1/10

This is a really tough problem to resolve, especially if the massive increase in inflows from the trade and financial accounts are sustained, as I expect they will be well into 2021.

Clearly the PBoC would like to see the RMB gradually...

2/10

strengthen. This would keep financial markets stable and promote rebalancing, but the RMB has already strengthened a lot, and this puts unwanted pressure on exporters and “international circulation”.

Although PBoC reserves have been flat, other state-controlled Chinese...

3/10

banks have bought large amounts of dollars, but this is expensive. If these banks have half a trillion dollars of exposure, for example, they are losing at least $15-17 billion annually on negative carry, plus another $20-30 billion just this year from the rise of the RMB.

4/10

Beijing seems also to be trying other measures to slow the rise. The regulators are relaxing capital controls on outflows. In mid October the PBoC cut to zero the reserve requirement ratio for banks doing FX forward trading. This requirement was created in 2018 to reduce...

5/10

downward pressure on the RMB. In late October it suspended the counter-cyclical factor in RMB fixing, which was introduced in 2017 also to reduce downward currency pressure. But in both cases while the RMB dropped a few pips on the news, it quickly resumed its upward climb.

A few thoughts on tax policy. Thread:

So you are worth >$100M or perhaps even a few billion. There are only two ways to become this rich.

1. You start a business that becomes very successful.
2. You inherit wealth from your family. 1/

Whether you created a great company or inherited a lot of wealth, you are now sitting on a capital asset. You don’t really have any ordinary income (not meaningful to be relevant) and you never will. To the extent you ever pay taxes, it will be capital gains. 2/

The highest tax rate that the super rich will ever pay on their income (or wealth) is 20% capital gains tax. So, the super rich pay the equivalent effective tax rate of any American earning $75K (when you include FICA taxes). Same as a teacher or a cop. 3/

The question following from this obvious injustice in the tax system is the appropriate policy for taxing capital income. Economic policy would suggest that the best tax rate on capital is 0%. Why? ...4/

...Because in a capitalist society you want capital flowing efficiently without friction to its most productive use. Benefits of that are obvious. 5/

Billionaires see fortunes rise by 27% during the pandemic.

Well would ya look at that.

While the world's been hiding, going broke, losing their homes and businesses, being corralled and penned like little sheep, the

I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.

1. Michigan : Product of China
Why did Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Former Gov. Rick Snyder (R) both endorse Joe Biden?
C H I N A !
special guest: Hunter Biden #9

Time for a Scorecard📊and thesis📑updates for purchases done in Feb/Mar 2020. Last review done in late April. How far things have come since then.😯

Not taking any drastic actions, other than few sells in fully valued, slower growth Co.'s.

Events since then
✔️Co's reporting two Qtrly reports
✔️Accelerating growth for few sectors
✔️Understandable problems for few others
✔️Crazy run-ups & valuations in the last 9 mo's, supported by biz growth in some cases, but mostly due to Monetary factors & Investor enthusiasm...

I usually buy for two scenarios

1⃣Leading Co's within strong secular trends, that also have strong Management Teams and solid Financials (Rev growth, Profitability or improving Margins/FCF prospects, no balance sheet risk...).

These are bought with the intention of holding for the long-term as long as the thesis is intact or getting better. Strongly intend to add along the way. Ex : $ROKU $PINS $TWLO $DOCU $W $NOW $WDAY $NVCR $MTCH in the above table.

2⃣More mature and stable Co.'s but with some growth left (no Financial risk), mainly bought for their current under-valuation, with the intent to sell when the Market or those stocks recover. Ex : $BIP $BUD $VTR $BR $BA in above table.

On Sep 3rd 2020 we closed on a 120k sf glove factory built in 1890 in a small NY town.

Has 45k sf of self storage inside and had $14k a month of net operating income at closing.

Let's breakdown this deal.

A THREAD on creating $2 million out of thin air in 18 months...

👇👇

First saw the property on Loopnet in mid 2018. I ignored it. Who wants to try to operate a business in an old factory in a dying NY town.

A few months later I reached out. Broker sent me financials. They were good. $24k a month in revenue and $10k in expenses.

So I visited the property. It was old. Needed a new roof. Full time manager. Only accessible to customers 9am-5pm M-S. No autopay. A lot of folks paying 1/2 market rent.

I loved everything about it.

But I knew they were going to have trouble selling this thing no matter the profitability, so on July 1 2018 I made a low offer. $750k + seller pays for new $250k roof + $20k in environmental work.

Countered at asking price + $100k credit towards roof.

I ignored the response.

Broker called me back mid September of 2018. Make another offer, he urged.

