changegonnacome

Interesting someone else brought this to my attention and intro'd me to a rep from EquityZen who seem to be a running a liquidity process for Fanatics employees...~$60 per share.....without looking much at the business at all......it sure has all the hallmarks of some future dated IPO that will "pop" on the first day of trading.

You don't need to worry - he never had nor does he have the capability to take Ukraine & Georgia in its totality...........never mind a quick invasion/conquering of those places...which again he failed at (although I don't believe that was ever the plan - a quick Zelensky coup/shock and awe was the plan).......the resources required to occupy a hostile territory & hostile population are basically 5x those required to invade it - it would be mind boggling large resource hog. Occupying Ukraine & Georgia would not be additive to core Russia IMO.....it would effectively bankrupt the country.

Exactly my point - motive/intent in international security assessments matter very little and in some sense are unknowable..it requires truly knowing whats inside the mind of a countries leader (or leadership)........it's ALWAYS a question IMO of means when assessing an appropriate response....to this day military means remain highly knowable.......even an under resourced intelligence agency can figure out an opponent's capability - number of fighter jets, ground forces, reservatists, population of men aged 20 -35, artillery capability, tanks, aircraft carriers, submarines.....Germany had the means to become imperialists in 1945 across every vector....coming to a decision of action based on what Hitler said in a meeting and then hoping for the best was a huge blunder when attempting to formulate a response strategy to Hitler's early acts of aggression.......Russia in the year 2024......I mean give me a break.....Biden loses or anybody else loses all credibility trying to frame this version of Russia as some kind of entity capable of true expansionary imperialism.......regional mischief making......sure.....expansionary edge outs from Russia itself, most definitely....but recreating the USSR and all that would entail economically & militarily......eh I dont think so.....China however.......appease them in Taiwan at your peril. I say all this only to highlight that an off ramp exists IMO for the United States, Russia and Ukraine....because Russia's capabilities as they stand today are so limited. Sufficient pain can be inflicted, at not much cost to the West, to create a mutually hurting stalemate which would trigger some imperfect peace in the region and would allow the United States to get back to the real emerging threat akin to a Germany in the 1930's.....a rising China.

I dunno @ValueArb - I get some of your points and they aren't without validity in spots but there's a central problem with your broad framework for this whole Russian-Ukraine conflict. You keep applying the WWII Hitler policy of appeasement blunder to the Russian-Ukraine war...the whole Putin as an imperialist thesis....ya know first he takes Kyiv and then he marches West to take Warsaw idea..........but at the same time and in your own words you a few times said something to effect that "Russia is a third world country", its military hardware is junk and 40yrs out of date. So you simultaneously inflate the Russian threat (Imperialists hell bent on expansionary USSR recreating wars) and then (correctly) identify their totally limited military/economic capabilities. So you're wrong on the former (Putin the Imperialist) and correct on the latter (Russia the militarily weak opponent)....but you can't hold those same ideas at the same time I think. I mean look at the evidence - unlike Hitler - Putin hasn't spent the last half decade building up his military ground forces to allow for a land invasion & recapture of Ukraine/Poland/Georgia/Lithunia. So ya know Russia is not Germany in 1945.........and its question of motive and means......Putin may have imperialist desires deep in his heart but he most certainly doesn't have the means to carry out that (isnt this Ukraine conflict an example of how limited his capabilities are?!?) and in fact he has shown almost zero preparation over the last decade to carry out anything that looks like imperialism....imperialism requires a build up of ground capabilities....and Russia's military has atrophied and stagnanted this last decade. The mistake of comparing this situation to some kind of appeasement policy of WWII as mechanism by which you argue that NO deal ever should be done with Russia on Ukraine cause it would only serve to embolden Putin to march forward later.....forgets the MOST important element here......and its the capabilities or means piece......Russia is a third world country as compared to us in the West from a military standpoint....in conventional warfare (not nuclear) Russia hasnt a chance against even a half baked NATO response. The mistake of appeasement in the 40's was not necessarily getting Hitler's intent and motives wrong.......the mistake Chamberlain and other leaders made....was the hubris to think one could even know someone's true intentions.....so you look past feeble judgments of intent and instead focus on capability.....Winston Churchill might have guessed Hitler's intent correctly but putting aside Hitler's intent Churchhill knew that Nazi Germany most definitely had the MEANS (GDP/population/industrial base/artillery/equipment and standing & reserve military) to carry out an imperialist campaign.....and given those set of facts.......appeasement was the MOST dangerous response to Hitler's early aggression. Coming back to Ukraine - and to use your own words again......Russia is militarily a third world country.......the Ukraine-Russia situation therefore is almost by capability alone a regional conflict and will remain so.....if Russia's capabilities or means change over time I reserve the right to change my mind but even today I dont see that.....in fact perpetuating this conflict with Ukraine, when a sensible end to the conflict might exist, only encourages Russia to build out its ground capabilities......at the moment however that is not the case......a negotiated imperfect peace that includes some 'appeasement' to Russia on Eastern Ukraine territories could and should be pursued for the literal good of the millions of people who live in Ukraine and the millions more who are now refugees all over Europe. Enabling Zelensky indefinitely with money/arms to live out his own personal Churchill fantasies while putting his own people through the meat grinder in the East is not an optimal or smart outcome. Some territories are lost forever and Zelensky and the West should draw some redlines around an economically viable future Ukraine....and do whatever it takes to fight and reclaim that pragmatic map and once achieved fly to Istanbul again and tell Putin what happens next if he doesn't stand down and sign a peace agreement.

