Oil price could hit $107/barrel by end 2023!

Read all about it, here. Normally, I’d be delighted to read a piece of research like this, but this note comes from Goldmans. Don’t get me wrong, Goldmans employs some bright people. Commodities are complex, and oil is the …

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“The US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”

Guess who said that!

Rudy nails it, again

Screaming Red Flags.

20 years ago this week Blair committed Britain to joining the USA in invading Iraq

Neil MacKay attributes the war to energizing the SNP. I don’t know enough about …

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Good news for the rich and the old

I’ve been too busy to pay much attention to the budget, but I did hear that the chancellor has abolished the upper limit on pension savings. My instinct is that people who already have a million pounds are so in pension …

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Is this the time for a steepener?

The markets have had a wake-up call with demise of Silicon Valley Bank (and Signature Bank, although that’s more of a crypto side show). For the last year or so we’ve seen the most vicious inversion of US yields on record …

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Silicon Valley Bank, RIP

Well, it’s happened. A biggish bank has exploded (well, two, but Signature Bank was mainly a crypto play, it seems). It’s deja vu all over again. The Fed insists that what is clearly a bailout is not a bailout. Although shareholders of SVB have …

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Silicon Valley Bank

• why do all these fintech startups put all their money in a bank that is decidedly low-tech?
• why did the bank decide to lend to the government, rather than to the entrepreneurs who throng California?
• almost nothing has been telegraphed as clearly and for as long as …

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Vim-ledger

Vim-ledger plugin for vim (‘vi improved’) is a terrific bit of software. Some guy has given this plugin to the world, to help people like me get more out of plaintext accounting tools like hledger.

I urge you to take a look at plaintext accounting, if you have any …

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2023-03-02

Digital Signatures

When I used Windows, I tended to use Adobe Acrobat Reader. This allows you to import a self-signed certificate and insert a digital signature into a pdf. To me, this is much more professional than a wiggly line drawn with a mouse which looks like a five-year …

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2023-02-22

Good news on anti-trust?

It’s really not intuitively obvious to anyone why a firm which has a large market share should be problematic. Exactly what ‘market share’ and ‘market’ are hard to define. They certainly depend on what people regard as substitute goods. Some people consider tofu an …

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2023-02-03

Wrap for Jan

The new year has started with a bang. Most risk assets are up a lot:

• SPX +6.3%,
• FAANG +18.7% (in spite of crap earnings),
• STOXX 60 +6.8%,
• USTs +2.8%,
• Other sovereign bonds (e.g. gilts +2.8%),
• Industrial metals (Cu +10.9 …

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