Shopify Inc. plunged the most in almost two years after giving a weaker outlook for growth this year, as online spending resets after the Covid-19 induced boom and consumers face higher inflation. 

“The Covid-triggered acceleration of ecommerce that spilled into the first half of 2021 in the form of lockdowns and government stimulus will be absent from 2022,” the Canadian ecommerce giant said in a statement on Wednesday. “There is caution around inflation and consumer spend near term, for the full year.”

As a result, Shopify said full year revenue growth will be lower than the 57% increase in 2021. The U.S.-traded shares tumbled as much as 16% as the market opened in New York. It was the biggest intraday decline since March 2020. 

Shopify, which provides software and other services that underpin the websites of many small businesses, grew dramatically during the early stages of the pandemic, with sales jumping 86% in 2020. Investors, however, fear the company can’t sustain its growth as shoppers return to more normal buying patterns. Those concerns intensified last month when Shopify said it had terminated contracts with several warehouse and fulfillment partners, sending shares to a 16-month low. 

The justification for Shopify’s heady valuation was that it would become a true competitor for Amazon. The folly of that has been exposed by the pullback from fulfilment centres. From a broader perspective the big question is about a central hub versus distributed model.

“We’re seeing right now the highest death rates we’ve ever seen in the history of this business,” said Scott Davison, the CEO of OneAmerica, a $100 billion life insurance and retirement company headquartered in Indianapolis.

“The data is consistent across every player in the business.”

Davison said death rates among working age people – those 18 to 64-years-old – are up 40 percent in the third and fourth quarter of 2021 over pre-pandemic levels.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three sigma or 200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic levels,” Davison said. “So, 40 percent is just unheard of.”

He said the data shows COVID deaths are greatly understated among working age Americans.

Davison says OneAmerica expects to pay out more than $100 million in short- and long-term disability claims due to the pandemic.

“Whether it’s long COVID or whether it’s because people haven’t been able to get the health care they need because the hospitals are overrun, we’re seeing those claims start to tick up as well,” he said.

Because of this, insurance companies are beginning to add premium increases on employers in counties with low vaccination rates to cover the benefit payouts.

Middle aged people have been dying at an increasing rate in the USA over the last decade. Poor lifestyle habits, suicide, and an opioid epidemic contributed to that condition. Now the pandemic has resulted in an acceleration of the trend.

Ryanair Holdings Plc has seen a “dramatic recovery” in bookings over the past two weeks as the easing of pandemic travel curbs across Europe encourages people to fly again.

The Irish low-cost carrier’s planes are flying about 75% full and could reach 90% of capacity by the peak of the summer high season, Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary said at a briefing in Milan Wednesday.

Ryanair expects fares to remain “very low” through May before rising for summer, by which point it’s possible that a combination of strong demand and limited capacity could see them climb above pre-coronavirus levels, O’Leary said. Trends for next winter are difficult to predict, he said.

Most people are hungering for a traditional vacation. I know I am. As the omicron variant flares out, demand for travel and other opening-up sectors is likely to continue to improve. There have been several times when it looked like a full recovery was possible, only for a new variant to pop up and create delays. The good news is the last one was much less serious, albeit much more transmissible, than its forerunners. That suggests the bounce back in demand will be stronger this time.

A bad back currently prevents me golfing, walking the dog, or driving the car and, in my opinion justifiably, I am feeling a grumpy.

So here are a few gripes for you:

First gold:
For several years you taught us that the gold price follows an approximate 35-year cycle between highs, although the gold price could outpace stock indexes for short periods in between those highs. We’ve not heard too much about the 35-year cycle for a while, the message now being that it is not unusual for gold to trade in a boring range for up to 18 months or so before breaking out conclusively up or down. You believe it will break to the upside taking out previous highs (which runs contrary to your 35-year cycle theory). I hold a fair chunk of gold and silver miners in ETFs but regard the holding as a hedge rather than representing a belief that gold will imminently break to the upside. It might and it would be nice if it did but I doubt it. As David said, investment options are similar to a beauty parade and for the foreseeable future, many options are likely to look superior to gold.

Second India v China:
You are very hard on China and its political system. Having lived most of my life in Asia I take a less severe view. Like most observers I was disappointed to see that XI, the reformer, had no intention of political reform but on reflection, I think he’s probably right to opt for political stability at a time when China is still struggling to bring modernity to all its people and regions; when lightening-speed technological change is taking place across the globe and when it finds itself in an inevitable struggle to assert what it regards as its rightful influence on global institutions and practices. On a smaller scale in Singapore Lee Kuan Yew did much the same thing and while there is now a little more political tolerance in Singapore than there was, the Government – and most of its people – believe that full-throated democracy would lead to economic and societal break-down. That would be Xi’s worst nightmare.

My grouse is not so much with your view on China but with your uncritical view of India. I agree with you that India should do well given its demographic advantage and talents of its people. However, I think the Modi government is quite repugnant in its covert – and not so covert – support of extremist Hindu nationalism represented by terrorisation of the Muslim and Christian communities, and by its appalling failure to do much about the abuse of women, also fuelled by Hindu extremists. In the medium term, I fear this, together with over-dependence on coal, will limit India’s investment appeal and therefore its economic potential.

To declare my investment positions, I have reduced my exposure to India and wait for an opportunity to reinvest in China. My favourite Asian market currently is Vietnam.

Third, the purpose of your ‘service’:
Under David’s direction, Fuller Money provided objective macro oversights together with some trading suggestions/recommendations and some investment suggestions/recommendations. He often put his money where his mouth was and invested in his recommendations. Towards the end of his career, he stopped publishing his investment portfolio which I regarded as a pity. Under your direction, Fuller-Treacy Money continues to provide objective (if sometimes convoluted and long-winded) macro oversights, but I find it difficult to work out whether beyond that you are offering trading hints or investment hints. I use the word ‘hints’ rather than ‘suggestions’ because in this aspect you are far more non-committal on specifics than was David. The details you provide of your own investment activities suggest that you are a trader with long(ish) term investments in gold bullion, gold miners and Rolls Royce. I made several profitable purchases based on David’s recommendations but so far have identified none under your watch.

Fourth Daily Audio and Video:
From emails you have referred to from other subscribers, I am confident that I am not alone in being irritated by several of your constant refrains. Three which particularly annoy me are ‘The big question is ….’ (to which we never get an answer); ‘[Gold (for example) has a lot of work to do’ (which is a nonsense, better to identify factors which might influence buying/selling decisions) and; ‘I can’t talk and chew gum at the same time’ (which sounds quite catchy heard for the first time, but grates increasingly after many repetitions).

So, getting that off my chest makes me feel slightly less out of sorts. I shall be renewing my subscription in March. It’s been part of my routine for too long.

Thank you for this detailed email, your long-term support and I hope you back feels better soon. If it is muscular, rather than a herniation, I strongly recommend Yunnan Baiyao. I’ve pulled muscles in my lower back on several occasions either playing tennis or lifting. If it is taken quickly after injury, it provides a powerful, quick solution with no side effects I have experienced. 

I began questioning the wisdom of relying on the Dow/Gold ratio during the early stages of the pandemic. Here is a link to Comment of the Day on April 24th 2020. It includes a large number of long-term ratios and concluded that the Dow Jones Industrials Average is no longer the best way to look at the long-term ratio, confirmed concentration of attention in the growth sector, predicted the recovery in oil prices, higher wages, and the return of inflation.

In 2020 I began a series of reviews of longer-term themes which will be updated going forward on the first Friday of every month. These reviews can be found via the search bar using the term “Secular Themes Review”.

The biggest trend in the world isn’t bitcoin or the FANGMAN stocks. It’s bonds. Yields peaked in 1980 and the cost of borrowing has done nothing but decline since.

That’s enabled the steady rise of leverage, debt accumulation, asset price appreciation, speculation in all manner of public and private assets and every other bull market too.

The exact mix of where the debts have accumulated most is different in each country. For the USA, fiscal excess and unfunded liabilities are the biggest debt issue. The large number of companies surviving with no profits is the second biggest debt issue.

In Australia, Canada and the UK, consumer debt ratios, household debt and property debt are the pain points. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s reluctance to raise rates, despite inflation, is a symptom of the economy’s reliance on property prices.

For China, the accumulation of debt in the property sector has been epic. The sector represents 30% of GDP. At least in Japan, the massive quantity of debt is held domestically but it is a significant hurdle to raising rates.

Alphabet Inc.’s brisk rally on Wall Street on Wednesday is giving a boost to the Nasdaq 100 Index, still reeling from last month’s selloff in tech stocks. Shares in the Google parent are surging after it announced a stock split and posted quarterly sales and profit that topped analysts’ projections, signaling the resilience of its advertising business. The gains in Alphabet shares -- the third biggest stock on the Nasdaq 100 with a weighting of 7.4% -- account for most of the rise on the index on the day.

Apple warned about its ability to fulfill orders before Christmas and subsequently was able to beat that projection. The share jumped on the news but guidance was for slower growth in Q2.

Your rather surprisingly positive reportage from Saudi Arabia awakened my interest in their stock market.  I found to my surprise that it is nearly perfectly correlated with a broad commodities index. This is not because it is just the oil price, as that takes up only a small part of the commodities index, and oil companies take up only a small part of the Saudi stock market.  The two markets I am comparing are IKSA and COMF, both in London.  Do you have any ideas about why this correlation is so tight?

It would be nice if you would revisit the market from time to time and give us your opinions on it.

Thank you for this email which highlights an important aspect of the Saudi market. The SASE Index is predominately weighted by banks. This being Saudi Arabia they are run on Islamic principles so loans are less leveraged relative to deposits than one might see elsewhere. Additionally, companies are not allowed to list until they have posted profits for three consecutive years.

Brazil analysts raised their 2022 inflation expectations further above target for the third week in a row as the central bank prepares to lift its interest rate into double digits at Wednesday’s policy meeting.
Inflation will hit 5.38% in December, above the prior estimate of 5.15%, according to a weekly central bank survey published on Monday. Analysts also lifted their 2023 year-end consumer price forecast to 3.50% from 3.40%. 

Policy makers led by Roberto Campos Neto are expected to deliver their third consecutive 150-basis point rate hike this week, lifting the benchmark Selic to 10.75%. Inflation slowed less than expected in mid-January, as factors including global supply-chain disruptions pressured prices of transportation and
durable goods. Analysts see borrowing costs at 11.75% in December. 

The central bank risks missing this year’s inflation target of 3.5%, which has a tolerance of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

Brazil has some of the highest short-term interest rates in the world and they are about to get even higher. Emerging markets do not have the luxury of time to wait and see what happens. They have much more recent history of inflationary problems and have tended to act much quicker to curtail growth opportunities to bring inflation under control. That’s exactly what Brazil is doing with its aggressive hikes.

Thanks for the great service pulling the noise out of market trends for us. We especially enjoy what my wife affectionately calls the “Big Picture Long-Winded” Friday recordings. Regarding the possible rotation into the renewable/green economy do you have any ideas on Industries/companies that could benefit from the build out? Or would the safer play be directly in the commodities needed for the grid, vehicles, batteries, and such? Hoping to get to another Chart Seminar before too long.

Thank you for your kind words. A former delegate at The Chart Seminar once described my sense of humour as “impish” and I can’t argue with that. Your better half’s turn of phrase certainly tickled me. The Friday broadcasts are often a delicate balance between trying to be pithy and attempting to cover the relevant arguments. I’m looking at a late May/early June date for a London seminar and I hope to see you there.

The question of the future of the zero carbon/green revolution/energy transition is a big one. On one hand we have high minded projections of a utopian future where the air is pristine and no economy is dependent on carbon emissions for growth. Promises of hundreds of trillions being spent to achieve that goal were a major feature of international conferences in 2021.

Credit delinquencies were one of the first symptoms of stress in the US economy ahead of the financial crisis. The 300+ day delinquent figure was trending higher from mid-2007. Today it is still close to a record low which suggests a consumer sector that is healthier than ever.

I found the lists of companies scoring well on “quality” and “fast revenue growth and high profitability” filters to be particularly insightful.

Most global finance firms are planning to establish or expand operations in the U.K. in 2022, according to a survey of 40 key decision-makers in the industry.

Around 87% of global financial services investors expect to invest in the U.K. next year, EY’s latest poll found. That’s the highest since the professional services firm started tracking sentiment toward the country in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote, and compares to 50% in early 2021 and a low of 11% in 2019. 

The data is a boost for the City of London, whose credentials as an international finance center are being questioned since the U.K. left the European Union. Meanwhile, 90% of respondents said the U.K. offers the right conditions to invest in assets with environmental, social and governance attributes.

“This is testament to the stability and resilience of the mature U.K. market which continues to ably withstand the material challenges and uncertainty of both the pandemic and Brexit,” said Anna Anthony, EY’s financial services managing partner for the U.K.

There was a lot of fear that Brexit would result in London being denuded of financial firms. The reality is the Eurozone represents only a portion of the business done in one of the world’s great financial centres.

Viterra is already the world’s largest wheat trader, thanks to its investments in major exporting regions including Canada, Australia, Argentina, and the former Soviet Union. If Gavilon in the U.S. is added to that impressive portfolio, it will be the kind of concentration — and power — that governments worry about. Indeed, Beijing may be even more concerned about the deal than Washington. China, which is spending billions of dollars to build its own state-owned agricultural trading house, is unlikely to welcome further consolidation in an industry it relies on to feed more than one billion people.

Regulatory concerns aside, the deal is a steal. Glencore, founded by the late U.S. fugitive Marc Rich in the 1970s, built its agribusiness through acquisitions. In 2012, it beat out ADM and purchased Canadian grain trader Viterra Inc. for 6.1 billion Canadian Dollars ($4.8 billion). Today, Glencore controls just under 50% of the enlarged Viterra business, with 49% owned by two Canadian pension funds and a residual percentage controlled by the staff.

Most investment banks closed their commodity trading desks during the 2011-2016 bear market. They sold their ships and warehouses too so getting back to dominant positions is not going to be easy or cheap. That handed control of market making to private trading houses which now control the market regardless of whether Glencore’s bit for Gavilon is successful.

