Central bank asset purchases are actually little more than the de facto nationalization of private wealth.

If I could print money and use it to buy your house, I've basically stolen it. In theory CBs could use printed money to nationalize 100% of the economy/private wealth.
You'll often hear ppl say central bank buying is good for investors and increased wealth inequality. Nonsense. With asset purchases, income generating assets are confiscated and replaced with cash that generates nothing (-ve in EU). Investors as a class are left with less income.
The consequences of this are already starting to become apparent. Investors have less income generating assets left to fight over which drives up the price of everything. And pension funds etc are starved of income as the central bank is nationalizing income-generating bonds.
It is surprising there have not been more concern expressed about the constitutionality & desirability of governments having this degree of unchecked power. On the current policy trajectory, there is nothing to stop the CB printing and buying up half or more of the stock market.

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More from @LT3000Lyall

30 Dec
A Bloomberg article today reported that human-run hedge funds trounced quants in 2020 - a turnaround from the experience of recent years. Renaissance Technologies - run by Jim Simons - saw its Institutional Diversified Alpha & Global Equities funds fall by 32% and 31% <continued>
The fundamental problem with computer/AI driven trading strats is - and always has been - that the models will never be capable of evaluating novel situations which have not happened before. This was undoing of LTCM, as well as port. insurance which caused 1987 stockmarket crash.
A global pandemic was not in the past datasets, so the bots don't know what to do. AI is only good where you have sizeable and complete datasets that can 'train' the AI to recognized statistical patterns too complex for humans to extract, and use it to make accurate predictions.
Read 11 tweets
28 Dec
3-4yrs ago I thought Bitcoin would eventually go to zero. I was wrong and no longer think that. It's not because any of the arguments/narratives bulls put forward 3-4yrs ago have proven even remotely right, but because it's now entrenched itself as an instrument of speculation.
Human beings will always love to gamble/speculate, and Bitcoin holds out the lure/possibility of rapid & massive gains. I think what we will instead see is repeated, periodic waves of speculation- huge bubbles followed by equally huge busts; a reset; and then another bubble, etc.
When it busts a lot of hot money will come out & prices will drop 80-90%, just like post 2017. However, as it falls the market cap shrinks & it takes less & less buying to support the price, and at some point enough people will step up & take another punt hoping it 10xs again.
Read 4 tweets
24 Dec
Many people seem to believe EVs are a fundamentally disruptive innovation to the auto industry. They aren't. They are a relatively minor evolution. The vast bulk of the parts outside the engine/propulsion system are the same. <thread below>
You still need a chassis, axel, wheels & tyres, body & exterior panels, braking systems, suspension, chairs & other interior, airbags and other safety features, lighting/indicators and on-board instrumentation. You even often have (simplified) transmissions & gears.
All you're doing is ripping out the ICE and replacing it with an electric motor & batteries. Everything else about the design and production process is very similar. Parts suppliers across ICE engine supply chain will be impacted. The automotive companies themselves, not really.
Read 11 tweets
23 Dec
A lot of people are confused about China's economic model. Is it socialist/communist or capitalist? The answer is that it is a hybrid that doesn't comport easily with the simplistic dichotomies we have become accustomed to using in the West. My take on it is as follows (thread):
China's model is still somewhat socialist/communist in the sense that the country has a strong belief in desirability of top-down government management/supervision/social engineering to ensure that economy achieves desirable social, economic, and geopolitical ends (strength).
However, they have changed the means by which they seek to achieve that outcome. After the failed communist experiment under Mao, which made China weak & poor, they realised that they needed markets, capitalism, private incentives etc, to drive productivity & wealth accumulation.
Read 18 tweets
23 Dec
Reported in today's WSJ. If these allegations are true, this is unquestionably predatory pricing and is illegal.
Say you have proverbial lemonade stand that sells lemonade for 100c that costs 70c. I set up shop next to you and sell for 60c. U ask me how do I make money? I say I can't, but you will go broke before I do, and then I will push prices up to 110c.
That is illegal predatory pricing, and for good reason because it can allow too much monopoly power to be amassed. I have long suspected Bezos to be engaging in predatory pricing under the cover of 'providing value to customers'. If true, this is evidence he has been.
Read 4 tweets
22 Dec
I'm getting tired of the growing tendency to blame tool-makers for the misuse of their tools. It's not Robin Hood's fault if someone misuses the tool to make poor investment choices. Whatever happened to the quant notion of individual responsibility? <continued below>
Do we blame a hammer manufacturer if someone uses a hammer to bash in someone's head? Do we condemn auto manufacturers if someone drives a car into a crowd?

Human beings are imperfect and some people will misuse tools. We just have to accept that fact & stop blaming tool-makers
Many intellectuals instinct to social engineering is driven by delusions of utopia. They believe if only the right rules, regulations and policies are in place, nothing bad will ever happen. That is a fantasy. So long as humans are imperfect, some bad things will always happen.
Read 5 tweets

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