BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-12-21 We
Things Þt Went Whizzing by...
ONE VIDEO: Elon Musk Can’t Fix Your Commute:
Adam Kovacs: Elon Musk Can't Fix Your Commute:
ONE IMAGE: Binance Tokens:
Oþer Things Þt Went Whizzing by…
Very Briefly Noted:
John Quiggin: Reaching for Utopia…
Mohamed A. El-Erian: Another Annus Horribilis for the Fed: ‘Over the past two years, the US Federal Reserve has repeatedly erred in its analysis, policymaking, communications, and governance. To restore its effectiveness and reduce its vulnerability to undue outside interference, Fed officials must start making up for past mistakes in the new year… I do not see this at all: from my perspective, federal reserve policy over the past three years looks very, very, very good indeed…
Helen Thomas: Private equity’s debt tower is teetering: ‘What was once a simple story of buy, fix, sell is more complicated, after years of cheap money and keen investment…
Tim Duy: Fed Watch, 12/19/22: ‘The Fed believes wage growth exceeds the pace consistent with 2% inflation, and that the recent improved inflation numbers will not be durable unless wage growth decelerates… believes that restoring price stability requires it to raise unemployment 0.9 percentage points over the next year…
Azeem Axhar, Chantal Smith, & Nathan Warren: EV’s Charts of the Week #104: ‘Last week, we asked how much it cost the creators of Stable Diffusion to train their AI models using 4,000 GPUs over the course of a month. 31% of readers selected the correct answer: $50 million…
Thomas Wilson, Angus Berwick, & Elizabeth Howcroft: Binance's books are a black box, filings show: ‘The exchange said it dealt with net outflows of around $6 billion over 72 hours last week "without breaking stride" because its finances are solid and "we take our responsibility as a custodian seriously.”… Changpeng Zhao promised his company would "lead by example" in embracing transparency…
Nikodemus Silvola: Nikodemus' Guide to Mastodon…
Constanze Stelzenmüller: The west’s axis of prudence risks a Kremlin victory by default in Ukraine: ‘Putin’s relentless missile strikes on infrastructure indicate that mere containment of Russia will not achieve a secure peace…
¶s:
Very, very nicely done here. However, it is not clear to me what "international factors" mean here. Think of it in this way: there are four things going on in Britain between 1688 and 1815 economically—(a) the creation of the British empire and its engrossment of global long-distance trade, (b) the general growth of the Atlantic, long-distance trade economy, (c) the general growth of the Dover Circle economy of north west, Europe, and (d) things going on within the island of Britain itself. Customs revenues tell us about the first three while excise revenues tell us about the fourth. But what I am really interested in here is the division between the former two and the latter two:
Ernesto Dal Bó, Karolina Hutková, Lukas Leucht & Noam Yuchtman: Dissecting the Sinews of Power: International Trade and the Rise of Britain’s Fiscal-Military State, 1689-1823: ‘Brewer’s (1989) "Sinews of Power," attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with domestic goods, grew faster than customs revenues. We construct new historical revenue series… find substantial growth in taxes on traded goods, accounting for over half of indirect taxation around 1800. This challenges the conventional wisdom attributing the development of the British state to domestic factors: international factors mattered, too…
If you realized what was going on in the zero interest rate world before 2022, you recognized that if you could talk fast enough, the willingness of lenders to open their purse would give you near-infinite shots-onpgoal. And if you were smart enough to hire good-enough engineers, eventually some of those shots would go in. That is my theory of how Tesla survived and grew in the 2010s. But will the same talk-faster strategy work for the 2020s?:
Ed Harrison: Tesla Heading Into Make-or-Break 2023 With Pandemic Shine Waning: ‘In the run up to the early 2021 post-vaccine peak of high beta shares, [Tesla] got all of the parabolic gains other pandemic-related stocks did. But it is also now included in the S&P 500…. It has traded more like Nvidia or Facebook since early 2021.... Tesla is the only large cap tech stock that went up over sixfold from its pre-pandemic high and 10 times from its March 2020 low. It has further to fall as a result... Margin and growth pressure from the... Hyundai Ioniq 5... Kia EV6... Audi E-tron SUVs. Mercedes is coming....Unnder-$50k electric vehicles are gaining momentum.... Think of Tesla as the AOL of the EV market…. Zoom... is trading 30% below its February 2020 levels despite doing well financially. That’s the power of bubbles popping...
Meme-stock celebrity finance does not seem to be working well at Twitter:
Liz Hoffman: The bird is not all right: ‘In April... Musk was worth $250 billion on paper but was cash-poor.... Because Twitter was inconsistently profitable, it was a poor candidate for traditional buyout debt, which is secured by the cash flows of the company being acquired.... Within three weeks, Musk had assembled a $46.5 billion financing package... put up about half the money.… I think a restructuring is most likely, and probably soon. Selling new shares at the deal price is like buying a new car, crashing it, and then trying to sell it back to the dealer at sticker price…. [But] I might be underestimating the willingness of Musk’s fans to part with their money for the chance to hang out with him at Twitter HQ...
An unpreposessing beginning to one of the greatest works of early 20th-century literature:
John Watson: A Study In Scarlet: ‘In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties…
Capitalist enterprises can be surplus creation, machines, surplus, re-division, machines, or dissipative psychological grift machines. I am coming around more and more two of you that social media are the third. Cory Doctorow agrees:
Cory Doctorow: Better failure for social media: ‘Commercial social media sites don't want to be good, they want to be profitable. The unique dynamics of social media allow the companies to uncouple quality from profit, and more's the pity…. Social media sites who want to keep their users' business walk a fine line: they can simply treat those users well, showing them the things they ask to see, not spying on them, paying to police their service to reduce harassment, etc. But these are costly choices: if you show users the things they ask to see, you can't charge businesses to show them things they don't want to see. If you don't spy on users, you can't sell targeting services to people who want to force them to look at things they're uninterested in. Every moderator you pay to reduce harassment draws a salary at the expense of your shareholders, and every catastrophe that moderator prevents is a catastrophe you can't turn into monetizable attention as gawking users flock to it. So social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge…. There's no money in showing people the things they tell you they want to see. If Amazon showed shoppers the products they searched for, they couldn't earn $31b/year on an "ad business" that fills the first six screens of results with rival products who've paid to be displayed over the product you're seeking…