But it is the reaction of his own Tories that will be of most concern to the prime minister. One Conservative member of Parliament privately described the mood among colleagues as sulfurous, while predicting the premier will survive because he’s prepared to brazen it out. Another, though, said the scandal will ultimately mean the end of the road for Johnson.

It’s a significant moment of peril at the worst possible time for Johnson, who had hoped to begin 2022 with a reset after a turbulent end to last year when support for the Conservatives plummeted in the polls.

A string of allegations about other rule-breaking gatherings in Westminster -- dubbed “partygate” by the U.K. media -- was compounded by a damaging loss in a special election and widespread criticism over how he had funded the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.

Why such angst? There’s a lot in the minutes, with much useful information for students of the economy and monetary policy. You can find the full version here. For those less interested in such studies, the passage of three sentences that accounted for more or less all of the market reaction read as follows:

it may become warranted to increase the federal funds rate sooner or at a faster pace than participants had earlier anticipated. Some participants also noted that it could be appropriate to begin to reduce the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet relatively soon after beginning to raise the federal funds rate. Some participants judged that a less accommodative future stance of policy would likely be warranted and that the Committee should convey a strong commitment to address elevated inflation pressures.

This commits the central bank to nothing, but the notion that there were hawks on the committee who thought that the Fed should reduce the size of its balance sheet (in other words, start to sell off its huge bond holdings in a move that, all else being equal, should raise yields) came as an unpleasant surprise. Those words are there for a reason. The Fed thought it a good idea to plant a reminder of hawkish intent just as markets were ramping up again after the New Year break, and it seems to have worked.

The Fed Minutes were the catalyst for the sell-off in bonds yesterday which contributed to the weakness in the growth sector. I suspect talk of being more aggressive in quantitative tightening than the 2018/19 period was the primary reason investors took fright.

Equity team co-heads Atul Narayan and Erin Miles on other equity markets catching up with the US: Looking ahead, it feels that things are primed for the equity markets that have lagged the US (China, Japan, the UK, Europe, etc.) to catch up. There are several factors at play. First, COVID has been a material relative support to US equities from all channels—favorable sector tilt, less virus economic impact, more support from falling rates (versus, say, Japan, where yields are pegged), and compressing risk premiums, given safe-haven appeal for US equities, especially the FAANMGs. We would expect the COVID impact to gradually fade in the coming year and this to be a relative support for the markets outside the US.

Second, China is showing early signs of moving toward easing after a year when the structural goals (deleveraging, rebalancing, common prosperity, etc.) were prioritized. This again will be a bigger relative support for economies like Japan, Europe, and EMs that are a lot more exposed to China. Finally, if you look back over the last 100 years, it’s almost always been the case that the winners of a given decade end up being laggards in the next one because of the degree of exuberance (and pessimism) that gets priced in following the winning (and losing) stretch. Given how stretched the relative positioning and pricing is today (for logical reasons), we expect the US versus rest of world diff to finally start to revert after a decade-long off-the-charts performance. The main things we are watching closely are the evolution of COVID globally, China’s policy stance, and the retail flows in the US, which were the biggest support for US equities over the past year and a half.  

Based on valuations alone, there is a strong risk-adjusted argument for favouring ex-US assets. I also find the argument that a recovery for China’s economy would have a more positive effect on the Ex-US basket to be reasonable. However, momentum remains a tailwind for Wall Street which has been supported by the relative strength of the Dollar all year.

3. What does it mean for inflation and public finances?
Potentially, the Treasury takes on foreign-currency risk of 3.3 trillion liras ($265 billion) now deposited in retail banking accounts. If the lira depreciates beyond deposit rates, that would impose a burden on the budget. If the central bank prints money to make up the difference, then inflation would spike. 

4. Does this plan address the crux of the problem?
While the worst may be over for the lira for now, with some confidence restored among retail depositors, “until interest rates provide a credible anchor against inflation, the lira will tend to be volatile and subject to downward pressure,” said Todd Schubert, head of fixed-income research at Bank of Singapore Ltd. Much will also depend on whether depositors believe the policy can actually be implemented, according to Brendan McKenna, a currency strategist at Wells Fargo in New York. “Right now, Turkish institutions don’t have a ton of credibility, so there may be challenges getting lira depositors on board,” McKenna said. 

A commitment to ensure retail depositors are made whole regardless of currency volatility is an attractive offer and was behind the massive short covering rally in the Turkish Lira yesterday. A grand gesture was necessary because the central bank intervention earlier this month did not gain traction and the Lira’s accelerated decline persisted.

Turkey halted trades on all listed stocks after sharp declines triggered a market-wide circuit breaker,
with the lira extending declines to a record low.

Trading of equities, equity derivatives and debt repo transactions were automatically halted twice within an hour after the Borsa Istanbul 100 index fell as much as 7%. The index was earlier up more than 5.6% before sinking as a central bank intervention on the currency market failed to stem the lira’s decline. The currency has come under pressure after the central bank cut its benchmark repo rate by a percentage point to 14% on Thursday, despite inflation accelerating to over 21%.

The central bank’s easing cycle since September saw the key rate fall by 5 percentage points, prompting a rush to buy dollars among corporates and retail investors.  President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has advocated for cuts in borrowing costs, arguing that lower rates will eventually free Turkey’s economy from a reliance on short-term foreign inflows. The policy pivot and the ensuing market turmoil prompted complaints from industrialists, who say the current volatility is hurting companies. 

Less than two weeks ago the central bank intervened to support the currency. In normal circumstances that would begin to re-instill confidence. By cutting rates and bowing to political will, the central bank today demonstrated it is not able to do what is necessary to avoid a currency and debt crisis.

“We’ve seen evidence of a very tight labor market and we’re seeing more persistent inflation pressures, and that’s what we have to act on,” Bailey told BBC News on Thursday. “We’re concerned about inflation in the medium terms, and we’re seeing things now that can threaten that.”

The remarks represent a shift in tone for the U.K. central bank, which previously said most pressures on prices were temporary, or “transitory,” and likely to pass in the next few months. Now, Bailey expects the consumer price index to top 6% in the coming months, triple the BOE’s target.

Becoming the first major central bank to hike its benchmark since the pandemic started, the BOE raised borrowing costs by 15 basis points to 0.25%. No other Group of Seven central bank has made since the start of the crisis.

The Bank of England has been in something of a pickle. They did not want to raise rates before every other country, but felt pressured to do so by persistent inflation. The most important factor is inflationary pressures are seeping into perceptions of how the public view well central banks are doing their job. Even as upward pressure on prices, on a year over year basis, will abate next year, that will do little to deter the impression that prices are running away from consumers.

The author of this article in the FT argues that the current rise in inflation is a demand side event and not due to supply shortages. He argues that the statistics show that global supply has risen in 2021 but not as fast as global demand.  

hank you for this insightful email and related article. Here is a section:

There may be a case for such a policy turn, but the main factual premise of the new resilience-cum-autonomy doctrine is false. The pandemic put capitalist globalisation to the test, with sudden and enormous surges in demand, and it passed with flying colours.

Take durable goods. Headlines about shortages are the only thing that seem in ample supply, and everyone is experiencing delays in obtaining items, such as cars, that could previously be had with instant gratification. But the actual supply of durable goods is at record highs. Since the summer of last year, American consumers have been obtaining them in volumes much larger than the pre-pandemic trend. Many EU economies, including Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, have also matched or exceeded 2019 levels of durable goods consumption.

What about semiconductors? In a short paper published a month ago, Daniel Rees and Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul of the Bank for International Settlements showed that semiconductor exports from Taiwan and Korea in 2020 exceeded the volumes recorded in 2019, and 2021 exceeded 2020. Exports currently appear to be running at a good 30 per cent above two years ago. The BIS’s Hyun Song Shin has added that semiconductor sales in the US are much higher than in the years before the pandemic.

Additionally, while individuals do not have gas pumps installed at their home, they can have a level 2 ev charger installed that would seriously compromise the market share of a commercial charging station.

Thank you for this email which may be of interest to the Collective. The challenge for investors is in differentiating between the addressable market depicted in glossy pitchbooks and the real-world potential for a sector.

“The arable area still requires significant tonnage of synthetic fertilizer, but this is reduced by the use of manures,” Butler said. Since the animal waste from his farm is not enough, he has been buying biosolids from utility Thames Water, which produces over 750,000 meters squared of sludge each year for farmers across Britain’s southeast. 

However, Butler said that it’s increasingly difficult to source human excrement as “there is more demand than supply for biosolid materials.”

In the U.S., biosolids are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and in Europe, biosolids have been in use since 1986 when it received regulatory approval from the European Union. 

While manure is an inexpensive alternative to pricey synthetic fertilizers, it is a “poor replacement for those accustomed to traditional fertilizer products,” said Alexis Maxwell, an analyst at Bloomberg’s Green Markets. For example, the fertilizer diammonium phosphate has six times the nitrogen and 15 times the phosphate as manure on a per ton basis.

The farmer a mile from my old home in Ireland had a contract with the sewage treatment plant to buy waste. It made for a very smelly couple of days when he was spreading it on his land. However, it also meant he was not spending on costlier imports. That kind of business model has a lot more competition today, because of the surge in European natural gas prices which continue to recover from the October correction.

Gundlach, 62, said the reason why Fed Chair Jerome Powell characterizes the economy as strong, but not strong enough to allow for a rate hike at this point, is that the underlying condition is in fact weak -- artificially propped up by an unprecedented degree of stimulus.

Here are some other takeaways from Gundlach’s remarks:
He focused heavily on inflation, saying the annual pace of gains in the consumer price index could hit 7% in the next month or two. He ran through numerous inflation measures and pointed out that shelter costs have climbed significantly. He also said it’s possible that the CPI inflation gauge won’t drop below 4% throughout 2022.

Markets could face more volatility now that the Fed has said it might quicken its tapering program.

Gundlach reiterated that he bought European stocks for the first time in 12 years, which he disclosed a few months ago. He still owns some of those and they’ve done just OK until recently. He didn’t own emerging-markets equities, though he envisioned a scenario when they might outperform U.S. firms. “We’re looking for major opportunities” and emerging markets could be one over the next few years, he said.

The dollar has been in structural decline since 1985, he said, reiterating that the twin-deficit problem (that’s the current-account gap and the federal budget deficit) will cause the greenback to fall over time, which bodes well for emerging markets.

I’ve been saying for most of this year that the Dollar is the lynchpin for a migration away from US Dollar assets. Wall Street has outperformed by a wide margin from the perspective of international investors since 2008.

Vodafone shares rose as much as 3.3% following a so-called “uncooked” mention in a Betaville report regarding potential private equity interest in the telecom operator. Shares pared gain to 1.8% as of 4:18 p.m.

Representatives for Vodafone were not immediately available to comment when contacted by Bloomberg via phone and email
Betaville says there is speculation that one of Europe’s largest private equity firms is looking at all of some of Vodafone, citing people following the situation
NOTE: The speculation is described as “uncooked,” a term the Betaville blog often uses to refer to market gossip
NOTE: Vodafone shares have declined 5.9% YTD vs Stoxx Telecoms Index’s 9.5% gain
READ: Private Equity Rummages in the Telco Bargain Bin: Chris Hughes

One of the biggest questions for investors today is how to hedge a portfolio against inflation. The answer is not easy. Finding a business that has strong cash flows with the possible of passing on incremental price increases is a strong contender for the most attractive contender.

A year ago, I began a series of reviews of longer-term themes which will be updated going forward on the first Monday every month. The last was on October 1st. These reviews can be found via the search bar using the term “Secular Themes Review”.

One of the most basic truisms in the financial markets is it is easier to make money in a bull market. The bull market that began in late 2008 and early 2009 has been liquidity fuelled. That was not obvious to everyone a decade ago but now everyone gets the message. Money printing inflates asset prices. As long as central banks are printing, we will have bull markets and the most speculative assets will perform best.

Turkey’s direct intervention in its currency markets on Wednesday, the first in seven years, shows policy makers are intent on drawing a line in the sand on how far they are willing to tolerate weakness in the lira.

However, how long policy makers are able to buy the currency some respite will essentially come down to the size of the war chest and how willing the central bank is to run down those assets. The Turkish central bank’s gross reserves add up to $128.5 billion, with $60.5 billion coming from the bank’s swap deals, according to latest data released on Nov. 19. When swaps and other liabilities such as required reserves are stripped, Turkey’s net reserves stand at -$35 billion. The bank has repeatedly said that its gross reserves -- the total amount at its disposal at the time -- are more important than net reserves.

The central bank’s intervention this morning is significant if only for the signaling it sends. During a previous episode of similar stress in the lira back in 2018, there was no reported intervention. In other words, the policy makers may be telling the markets that their strategy to ward off any speculation on the currency will take a different tack this time. In 2018, the central bank took the benchmark rate to 24% from 8% in a short span to arrest the decline in the lira.

Last week the lira tumbled more than 11% against the dollar in a single day, representing a 10-standard deviation shock based on its moves in the past five years. The currency has weakened after the central bank slashed its benchmark by 400 basis points since the end of August. The monetary authority meets next on Dec. 16.

Erdogan seems to remain of the opinion that the answer to high inflation is low interest rates. At the same time, he has said that the central bank’s intervention in the market, to trim the currency’s decline, is lawful. Without the ability to raise rates, the central bank has even fewer resources. Eventually it will run out of money.

Anticipating a spike in inflation this month, ECB officials have redoubled efforts in recent days to reassure citizens that they are facing a once-in-a-generation cost-of-living squeeze that won’t endure, driven by energy and a series of one-time factors.

While President Christine Lagarde is sticking to that script, some colleagues are warning that price pressures might take longer to subside, stoking speculation about the future course of monetary policy. 

At a Dec. 16 gathering, the Governing Council is set to announce the end of its pandemic bond-buying plan and outline how regular purchases and interest rates will develop as the economy continues its recovery.

