james22

"You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," Richard.

Why not?

Westerners have projected power disproportionate to their numbers since ancient Greece. https://www.amazon.com/Carnage-Culture-Landmark-Battles-Western/dp/0385720386/

Over lunch I took care not to steer the conversation in any particular direction and instead let it take its own course. The feelings and impressions I heard from people whom I had never known to be particularly political were grim with discouragement. For their safety, I must withhold their names, but they quickly offered up the impression that their country had recently been closing in on itself, and the resulting sensation, one said, was like suffocation. One of them told me that I had lived in China during its heyday, a feeling I immediately understood but had never formulated myself. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/30/china-post-covid-19-tourism-foreigners-visitors-economy-society/

2,500 years (Western Ascendency) > 40 years (China's Economic Miracle)

Are you posting from your freshman dorm room, Luca?

He did qualify with on pace. But more significant than the duration is the negativity: 2023 will need be +18.9% for 2021-2023 to avoid being the worst three-year period since 1928. That seems unlikely.

When a nation is clearly planning for something, it is best to acknowledge it and make your own plans accordingly. . . . "What I think is they're on their five year [plan], and if you go back three different budgets for them, or four years, over our 20 years in the desert, they focused very clearly on delivering a force capable to take on the United States. And the speed and acceleration that they have shown and they are delivering, right, when you talk about outputs, we all look at the Chinese to understand, truly, where they are, what they're doing. The largest military buildup since World War Two, both in conventional forces and then strategic-nuclear. J-20s are in full-rate production, ships coming off their industrial baseline at numbers that only replicate what we did in the Lehman time and the 600 ship Navy kind of time frame. Again, nuclear build up... is the largest and continuous we've seen. So those are the concerning pieces. And that's what we're walking into." https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-prcs-buildup-is-not-a-jobs-program

So, what does all this mean? It's simple: rising rates reduce the value of bonds (which are paying lower rates that prevailed when they were issued), which goes a long way to explaining the banking crisis earlier this year. But this is actually good news for investors today because they no longer face the TINA ("there is no alternative") dilemma when thinking about whether to invest in stocks or bonds/cash because both are now attractive.

“Geothermal has historically been overlooked,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said at a hearing. But with innovation, she added, “the potential is out there, I think, that’s pretty extraordinary.” https://news.yahoo.com/vast-source-clean-energy-beneath-190543814.html

From Tilson's email today.

Executive Summary: G7 nations are fully developed nations with greater cumulative GDP. All G7 nations have representative governments. BRICS span the range from outright autocracy to flawed republics. Only India has decades of stable representative governance. G7 citizens have a much better standard of living. Their nations are attracting people and talent. They are less corrupt and have more equitable income distribution. BRIC nations are significantly poorer, but their economies have upside potential more than the already fully developed G7 nations. They have over five times the population of the G7, but in addition to being poorer, they live in a less stable civil societies more likely to be prone to internal disruption. The BRIC nations are not really the largest threat to the G7 nations. All G7 nations need to do is improve and have good stewardship of their positions generations worked to build, not import problems or sabotage the economic systems that produced a standard of living and civil society of such grandeur as never seen in human history. https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-brics?

I'm uninterested in anything callable, TwoCitiesCapital. What was your purpose in buying the preferreds, drzola? CorpRaider? Happy with how they've performed? You'd buy them again?

Anyone ever consider BAC-L and WFC-L as a bond (or annuity) alternative? https://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2017/03/a-value-opportunity-in-preferred-stocks/ Yielding 6.34% and 6.38% today.

