1. China holds more than $1.5 trillion of US securities.
Leo Lewis in FT points to two advantages from the depreciation,
The first relates to Japan’s increasingly important “not China” status in a less certain and deglobalising world... As global industry begins to re-engineer itself away from efficiency and towards security, Japan’s position as a reliable partner, manufacturing hub or supply chain link for US and European businesses has been significantly enhanced. The weak yen, say the bankers, is already tipping investment decisions in favour of Japan, with that trend likely to accelerate. But the second effect of the yen’s sharp fall this year has been to vindicate the continued commitment of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund to its big overseas investment weighting... the GPIF’s roughly 50 per cent portfolio weighting in overseas bonds and stocks now generates what one analyst calculates is a 2-3 per cent performance windfall for a 10 per cent move in the dollar-yen rate.
3. Fascinating snippets from The Economist's Technology Quarterly which focuses on wearable devices and health tracking. This graphic of technology diffusion is interesting
This on the smartwatch industry,
In 2019, Apple sold more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry. Some 400m devices a year (of all brands) are expected to be sold globally by 2026, up from 200m in 2020.
This about the wearables market,
What a wearable device can measure depends on its sensors and its software. Lower level algorithms turn the noisy output of photodetectors and the like into heartbeats. Higher level programs combine, say, heart rate, temperature and movement into measures of the duration, and quality, of sleep. Sensors and algorithms combine to help wearable devices measure step counts, calories burned, oxygen levels and more. Artificial intelligence gives extra oomph to the algorithms. Technology advancements in the past five years have made it possible to pack wearable devices with more sophisticated sensors and more computing power... In a recent review iqvia, a research firm, found 384 wearable devices marketed to consumers. They include wrist-worn fitness trackers, sports watches, smartwatches, smart jewellery like the Oura ring and sensor-bearing headsets, patches, straps, clip-ons and even clothes (such as smart socks that measure the vitals of babies). Just over half of the devices analysed by iqvia monitor activity. The rest are devices that measure a wide array of health variables, including sleep, temperature, breathing, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood sugar and electrical activity of the heart.
4. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is perhaps the mother of all misadventures and blunders. Ian Bremmer has a nice summary of all the costs,
Mr Putin has cost his country the lives of thousands of young soldiers, some of them conscripts. He claims that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” but his war has given Ukraine a stronger sense of national identity than it’s ever had before and transformed it into Russia’s bitter enemy. He has shown the world that his army is ineffectual, and that billions of dollars spent on modernising Russia’s military has been wasted. He has given NATO a sense of unity and purpose it hasn’t had in decades and non-members like Finland and Sweden new reasons to join. His actions have driven members including Germany to boost defence spending. Others have dispatched troops close to Russia’s border. Mr Putin has convinced Europe that it must stop buying Russia’s most valuable exports. He has brought sanctions and export controls on his country that will inflict generational damage. For Europe and America he has crossed the Rubicon. Most grievously, he failed to prepare the Russian public for the true human, financial and material costs of his “special military operation.”
5. Financial market concentration fact of the day,
The past decade has seen a concentration of voting power among managers of large index funds. Three asset managers—BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard—together own over a fifth of the average company in the s&p 500, but wield even greater clout, because only 30% of retail investors bother to vote their shares.
6. The manner in which the stories around the electric two-wheelers catching fire have been handled by the startups firms indicates that poor corporate governance is not exclusively confined to the old economy companies. Sample this,
There is no official count of EV fires because the government and industry bodies don’t collect such data... Ola Electric, Okinawa, Pure EV and Boom Motors made around 7,000 recalls after incidents of flaming vehicles emerged since last September, and after transport minister Nitin Gadkari warned of penalties... One of the problems is the lack of standardisation. As a result, companies send a good model for certification but subsequent batches may have inferior units... With over 400 EV models in the market, there’s a need to standardise batteries for safety and performance... More so in India’s fragmented EV market, where big manufacturers jostle with minions and traders for a slice of the $200 billion opportunity by 2030. Most treat E2W manufacture like a kid assembling a Lego game — import cells and components from China, pack, and arrange them in a shell. There are no penalties if something goes wrong... Ola Electric acquired Amsterdam-based Etergo, an E2W scooter OEM in 2020, and opened bookings last year. It now faces fires, irate customers cribbing over performance and range anxieties, and allegations of a Twitter-led customer service.
