Did Amazon grow? An honest question, if Amazon revenue growth was +7% in the last quarter and inflation in the US was 8%; did Amazon grow at all? In real terms, surely no. Consider then that the US economy actually shrank by 1% in Q1 this year. It is rather odd that this was not

The Ministry of Truth The American government last night announced the formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” which will counter misinformation relating to Homeland Security. I can’t imagine that this could go wrong in any way at all and I’m looking forward to their considered musings. It does focus the mind on what the truth

Web 3.0 A crisis? At no point in the last 60 years have bonds yielded such a negative real return. Perhaps more critical now is the fact that government borrowing has never been at such consistently high levels. So while bonds are an awful investment, never have there been more of them on sale. It’s

Time for a new boyfriend? A quarter to forget for bonds The purchasing power of money invested in bonds is now collapsing at quite a rate. $100 invested in Treasury Bonds in July 2020 is now worth $81.90, concluding with the worst quarter for bonds since, well, forever. I don’t want to say we told

April Fool Exxon Mobil We mentioned last week the likelihood of energy producers and bitcoin miners merging over the coming years. As if by magic, Exxon Mobil (the world’s largest energy producer) revealed they are now using flared gas to mine bitcoin. As it turns out, the project has been running in secret for over

Zeitgeist Risk The investment game can be very accurately characterised by simply saying, “I buy or sell assets where the risk is not priced correctly.” Specifically, for our asset class there are a number of aspects that are not understood by the market that mean risk is hugely mispriced. For example, while the market knows

Who wins? Sexy eyes Retinal fundus, I discovered, is the interior lining of the eyeball. Anyway, the artificial intelligence used in this research predicted the sex of the owner of the eyeball with 87% accuracy. The most surprising thing is the researchers do not know how the machine is doing it. The rate of change

A bus Hostage to fortune The power of energy independence is being writ large across the sky by the Ukraine conflict. The US Secretary of State is looking to ban Russian oil imports for reasons we can well understand, but with oil at $100 translating to $4/gallon at the US pumps it is not politically

State of the Union A confused Kamala Harris wonders why he’s talking about Iran Normally, the State of the Nation is boring. Now that Joe Biden does it, there’s real anticipation, generally for the wrong reasons. He didn’t disappoint either, immediately addressing the war in the Ukraine: “Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never

Euro-Trash President Vladimir Putin must be terrified of the EU. Prior to his decision to invade the Ukraine, he was assured by Ursula Von Der Leyen that the EU might impose energy sanctions if he did. It’s another example of Euro-madness and the high handedness that permeates the European Union. They just don’t have a clue. Notwithstanding their