economics

This means that rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires.

Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas, or four times with double cropping. [2] A hectare of land can feed 1.5 families with wheat and 6 with rice.

After-tax cost of debt = (Risk-free rate + Default spread) ×(1 − Marginal tax rate)

Here are some basic numbers to get things started:

• US 2025 GDP: $25 trillion (Source: Consensus forecasts and extrapolations from BEA data)

• Nvidia sales to datacenters (Q1 FY2026): **$39.1B (**Annualized: $156.4B)

• % of Nvidia datacenter sales that is AI related: ~99% (Primarily H100/GH200 sales to hyperscalers and enterprises)

• Nvidia share of

With interest rates low and set to remain so, and banks prepared to prop up weak businesses for fear of crystallising losses, monetary policy looks very unlikely to precipitate a major reallocation of resources.

Now this has partially reversed. Western commodity traders’ power, at least when it comes to certain niche metals. Germany’s near-monopoly on tungsten smelting in the 1910s has been replaced by China’s monopoly on rare earth processing today. Konkel argues that “the Pax Americana was the resolution to the interwar raw materials problem.”

When imbalances that are not associated with a large increase in productive investment in the deficit country become large and persist for many years, it is almost always because policy distortions,

First, he’s threatening broad tariffs on most or all Chinese goods, instead of tariffs targeted at specific, military useful goods. In a post two weeks ago, I explained why broad tariffs are of limited effectiveness:

Broad tariffs cause bigger exchange rate movements , which cancel out more of the effect of the tariffs. Putting tariffs on

Second, the decision by countries like China to buy U.S. government obligations is not a discretionary decision that can be made or unmade at will. Remember that the People’s Bank of China does not purchase huge amounts of U.S. government bonds simply because it has a lot of money lying around and doesn’t know what to do with it. Its purchase of

When Beijing’s economic planners do talk about consumption, they tend to do so in relation to industrial aims. In its brief discussion of the subject, the current five-year plan states that consumption should be steered specifically toward goods that align with Beijing’s industrial priorities: automobiles, electronics, digital products, and smart