rogermunibond

Massive liquidity from pandemic, plus global wealthy savings glut = counting assets BTC, gold, equity goes up. This is divorced in some respects from the real economy ie oil, NG, ag commodities. Strategic metals and REE are their own thing.

Does propping up Argentina/Milei get the US exclusive access to mineral rights?

Short JPY Long trips to Tokyo

Interesting set of charts from Torsten Slok on labor market weakness. Good reasons for it. Thinks Fed should focus more on rising inflation trend. https://www.apolloacademy.com/the-daily-spark/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=pardot&utm_id=b5fabc137ed88ba6b9694d660c56edec&utm_campaign=EXT_Daily+Spark

I'm not sure Trump wants a weak dollar. But there are huge inherent contradictions in his and Bessent's economic policy. The majority of ETFs and index funds exposure to non-US equitites is unhedged and you pay an extra cost for that protection. But as a US investor, I think I'm okay with exposure to other developed and emerging markets on an unhedged basis.

Let's hear it for index portfolio diversification this year. Compared to the S&P 500, non-US indexes and ETFs, such as European, Asian Pacific, or Emerging Market indexes have outperformed the S&P 500 for the first time in ages. Maybe I'm jinxing it by celebrating. What do you think? Does non-US market performance repeat in 2026?

I have you all beat on NVDA, having invested in NVDA and ATI Technologies (both GPU makers, ATI was acquired by AMD) back in 2005. Let's say that the returns I got were excellent but the regret is real!

@Castanza haven't seen anything yet that does "push button" automation, but that's not to say lots of investment dollars aren't being thrown at how to do this. there are certain middleware standards that would need to be adopted industry-wide to make this easier. one of which is MCP (model context protocol). As these standards codify, we may see more software disruption. https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro A blog post from Steven Sinofsky on the middleware of AI - provides a lot of useful context for how this works and what might happen https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/230-mcp-its-hot-but-will-it-win?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82387&post_id=160043222&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8j4ms&triedRedirect=true

Charles Mann's four part essay "We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It" in The New Atlantis is very good and I highly recommend it. It requires subscription though. It's set up as an introduction to how our modern life works. The advances that allow us to live as we do. Part 1 - food system, Part 2 - water systems, Part 3 - the electrical grid, and Part - public health system. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-royalty-and-dont-know-it

@LC I agree and they haven't seen or read that. Nor did their parents probably. Maybe their grandparents did but they didn't listen to them. I would guess that only 5-10% of the US population know of the strides that public health and vaccination has made in nearly eradicating once common diseases.

The collective memory of disease and pestilence is short. One needs only to go back 100 years when outbreaks of diseases affected millions.

AI hyperscale power issues are already being figured out. Some of it is going to be voluntary curtailment and switching to backup generation/batteries/VPP during peak load conditions. And where it is available, some of it is going to be BYOG (build your own generation). What won't happen because ratepayers won't tolerate it, is passing on a disproportionate cost of newbuild generation to existing ratepayers to the benefit of hyperscalers. In the PJM region, where there are GW of data centers already, the recent capacity auctions resulted in huge increases. There's likely going to be a requirement to BYOG and along with it streamlined process for transmission and approvals.

Leading tech firms are building physical models of the world to power "Physical AI" https://www.ft.com/content/ae1c6de2-691e-448d-8bf3-8837cc1e6efb?

Bloomberg article covers more of the same points. https://archive.ph/LnA2h

Interesting twitter thread on PE jam up. Depending on how PE firms try to exit their private company investments could be an interesting playing field for WEB and GA. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1970293827710886100.html

I would look in the specialty chemical sector for existing carbon black producers who have the ability to do R&D on new carbon forms like graphene. It's a pretty niche business but enjoys decent returns on capital for the chemicals/industrial sector. Names like CBT would be one place to look.

Economy is weakening - real final sales to domestic purchases is declining. GDP has noise from import surge. But averaging out over two quarters real GDP closer to 1.2%

Well if @parsad is able to pay some of the overhead of the site by letting AI bots crawl our content, so be it.

That list of WWAfco projects is impressive. Just makes me think that there's going to be lots of concrete poured as well as lots of building envelope installed as well. Not to mention the HVAC systems.

From Stratechery

Loading the elephant gun

@wabuffo have you looked at what Bessent et al. are doing from the MMT perspective? govt sector - increase deficits - reduce spending to rent seeking/maybe reallocate to more productive federal spend/attempt to increase private sector investment through dereg etc. private sector - increase surplus - reduce taxes/decrease consumption (tariffs)/increase private sector investment foreign sector - decrease surplus - tariffs/reduction in US consumption of imports Does that somewhat simplistically describe their puts/takes in the MMT sectoral model?

@wabuffo that's great for explaining this. Have you posted somewhere onlline a comprehensive take on the Treasury workings from the viewpoint of MMT? Or is there someone you can recommend who's posted on this?