Wrap
(I was out yesterday, this is written way after the close of markets, but I add it for completeness.)
- commodities largely flat. Precious metals steady/rising,
- bonds flat,
- DX sagging a bit, 91.7,
- equities generally grinding higher, but nothing dramatic.
Nexhealth, Plaid (nothing to do with Tesla)
Packy McCormack writes about API-first companies.
Code is powerful, but that power comes only when there is something to connect it to. When I was a programmer, I spent some time writing screen drivers, i.e. a set of calls to allow an application program to make things happen on the monitor in front of him. Now, companies are employing people to write code to make things happen in their real life: e.g. taking money from their bank account to put it into securities. This sort of thing is difficult because real life was never designed to be driven by software.
Anyway, read the piece. It’s excellent. Stripe is a wonderful company. It looks as though these two have the potential to emulate it.
The West, in opposition to communism, has become fascist
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini
It is generally attributed to an article written by Mussolini in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana with the assistance of Giovanni Gentile, the editor.
https://www.politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate-state
Banks stress test results out today
Everyone is expecting that, backstopped by the Fed, the banks will be able to pay out much more capital than previously. It’s not obvious how a change of capital structure will change the valuation of the enterprise (didn’t two academic economists get a Nobel Prize for saying that?), but it seems that it does.
It’s a guilty pleasure of mine to read RT
It’s normally pretty mainstream, but this article about Blackstone buying up housing assets in the US really goes for the jugular.
It seems to me that there is a very tilted playing field involved here. Blackstone can access funds at a few basis points. The precariat is having to borrow from credit card companies at 30% (i.e. 3,000bp). The higher rate is to compensate the lender for the credit risk. But the high rate is itself the cause of that risk!
OK, people do not buy houses on a credit card, but when people are buyers, their liabilities may push their marginal cost of funds to these levels. Once they have received the ‘black spot’ of having an impaired credit score, their sins can never be expunged.
No we can’t!
I believe that EVs need about 0.3 kWh per mile to travel. I don’t know if the other figures here are right, but they don’t sound wild.
At the end of 2020, the United States had 1,117,475 MW—or about 1.12 billion kilowatts (kW)—of total utility-scale electricity generating capacity and about 27,724 MW—or nearly 0.03 billion kW—of small-scale solar photovoltaic electricity generating capacity.
from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
It seems intuitively obvious that to replace the energy distribution capability of petrol and diesel in a country, the electricity generation capacity is going to be massively ramped up.
Some quick napkin math
Per 1M EVs on the road driving 12K miles/year require ~400GWh
286M EV cars on the road (US) will need ~114TWh capacity
US capacity had 1.12TWh in 2020
Solar cost (retail) at ~$2.75/watt would be ~$314T to get to 114TWh
Comments !