I knew it was a good biz so I got more aggressive - $1MM + seller pays for roof / environmental.

Declined. Countered with $1.2MM but they'd give me a new roof and do the environmental.

Last month, Texas resident Royce Peirce paid $387.70 to heat his two-story house. This month, he owes $8,162.73 — and counting.

Amid freezing temperatures and another looming winter storm, Texans are facing a second crisis: astronomical power

Why are these energy bills so high? You can thank Texas’s power grid for that.

The U.S. is divided into three grids: one covers the eastern states, another the western states, and then there’s the Texas grid, ERCOT, which covers nearly the entire state.

Now you might be wondering: Why does Texas have its own power grid?

If you’re familiar with the state’s history and public policy, you probably already know the answer. In short, Texas has its own grid to avoid dealing with the federal

What we’re witnessing now is a collapse of the state’s power grid.

Amid freezing temperatures, the imbalance between Texas’s staggering electricity demand and its limited supply caused prices to skyrocket from $20 per megawatt hour to $9,000 per megawatt hour — a 450% increase.

One wholesale power supplier, Griddy, made a surprising decision.

CEO Michael Fallquist told Griddy’s 29,000 customers to abandon his service and switch providers: “We want what’s right by our consumers, so we are encouraging them to

We're not doing any of this because a lot of people were going to catch a cold. We're not destroying our economies and societies because a tiny number of people felt tired for a few months after a cough. We aren't allowing babies and children to die because a new strain

of coronavirus is at large. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that this new virus CAUSES a brand new, deadly disease called Covid-19, the like of which we had never seen before. A disease so horrific that doctors were having emotional breakdowns after treating it. That is what

all of this is based on. The reasoning behind a global reaction which may well lead to the permanent destruction of all the things that make life a worthwhile experience.
In nine months of being immersed in this swamp of information, I have still not found an explanation of what

it is about Covid-19 that makes it so different from other respiratory illnesses.
I think the most important question is this:
What scientific or medical reasoning prevented the message to the public being something along these lines:

'There is a new strain of coronavirus spreading around the world. For the vast majority, it's asymptomatic. Most who have symptoms will experience a mild cold. A tiny number will suffer longer-term fatigue (as is the case with many other viruses). However, for the elderly,

Alright. I've got that out of my system. Happy Thanksgiving and back to work here with a Early Black Friday pallet cleansing mega thread with a Cornucopia of thoughts on 2021. First, precious metals aren't dead. Yes, Bitcoin is stealing gold's thunder as a... /1

...currency alternative but it's not going away as a dollar hedge though I see Bitcoin likely to outperform gold in 2021. That said, gold could be up over 50% by the end of next year as Yellen and Powell (Jack and Jill) are climbing the stimulus hills. Meanwhile.. /2

...silver really should kill it next year. Solar is heating up, not just with Biden's win, but globally, & with pent up demand unleashed as lockdowns either relax or get tossed aside via polite revolts. Industry is going to boom and with globalists back in business so are... /3

...green energy and rare earth metals. Yeah, looking at you $MP on rare earths and - dare I say it - $AG and miners might have their year come summer of 2021. Specs are going to sniff that out in January so look for December tea leaves on the metals. No shame in buying $SLV... /4

....but I really like playing options for it. Speaking of lockdowns, no I promised to behave, I think the by-product of lockdowns ending is that the torturous path of a decade plus of "deflation" (in name only really) dies in a supernova heat death of feels good man spending. /5

1/9

Good article. But while growing international criticism and rising trade tensions may have had some impact, as the article suggests, I don’t think they really explain the great reversal in BRI lending of the past few years.

2/9

As I have been writing since 2011, China’s development lending was always likely to follow the pattern of other countries when they first “went out” (e.g. the US in the 1920s, USSR in the 1950s, Japan in the late 1970s). Because of little historical...

3/9

knowledge and no previous experience, an early rapid rise in development lending would be driven mainly by underestimating risk and an overestimation of their own business "success" in making loans, and would of course be further supported by geopolitical ambitions.

4/9

This combination would inevitably lead to bad lending decisions, followed just as inevitably by debt restructuring, loan losses, and a contraction in development lending. In the 1920s, for example, the US set off quite explicitly and aggressively to displace England in...

5/9

Latin America, and American businesses and banks assumed they “understood” Latin America much better than the English did, in spite of the vast English experience there, but their early displacement of British lending only resulted in the huge loan losses of the 1930s.

1/16

It is a little frustrating to see the response many analysts had to the GDP growth data Chinese released today. These numbers aren’t especially good, and they certainly shouldn’t have been surprising. Back in April and May, when most

2/16

were projecting negative or barely positive GDP growth for China in 2020 (the OECD, for example, expected China’s GDP to contract by 3.7%), I insisted that GDP growth for 2020 would be positive, and probably between 2% and 3%.

