Chart of average term to maturity of the outstanding stock of government debt.
As interest rates rise around the world and fiscal tools are being used to cushion the energy shock, it is worth keeping these numbers in mind when assessing country risks.
QE has actually distorted the usability of this metric as described so well in this OBR piece.
Sometimes ideas come in seconds and the job is done.
Yet, those paying for these ideas always equate time spent to value. They want to pay for process.
“How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it IS done in a second — it’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in a second and every experience, and every movie, and everything in my life that’s in my head.“
Taken from FS this quote is from Paula Scher who conceived the Citi logo in seconds.
There is a great story in the link as well along the same lines.
Professional investing can actually sometimes feel the same way. Especially if you believe in Blink.
If you haven’t come across it before, effective altruism is an interesting movement that coined the term “longtermism”.
It says of the human race – “We’ve been around for approximately 300,000 years. There are now about 8 billion of us, roughly 15 percent of all humans who have ever lived.“
“You may think that’s a lot, but it’s just peanuts to the future. If we survive for another million years—the longevity of a typical mammalian species—at even a tenth of our current population, there will be 8 trillion more of us. We’ll be outnumbered by future people on the scale of a thousand to one.“
One of the movements champions – William MacAskill – has recently written a book that has received much attention (to be expected for such a well funded movement).
“What We Owe The Future” is worth knowing about – and this is a very good review of it.
Flaring natural gas is a hot topic right now, and not just because Russia is using it as a political weapon.
Interestingly Chevron has decided to link some incentive pay to a target to reduce flaring by 25-30% vs. 2016 levels.
Flaring is really bad – not only because it creates CO2 but because it often doesn’t do a good job leading to methane escape (a greenhosue gas that is 80x worse than CO2). Though this appears to be getting better.
In some ways gas is flared because it is a “trapped asset” and this latest piece from Byrne talks a lot about innovative solution for non-tradeable assets. In the case of gas building data centres next to them.
“His reasoning regarding the oversold entry level is basically buying some 20% below the 200 day moving average: currently at 3374. This has worked over the past century (except 1931/37/74 and 2008). He adds: “…monster undershoot requires monster credit event & recession”.”
They say in investing it is all about having strong opinions weakly held.
Another way to say this is – bewilderment to combat excessive certainty, inflexibility, over confidence.
“You no longer need to exhaust yourself pretending to understand what you don’t or making pronouncements about questions that are above your pay grade. You can trade false simplicity for complicated truth. And the resulting worldview is more useful and more beautiful because it genuinely reflects reality. That’s why a synonym for bewilderment is wonder, which, at least for me, is not terrifying but exhilarating.”
In the US in 2021 the NY Fire Department attended 10,639 incidents that were deemed “structural fires” out of a total of 1,213,715 incidents.
The vast majority of the rest are actually medical incidents.
Fires are just must less common (more alarms, less smoking, better safety).
Fire departments in the US perform the role of ambulances – in 1980 they attended 5 million medical calls but in 2020 this was 24 million (Covid notwithstanding, a huge rise).
Contrarian article arguing why fire departments have perhaps put themselves out of business.
