The Economist on Xi Jinping's "grip" on the economy

[The value of China's and Hong Kong's equities are down nearly $7 trillion since their peak in 2021, a fall of about 35%.  Since that time, the U.S. and India are up 14% and 60% respectively.]

On January 22 India briefly overtook [Hong Kong] to become the world's fourth-biggest stockmarket...  Most worrying of all is that investors on the mainland are losing confidence...  Investors trapped in the mainland may have little choice but to put some of their hard-earned cash into stocks.  Foreigners, by contrast, may be harder to tempt back.

[...]

The implicit understanding was that, whatever China's politics, its officials could be trusted to steer the economy towards prosperity...  Mr Xi seems to know that something is going wrong.  In addition to sacking [top securities regulator] Mr Yi, the government has curbed short-selling, and state-owned asset managers have been ordered to buy stocks.  This may prop up stock prices for a time.  But such meddling only [belies] China's mistrust of markets, underlining why investors left.

[...]

In January the central bank declined to cut interest rates, despite continued deflation, catching out markets.  All of this serves only to frighten investors...  The real obstacle to change is Mr Xi's firm belief that he and the Communist Party must be in total control.  Regaining investors' trust requires a rethink of the state's role in the economy.  But Mr Xi is unlikely to soften his grip.

~ "Who's in control? Why investors are losing faith in Xi Jinping," The Economist, February 10, 2024

Saifedean Ammous on the failed forecasts of Paul Samuelson's economics textbook

The most popular and influential economics textbook in the post-war period was written by Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson.  We saw in Chapter 4 how Samuelson predicted that ending World War II would cause the biggest recession in world history, only for one of the biggest booms in U.S. history to ensue.  But it gets even better.  Samuelson wrote the most popular economics textbook of the postwar era, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which has sold millions of copies over six decades.  Levy and Peart studied the different versions of Samuelson's to find him repeatedly presenting the Soviet economic model as being more conducive to economic growth, predicting in the fourth edition in 1961 that the Soviet Union's economy would overtake that of the United States sometime between 1984 and 1997.  These forecasts for Soviets overtaking the United States continued to be made with increasing confidence through seven editions of the textbook, until the eleventh edition in 1980, with varying estimates for when the overtaking would occur.  In the thirteenth edition, published in 1989, which hit the desks of university students as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel, Samuelson and this then-co-author William Nordhaus wrote, "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."  Nor was this confined to one textbook, as Levy and Peart show that such insights were common in the many editions of what is probably the second most popular economics textbook, McConnell's Economics: Principles, Policies and Problems, as well as several other textbooks.  Any student who learned economics in the postwar period in a university following an American curriculum (the majority of the world's students) learned that the Soviet model is a more efficient way of organizing economic activity.  Even after the collapse and utter failure of the Soviet Union, the same textbooks continued to be taught in the same universities, with the newer editions removing the grandiose proclamations about Soviet success, without questioning the rest of their economic worldview and methodological tools.  How is it that such patently failed textbooks continue to be taught, and how is the Keynesian worldview, so brutally assaulted beyond repair by reality over the past seven decades - from the boom after World War II, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the collapse of the Soviet Union - still taught in universities?  The dean of today's Keynesian economists, Paul Krugman, has even written of how an alien invasion would be great for the economy as it would force government to spend and mobilize resources.

In a free market economic system, no self-respecting university would want to teach its students things that are so patently wrong and absurd, as it strives to arm its students with the most useful knowledge.  But in an academic system completely corrupted by government money, the curriculum is not determined through its accordance with reality, but through its accordance with the political agenda of the governments funding it.  And governments, universally, love Keynesian economics today for the same reason they loved it in the 1930s: it offers them the sophistry and justification for acquiring ever more power and money.

~ Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard, pp. 158-160

First Edition, 1948

The Economist on the impact of lower interest rates and corporate tax rates on corporate profits (1989-2019)

If the boom has a home, it is America.  A hundred dollars invested in the S&P 500 on January 1st 2010 is now worth $600 (or $430 at 2010's prices).  However you measure them, American returns have outclassed those elsewhere.  Almost 60% of Americans now report owning stocks, the most since reliable data began to be collected in the late 1980s.

[...]