“While energy costs and statistical effects can explain the bulk of this month’s jump, today’s reading also revealed some stronger than anticipated underlying pressure. That will add to concern over upside risks to the outlook, but the ECB is still likely to see inflation falling below 2% by the end of next year.” - Maeva Cousin, senior euro-area economist. 

The spike in Eurozone inflation was expected even if the headline number was higher than estimates. The ECB believes inflation will drop back towards 2% once the pandemic subsides. At least they are dearly hoping that will be the case.

South Africa announced the identification of a new variant on Nov. 25, saying a few cases had first been identified in neighboring Botswana and then others had followed in Tshwane, the municipal area in which Pretoria is located. The announcement caused a global panic, roiling markets and resulting in travel bans on southern African nations.

Scientists advising South Africa’s government told a media briefing on Monday that while omicron appeared to be more transmissible, cases appeared to be very mild.

Coetzee’s patients have been relatively young. A vaccinated 66-year-old patient did return a positive test on Monday but was only mildly ill, she said.

Everything we have been led to believe over the last couple of years is that cold and flu viruses mostly evolve to be more transmissible because that furthers the urge to replicate all organisms share. Becoming less deadly is often a part of that because it aids in replication. That part of the argument is complicated by the fact that COVID does not kill before it is has ample time to replicate and disperse.

6. How worrisome is this variant?
It’s too early to say. The World Health Organization said there are fewer than 100 whole genomic sequences of the new strain available, which could add to the time it takes to study how it compares to previous strains and its impact on Covid therapies and vaccines. Viruses mutate all the time, with the
changes sometimes making the virus weaker or sometimes making it more adept at evading antibodies and infecting humans. Covid vaccines have shown they are effective against previous variants and pills being developed by Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc. may also provide new treatments. 

7. What should we look out for next?
In the U.S., which recently lifted a year-long ban on tourism from much of the world, top medical adviser Anthony Fauci said he wants to see more data. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control assigned the variant -- first detected in South Africa and Botswana -- the category “Variant of Concern.” BioNTech expects the first data from laboratory tests about how it interacts with its vaccine within two weeks.

This is the most important chart from the above article. It highlights how transmissible this variant it. From the available data, it is much more transmissible than the Delta or Beta variants and is already approaching dominance of South Africa cases. That implies it will spread around the world rapidly and within a month or at most two will be the dominant global strain.

But the result is a bracing reality check for the Chilean left after two years in which the country has followed a broadly progressive trajectory.

Since 2019, mass anti-inequality protests have rocked the country, leading to the election of a broadly leftwing assembly to rewrite Chile’s Pinochet-era constitution.

But Sunday’s result suggested that the protest movement’s ability to galvanise support has worn thin.

Kast survived a bruising final week of campaigning in which his open support for Genl Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and its economic legacy were the subject of intense scrutiny.

As he took to the brightly lit stage on Sunday night, he had regained some of the composure that had deserted him before the vote, presenting the runoff election as an existential fight against “the intransigent left”.

“We are going to chose between freedom and communism – between democracy and communism,” he said.

Kast’s campaign spokesperson, Macarena Santelices – a great-niece of Gen Pinochet who briefly served outgoing President Sebastián Piñera as women’s minister – also appeared on stage.

Political commentary has until recently assumed that the entire South American continent would be subsumed by a tide of progressive new governments. That conclusion is being challenged in Chile and suggests traditional arguments about law and order, health and education will be more important talking points.

Revenue growth at a plethora of divisions including its Cainiao logistics arm and local on-demand services underperformed expectations, while bread-and-butter customer management revenue from platforms like Taobao and Tmall grew just 3% -- the slowest in at least five quarters.

Competition is intensifying just as China grapples with the widest Covid-19 outbreak since the virus first emerged in Wuhan. Rivals like JD.com Inc. and Pinduoduo Inc. are stepping up investments to win over Alibaba’s users, just as a resurgence in coronavirus cases dents consumer spending. Gross domestic product expanded 4.9% in the September quarter, cooling from the 7.9% growth in the previous period, partly because of lockdown measures across many cities.

“Looking ahead, we will continue to invest heavily into three growth engines of domestic consumption, globalization, cloud computing and data intelligence,” Zhang told analysts on the call.

China’s growth has slowed meaningfully as the housing market shock therapy imposed in response to Evergrande’s overleverage has weighed on sentiment. As more credit is made available to property developers, speculative interest should begin to recovery over coming quarters.

MacLennan said in September that soaring food costs would prove transitory and should dissipate in time. Since then, the rally in energy prices and continued supply-chain snarls have made markets “a lot tighter,” he said.

“When you have limited supply, that can lead to higher prices,” MacLennan said. However, he noted that China hasn’t been buying crops as aggressively as it did last year, while North American harvests are robust. “That takes some pressure off the system.”

A search for greener airplane fuel and biodiesel is also pitting food against energy production, leading to tighter edible oil supplies. Prices for palm oil, the world’s most consumed vegetable oil, have soared about 50% in the past year, while soybean oil is up 60%. Canola, also used to make oil, is near a record.

The food-versus-fuel tension will become more intense than it’s ever been in the last 15 years, MacLennan said. The day will come when more agricultural products will be used for energy than food, so it will be incumbent upon the farmers of the world to innovate and become more productive, he added.

Using food for fuel should be a much more controversial practice. We are literally substituting political idealism for the wellbeing of millions of people. The fact that palm oil demand is soaring because of its use as both a food ingredient and a fuel is a useful example of how the environmental lobby often does more harm than good.

Meanwhile, mines across China and India have been ramping up production in recent weeks to ease a supply crunch that’s caused widespread power shortages and curbs on industrial activity. China’s miners have beaten a government target to raise output to 12 million tons a day, while India’s daily production is close to 2 million tons.

“The power cuts since mid-to-late September show that we are still not prepared enough,” Yang Weimin, a member of the economic committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a government advisor, told a conference in Beijing on Saturday. Additional funding is needed to ensure coal plants can be used to complement a rising share of renewables, he said.

Coal’s share in global electricity generation fell in 2020 to 34%, the smallest in more than two decades, though it remains the single largest power source, according to BloombergNEF.

In China, it accounted for about 62% of electricity generation last year. President Xi Jinping has set a target for the nation to peak its consumption of the fuel in 2025, and aims to have non-fossil fuel energy sources exceed 80% of its total mix by 2060.

For India, coal is even more important, representing 72% of electricity generation. The fuel will still make up 21% of India’s electricity mix by 2050, BNEF analysts including Atin Jain said in a note last month.

The focus on attention right now is on the willingness and potential of both India and China to eventually limit their use of coal. Much less attention is focused on Africa where the bulk of population growth is occurring. The next couple of billion people will mostly be born in Africa. That means increasing demand for power and higher standards of living as the continent urbanises. 

The question remains then whether $20.23 is still too high. For example, with a 6% dividend yield, the stock has to trade at $19.17 per share. If we add $4.76 to that price, this implies that T stock should be at $23.93 per share.

That implies that T stock could fall another $1.12 or 4.5% to $23.87 if the post-split dividend yield will be at 6%.

But don’t forget this is just an estimate. We don’t know exactly what the new dividend payment will be. For example, if the dividend is reset at $1.18, then today’s price implies a new post-split yield of 5.62% (i.e., $1.18 / $20.99). That is fairly close to 6% and may imply that T stock is actually near a trough.

Until the company begins to clarify some of these issues, the market will not know exactly where to price T stock. However, all indications are that it is getting close to a trough, assuming that the new yield will be close to 6%.

An 8.38% yield is conspicuously large even for the high yielding global telecommunications sector. With a lengthy history of both paying and increasing the pay out, it is reasonable to assume a good many investors are in the share for the income and are selling because they fear their income will be reduced.

Economics - 3 Reasons To Be Bullish: We see an absolute and relative growth story in Indonesia for 2022. We expect growth here to accelerate into 2022, even as it moderates in other parts of Asia and growth differentials between Indonesia and the rest of the world are likely to become more favourable. Indeed, we expect Indonesia to be a prime beneficiary as growth broadens out from the front-runners to the laggards and from exports to domestic demand. This is due to: (1) Indonesia is a reopening domestic demand play. We estimate that Indonesia will have implemented more than enough doses to fully vaccinate its adult population by Jan-22 and 99% of its total population by Mar-22. Rising vaccination rates should unlock growth delta from domestic demand. India's recovery patterns offer some interesting insights in that regard. (2) Indonesia offers an inflation hedge against stagflation concerns from supply-side constraints. It is one of the only two net commodity exporting economies in AXJ and hence benefits from the positive terms-of-trade as commodity prices rise. (3) It has one of the strongest structural growth stories in the region and offers diversification opportunities away from China. Its benign demography and low debt ratio stand in contrast to most other parts of Asia. Geopolitical tension and Covid have increased the need to diversify manufacturing risks and policy[1]makers are capitalising on this with the right structural reforms.

Indonesia was one of the best performing markets in the post GFC recovery. That was because the entire ASEAN region was not leveraged to the US mortgage market and reacted very positively to massive monetary accommodation. The recovery in commodity prices also contributed to its outperformance. That ended when commodities peaked and the Dollar began to recover.

Hi Eoin, would like to hear your opinion on the Global Telecom sector and AT&T in particular. Is there any reason why these high yielding but low growing stocks are so unloved? Tkx for your thoughts!

Thank you for this question. I was also looking at AT&T over the weekend and found the size of the decline puzzling. The most recent news is focused on the delay to rolling out 5G imposed on both AT&T and Verizon; resulting from a complaint by the FAA that their signals might interfere with aircraft.  

For Opendoor, Zillow’s departure represents an opportunity, CEO Eric Wu said in an interview. He expects his company, which pioneered the iBuying model, to be the market leader now that the best-known brand is out.

“We’re going to lead the charge in this transition from offline to online,” he said in an interview.

Wu said Opendoor has invested heavily to build expertise in home pricing and getting renovations done in a timely, cost-efficient manner. Those challenges contributed to Zillow’s iBuying demise.  

On Oct. 17, Bloomberg reported that the Seattle-based company would stop pursuing new acquisitions for its iBuying business, citing shortages of workers and supplies it needed to fix up homes. But Zillow also struggled to get pricing right. The company bought many homes for more than it could sell them for, forcing it to take writedowns of more than $500 million on property inventory. 

Those results convinced Zillow CEO Rich Barton that the iBuying model was too risky for his company.

“Fundamentally, we have been unable to predict future pricing of homes to a level of accuracy that makes this a safe business to be in,” Barton said on the company’s earnings call this week.

Anyone using Zillow’s app to look at houses over the last year will quickly have realised how inaccurate the “Zestimate” score is for gauging a home’s value. It was in no way reflective of the market condition because it was not adjusting quickly to new selling prices for homes. That resulted in differences of over 20% when we were housing hunting in the spring. That would also have forced Zillow’s algorithm to be manually adjusted to cope with the lag of data which obviously created issues.

“The RBA is clearly more dovish than the market anticipated,” said Jeffrey Halley, a senior market analyst at Oanda Asia Pacific in Singapore. “The market was clearly short and now they are taking some of it back after bit of a disappointing decision by the RBA.”

Australia’s underlying inflation is forecast to be no higher than 2.5% at the end of 2023, with only a gradual increase in wages growth, the RBA said in its policy statement. The central bank said last month its central scenario was that conditions for a rate hike wouldn’t be met before 2024.

The RBA’s policy statement means traders are likely to dial back some of their expectations for higher rates and that should pave the way for a steeper yield curve, according to Westpac Banking Corp.

“We expect that the market will be satisfied with the shift in the RBA’s approach, and will continue to pare back some of the aggressive front-end pricing,” Damien McColough, head of fixed-income research at Westpac in Sydney, wrote in a research note.

The RBA ended its yield curve control policy today so that implies they will allow not get in the way of short-term rates rising. The other side of that argument is they are not going to be in a hurry to raise rates. There are still too many uncertainties in too many portions of the economy to commit to a pattern of raising rates.

It’s last call for cheap beer. Rising input costs are soaring across the globe, fueled by withering barley supplies and surging aluminum costs, plus the same labor and transport bottlenecks plaguing every other industry. In North America, dry weather scorched fields, which typically produce enough barley to account for about 20% of global commercial beer production. In the U.S., American farmers reaped the smallest crop since 1934, just after Prohibition ended, while in Canada - - the fifth-largest producer -- barley output shrunk 34% to the second-smallest harvest since 1968

The cost of both barley and aluminium might be rising but there is increasing evidence that brewers are using this as an opportunity to raise prices. Many consumers have been couped up at home for more than a year and they are probably more willing to accept a price increase now than before the pandemic if they can get some semblance of their normal social life back.

How do you convince truckers to work when their pay isn’t guaranteed, even to the point where they lose money?

Nobody is compelling the transportation industries to make the needed changes to their infrastructure. There are no laws compelling them to hire the needed workers, or pay them a living wage, or improve working conditions. And nobody is compelling them to buy more container chassis units, more cranes, or more storage space. This is for an industry that literally every business in the world is reliant on in some way or another.

My prediction is that nothing is going to change and the shipping crisis is only going to get worse. Nobody in the supply chain wants to pay to solve the problem. They literally just won’t pay to solve the problem. At the point we are at now, things are so backed up that the backups THEMSELVES are causing container companies, ports, warehouses, and trucking companies to charge massive rate increases for doing literally NOTHING. Container companies have already decreased the maximum allowable times before containers have to be back to the port, and if the congestion is so bad that you can’t get the container back into the port when it is due, the container company can charge massive late fees. The ports themselves will start charging massive storage fees for not getting containers out on time — storage charges alone can run into thousands of dollars a day. Warehouses can charge massive premiums for their services, and so can trucking companies. Chronic understaffing has led to this problem, but it is allowing these same companies to charge ten times more for regular services. Since they’re not paying the workers any more than they did last year or five years ago, the whole industry sits back and cashes in on the mess it created. In fact, the more things are backed up, the more every point of the supply chain cashes in. There is literally NO incentive to change, even if it means consumers have to do holiday shopping in July and pay triple for shipping.

