Xerxes

come on Greg !! a bit of humour on Friday. Iwasn’t suggesting BX is having run on the Bank. Even the Ark has inflows (supposedly)

@Dinar @Spekulatius B21 stealth bomber roll out live on YouTube https://youtu.be/WjfsANcgJAg

Cheers !

"Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king.'" --- In the eternal words of Tywin Lannister "An investment firm that says it has permenant capital, yet needs to cap redemption, has no true permenant capital" --- Xerxes Blackstone -1 Brookfield -1 Berkshire +1 Fairfax +1

Yeah. Thanks guys i did go back through Amazon. They refunded me and ask me to dispose the article since it was fraud. No need for return. As a concerned Digital Citizen i did put pressure on them to remove that seller, for copyright violation. They said it will take a few days. I haven’t check today they finally did it. I did return the note-pad anyways just to experience the return process. Extremely smooth. this was just a heads-up for book-buyers among you.

I listened to a podcast couple of weeks ago where the author was talking about a book called “Price of Time” that he wrote. And it sounded very interesting so I said let’s buy it. I saw the “paperback” version on Amazon for $12 so went for it. I get the copy and Et Voila, it is a notebook with blank pages !!! WTF. I go back on Amazon and realize that someone has cleverly created a “paperback” that got linked to the “hard copy”. but it is a phony book with the same cover page as the hard copy. They even say that it is notebook in the description so that in technical terms they are not deviating from the intent.

I watched Dooms (along with the first SW movie and Empire Strikes Back) in piecemeal format. Saw various scenes in different order on TV in the 90s. Overtime I collected most of the pieces and got a final picture on it. Yet when I saw Doom in one shot again later on in late 90s I was surprised to see that the first scene which is actually in Shanghai, I had never seen before. Same for SW, when I saw the whole movie in one shot, I realized that there was a scene before Tatoinne scene where Tentative IV is captured by Darth Vader ship. And I had not seen it. Last Crusade. I saw it like a normal human being in one shot. Raiders of Lost Arc. Saw it first on dvd in the 2000. I was not impressed.

If you live long enough, you can take another go at Indiana Jones

Either no recession or a deep recession. Given that consensus is “shallow recession”

hilarious deleted scene. so the old Maester was acting after all.

Thanks. I didn’t realize they actually expanded the “total return swap” program

“We have purchased total return swaps with respect to 1,407,864 subordinate voting shares of Fairfax with a total market value at the time of those agreements of $484.9 million ($344.45 (Cdn$443.93) per share)”. —- Feb. 2021 At $574 USD per share today’ print, that “bet-on-myself” play is worth $808.5 million USD. A nice 66% return over two years.

Very awkward

Hell in Bakhmut

How do you square capturing "industrial commodities" not directly but through related equities ("financal assets")

What I heard (don’t know where I think Economist), Surovikin’ condition to accept the top job as military commander was that there would a withdraw and consolidation east for the river by pulling out from Kherson. On Bakhmut, Wagner is actually working to gain political market share in Kremlin by bloodying itself at Bakhmut. How twisted is that

Thanks. I have forgotten that minority shareholders can short-circuit both ways: use dividends to simulate buy-back but also the reverse to create their own dividend payout. What matters for Watsa Family Office (and less so for minority shareholders) are taxes and increasing familly control.

This Friday, in a theatre near you. unrelated there has been some very interesting development with Boeing that will have long term consequences in the commercial industry at large. I will post those on Boeing thread and related articles. Quite interesting

B-21 roll out this Dec 2nd

^^^ that is 100% correct For gold it is not about inflation. It is about the differential between inflation and interest rate. There is a scenario out there where interest rate hike will peak, but inflation will be persistent. Opening the differential again and thus the bid for gold.

Math / mental gymnastic question: We know that mathematically (in a tax-free environment), a $1 of dividend, re-invested by shareholder for more shares will have an identical effect on EPS to a buyback by the company. Knowing that, a dividend will in fact give optionality to the shareholder to decide to increase exposure or not. Whereas a buyback doesn’t give that optionality. Now bringing this to FFH, on this hypothetical $1 billion of surplus at this point in time. Why should it not be disbursed as “special dividend” for the shareholder to chose to buy more shares or not. A buyback based on the company thesis of discount to intrinsic value forces a certain fixed outcome. A re-invested dividend, allows each shareholder executing on their specific view of intrinsic value and their desire for margin of safety to it. I think there is a certain mental view that a dividend is just money wasted whereas buyback below intrinsic value is not. That shouldn’t matter from a shareholder point of view (tax-free environment). In both cases, $1 billion leaves the company coffers never to be seen again.

Robert Massie passed away few years ago. He wrote several books on the House of Romanov and two other books on the naval landscape pre- and post-1914 (i.e. Dreadnought era) Robert K. Massie, Narrator of Russian History, Is Dead at 90 - The New York Times (nytimes.com) I just finished reading his +900 page on "Peter the Great". What a fantastic read. The man was a clossus. A force of nature. Against interia itself he pulled the Russian people out of doldrums into the European stage and into a major power. The book is very well written and reads like a novel. The author does a really good job in explaining the European political situation. Where is the Ottomans, the Hapsburng, the Prince of Orange, Louis XIV, they all get a detailed explaination by the author. His four books on the Romanov are: Nicholas and Alexandra (written in the 1967; which actually became Book 3) Peter the Great (written in 1980, which became Book 1) Catherine the Great (written in 2011, which became Book 2) Final Chapter (2012?) I have bought the first three books and read only Peter the Great. Will read Catherine the Great in 2023. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Below I copied 4 excerpt from the book. Excerprt 1 talks about the origin of Russian flag. Excerpt 2 is about the Port of Archangel. It was truely the only sea-link that Russia had with the outside world pre-Peter era. It took a Peter to expand into the Baltic sea and it took a peter to challenge the Turkish dominion over the Black Sea, which was considered a Turkish lake till then. It would however be in the reign of Catherine, that the Russia would make most progress against the decaying power of Persia and the Ottomans. Excerpt 3 is about the tax policies and the enormous burden that the Russian people carried to fuel Peter' titanic ambitions. Excerpt 4 is about St-Petersburg, when and where it was created (how high it was on a frozen wasteland). And the force of personality that pushed for its construction and completion.

"Tell me the currency, I would tell you when was the supercycle bull market" that is what Jeff Curie would say. He said that comment few years ago pre-Covid, when he was explaining that while the peak and the pinch in oil price was $147 per barrel in North America in 2008-09, the emerging market (like Brazil) saw that pinch not in 2008-09 but rather in 2018-19 during unprecedent strenght in the U.S. Dollar. I may be fuzzy on the detail. Gold may not have worked for US or Canadian petro-dollar currencies, but probably worked wonderfully for emerging market holding gold in their currency.

Yeap, we really don't know much. We have few random datapoints from different sources. I want my books now ! And to your point only when a major milestone is achieved (a fall of a city) that goes toward tangible book value. Everything else is Goodwill till then