Yet much of this strong performance is, in a sense, a mirage.  Politicians have reduced the tax burden facing corporations.  From 1989 to 2019 the effective corporation-tax rate on American firms dropped by three-fifths.  Since corporations were giving less money to the state, corporate profits rose, leaving them with more money to pass over to shareholders.  Meanwhile, over the same period borrowing became cheaper.  From 1989 until 2019 the average interest rate facing American corporations fell by two-thirds...  We find that in America the difference in profit growth between the 1962-1989 period and the 1989-2019 period is entirely due to the decline in interest rates and corporate-tax rates.

~ "Problems on the horizon: Stockmarkets are booming. But the good times are unlikely to last," The Economist, March 2, 2024

Thomas Sowell on envy

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, "social justice."

~ Thomas Sowell

Simon Handrahan on two keys to investing

Investing requires the arrogance to go it alone and the humility to follow others’ better ideas. 

~ Simon Handrahan, MOS Capital, tweet, March 28, 2024

The Economist: "technological breakthroughs take ages to pay off"

Previous technological breakthroughs have revolutionized what people do in offices. (example: typewriter in lates 1800s, rise of computer a century later; more recently the rise of work at home)...  Could generative AI prompt similarly profound changes?  A lesson of previous technological breakthroughs is that, economywide, they take ages to pay off.  The average worker at the average firm needs time to get used to new ways of working.  The productivity gains from the personal computer did not come until at least a decade after it became widely available.  So far there is no evidence of an AI-induced productivity surge in the economy at large.

~ "Meet your copilot: The inside view of how companies are using generative AI," The Economist, March 2, 2024

The Economist on bugs in generative AI

In November Microsoft launched a Copilot for its productivity software, such as Word and Excel.  Some early users find it surprisingly clunky and prone to crashing - not to mention cumbersome, even for people already adept at Office.  Many bosses remain leery of using generative AI for more sensitive operations until the models stop making things up.  Recently Air Canada found itself in hot water after its AI chatbot gave a purveyor incorrect information about the airline's refund policy.  That was embarrassing for the carrier, but it is easy to imagine something much worse.  Still, even the typewriter had to start somewhere.

~ "Meet your copilot: The inside view of how companies are using generative AI," The Economist, March 2, 2024

The Economist on the failure of Israel's invasion of Gaza

If you are a friend of Israel this is a deeply uncomfortable moment.  In October it launched a justified war of self-defence against Hamas, whose terrorists had committed atrocities that threaten the idea of Israel as a land where Jews are safe.  Today Israel has destroyed perhaps half of Hamas’s forces.  But in important ways its mission has failed. 

First, in Gaza, where its reluctance to help provide or distribute aid has led to an avoidable humanitarian catastrophe, and where the civilian toll from the war is over 20,000 and growing.  The hard-right government of Binyamin Netanyahu has rejected plans for post-war Gaza to be run by either the Palestinian Authority (pa) or an international force.  The likeliest outcome is a military reoccupation.  If you add the West Bank, Israel could permanently hold sway over 4m-5m Palestinians.

Israel has also failed at home.  The problems go deeper than Mr Netanyahu’s dire leadership.  A growing settler movement and ultra-Orthodox population have tilted politics to the right and polarised society.  Before October 7th this was visible in a struggle over judicial independence.  The war has raised the stakes, and although the hard-right parties of the coalition are excluded from the war cabinet they have compromised Israel’s national interest by using incendiary rhetoric, stoking settler violence and trying to sabotage aid and post-war planning.  Israel’s security establishment is capable and pragmatic, but no longer fully in charge. 

Israel’s final failure is clumsy diplomacy.  Fury at the war was inevitable, especially in the global south, but Israel has done a poor job of countering it.  “Lawfare”, including spurious genocide allegations, is damaging its reputation.  Young Americans sympathise with it less than their parents do.  President Joe Biden has tried to restrain Mr Netanyahu’s government by publicly embracing it, but failed.  On March 14th Chuck Schumer, Israel’s greatest ally in the Senate, decried Hamas’s atrocities but said Israel’s leader was “lost”.

It is a bleak picture that is not always acknowledged in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Mr Netanyahu talks of invading Rafah, Hamas’s last redoubt, while the hard right fantasises about resettling Gaza. Many mainstream Israelis are deluding themselves, too. They believe the unique threats to Israel justify its ruthlessness and that the war has helped restore deterrence. Gaza shows that if you murder Israelis, destruction beckons. Many see no partner for peace—the pa is rotten and polls say 93% of Palestinians deny Hamas’s atrocities even took place. Occupation is the least-bad option, they conclude. Israelis would prefer to be popular abroad, but condemnation and antisemitism are a small price to pay for security. As for America, it has been angry before. The relationship is not about to rupture. If Donald Trump returns he may once again give Israel a free pass. 