I was at the bonded warehouse in Dallas this morning to pick up Mrs. Treacy’s Christmas inventory. There is a great deal of talk at present about the supply chain crisis so I thought subscribers might be interested to know how long it took for us to get our goods.

“We need to strengthen our public finances so that when the next crisis comes, we have the fiscal space to act,” Sunak said. He also said the country hasn’t yet turned the corner on infections, warning of “challenging months ahead.”

The chancellor signaled the need to repair the country’s finances after racking up hundreds of billions of extra debt to protect workers and businesses through the pandemic. Unveiling new fiscal rules that will guide his approach to rebuilding the economy from its worst recession in a century, he vowed that in “normal times,” the government would only borrow to invest and that underlying public sector net debt must be falling as a percentage of output.

With inflation already well above the Bank of England’s 2% target and forecast to rise to at least double that, it’s already raising the cost of repaying the country’s debt, a quarter of which is linked to inflation indexes. Sunak also faces the prospect of an interest-rate hike that would add to borrowing costs: For every percentage point that interest rates go up, the Treasury estimates it would cost an extra 23 billion pounds a year.

“The House will recognize the challenging backdrop of rising inflation,” the chancellor said. “Our public finances are twice as sensitive to changes in interest rates as they were before the pandemic and six times as sensitive as they were before the financial crisis.”

And

Sunak’s firepower was boosted by a significantly improved outlook for the British economy from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent fiscal watchdog. It revised upwards its forecast for growth this year to 6.5% from 4%, and downwards its forecast for the long-term economic scarring caused by the pandemic to 2% of output from 3%.

With growth filling the government coffers, the OBR’s borrowing forecast for the next five years was lowered by 154 billion pounds, while planned debt sales for this fiscal year were cut by a fifth.

The UK is boosting spending which is a crowd pleaser. That’s possible because the economy is rebounding from the pandemic nadir and the outsized growth is benefitting from the base effect of last year’s decline. Sustaining that momentum will be a key challenge, so supporting workers with higher wages and businesses with lower taxes is a necessary move but it also delays balancing the budget which will exacerbate the fiscal drag.

The S&P 500 has advanced 5% since JPMorgan Chase & Co. kicked off the earnings season nine days ago, in the best start to a reporting cycle since the dot-com mayhem 88 quarters ago. Along the way, the index slipped only once, with a 0.1% drop on Friday doing little to derail the benchmark from its best month since the election.

Now institutional investors with large stock and bond holdings will need to balance out their positions, buying dips on losers and taking profits on winners. How big will the impact be? A regression analysis done by strategists at BNP Paribas SA shows that the outflow needed to compensate for a divergence between this month’s drop in the bond market and rally in stocks could translate into a 2.6% decline in the S&P 500 when the rebalancing takes place.

End of month reweighting of portfolios is a predictable event and represents a solid rationale for the recent bounce in Treasury futures. It’s unlikely to contribute to more than temporary strength because none of the underlying factors have changed.

The cars will be delivered over the next 14 months, and Tesla’s Model 3 sedans will be available to rent at Hertz locations in major U.S. markets and parts of Europe starting in early November, the rental company said in a statement. Customers will have access to Tesla’s network of superchargers, and Hertz is also building its own charging infrastructure.

It’s the single-largest purchase ever for electric vehicles, or EVs, and represents about $4.2 billion of revenue for Tesla, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because the information is private. While car-rental companies typically demand big discounts from automakers, the size of the order implies that Hertz is paying close to list prices.

“How do we democratize access to electric vehicles? That’s a very important part of our strategy,” Mark Fields, who joined Hertz as interim chief executive officer earlier this month, said in an interview. “Tesla is the only manufacturer that can produce EVs at scale.”

The electrification plan, which eventually will encompass almost all of Hertz’s half-million cars and trucks worldwide, is the company’s first big initiative since emerging from bankruptcy in June. And it signals that Hertz’s new owners, Knighthead Capital Management and Certares Management, are intent on shaking up an industry dominated by a handful of large players who are typically slow to change.

This is a win/win situation for Hertz and Tesla. Anyone wishing to rent a vehicle will take a look at Hertz if only for novelty value. For Tesla, it represents a strong try before you buy marketing campaign, they don’t have to pay for. I had both Toyota and Hyundai SUVs when I was house-hunting in Dallas earlier this year and my opinion of both brands was much improved following the experience. For many consumers looking at a minimum of five months wait time for a new Tesla, the chance to drive one on a temporary basis will be a tempting prospect.

Russia's central bank aggressively raised its interest rate for the sixth time in a row Friday in an
effort to slow soaring food prices, and did not rule out further hikes.

Rising prices, falling incomes and a lack of tangible government support during the pandemic have been eroding popular support for President Vladimir Putin's two-decade rule, and authorities are under pressure to ease inflation.

At a meeting on Friday, the Bank of Russia increased its key rate by 0.75 percentage points to 7.50 percent, surprising many analysts who had expected a smaller hike.

The bank said that more hikes could follow and revised up inflation predictions.

"Inflation is developing substantially above the Bank of Russia's forecast and is expected to be within the range of 7.4-7.9 percent at the end of 2021," the bank said.

The Bank of Russia said that as of October 18, inflation stood at 7.8 percent but was expected to return to 4.0-4.5 percent next year.

"The central bank continues to act decisively and proactively," Dmitry Polevoy, head of investment at Locko Invest, said in a note to clients.

After months of historically low inflation, consumer prices began to climb in March 2020, driven by a drop in the ruble's value in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

The central bank started raising its historically low rate the same month. Its next rate review meeting is scheduled for December 17. In September, the bank raised its interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to 6.75 percent.

Russia is a major grain producer but is also reliant on imports for many additional food stuffs. That offers a graphic representation of how everyone is susceptible to the fragility of the global supply chain. Shutting the whole world down eighteen months ago had a dire effect on the ability of producers to manage their operations. The ensuing volatility has taken much longer than anyone thought to iron out and it is not over yet.

Guedes, who spoke shortly before markets closed, said the government also mulls bringing forward a spending cap revision scheduled for 2026.  

“We want to be a popular, not a populist government,” he said, adding that the country must remain committed to fiscal responsibility.

Brazilian assets tumbled the most in the world on Tuesday on reports the government would breach the country’s spending cap rule, in place since 2017, to finance the new social program. 

The cap is seen by economists and investors as one of the key pillars of Brazil’s fiscal policy, keeping public finances from derailing by limiting spending growth to the inflation rate of the previous year. The government bypassed the rule in 2020 and 2021, getting one-time exemptions approved in congress to accommodate pandemic-related expenses.

One of the central themes of democracy is the loser of an election leaves office peacefully and handovers to new governments are reasonably smooth. When that pattern does not go according to plan, as in the US earlier this year, the strength of a nation’s institutions is tested. The USA passed that test, even though no one ever considered it would ever need to be tested.

The White House plan has the cooperation of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose leaders and port officials were expected to meet with Biden's top officials on Wednesday. The ILWU says its members are willing to work extra shifts to ease the crisis.

Six companies are part of the plan -- Walmart, FedEx, UPS, Target, Home Depot and Samsung.

"Across these six companies over 3,500 additional containers per week will move at night through the end of the year," the White House said in a statement.

The administration said it's also trying to assist in a truck driver shortage by supporting state motor vehicle departments.

"In 2021, an average of 50,000 commercial drivers licenses and learner's permits have been issued each month, 60% higher than the 2020 numbers," a senior administration official said. "The supply chain is essentially in the hands of the private sector, so we need the private sector to up to help solve problems."

To say that the supply chain is in the hands of the private sector is a gross misrepresentation of the power unions hold over how speedily goods move through the most significant ports in the USA.

Foxconn is among the technology companies targeting EVs as a source of growth beyond low-margin electronics assembly. The Ohio deal is a boon for Foxconn, giving it assembly capacity, equipment and talent, Citigroup analyst Carrie Liu wrote in a recent note. The company is close to deciding the location for a car plant in Europe, Liu said.

The Apple car would be the ultimate prize for every aspiring EV manufacturer. Working in Foxconn’s favor is its strong relationship with the U.S. consumer-electronics giant. The years-long partnership has expanded as Apple has added product categories, and the company now accounts for about 50% of Foxconn’s annual sales.

Any Apple automobile is still years away and the company has suffered setbacks including the recent departure of the head of its car project to Ford Motor Co. An Apple car has for years been somewhat of a paradox -- it’s one of its most hotly anticipated products yet the company has publicly said almost nothing about it.

Foxconn has yet to start sales of any vehicle following the debut of its EV platform last year. It plans to start mass production of Lordstown’s Endurance electric pickup in Ohio in April, according to a person familiar with its schedule.

Even if Apple is not going to produce a car, we are in a new era for the automotive sector. The evolution of the battery drive fuel cycle has lowered the barrier to entry and enables third manufacturing business models.

A link to the full report is posted in the Subscriber's Area. 

Every country had to break the piggy bank to deal with the pandemic. That helped to boost economic activity and demand for just about everything over the last 18 months. Going back to less profligate ways will be a challenge everywhere, but emerging markets have the benefit of growth to ease the challenge. They also have more recent experience of doing what is necessary to combat inflation which should be a useful skillset going forwards.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), which seeks to keep inflation around the midpoint of a 1 per cent to 3 per cent target band, raised its official cash rate on Oct 6 and signalled more increases are coming. That is despite a coronavirus outbreak that has kept largest city Auckland in lockdown for two months, curbing economic growth.

"We can now see annual CPI (consumer price index) inflation exceeding 5 per cent by the end of this year," said Mr Mark Smith, senior economist at ASB Bank in Auckland. "The widespread nature of price increases seen today was not a comforting sign. If it were not for the Delta variant outbreak, the pace of OCR (official cash rate) hikes being implemented by the RBNZ would potentially be quicker than 25 basis point increments."

Investors ratcheted up bets on further RBNZ rate hikes. Another increase is now fully priced in for the Nov 24 policy decision and there is a chance the bank will deliver a 50-point move, swaps data shows.

- I received this account from a New Zealand-based subscriber last week which may be of interest:

I hope life is going well for you and your family in your new abode.

Life is very good on a personal level although we are sad at our present inability to visit our son and his family in Portugal. They moved from the UK to the Algarve in early 2019 just before Covid hit. Luckily, we have a daughter and her family here and we are helping them to build a new house next door to ours.

Auckland is struggling with an outbreak of Delta but, so far, the rest of the country is Covid-free, as we have been all the way through.  There is a big race to get 90%+ of the nation fully vaccinated before Christmas. That looks achievable and we all hope we won't stumble at the last hurdle. NZ has coped with the pandemic very well to date but Delta is a tricky challenge.

The economy has surprised everyone with its strength, even through lockdown periods.  Our government debt levels were low by world standards going into the pandemic (thanks to years of sound economic management by successive administrations) and even with the generous support measures over the past 18 months, net Government debt is still only around 30% of GDP.  Apart from tourism and some parts of hospitality, businesses are thriving, with the recent tax- take far above expectations.

As in many countries, Covid has highlighted the wealth disparities in our society, exacerbated by the recent house price boom.  The disadvantaged communities (Maori and Pacific Islanders in our case) are at greatest risk of severe Covid with unlucky genetics, poor housing and little financial flexibility.  Lockdowns have shown the absurdity that most of the truly essential workers in societies are often also the lowest paid and least appreciated.  The social fabric is a precious, fragile thing and history shows that prolonged injustice and disparity will sooner or later cause it to rend. 

As the fortunate son of Estonian WW2 refugees from totalitarianism, it troubles me that surveys all over the Western world show younger people losing faith in democracy and market economies and, unfortunately, it's not hard to see why in many places today.

I want to thank you for the great job you are doing in taking over from the late, great David.  As a long-time subscriber (and Chart Seminar attendee), I can't think of a year where your service hasn't helped me make up my subscription several times over.

Thank you for this generous email. New Zealand has fared better than most during the pandemic and not least because demand for its primary exports has sustained the economy despite the challenges of losing tourist revenue.

I totally agree on the challenge of young people losing faith in free markets and democracy. Unfortunately, they have grown up in an environment where markets have not been free and where democracy has been overridden by special interest groups (both public and private) and much of what passes for legislation is the product of focus groups.

Radiant says its fuel "does not melt down, and withstands higher temperatures when compared to traditional nuclear fuels." Using helium as the coolant "greatly reduces corrosion, boiling and contamination risks," and the company says it's received provisional patents for ideas it's developed around refueling the reactors and efficiently transporting heat out of the reactor core.

Radiant joins a number of companies now working on compact nuclear reactors, and a smaller number focusing specifically on portable units, which would include the floating barges proposed for mass-manufacture by Seaborg. It'll be a while before we see one up and running, but a clean, convenient, low-cost, long-life alternative to diesel generators would be very welcome.

The evolution of small modular reactors and the increasing volume of space traffic point towards secular growth trends for helium. The terminal decline of helium supply from North America’s major source of production in Amarillo Texas was highlighted in 2018 as a major supply bottleneck. It had the potential to be a major supply inelasticity trend, as new sources of demand emerged. With so much enthusiasm about nuclear reactors in the market today, I thought it might be worth revisiting.  

“Many participants pointed out that the owners’ equivalent rent component of price indexes should be monitored carefully, as rising home prices could lead to upward pressure on rents,” minutes from the Fed’s September meeting, released Wednesday, said.

Rent is less critical to the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the one it officially targets when it shoots for 2 percent annual inflation on average, than it is to the C.P.I. But it is a big part of people’s experience with prices, so it could help shape their expectations about future cost increases.

Those expectations matter a lot to the Fed. If consumers come to anticipate faster inflation, they may begin to demand higher wages to cover their rising expenses. As businesses lift prices to cover rising costs, they could set off an upward spiral. Already, some key measures of inflation outlooks — notably the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations — have jumped higher.

The Fed is already preparing to start slowing the large bond purchases it has been making during the pandemic to keep longer-term interest rates low and money flowing around the economy. If inflation stays high, the Fed may also come under pressure to raise its policy interest rate, its more traditional and more powerful tool. That might slow mortgage lending, cool the housing market and weigh down inflation.

