Xerxes

For clarity the word “sovereignty” is not just about land/sea and the control of it. It is equally about economic, financial & political freedom to not be under the jackboot of any given power. I suspect my fellow Westerners here are overfocused on the first part of that definition. That is understandable. Wars makes news. ex: People’ Republic of Mongolia is a sovereign nation. But is it really ? Peel the onion, you ll see the People Republic of Mongolia is actually what they call “Outer Mongolia” and what is called “Inner Mongolia” is now a province of PRC. Peel it further, doesn’t take a genius to see while the “inner” is under de jure PRC control, the “outer” is very much under de facto influence/control of PRC. how many nations don’t have their economic sovereignty … and you won’t bat an eye about it

Is that called Keynesian economics ! Akin to how WW2 slowly pulled participating nations from the doldrums of the Great Depression

my man ! I half way through the movie

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant looks pretty good as a movie anyways (putting politics aside). Now not sure why the director first name is in the movie title. Fan fact: I was able to understand most of what the Afghan were saying in Darsi. Not everything.

That’a right. In fact Filoni collaborated with George Lucas in those pre-Walt Disney days on Clone Wars. They jointly developed Ashoka. Check out the trailer for Alien Romulus https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dL0XLpl3SiA

jon favreau and dave filoni have been the brain of the SW TV series. And their work is outstanding. i wish JJ Abrams was never put it on the sequels. But that was the time Disney was not sure how much risk it could take on deviating from the re-hash Skywalker Saga. they figured it out now. And they just need to let jon favreau and dave filoni do their magic. There is a lot of lore in SW and a lot of open space. Based on the first two Ashoka episodes and some Easteregg planted in one of Andor episode, looks like they will be linking/referencing the KOTOR timeline. Knights of the Old Republic was a role playing game that came 20 years ago and had an amazing storyline. Marvel does not have that. Yes it has tier-2 and tier-3 characters that it can mine further. But some of those just don’t resonate. And once you establish and work out tier-1 characters, you cannot really do a reboot to tell the same story (like Warner or Sony does), given the scale of investment. With SW you can go 10,000 years in the past an explore the rise of the Sith as a storyline. Or move to another galaxy. Yes Marvel has many dimensions and galaxies but at the end things revolves around Earth and present timeline. So limited real estate

thanks. I may yet watch Foundation. i complained endlessly about Season 1 on this board. Generally speaking I am pretty liberal on movie adaptation but Foundation S1 broke the cardinal rule.

The other possibility is that Bane was responsible for the Wagner’ leadership team demise.

Very much doubt Ukrainian had anything to do with this. it was either the Kremlin or elements of GRU or MoD (without Kremlin’ consent). And the latter is unlikely as well. Wagner was largely de-fanged post its aborted march on Moscow. People forget that it was MoD that provides all or most of its heavy equipment. Without which Wagner is just a lightly armed militia.

I think there is no chance of FFH reaching these lofty market capitalization …. in my life time anyways. Also, as a side note, a company that becomes a serial buyer of its shares will see its market capitalization grow at a slow rate (or even flat out) than its value per share (I.e share price) as the share count drops off.

If Jack Welch was in charge of FFH at this point in time he would do it. As he was just an employee-CEO looking for a quick buck and fame as oppose to being owner-CEO

The argument about moving to NYSE to get a “rich valuation” assumes that management is willing to trade its high quality long term shareholders (who might flip if trades at a very rich P/B) with lower quality shareholders (con) and ability to issue stock (pro) at premium one one time shot. (If ever it shoots up). I am not sure that is a good trade off for FFH management. As they will already get plenty of capital back to the holding company as opportunity to re-invest in premium growth tapers down. So why trade its shareholder base … for more SEC scrutiny, more exposure to over excited hedge funds all for maybe there is an opportunity to issue stock at 3x book

Btw I thought it was fantastic. Some scene looks liked from old samurai movies. With dialogue, pause, dialogue. Inevitably, some call that “wooden” dialogue. Anyhow. I had a blast watching the very first scene with the duo getting on the cruiser, which took me back to 1999, when ObiWan and Jin duo got on the enemy ship. That is called paying homage visually. And not rehashing stories.