This seductive story is a manifesto for disaster.

~ "At a moment of military might, Israel looks deeply vulnerable," The Economist, March 23, 2024

Fred Hickey on the lack of demand for generative AI

Understand that I believe in AI.  But AI has been with us for decades - becoming a bigger part of our lives year after year.  But Generative AI (Gen AI) - which just came on the scene last year when Microsoft touted it as means to threaten Google's stranglehold on the search market (so far Microsoft has failed with that attempt - getting just 1% additional market share) is another matter.  To me (and many other observers) Gen AI is like the Metaverse or Blockchain - "all hat and no cattle" - as the saying goes.  For example, Wired magazine (not exactly a Luddite's favorite read) titled a recent story: "Get Ready for the Great AI Disappointment."  Wired: "More and more evidence will emerge that Generative AI an large language models provide false information and are prone to hallucination - where an AI simply makes stuff up, and gets it wrong."  Anticipation that there will be exponential improvements in productivity across the economy, or the much vaunted first steps towards 'artificial general intelligence,' or AGI will fare no better."  "Some people will start recognizing that it was always a pipe dream to reach anything resembling complex human cognition on the basis of predicting words."  There are many similar stories out there questioning the usefulness of Gen AI.

Microsoft has placed its AI-powered assistant called Copilot that uses ChatGPT (a Gen AI version from OpenAI) in the upper right-hand corner of my computer screen.  When it first came out, I tested it when I was researching topics.  I found its answers underwhelming.  I rarely use it anymore - just as I almost never utilized Microsoft's previous assistant "Clippy."  My experience with ChatGPT is not unusual.  Data traffic analytics firm Similarweb recently reported that ChatGPT web traffic has declined in five of the last eight months and is currently (January 2024 data0 11% lower than its peak in May 2023.  The thrill is gone - just don't tell Wall Street.

~ Fred Hickey, The High-Tech Strategist, February 27, 2024

Derek Au on AI: "training is computation heavy, inferencing is computation light"

Inferencing is computation light; training is computation heavy.  Kind of like crypto, mining takes more resources than validation. 

At a very high level, what happens during the training of a model is that you ingest and analyze high volumes of data in order to derive a mathematical representation of the correlation of all of the data.  For example, in order to train a model to identify cats, you would expose the training algorithm to hundreds of thousands of pictures of cats.  You iterate the training of the algorithm across all of the pictures, the result of which converges to a mathematical equation, which becomes the trained model.  The training process is very computationally intensive because you are computing across the entire training set, i.e. every single one of the cat pictures.  GPUs are uniquely suited for these tasks because many of those computations can be performed in parallel. 

Inferencing is simply pattern matching.  It is the process of making predictions, decisions, or conclusions based upon the data given to the trained model.  You take an unknown picture, run it through the trained model, and it returns a probability distribution on whether the picture is a cat.  Inferencing is computationally light relative to training because the computation involved is only running the single picture in question through the trained model (as opposed to deriving a mathematical model of a cat by computing though hundreds of thousands of pictures of various cats). 

Inferencing can be done on existing CPUs, which are better suited for sequential computing.  It is fine for this task because you are only processing the image in question.  Still, there are a number of startups creating inferencing chips that aim to be faster, and more energy efficient (not for climate change, but for battery life!)

Over many years, Nvidia has developed its own proprietary programming language for its GPUs, to which the developer community has become accustomed.  Nvidia has the lead and mindshare on this.  I believe this is a competitive moat.  While competitors may introduce rival GPUs, will the programming community adopt them if the rival GPUs lack the familiar programming resources that programmers are accustomed to?

~ Derek Au, technology analyst, Orange Silicon Valley, February 14, 2024

Sheldon Richman on the proposed bill to force a sale of TikTok

According to Glenn Greenwald, the bill had been floating around for a few years but had not garnered enough support to get through Congress.  That changed recently, according to Greenwald, citing articles in the Wall Street Journal, Economist, and Bari Weiss's Free Press.  Why?  As Greenwald documents, anxiety about TikTok took a quantum leap beginning on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel began retaliating against the people of the Gaza Strip. 

