Dinar

You are wrong. Trump is not looking to impose tariffs on Canada, he is using tariffs as leverage to make Canada stop illegals and drugs into the US.

Why? It is a negotiating tactic to make Mexico and Canada stop flow of illegals & drugs. Now if only the headlines (looking at you WSJ) would reflect what Trump actually stated. (Surprisingly NYT headline was actually accurate and the Journal's was misleading.)

Actually, not at all. What he said was the tariffs will stay until the countries stop the flow of drugs and migrants to our borders. Seems reasonable to me. The ball is in Mexico's court.

You are 100% right. Unless Israel wipes out Hezbollah, wipes out Iran's nuclear capability, and transfers Gaza's population and West Bank's to Syria, it will lose the next war, since it will be under arms embargo from the West.

You guys just don't get it. Europe is finished unless it gets Margaret Thatcher in every country and kicks out those that hate the western way of life. A continent where most political leaders (except Germany, Hungary and Czech Republic) obsess with jailing Israeli leaders for waging war the way it has been waged since tirme immemorial rather than focusing on fixing their economies or preventing natural disasters from killing hundreds people (Spain) will not prosper. Historically societies that kicked out Jews did not prosper, and neither did societies that imported millions of Muslims. Europe is doing both. There is no freedom of speech in UK unless you call for wiping Israel of the map. In Germany they want to ban essentially the largest political party - Afd. Imagine the US being run by Harvard/Yale faculty, no freedom of speech/information control that would make old USSR proud and instead of Elon Musk + Indian/Chinese/Korean immigrants you have Muslim immigrants with no work ethic and many of whom hate and ready to kill non-Muslims. Now would the country prosper? US is being saved by entrepreneurs both domestic and imported, but why would Musk go or stay in Europe? To have Rachel Reeves tax him to death? Macron & Sanchez regulate him to death?

I disagree with you. For one, you are assuming that none of the spending finds its way outside the country. Furthermore, you are assuming that spending is not counterproductive. Say government gives $150K loan to someone to get an MFA in film at Columbia, who will never repay the loan, what is the impact if that loan is never granted? That person actually has to go and get a job and do something that is productive raising the GDP. Meanwhile, Columbia has $150K less in revenue. So it either has to spend more from its endowment, or it spends less, but on what? On foreign trips for its faculty? On leather couches that it imports from outside the US? On foreign graduate students? You have millions of people who could be in the labor force who are not because they are subsidized by taxpayers do learn something unproductive in academia. What makes you think that if these people actually worked, they would produce less than $400bn in GDP?

Actually, you are not correct. First of all, 3% GDP growth by itself should shrink budget deficit as a % of GDP by a full percentage point due to higher taxes and less social spending. Also, if you bring spending to the 2019 level, you have a budget balance. Lastly, if you eliminate $400bn+ spent on student loans annually + say tens of billions on illegals, will that really impact GDP? How much is being spent on subsidizing research abroad? Didn't Fauci's department subsidize Chinese research into gain of function for bat viruses? Real value add there.

Which names do you find attractive and why? Thank you.

I would buy today and probably hold for a decade (I own all of these names): Arcosa (ACA), CRH, CP (Canadian Pacific Railroad), St Joe (JOE), MSGE (Madison Square Garden Entertainment), New England Realty (NEN).

What is CNSFW? Cannot find it, thank you.

Here is an interesting anecdote. I have an investment in a company that owns several dozen apartment buildings in and around Boston. Their insurance expense went up 30% - 5% due to a rate increase and 25% due to higher insured value of buildings. The higher insured value drives demand for more insurance, and hence in this example, the insurance industry has to set aside 25% more capital to insure these guys. So if this is replicated across the industry, then this could keep upward pressure on rates. On the supply side, according to Renaissance, they have not seen additional capital enter. Meanwhile, ACGL just announced a 5% special dividend. So it seems the industry is staying discipled. By the way, Tom Gayner of Markel bought around $200k worth of Markel stock in the past two weeks - another insider who is bullish. Everest (EG) just saw a director buy USD 1MM worth of stock. So industry insiders are bullish, time will tell whether they are correct or not.

