Brilliant episode.
Do yourself a favour and get a half-hour heads up on the shape of where we are going
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…and adapt expectations accordingly
…I thought of the above episode while watching Starmer on the news, at the lectern today with Takaichi.
Here’s a relevant lightly edited excerpt:
1/3
“Japan is a country that has run on increasing its financial claims on reality for a long time… held together for decades by low yields, converting natural resources into exportable tech, central bank interventions, associated credibility and a shared belief that the plumbing will continue to work at this top level of the biophysical pyramid…
2/3
…“Japanese government bond yields have been pushing higher [and when] they start spiking as they are now, it matters not because Japan is about to blow up tomorrow, but because the entire modern system is built on the assumption that debt can be carried cheaply and continually rolled forward, smoothly…
3/3
…“Higher yields are gonna be biophysical gravity reasserting itself because they increase the cost of serving an already large stock of obligations. They pressure [Japanese] government budgets and they force investors to reprice risk across portfolios that were built for a much different interest rate regime.”
…To come back to Starmer trying to do his bit to glue Anglo-Japanese relations. Trouble is his entire economics is BS. He and Takaichi seem peas in a pod in that respect. It cannot possibly hold. At some point it won’t
…In a month-old JP Morgan report they show that, at $80, silver is 30% of the cost of a solar panel.
At yesterday’s $115, silver is 45 to 50% of the cost”
“The March silver contract alone… is almost double the amount of the actual silver in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange warehouse.”
”Silver is just a tiny reminder that the energy transition is also a materials transition, and materials are not infinitely substitutable.”
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…Robert Friedland, a copper investor, says:
“We’re consuming 30 mn tons of copper a year, only 4 mn tons of which is recycled.
That means to maintain 3% GDP growth with no further electrification, we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as in the last 10,000 years combined.
This is without any new electrification, without data centers, without solar and wind and the greening of the world economy, you people have no idea whatsoever what we’re facing. You are dreaming.”