Connecting Dots

Connections not Coincidence

Big Oil and the coming bailout

This was originally posted on September 22, 2020 on my old blog and is ever so slightly updated. Exxon et al. are on track for a bailout that will make the financial rescue of ‘08 look like handing a lollypop to a child.Oil companies – no matter what you think of them – create an […]

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Two Characteristics of Money

This is the first of a couple of posts which will be directly related. What is money anyway? Money by itself is fundamentally useless as a true asset. Its value is the result of a societal construct. An asset is something that has value to the holder, and the funny thing with money is that […]

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One-sided currencies and banking

In the modern banking system money is created through lending. For every dollar in existence there is a corresponding amount owed.[1]  By and large, in the commercial banking system S≠I, no money is transferred from savers to investors. One way to describe this phenomenon is that banks print money out of thin air. That may […]

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Social Media

Social Media The Anti-Social side of Social Media On the surface social media seems to be an extension of how we socialized pre-internet.  Even the name itself leads us to think in that direction. We used to get together on birthdays, holidays etc. and take each other’s temperature on various issues. Going on-line seems just […]

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On EROEI

This was written in July of 2011 Energy Return On Energy Invested and its variations is a metric frequently used to look at our efficiency in harvesting energy with respect to the energy input.As an aside, regarding fossil fuels in day to day use we talk about energy production when strictly speaking we don’t produce […]

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Looking at cash from April 2015

This post was written in 2015 but I decided to dust it off – most of it is relevant today. As fixed income returns have been compressing, it has become harder and harder for banks for find investments which have no capital charge under Basel III and have a positive enough yield to cover the […]

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Currency, Carry and Entropy

Things ain’t what they used to be or How currencies are not stores of value. One of the standard attributes that money is claimed to have is that it acts as a store of value. “Store of value” tells you that it is the current holder’s intent to keep the currency for a while before […]

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Getting Lucky with Trump

The US, as a country, should count its blessings that Trump was the president over the last  almost 4 years. As crude and rough as Trump may be, the US has been incredibly lucky. His narcissistic nature, as painful it may be to witness and deal with the consequences of decisions made by him, are exactly […]

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