How Did ID.me Get Between You and Your Identity? 

Should we be entrusting private companies with a responsibility that would naturally fall on governments—such as verifying the identities of their own citizens? Just as we probably don’t want Amazon or Facebook controlling access to our tax records or a government lifeline when things go wrong, it isn’t clear we should want ID.me to be everywhere we want to be.

Economist: The price of orange-juice futures surged, after this year’s orange crop in Florida was forecast to be the smallest since 1945. The Sunshine State’s orange groves are plagued with tree lice. Orange prices are also sensitive to a drought in Brazil, which has hurt citrus production there. The overall demand for orange has lost some zest in recent years, as consumers switch to low-sugar drinks.

The Video game industry is now far larger than the movie business. FT

It’s Not Complicated. Microsoft Wants Activision for Its Games. NYT

 

Notes Today:

 

• Tensions between Ukraine and Russia have led to the U.S. delivering 90 tons of military aid that arrived in Ukraine.

• State Department orders families of U.S. embassy personnel in Ukraine to begin evacuating the country as soon as Monday.

• The FOMC meets this week, and they are projected to hasten the taper of asset purchases. 

• Reports upcoming are the estimate of Q4 GDP and December New Home sales, December Personal Income and Outlays and November Case-Shiller house prices. 

• If you think your stock portfolio had a rough week, Jeff Bezos lost $20 billion of his fortune, Changpeng Zhao of Binance dropped $17.7 billion, and Zuckerberg’s wealth fell $10.4 billion. 
• Feel better?

• The Arizona Democratic Party on Saturday voted to formally censure the state’s senior senator for her part in killing the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts.

• Artificial snow has become a Winter Olympics fixture as climate change shrinks the number of countries that get enough natural snowfall to hold the event. But Beijing will be the first host to rely completely on man-made powder. 

Powerful evidence suggests that fishing fleets are deliberately dumping their used nets and lines at sea, threatening the complete collapse of marine ecosystems.

 

Quick Overview is up to date

You may want to note that the China Containerized Freight Index is making new highs while The BDI Baltic Exchange Dry Index is making lows.

Nassim Taleb on BitCoin - 

to 0

@nntaleb

View BTC is as a contagious disease. It will spread, spread & its price will rally until saturation, that is ~every sucker stupid enough to buy the story is invested. When all suckers are in, the prevailing belief will make it an "obvious" investment. That's maximal fragility.

 

Comment 1: Why BTC is worth exactly 0 Gold and other precious metals are largely maintenance free, do not degrade over an historical horizon, and do not require maintenance to refresh their physical properties over time. Cryptocurrencies require a sustained amount of interest in them.

Let us go deeper into how a currency can come about.

No transaction between two persons is analytically pairwise

in an open economy. The root of the confusion lies in the

prevalent naïve-libertarian illusion that a transaction between

two consenting adults, when devoid of coercion, is effectively

just a transaction between two consenting adults and can

be isolated and discussed as such12. But one must consider

the ensemble of transactions and the interactions between

agents: people happen to engage in contractual agreements

with others; for them a specific transaction is just one piece.

To be able to regularly buy goods denominated in bitcoin

(whose prices fixed in bitcoin but floating in U.S.$ or some

other fiat currency), one must have an income that is fixed in

bitcoin. Such an income must come from somewhere, say, an

employer. For an employer to pay a salary fixed in bitcoin, she

or he must be getting revenues fixed in bitcoin. Furthermore,

for the vendor to offer a can of beer in fixed bitcoins, she or

he must be paying for the raw material, and have the overhead

fixed in bitcoin. The same applies to the mismatch of assets

and obligations on a balance sheet. All this requires a parity

in bitcoin-USD of low enough volatility to be tolerable and

for variations to remain inconsequential.

Notes Today:

 

• Nikkei 225 Hits 6-week Low
• Heating Oil Hits 7-year High
• S&P/ASX 200 at 4-week Low
• Crude at 7-Year High 

• British consumer price inflation rose more than expected to 5.4% in December, its highest in almost 30 years
• Germanies housing boom has accelerated yet again. Home prices rose 14% in 2021. 

• Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews: On multiple (RUSSIAN) shows, experts and pundits are claiming that the principle of MAD (mutually assured destruction) is obsolete and trying to convince the audiences that Russia could prevail over the U.S. in a nuclear war. 

• The Baltic Exchange Dry  Index  at its lowest level in about a year, on weaker demand across all vessel segments.

 Palm Oil at all time high

 Quick Overview is up to date

 US wages growing at the fastest pace in two decades

Moex Russia Index  falls 13% over past four trading days on fears of Moscow invasion of Ukraine 

Green Hills Software CEO Dan O'Dowd took out a full page ad in Sunday’s New York Times calling TSLA's “Full Self-Driving” software “the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company.

• AP California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019.

British troops sent to Ukraine: Soldiers and hi-tech weapons on way amid fears of Russian invasion | Daily Mail Online

 

 Dow Theory

 Philadelphia housing index  (HGX)

 Nasdaq advance decline line

 NYSE advance decline line

Has Eurodollar (interest rate) decided to put in a “long term” top?

Notes Today:

 

• China’s economy expanded 8.1% in 2021, defying expectations, despite slowing in the last quarter.

• The pentagon declares climate change a national security issue. Btw, the pentagon has known this for decades. 

• US annual rate of inflation jumped to 7% in December, its highest level since June 1982. 

• The euro zone’s annual inflation rate rose to 5%, record high, in December. 

• The Insurance industries had the fourth-costliest year ever for natural disasters, according to Munich Re. 

• Argentina’s interest rates are currently at a remarkable 40%. Inflation  at 51.2%

• TheBaltic Dry index has lost nearly 23% this week. 

• China would like to produce 40% more soybeans by 2025 hoping to become self-sufficient. 

• Fears rise over how unregulated trading and promotion of crypto assets are creating a new generation of addicts.

Tulip file:  Economist  According to some estimates, Bitcoins’ electricity use is approaching that of Italy. “You waste all these resources only to end up with a system that is controlled by people you have even less reason to trust than those who run conventional financial institutions,” 

•  China’s birth rate plummeted to just 7.5 births per 1,000 people in 2021, the lowest figure since records began in 1949.