News Items with John Ellis (2024)

25/10/2023

A key stat of "future performance":

13. China is increasing its lead over the US in AI patent filings, underscoring the Asian nation’s determination to shape and influence a technology that could have broad implications for the world’s richest economies. Chinese institutions applied for 29,853 AI-related patents in 2022, climbing from 29,000 the year prior, according to data that the World Intellectual Property Organization provided to Bloomberg News. That’s almost 80% more than US filings, which shrank 5.5%. Overall, China accounted for more than 40% of global AI applications over the past year, the data from the United Nations-affiliated agency showed. Japan and South Korea rounded out the 2022 leaders, with a combined 16,700 applications. (Source: bloomberg.com)

Antarctica's lost world

24/10/2023

Separate Science and Technology Edition:

1. Astronomers have created a detailed atlas of almost 400,000 galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood. The Siena Galaxy Atlas was compiled using data from the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab telescopes, and is designed to be the pre-eminent digital galaxy atlas for large galaxies. It’s a treasure trove of information for researchers investigating everything from galaxy formation and evolution to dark matter and gravitational waves. It’s also freely available online for the public to explore. (Source: noirlab.edu)

Science/Technology Items.

24/10/2023

Depressing statistic:

4. In a year when the US economy exceeded almost everybody’s expectations, the underlying federal deficit roughly doubled, spotlighting a dire fiscal trajectory likely to only worsen the partisan budget battles in Washington. The government ran a $2.02 trillion deficit for the fiscal year through September, after adjustments to remove the impact of President Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program, which was scotched by the Supreme Court. The gap is $1.02 trillion more than the prior year. The surge is a powerful illustration of a fiscal path that’s triggered warnings from economists, politicians and credit rating agencies. It also helps explain why yields on longer-term US Treasuries are reaching highs unseen since before the global financial crisis, with the government needing to issue ever more debt to cover the shortfall of revenues relative to spending. Ten-year yields surpassed 5% on Monday. (Source: bloomberg.com)

Xi goes to the bank.

23/10/2023

This is the most important national security issue on the agenda.

1. They call it Q-Day: the day when a quantum computer, one more powerful than any yet built, could shatter the world of privacy and security as we know it. It would happen through a bravura act of mathematics: the separation of some very large numbers, hundreds of digits long, into their prime factors. That might sound like a meaningless division problem, but it would fundamentally undermine the encryption protocols that governments and corporations have relied on for decades. Sensitive information such as military intelligence, weapons designs, industry secrets and banking information is often transmitted or stored under digital locks that the act of factoring large numbers could crack open. Among the various threats to America’s national security, the unraveling of encryption is rarely discussed in the same terms as nuclear proliferation, the global climate crisis or artificial general intelligence. But for many of those working on the problem behind the scenes, the danger is existential. (Sources: nytimes.com, media.defense.gov)

The Chairman of everything.

22/10/2023

Weekend News Items is up on the internets.
Subscribe now while supplies last.
https://substack.news-items.com/14dayfreetrial

Unity of fronts.

21/10/2023

New piece on Issue 1 in Ohio and Issue 1 writ large.

Women's moment.

20/10/2023

Big News from Big Blue:

3. A brain-inspired computer chip can run AI-powered image recognition operations 22 times faster than comparable commercial chips, and with 25 times the energy efficiency. The IBM NorthPole chip intertwines its computational capability with associated memory blocks that store information. This allows it to bypass the so-called the von Neumann bottleneck – named after computing pioneer John von Neumann – which describes how modern computers slow down while waiting on information exchanges between more separated compute and memory units. The melding of computation and memory was inspired by the way the human brain works. IBM had previously built a chip based on this idea called TrueNorth. But NorthPole transforms the technology into a digital architecture that is compatible with the silicon chip technology used in contemporary computers. “It’s a new way to look at computer architecture,” says Dharmendra Modha at IBM Research. The IBM blogpost about this is here. (Source: newscientist.com, research.ibm.com)

The basis trade.

18/10/2023

Item of the Day:

8. A Country Garden $15 million coupon payment deadline has expired without word of payment, fueling expectations that China's biggest private property developer has defaulted on its offshore debt as the nation's real estate woes deepen. Non-payment would trigger cross defaults in other Country Garden bonds as is standard in bond contracts. The company has almost $11 billion of offshore bonds and a default would set the stage for one of China's biggest corporate debt restructurings. One bondholder of the tranche in question, who declined to be identified discussing confidential information, said he had not received payment on the coupon as a 30-day grace period ended. Country Garden reiterated on Wednesday that it expects to be unable to meet all of its offshore debt obligations and hopes to seek a "holistic" solution to its difficulties. Its statement did not directly address the question of whether there had been a default and representatives of the company declined to comment. (Source: reuters.com)

Wheat bread.

17/10/2023

Bridgewater CIOs on the implications of the second stage of tightening:

For the economy, we should see higher short-term and long-term rates for longer produce a grinding pressure on growth. As future easing is pushed back, the level of real interest rates has vastly diminished the incentives to borrow and leverage up relative to the stimulative real rates of the past 15 years. The credit system is healthy enough that an acute contraction in credit is not the most likely outcome, but a higher level of rates that persists for longer will close the arbitrage between the level of interest rates and the level of growth (changing the economics of leveraging up private assets) and, on the margin, will redirect income from spending to debt service, as existing debts are refinanced at higher interest rates.

Three Bridgewater CIOs on the implications.