Covered my thought on this in the post above your in this bit down below - which I think is a point orginally made by Niall Ferguson....and for which when he raised I must say I totally agree with the logic. "Trump is correctly stating the obvious by questioning such deep US involvement....where he's wrong to a certain extent is that America has by its INVOLVEMENT there made Ukraine strategically important...not because Ukraine itself is important.....but because China is watching what happens there and how the US deals with the problem its got itself into....China is now measuring US political resolve.....and attempting to apply what it learns to whatever aspirations it has in the South China sea....for this reason Ukraine has become IMO hugely strategically important but not for the reasons of 'defeating' Russia.....but as a mechanism by which China might be deterred in Asia."

Exactly - cause the reality no wants to hear is that Ukraine, like Afghanistan.....when push comes to shove is not truly strategically important to the United States.....its unimportance is DEMONSTRATED by the fact that it has become a political football in D.C........this rarely ever occurs with truly important matters of national security which, in the main, unite the political parties......Biden is doing an extreme version of the most repeated trick in history which Russian threat inflation as per his State of the Union speech (which he may actually believe btw but he's on the face of it wrong).....Trump is correctly stating the obvious by questioning such deep US involvement....where he's wrong to a certain extent is that America has by its INVOLVEMENT there made Ukraine strategically important...not because Ukraine itself is important.....but because China is watching what happens there and how the US deals with the problem its got itself into....China is now measuring US political resolve.....and attempting to apply what it learns to whatever aspirations it has in the South China sea....for this reason Ukraine has become IMO hugely strategically important but not for the reasons of 'defeating' Russia.....but as a mechanism by which China might be deterred in Asia.

