If Australia wants to subsidize its mining, farming and packaging sectors, maybe it should just do that, instead of spending bajillions on boondoggle gas infrastructure whose main function will be to give those sectors under-priced raw materials?
I like ammonia and olefins as much as the next person but there's a global market for this stuff, you don't need to build a government-funded fantasy domestic gas industry to get hold of it.
I realise we're all meant to pretend that building a couple of gas storage tanks at Wallumbilla will magically turn Australia into some South Korea-style heavy manufacturing hub.
But this really is all about ammonia and olefins, and there's not much in the way of jobs or money in that.
If you're wondering what ammonia and olefins are, that's a sign of the extraordinary fact-free poverty of the debate we've been having:
A thing people really do not understand about US companies fretting about their per-car EV losses stories is that this is almost entirely a spurious issue about the unique way US accountants treat certain types of R&D spending. 🧵
I've long been a huge fan of @michaelxpettis and agree with him about most aspects of China's economy, but I think there's good evidence that clean tech, at least, is seeing solid, operationally-financed, productivity-enhancing growth right now. 🧵
A pretty common argument you hear these days to justify trade restrictions on Chinese EVs, solar panels, and batteries is that the industries are only prospering because of unfair subsidies. I don't think that's supported by the data:
The argument goes something like this: China is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting overseas rivals; ergo, its comparative advantage isn’t scale, efficiencies or innovation, but the availability of cheap government cash.
Last September I made one of the scariest calls I've made as a columnist — a prediction that consumption of crude oil had already peaked, despite predictions that this was a decade or more in the future:
Well, much of the ocean floor is strewn with these potato-sized pebbles, which appear to form through complex processes over millions of years and are rich in manganese and other useful base metals.
From time to time, people have thought about mining these nodules. The most famous case was an extraordinary Cold War caper in the 1970s, when Howard Hughes set up a fake nodule mining company as cover for a CIA operation to salvage a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
I would like to suggest that the best explanation for this contradictory series of facts is that oil demand is in decline and every party is behaving rationally.
If you think oil demand is in fact rising then the entire global oil industry, with ~$3 trillion of annual revenues and ~$500 billion of annual capex, has taken a collective decision to just leave trillions of money on the table for ~reasons~
Today I want to tell a story about the con artists of cryptoland, and how they have a lot more in common with the founding fathers of modern capitalism that one might initially think (thread):
At this point it's pretty clear that cryptoland is in deep trouble. Sam Bankman-Fried can now add allegations of bribing Chinese officials to the string of accusations stemming from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
His nemesis Changpeng Zhao is now facing a lawsuit against his rival Binance exchange from the CFTC: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…