But doing that would come at a big cost, slowing the labor market when there are 5 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic. So for now, Fed officials are getting themselves into a position where they can be nimble without signaling that they’re poised to raise rates.

David Ricardo’s Iron Law of Wages dictates that the prevailing base rate will be enough for people to scrape by.  Since the cost of everyday items people spend money on to survive keeps rising, there is only one way for wages to go.

Separately on Tuesday, Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said his government “fully supports the new conditionality mechanism.”

Member nations “cannot take advantage of EU financial aid on the one hand, and disrespect the European values that unite us on the other. We cannot and will not accept this,” he said. “This is even truer in the context of a recent decision in Poland.”

Testing the Limit
The verdict questioning the supremacy of EU law, announced last week in Warsaw, marked a major escalation in Poland’s already fraught relations with the bloc and triggered street protests. In a joint statement just days later, France and Germany said Poland has a legal and moral obligation to abide by
EU rules.

Poland’s opposition, led by former European Council President Donald Tusk, accused the government of trying to force the country out of the EU. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who triggered the ruling by the Polish court, has dismissed that accusation as “fake news”
Still, his government ushered the ruling into law by publishing it in the official gazette on Tuesday, putting put to rest any doubt it may be seeking a way to compromise. “The government has decided to put itself on the collision course with the EU,” said Piotr Buras, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw. “They’re trying to test the limits of how far they can go.”

The big question for everyone in Europe is where does the state end and the superstate begin. That’s a question which is currently being tested on the eastern frontier of the bloc. Many policy setters in the Eurozone tend to socially and fiscally liberal (France, Spain, Italy, Belgium), while many in the governments in former eastern bloc countries tend to be both socially and fiscally conservative. That’s true even if they are some of the biggest beneficiaries from structural funds.

While Tony the Tiger thinks Frosted Flakes are “grrr-eat,” hundreds of Kellogg’s factory workers think the company is “grrr-eedy”—and they’re using Tony to drive their point home.

On Oct. 5, when about 1,400 Kellogg’s workers across four US plants went on strike over payments and benefits, a poster featuring the iconic tiger appeared along the picket line in Battle Creek, Michigan. In front of Tony were the words “I’m greedy.” A digital poster by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union also features an angry Tony holding a”Kellogg’s on Strrr-ike” sign.

Many workers feel like they did everything right during the pandemic and came out worse off than they went in. That belief was reinforced by millions of people making more on welfare and stimulus payments than from working. We are now seeing the results of those policies. Worker activism is trending higher.

The Australia-Asia PowerLink project, led by Australia's Sun Cable, plans to create a mammoth "Powell Creek Solar Precinct" on 12,000 hectares (29650 ac) of arid land about 800 km (500 miles) south of Darwin. The site, chosen because it's one of the most consistently sunny places on Earth, would be home to a mind-boggling 17-20 gigawatts of peak solar power generation and some 36-42 GWh of battery storage.

To give you a sense of scale, that's nearly 10 times the size of the world's current largest solar power installation, the 2.245-GW Bhadia Solar Park in India, and more than 30 times more energy storage than the last "world's biggest battery" project we covered in February. It's a bit big.

Not all that long ago spending more than $20 billion on a first of its kind project was considered completely unreasonable. Today, $20 billion is a rounding error compared to the quantities spent on stimulus.

The market for High Voltage Direct Current lines has been growing for more than five years. The first report of a feasibility study for an Australia - Indonesia connector is from 2016.

On November 24th I began a series of reviews of longer-term themes which will be updated on the first Friday of every month going forward. The last was on May 7th. These reviews can be found via the search bar using the term “Secular Themes Review”

Supply Inelasticity Meets Rising Demand was the phrase David coined to explain the last commodity-led bull market. After decades of underinvestment in commodity supply infrastructure, the market was not prepared for the massive swell of new demand from China; as it leaped from economic obscurity into one of the largest economies in the world. A decade of investment in new production was needed to supply China and that crested ahead of the credit crisis in 2008.

Today, we also have extreme example of supply inelasticity, and demand is breaking records for all manner of goods and services. The factors contributing to these trends are quite different from a decade though. Some will be resolved relatively quickly. Others will take years.

Lawmakers passed the 2022 budget into law at a plenary meeting on Thursday, with state spending seen at 2,714.2 trillion rupiah, slightly lower than the 2,750 trillion rupiah set for this year. It set a faster economic growth forecast of 5.2% for 2022, while reducing its budget deficit to 4.85% of gross domestic product from a projected 5.8% this year. 

Earlier in the day, a parliamentary commission approved a tax reform proposal that will introduce a carbon tax policy, overhaul the value-added tax system, expand income tax brackets, and offer another round of tax amnesty program. The bill will next be deliberated at the plenary level so it can be passed into law. 

Indonesia joins its neighbors in finding solutions to improve finances as a protracted coronavirus outbreak depletes government coffers. While Thailand has been forced to raise its public debt ceiling and Malaysia weighs doing the same, Indonesia has stood by its pledge to bring its budget deficit back to 3% of GDP by 2023 by streamlining spending and expanding revenue sources.

 

Asian and other emerging markets are much more accustomed to dealing with inflationary pressures than we are in the West. As a result, it is not all that surprising that they are further along in normalising policy and taking corrective measures to improve economic efficiency and tax collection.

Dollar Tree said it plans to begin adding new price points above $1 across all Dollar Tree Plus stores.

To test additional price points above $1 in selected legacy Dollar Tree stores
On track in 2021 to have 500 Dollar Tree Plus stores by fiscal year-end
Another 1,500 stores are planned for fiscal 2022; at least 5,000 Dollar Tree Plus stores are expected by the end of fiscal 2024
Currently has 105 Combo Stores; expects to add 400 Combo Stores in fiscal 2022
Sees potential for up to 3,000 Combo Stores over the next several years

Rising shipping costs, power cuts in major manufacturing centres and rising commodity prices all point towards margin compression for the sellers of low-priced items. They have no choice than to pass that inflation along to customers. The temporary shutting down of port facilities outside Shanghai will also have had the knock-on effect of putting upward pressure on prices because so much manufacturing capacity of low-cost items comes from Zhejiang.

You mentioned the energy shortages in China. These two articles from the Daily Telegraph spell out the scale and the implications globally. Best wishes to you and family

Thank you for the wishes and both these articles. Here is a section from Ambrose Evans Pritchard’s and here is a link to the other: 

The property squeeze is compounded by a parallel squeeze on carbon. Xi has promised peak CO2 emissions by 2030, a 25pc cut per unit of GDP by 2025, and a 3pc cut in energy intensity this year.

He knows that China is paying a high credibility price for foot-dragging as Europe and the US launch green deals (nobody can hide behind Trump any longer), and may soon face a carbon border tax in its top markets if it is not careful.

Energy-saving edicts are raining down. Party cadres have been mobilised to pursue CO2 crimes, and are reportedly doing so with the zeal of the Cultural Revolution. The state planner (NDRC) says 20 Chinese provinces have failed to meet this year’s goals on cutting energy intensity.

Nomura says nine have received “Level 1 warnings”, including Guangdong and Jiangsu, 35pc of China’s economy between them. Woe betide the Party officials responsible.

The steel, cement, and aluminium industries face production caps by the industry ministry (MIIT). They stole part of their allowance over the first half, and must cut back this half to compensate. That means drastic falls in steel output. It has already begun and is hammering iron ore prices, along with miners such as Vale and BHP Billiton.

I wonder does anyone remember the butter mountains and the wine lakes of the late 1980s and early 1990s? They were a political embarrassment, but prices were low. The EU and North America were overproducing because they subsidized farmers and low prices meant third world country farmers were impoverished and could not compete. The result was the abandonment of subsidies, much higher prices, still impoverished global farmers and a migration of market dominance to Brazil. I mention it here to emphasise that no good intention is left unpunished in the commodity markets.

Dear Eoin, could you kindly update us on Rolls Royce, e.g.: Worth buying more on this surge? Sell and buy back on inevitable dip after rumours regarding nuclear reactor subside? Thank you very much, very best, 

Thank you for this question which may be of interest to other subscribers. Rolls Royce is a potential beneficiary from the UK’s decision to exclude Chinese companies from its nuclear sector. That’s been a bullish factor for the share recently, not least as uranium investments have broken out. The additional news that it has sold ITP Aero unit for £1.5 billion also helped to support the share.

Dear Eoin, Many thanks for your comment on inflation as a solution for the massive public debts. In these circumstances how would you structure your portfolio? In which sectors would you invest your funds?

Thank you for this question which may be of interest to subscribers. This is a very big question because the stocks that have done best over the last decade have benefitted enormously from the massive availability of liquidity and very low rates. Divesting from the best performers runs contrary to most people’s instinct to run their winners so monitoring the consistency of their price action is particularly relevant to all portfolios over the next decade.

“My concern is that we are in a debt trap,” Roubini, chairman and chief executive officer of Roubini Macro Associates, said in an exclusive interview on Bloomberg TV at the Greenwich Economic Forum in Connecticut. “When central banks are going to want to essentially phase out unconventional monetary policy, given the debt ratios, there is the risk of a crash in the bond market, in the credit market, in the stock market, in the economy and therefore they’ll be in that debt trap and unable to normalize policy rates.”

When the Covid-19 pandemic started to strangle the global economy, easy monetary policies and stimulative fiscal policies were seen as necessary to “backstop the financial system,” Roubini said. But the results have been extreme.

“We are in a debt super cycle,” he said. “And eventually, central banks are in a trap. People said they are going to normalize policy rates, but with these levels of private and public debt, if they were trying to do that, there will be a market crash, an economic crash, and therefore, I think the path of least resistance is going to be to wipe out the real value of nominal debt at fixed-interest rates with higher inflation.”

The recipe for success in 2020 was a willingness to accept problems and look through them to the inevitable solutions. The magnitude of the challenge the pandemic presented was so large that only a massive monetary and fiscal response would suffice to blunt its impact. With that conclusion in hand asset prices rebounded impressively.
 

Think, you may find interesting this Financial Times story that looks into the longer-term consequences of Evergrande saga - https://on.ft.com/3io45gH (open link). It seems that the Chinese real estate market finally (at long, long last) is crumbling, not without help of the country leaders. If it is so and given the fact that the property market accounts for 29% of the Chinese GDP (and land sales to developers, for the third of local governments’ revenues), the economic growth seems to slow dramatically in the coming years. What could be implications, in your view? We all remember that China and its industrialization were the major drivers of the global commodities supercycle in the 21st century. Also, every time China has got into trouble, the Communist party used the same recipe “more investments in infrastructure and construction, more leverage. If now China and its property sector grow much more slowly, not to mention possible contraction of the latter, it will need much less metals and materials, and also possibly less gas (to power plants and send it to homes) and even oil (fewer working trucks and construction equipment). What do you think?

Thank you for this informative email which may be of interest to the Collective. Here is a section from the FT article:

An even more consequential trend for China’s political economy is the collapse in land sales by local governments, which fell 90 per cent year on year in the first 12 days of September, official figures show. Such land sales generate about one-third of local government revenues, which in turn are used to help pay the principal and interest on some $8.4tn in debt issued by several thousand local government financing vehicles. LGFVs act as an often unseen dynamo for the broader economy; they raise capital through bond issuance that is then used to fund vast infrastructure projects.

The property market has funded local governments for decades. Without a solid trend of land sales municipal governments face bankruptcy. There is just no way the central government can let that happen. The first order solution will be to avert contagion into the rest of the property market following Evergrande’s demise.

If progress toward the Fed’s employment and inflation goals “continues broadly as expected, the committee judges that a moderation in the pace of asset purchases may soon be warranted,” the U.S. central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee said Wednesday in a statement following a two-day meeting.   

The Fed also published updated quarterly projections which showed officials are now evenly split on whether or not it will be appropriate to begin raising the federal funds rate as soon as next year, according to the median estimate of FOMC participants. In June, the median projection indicated no rate increases until 2023.
And 

Projections for 2024 were also published for the first time, with the median suggesting a federal funds rate of 1.8% by the end of that year. The median for 2023 rose to 1%, from 0.6% in the June projection.  

 

Here is a link to the side by side comparison of today’s statement with the July one. Central banks feel the need to act to normalise policy because they are worried their actions are fuelling speculative activity. Yet, many of the countries that have begun to taper have soon found their initial estimates of the pace at which that can take place were overly ambitious.

Adjusted for inflation and annualized, costs are already higher now than for almost anytime in the past six decades, according FAO data. Indeed, it’s now harder to afford food than it was during the 2011 protests in the Middle East that led to the overthrow of leaders in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, said Alastair Smith, senior teaching fellow in global sustainable development at Warwick University in the U.K.

“Food is more expensive today than it has been for the vast majority of modern recorded history,” he said.

It is interesting to contrast the charts of Food and Agriculture World Prices disseminated by the UN with how the commodity sector as a whole has performed.

A key U.K. power cable knocked out by a fire will stay partly offline until March, National Grid Plc said, deepening the energy crisis threatening Britain as it heads into winter.

The timing couldn’t be worse. The U.K. is already struggling with shortages, with gas and power prices breaking records day after day. The energy crunch is fueling concerns about inflation and a potential hit to businesses just as the economy emerges from the worst impact of the pandemic. How the U.K. fares through the winter now hinges in large part on the weather.

One has to question how long it will be before the population wakes up to the reality that wind and solar are not base load suppliers of electricity. Placing one’s faith on an intermittent source of power is inevitably going to result in blackouts when the system breaks down.

Hope you are well in Dallas.

I have a question: why do you often mention that we have MMT in action right now?

MMT is not a policy adopted by government or central banks. They don’t “do mmt”

MMT is a theoretical framework that tries to explain how the monetary system works in a freely convertible and fiat currency system in which we have been living for 50 years now (and it explains it correctly to a large part in my opinion). it’s not the “policy ode making debt”. Isn’t it?

When you mention “MMT in action” you likely refer to the government demand for goods, services and the grant of subsidies / social securities payment / medicare /unemployment benefit to people etc. along with the debt issuance “to pay for” this spending. Finally the FED buying the government debt to “ease” the monetary conditions (the QE vs tapering).

