Sweet

overall what’s your feeling about CRE - long decline?

How is it trending, has it seen a recent improvement.

Anecdotal and with major caveats, one of which being I don’t live in the US. However we experienced lockdown and all the same hybrid working in the UK and commercial occupancy has significantly improved. Nearly everyone is regularly back in work, hybrid working still in force in some places but not nearly at the level during covid. Could the CRE not be as bad as predicted?

Is this mostly a West Coast phenomenon?

@Gregmal https://truflation.com Its attempting to be the inflation equivalent of GDPNow and try to track inflation in real-time rather than the lagging CPI etc

You obviously exited the original position, did you exit both legs though?

@gfp @Spekulatius thanks both. Yes I misinterpreted that - it completely changes the analysis lol.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/regional-bank-crisis-may-be-far-from-over-experts-warn-2b793d95?mod=home-page Nice chart showing the maturity of outstanding debt. All else being equal I’d imagine that those banks with more short term loans are likely to be safer because they aren’t locked into long maturity low rate debt? For me CMA stands out as being interesting.

Overall Luca I think you are a great poster, but on China you are on a different planet from me.

Luca, you are just spamming Chinese propaganda.

Agree 100%

The IP issue is not hypocritical. We can’t even name a single patent the US have apparently stole. I also don’t think the histories are at all comparable. China has many thousands of years of history to pick apart lol. China might be doing what it sees in its best interest, I think the West should do the same, which is decouple from China. They aren’t playing fair so you don’t get to trade with us - my opinion, shared by many in the West I expect.

You don’t have to buy it, but I believe it is a Mafia state. Has China apologised for the killing of millions? Has it closed those camps? No. The US is not the same country today, with the same beliefs as it was 250 years ago. Yet you keep pointing to US history to justify the action of China today. You aren’t denying that China is stealing secrets, or operating discriminatory and unfair practices, or using massive state subsidies, you simply reply with the West once did this. Fine, but there is no reason for the West to passively accept it.

No doubt the development is spectacular. That’s not the issue though.

That’s truly a ridiculous thing to say. How many people died as a result of the CCP - many many millions Luca. There is no parallel. If it wasn’t for the US, communism might have run rampant all ofer the global, and communist societies are not kind, and in many cases (like China) they are downright murderous. Can you tell me the patents the US stole please?

Yes ‘re-education camps’. I disagree, they are a mafia state ran by a cabal of Xi appointees who are fabulously wealthy. Xi is the Godfather - there are quite a lot of parallels with a mafia. Does the US steal patents now? Which ones recently? The workplace Chinese student that stole documents and technical information was on cultural / student exchange programme. A programme which Western governments figured out was actually used by the Chinese government to spy and steal technology. It’s was not a private citizen, the programmes are used as a spying ring. There were articles exposing this BEFORE the Chinese student worked with us, and sure enough information went missing after his visit. America like anywhere has its problems, but what has black males in Harlem got to do with anything? As Morgan Freeman said “the bus runs every day” - in other words get out of Harlem. Does America government spy and get involved with companies like Twitter. Sure. The difference is that we can have an open conversation about what level of surveillance is appropriate. We can throw out the politicians and get some to enact different policies. China has Godfather Xi and he isn’t leaving for anyone. And regarding India, I don’t buy your answer. India is a competitor but not an adversary. They are democratic and not authoritarian. The West doesn’t have a problem with India for those reasons. I don’t think India will be moving closer to China.

That’s a year on year chart, and 4.5% yoy is not that scary.

@Lucathere is a line between being devils advocate and shilling for China, and I’m not sure what side of that line you are on It’s unserious to compare the detention of less than 1,000 known and suspected terrorists at Guatanamo bay with the internment and other abuses of millions of Uyghurs on the basis of their ethnicity and religion. IPs are important for technological advancement. If anyone could just steal your drug product, or your technical innovation, that would remove any incentive to create those products in the first place. Take drugs, who is going to spend billions researching and bringing a new drug to the market if there is no reward for them in doing so? There was a Chinese placement student in my work who we are certain stole a load of documents which contained technical information and experimental results - is that OK Luca? Trade rules are in place between countries that seek to set the ground work for fair trade and competition. China has not been playing fair, it’s the biggest abuser of these rules, and whilst Western markets have been largely open to China, Chinese markets are not largely open to Western countries. That parasitic relationship needs severed now. I asked you these questions before and would appreciate answer: Why is the West not concerned with the development and rise of India? Why are non-Western countries in South East Asia remilitarising and seeking alliances to counter the influence of China? The answer to both those questions tell you an awful lot about geopolitics in that region.

Luca - you can’t be serious with this post lol? China has just thrown people into prison. There are about 1 million or more people in ‘education’ camps - yes it is a Mafia state, that’s exactly what it is. China have deliberately ran a surplus with Western countries by i) pegging their currency and keeping it artificially weak, ii) enjoying most favoured nation status from most Western nations whilst preventing access to Western companies and goods through trade restrictions, iii) using the proceeds from their economic model to state funds businesses, buy up companies around the world, and put Western companies out of business, and iv) steal intellectual property from anywhere they can. They’re a parasite state who the West have allowed to hollow out their industrial base by unfair and unbalanced trade practices, and as thanks they have built up their military to challenge us. This is after the West rescued them from the Japanese in World War II. If I was President, all trade would stop with China in my first term, and I would trade with democratic countries that play fair. That would be my number one priority. It would hurt but it needs done.

Even with core, interest rates are now above inflation. The tightening effect takes time to show up. The Fed was too slow to tighten and are too slow to stop. CPI is down by half and interest rates have only just hit 5.25%. We need to pause for a while, ratcheting the rates higher makes no sense.

Is it really that surprising when you had fed officials this week saying two more hikes this year? Some of them have lost the plot. Why hike when inflation is down. Killing the economy is not part of their mandate.

Russia just lie all the time. OPEC cut only took effect in May and likely only seeing the reduced volumes in transit now.

Dam, that’s a prediction.

Noam Chomsky is saying the West is and has been trying to stop Chinas development? Maybe now but that’s not the full story - the guy is a clown. Henry Kissinger said that the US, and the West more generally, sought to develop China’s economy in the hope of i) pulling it away from the Soviet Union, and ii) hoping that free market reforms would lead to a free political system. That policy was a huge error in hindsight, because China used its economy to solidify its authoritarian regime, and is now an adversary to neighbouring countries and the West. If it’s just because the West dislikes China, why isn’t the same approach being taken by the West with India? Why are countries all over the South Pacific arming and seeking alliances against China?

There is an article on Marketwatch today of Bill Gates claiming that AI will mean we won’t use a search engine again i.e. Google, or Amazon again. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-gates-lays-ai-tombstone-on-amazon-and-google-61814cdd?mod=home-page I think he is wrong on both counts. I think some of the predictions of what AI will replace right now, as Gates predicted above, will be quite wide of the mark. I think AI will have an impact that nobody can quite predict. I don’t see a broad market bubble as a result of AI right now, so if one were to develop we would be in the very early innings.