Every powerful nation with significant regional muscle likes a buffer zone around it (Monroe Doctrine anybody?) - in fact as I've argued the Russian invasion of Ukraine was principally triggered by its slow slide from a kind of ambiguous buffer zone (providing both NATO countries & Russia comfort)......into something much more akin to a US/EU client state....ya know the type of place where the US Vice President's son is on the board of the largest company there.....and where a current US sitting president is so secure in his leverage over a sitting Ukrainian president (due to aid payments) that he can instruct him on a phone call to investigate a domestic political rival. The great tragedy of Ukraine - is that we in the West put it so firmly 'in play' with our hubristic liberal democratic nation building dreams and superior economic resources vs. Russia....to be clear I'm not advocating for some kind of past Ukraine abandonment strategy where we ceded the country to Putin to become a Russian vassal state....I'm advocating for a Kissenger-esque balance of power strategy for Ukraine in the 2000's one where it was neither fully a Russian nor USA vaseel state......a strategic approach that never put it firmly in the Russian column or the West's column......put more crudely....just because you can afford to pump billions more of aid/economic investment into Ukraine than Russia could in the 2000's to buy their allegiance doesn't mean you should have. We failed at this game in Belarus might I add....seems all our love and attention was spent on Ukraine in this period. That's ancient history - the correct strategy moving forward is to give Ukraine exactly what it needs to regain most of the territory lost with the highest priority placed on the economically important regions which allow Ukraine in the longer term to be somewhat self-sustaining economically and militarily. Some landlocked Oblasts in the East are not hugely important economically and due to Ukrainian populations fleeing there are no longer ethnically hybrid regions...they are simply now edge outs of Russia...pragmatism would suggest that these regions form the basis of concessions to Russia in the future.

Agree broadly. What permeates EVERYTHING with China now is that it has gone from a junior economic partner of the US/West to something akin to a peer competitor across many fronts. Like it or not we have entered into a security competition with China - not because China has changed per se (it was and is a communist dictatorship with a myriad of human rights abuses that are abhorrent when viewed in the context of our societies. They also have and have had for decades national strategic aspirations to take their place again on the world stage and wipe away the century of humiliation. The most interesting aspect of the change in the Chi-Merica relationship is how little has changed about China....in some respects nothing has changed......what's changed recently is OUR collective assessment of China from a strategic competition perspective (economic & militarily). China's intent on any action is now viewed through the lens of mal-intent BECAUSE of that security competition and because they are approaching a level of technological, military and economic power that has the capability to do harm to the USA. The global rules based order post-WWII is just that - a rules based system written in effect by the victors dominated by the US/West (WTO, UN, World Bank etc.). I mean look where the physical 'infrastructure' of the rules system are based its like US bingo - NYC (UN), World Bank (D.C.), IMF (D.C.). I guess to not look so bad they threw some stuff over to Switzerland like the WTO in Geneva. I've no problem with this - its the natural order of things - the global superpower gets to call the shots and it gets to tilt the table of 'rules' in its favor. In this respect I commend the USA political leadership post-WWII.....they were/are a rather benign global hegemon, relative to the Empires of the past. Most recently of course it was Britain - that was the torch bearer for its 'version' of the rules based order which was much less benign. But lets not pretend the 'rules based order' is some stone tablet written by God and handed to Moses - the rules based order is a very human set of institutions...which is to say that it's sketching was done hierarchically & based on power and leverage. The China talking point on this is not without merit - in that the 'rules' in the global rules based order were written without Chinas input...they weren't in the room.....they were defeated peasant farmers and less than 1% of global GDP when the WTO rules written......and as they become a greater share of global GDP they would like increasing influence in modifying and evolving those rules where they the table tilted against them. The problem remains that the very idea of a 'real' higher power above nation states is a kind of thinly veiled charade - when the poop hits the fan these institutions that supposedly float above nation states get quickly revealed to be toothless tigers. The names (international court of justice, international criminal court et al.) sound great but in reality......what does it mean when you issue an arrest warrant and nobody gets arrested! ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and

Maybe - but that's their niche in a way and I see the DFS acquisition as an acknowledgment that there isnt much market maneuvering left for them moving across FICO scores....the high ground is occupied by AMEX + Chase + various premium offerings....the low ground Synchrony etc....COF stepped into this nice niche above sub-prime but below prime and grew the hell out of it....in a credit business they are limits to profitable growth (of course there are no limits to unprofitable growth) ......with DFS they've instantly made their current domestic focused book of business much a higher RoE proposition by adding delicious capital light & credit risk free swipe revenue.

Perhaps - but watch what happens to COF's legacy book of business from an RoE perspective as its domestic focused card portfolio (i.e. non premium travel cards) get transitioned from MasterCard/Visa's authorization network to Discovers (soon to be Capital One's captive one). It's a game changer for an issuer of COF's scale to vertically integrate with an authorization network and start collecting swipe fees.

