This large (22m records) cross sub-discipline study found that nearly one in ten people (13% for women and 7% for men) have an autoimmune disease – much higher than historic estimates.
this “research also confirmed that some autoimmune diseases tend to cluster together (for example, one person with a first autoimmune disease is more likely to develop a second autoimmune disease than someone without autoimmune disease), however at a much larger scale and for a much larger set of autoimmune diseases than previous studies.“
Useful read for both systematic and fundamental investors.
“Ilmanen et al. (2021) examine the out-of-sample performance of the main factors we focus on—value, momentum, carry, and defensive—using a century of data across multiple markets and asset classes.“
“Exhibit 2 highlights the results from their study, which shows that these factors work uniformly across all markets and asset classes and their performance is stable over the periods before and after the original sample period, with little degradation from the original sample period.“
“Aerospace is one of the deepest branches of humanity’s technological tree. It is a telling fact that more countries have produced a nuclear bomb than mass-produced a jet engine.“
Kotkin is a scholar of Russia and the Soviet Union. Most famous for his three-part (only two are published so far) biography of Stalin.
In this interview, he turns his attention to China.
There are a lot of interesting points made here.
“There are two subjects at Party School that are absolutely dominant in the Chinese case. One is the supposed decline of the United States … But the other big subject — in fact, it’s an even bigger subject for them — is not having a Soviet collapse in China“
Interesting to read this together with Dalio’s latest on the US v. China.
It didn’t start with the Inflation Reduction Act or Trump.
It started as early as 2008, and took the form, as this article identifies, of four key forces.
Things in global trade wars move slowly.
“If this analysis is correct, it should be clear that the American protectionist turn has been taken for a long time and will last long, as one doesn’t see the main forces that provoked it changing direction, starting with the desire to push China back.“
Studying these global balances helps understand and predict where the stresses of financial systems build.
To this end, Brad’s re-opening post from November 2022 is a foundational read.
The short summary – deficits are back to pre-GFC highs, have concentrated in autocratic regime countries but with none of the historic reserve growth.
Prescient conclusion – “By implication, private financial intermediaries somewhere around the world will need to absorb Treasury bonds. Just as financial intermediaries globally had to absorb U.S. “subprime” (household) risk prior to the global crisis, now they have to absorb U.S. interest rate risk.”
“Just between 2000 and 2021, the share of public and publicly guaranteed external debt of low and lower-middle income countries (other than that held by IFIs) owed to bondholders jumped from 10 to 50 percent, while the share owed to China rose from 1 to 15 percent. Meanwhile, the share held by the 22 predominantly Western members of the Paris Club of official lenders fell from 55 to 18 per cent. Thus, co-ordinating creditors in a comprehensive debt restructuring operation has become far harder, because of their greater number and their diversity.“
