My Posts (2-8 June, 2024)

The article on investing in distressed Imperial Japanese Government Bonds was quite interesting. I did find a few health care related articles this week including COVID, Canada's Medical Assistance In Dying, and vitamin D. The last one on the list about China's New Left gives an insight on the thinking inside China.

Investments

Global Diversification Has Disappointed. Don’t Give Up on It (Bloomberg): "The results of the past 15 years are astounding. Since 2010 the S&P 500 index has returned 13.3% a year, including dividends... Private US equities performed as well as public ones, with Cambridge Associates Ltd.’s private equity and venture capital indexes posting returns of 14.1% and 13.1% a year, respectively, over 15 years through September 2023."

When Past Performance Doesn’t Even Predict Past Performance (WSJ): Difference between Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500.

Comparing short-term returns against long-term averages (WSJ): "[R]unning your investments, and your expectations, through the filter of long-term averages is a quick and easy way to keep yourself from getting euphoric about recent gains or miserable about the latest declines."

Jamie Dimon says there could be 'hell to pay' if the swelling private-credit market starts showing cracks (Business Insider): "I've seen a couple of these deals that were rated by a rating agency and, I have to confess, it shocked me what they got rated. So, it reminds me a little bit of mortgages."

"But not all the people doing (private credit) are good," Dimon said. "And the problems in financial markets are often caused by the 'not good one,' the people that make the mistakes.”

Liquidity Mismatch and Leverage Among Euro Area Investment Funds (European Central Bank via The Daily Shot):"Real estate funds with unrealized losses face liquidity mismatches. According to the ECB, rising redemptions could lead to forced sales and wider financial stress."

AI is promoted from back-office duties to investment decisions (FT): J.P. Morgan Asset Management will use AI to check portfolio managers' decisions. Voya Investment Management is using AI to complement human analysts. Legalist, a litigation finance specialist, uses AI to identify find promising cases and friendly judges.

Americans Have More Investment Income Than Ever Before (WSJ): They have to find a reason to make something alarming and worth reading. But I think the take should be, US consumption will be structurally strong

Off the Run: Piero Sraffa and Imperial Japanese Government Bonds (Irwin Union): This is a story of investing in distressed Imperial Japanese bonds. A textbook case of distressed bond investing.

Investors pull cash from ESG funds as performance lags (FT Free Article): "Pierre-Yves Gauthier, head of strategy and co-founder at AlphaValue, a Paris-based independent research company, compared the sector to the tech bubble that burst in 2000. 'ESG was a dotcom sort of hype 20 years later and now it has passed,' he said.”

Australia orders Chinese-linked funds to sell rare-earth stakes in ‘national interest’ (FT): It seems there is a bit more behind the scenes.

Nigeria targets lithium, gold as oil wealth dwindles (The Africa Report): "A government report says the value of the solid minerals underneath Nigeria's soil is valued at over $750bn with the country having an abundance of lithium, gold, bitumen, coal, iron ore, gemstones and 34 others.”

Information Technology

Sharp, KDDI to turn old factory into Nvidia-powered AI data center (Nikkei Asia): "Sharp and KDDI Corporation agreed Sunday to begin talks on establishing a data center joint venture with other partners including Japanese systems developer Datasection Inc. The size of the investment and the ownership breakdown have yet to be decided.

The joint venture is expected to procure around 1,000 servers equipped with next-generation NVIDIA graphics processing units, such as the Blackwell series."

Don’t You Dare Call Me Without Texting First (WSJ): Texting before calling is a bit like knocking the door before entering a room... I don't mind sudden calls except from scammers and marketers...

Health

COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic’s great scientific success and flawed policy implementation (Monash Bioethical Review): The purpose of this study is "to consider the history of COVID-19 vaccines to identify where we succeeded and where we failed, and the effects that these errors may have more broadly on vaccination hesitancy and routine childhood immunization programs in the decades to come."

‘I was offered assisted dying over cancer treatment’ In Canada, a broken healthcare system is killing patients (Unheard): There was (or still is) a good reason to introduce MAID [medical assistance in dying] in Canada. But I read too many incidences where the practice sounds too "casual." Maybe I am under the influence of confirmation bias. The cases where MAID actually was a blessing is seldom reported, I get that. Yet I do not feel comfortable whenever I read about it.

The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism (The Eternal Radical Idea): “[I]f we begin teaching our youth antifragility rather than fragility, that words are not violence, that exposure to dissent not only doesn’t hurt you but actually makes you a stronger, more capable thinker and person, it will be no surprise when we start seeing the mental health of young people increase over time.”

Vitamin D for the Prevention of Disease: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline (JCEM): Overall, vitamin D supplementation is seen as cost-effective, easy to implement, and acceptable without affecting health equity.

Frozen Fruits and Vegetables Are Often Just as Nutritious as Fresh (Real Clear Science): Frozen, Canned and Fermented

Environment

Paris wanted an AC-free Olympics. Visiting nations had other plans (The Washington Post): “The Washington Post sent inquiries to 20 of the largest competing nations. Among the eight that responded, all — including the United States — said they were planning to use portable ACs in some or all of their athletes’ rooms. Others with air-conditioning plans include Great Britain, Canada, Italy, and — to a limited degree — Germany… If Japan, which did not respond to The Post’s inquiry, goes through with its own air-conditioning plans — announced at a news conference last December — then every Group of Seven country aside from the host will be using the units.”

Is the number of natural disasters increasing? (Our World In Data): "To be clear: this does not mean that there is no increase in disasters, especially when looking at specific types of events, or specific locations. To establish clear trends on this, people need to look at more focused academic literature. It may also be the case that other databases do find an increase. It also says nothing about the intensity of disasters."

Tonga's Volcanic Eruption Could Cause Unusual Weather for the Rest of the Decade (Real Clear Science):  "For the northern half of Australia, our model predicts colder and wetter than usual winters up to about 2029. For North America, it predicts warmer than usual winters, while for Scandinavia, it again predicts colder than usual winters."

Giant viruses found on Greenland ice sheet (Aarhus University):  A "Giant Virus" was an oxymoron for me, until I read this article.

Chinese Philosophy

How China’s New Left Embraced the State (China Books Review): Dr. David Ownby is one of the China observers I follow. This essay is about the New Left ("New Left thinkers combed the socialist past in their search for ideas that might work for China’s present, while also embracing post-modernism and other trends from the contemporary West [where many of them did their Ph.Ds.], even if they were fundamentally anti-Western.") who are dominant today and supports the current regime.