Yeah I hear ya - and listen anytime I suggest a politician might do something hard & selfless, I have to check myself.....my scenario above is kind of an impish outcome.......the most ironic outcome...in a world where Biden gets a second term....it would be hilarious to see him on the pulpit preaching fiscal austerity (after billions were borrowed/committed under his watch and he got re-elected )

For sure - and one thing I've taught a bit about is that if Biden gets his second term (and its a big if) - he is truly a man that can only be thinking of the next generation given how short the run way that remains for him in life and his political career......I never overestimate the US President's ability to get anything done (the domestic powers of the office are rather weak).....but what I do think the President can do is bring an issue from the back pages to the front pages of political minds and make it an agenda item in Congress.........the US national debt & the annual % deficit is now just irrefutably on a crazy trajectory but it is not yet a political problem that voters think about much so Congress doesn't either.....how ironic would it be if the man that racked up so many trillions of dollars of that debt over his career but directly responsible in the more recent past.....that once he'd been re-elected to the WH & where his political career had no where left to go.....started to speak stridently to the American people on the need for fiscal discipline and getting America's finances 'back on track'. What is clear in my mind - the political expediency of running ~7% budget deficits in a ~3.5% unemployment economy diminishes a whole bunch post Nov 2024 (depending on the outcome)....very interesting to see how it plays out.

illegal immigrants almost by definition in the US (no social security number, no papers) are those most perfect of kind of Milton Friedman libertarian workers..........they sit outside the state, they incremental to the economy.....they suck-in no government resources......the true illegal migrant........are dependent on no one but themselves and cash payments they can generate for their labor.....they dont show up for work - they dont get paid........they get sick - they dont get paid.......they become disabled - tough luck, you dont get paid. Now some states in their infinite stupidity seem to be willing to provide social services to undocumented illegal migrants that's their mistake as it creates an adverse selection problem inside the pool of illegal migrants available......in much of the country however........an illegal migrant is the definition of a solo libertarian entrepreneur - not PTO, no disability, no unemployment assistance.......a lone ranger who eats what he or she generates

The problem with today's print has zero to do with shelter - everybody gets the lagged data in this component....the PHD's at the Fed might be dumb, but they're not so dumb that they cant figure out OER quirks & lagged data......in fact the metric that the fed follows closely and surprised today is SuperCore which specifically excludes shelter. I've referred to it to many times in this thread as dometic made in america inflation....one can think of it as services inflation..no big deal I hear you say.....the only issue is services make up ~77% of the US economy- it fell along with all other inflation components from late 2022 until Q3 2023....at which time it flattened out and began to accelerate upwards again recently. The most recent MoM spike to 0.7 (if annualized thats 8.4%....in reality smoothed out on current trajectory its more like mid-4%)......this is not what progress looks like....... this the largest MoM increase recorded since mid-2022 .....and as you can see below that MoM figure is effectively unheard of in the last decade only being seen in the context of COVID induced inflation spikes. You can't get back to 2%........with SuperCore at mid-4%.....its too large a component of CPI......but supercore is more important in that it is a large contributor to the people's perception of inflation and therefore inflation expectations. China is exporting deflation to us..........the US dollar is exporting inflation to the rest of the world....oil supply/demand dynamics post-Ukraine have been benign....lots of tailwinds have delivered disinflation and the progress has been impressive.....the problem remains however that the domestic US economy is running too hot, nominal spending growth is exceeding productivity growth by a number which is inconsistent with ~2% inflation. I expect to see more references to 'sticky' 'stuck' & 'stubborn' inflation over the coming months (if the strong economy persists). Something in the nominal spending growth - productivity growth - inflation equation has to adjust.....maybe productivity can keep surprising - its certainly surprised me. The most likely candidate remains the most obvious one at the end of most hiking cycles - nominal spending growth contracts......and we get back sustainably to 2%......seems like that old fox in the White House just wont be letting nominal spending slip until after November if he has anything to do with it.......running 7% fiscal deficits when unemployment is at historical lows and inflation is still elevated...... is reckless......but maybe its cheap when you believe your are battling for the "soul of the nation".......me.........I think he's an old guy who spent his life learning this fiscal math trick in D.C.......and trying to get to the White House and now he's got there he doesn't want to leave......and he's willing to incinerate billions/trillions to stay.....the White House has officially become the world's most expensive elderly care facility with this fiscal largesse.