how could you seriously know if it is rehash based on a sample. It is one thing to make that case/argument half way through …

As the saying goes … if you come at the king, you best not miss. Though personally I don’t think he was gunning at the king (rather gunning at MoD), not many people in Putin inner circle have the “minerals” or intellectual IQ in them to try to topple him. Those who had it were sidelined years ago. Putin is the Godfather, plain and simple, surrounded by lesser men. His mistake though has been to apply the peace-time strategy of creating competition in his inner circle in war-time, which has boiled over between MoD and Wagner. Instead of not procrastinating and being decisive. At the end of the day, the aborted coup caused a reputationnal damage. I admit I thought that his African connections would have save him.

Hi Pete , did you mean the reverse ? 0% rates forces capital into the industry and CR's UP, and 5% rates have the opposite effect. - - - as far as the on-going conversation here is concerned, my concern would be if BV goes down on a sustainable basis !! So (absent some catastrophe) whether after-three years, and post hard market, their operating earning drop from today’ peak earning, is not really of concern for me because I didn’t pay 1.2 book for it. even buying today as BV, you are still catching the growing NAV, which will grow at a slow rate past peak earning. put it differently, end of the hard market does not mean BV dropping. Just that it will grow much slower, as one of FFH’ growth engine start to falters. At that point in time, value per share (rather than just value) will start to matter more as surplus capital get funnelled to share repurchase as organic business growth stalls.

personally, I think it comes down “taste”, feel, political orientation, and what point one wants to score, when it comes down to decide what include/exclude in any postmortem analysis. if a geopolitical decision in a given time, changes the trajectory of history, does one need to re-run the entire business case with a “what if scenario” as a hurdle rate For me anyways, analysis of “ohh it is just $50-$100 billion or” is just plain silly. The front end is always easy to quantify in dollar terms, and sure enough is conclusive enough for isolated cases, de-coupled from current of history. But it gets very tricky for systematic cases. Case in point Iraq. Some idiots in DC (and their citizen supporters)* decides it would be fun to have some fun with Iraq. Life is too boring. Let’s spice thing up, they said. Let’s just make things up at UN, they said, and let’s through around 9/11 for good measure, they thought. Hell yeah, let’s blow stuff up !!! Yeap, soon after US current surplus went into deficit …. And stayed there. Does that goes into the postmortem business case analysis or just the upfront investment needed to BS. * no different than Moscovites supporting the war in Ukraine

… and he put some money private investment in a prison

Unless something goes off this fall, I should be going to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, GeorgeTown, Phuket, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. Most likely in that order.

If you live in the suburbs living without car is nearly impossible, specially with companies forcing folks back to office

Buffett on technicians, gurus and level-headed monkeys

Last week Ackman talked about his short position on the long end (via options) arguing for a repricing of its yield to the upside … if that steepening does happen FFH could lock in the interest stream for longer duration (at a cost of liquidity) I don’t think Prem & Co had envisioned that, as the sequence that they have in mind is : 1) short term goes up (yield inversion) 2) credit spread widens (recession) 3) long term goes up (yield steepens) We are now in phase (1), but what if (2) does not happen and we go straight to (3) ?? if “soft landing/no recession” scenario plays out, the higher interest stream is as good as its low duration.

Unrelated the last Koffman podcast on War on the Rock was pretty good. The last few ones didn’t say much, I guess as situation was evolving.

Some Berkshire old timers might sell in the months/years after Buffett … or might de-risk months/years before in anticipation of. But I sincerely doubt that the day after tomorrow, there would be a massive sell off by the long time holders. Like they are surprised and didn’t see it coming. This is not the Berkshire of 20 years ago, where there would have been a change in trajectory, because there is a change at the helm. I have a friends who are “supposedly” going to make their first BRK in size the day after. Thus expecting some major sell off. They have been waiting for a long time. In the meantime, Berkshire climbs the wall of worry.