Renaissance Re on its conference call on November 7th: strong markets and rates are here to stay.

Very, very good investors. A number of their funds have excellent returns.

I haven't been following, what has she done? Thank you.

Kasparov is a pompous fool, he knows chess and probably nothing else! He can't pick wives (on number 3), and he is no strategist. Trump is not loyal to Putin, but US does not need to spend money on helping Ukraine, Germany needs Ukraine to fight, so Germany should pick up the tab. I said this two years ago, and will say it again, instead of sending weapons and money to Ukraine, offer every Russian serviceman who deserts and every Russian male/female between 20-40 who leaves Russia $50K and $5K respectively plus permanent residency in US/Canada/Germany. Watch Russian army and population melt away, and comrade Putin will have to negotiate. Instead, the pompous moron Garry wants hundreds of billions of US aid and hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives to be wasted while he is sitting on Upper West Side of Manhattan scratching himself and saying do I look like Napoleon or Bismark!

It should be offset by the higher discount factor on the insurance liabilities.

You just lie. 90-95% of Jews, all non-combatants, were killed in areas controlled by the Nazis in WWII. What % of Gaza's population that are non-combatants have been killed? 1%? How many non-combatants in Gaza were killed by Hamas? Jews were not shooting at Nazis in 1939 Poland or 1941 Ukraine. You want to end the war? Call for Hamas to surrender.

When Israel puts IDF or Mossad HQ under apartment buildings or hospitals, then you'd be correct. Until then, the answer is no.

No, at the right price, it is. The right price is when you assume that shares are actually warrants, and you want a pay-off associated with warrants.

My limited view is based on talking to dozens of kids from China who have received PhD degrees in math, physics, accounting, and operations in the US and who all have chosen to stay either in US or Western Europe. Not a single one chose to go back to China, including a few that won gold metals at International Math and Physics Olympiads. And your clearly well informed views are based on talking to millions of Europeans and Americans who have chosen to immigrate to China...

You have no idea about China. If are a Chinese national and China is so great, why do you live in Germany? If you are a European, why don't you live in Chinese paradise with no rule of law? If US opened its borders, 100MM+ Chinese would leave. US universities are full of kids from Beijing, Shanghai, who will do whatever it takes to stay in the US. If China is so great, why do millions of Chinese from Tier 1 cities flee it every year? You remind me of talking heads on Soviet TV who reported from Vienna or Paris or London and talked about how horrible life was in the West compared to Soviet Paradise. Investing in a country without a rule of law is gambling. Exactly the same arguments as you are using were made 20+ years ago about investing in Russia. I got one word for you - Yukos. If I can get a pay-off of 50 to 1, I will buy Tencent. But to make 3x my money in the best case scenario or lose 100% in the worst is idiotic. Good luck with your Kool-Aid, just spare us the Soviet Propangda - China is great, West sucks. Hundreds of millions of people in China disagree with you, but you of course know better, that's why you sit in Germany!

You have clearly never lived in under communism or a place with no rule of law. Any common peasant will tell you that rule of law is what matters. Who gives a damn about a shiny subway if you can be jailed and your property confiscated at any time and for any reason? Soviet metro was the best the world had ever seen, Soviet educational system was better than the one in US & UK, yet it was the Soviet Union that needed to have an Iron Curtain, lest 50% of the country depart. Rather than spout empty platitudes about the superiority of China, (and yes, I live in NYC and our government is insanely inefficient and corrupt), move to China for say five years and start by stating that Xi is an incompetent buffoon in a public square. Let's see what tune you will sing when you return.

For me, one very interesting comment was that even if CAT 4 hit Tampa directly, Fairfax would still have an underwriting profit for the year. Another was that interest and dividend income are running at $2.5bn per annum, vs $2.2bn previously stated.

Ha! What the immigrants from the former USSR do in the US, in terms of milking the system is insane! You are 100% right.

Gee, and I thought that millions of Muslim immigrants + insane amount of regulation is a winning recipe!