Really comes down to one choice - “Get busy livin’ or get busy diein’ “ - You goddamn right #shawshankredemption#movie#Classics
https://t.co/JJaH7lyPkx
My follow up essay: Ireland's Failure Premium. To answer the question a lot of people have asked me: So where the hell does all of our money go, if it's not into creating infrastructure and a high living standard?!
[The short answer is: someone's pockets. Just not yours...]
Paul Tudor Jones says the US is more dependent on equity prices than ever, and explains what a 35% correction would trigger in the economy:
"We're 252% of stock market cap to GDP. In 1929 we were 65%. In 1987 we got to ~85-90%. In 2000, 170%.
If you think about the periodicity of significant bear markets. Since 1970, we get a mean reversion about every 10 years.
Let's say mean revert to the past 25 or 30-year PE. That would be a 30, 35% decline. Well, 35% on 250% of GDP is 80, 90% of GDP.
10% of our tax revenues are capital gains, they go to zero. So you can see the budget deficit blowing up. You can see the bond market getting smoked. You can see this kind of negative self-reinforcing effect.
In the stock market, we're over-equitized as a country. We have the highest individual equity weightings in the history of the country.
And then the real problem is if you look at private equity in 2007-2008, that was about 7% of institutional portfolios. Now it's about 16% of the institutional portfolios. We're so much more illiquid than we were in 2008.
The problem is that if you buy the S&P at this current valuation, the 10-year forward return is negative when you buy the S&P with a PE of 22. That's what history shows.
So yes, the S&P is spectacular long-term, if you have a hundred-year view. But that's because that's an average of a hundred years, including times when the S&P 500 PE was 6, 7 and 8, or one third of what it is right now.
Valuation matters a lot, and the stock market's really high and it's gonna be really hard to make money from here with any kind of long-term view."
En Nürburgring, la regla de oro es: Si el coche que viene detrás es más rápido, te apartas a la derecha, pones el intermitente y ¡le dejas pasar! ¡El M2 que iba delante no pudo tragarse su orgullo!
In 1983, Paul Newman stated that the American state disregards the truth, always creating exaggerated enemies to justify wars and massacres for profit, while ignoring crimes committed by others like Israel..
Sinéad O’Sullivan’s follow up piece to her tweet, which burned Varadkar so bad he’s been covered in Sudocream for the last 24 hours
https://t.co/BKGgy1s1VQ
The Governments pitiful excuse for not abolishing the carbon tax is that the state cannot afford to do so.
That's despite the fact that the state has spent away its €1.1 billion year carbon tax take on €1.2 billion for IPAS and €800 million on foreign aid.
The maths is simple: abolish carbon tax + cut IPAS and foreign aid = save Irish taxpayers.
Varadkar goes back to school:
He tried to gas-light Sinéad O’Sullivan and debunk her chart that shed light on how bad things are in Ireland.
He got schooled by her and totally owned. He is an embarrassment to Ireland.
It’s amazing that Ireland with same population like Denmark can’t have for one a decent public transport system ( bus / metro / 2 types of rail ) and all the other public services too Mind boggles .. definitely a management issue
(RE this graph: I aggregated public infrastructure and services capabilities and weighted them, country by country, against each other, before plotting this against wealth per capita, and GINI. Happy to share my data as always)
Sinéad raises very important points. Another one that diretly affects the fuel protesters is the every growing burden of charges on small business from government, Irish Water, lawyers etc. Flagged every year by the National Competitiveness Council but ignored by govt & the media
The protests in Ireland are not about just fuel! They are about the distance between Ireland on this graph and every other modern and developed economy. Ireland is second wealthiest but gets waaaaay less than any other country for that wealth. By a golden mile.
That visual gap in this graph? That’s what people are protesting. It’s a lack of infrastructure and the everyday enshittification of services, the economy, and the additional difficulty of trying to live, relative to peers in any other country. It also highlights why people don’t get uniformly listened to! - because there is no government architecture to engage meaningfully across this huge gap.
That gap is a three hour drive to work in traffic, a 14 month wait for an MRI, buses that don’t arrive, trains that don’t exist, schools that have no places for your kids, houses that are unaffordable, pubs that close before midnight, €12 sandwiches, expensive fuel.
People feel this gap, even if they can’t explain it precisely. And that builds into resentment, and ultimately protest. Fuel just happened to be the next thing that could be pointed to, today.
Irish media caught lying again. Business Post editorial today: “There is little evidence of much public support for these protests”
Latest polling data shows this to be a bare faced lie - protests have majority support. Editor @McConnellDaniel is a shameless FFG shill.
The protests in Ireland are not about just fuel! They are about the distance between Ireland on this graph and every other modern and developed economy. Ireland is second wealthiest but gets waaaaay less than any other country for that wealth. By a golden mile.
That visual gap in this graph? That’s what people are protesting. It’s a lack of infrastructure and the everyday enshittification of services, the economy, and the additional difficulty of trying to live, relative to peers in any other country. It also highlights why people don’t get uniformly listened to! - because there is no government architecture to engage meaningfully across this huge gap.
That gap is a three hour drive to work in traffic, a 14 month wait for an MRI, buses that don’t arrive, trains that don’t exist, schools that have no places for your kids, houses that are unaffordable, pubs that close before midnight, €12 sandwiches, expensive fuel.
People feel this gap, even if they can’t explain it precisely. And that builds into resentment, and ultimately protest. Fuel just happened to be the next thing that could be pointed to, today.
This is a must read from @davidmcw “Is Ireland the worst run country in Europe?”
The figures in this article are mind blowing . No accountability in the Senior echelons of Public Service. No wonder people are angry. #fuelprotests