But this is not “MMT”. Government spending has always existed and it is the second largest component of a country GDP (after “C” , private consumption). Look at the development of the US federal debt since the early 80es to the almost USD 28tn in 2021 / today. It does not matter who administered the country (super conservative or super liberal), they have all managed to expand the debt. And the market has always absorbed the “debt”. Have they been “doing MMT” for 40 years?

Thank you for your regular market updates... always appreciated

Thank you for this email which I believe will be of interest to the Collective. I agree there is nothing “modern” about MMT. Governments have a natural proclivity to spend and the freedom of fiat currencies inevitably leads to high debt loads. In that regard, the sustainability of debt regimes has been on a downward trajectory for a long time and people have been worrying about it for just as long. The bigger question is whether anything has really changed? 

But mounting pressure from several investigations and calls for his impeachment have led to the president's rhetoric becoming ever more belligerent.

The rallies he convened for independence day were seen as an attempt to demonstrate he can still draw huge crowds of supporters after recent polls had him trailing his left-wing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by nine percentage points.

While elections are not due to be held until October 2022, Mr Bolsonaro's approval ratings have also dropped to an all-time low.

A poll by the Atlas Institute suggested that 61% of Brazilians described his government's performance as bad or very bad, up from 23% when he first took office in January 2019.

While an attempt to impeach the president over his handling of the Covid crisis was blocked by the speaker of the lower house of Congress, Mr Bolsonaro is portraying himself as under attack from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Last week, he told evangelical leaders - who are among his staunchest backers - that "I have three alternatives for my future: being arrested, killed or victory".

And he again took up that theme in his speech on independence day, saying that "only God will oust me".

The accusations being levelled against Bolsonaro are primarily focused on his response to the pandemic, but are likely to gain traction because he has been playing fast and loose with rules and regulations.

“This is not a tapering decision, as ECB President Lagarde stressed,” Elga Bartsch, head of macro research at the BlackRock Investment Institute, said in an emailed comment. “Asset purchases look here to stay as the new policy framework paves the way for looser for longer monetary policy in the euro area.”

Mark Dowding, who oversees $70 billion at BlueBay Asset Management LLP, was less convinced by Lagarde’s protestations. 

“To me it is just semantics,” he said. “It is a choice of words. It looks like a taper and smells like a taper, so markets will view it as the start of the taper process.”

With supply-chain disruptions and resurgent virus infections threatening to undermine the recovery and medium-term price pressures likely to remain well below its goal, officials have insisted in recent weeks that the euro-area economy is in a different state than the U.S. and remains reliant on ECB support.

Yet some governors have started to warn publicly that maintaining an ultra-accommodative stance for too long also carries risks. Austria’s Robert Holzmann and Klaas Knot of the Netherlands both told Bloomberg in separate interviews last week that emergency asset purchases should end in March, hinting at heated discussions about the policy path in the months ahead.

The most likely scenario is a long slow taper; potentially beginning in December. That appears to be the plan being laid out by central bankers everywhere with a similar statement released about Australia’s ongoing taper earlier this week.

They don’t have much choice. We are 18 months on from the pandemic nadir in markets and economies are well on the road to a full recovery. As economies recover, they have to think about tailoring their assistance. However, we are still a long way from the first interest rate hikes.

On November 24th I began a series of reviews of longer-term themes which will be updated on the first Friday of every month going forward. The last was on May 7th. These reviews can be found via the search bar using the term “Secular Themes Review”.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Wall Street is behaving like it is in a bubble. The most important thing is the bubble is still inflating.

I did notice the surge in fresh fish prices for the past 6 months. For example, dover soles (300-400g size) had been in the 20-25 eur/kg (with an average at +/-23 eur) for +/- 15 years with a few peaks at 30 eur and dips at 18 eur; for the past 6 months, I have never seen the price below 30 euros and it has averaged 35-37eur with peaks at 40+ eur. I wonder whether it has to do with Brexit and therefore less fish available on the EU market. In any case all fish prices have substantially increased (depending on the species 40-70%); the cost of milk, pasta, etc. has also increased, not talking about gasoline or real estate.

(Here in Luxembourg, I have been made aware that a new project outside the city -at +/- 10 km to the north- a new residential development to be delivered in 2023 has prices at 20.000 euros/sq m for flats of 65-75 sq m) ... [Ed. c.€1890/sqft]

Wages are not following, and taxes are globally up with budgets still showing too large deficits. This will fuel resentment and populism, maybe revolts when people have nothing left to lose (the situation is dire in France and the split within the have and have nots deepening by the day compounded by and immigration - whether with a French ID or not - separatism being more evident by the day. Wages are not following.

Thank you for this insightful account. The rising cost of marine products may be an unintended consequence of renewable energy, regulations and compliance. This article from the BBC profiling Grimsby may be of interest. Here is a section: 

Shell fisherman Darren Kenyon is not a fan of the wind companies, though.

"It's been a really bad thing for us," he says. "They've taken thousands of miles of sea up, and put wind poles in. They've gridded the sea with electricity cables."

Darren complains that he cannot compete with the wages the wind farm companies pay their crews. 

And

According to the environmental group, Greenpeace, just five wealthy UK families own or control nearly a third of the country's fishing quota.

Danny complains that the whole system conspires to push small players out. Retiring smaller fishermen have often sold their quota - sometimes to continental Europeans. Others rent out their allocation on a monthly basis; they're known in the trade as "slipper skippers" because it's assumed that they sit snug and warm at home while others go fishing.

Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to water scarcity. In many countries simply reducing loss and leaks could make a huge difference – Iraq loses as much as two-thirds of treated water due to damaged infrastructure. The WPS partners also suggest tackling corruption and reducing agricultural over-abstraction as other key policies that could help. Iceland even suggests increasing the price of water to reflect the cost of its provision – in many parts of the world, humans have grown used to getting water being a cheap and plentiful resource rather than something to be treasured.

Much can also be done by freeing up more water for use through techniques such as desalination of seawater. Saudi Arabia currently meets 50% of its water needs through the process. "Grey", or waste water, recycling can also offer a low-cost, easy-to-implement alternative, which can help farming communities impacted by drought. One assessment of global desalination and wastewater treatment predicted that increased capacity of these could reduce the proportion of the global population under severe water scarcity from 40% to 14%.

At the international level, extensive damming by countries upstream are likely to increase the risk of disputes with those that rely on rivers for much of their water supply further downstream. But Susanne Schmeier, associate professor of water law and diplomacy at IHE Delft in the Netherlands, says that co-riparian conflict is easier to spot and less likely to come to a head. "Local conflicts are much more difficult to control and tend to escalate rapidly – a main difference from the transboundary level, where relations between states often limit the escalation of water-related conflicts," she says

Large populations with aspirations of increasing living standards are bumping up against the reality of resource scarcity. This is particularly true for water because many people think of it as free resource that falls from the sky or flows through the city. As cities grow larger and the global population becomes further concentrated at the deltas of major rivers, it is inevitable that water is going to become an increasingly contentious issue. That’s before anyone even begins to think about the ramifications of a changing climate.

Investors took the news of the coming taper in their stride -- avoiding any hint of the so-called 2013 “tantrum” when the Fed surprised markets by unexpectedly announcing it would start to pare back asset purchases. The S&P 500 rose during the much-anticipated address to stand more than 0.6% higher from opening levels. Ten-year Treasury yields nudged slightly lower to around 1.33% and the dollar fell.

“Chair Powell stuck to the script in his Jackson Hole speech; anyone hoping for a steer on the timing of the taper will have been disappointed, but it was never likely,” said Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

At the July Federal Open Market Committee meeting, most Fed officials agreed it would probably be appropriate to begin tapering the central bank’s $120-billion-a-month bond-buying program before the end of the year, according to a record of the gathering. Some are pushing for a move as soon as next month.

Monetary policy makers would like to conclude the purchases before they begin raising interest rates, and several in June saw a possible need for rate increases as early as 2022 amid inflation that is running above the central bank’s 2% target. The Fed cut its benchmark rate to nearly zero and relaunched the crisis-era purchase program last year at the onset of the pandemic.

No surprises and the promise of a potentially lengthy interval between the end of quantitative easing and tightening was greeted with enthusiasm by investors. It ensures the Fed will remain a significant force in the Treasury market for a while longer.

Carmakers are exacerbating issues by producing more components in-house. Tesla, VW and Porsche are making car batteries themselves or with a partner from outside the traditional car-parts industry. VW aims to cut procurement costs by 7% and fixed costs by 5% over the next couple years, potentially pressuring suppliers including Continental, Magna and ZF Friedrichshafen, my colleague Joel Levington wrote for Bloomberg Intelligence. During a visit to Germany earlier this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly called out Bosch for not supplying chips quickly enough.

The industry’s struggles won’t be over soon. The semiconductor shortage will cut worldwide auto production by as many as 7.1 million vehicles this year, with pandemic-related supply disruptions hobbling output well into 2022, according to IHS Markit. This week, VW's Wolfsburg plant — the world’s
biggest, employing some 60,000 people — restarted from its usual summer break running only one shift.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which has been kind to the industry in past years, earlier this month green-lighted a 1 billion-euro “future” fund to help German regions reliant on autos survive the shift away from the combustion engine. Still, analysts anticipate greater consolidation of the parts industry. So, what can suppliers do? Roland Berger says they must overhaul long-established processes to become leaner, invest more in software and digitization, become more open to R&D partnerships and look to Asia for potential growth.

I wonder if the CDU/CSU is prepared for the destruction of the auto parts sector to become an election issue because these kinds of events tend to spark populist uprising. There is no getting around the fact that electric vehicles do not have nearly as many parts as internal combustion engine-driven vehicles. As carbon credit taxes surge the incentive to sell rather than buy them ensures a migration towards batteries. That’s going to put a lot of people out of work in Germany’s CDU dominated industrial heartland.

“It’s metal products, it’s plastic products, paper even. And then it’s certainly the pandemic,” he said. 

Concerns about the outlook come as Germany prepares for next month’s elections that will see the winner succeed outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkelafter 16 years in power. 

The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, said this week economic growth this year may be somewhat lower than the 3.7% it had forecast in June. But Fuest said a lot depends on how long supply shortages will last.

“What we see in this month is that in manufacturing, things are actually getting worse rather than better,” he said. “If that continues it will be a significant downgrade of the growth outlook.”  

China locked down half the country to deal with its outbreak of the Delta variant. That stopped people moving from the hinterland to the coast to find work. That has resulted in longer lead times for manufacturing. The temporary and partial shutdown of port facilities in Shenzhen and Ningbo created additional supply constraints with long queues of ships waiting to be loaded. These events have been significant contributions to shortages in Europe.

Luxury stocks sink in Europe, dragging the Stoxx 600 Index lower, after Chinese state media said President Xi Jinping offered an outline for “common prosperity” that includes income regulation and redistribution, putting China’s wealthiest citizens on notice. 

LVMH -4.3%, Burberry -4%, Kering -3.5%, Hermes -3%, Richemont -2.2%

“This is a rather nervous market reaction to leadership statements in China about the ‘third wealth redistribution,’” Bernstein analyst Luca Solca says in an email

“I am not sure there is necessarily a lot to fear from that,” he adds. “Time will tell”

NOTE: Since Xi took office in 2012, the ruling party has made it a priority to end poverty and build a moderately prosperous society, goals that the party sees as central to promoting well-being and strengthening its governance

Income inequality in the country is wide -- the richest 20% earn more than 10 times poorest 20% -- and hasn’t budged since 2015

Bernard Arnault is now the wealthiest individual in the world. That’s a significant achievement considering the products his companies sell haven’t exactly changed the world. Instead, the world has changed so there are enough nouveau riche to purchase the products amid the illusion of supply inelasticity.

By global standards, the U.S. has bounced back fast. But as data on the recovery continue to pour in, there’s plenty to support the suspicion that the glass is still half-empty.

Consumer sentiment fell in early August to the lowest level in nearly a decade by one measure and U.S. retail sales fell in July by more than forecast.

The following charts help explain why Americans still aren’t clear how impressed they should be.

I was at a wholesale furniture warehouse this morning that does not deal with retail customers. The two things that employees related to me were that business was booming in the 1st and 2nd quarters, but over the last two months sales have been way down. The second was there was a big whiteboard on the wall with their monthly minimum sales target of $950,000. As of this morning they were at $431,000.

A link to the full report is posted in the Subscriber's Area.

The big question for investors is how to attribute responsibility for the strong earnings growth in the 2nd quarter. There is a good argument that much of the surge in earnings was due to pent up demand and outsized liquidity provision. As the economy opened up and confidence built around the protection offered by vaccinations there was a surge of economic activity. In order for the pace of the recovery to be self-sustaining, consumer confidence has to continue to recover and liquidity needs to remain abundant.

“We need to see higher carbon prices to make those projects profitable,” said Anders Opedal, chief executive officer of Equinor ASA, which is developing CCS in the U.K., Norway, Germany and the Netherlands. “It actually needs to be more expensive to pollute than actually capture and store.”

Britain has the most ambitious climate goals of the G-20 nations, targeting a 78% reduction in emissions by 2035. The nation has committed to helping fund two industrial hubs, where heavy industry and power generation can use carbon capture and storage by 2025, with another two by the end of the decade.

The aim is to scrub as much as 10 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Details on how the funding will be allocated are due before December. At today’s power prices, the U.K.’s largest planned project at Drax Group Plc’s biomass station in north England already would be profitable using carbon-capture technology, according to Credit Suisse.

“We need to be sure we could get those prices over a long time period, but we’re getting pretty close,” CEO Will Gardiner said in an interview on Bloomberg Radio. Drax’s project will start in 2027, and by 2030 it will capture and store 8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

In 2019, the world emitted about 33 gigatons of carbon. Operational projects are capturing just a fraction of that, about 40 million tons, according to Wood Mackenzie. There are 19 large-scale CCS facilities in operation today and another 32 in development, according to Credit Suisse. If these all come online, they could store 100 million tons – a slightly bigger fraction.

