This is a useful paper on a new metric – the market expected return on investment – that aims to give a more accurate view of returns in a world increasingly dominated by intangible assets.
“Contrary to the conventional wisdom, disinflation is more likely than accelerating inflation. Since prices deflated in the second quarter of 2020, the annual inflation rate will move transitorily higher. Once these base effects are exhausted, cyclical, structural, and monetary considerations suggest that the inflation rate will moderate lower by year end and will undershoot the Fed Reserve’s target of 2%. The inflationary psychosis that has gripped the bond market will fade away in the face of such persistent disinflation.“
Apple is upending the traditional (x86) CPU markets.
It is doing this by offering the same M1 chip in laptops, tablets and desktop PCs.
The same M1 chip at all price points (from $699 to $1,699).
“Apple’s willingness to position the M1 across so many markets challenges the narrative that such a vast array of x86 products is helpful or necessary. It puts Intel and AMD in the position of justifying why, exactly, x86 customers are required to make so many tradeoffs between high performance and low power consumption. Selling the M1 in both $699 and $1,699 machines challenges the idea that a computer’s price ought to principally reflect the CPU inside of it.“
“This graph shows existing home months-of-supply (from the NAR) vs. the seasonally adjusted month-to-month price change in the Case-Shiller National Index (both since January 1999 through February 2021).“
Simply put if inventory is high prices decline, if months of supply is low they rise.
Months of supply in March is 2.1. Prices are rising strongly.
“Observation of history also supports the notion that the saving rate is unlikely to sharply undershoot its pre-pandemic value. Consider the experience around World War II. During the war, the saving rate spiked as production and purchases of consumer goods and spending on leisure services were curtailed. At the conclusion of the war, despite the release of pent-up demand as returning service members married and started families, the saving rate declined to a level above its pre-war average and then trended higher for several years. Our forecast features a broadly similar result. The return of the normal relationship between spending, income, and wealth does not imply an undershoot of the saving rate. Without such an undershoot, the path of consumer spending, while strong, does not launch the economy into an inflationary boom.“
Seemingly in the face of this and this, venture has quietly been funding semiconductor start-ups since 2017.
Partly this is an explosion of AI (especially edge AI), and new use cases (biology, quantum computing) but also the interest of big tech firms in acquiring semiconductor startups.