Yep - and when you look at SPY - your looking in a very large way at the Mag6.......where one could argue that these companies represent monopolies or duopolies operating product monopolies that are capital light with the product distributed digitally........that just makes them amongst the greatest business that have ever existed in history period.....in terms of their moat and their ability to grow sales without consuming capital to do so

Culture - I mean at its core the US culture is an immigrant culture - one ultimately ever evolving shaped by successive waves of immigration since its founding but underpinned by an idea - all men are created equal, individual liberty etc. etc. The US 'culture', the US nation - the thing that makes it different from every other nation state or kingdom that's practically ever existed ever - is that its based not on tribalism ( which is a derivative of DNA/ethnicity) or based on some religious fanaticism - but rather its based on an idea......the idea of individual liberty, freedom & the pursuit of happiness What makes America dynamic.... is its very lack of reverence for the past...for old cultures, stale ideas...its unwillingness to "keep" a static US culture....America's ability to reinvent itself is its secret sauce I would posit....and that re-invention is no small part driven by the immigrant culture and the drive to reinvent oneself that immigrants have in abundance....to drive forward, to do things differently, boldy, take risks and ignore the old ways of doing things. Tinkering with this uniquencess IMO is akin to Coke suggesting they should tweak the recipe.....immigration is the USA's secret recipe.

Speak English?…you know where these folks end up working right…it’s not Google or Facebook…you don’t need English in a restaurant kitchen in NYC dishwashing you actually NEED Spanish or Portuguese - you don’t need English to have a pile of construction trash pointed out to you and the dumpster where to put the stuff. Who I see on the street in NYC begging are born and raised American’s with mental illnesses & drug problems….whom in another country would be identified as such and be in drug treatment centers or mental institutions…many US cities seem to prefer the open air mental asylum model….that model is clearly breaking down….it should never have been allowed to get to this.

A woman who walks/buses/hitchhikes up from Honduras with two or three kids in tow to start a new life in America leaving everything and everyone she knows, saving for months for the journey, strategizing & networking her way to get here while solving upteempth complex issues on the way......is NOT headed to NYC to sit on her ass, collect welfare cheques and watch Dr.Phil. I can assure you of that. THIS woman and the 1000's or 99% of people like her who enter through the southern border are, in the main, like many many immigrants before them deeply deeply congenitally motivated people...industrious, hardworking, smart etc...... Folks dont get it - look out the window of your home, your train, your airplane....this country is literally built on the positive selection bias that has come from the various waves of immigration (Poles, German, Irish)....each one like this one feared at the time cause it might change the nature of the country but in retrospect turned out to be a boon for everybody here right now and yet to come. This wave is no different - in some respect the positive selection bias has only increased as the immigration system has become ever more byzantine. Could a system be put in place to make it more structured - for sure - thank the dipshits in D.C......the system in all its craziness right now......has one positive aspect....and it's what I laid out...it is not easy to 'get papers' in the US....those that do have already showed at least a top decile, if not a top 1% level of smarts and industriousness..

Not a fan of websites - selling token blockchain nonsense - while masquerading as some final authority on marco economic data.....you'd get thrown out of an economics 101 junior high school class for citing truflation in an essay....so not really interested in what the people at truflation have to say about anything really.

Bro - its a website called Truflation....have you looked into it or do you just like the confirmation bias its feeding you...have a deeper look at truflation.com......its a bunch of blockchain web 3.0 hocus pocus bullshit attached...it has a whitepaper...they are literally selling shitcoins TRUF.....connected to the service. Like look at this crapola: Please dont send me crypto websites with proprietary undisclosed inflation models ....which at the same time are trying to sell unregistered securities linked to the service while simintoulsy promoting various crypto schemes. It is not a robust source of information.