There’s also a chance the technology might not be as effective as promised. The world’s biggest project, at Chevron Corp.’s $54 billion liquefied natural gas plant in Australia, has fallen short of its target to capture 80% of emissions from the plant, burying just 30% over five years.

“The tech isn’t there yet for large-scale adoption, but our industry has to start changing how we operate,” said Andrew Gardner, chairman of Ineos Grangemouth Ltd., which is working with Royal Dutch Shell Plc on the Acorn project in Scotland that’s scheduled to start in 2027.

The system developed by Oslo-based Aker Carbon Capture ASA costs between 60 euros and 120 euros per ton, CEO Valborg Lundegaard said. That means CCS could be nearing a crossover point.

The fundamentals of carbon prices focus on the outlook for the economy and how much emissions will be created to achieve the anticipated growth rate. The reality, however, is that this is a politically motivated rate. The European Commission has said on regular occasions that it wants to see prices trade up to €100 and nothing has happened to question that view.

Nair was referring to massive delays at Shenzhen's Yantian port in May and June. Weeks of containment efforts following outbreaks of Covid-19 among dockworkers in China's Pearl River Delta caused global shipping delays, supply-chain disruptions and surging freight costs. The problems have not been fully resolved.

Lars Jensen, CEO of liner consultancy Vespucci Maritime, also said the Meishan terminal closure could have a similar impact on the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port that Yantian experienced when it was closed for more than three weeks.

"Significant problems, both for export cargo as well as for the movement of empty containers into the region, would then ensue," he wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.

With its zero-tolerance approach to the coronavirus, China is currently carrying out mass testing to contain the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, which Ningbo authorities said the Meishan worker tested positive for.

However, the deputy director of the Ningbo Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Yi Bo, said the worker may have contracted the virus from his interactions with foreign crewmembers of cargo freighters that he had boarded at the port. Video surveillance showed he had close contact with crews.

Meishan is one of the busiest terminals at the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, servicing main trade destinations in North America and Europe. In 2020, it handled 5,440,400 TEUs of container throughput, or around 20 per cent of the total container throughput at the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, according to official statistics.

Shipping rates from China to the USA and Europe are up 400% in the last year. A good part of the reason for that jump is because ports are having difficulty managing the volume of traffic. That’s both a function of outsized demand during the pandemic and the infection rates among dock workers.

South Africa’s new finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, has a difficult job ahead: convincing investors that he can help Africa’s most industrialized economy reduce debt while boosting economic growth.

He took the first step in an investor call Friday, when said there would be no changes to the fiscal framework for Africa’s most industrialized economy. The rand gained and bond yields fell after he spoke.

“I don’t see much changing in that fiscal framework,” Godongwana said on the call. “There is commitment from myself as the minister of finance and I would imagine from government.”

The rand reversed losses against the dollar, and strengthened 0.2% to 14.7576 per U.S. dollar by 4:13 p.m. in Johannesburg. Yields on the most-liquid 2026 government fell three basis points to 7.39%.

Europe adopted fiscal austerity after the global financial crisis and its sovereign wealth crisis. The result was the surge in populism and widespread disaffection with the European project. On this occasion they have resolved not to make that mistake again. In fact, it could be argued the pandemic has been the perfect excuse to ditch the failed austerity program.

40 minutes but really good (essential) analysis of where we are now with the virus. Martenson has been an excellent guide throughout. One for the collective perhaps. 

Thank you for this informative video. The primary points are that the delta variant is much more transmissible that previous versions of the novel coronavirus but it is less deadly. That stands up to logic. If the transmissibility is indeed anything approaching that of chickpox, everyone will be exposed to the delta variant in a short period of time. The UK’s high case count but low death count confirm it is less deadly. India’s experience, as the country where delta evolved, suggests a rapid flare up of cases and equally rapid decline as something approaching herd immunity is reached.

In this article, we document that two derived US inflation variables—inflation cycles and inflation surprises—have been robust predictors of US equity returns. We demonstrate that this predictability translates into new sources of alpha that investors can seek to harvest. In particular, we highlight the signals’ ability to perform during the worst times in the stock market without missing upside opportunities.

The tail-hedging properties derived from inflation signals are particularly desirable. Hedging positive inflation shocks can be costly when inflation is low.9 For example, strategic allocations to alternative assets, such as commodities, or absolute return strategies as a way to protect against inflation have not all fared well in recent years, with commodity indices down more than 30% versus their 2011 levels. As a result, many asset owners may not be able to stay the course if inflation fails to materialize in the medium term. We find that inflation signals can provide a new tool for investors who wish to hedge their portfolios against inflationary and deflationary risks.

“The tail-hedging properties derived from inflation signals are particularly desirable.”

For forty years inflation is the dog that refused to bite. There have been several occasions when it looked inevitable profligate spending, overly generous social programs, supply disruptions, commodity and property booms and busts would break the trend of disinflation but they never did.

Arber and his team, including Dr. Shiran Shapira, developed the drug based on a molecule that the professor has been studying for 25 years called CD24, which is naturally present in the body.

and

Arber noted that another breakthrough element of this treatment is its delivery.

“We are employing exosomes, very small vesicles derived from the membrane of the cells which are responsible for the exchange of information between them,” he said.

“By managing to deliver them exactly where they are needed, we avoid many side effects,” he added.

The team is now ready to launch the last phase of the study.

“As promising as the findings of the first phases of a treatment can be, no one can be sure of anything until results are compared to the ones of patients who receive a placebo,” he said.

Some 155 coronavirus patients will take part in the study. Two-thirds of them will be administered the drug, and one-third a placebo.

The study will be conducted in Israel and it might be also carried out in other places if the number of patients in the country will not suffice.

“We hope to complete it by the end of the year,” Arber said.

If the results are confirmed, he vowed that the treatment can be made available relatively quickly and at a low cost.

“In addition, a success could pave the wave to treat many other diseases,” he concluded.

Many doctors have stated that using wartime phraseology to talk about the efforts to treat the coronavirus are unhelpful. However, there is one important crossover worth considering. Wars tend to result in significant technological acceleration.

On November 24th I began a series of reviews of longer-term themes which will be updated on the first Friday of every month going forward. The last was on May 7th. These reviews can be found via the search bar using the term “Secular Themes Review”.

We are 17 months on from the panic low in 2020. At this stage it is quite normal to marvel at the speed of the advance and worry that the pace can’t possibly be sustained. The abiding sentiment is something like “surely, the world is not nearly as good as it was before the pandemic and therefore how on earth can prices be so high?”.

The world is not as good as it was before, millions of people have been deeply inconvenienced and many are traumatized by the events of the last 17 months. The counter argument is the quantity of money in circulation has only been matched during wartime and that has helped to inflate the price of everything. That’s the key to the argument. Having spent so much to achieve this recovery does anyone really believe central banks are going to endanger it? So where do we go from here?

Adding press freedom to the list may benefit those seeking investment too. When a newspaper closes, the local government’s borrowing costs rise because diminished scrutiny makes investors less comfortable, a 2019 report published in the Journal of Financial Economics found. 

Press freedom “is a very foundational thing that needs to be in place before you can have meaningful ESG metrics,” said Perth Tolle, founder of Life + Liberty Indexes, which invests in countries based on third-party rankings of various freedoms. The Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF, which tracks Tolle’s index, has no holdings in Turkey or China and also reduced its position in Poland in recent years as concerns have mounted over the country’s erosion of the rule of law. The benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets Index — which Tolle’s index has outperformed this year — has exposure to all three nations. ​

Most investors simply don’t factor in human rights concerns when it comes to allocating capital, Tolle added.

“The metrics are out there, the problem with Wall Street is that they don’t make any money out of those, and they don’t like it,” said Tolle, who was born in China and now lives in Texas. “In places that have no press freedom, do you think they’ll have freedom for stock or bond analysts?

Governance is Everything has been a central theme of this service for decades. It really is as simple as knowing that when you have a grievance, you will have recourse to a system of justice. In order for that to be possible you need property rights and respect for minority shareholder interests. You need an independent judiciary, so your case can get a free hearing. Then you need a free press to help publicise corruption and political overreach so they system can be sustained.

The Philippine peso posted its biggest intra-day decline since 2013 as investors turned cautious ahead
of a two-week strict lockdown in the Manila capital region starting Friday.

The peso slid as much as 1.2% to 50.37 against the dollar to become Asia’s worst performing currency on Thursday. Local stocks also declined after rising for three straight days. The peso’s drop comes after Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas said on Wednesday that a reserve requirement ratio cut could be on the
table. The central bank is set announce its policy decision on Aug. 12.

The peso may have weakened on “some positioning ahead of the imposition of the tighter restrictions starting tomorrow,” said Nicholas Mapa, an economist in Manila at ING Groep NV. There’s also “some chatter now also about the RRR reduction from BSP as the central bank appears to have run out of policy rate cuts for now.”

It’s well understood that there is no one fundamental metric that dictates how currencies trade. From one year to the next traders will focus on interest rate differentials or forward rates, money supply growth, or economic development. Over the last 12 months, the primary focus has been on how well any individual country is faring against the pandemic. At present ASEAN is taking the epicentre of rising numbers of cases so that is weighing on regional currencies.

This lack of long-term protection against infection means that herd immunity is probably impossible and that the virus will become endemic and continue to circulate in human populations. If this happens and the disease then stabilises, such that case numbers are constant across the population, neither increasing nor decreasing, it will have reached what’s called an “endemic equilibrium”.

So is this what we’re now witnessing? Possibly. One of the basic models of how infectious disease cases change over time is called an SIR model, which looks at how many people are susceptible to a disease, infectious with it or have recovered from it (and so are immune) at any one time.

With this model, cases increase rapidly at the start of an epidemic as lots of people are susceptible, become infected, and go on to infect other susceptible people. But as infections mount, over time fewer people are susceptible and more have recovered. The rate of growth therefore decelerates, the epidemic reaches its peak, and then case numbers decline to an endemic equilibrium point, where they remain roughly stable.

A leaked CDC document has been circulating today with a claim that the Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox. That news is enough to make anyone worried. The fact that this variant is also more likely to result in acute sickness is doubly worrying. With 110,000 confirmed breakthrough cases in the USA there is a palpable sense of worry that news is about to get worse. Meanwhile, the UK’s number of cases has peaked and is falling quickly. That should act as at least a partial salve to those worries.

They further explain if the market reaches the higher end, a new market could be opened with a new range, so making this effectively price discovery for non publicly traded companies, including McLaren, Reddit, SpaceX or OpenSea, Zapper, dYdX.

This hasn’t quite launched yet, with it to be seen what it will look like exactly once it is in hard code, but the idea is that once the company goes public, then the prePO price is settled at the company’s opening price on the first day of trading.

So in theory and perhaps even in practice this can allow for betting on startups even at the very early stages as well as mature companies that will probably go public at some point with the investor benefiting from the price appreciation that does finally settle once the company goes public.

“When the asset goes public, you can exit your position at a final settlement price, based on the price at the end of the first day of public trading for stocks, or on a time-weighted average price for tokens,” they say.

Every major bull market comes up with a way for investors to believe they have an edge over everyone else. In the 1990s that was characterised by buying IPOs. During the housing bubble it was liar loans and zero down mortgages. Today, the tokenization of everything from art to companies is allowing private investors an opportunity to invest in private markets like never before.

A resurgence of virus infections thanks to the delta variant is likely to mean sustained demand for vaccines around the world. Further, it is widely expected that many people could require booster shoots to bolster the immunity gained in the initial round of immunizations.

Pfizer said in a presentation accompanying its earnings release that emerging real-world data “suggests immunity against infection and symptomatic disease may wane,” underscoring the need for boosters.

The company said regulators will determine “whether, and which, populations to recommend booster,” and that they will likely first focus on those with compromised immune systems and older adults.

The ideal business model for any pharmaceutical company is to develop a treatment for an unmet but dire chronic condition. Diabetes is the perfect example. There is no cure and treatments are both necessary and tend to increase in magnitude as the disease progresses. Each patient represents a growing cashflow for as long as they live following a diagnosis. Viagra was also a blockbuster because it catered to an unmet need but did not cure it. 

Vaccines appear to be very effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalisation. The reality is that anything which does not result in hospitalisation is pretty much considered to be mild infection. That means everything from feeling fine to the worst flu you’ve ever had is a mild infection.

One of our HK analysts wrote this week: “the USA government has issued a joint advisory on the risks of conducting business, studying, and investing in HK, in a direct response to the June 2020 National Security Law (NSL)…which effectively crushed the autonomous region’s special freedoms. Certain multinationals in Hong Kong now face two-way political risk as the U.S.-China decoupling continues…Businesses will be forced to pick a side: adhere to U.S. sanctions and be penalized by China or potentially violate U.S. sanctions to maintain access to Chinese markets. Airlines will need to provide passenger information to authorities before flights depart…to prevent…political dissidents from leaving HK. The NSL allows authorities to conduct wiretaps or electronic surveillance, search and seize electronic devices, requires internet service providers to produce corporate or consumer data. The NSL has dissolved freedom of press in HK. The city’s public radio station is also now under tight censorship...all media based in HK now reflects the political agenda of Beijing. The U.S. has placed sanctions on several individuals and entities within HK, barring U.S. businesses and nationals from transacting with them.”

It is clear that under President-For-Life Xi, the primary condition for portfolio investment in China –the safety of one’s capital in a free system under a Rule of Law- does not, indeed cannot, exist.

This brings us back to the frog. The human tendency to cling onto hope and the status quo can be admirable, but it can also be a pathway to the poorhouse in investment. The destructive forces of late 1930s Germany were foreshadowed a decade before; “Mein Kampf” was published in 1925.

Why not invest in sectors that are actively encouraged by the Chinese state, such as semi-conductors, or which lie outside the ambit of state interference? For institutional investors tied to a global equity index, this is indeed an option, though the tendrils of the Chinese state reach everywhere. For private investors who have no compulsion to invest in China, and who see the world of investment as a “global beauty contest” it may be considered a risk too far. Other more beautiful shores, those that feel the radiation effect of a booming China, may offer more attractive prospects. ASEAN and the free-thinking members of the Trans Pacific Partnership spring to mind.

