Random articles - InvestingChannel

Random articles



1. In many ways, the UK resembles the US. This is not one of them:

Despite its reputation as a hotbed of metropolitan liberalism, London is the most devout place in the country. One in four attends a religious service in the city each month, compared with one in ten outside the capital.

2. From Al Jazeera:

When Eriko Sairyo, a 30-year-old professional who lives in Shizuoka, Japan, saw that American pop singer Gwen Stefani was being accused of “cultural appropriation” in Western media, she couldn’t understand the controversy. . . .

“I don’t have any issues when, for example, foreigners wear kimono and walk around Kyoto for sightseeing. I actually love it that people love our culture.”

In an interview with Allure magazine published last week, Stefani, 53, sparked outrage across English-language media and social media with remarks expressing the deep sense of connection she feels with Japanese culture. . . .

Media outlets including CNN, The Guardian, CBS, ABC, NBC and Buzzfeed picked up the interview and resulting social media firestorm, while notably omitting any reference to the views of Japanese people themselves.

But why would anyone care what the Japanese people think of Westerners appropriating their culture? All that matters is the views of highly educated Westerners on Twitter. Right?

3. It turns out that the KKK arrived at “progressive” views on education even before the left:

“Throughout the boom years of the early 1920s,” the historian ​Adam Laats notes in a 2012 History of Education Quarterly article, “every local Klan group made education reform a leading goal of its public activism.” Eventually, Laats writes, a push for compulsory public schooling overseen by a federal cabinet agency became the “linchpin” of the organization’s agenda.

Why the Klan’s sudden interest in education policy? First and foremost, because of the KKK’s virulent nativism and anti-Catholicism. Most private schools at the time were associated with the Catholic Church, while most public schools were openly, if unofficially, Protestant. By requiring all children to attend the latter institutions, Klan members thought they could strip Catholic parishes of an income source, reduce the Catholic hierarchy’s ability to indoctrinate the next generation, and secure their own right to inculcate values instead.

In 1979, they finally got their Department of Education. Of course once desegregation became an issue, the attitude of Southern racists toward the public schools turned on a dime.

4. How does one become the first person to lose $200 billion? Easy:

Step one: Become the world’s richest man by selling cars to Democrats.

Step two: Spend months engaging in non-stop lame twitter jokes that ridicule Democrats.

Step three: Start censoring political speech that threatens your business interests, exposing yourself as a phony.

Easy come, easy go.

5. Just how obsessed have Republicans become with conspiracy theories? In the past, Republicans would defend themselves by pointing to nutty Democratic conspiracy theories, such as the idea that 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Today, however, Republicans are more likely than Dems to believe in silly 9/11 conspiracy theories, even though these theories implicate their own party!

6. Bloomberg suggests that China’s behavior has improved in recent months, and . . . surprise, surprise . . that’s a “problem” for the US:

China Is Trying to Play Nice, and It’s a Problem for the US

I suppose if you are determined to have a cold war with a country, then it’s a “problem” if their behavior improves.

7. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to become Censor in Chief is not going well:

Florida last year passed the Stop WOKE Act, which attempts to censor how schools and even private businesses teach about race, prohibiting the inclusion of the various ideas connected to Critical Race Theory. The law is being challenged by multiple parties in court as an unconstitutional abridgment of the First Amendment. It’s not going well for Florida. An injunction has halted enforcement of the business component of the law. Another injunction has halted enforcement of the law against college professors, with one federal judge describing the law as “positively dystopian.”

8. Meanwhile, the left is destroying what’s left of NYC’s school system:

When then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and the entire New York City political and educational establishment unveiled in September 2018 a trailblazing new middle-school Diversity Plan that radically changed the admissions criteria for Brooklyn’s District 15 in the name of racial “equity,” they chose the most symbolic possible site for the announcement: M.S. 51, the William Alexander School, in progressive (and prosperous) Park Slope. . . .

After sending 122 kids to the elite schools in both 2018 and 2019, William Alexander has nose-dived down to 52. Once among the top four feeder schools in the city, M.S. 51 is now tied for 16th. And it’s not just the smart kids suffering.

Seventh-grade math proficiency scores at the school have collapsed from 81 percent in 2019 to 48 percent in 2022, with double-digit declines among each of the four racial groups that the DOE tracks. This cannot be explained away by pandemic learning loss; Manhattan’s District 2, which is consistently the second-largest feeder into the specialized high school, saw very little decline over the same period.

9. I’ve always regarded NYC’s subway system as the world’s worst. But I must grudgingly admit that this looks very impressive.

10. I’m bored with Trump, but if you insist.

11. Almost all of America’s densest urban areas are in California. (LA is denser than NYC, if you evaluate entire metro areas including suburbs.)

California, with the densest urbanization, has 70 of the 100 densest urban areas. California also has 35 of the 43 urban areas (81%) with population densities exceeding 5,000. California has the three densest urban areas with more than 500,000 population.

12. I am of British descent, so this caught my eye:

13. Norbert Michel says the Fed already has something akin to the trillion dollar coin:

The deferred asset is the magic asset. Though like a tax loss carry forward, the “amount of net earnings a Reserve Bank will need to realize before remittances to Treasury resume” is entirely up to the Fed. (The Fed does not follow generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), it follows the Financial Accounting Manual for Federal Reserve Banks, a set of accounting principles the Fed created.)

The implication, of course, is that there will be earnings in the future and the Fed will remit those earnings to the Treasury. So, the Fed could just decide that it will hold back from Treasury an additional amount in the future and increase the deferred asset.

The Fed could, for instance, decide that it will hold back an additional $1 trillion in the future and increase the deferred asset now by $1 trillion. As the deferred asset goes up, capital goes up by a corresponding amount.

Just as it did in 2015, Congress could then raid the Fed’s capital account. Back then, they raided the Fed to pay for new highway spending. But there is no reason that Congress couldn’t now take the Fed’s capital surplus to pay for whatever Congress wants. (For what it’s worth, I mentioned back then Congress was setting a dangerous precedent.)

Read the whole thing.

14. Cato has a long article on trade that is difficult to excerpt. They show that America has blatantly violated international trade laws under both the Trump and Biden administrations. When I was younger, we used to complain that other countries didn’t play by the rules. Now we are the bad guys. The Europeans are so disgusted with our hypocrisy that they are considering copying our protectionist approach.

A model for Europe? / The Trump and Biden administrations’ trade phobia has contributed to making America a sort of protectionist model for Europe. The EU recently acquired new protectionist powers and is working on creating more, such as retaliation against countries whose governments limit foreign competition on domestic tender offers and restriction of exports in emergencies. The Financial Times has suggested that these measures are partly a response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum and to Biden invoking the Korean War–era Defense Production Act to threaten export restrictions on vaccine ingredients.

When people tell me, “We need to get tough with China because they don’t play by the rules”, I wonder what world they are living in.



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