What has this got to do with TikTok? you ask.  Good question.  Israel's defenders in the United States, such as Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, are upset that TikTok's young users are being exposed to what he calls anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic disinformation.  "It's Al Jazeera on steroids," Greenblatt said on MSNBC.  During a leaked phone call, he complained, "We have a TikTok problem," by which he means a generational problem.  Younger people -- including younger Jewish people -- are appalled at what Israel's military is doing in Gaza.  (To complicate things, it looks like TikTok and Instagram have suppressed pro-Palestinian information.) 

Would an American-owned TikTok be easier to control?  Experience says yes.  Have a look at the Twitter Files, which document how American officials, Chinese-style, pressured social media to censor or suppress dissenting views on important matters such as the COVID-19 response and the 2020 election.  A federal judge likened the government's efforts to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Do we want to become more like China?

~ Sheldon Richman, "TGIF: Leave TikTok Alone," Free Association, March 22, 2024

Tom Woods on his stingray experience

When I open my eyes in the morning I'm usually looking at a wall that contains (I just counted) 60 small pictures, each of which depicts a happy memory from the past five years or so.  

Last week was rather exhausting for me, so I'm relaxing in bed before heading for the gym in a little while, and one of those pictures caught my eye.  It shows my wife and me in the ocean at a stingray experience in the Bahamas.  I went primarily for her sake, but the experience was enjoyable enough. 

At one point everyone was given a chance to touch a stingray.  I politely declined.  Then the kind of thing I can never understand happened: The event organizer, along with the other attendees, started insisting I do it, thinking that maybe I was frightened or nervous.  Nope, just don't want to.  I have no idea what difference what I do makes to anyone else there, but man did they want me to.  They insisted again.  Again, I politely declined.  I did not make a spectacle of myself, I wasn't a drama queen about it, nothing.  I simply declined. 

For some reason this episode left my wife very impressed.  She couldn't believe I had simply stood my ground.  From then on, whenever there's been pressure on me from any group at all to do something I prefer not to do, she recalls the episode with the stingray.  Sometimes people hear about an incident like this and wonder if I'm just a contrarian by nature -- particularly given my views on politics and many other subjects.  But I'm not.  

However, doing the opposite of what's expected of me has generally served me well.

~ Tom Woods, March 25, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on war China's foreign policy

China does not want a war with the United States.  We spent three times on our on our military what they do.  We have 800 bases abroad, they have one and a half.

~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., "Robert Kennedy Jr: China Doesn't Want War With US — They Want to 'Bury' Us Economically," Bitcoin.com, September 2, 2023

Stanley Druckenmiller on patience and investing

I think it's one of the most important things to do is not to play when you don't see a fat pitch.

~ Stan Druckenmiller

Hans-Hermann Hoppe on decentralization

As indicated, the democratic system is on the verge of economic collapse and bankruptcy as in particular the developments since 2007, with the great and still ongoing financial and economic crisis, have revealed.  The EU and the euro are in fundamental trouble, and so are the US and the US dollar.  Indeed, there are ominous signs that the dollar is gradually losing its status as dominant international reserve currency.  In this situation, not quite unlike the situation after the collapse of the former Soviet Empire, countless decentralizing, separatist and secessionist movements and tendencies have gained momentum, and I would advocate that as much ideological support as possible be given to these movements.

For even if as a result of such decentralist tendencies new State governments should spring up, whether democratic or otherwise, territorially smaller States and increased political competition will tend to encourage moderation as regards a State's exploitation of productive people.  Just look at Liechtenstein, Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even Switzerland, with its still comparatively powerful small cantons vis-a-vis its central government.  Ideally, the decentralization should proceed all the way down to the level of individual communities, to free cities and villages as they once existed all over Europe.  Just think of the cities of the Hanseatic League, for instance.  In any case, even if new little States will emerge there, only in small regions, districts, and communities will the stupidity, arrogance, and corruption of politicians and local plutocrats become almost immediately visible to the public and can possibly be quickly corrected and rectified.  And only in very small political units will it also be possible for members of the natural elite, or whatever is left of such an elite, to regain the status of voluntarily acknowledged conflict arbitrators and judges of the peace.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline, pp. 131-132

2015

The Economist on how woke images appeared on Google's AI search engine

Alphabet, Google's parent company, lost $80 bn in market value in a day amid the controversy over Google's Gemini.  In overcompensating for diversity the AI model has depicted erroneous woke images of historic figures and at times refused to show images of white people.  Examples include black Vikings, an Asian Founding Father of America, a female pope and a Native American British king.  Google has withdrawn the tool to make improvements.  Sundar Pichai, Google's boss, told staff that Gemini had "shown bias" which was "wrong."

