PayPal’s interest rate sensitivity now has a ¥en angle
PayPal shares, which had suffered sharp declines this year, drew support after the payment processor disclosed in first quarter earnings that it would be cutting its medium-term outlook on a deteriorating macro environment. Most analysts had been anticipating a cut in forecasts. The company’s Q1 results, announced April 27, showed the payment processor posting revenues […]
Twitter’s weird metrics
Ever since Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter was accepted, the social media site has been ablaze with rumours that the company is already making changes to how users and information are handled on the site. Many claim shadow bans have been lifted. Others say previously filtered or constrained feeds have been liberated, and others still […]
Is Russia building an atomic priesthood?
The Blind Spot was one of the first online publications to highlight how an increasingly religious mindset, possibly inspired by a desire to manifest the myth of Moscow as The Third Rome, was possibly influencing Vladimir Putin’s bellicosity in Ukraine. Since then, the idea that Putin sees himself as engaged in a holy mission on […]
In the Blind Spot ($hortages, Roubini, Mass hysteria)
Finance, markets, economics etc… The new corporate governance – a paper by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales that argues in favour of replacing shareholder value maximisation with shareholder welfare maximization. The yuan is depreciating quickly: (Chart courtesy of the FT’s market pages.) The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said on Monday that it will cut […]
An ongoing inquiry into what’s going on with PayPal
The PayPal share price just keeps going down: And here’s the stock compared to the performance of the Nasdaq: The usual pundits are at a loss. They think the stock should stage a comeback soon. As Bloomberg’s Subrat Patnaik noted on Monday: “Wall Street sees the company’s shares jumping 90% over the next year, according […]
The Mariupol steelworks are more important than you realise
The last stand over the steelworks of Mariupol is more significant than most people appreciate. The thing about former Soviet steelworks is that they’re fairly unique in the world due to their scale. The capitalist system has never been able to produce equivalents due to the uneconomic upfront costs. Yet the scale has brought unique […]
Why Europe’s sanction dilemma is a “ransom-fuel” problem
Editor’s note: Sunday’s newsletter suffered a version control issue so a number of errors were accidentally sent out. A corrected version of the affected story is reprinted below. —————— As the week draws to a close (and Germany remains as reticent as ever about banning Russian gas imports), I find myself thinking about this chart: […]
How about a Vitruvian capitalist reset?
Editor’s note: In this third post of a multipart series, Tim Ferguson, founder of the Anacyclosis Institute, outlines a new approach to political economy named rationism, which I like to describe as “Vitruvian Capitalism”. Solving precarity without aggravating dependency The first post in our Anacyclosis series concluded that: The diffusion and reconcentration of wealth dictates […]
“Without synthetic fertiliser billions of people would never have been born”
ADM is one of the world’s biggest food processing and commodities trading companies. Weirdly, it tends to receive a lot less attention than some of its competitors like Glencore and Cargill. Even less well known is the fact that ADM also has an investor services arm, which — among other things — offers commodity brokerage […]
Why “safe assets” may not exist anymore
An interesting point comes by way of veteran fixed income market watcher, Marc Ostwald, of ADM Investor Services, in his latest quarterly publication “Ghost in the Machine”. It caught my eye because of how it aligns with my own thesis about the end of dollar neutrality. As Ostwald notes: If everything can be weaponised, as […]