Global Winds Hack

Some, unknown, state actor seems to have gained access to the Global Winds source control system and inserted malware in the underlying source code (or, in some other way incorporated its software into the legitimate, and signed, release executables built by Global Winds). This is a serious piece of industrial, or national, espionage. IHAK is an ETF of companies in the anti-hacking space. It seems reasonable to assume that better software is needed to monitor servers and workstations (not to mention phones) and it seems likely that companies will pay money to specialist firms for the promise of better security.

I have no idea how any of this works, so I don’t endorse the underlying stocks in IHAK, but the idea of a cybersecurity ETF seems a good one.

Wrap

Yields down. US 10s by 1 bp. Pretty unremarkable! Food strong, metals generally down, except silver, which went up 1.65%. Big news is a variant Covid virus, causing problems in the UK. Banks positive, because the Fed gave the green light for them to restart buybacks. The dollar was a big stronger. Up .23% vs EUR. Curves flattened. Bitcoin was slightly down. Commodity currencies were down. On balance, a bit risk off.

The latest stimulus package, $0.9bln, is due to be voted on today. The bill is packed to the gills with pork, and so will probably pass. It’s Congress “giving away” money, so it’s bound to be popular. The fact that people are being given money they already had it irrelevant. $600 per person one-time cheque, together with a modest uplift in unemployment benefits is less than was hoped.

My guess is that markets will revert tomorrow, but who knows in this crazy market?

Young cardinals vote for old popes

I am not in favour of diversity for its own sake. And I get very cross when diversity is defined in terms of a very tiny number of dimensions. We justify gender and ethnic diversity for the breadth of viewpoint it introduces, but shouldn’t we try to broaden the composition of decision-making bodies even more? For example, how about a balance of:

• the various personality dimensions, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion (note that this would require individuals from all parts of these spectra),
• intelligence and stupidity (contrary to appearances, most successful politicians are not actually stupid),
• parental income,
• age?

Politics used to be a continuation of the class war by other means. Now, all the leading politicians seem to know each other from university.

Note that politicians, at least senior ones, are almost always fairly old. This surely gives them less of a stake in sorting out education than they might have.

Bellingcat — give yourself a Christmas present

This week’s newsletter is representative of the material from Bellingcat. It’s fairly anti-Russian, but is always worth a read. Probably, it would be good to read something out of Russia as a balance, but the material seems well-sourced.