~ The Economist, March 2, 2024

Jim Chanos on the meme stock mania

 There's just a cognitive dissonance in a lot of these situations.  And short sellers get the blame for it.  Short sellers were seen, politically and (socially), as heroes after Enron and the dot com era.  A little less so in '08-'09 … but now, post-meme stock world, short sellers are again the evil conspiracy to derail retail investors from making their profits in stocks like AMC and Bed Bath and Beyond.  [The meme stock rally was] probably the best example in modern financial history [of cognitive dissonance in the markets].  Despite evidence staring you in the face about the declining business prospects of AMC or Bed Bath and Beyond, the cult members want to continue to believe in things like naked short selling or phantom shares and what have you.  I just keep saying 'Guys, if you do spend all this time on this nonsense, instead, learn how to read a balance sheet – you'd be far better off'.

~ Jim Chanos, "'I'm not dead yet': Jim Chanos isn't done short selling despite hedge fund wind down," Pensions & Investments, December 14, 2023

Joseph Hogue on the magazine cover curse

A much less technical sign is in the overall bullishness of investors and what’s been called the Cover Curse.  Just last week, both Barron’s and The Economist published covers trumpeting the new bull market but not all are cheering.  These displays of optimism from the media have more often than not previewed a change in the market. 

Like when Time covered the ‘Secrets of the New Silicon Valley’ and ‘GetRich.com’ September 1999…just four months before the dot-com bubble peak.  Or when BusinessWeek called for ‘The Death of Equities’ in August 1979, just before the 80s boom that doubled stock prices.  In fact, in a study of 50 magazine covers back 25 years, researchers have found that this level of media optimism or negativity is a contrarian indicator with a 68% success rate.  That means, if you were to bet against the cover’s thesis, you could have called a market change 7-out-of-10 times.

~ Joseph Hogue, Bow Tie Index, March 21, 2024

Saifedean Ammous on the appreciation of the Iraqi dinar in 2003

Should a currency credibly demonstrate its supply cannot be expanded, it would immediately gain value significantly.  In 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, aerial bombardment destroyed the Iraqi central bank and with it the capability of the Iraqi government to print new Iraqi dinars.  This led to the dinar drastically appreciating overnight as Iraqis became more confident in the currency given that no central bank could print it anymore.  A similar story happened to Somali shillings after their central bank was destroyed.  Money is more desirable when demonstrably scarce than when liable to being debased.

~ Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard, p. 68

Saifedean Ammous on hyperinflation

Hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money.  There was never an example of hyperinflation with economies that operated a gold or silver standard, and even when artifact money like seashells and beads lost its monetary role over time, it usually lost it slowly, with replacements taking over more and more of the purchasing power of the outgoing money.  But with government money, whose cost of production tends to zero, it has become quite possible for an entire society to witness all of its savings in the form of money disappear in the space of a few months or even weeks.

Hyperinflation is a far more pernicious phenomenon than just the loss of a lot of economic value by a lot of people; it constitutes a complete breakdown of the structure of economic production of a society built up over centuries and millennia.  With the collapse of money, it becomes impossible to trade, produce, or engage in anything other than scraping for the bare essentials of life.  As the structures of production and trade that societies have developed over centuries break down due to the inability of consumers, producers, and workers to pay one another, the goods which humans take for granted begin to disappear.  Capital is destroyed and sold off to finance consumption.  First go the luxury goods, but soon follow the basic essentials of survival, until humans are brought back to a barbaric state wherein they need to fend for themselves and struggle to secure the most basic needs of survival.  As the individual's quality of life degenerates markedly, despair begins to turn to anger, scapegoats are sought, and the most demagogic and opportunistic politicians take advantage of the situation, stoking people's anger to gain power.  The most vivid example of this is the destruction of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, which not only led to the destruction and breakdown of one of the world's most advanced and prosperous economies, but also fueled the rise of Adolph Hitler to power.

