3 Sept 2021

What is Afghanistan all about

I listened to this podcast recently. It’s about Afghanistan, and what went wrong, and what it’s like to live there. It’s about why economics, and particularly property rights are behind a lot of the violence in the country. It’s about how the US invasion lead to a reinstatement of the earlier, centralized, soviet-style governance that had been put in place after the coup in 1978. It’s about land reform, needed, but botched, had lead to a deep suspicion of the state machinery from enforcing and recording property rights. It’s about how the Afghans much prefer “customary rights” over centrally determined property rights, because the court system is corrupt and extractive. It’s about how after 20 years, the US has left a failed state in which fifty percent of GDP is derived from aid. It’s a very sad story, but it’s much more informative than anything I’ve seen on the mainstream media.

Image of the day

– Charles Delius, 1910

Wrap

There was a huge miss in the Non-farm Payrolls figure: 235K vs 750K expected. Under normal circumstances, this would have resulted in a crash in yield and in the equity market. In fact, the two markets barely budged. I guess it’s the famous ability of the market to look through temporary blips. Almost certainly, the delta variant will burn itself out and we’ll return to something approaching normal. The one market that did react was oil, down ~1%.

For individual stocks and commodities, $TSLA was up against all the odds. There are increasing signs that the regulators are looking more carefully as “Full Self Driving.” Some commodity plays did well: $CCO (TSE), $TECK, $RRC, $SD.

An interesting one is $INMB.This is working on a treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. I don’t know enough about the biochemistry to know if it will work, but the idea that the disease has an autoimmune origin seems appealing to me, and having some sort of option on a treatment for what is probably the world’s most serious human disease seems worth having, even if it is way out of the money.

The real pandemic we face is autoimmune diseases. Many chronic conditions, such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s autoimmune thyroiditis, celiac diseas, Graves’ disease, vitiligo, rheumatic fever, pernicious anemia, and alopecia areata are autoimmune in origin, and are very serious indeed. There are very many others, affecting almost every organ in the body.