Dinar

@John Hjorth, Ukraine is NOT part of NATO, so what is your point?

You are kidding, right? 30 year treasury issued in 2020-2021 is trading at less than 50 cents on the dollar.

John, after my experience in Maui, I told my wife that when we buy a place there, we are definitely getting it. I used it for two weeks, excellent quality.

Politicians have to respond to voters. There is a choice, not to support Ukraine, and let the Europeans pay for it. Russia is NOT our enemy, and has never been one. We fought two wars against Germany, two against England, one against Japan, and not one against Russia. In any case, it is irrelevant what you and I think. What matters is what man on the street in US wants, and he wants nothing to do with Ukraine. Let the Germans & the French and the Lithuanians/Latvians/Estonians/Danes/Czechs and company for this is. This is their problem, not ours.

When has Ukraine existed for centuries? Your own link shows that it was not an independent country before 1991. In any case, you can argue whatever you want, but the point is there is no support on the American street for helping Ukraine.

@UK, @no_free_lunch, there has not been a poll done in at least a year of US citizens asking whether or not they would be willing to pay $100 per person per year to support the war in Ukraine. You may think $25bn per annum is a small price to pay, but US citizens think otherwise. Also, nobody is talking about handing the region over to Russia. However, it is NOT the job of US taxpayers to support Ukraine. It is the job of Ukrainians. Yes, we are obligated to defend Poland and the Baltics due to treaty obligations. Meanwhile, let's not forget, Ukraine has never existed as a country. Western Ukraine was part of Austro-Hungarian empire for centuries, and eastern Ukraine was called Little Russia for centuries, and part of Russian empire, and was Russian speaking. Hell, Kiev was called the mother of Russian cities.

Who is going to pay for all of this? Ukraine needs $50bn per year to fight and probably a trillion for reconstruction. There is not a chance in hell the US will come up with $25bn per year for the next five years.

Why? Baltics are part of Nato and so is Poland, that's a big difference!

Added to Transdigm (TDG) and Philip Morris International (PM)

Hell no!

You are cherrypicking, and also saying things that are not true. For instance, in 2004, gas was $1.25 in NJ per gallon and today is it $4 per gallon. In terms of food, in 1990, the grocery bill for my family of 3 was $350 per month in NYC and we ate very well. Today, it is closer to $2000 for a family of 5. I challenge you to spend the same amount of money on food that you did in 2008. Yogurt that I buy has doubled in price in the last 5 years, tomatoes and chicken as well, fish more than doubled, and the list goes on and on. What food products are cheaper today than they were in 2008?

Your point being? Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, Berkshire, and the list goes on were all created by white men.

@Spekulatius, yes, you are absolutely right.

@RichardGibbons, I grew up in the Soviet Union, you do NOT want to live in a place where everyone is equal. The US does have serious problems and this is how I would begin to address them: a) Stop immigration. Immigration expands labor supply and depresses wages, particularly for unskilled and the poor. Raises cost of housing, again impacting the poor and middle class the most. b) Fix public school system (just don't spend more money - NYC spends USD 40K per kid, and outcomes are awful, Newark tripled its spending per pupil, nothing improved.) and give vouchers for private schools to kids. Break the monopoly of public schools. Mandate personal finance classes in every grade starting with 5th in every school, and teach personal responsibility. Classes how to choose a spouse, a job. c) End federal guarantee of student loans which just serve to enrich colleges. Use the money to reduce budget deficit. d) End personal income tax on the first USD 50K of income of you are single, $100K if you are married, and say $100K if you are single + kids, $200K if you are married with kids. End all personal deductions, including for charity and mortgage interest. e) Fix healthcare system which is dysfunctional and a cancer on the US. Three quick solutions: 1) Every hospital/medical practice should have publicly listed price list and law of one price - you have to charge everyone, ensured and uninsured same price, no $50K bill but $10K if you have insurance (80% discount negotiated by your insurance company) and $50K if you pay cash. 2) Mandate that for every medicine in the US, pharmaceutical companies cannot charge more than say 30% more than the same medicine costs in Canada. 3) Ban rebates and other abusive practice in the pharmaceutical industry in the US. f) Reform welfare and other social programs. It should not be that in the US, a single mother with 2 kids gets so much generous support that she needs to earn $150K per annum in NYC before she is better off working than sitting on the dole. g) Stop the whole switch to solar and wind which is very expensive, particularly for the poor, and build nuclear power plants - cheap, environmentally friendly electricity. I am sure that there are a number of things that should be done that I have missed.

TIPS are NOT cash. They are bonds, albeit inflation indexed ones.

@RichardGibbons, what do you think the implications of a 99% inheritance tax will be? I will bet that you will a) see tax collection decline b) people move out of the country (like Eduardo Saverin did) c) massive misallocation of resources and economic destruction. (If I had a net worth of $200MM and could only leave $30MM to my kids, I would move out of the US. If I was prevented from doing so, I would then buy $170MM worth of apartment buildings or a really scarce commodity and burn them down. Most of the kids I know from high school would do same thing by the way.) By the way, I came to the US as a penniless immigrant, and 70% of the kids in my high school were penniless immigrants. We all became doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc.... I have yet to meet someone in the US (excluding people who are very ill) who worked hard, saved and did not do well. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-09/norway-wealth-tax-pushes-the-rich-to-move-to-switzerland?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=230914&utm_campaign=wealth

For the moment I thought that you were talking about US. You are absolutely right of course, that's what Russia should have done. It needs Lee Quan Yew and so do we.

Would you mind providing proof for your assertion that there is a defense alliance between UK and Ukraine? I was not aware that one existed.

Really? Why do you think that UTX did quite well from 2014-2020? I do not recall the company posting good operating performance. Sure it was good that Carrier & Otis were spun off, but Otis organic revenue growth has been below peers for years.

Why? This is a no growth business, right? 16-17x p/e on 2024 is not expensive, but what's the upside? 20x?

RTX, in my opinion, has an insanely incompetent CEO and CFO (who was an IR guy before becoming CFO.) I wonder how good the next layer of management is as well? This is NOT a business that a moron can run!

I looked into doing same right now, but there is no vol in the options.

SUI - Sun Communities at $121.33

@Xerxes, I agree 100% with you regarding the risk at Safran (which I own.) That's why Safran is a 5% position and not a 10% position. The way I deal with it also is that in my back of the envelope DCF, I assume Safran's unlevered cost of capital = inflation + 6%. I have always been worried about this given troubles at Rolls Royce.

Isn't the earnings quality lousy? A bunch of operating income comes from pensions, no? Also, given the engine issues, should we not increase discount rate since the business is riskier than perhaps we thought in the past?