1. The Times has an article on the pandemic induced trend of reverse migration to suburbs and small towns in the US. The main driver is lower housing costs, which more than off-sets any disadvantages.
2. The Times has an article on the expanding bus lanes in large global cities.
Beijing has set a blistering pace for bus lanes, carving out 624 miles since the first one opened in 1997 to stem soaring car ownership. The average travel speed in the lanes is 12.4 m.p.h. at peak times, over 50 percent faster than the average bus speed in New York. London, with 180 miles of bus lanes on its busiest roads, has placed some of them at pinch points to improve traffic flow and expanded to 24/7 service on many lanes, which has helped improve travel times and reliability... The bus lanes in London have been a “a real success story” that helped turn around its bus system and “remain incredibly important and a backbone of road based public transport,” according to Philipp Rode, the executive director of LSE Cities... San Francisco, a city of just 47 square miles, now has 65 miles of transit lanes, of which nearly 15 miles were added in the last two years.Bus lanes have more than doubled in Boston while pop-up bus lanes were added to key routes in Chicago. Houston’s first bus rapid transit service, the Silver Line, opened on a five-mile bus lane through a bustling employment and retail center... New York plans to build 150 miles of new bus lanes over the next four years, adding to 140 miles of existing lanes to create one of the largest such networks in the world... New York’s outdated and inefficient bus system, where the average speed is 8.1 miles per hour, is used primarily by low-income riders who do not have cars and often live far from the subway.
3. Adam Tooze points to a chilling fact about the Ukrainian economy,
Ukraine’s performance between 1990 and 2017 was not just worse than its European neighbors. It was the fifth worst in the entire world. Between 1990 and 2017 there were all told only 18 countries with negative cumulative growth and even in that select group, Ukraine’s performance puts it in the bottom third. Amongst the four countries that delivered less growth for their citizens than Ukraine were the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Yemen.
The Fed hiked rates 17 times from mid-2004 to mid-2006. And yet, during those rate hikes, the S&P500 rallied 46 per cent. There were nine rate hikes from 0.25 per cent to 2.5 per cent from December 2015 to December 2020. How did the S&P react? It went up non-stop, from around 1,900 in December 2015 to 2,800 in December 2017. The index wobbled in 2018 at the end of the three-year rate hike cycle — not at the beginning. After the Fed cut rates in August 2018, the market went up again before the Covid-driven crash in March 2020.
7. Via Rana Faroohar, an important perspective on private equity,
As Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, put it in her influential book with Rosemary Batt, Private Equity at Work, the rise of private equity represents “a fundamental shift in the concept of the American corporation — from a view of it as a productive enterprise and stable institution serving the needs of a broad spectrum of stakeholders, to a view of it as a bundle of assets to be bought and sold with an exclusive goal of maximising shareholder value.”
8. This is a partial explanation for the rise of the likes of populism,
Recent polls suggest that 26 per cent of Americans agree that “Joe Biden is a puppet president” controlled by a Deep State; while 31 per cent of Americans, 28 per cent of French people and 23 per cent of Germans think it is definitely or probably true that there is a “single group of people who secretly control events . . . and run the world together”.
Whether we like it or not, such misinformed views are held by a disturbingly large share of population.
9. FT points to the flattening of the yield curve in the US, which points to expectations of weaker economy and possible recession.
The difference between two and 10-year yields shrunk to 0.4 percentage points on Monday, its narrowest point on a closing basis since April 2020, having declined sharply in the wake of last week’s US inflation data. The difference in these two yields was about 1.2 percentage points a year ago. Parts of the yield curve have even begun to flip upside down, typically an ominous signal for investors’ economic outlook. For example, seven-year yields on Monday ticked up above 10-year yields... The gap between two and 10-year yields is just 0.09 percentage points, while the yield curve is inverted in several places. Three-year bond yields, at 1.48 per cent, are higher than 50-year bond yields.
10. Scott Galloway has this striking graph of political polarisation in the US.
It's interesting that Democrats are more strongly biased against Republicans than the latter are towards the former. Does this again reinforce the point about liberals being more intolerant than the conservatives?
11. Brazil monetary policy fact of the day,
Brazil, for example, has steadily increased its policy rate from 2 per cent in March last year to 10.75 per cent today. It is expected to peak at 12 per cent before being pared back towards the end of this year. Consumer price inflation, running at more than 10 per cent, is expected to fall to 5.5 per cent over the same period.
12. Good set of statistics about Life Insurance Corporation of India.
13. The scarcely believable story of Chitra Ramakrishna, the former CEO of National Stock Exchange, being controlled through emails from an unknown swami is only the latest exhibit on India's corporate governance problems.
14. India is witnessing the tightest labour market for formal sector skilled workers.
No comments:
Post a Comment