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: […]
What pricing the value of a combat death reveals about war
Editor’s note: There are many astute people in finance who know a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of the time they can’t express themselves freely on topics outside of their immediate purview. The Blind Spot is happy to host content from such individuals on anonymous terms providing it meets our quality criteria. That means it […]
“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 […]
In the Blind Spot (Gosplan, Falklands, Chelsea)
Finance, Markets, economy etc… Vanity Fair deep dives into the Dan Loeb school of activist investing. Serena Williams, Lewis Hamilton join former Liverpool chairman Martin Broughton’s consortium to buy Chelsea football club. Israel adds China’s yuan for the first time ever while cutting its dollar holdings in biggest currency reshuffle in a decade. Rana Foroohar […]
Why the oil price is not what it seems
Just because oil prices are absorbing the prospect of an outright European ban on Russian imports well, doesn’t mean there won’t be a major breakout to $300 per barrel highs if and when such a ban is executed.
The end of dollar neutrality and what it means for funding markets
Why the current crisis represents the end of the neutral dollar era.
In the Blind Spot this Easter Sunday (Versailles, Elon, Precasting)
Finance, economics, markets etc… The illustrated Zoltan Pozsar. This week’s Blind Spot spotlight is on what I have termed “the end of dollar neutrality” and why this is an important historical marker for finance. It riffs on Zoltan but takes things in its own direction. After I wrote it, however, Zoltan popped up with a […]
Anacyclosis Watch: Why the middle class underpins democracy
In The Blind Spot’s first post introducing the concept of Anacyclosis, Tim Ferguson, founder of the Anacyclosis Institute, explained how the ancient Greek theory outlines the probable and natural sequence of political evolution. As that post concluded, authentic democracy – reflecting but one phase in this broader sequence – requires a stable, independent and self-sufficient […]