Sometimes investing is about the return of your money rather than return on it. That’s the challenge for investors in Chinese equities at present. It’s a big question because Chinese stocks represent significant weightings in the broad emerging markets universe. That’s true for both equities and bonds.

“It’s going to be worse before it gets better,” with shutdowns and staff disruptions increasing in Asia, said Deborah Elms, executive director of the Singapore-based Asian Trade Centre. “Places like Vietnam that largely avoided locking down cannot maintain an open posture. With vaccinations painfully slow, I assume more shutdowns in factories, with the ripple effects felt elsewhere.”

Trade in goods has been a rare buffer for the Covid-ravaged global economy -- especially for export-heavy Asian countries -- but the latest reports show cracks in this growth pillar. The delta variant-driven surge has hit Southeast Asia especially hard, underscoring the delicate choices for policy makers who are balancing vaccination drives and mobility restrictions while trying to keep their economies afloat.

The manufacturing pain is especially acute in Vietnam, where officials have taken drastic steps to ensure factories can continue operating. In some instances, electronics and tech companies have had workers sleep overnight on-site.

The garment industry, with lower profits and more workers, hasn’t been able to replicate that effort. Feng Tay Enterprise Co., Pou Chen Corp. and Sports Gear Co. are among manufacturers that have suspended some operations in Vietnam.

My 13-year-old informed Mrs. Treacy yesterday last night that they had to go to the Nike store because the shoes she wants for school were sold out online. Her rationale was most people begin shopping for school in August so now was the time to make the purchase. They dutifully made the journey and secured the shoes while witnessing numerous kids making Snapchat videos with their purchases.

For many others, the potential outweighs the downsides. With almost half its 1.3 billion people accessing the internet via smartphones, a bet on Zomato represents optimism that India’s tech upstarts could go the way of the U.S. or China, particularly as India’s internet infrastructure remains nascent and consumers are just getting used to buying online.

“This is how it is supposed to work. Nine out of 10 will fail,” Goyal, who is barred from commenting in the run-up to the listing, said in an earlier interview. “But the one that thrives will be a spectacular success.”

Fund-Raising Blitz
In previous conversations, Goyal recounted how he first got the idea for an online service when, as a math and computer science student at the Indian Institute of Technology, he was particularly frustrated with a pizza order. His resolve strengthened after he graduated and joined Bain, where he saw colleagues in the company cafeteria skimming the limited menu and talking longingly about food at nearby restaurants.

Goyal and Chaddah started uploading menus of neighborhood cafes and restaurants onto the company intranet, with phone numbers. That was a huge hit with coworkers, driving a weekend venture they christened foodiebay.com. After his wife got a teaching job at Delhi University, Goyal quit to pursue
entrepreneurship full-time, shrugging off the onset of the global financial crisis.

In the India of a decade ago, entrepreneurship was frowned upon and Goyal didn’t tell his parents -- both teachers -- until much later. In the first year, the startup began by listing thousands of restaurants in India’s six biggest cities. Then came an email from entrepreneur-turned-investor Sanjeev Bikhchandani, who invested $1 million through his Info Edge India Ltd.

4G is having the same effect on the Indian economy as it has had everywhere else. The spectrum of online services available has increased significantly which is benefitting the banking, entertainment and nascent social sectors. Food delivery services have sprung up everywhere mobile broadband access becomes available. India is no different.

“We have a ways to go on the cyclical recovery here,” Levine, head of equities at the firm, said on Bloomberg TV and Radio. The U.S. has exhibited “an exceptionalism in the amount of fiscal policy, the amount of monetary stimulus and also in the way we vaccinated the population. And because of that I actually am very bullish,” she added.

For Bill Callahan, an investment strategist at Schroders, “equities just make sense right now,” and dip buyers will be rewarded as the market continues to grind higher.

On the economic front, data showed U.S. housing starts increased in June by more than forecast, suggesting residential construction is stabilizing despite lingering supply-chain constraints and labor shortages.

The compression in yields makes the argument for investing equities more compelling because it reduces speculation that monetary accommodation is about to be removed.

Plastic waste is “a massive problem . . . On this trajectory, we will have more plastics in our ocean by weight than fish by 2050”, said Sander Defruyt, who leads the New Plastics Economy initiative at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 

Its root cause was our “throwaway society” — countries must move from a system “based on the extraction of resources to one that is based on the circulation of resources”.

Plastics are made from fossil fuel-based chemicals, and break up into smaller and smaller pieces when they are disposed of, rather than decompose in the way that food does. Although disposable plastic items can often be recycled, many are not and millions of tonnes of plastic waste find their way into the ocean each year. 

As images of plastic-strewn beaches have become familiar sights, governments have started cracking down on the material with plastic bans or taxes.

Last year, England banned single use plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds, and raised the charge on plastic bags. China outlawed single use bags and cutlery in major cities, and is planning to extend plastic bans in the years to 2025.

In a drive to entice eco conscious shoppers, consumer brands, including coffee chain Starbucks and fast food retailer McDonald’s, have started replacing disposable plastic items with paper alternatives. In April, grocer Morrisons announced it would become the first UK supermarket to completely remove plastic bags from stores.

In its 2020 annual report, Dow said plastics were facing “increased public scrutiny”.

“Local, state, federal and foreign governments have been increasingly proposing — and in some cases approving — bans on certain plastic-based products including single-use plastics,” which could affect demand, it said.

Nevertheless, producers expect global demand for plastics to increase, driven by population growth and an expanding middle class. The pandemic also prompted an increase in the use of disposable items, which have been seen as a way to minimise the virus’ transmission.

The drive towards managing the growing volume of waste products, and the related demand for landfill sites which no wants near their home, means the single use plastics sector is likely to attract significant attention in the expanding global carbon emissions market. That’s particularly true following the massive growth in demand for single use items during the pandemic. I think many people found it ironic that as soon as plastic straws were banned, that the number of used mask litter increased exponentially.

But the lifting of curbs came against a fraught backdrop of surging infections and political strife for Johnson. The U.K. added more than 54,000 new cases Saturday, and over 47,600 on Sunday, more than Indonesia, the current pandemic epicenter, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The surge in cases weighed on the pound, which fell as much as 0.4% to $1.3707, the lowest since mid-April. Meanwhile, demand for safety boosted U.K. government bonds, with 10-year gilt yields falling two and a half basis points to 0.60%.

The prime minister, meanwhile, is fighting to regain his credibility after a furious backlash forced him and finance minister Rishi Sunak to abandon an initial attempt to avoid their own government’s isolation rules. The pair were told they needed to stay home after meeting Health Secretary Sajid Javid, who tested positive for Covid-19.

The furore — overshadowing what U.K. media have called “Freedom Day” — is a deep irony for Johnson. It graphically demonstrates the perils the premier faces as he tries to break the U.K.’s cycle of lockdowns and revive economic activity while ensuring state-run hospitals are not overwhelmed.

The big question for the UK was whether the trend of new cases would be followed by a trend of new deaths. Without the aid of a high vaccination rate, the death rate could have been expected to surge higher by now. The fact that it has not points to the efficacy of the vaccines administered.

“Dear friends,

Many of you outside of South Africa are wondering what is really going on. So here is a very simple outline. The thing is obviously far more complex and nuanced than can be set out in a brief note but this will give you some picture of what is really happening.

Following the 1994 democratic elections in South Africa, South Africa did really well economically until about 2008. That was also the year that Jacob Zuma was elected president of the ANC. At that point in time, some of us had a sense of disquiet already. But little did any of us understand then the extent of the corruption and weakening of government institutions that would follow. We have no clear idea of the extent of what was stolen during the Jacob Zuma years, other than that it is a stupendous sum of money which this country certainly cannot afford. Eventually however the internal tide within the ANC started to slowly turn against Jacob Zuma. On 18 December 2017 Cyril Ramaphosa was elected as the president of the ANC (and also subsequently became the president of South Africa). But it was a very narrow margin of victory.

The thing about Cyril Ramaphosa is that he is fundamentally a principled man. And certainly, determined to clean up the history of corruption we have seen since 2008. Various steps have been taken by him and the ANC under his guidance to give effect to this. One of the things that was done was to establish a commission chaired by Raymond Zondo, who is the Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa. The purpose of this commission was to investigate the corruption issues and to expose them to the light of day.

Jacob Zuma was required to appear in front of the commission. He effectively refused to do so. He was ordered by the Constitutional Court to do so. He defied the order of the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court in turn ordered his imprisonment for a period of 15 months for contempt of court. This, whatever you call it, is fundamentally the rule of law in action.

Initially there was resistance to imprisonment by Jacob Zuma and his supporters. A week ago, however Jacob Zuma submitted himself to imprisonment. And then all hell broke loose.

What you need to understand is that Jacob Zuma has his powerbase in KwaZulu Natal, where the riots have been at their worst. This is also, as the name will tell you, the home territory of the Zulu nation. And Jacob Zuma is a prominent figure in the Zulu nation. Within the Jacob Zuma camp, individuals set about instigating the so-called protests, riots and looting that you have seen in the media. To a significant extent they leveraged the problems of poverty and inequality in South Africa to achieve their ends. Very often in this country we have areas where many very poor people are resident adjacent to commercial complexes. This was an ideal combination to exploit. In addition to that there are the existing fissures along race lines that exist in our society which were also available to leverage. Audio files doing the rounds encouraged people to attack and destroy what are perceived to be white and white owned businesses. In the end though, many black businesspeople also suffered considerable losses.

The gameplan was to create a situation which would force the hand of the current government. Ideally, it would result in an overreaction by the security forces, with the result that many of the poor and vulnerable would be killed (which is what happened at Marikana a few years back). If that occurred, it would likely force the resignation or removal of Cyril Ramaphosa as president. Meaning the Jacob Zuma camp would have achieved their objective. This is one reason why the security forces have been so careful not to use excessive force in dealing with the riots and the looters.

While there is still a lot of instability in KwaZulu Natal and certain pockets in Gauteng, what is now starting to emerge quite clearly is that the gambit by the Jacob Zuma camp has failed. South African society of all walks has turned its face against this insurrection. In effect, an attempted coup has failed.

South Africans are a strange nation in many ways. They argue and fight amongst themselves but when pushed to the edge, they always pull together for the common good. This has happened again and again over the decades.

This has been perhaps a necessary test of our democracy and of the rule of law. Make no mistake but that South Africa has many very real challenges. But South Africa will pass through this and will put the locust years behind it.”

South Africa is a country of contrasts but it will survive as long people are willing to pull together during times of crisis. The significant threat to the rule of law that arose last week was a major challenge. The restraint shown by the armed forces, at least so far, is to be welcomed and highlights the fact that there are government institutions capable of acting responsibly and effectively. South Africa’s greatest institutional strength is the independence of the judiciary and a free press. Threats to both these pillars of governance never cease to arise but as long as they survive there is the potential for bounce backs following crises.

Before the launch of the national ETS, China had already established regional ETSs in eight provinces and cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Seven of the regional ETSs started trading in 2013, while the one in the eastern province of Fujian kicked off three years later. These regions allow companies to buy carbon credits equivalent to as much as 5% to 10% of their original quotas or actual emissions. The average price of carbon credits traded on the regional ETSs stands at 50 yuan ($7.73) per ton, analysts at Guotai Junan Securities Co. Ltd. estimate, far lower than the 250 yuan equivalent per ton in the EU ETS in 2020.

And

Initially, China’s national ETS will only cover the electricity generation sector. A batch of 2,225 electricity companies (link in Chinese) will participate in the trading.

In addition to electricity, the trading system will eventually cover seven other industries (link in Chinese), including petrochemical, chemical, construction materials, steel, nonferrous metal, papermaking and aviation. Companies that emit greenhouse gases equivalent to more than 26,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year will be included in the system.

It is expected that financial institutions will indirectly engage in the carbon market, as central bank Governor Yi Gang in April said that “the carbon market should be a financial market in nature and allow carbon financial derivatives trading.”

China appears to be serious about its intentions to migrate away from its reliance on coal (65%) for electricity generation. As a country’s economy progresses the relative value received from the health and wellbeing of citizens increases relative to the benefit gained from physical output. China crossed that barrier a decade ago so it is logical to expect greater focus on air and water resources.

“This is a wake-up call to the entire world,” David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, said on a webcast on Monday. “We’re heading in the wrong direction. To think that we’re going to end hunger by 2030, that’s not even possible given the direction, trajectory we’re on now.”

Between 720 million and 811 million people were undernourished last year, according to the UN, which used a mid-range of 768 million due to uncertainty of the pandemic’s impact. Most of those were in Asia. Roughly a third of all people lacked access to adequate food, a figure that rose by 320 million from a year earlier, about as much as in the previous five years combined.

The report -- the first global assessment of food insecurity in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis -- was jointly produced by agencies including the Food and Agriculture Organization, the WFP, Unicef and World Health Organization.

“Famine should be consigned to history, yet in multiple countries they loom again,” Unicef Executive Director Henrietta Fore said. “Millions of children are still struggling to access the nutritious and safe diets they need to grow, to learn, to develop and reach their full potential.”

The global community made a conscious decision to increase food prices in the 1990s. The primary argument was farm subsidies were creating an unfair system that favoured farmers in Europe and North America. Subsidies contributed to poverty among poor countries as excess supply was dumped on those markets. 

“Zuma’s imprisonment was the spark that ignited the protests, but underlying issues such as rampant unemployment, widespread inequality and discontent with Covid-19 related restrictions are the powder keg,” Montana said.

The reality is South Africa is suffering from the declining standards of governance the economy has endured for the last couple of decades. South Africa’s strength is in the independent judiciary. It is imperative that contempt of court charges be addressed in an adroit manner regardless of the target. The challenge is faith in democratic institutions has fallen to a low ebb and many of Zuma’s supporters believe the corruption charges levied against him are politically motivated. It’s hard to avoid that conclusion when corruption is rife and the new administration has failed to do anything to improve the situation.