Even if the textbooks were correct about the benefits of government management of the money supply, the damage from one episode of hyperinflation anywhere in the world far outweighs them.  And the century of government money had far more than one of these calamitous episodes.

As these lines are written, it is Venezuela's turn to go through this travesty and witness the ravages of the destruction of money, but this is a process that has occurred 56 times since the end of World War I, according to research by Steve Hanke and Charles Bushnell, who define hyperinflation as a 50% increase in the price level over a period of a month.  Hanke and Bushnell have been able to verify 57 episodes of hyperinflation in history, only one of which occurred before the era of monetary nationalism, and that was the inflation in France in 1795, in the wake of the Mississippi Bubble, which was also produced through government money and engineered by the honorary father of modern government money, John Law.

~ Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard, pp. 66-67

Charles Schumer on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a two-state solution

Gaza is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe.  Entire families wiped out, whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, mass displacement, children suffering.  We should not let the complexities of this conflict stop us from stating the plain truth: Palestinian civilians do not deserve to suffer for the sins of Hamas and Israel has a moral obligation to do better.  The United States has an obligation to do better.  I believe the United States must provide robust humanitarian aid to Gaza and pressure the Israelis to let more of it get through to the people who need it.  

Jewish people throughout the centuries have empathized with those who are suffering and who are oppressed because we have known so much of that ourselves.  As the Torah teaches us, every human life is precious.  Every single innocent life lost, whether Israeli or Palestinian, is a tragedy, as the scripture says, "destroys an entire world."  What horrifies so many Jews, especially, is our sense that Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear.  We must be better than our enemies lest we become them.

[...]

And now, as a result of those inflamed tensions in both Israeli and Palestinian communities, people on all sides of this war are turning away from the two-state solution, including Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent weeks has said out loud repeatedly what many have long suspected by outright rejecting the idea of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty.  As the highest ranking Jewish elected official in our government and as a staunch defender of Israel, I rise today to say unequivocally: this is a grave mistake, for Israel, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world.  The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution, a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity and mutual recognition.

[...] 

Jews have a human right to their own state just as any other people do, Palestinians included.  As I have said, there are also some Israelis who oppose even a two-state solution with a demilitarized Palestinian state because they fear that it might tolerate or be a harbor for further terrorism against the Jewish state.  I understand these fears, but the bitter reality is that a single state, controlled by Israel, which they advocate, guarantees certain war forever and further isolation of the Jewish community in the world to the extent that its future would be jeopardized.  Let me elaborate.  They say the definition on insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  If Israel were to not only maintain the status quo, but to go beyond that and tighten its control over Gaza and the West Bank, as some in the Netanyahu administration have suggested, in effect creating a de facto single state, then what reasonable expectation can we have that Hamas and their allies will lay down their arms?  It would mean constant war.  On top of that, Israel moving closer to a single state entirely under its control would further rupture its relationship with the rest of the world, including the United States.  Support for Israel has declined worldwide in the last few months, and this trend will only get worse if the Israeli government continues down its current path.

~ Sen. Charles Schumer, speech before Senate, March 14, 2024

The Economist: "You have to marvel at America’s economy"

You have to marvel at America’s economy.  Not long ago it was widely thought to be on the brink of recession.  Instead it ended 2023 nearly 3% larger than 12 months earlier, having enjoyed one of the boomier years of the century so far.  And it continues to defy expectations.  At the start of this year, economists had been forecasting annualised growth in the first quarter of 1%; that prediction has since doubled.  The labour market is in rude health, too.  The unemployment rate has been below 4% for 25 consecutive months, the longest such spell in over 50 years.  No wonder Uncle Sam is putting the rest of the world to shame.  Since the end of 2019 the economy has grown by nearly 8% in real terms, more than twice as fast as the euro zone’s and ten times as quickly as Japan’s.  Britain’s has barely grown at all.

~ "America’s extraordinary economy keeps defying the pessimists: Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have ideas that endanger it," The Economist, March 14, 2024

John Tamny on conservative support for bill to force sale of TikTok

Contra crybaby conservatives, an app could never destroy the greatest country on earth.  On the other hand, the taking of freedom required to ban an app could destroy a country whose greatness is rooted in freedom.