This is a Mint investigation which found that "a network of seemingly co-ordinated Twitter handles appears to be working to drown out criticism of Ola Electric on social media and build a positive narrative for the brand online". These handles attack people who post stories of their experience with Ola electric's safety.
7. Scott Galloway writes about the attention economy,
The element fueling economic growth is not a rare earth metal, processing power, or NFTs: It’s attention. The average American spends 11 hours per day consuming media, 65% of their waking life. Roughly 40% of that time is spent on a mobile device. Billions of dollars and millions of person-years are spent capturing and monetizing that attention. The more attention, the more data, the more money, the more relevant offering(s), the more attention … and so on and so on.
8. Economics explains politics. The US enthusiasm for oil and gas embargo on Russia is explained by the graphic below - its limited dependence on Russian imports!
9. Manu Joseph has a nice read on the ways in which India's price consciousness plays itself out. The context is the use of air-conditioners in public facilities and utilities.
The average Indian has low standards for life—for beautiful spaces, time, hygiene and comfort. He is willing to wake up at dawn and commute two hours in heat and dust, and return late at night. He plays no sport, does not date and spends very little on fun, even if he is a drinker. He overspends only if there is a sacrificial quality to it—like his child’s education or sister’s wedding.
10. Conventional wisdom has it that anxiety is bad and something to be avoided. So it can come as counterintuitive to argue in favour of anxiety. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, a clinical psychologist, writes,
We’ve convinced people that anxiety is a dangerous affliction and that the solution is to eliminate it, as we do with other diseases. But feeling anxious isn’t the problem. The problem is that we don’t understand how to respond constructively to anxiety... This “bad” feeling isn’t a malfunction or failure of mental health. It’s a triumph of human evolution, a response that emerged along with one of our greatest attributes: the ability to think about the uncertain future and prepare for it. Anxiety places us in the “future tense” (pun intended)—a state in which we are motivated not only to survive but to thrive, by being more persistent, hopeful and innovative. It was the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and his intellectual heirs, such as psychologists Nico Frijda and Joseph Campos, who saw that unpleasant emotions like anxiety confer a profound evolutionary advantage. Emotions provide key information about our well-being and prepare us to act. Fear, for example, signals that you may be in danger—from a predator, bully or speeding car—and readies your body and mind to fight or take flight. Anxiety, by contrast, has nothing to do with present threats. Instead, it turns you into a mental time traveler, drawing your attention to what lies ahead. Will you succeed or fail in that interview for a job you desperately want? Anxiety prompts your mind and body into action. Your worries impel you to prepare meticulously for the interview, while your heart races and pumps blood to your brain so that you stay sharp and focused, primed to pursue your goals.
The article points to research that confirms the presence of higher levels of dopamine (the hormone whose levels spikes when we have pleasurable experiences and in expectations of reward) when we are anxious, thereby raising the possibility that the elevation makes us do the same thing that we do when we experience joy and expect reward - prepare for the same.
She writes about the problems with trying to eliminate anxiety,
We have come to believe that the best way to cope is to treat anxiety like Covid-19 or cancer by trying to eradicate it. But treating anxiety like a disease is a recipe for its spiraling out of control; it prevents us from distinguishing between ordinary anxiety and anxiety disorders, which occur when our ways of coping with anxiety serve to amplify it in ways that are out of proportion to the situation and keep us from functioning in our professional and personal lives. When we say anxiety is a public health crisis, what we really mean is that the way we cope with anxiety is a public health crisis. We need to develop a new mind-set about this misunderstood emotion. Reframing and reclaiming anxiety as an advantage and a valued part of being human isn’t easy or just a matter of willpower. It takes practice and time, and it doesn’t mean that anxiety becomes enjoyable. Anxiety can’t do its job unless it makes us uncomfortable, forcing us to sit up and pay attention. We don’t need to like anxiety—just to use it in the right way.
Instead the way forward
Today we too often treat anxiety as a malfunction to repair, but anxiety doesn’t need fixing. What needs fixing is our disease model of dealing with it, which is meant to increase stability and destigmatize psychological struggle but is not succeeding and may even be causing harm. Once we rescue anxiety from this mindset, we’ll be in a better position to rescue ourselves.
The article points to this study and its findings about the benefits of ikigai
Beginning in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running and most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted, asked a fundamental question: What leads to a healthy and happy life? Following over 1,300 people from all walks of life over decades, the study has found that one of the best predictors—better than social class, IQ and genetic factors—is having a sense of purpose.
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