1/7 This article in the FT explains Buffett’s increasingly combative stance with regulators in the utility space. The unfortunate disconnect between well-intentioned progressive policies and reality may be coming to a head.
2/7 People don’t hesitate to pile into the latest AI stock, plug their cars into the wall, go to the hospital where everything is disposable plastic, and shop at the grocery store – a glorified gas station if there ever was one.
3/7 Yet when those same people then vilify the companies that make this possible it drives capital away from maintaining & expanding the electric grid. Does it make sense to buy electric cars and invest in #AI at the same time we are knee-capping US utility companies?
2/8 What we've been saying: banks and the consumer are no longer the problem. #Banks are the new utilities.
3/8 The #government and business sector are the problems. Businesses have seen record #debt and record low #tax rates help inflate margins to unsustainable levels.
2/10 “We’ve had 40+ years where all the money went into broadband, or internet, or #Netflix or the cloud and no money went into basic productive capacity…”
–Robert Friedland, CEO, Ivanhoe group of companies
3/10 What follows is KCR’s attempt to create a simple walk-through of the #risks and #opportunities offered today. We believe both the structure and implications of this paper are easy to grasp.
1/19 @ttmygh of the wonderful Things That Make You Go HMMMM newsletter just wrote a scathing piece on the emerging #pension fund disaster in lagged marks from private #equity.
2/19 As he explains: #PrivateEquity is taking down Pension Funds as they struggle to keep the game of hot-potato going. “Hot potato” being the business practice of selling slices of companies back and forth to one another at ever higher #valuations.
3/19 The “solution” appears to be PE firms building funds to buy #assets from themselves at possibly fraudulent valuations set by themselves.
2/4 In our piece, The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions we stated, " The electrification of transportation is going to require a massive amount of #mining. The stocks are incredibly cheap."
2/7 "$CRM CEO Marc #Benioff and $META CEO Mark #Zuckerberg have admitted that they hired too many employees under the assumption that the growth their #sector experienced during the pandemic would continue."
3/7 "In periods of growth, the errors made by overconfident #CEOs are often buffered by the upswing of the economic cycle. In contrast, during upswings, underconfident CEOs lose out because they stay hamstrung with #risk aversion."