Dinar

See your Sergei Brin and raise with tens of thousands of Russian immigrants on Brighton Beach collecting welfare/supplemental security income + food stamps + receiving Medicaid + receiving Section 8 housing. Don't forget the massive home attendant fraud - nothing wrong with your 68 year old mother/father, but you get a sympathetic doctor to write a note that she/he needs 40 hours a week of home care, and voila - Medicaid pays you for forty hours of "work" + health insurance. Indian immigrants like Satya Nadela & Sundar Pichai (and the list goes on) obviously add a great deal, however in many cases Indians in IT (just like Russians & Chinese immigrants) only hire their own, care to put a value on that? We need a well thought out immigration policy - get people with the right skills, deal with negative externalities, exclude people with few skills, end chain migration, and limit it. If we let 100MM Russians or Chinese or Indians or Africans or pick your favorite nationality/ethnic group in, we will turn the US into the same unpleasant place that these immigrants are fleeing from. Small numbers of immigrants will assimilate, large numbers will change the country.

Then why doesn't Canada or US hold a nationwide referendum and see if the masses agree with you? Also what exactly are the positives of a Russian computer scientist depressing wages or Haitian construction worker destroying job prospects of African Americans?

The world has changed. There is no need for unskilled labor anymore. Just because something worked two hundred years ago does not mean it works today. Cavalry was great for millenia until tanks and automatic weapons made it useless. Interesting that you do not address the costs that I have outlined. Or does the plight of the poor/unskilled in US and Canada not matter to you?

There is a real cost to immigration that nobody talks about. Lower wages, higher traffic, higher stress on environment, higher rent and housing prices, higher economic inequality which leads to all sorts of social problems. Lower wages in our welfare state encourage people to stay on the dole with very negative consequence for the society as a whole. I am all for welcoming Einsteins/Fermi/, but not millions of unskilled people with two grades of education who will have ten children that taxpayers will have to educate. You want labor force growth? Reduce welfare benefits (welfare, food stamps, section 8, medicaid, free phones & internet and the list goes on). Fix public schools so that kids can get a good education rather than propaganda, so that middle class is comfortable having 2-3 kids rather than have one because they need to send him to public school.

Thank you very much. Have you looked at Warsaw stock exchange? I own Tel-Aviv stock exchange and like exchanges in general.

I own it and love it. In my opinion, the best management team in the business. Really smart buyers of assets and then able to grow them. It is less of an exporter though than Diageo or Pernord Ricard or Remy.

Spek, I respect Soros as a great investor, and I appreciate what he had tried to do in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I do not appreciate his funding of people like Chesa Boudin and Alvin Bragg and other leftins. Crime in NYC is going up very sharply, at least in part in my opinion, caused by Bragg's refusal to prosecute criminals for many crimes, and end of cash bail. When I am worried about taking a walk in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in NYC, I do not appreciate people who created the situation.

Spek, what broker do you use to trade Poland? Any Polish names you'd care to share? What is the thesis on Deutsche Post? I would be careful with Porsche, after 2008 saga, I do not trust the families/management. Do you think that Akza can grow volumes?

You can simply flare gas, which is what Putin will do rather than shut down wells. I am 99.99% confident that Soros is aware of this, the fact that he omits this fact once again shows that he is, while a great investor, not a person to be trusted in my opinion.

Spek, which names do you like and why? Thank you very much.

It is cheap. I prefer Remy. Remy is 20% more expensive on a multiple basis, but I think cognac will grow much faster than the spirits industry as a whole, so growth will probably be 1-3% per annum faster than Pernod. Too me, that is worth a 20% P/E premium. I also have owned L'Oreal and Dior for years and think that they are quite cheap here.

Exporters look interesting - Remy Cointreau and Hermes come to mind, also Safran.

Thank you, I agree with you. My biggest fear is lousy capital allocation and high SG&A. I guess there is always a chance that Jonathan Gray comes in.

Greg, what do you think the company looks like in 2023? I think that 2023 will look as follows: a) Office + hotel + development gone b) Debt + repurchase obligations ($532MM) = $1.25bn on 12/31/2022 c) Existing stabilized multifamily = $140-$145MM of EBITDA d) Haus25 = $40MM rent roll and $28MM of EBITDA e) Park ridge = $5MM of EBITDA f) s/o + all opco units + options = 100MM g) Fair value of our interest in joint ventures = $250MM h) Corporate SG&A = $20MM per annum. Please let me know if I am missing something or you disagree

I listened to a few, they are not bad. Tangen himself is absolutely brilliant.

Thank you very much. While i see how this is incredibly cheap on a liquidation basis, my problem is the SG&A burn. I think that it could easily be $20-30MM per annum, and that significantly reduces NAV. It is also not in the CEO's interest to sell the company, and I am trying to figure out what is in Aharon Aviva Katz's interest.

What about management comp, seems egregious? Also, are you not bothered by absence of insider buying? Also, do you like the Jersey City/Port Imperial assets or Park Ridge? Are these truly prime locations?

It was a Communist organized famine, not Russian organized famine, there is a difference.

I agree with everything that you are saying, I would add a couple of points: a) Demand is still down a couple of million barrels a day from 2019 probably caused in part by Chinese lockdowns; b) Iran and Venezuela have potential to increase production materially, may be as much as 1.8MM barrels per day from Iran, and a million or two from Venezuela (unless I screwed up my math.)

Greg, with all due respect, inflation was not nil over the past decade, even if we measure it from 2010-2019. May be CPI reported 2% per annum, but that is not a reflection of reality. Housing, healthcare, education, food, and the list goes on compounded closer to 3-6% per annum.

What do you think about nitrogen? I had thought that this was very well positioned for long term given that Euro capacity is permanently out of the market.

Thank you, I already own both CP & CN. So will add potash

SD, if I may ask, what fertilizer names do you find the most attractive or do you own them all? I am a tourist in the space, and I think that UAN seems very cheap. Thank you in advance.

Just out of curiosity, why British, French or American response is shocking but Israel's is not?

Why is Tobin's Q a good measure of anything? If I spend a billion dollars to build a hotel in Sahara that will never have any customers, is it cheap at 0.1x Q? If you can buy a monopoly, like an airport, at Q =3, yet a 10% free cash flow yield, is it expensive? Tobin's q implies that there is a perfectly competitive market for any and every business, and economy as a whole. What makes you think that it is actually correct?