Many of the countries now proposing the bric have common interests, not least a dislike of U.S. hegemony. But while the enemy of my enemy may be my friend, a successful BRICS needs more than that. It needs genuine aims, rules and commitment. No amount of backslapping and fist-pumping will change that. India sees China as a strategic rival. It is aggressively positioning itself as a palatable alternative to China for manufacturing. Meanwhile, the skirmishes between India and China on the Tibetan plateau have turned more deadly. If China is promoting a BRICS concept as cover for Chinese hegemony, India is determined to use that same organization to block Chinese influence. Saudi Arabia and Iran feel the same way about each other. South Africa is rapidly becoming a failed state. Its power crisis threatens value-added exports. How can the country possibly lead any alliance? Mexico? Every Mexican company I talk to tells me how it is expanding in the United States. Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently lamented, “Every night, I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar.” Simple answer: Brazilian mining giant Vale SA can sell iron ore to China in Chinese yuan, or renminbi (RMB), all it wants, but what would it do with those RMB afterwards? Vale’s debts are all in U.S. dollars. The heavy construction equipment the company uses is often built by Caterpillar Inc. or Japan’s Komatsu Ltd., so Vale needs dollars and yen to buy it. RMB is valueless for Vale’s operations in Sudbury or Sulawesi (part of Indonesia). Meanwhile, China has bought considerable influence outside of BRICS via its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which invests in more than 150 countries. Why would China give that influence away to others via BRICS? https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-russia-china-brics-west/

Xi Jinping failed to show up for a planned speech. Did anything extraordinary happen yesterday that might have unavoidably pulled Xi away from his duties? Maybe? https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/08/23/what-happened-to-xi-jinping-at-the-brics-summit-n573100

You don't remember when Bezos was disappeared?

The eight habits are: being physically active, being free from opioid addiction, not smoking, managing stress, having a good diet, not regularly binge drinking, having good sleep hygiene, and having positive social relationships. . . . Overall, the results showed that low physical activity, opioid use, and smoking had the biggest impact on lifespan; these factors were associated with around a 30-45% higher risk of death during the study period. Stress, binge drinking, poor diet, and poor sleep hygiene were each associated with around a 20% increase in the risk of death, and a lack of positive social relationships was associated with a 5% increased risk of death. https://nutrition.org/these-eight-habits-could-lengthen-your-life-by-decades/ Actually kind of encouraging. Stress, poor sleep hygiene, and a lack of positive social relationships aren't fun, opioid use and smoking might be, but not once addictive, and low physical activity isn't any more fun than being physically active. Needn't make any compromise when addressing them. Binge drinking and a poor diet are the only things that really have a fun cost.

Only Apple exposure via BRK and VITAX. Not significant enough to hurt.

For decades, China powered its economy by investing in factories, skyscrapers and roads. The model sparked an extraordinary period of growth that lifted China out of poverty and turned it into a global giant whose export prowess washed across the globe. Now the model is broken. What worked when China was playing catch-up makes less sense now that the country is drowning in debt and running out of things to build. . . . The most obvious solution, economists say, would be for China to shift toward promoting consumer spending and service industries, which would help create a more balanced economy that more resembles those of the U.S. and Western Europe. . . . Instead, guided by a desire to strengthen political control, Xi’s leadership has doubled down on state intervention to make China an even bigger industrial power, strong in government-favored industries such as semiconductors, EVs and AI. https://archive.ph/HES9y#selection-639.0-653.36 With the old model reaching its end, it would make sense for China to pursue another phase of liberalization, evolving toward a freer economy with a focus on consumer spending and service industries. But that clashes with President Xi Jinping's vision. Instead, the government is scaling up another round of industrial policy focused on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and direct government spending on cultural items such as sporting events. "The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires," the Journal reports. That line does a pretty great job of summing up what's at stake in China. There's no doubt that governmental stimulus spending can drive economic growth higher over the short term, but the bill eventually comes due in the form of higher debt and wasted resources. Sustainable, long-term economic growth doesn't come from officials issuing edicts. It comes from the individuals' power to pursue their own needs and desires in the marketplace—even if some of those desires aren't aligned with what the government wants. https://reason.com/2023/08/21/chinas-industrial-policy-is-failing-will-american-politicians-take-notice/