The Sounding Line

It's also worth noting that the financial elites and the CCP aren't really doing business, they're committing fraud and theft. China isn't exporting productivity, it's exporting deflation and corruption. Arguably, the trade war may have nothing to do with trade and, together with financial decoupling, everything to do with deliberate monetary strangulation. The Trump administration holds all the cards, the CCP holds none. The challenge is getting the job done without more people getting killed. https://mises.org/wire/china-trouble https://mises.org/wire/chinas-biggest-problem-isnt-trump-its-broken-ba… https://thesoundingline.com/chinas-money-supply-has-outgrown-its-econo…

http://thesoundingline.com/ Economic and miscellaneous

China has also printed a lot of money. As the currency is not freely exchangeable, it's largely unnoticed. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/458148/china-m2-broad-money-supply… [2] https://thesoundingline.com/kyle-bass-china-has-printed-more-money-tha…

> as experienced by people living at the time there's another twist of all this. Communication back in time has been.. mostly missing - and slow if any. So people in two distant cities could be on two different planets, with similar outcome :) Seems those "linear" timelines, put in that context, look more like bitemporal things.. so its possible that city B learned that city A was in war when that war actualy ended, or later.. and reaction (if any) might be misplaced.. As of maps of "rivers".. that's similar to how people migrations - or army moves are shown. btw, there's this history-map of europe 1-year-per-second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI and also this, i don't know are they of same author: https://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-every-ruler-in-europe-since…

> Cars did not get more expensive in the last 30-40 years vs CPI and much more accessible vs median let alone average income. This is objectively false, cars absolutely did get more expensive in the last 30 years, they cost about double what they did in 1990, even after accounting for inflation. (see https://thesoundingline.com/since-1990-the-price-of-a-cheap-car-has-ri… as just one example of the math on that). They may "last longer", sure, but that can itself also carry negative impacts (particularly on fuel economy, safety, and air pollution)

The solution is to not allow the digital yuan app into the swift system. As soon as people figure out they can't convert their Yuan back into dollars they will use the app less. But if it gets approved for Swift then it would make sense to pay for items from China with the app and that would circumvent having to be converting dollars all of the time. Once people get used to not using Dollars and that will certainly hurt the US monetary system most. Certainly China will also be able hide more money printing behind the app. They can give out Digital Yuan as stimulus unlimited and no one would know any better. https://thesoundingline.com/kyle-bass-china-has-printed-more-money-tha… https://thesoundingline.com/chinas-money-supply-has-outgrown-its-econo…

I was mostly being sarcastic, but I think it's relevant to direct you to this article (found in top 50 on HN). https://thesoundingline.com/fed-slows-qe-unlimited-to-just-83-billion-… I'm hesitant to say that they're going to stop buying, but there is at least evidence of slowing.

Let's see how this is going to play out! https://thesoundingline.com/do-not-allow-the-fed-to-buy-corporate-bond… > Which companies will the Fed give free money to? Which companies will they allow to fail? How low should corporate borrowing costs be and for which companies? How much debt should they allow each company to carry? What if companies issue bonds to buyout competitors? What if a company defaults on the Fed? The Fed can’t answer any of these questions. That won’t stop them from showering America’s largest and most indebted companies with free cash

US R&D Spending Has Reached a Post War Record High https://thesoundingline.com/us-rd-spending-has-reached-a-post-war-reco…

We've been trying to do that. The problem is that macroeconomic inflation is a big sausage number that doesn't really say much about the reality on the street. Take a look at this: http://thesoundingline.com/why-inflation-is-much-worse-than-the-headli… Price stability has only been achieved for a few categories of things and the divergence is huge.

Url changed from http://thesoundingline.com/hong-kongs-ultra-rich-population-overtakes-… which points to this.

We've updated the link from http://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-the-population-of-every-civi… which points to this.

The map of Protestants and Catholics is the one that leaps out at me as aligning quite closely: Religion: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_Protestant… Unemployment: http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-and-Turkey-un…

Another way to put it: How many Americans in 2018 were clamoring to spend massive amounts of GDP on reaching parity with countries like Peru, Costa Rica, Austria, France, South Korea and Japan? Those countries have (respectively) around 1-6 additional years of life expectancy compared to the US[1]. Or, to put it another way: Life expectancy peaked in the US in 2014[2], while it kept rising in most peer countries. That certainly made the news, and something was being done about the root causes of that, but by and large it was being ignored politically. Again, none of this is an argument for or against any particular COVID measures. I'm just pointing out that it's a particularly egregious case of historical blinders & end-of-history thinking to think that human beings as a species can't get used to the relatively small (in a historical context) rise in risk the world has seen in the last couple of years. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy 2. https://thesoundingline.com/in-brief-us-life-expectancy-peaked-in-2014…

> She might want Coca-Cola to take big risks to crush Pepsi, and invest capital in new products and markets to do so. An investor who holds both, on the other hand, would prefer that Coke and Pepsi avoid price wars. > So the way we can solve this problem is to outlaw shares ownership of competing companies? Seems like a fair solution. Nobody cares about Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola and Apple aren't competing, so if Coca-Cola can somehow be in the same index as Apple, and Apple gets 2x the return as Coca-Cola (which it does), which is what really makes the index look good against an average active picker (who doesn't pick Apple), it's a moot point who's allowed to own which shares in competing companies. There are two real stories about indices. The first is [1] -- sorting the huge individual winners into different indices so that crappy companies, like Comcast and AT&T, can ride up on the demand for the index they are part of. Then there's [2] -- that most demand for individual stocks is the corporations themselves. When you buy an individual stock versus an index with that stock, you're really making two bets: (1) a bet that there are an excess of individual stock pickers for this stock than for the indices it is part of, and (2) a bet on how much cash a company can get from consumers (even if it is a B2B company) to spend on buybacks in the long term. When you buy the index, you are betting that an industry or corporate class (e.g. large cap companies) are going to…