Skip to main content

What I read

As a finance guy there are a few things you have to read almost on a daily basis; the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times are the three core "journals of record" of the financial world.  Over the past 5 years my reading habits have been changing.  First to go was the WSJ, frankly now that the rest of the journal (the Editorials and opinions always were) has been taking over by the loony right and now colours everything they write (I blame Newscos to some extent... but the seeds have long been there).  The FT for some reason (maybe because the problems in Europe are so severe) has become such a Eurocentric publication to become almost irrelevant to my needs.

I had a short divorce from the Economist (2002/06) but I'm now back in the fold.  The one surprise has been the NY Times that has proven to be a very good replacement for the WSJ (Ok the opinion pages has the same problem, except from the other side of the isle),  Still the NYT's financial coverage is now excellent -- and when I gave up the FT last week, it was the NYT that took its place.

I read virtually no Canadian papers, principally because their news coverage is terrible, the French side is bad (in fact the entire paper has been taken over by columnists -- at the expense of hard reporting).  I don't  really understand that here in Quebec "feelings" have replaced hard facts... The English press (Montreal's Gazette) here lived in that strange universe.  The two national papers (Globe & Mail and National Post) have strong political slants (left and right respectively) and have an axe to grind with regards to almost every issue with these polarized glasses. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The end of Tesla?

 it takes a special kind of idiot, to think that he can antagonize his entire customer base, and think that it will not impact his business. When Elon Musk went to work for Donald Trump, and created the doge department, he antagonized every liberal, and these people represent 90% of his client base.That’s not a brilliant move. Now Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollar, so he shouldn’t care a great deal, however, he needs to care because of several other issues. The cyber truck has been a disaster, most have had to be recalled because of defective glue, it’s not a truck, it’s not a car, it’s noisy, relatively uncomfortable, but great as a development platform. What Tesla has learned in making car manufacturing more seamless is truly amazing. The problem was that Elon Musk was so pissed with the Democrats, and with Joe Biden, in particular because of some slight, which were just plain stupid too. By the way, that he decided to support with hundreds of millions of dollar, ...

what people get wrong about tariffs

 The issue is simple. What percentage of the economy is dependent on tariff goods? The truth, is that the US economy is far more closed than people understand. People genuinely believe that all manufacturing has ceased to exist in the United States all given to China on the altar of woke policy the truth can be further from That statement. Only about 15% of US GDP is related to foreign trade. Of that amount, slightly more than half is from Canada in Mexico. And half of that is energy. What that means, is that about 7% of US GDP is tariff dependent. The proof in the pudding, is how little money tariff generates. People think that 30 or 50 billion is a lot it’s not in an economy that has $3 trillion. The impact on the US economy will be less visible but not absent. Inflation hasn’t occurred yet first because tests have hardly started to bite, but more importantly it’s such a small percent of the economy. Now certain things are critical. The rare earth metals from China were critical....

Demographics

 I am preparing a kind of family tree for our children so that they know where they came from.  In my family I am the only survivor, although my brother and sister died recently they were both in their seventies (a story I told already).    It was a fun process, but it provided more than that.  First, I married relatively young I was 26 when I married and nearly 30 when our first child was born.   I was looking at my ancestors.  On my mother's side, she had 6 siblings, Four died before the age of 30, two in war, and two from illnesses.  Only she and a single sister survived.   The two boys had a child each but they died in WWII, and the other sister died as an infant.   what is interesting is that every one of my mother's siblings had children in their early 20s.   I know that my mom was hardly 20 when my brother was born.    What is remarkable is that among our friends, we are the only ones to have fou...