Spring day

• On this day in 1968 students were rioting in Berlin
• Margin debt is exploding.
• Everyone wants a more activist state, but nobody wants public spending to spiral out of control. In other words, ‘people’ want incompatible things. Not a person, but society, made up of individuals with different objectives.
• The USA gives up on Afghanistan, just as everyone predicted they would. But not before trillions of dollars have flowed from the pockets of taxpayers to the military-industrial complex.
• Macro Markets Daily is well worth signing up to. It has a great selection of charts daily, for free.
• The Convexity Maven has a new newsletter out. He recommends some very long-dated option positions. The thesis hinges on the cost of vol going as the square root of time, but interest cost being linear.
• Johnson and Johnson announce they are withdrawing their vaccine on the basis that six women have experienced blood clots after millions have received the vaccine.

Producer prices foreshadow retail price inflation

But we’ve heard this story before …

Someone is not a fan of the royal family

see url: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-56721078

see full article…There are some republicans among us here in the UK…who just couldn’t get access to the website to complain…particularly after the BBC realised that it had made a mistake and pulled the website down. There is just so many other much more interesting things going on in life these days, particularly with the wealth of mass media which surrounds us, that the histrionics of the Royals, only interests the addicted, besotted, gushingly English royalists and the experts who make their money out of “advising” the royals on what they should have done and not done over some trivial pursuit or other, or titillating and tittivating for those Americans who are so bored with toting guns and watching wild westerns, wars on Vietnam and the rest of the world, aliens and crummy, one minute wonder flashy Presidents that they turn to the upper English classes for teachings in politeness, language and decorum and accents and what the butler saw, and who are gullible enough to pay out money for the privilege…😉 It is us folks who pay for the BBC through our license payments and we don’t want those royal sycophants who run the BBC ramming royalty down our throats all the time there is some minor “catostrophic” event within the ruling family, a “chink” in the crown “jewels” so to speak😉 ; with a history which is not only highly conjectural and based more on fantasy of the English way of life and empire than it is based on reality…but keeps getting repeated time after time, until it becomes so boring it makes us all go to sleep….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz😉

I am slightly amazed that the death of a ninety-nine year old man, who was never in line to the throne, should cause such widespread shutting down of civic activity. I have never understood the reverence with which the royal family is held, although I willingly concede that our system is, perhaps surprisingly, better than the alternative of having an elected head of state. Certainly, the idea of having a head of state with huge, and growing executive powers, such as the system found in the USA, is a recipe for bad governance.

Worth following

I heard an interview with the CIO of Massif Capital on The Market Huddle. He had some very interesting things to say about carbon credits, European ESG, gold, lithium, uranium. I urge you to listen to the episode.

Wrap

Markets lack direction. The 10Y yield was up a tiny bit, equity markets had a wide diffusion.