Dumb Kapitol Trading @dk_trades - Twitter Profile

All these clever takes miss one fundamental point. Thanks to sanctions China has been operating as an oil purchasing monopsony for at least five years. This means it’s been drawing a huge economic dividend in energy terms from not adhering to the rules based order. This boon has helped power and intensify its commitment to running an increasingly dysfunctional export oriented model, which - despite the huge economic advantage this gives it versus the rest of the world - is still failing to deliver. Stocks or no stocks, the Iran crisis means it is now being forced to pay the global price for oil. That means all its relative price advantages are disappearing. Meanwhile, whatever stocks it draws down, from now on it will have to replace at the global price. Why is this important? Because its mega commodity stockpile is less a function of strategic thinking and more a function of its need for CREDIT. China builds stockpiles because it has to park the rent it extracts through mercantilistic means from the FREE world in something that holds its value. Since the Chinese state can’t simultaneously keep signaling that the dollar is trash and openly investing in dollars, it has to use more creative means. One way, as emphasised by Brad Setser, is to get its private institutions and banks to do it on its behalf. But the other way is to park all that value in commodity reserves that are surplus to its immediate throughput needs. That is the trick at hand. Without stockpiles or dollar reserves it would have a credit problem. With them, it is neither efficient or wealthy. It’s just a sovereign nation with an obesity problem on its balance sheet. This is ironic because its people still don’t have enough to eat, and it couldn’t even commit to helping out its BRI dependents with that oil despite their huge size. If it gets a dollar or capital backstop, it probably can begin to share some of those reserves with the BRI nations. And that, I suspect, is why it is now moving to undo its export ban. America of course is in exactly the opposite position.

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Dumb Kapitol Trading @dk_trades

about 1 month ago

@Kao206245014212 First I make you tidy your room!

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Dumb Kapitol Trading @dk_trades

about 2 months ago

@Bogachan_1971 This is a rabbit hole worth diving in!

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about 2 months ago

@tuooooy2 You can make me coffee anytime

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dk_trades retweeted

Reid Wiseman

@astro_reid

about 2 months ago

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.