kai

The fact that memory stocks are crashing because of Google’s Turboquant is a pretty good indicator of how many clueless people this market is filled with. It’s like saying Aramco should crash because Toyota came out with a next-generation hybrid engine.

China’s COSCO Shipping just announced: Effective immediately, our company has resumed new booking services (standard containers) to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq. What does this mean? Seems to be a positive signal.

Once again, people really underestimate how powerful and secure the US is, which is why they keep hoping against all evidence to the contrary that something terrible will befall to Americans because of their foreign policy blunders that will finally make them learn and stop doing stupid shit. But even in the worst case scenario, where Trump orders a ground invasion and it turns into a quagmire that lasts years, Americans will be fine. They will be harmed, but less than almost everyone else, because the US will be relatively insulated from the both the energy shock and the economic slowdown that will result from it since it's a net exporter of energy and is probably the least trade-dependent major economy. Moreover, while the cost will be huge even for Americans, it will be relatively invisible because 1) it will be very diffuse, 2) Americans are so rich that even a much larger cost per capita would still leave them very well-off and 3) people won't really see it for the same kind of reasons that Bastiat explained a long time ago in his parable of the broken window. For the rest of the world, especially some of the poorest people, it will be a different story, but Americans mostly won't feel much. Even the invasion of Iraq, which is widely seen as one of the worst foreign policy blunders in US history and cost the US trillions of dollar, didn't make such a huge difference for Americans. They complain about it and talk about how it was a terrible mistake, but for the average American it was mostly a non-event, for the same reasons I just mentioned. I also don't think it will have the effects some people think on US influence in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular. It's not going to end the role of the dollar and I don't think Gulf states will abandon their alliance with the US either. Where else would they go? It's not as if China was going to protect them from Iran or as if they had a lot of attractive yuan-denominated assets to buy with their earnings from oil and gas exports. To be clear, I don't say that to defend this stupidity or to deny that it will have large costs even for Americans in absolute terms (to say nothing of the effects it will have on the rest of the world), I'm just saying that people are fooling themselves if they think that it will teach Americans a lesson. At best it will be a very short-lived lesson they will forget after a few years because it won't matter much for them.