Friday 26, May 2023

Seen on the web

• The Convergence of Antitrust Thought in the Late 1930s and Its Subsequent Collapse. The curse of bigness. Somehow, anti-trust dropped off the radar after the 1930s.

• North Korean pop sound about CNC machine tools (really!). Shared with me by John Kozak.

• Martin Shkreli was too honest (about how big pharma have adopted Shkreli’s MO but know they’d better keep quiet about it). More ….

• Acemoglu and Manera explain why taxing capital lightly and labour heavily might not maximize economic production.

• Buffett bags some Capital One

• The weakness of oil prices is a reflection of supply, not demand. Basically, it seems that Russia is getting better at evading sanctions. With India and China both willing buyers of Russian hydrocarbons and minerals, is there really any suprise at this conclusion?

• Crack spreads point to a slowing US economy,

• We’re all bullish on Japan now

• ‘Boomy’ talk about the Chinese economy is a charade

  There has never been a bigger disconnect, in my experience, between some of the rosier investment bank views on China and the dim reality on the ground. Perhaps reluctant to back off their calls for a reopening boom this year, sellside economists keep sticking to their forecasts for growth in gross domestic product in 2023, and now expect it to come in well above 5 per cent. That’s even more optimistic than the official target, and wildly out of line with dismal news from Chinese companies.

  Hopes for a reopening boom were based on the premise that, once released from lockdown, Chinese consumers would go on a spending spree, but company reports show no sign of one. If China’s economy were growing at 5 per cent, then based on historical trends corporate revenues should be growing faster than 8 per cent. Instead, revenues grew at 1.5 per cent in the first quarter.

• Recession Fears Mean Opportunity in the Oil Market. Well, up to a point!

• What was Liquid Funding? The mainstream press is strangely uncurious about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and US bulge-bracket banks.

• Rudy unlocks his older posts. Rudy Havenstein is always provocative. He put his substack behind a paywall a month or two ago, but has now started unlocking the older ones. He is always worth reading, even when he’s wrong. You will find points of view here which you will never find in the mainstream media. Every post is fuelled by righteous indignation. It’s energizing just to read them.

• Why Britain Doesn’t Build. TL;DR: it’s because people won’t vote against their own narrow self-interest. More kindly expressed, it’s because of all the many political solutions attempted, none have been successful in compensating the losers in a credible way.

I’m putting my stuff on Substack now. You can see it here. I’d prefer to write in markdown, but Substack does have a lot of nice features.