Today, it was reported as 2.3%. How did...

3/16

I know? Because I knew that while most of the healthy sources of Chinese growth would contract (except for exports, which would expand given Beijing’s intense supply-side response to the impact of Covid-19), Beijing was going to respond to a significant...

4/16

worsening of the healthy parts of its economy by unleashing enough of the unhealthy, non-productive growth it has long tried to constrain – basically real estate and infrastructure investment – in order to achieve as much economic activity as it...

5/16

needed for domestic political ends.

And that’s exactly what happened. While GDP grew by 6.5% in the fourth quarter, even with substantial tailwinds its retail sales measure – a proxy for consumption – was only up 4.6%, and it was down 3.9% overall in 2020.

Thread - How to spot a potential multibagger

Multiple fundamental parameters however we cannot be rigid on any of these parameters.

Be flexible to interpret things from bigger picture point of view.

Input 1 ~ No doubt on business survival

Come whatever event (health crisis, economic bubbles, economic recessions, political events, etc.), there should not be any doubt on business survival.

Earlier it used to be only food companies into this category, but now there are many.

Input 2 ~ Visible & sustainable growth potential

At any point of time, we can think with a certain common sense approach that if management wants, there can be a sustainable growth at any point of time.

Obviously this growth may come thru innovation, optimization, etc.

Input 3 ~ Management has vision towards growth

Management should be forward looking, should be able to read into future to build right growth avenues, should be considerate towards every stakeholder.

In addition management should be ethical & should have good social image too.

Input 4 ~ Promoter stake

There should be a reasonable skin in the game from promoter.

If in case there is a low promoter stake, then promoter should increase stake at every possible opportunity.

Also pledging should either be zero or minimal.

1. Been excited about @JoeNBC's sustained convo today about @KBAndersen's new book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America which explains how the Republican Party radicalized OVER ECONOMICS over the past 30 years. It was launched w the radical tax cuts in Reagan's presidency, but

2. as the GOP evolved through the 90s & 2000s they became dogmatic about their economic philosophy- until it became a radical litmus test/position the party followed even when conditions screamed for different policy. It was a MIRACLE the party acted to stabilize the economy at

3. at the end of 2008 when it was crashing down around us (though they just barely did & some didn't and that's bc it was before the Great Purges of 2010,2012, & 2014). America doesn't know the hit job the GOP did on the American economy as they dogmatically pursued tax cuts to

4. the exclusion of everything else while denying any policy that could grow wages or improve the economic lives of the bottom 80% aside from the 2 or 3 times Ds managed to squeeze through policy while in charge (minimum wage increase in 2007-which was the 1st time in a decade

5. and now, of course, its been another decade. It's actually a miracle wages (all wages bc when the min wage is artificially low it affects all the wages above it, that's how you end up w $10 per hr EMTs & teachers) aren't even more out of wack w inflation. As @JoeNBC points out

Here @playbookplus goes again: ‘HOW MUCH IS BIPARTISANSHIP WORTH?’ I don't know @politico, how many more months would you like the pandemic to drag on for? How many more dead? How many more people, businesses ruined economically? I'm sorry but this is garbage framing in a crisis.

Oh but this is what powerful people are talking about in DC! Might that point itself be examined with more seriousness than taking this BS at face value? Don't you understand, we just reflect back what people are saying? We are mirrors on the world, we offer no commentary.

If "very serious people" are talking about what "nice number" would be $1.3T, 1.2T and not what we need to get out of this mess, might it be worth saying, perhaps, this conversation w/o reference to epidemiologic or economic reality is just a failure of leadership, governance?

My Foresight

Whatever you see in the next 20 years to come in this country blame the bi-partisan mishandling of ASUU strike.
Let me drop some rough statistics to see what I'm thinking right now.

Today about 2 million Nigerians are working in the US alone. Almost 250 thousand of them are Medical Doctors. The rest are Academicians, Engineers and so forth. Most of these guys were the bests in their schools here in Nigeria.

Because of the poor working condition, unfavorable environment and very low salary, the're forced to emigrate to greener pastures for a better life. Many Nigerian students particularly the ones reading professional courses are thinking of leaving for a better life.

Don't forget this is a country that's in dare need of professional workers. The current doctor-patient ratio will throw you into a depth of despair. From what I observed recently, bad days are coming unless something is done.

Just recently our association hosted a Webinar on opportunities for Doctors in foreign countries. What do you think?
Almost all the people that participated including me are just waiting to graduate in order to apply for job abroad.