~ John Tamny, tweet, March 14, 2024

Doug Casey on the green energy scam

Before the Industrial Revolution, the overwhelmingly major fuel source was wood.  After that, we went to coal, which was a big improvement in density of energy and economics.  Then, we went to oil, another huge improvement in energy density and economics.

These things happened not because of any government mandates but simply because they made both economic and technological sense.  If the market had been left alone, the world would undoubtedly be running on nuclear.  Nuclear is unquestionably the safest, cheapest, and cleanest type of mass power generation.  This isn’t the time to go into the numerous reasons that’s true.  But if nuclear had been left unregulated, we’d already be using small, self-contained, fifth-generation thorium reactors, generating power almost too cheap to meter.  The world would already be running on truly clean green electricity.

Instead, time, capital, and brainpower have been massively diverted to so-called “ecological” power sources—mainly wind and solar—strictly for ideological reasons.  The powers that be want to transition the whole world to phony green energy, like it or not.

I’m all for green energy in principle.  There’s no question that solar and wind are worthwhile and effective for select applications—generally small, isolated, special locations where conventional fuel is inconvenient or too costly.  The efficiency of solar has been tremendously improved over the last few decades, as has wind efficiency.  But neither make any sense for mass base-load power in industrial economies.

With further technological advances, they may become more economic someday.  Perhaps people will eventually put large collectors in high Earth orbit and microwave the power down to the surface.  There are all kinds of sci-fi possibilities.  But right now, “green” is just a nice word for “stupid,” “ideological,” or “government-sponsored.”

Doing things the green way takes power away from the markets, which is where people vote with their dollars. It instead places power in the hands of ideologues and bureaucrats.

In brief, wind and solar are being promoted at the very time, nuclear and fossil fuels are being damned.  It’s the opposite of what should be happening and a very bad trend from every point of view.

Put me down as liking the birds and the bunnies as much as anyone else, but I’m anti-green.  Anyway, ecofreaks don’t really care about the birds and the bunnies so much.  That’s just a veneer.  They actually just hate people and really want them to disappear.  At a minimum, they want to control them.  And the great global warming/anti-fossil-fuel hysteria is a great way to do it.

~ Doug Casey, "Why the Carbon Hysteria is a Huge Threat to Your Personal Freedom and Financial Wellbeing," International Man, February 15, 2024

Rick Rule on natural resource investing

In terms of natural resource investing, you're either going to be a contrarian or you are going to be a victim.  There isn't much by way of middle ground.  Everybody wants to invest in commodities where the price action has already justified the narrative, but the price action takes the value-added out of the narrative.  You have to look for commodities that are in liquidation, where the price is so low that the industry is liquidating and where if the price of the commodity doesn't increase, the commodity will become unavailable to humankind.  And finally, humankind needs to need that commodity.

Another way to put that phrase, in terms of the time value of money, is that you need to invest in things that are inevitable, even if they aren't eminent.  And you have to need to know the difference between those two words.

~ Rick Rule, interview with Dan Ferris and McLaughlin, Stansberry Investor Hour, 60:30 mark, March 4, 2024

Lew Rockwell on anarchy

Is it possible that we have likewise assumed that the state is inevitable only because we are used to it, and can hardly imagine a world without it?  Just as the menial tasks once performed by slaves are now distributed differently among free men, perhaps, as anarchists argue, the functions of the state could be distributed among voluntary agencies.

The Renaissance philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that anarchy — the “state of nature” — would be “a war of all against all,” making human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  His solution was the state, which would quell quarrels among men.  He didn’t foresee that the state itself might aggravate conflict and make social order far more miserable than anarchy could ever be.

Hobbes’s near-contemporary John Locke offered a more attractive alternative: the limited state, which would have the power to secure men’s natural rights but would lack the power to violate them.  But such a state has never existed for long.  Once a monopoly of power exists at all, it tends to degenerate into tyranny; anarchists argue that this decline is inevitable, because tyranny is inherent in the very nature of the state.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The Heroic Joe Sobran," LewRockwell.com, March 4, 2024

Joe Sobran on government intervention

If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. 

If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. 

If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. 

If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.

~ Joe Sobran, 1995

John Templeton on idealism

The true idealist preaches not class hatred but universal love; not redistribute the wealth but multiply the wealth; not more regulation but more freedom; not security but opportunity. The true idealist is the missionary for individual freedom and competition.

~ John Templeton, January 1961