“Demand and output for cardboard boxes and other packaging material fell sharply in the fourth quarter of 2022“.
“the most severe quarterly decline since the Great Financial Crisis (2Q09).”
Operating rates have fallen as a result leaving 20% of capacity idle. Excess inventory (which has fallen) remains high.
“To Josephson, the end of 2022 in the packaging world had “echoes of the Great Financial Crisis everywhere one looks,” he wrote in the Sunday note“.
RISC-V, the royalty-free open-source instruction set architecture, is worth keeping an eye on especially as Arm convulses its way back to the stock market.
The December 2022 summit (and this great write-up) offered a deep feel of the status of RISC-V.
Bold statements abounded – “It’s really important that you get this. RISC-V is inevitable. RISC-V is going to have the best processors. And RISC-V is going to have the best ecosystem.”
2022 saw a new record in off-exchange trading of US ETFs.
Part of a broader trend where trading off-exchange in US equities went from 35% in 2015 to 43% last year.
Yet, as the FT Alphaville article notes, “ETF shift from lit to off-exchange trading has actually been even starker than it has for equities as a whole“.
Films often get measured by gross box office, with Avatar (both of them) reigning supreme on this measure.
However, using a measure of return on investment (percentage of budget recovered) throws up an alternative perspective.
Winners on this measure are E.T. (7,552%) but also films like “The King’s Speech (2,849%), Home Alone (2,648%), and breakout sleepers like Crocodile Dundee (3,282%), Slumdog Millionaire (2,523%) and … er, Black Swan?“
IRF’s The Cut is a fortnightly publication highlighting the latest original and thought-provoking research from a selection of high-quality and differentiated Research Providers.
Interesting use case of GPT3 – to model economic agents – as was done in this paper.
“These models can be used the same way economists use homo economicus: they can be given endowments, put in scenarios and then their behavior can be explored—though in the case of homo silicus, through computational simulation, not a mathematical deduction“
“As shown below, in the history of US recessions (with the exception of the dot-com collapse of 2001), equity markets bottomed well before the bottom in GDP, payrolls, S&P 500 earnings and housing starts and the peak in household/corporate delinquencies. The ISM survey has been the most reliable coincident indicator of a bottom in equities“.
