economics

Once coal had reached dominance, it didn’t yield quickly to its successor, oil. Even though oil was available in sufficient quantities and processes to refine and use it were well known in the early 20th century, people stuck to coal which was the largest energy source, providing more than 50% of all energy used. It took oil until the 1960s to

A military-industrial strategy for the U.S. and its allies to match China will need to involve three elements:

1. Tariffs and other trade barriers against China , in order to prevent sudden floods of Chinese exports from forcibly deindustrializing other countries.




2. Industrial policy , to maintain and extend manufacturing capacity in democratic nations.

More money is lost by people trying to prepare for recessions than in recessions. However, there are times to lean in with conviction and other times to remain flexible, and I view this as a time to remain flexible.

And from 1991 to 2019, Japan’s broad money supply never grew more than 5% year-over-year. Even last year in 2020, during this pandemic era of actual money-printing, Japan only grew their broad money supply by a little over 10% during the year, compared to 25% during the year for the United States.

Part of this historically slow broad money supply

The bailout really rescued LTCM’s partners, its investors, its counterparties, and averted further market imbalances.

Side note: I’m actually not sure Kedrosky is right about the height of the telecom boom. His chart shows the level of capex for 2020, when 5G and fiber infrastructure was being built out. But Doms (2004) shows U.S. telecom capex reaching $120 billion in 2000:

In FY 2010-11 the share of consumer credit in total bank credit was only 19%. By FY2023-24 this increased to around 33%. Nearly half of this credit is unsecured or quasi-secured (secured against weak collateral), which makes it riskier. In the post-pandemic period, much of the growth in bank credit has in fact been driven by growth in consumer

Pricing power has arguably been the most enduring determinant of high returns for these investments. It has come from two main sources. The first is a concentrated market structure, closely associated with effective management of capacity through the demand cycle which encourages a rational approach to pricing. The second is “intrinsic” pricing

And so why do we continue to delineate between the two formats of audiobooks and podcasting, and how much longer will that delineation survive? In response to that question about the future of the formats, my response typically went something like this: “In the future there won’t be audiobooks or podcasts. There will just be audio.”

The forced