese perished during the Second Sino-Japanese War and Civil War starving to death or dying from disease during conscription campaigns.[85]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident
In 1945, following the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, the Allies handed administrative control of Taiwan over to China, thus ending 50 years of Japanese colonial rule. Local residents became resentful of what they saw as high-handed and frequently corrupt conduct on the part of the Kuomintang (KMT) authorities, including the arbitrary seizure of private property, economic mismanagement, and exclusion from political participation. The flashpoint came on February 27, 1947, in Taipei, when agents of the State Monopoly Bureau struck a Taiwanese widow suspected of selling contraband cigarettes. An officer then fired into a crowd of angry bystanders, striking one man, who died the next day.[8] Soldiers fired upon demonstrators the next day, after which a radio station was seized by protesters and news of the revolt was broadcast to the entire island. As the uprising spread, the KMT–installed governor Chen Yi called for military reinforcements, and the uprising was violently put down by the National Revolutionary Army. Two years later, and for 38 years thereafter, the island would be placed under martial law in a period known as the "White Terror."[8]
The number of deaths from the incident and massacre was estimated to be between 18,000 and 28,000.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
Deaths At least 3,000 to 4,000 executed, not including 228 incident (18,000 to 28,000 killed) or extrajudicial executions[1] Victims At least 140,000 imprisoned Keep in mind Taiwan's population at the time was probably around 5m. So they imprisoned or killed at least 3-5% of the population.
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9 hours ago, Peregrine said:
The GTA probably has a population that's around 8 million now, on par with New York City. I remember 20 years ago when they had less than 5 million. I think it's surely the fastest growing developed city in the world. Combine this with housing NIMBYism and a public transport system that hasn't budged and it's really unsurprising why housing prices are what they are.
The Tier 1 cities in China have the same problem with housing prices and they don't have the NIMBY problem because the state owns all the underlying land.
Population 20 years ago ~5m today ~7m. ~1.5% CAGR
Hard to compare NYC and GTA cause GTA is made of several cities. The size of GTA is probably around 10x of NYC.
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2 minutes ago, Jaygo said:
I dont see the issue with this. People will still pay the mortgage so doesn't this just boost the banks earnings at the expense of the rest of the economy.
I owe close to 500k on mine. So in 2025 we renegotiate ours. Lets say it goes from the current 2.5 to 6% it will be painful but Im still going to have to pay up. I think it works out to be an extra 1000 a month. If its at 8% it will be double what I pay now.
Maybe I take on a bit of extra work or cut back on travel ect. but im not giving the keys back that's for sure.
I think the issue is that a large % of society have excessive leverage because they assumed rates will stay low forever. For the financially prudent as yourself it's not a big problem. Banks are playing this extend and pretend game so they won't recognize any credit losses.
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23 hours ago, Gregmal said:
Yup. Like mentioned a bit back, the better life gets for people, the more it seems like folks need to come up with problems. In itself, a mental disorder. The school shooters and the transitioning teenagers with identity issues….very often happen to be….middle class white kids.
You can see gangs are a derivative of poverty. Some of this other stuff, a derivative of things like boredom or levying high expectations on someone not able to handle it. Ever heard of the alcoholic housewife?
Not sure if life is getting better for most people. This feels more like the govt/media's way of distracting us from the real issues.
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9 hours ago, zippy1 said:
I think the question is whether China is turning away from what made it successful in the past 30 years or not. Don't forget CCP created the mess that Deng inherited in the first place. CCP does have that capacity to make such a mess. Just look at its COVID policy.
Yes, but the future is difficult to predict.
They created part of the mess from the bad policies of the 1950-70s. But it's not like China wasn't a mess before the CCP took over. You had a century of mismanagement under Qing, Western colonialism, opium crisis/war and then decades of internal turmoil/facism/corruption/civil war followed by WW2 against Japan and more civil war.
The fact that China has pivoted from zero covid and tech-repression and wolf-warrior diplomacy is a sign that they are learning and reflecting on public feedback.
This whole "China bad Russia bad thing" feels like a way to distract us from our government's incompetence. The West has largely stagnated the last few decades in improving quality of life. Life expectancy is declining in the US and is now below China despite having 3-4x higher GDP. How did this happen and what is the govt response? Of course exit Afghanistan & fight a proxy war in Ukraine!
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15 hours ago, Spekulatius said:
I disagree on brilliant leadership. Xi is still a bonehead autocrat. Invest there at your own peril, especially if you are at the western side of the fence, it can end up bad very quickly.
If you look at the mess that Deng Xiao Ping inherited vs. the country today. I think it took a lot of brilliant leadership and strategic thinking to turn things around.
I think it may be too early to judge Xi and the future is difficult to predict, but we will see in the coming years.
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On 4/14/2023 at 6:29 PM, cubsfan said:
I agree alliances do change. But the Western Alliance (Europe/USA) has brought remarkable peace for 75 years now. It needs to stick together.
It remains the most powerful alliance of all.
If it’s able to link up with Japan, S Korea, Australia- it’s unbeatable.
It depends on who you ask. The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Palestine, Vietnam, Korea, Serbia and many Central American and African countries might disagree.
I don't think a strategy of containment against China is viable. The country is far too large and well-connected to the world.
It's far better to pursue a strategy of improving our domestic situation. The US won the Cold War because it was clear to the Soviets and the World that the US system delivered far better outcomes.
Unfortunately when you look at the statistics today, in terms of healthcare, education, crime, safety, growth, China's system offers a very compelling alternative. Part of it is due to brilliant leadership in China, but the bigger part is because the US has squandered so many opportunities and pursued idiotic domestic and foreign policies.
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This thread is a reflection of the problem facing the US and the West.
A conversation about the decay of our cities evolves into a discussion on transgenderism.
Both sides are passionately engaged in topics that affect a very small % of the population.
If only the same amount of energy and passion was devoted to matters that affect the majority of the population like improving our cities, health care, education, lowering crime and substance abuse.
I think what we need from our leaders is just a dose of common sense. Like this guy:
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Core inflation actually increased from Feb.
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13 minutes ago, Castanza said:
The fact that people live like this in the US is incredibly sad. How it got this bad is a crime in and of itself.
Real tragic. But there are also influential people trying to continue the policies that led to this.
It's a similar situation in East Hastings part of Vancouver. Recently, the new Mayor/Premier trying to clean up the area, and has been labelled "genocidal" by the previous mayor. Lots of protestors actively trying to stop the "decampment".
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/welcome-to-cruel-vancouver-mayor-decampment
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The crime/violence might also have something to do with the rampant drug usage.
The US also has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
This seems to suggest there's more fundamental/underlying issues with American society than just policing.
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How did it get to this point in the US? Isn't democracy supposed to self-correct and people with ideologies that don't work get voted out?
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5 hours ago, Dinar said:
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-738940
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are busy glorifying Nazis. Could not ask for a better gift to Putin, plays straight into his narrative for domestic consumption, and of course gives those who do not want to see their tax dollars/euros/pounds given to Ukraine plenty of ammunition.
Pretty clear by now that Western governments are fine with arming extremist groups as long as they're fighting on our side.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary-idUSKBN1GV2TY
https://forward.com/opinion/416751/why-does-no-one-care-that-neo-nazis-are-gaining-power-in-ukraine/
Btw, they canned this street rename for obvious reasons.
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Unless prices are dropping, March inflation rate should still be at least 4%, probably closer to 5%..
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@Cigarbutt thanks for the explanations.
Do you know if there's a limit to the RRP program?
US Regional bank stocks - PNC Financial, TFS - Truist, USB- USB Bank, MTB - M&T Bank etc
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