Jerome Fauci - love it But in all seriousness - he does have a problem - people are extrapolating the progress on inflation to date out to the 2% target......the reality is that we are hitting this stubborn underbelly of 3.x% inflation that isn't budging from what I can see (absent economic weakness which just isnt there)....productivity gains to the upside have pushed this persistently high inflation from my previous estimate of high 3's 'sticky' inflation to more like low 3's. Not too sure Jerome has much room to cut - maybe one as a signal of strength/progress.....on the flipside productivity has surprised to the upside (I got this totally wrong). its very interesting - this productivity progress - likely goes to show that American business is/was running with a tonne of fat on the bones - there was most definitely a churn in human capital in 2022/23.......and the re-allocation of talent from say Twitter's canteen/meditation rooms forcing these folks to get 'real' jobs definitely led to a productivity boost. Ironically the 'crisis' at the Southern border - is no crisis at all......its a symptom of the immigration tap being turned on again (post-COVID) which feeds low end unskilled workers into an economy that desperately needs it (cooling inflation). The crisis at my southern border is not being able to hire someone to cut my lawn....or having to wait for months to get my deck re-done cause the decking company cant find workers anywhere!

For sure - there's a strange cognitive dissonance that some people have Re: Russia Some people hold the thought that Putin is an imperialist and Ukraine was Step 1 in a multi-step expansionist plan...when there is no evidence of either a military or standing army build up of a scale to support that thesis. Then the reality is that the Russian army in 2022 and even today - is relatively modest and incapable of anything beyond what is doing today.....occupying a tiny sliver on an 'edge out' basis from its own borders. Let's get real folks Russia entered Ukraine in 2022 with an army of no more than 190,000 men. Hitler built up the German war machine in plain sight under the guise of self-defence.....eventually sending nearly 2 million troops into Poland to invade, capture and occupy the country (a country half the size in land mass terms as Ukraine today). As @Dinar says - Russian military capabilities are all tied up now....because they are extremely limited in their scope.....that was true in 2022 and that is true today. The only thing that keeps Russia in the 'game' of great power politics are its resources (oil/gas) and its nuclear capability.

Yep there are interesting industries that were just destroyed by low rates.... it did the opposite of what textbooks said it would cause it threw a lifeline to competitors who ordinarily would have gone extinct. Darwinian capitalism was paused for a decade plus - and certain industries were just ruined by this. European telecoms IMO is an example of this IMO.......normal rates would have seen 5 player markets consolidate into 3 player ones where more rational pricing would have emerged. Low rates allowed the 4th and 5th player to continue to operate destroying the unit economics for everybody. Normal rates are forcing function for this moving forward and heretofore terrible businesses will become less terrible....and that can be enough for excellent equity returns if you pick your spots. Europe is a good hunting ground for this - just given it was one of the worst ZIRP offenders.

Low interest rates allowed Zombie companies to continue to operate......those Zombie's consumed the most important capital of all - human capital....while destroying the economics/pricing power of non-Zombie companies...the low/no growth of the 2010's can be seen in the context of a misallocation of that human capital. Europe in some ways was the worst offender as they went literally negative on rates. Capitalism is brutal - when allowed to operate - creative destruction recycles resources into activities that have merit. It appears that Zombie's with debt stacks maturing into 2024 are finally going to have their moment. Europe is going to be at the forefront of this.

Exactly - and certainly more work than a bank account somewhere inside the Swift payment network...that has some, even faked KYC data attached.... BTC isn't perfectly anonymous....far from it....but if your choosing a digital mechanism to extract value in a way that represents the best chance of collecting that value AND more importantly not getting caught collecting that value BTC is the best answer out there*.....as I said don't take my word for it.......the people for whom this matters alot have voted with their wallets and their freedom.......and overwhelmingly they choose BTC as their preferred payment method. * for larger sums......some more esoteric shitcoins I'm sure work better for a few G's.....but if your shaking down someone for a few millis well btc is about the only coin with a large enough mkt cap do that in.