17/10/2023

Item of the Day:

1. The world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers are transforming chatbots into a new kind of autonomous system called an A.I. agent. These agents can do more than chat. They can use software apps, websites and other online tools, including spreadsheets, online calendars, travel sites and more. In time, many researchers say, the A.I. agents could become far more sophisticated, and could replace office workers, automating almost any white-collar job. “This is a huge commercial opportunity, potentially trillions of dollars,” said Jeff Clune, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia who previously worked on this kind of technology as a researcher at OpenAI, the San Francisco start-up that built ChatGPT. “This has a huge upside — and huge consequences — for society.” (Source: nytimes.com)

Bonus link: A Daily Dave.

16/10/2023

Item of the Day:

12. China’s property sector is struggling to halt its unprecedented decline. The biggest developers have gone into default. What will happen to private equity that had enthusiastically bought into real estate during the euphoric years then, investors are asking. The fate of Ping An Real Estate Co., the wholly-owned subsidiary of insurance giant Ping An Insurance Group Co., is igniting a lively debate. The PE firm’s 2 billion-yuan ($274 million) bond, due next January, went through a roller coaster ride in recent months, hitting a yield of 30% in late August. As of the end of June, Ping An Real Estate — with 110 billion yuan in assets — held around 10 billion yuan in cash, allowing it to cover only about half of its interest-bearing debt due in the next 12 months. Over the last year, its business operations and liquidity positions have deteriorated rapidly alongside China’s property slump, with sales falling by more than half from their 2021 high. But worrying investors the most is not what shows up in financial reports, but liabilities Ping An Real Estate might be on the hook for off its balance sheet. In late September, while processing the company’s application for a new corporate bond, China Securities Regulatory Commission said it noticed that the firm had concealed an overdue loan totalling 200 million yuan. Ping An Real Estate routinely resorted to joint ventures for its investments, playing the minority shareholder role and giving out shareholder loans to the JV. This way, the private equity can be shielded from day-to-day operations — it is a financial firm, not a professional developer after all. In addition, these risky early-stage projects, along with their debt, don’t need to enter Ping An’s balance sheet. (Source: bloomberg.com)

And you can't miss it.

13/10/2023

Item of the Day: Plunge Protection!

7. China is considering forming a state-backed stabilization fund to shore up confidence in its $9.5 trillion stock market, according to people familiar with the matter. After at least two rounds of consultation with industry participants over a period of months, financial regulators including the China Securities Regulatory Commission recently submitted a preliminary plan to the nation’s top leadership, said the people, who asked not be identified discussing a private matter. While implementation details have yet to be finalized and there’s a chance the proposal will be scrapped, it calls for the fund to have access to total capital in the sum of hundreds of billions of yuan, one of the people said. The CSRC didn’t respond to a request for comment. (Source: bloomberg.com)

Agent of Egypt.

12/10/2023

Item of the Day:

10. Wolfgang Munchau:

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not the deep cause of anything, but the trigger of everything. Until a year ago, Germany reveled in its role as a geopolitical fence sitter. It was a country that was simultaneously of the east and of the west: dependent on the US for security, on Russia for gas, and on China for exports.

Russia's invasion exposed the unsustainability of diplomatic fence-sitting. It also exposed Germany's over-dependence on old gas-guzzling industries, and its lack of industrial modernisation. My sense of the debate in Germany right now is that the appetite for deep change is not all that big. We may instead be looking at a scenario very similar to what happened to Italy after the introduction to the euro - a long period of economic depression, a weakening of the classic political centre and a rise of extreme parties. (Source: eurointelligence.com)

Key ingredients of life.

11/10/2023

Item of the Day: The first one!

Outside activity.

10/10/2023

The Item of the Day is not for the faint of heart.

10. Penn Wharton Budget Model:

Under current policy, the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt whether explicitly or implicitly (i.e., debt monetization producing significant inflation). Unlike technical defaults where payments are merely delayed, this default would be much larger and would reverberate across the U.S. and world economies.

This time frame is the “best case” scenario for the United States, under markets conditions where participants believe that corrective fiscal actions will happen ahead of time. If, instead, they started to believe otherwise, debt dynamics would make the time window for corrective action even shorter. (Source: budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu)

From the Gaza Strip.

09/10/2023

Item of the Day:

8. Eurointelligence:

This is not the scenario Europeans had hoped to be in. They are the masters of political fence-sitting, and have now ended up being surrounded by war: in Ukraine, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and now Israel. They are subject to mass immigration from the south-east and the south. The political impact of immigration is much stronger today than it was in 2015. The bond markets have also crashed, which is immensely important for our economic stability, but this has now been pushed off the front pages. A generalised uncertainty has descended.

The one important analytical point we would like to make today is this. All the conflicts that are playing out today, military and economic, are the result of unsustainable policies: US policy in the Middle East; Israel's lurch to the far-right; Europe's chronically low levels of defence spending; Germany's special relationship with Russia and China; the euro area's superficial crisis fixes; and massive central-bank-funded fiscal stimulus. One can quip that the unsustainable ends. But it is quite something else to see it ending. Quite a few of those things on our unsustainables list have ended at around the same time. The accumulation of disasters is no accident. (Source: eurpintelligence.com)

War in the Middle East.

07/10/2023

A podcast with Joe Klein, myself, and Jim Haskel of Bridgewater Associates. #2024 presidential campaign

A podcast with Bridgewater Daily Observations.

06/10/2023

Laure's Movie Pick!

Taylor Swift and Beyonce to the rescue.

06/10/2023

Terrific piece by Mary Williams Walsh. Best piece of reported political journalism I have read in a while.

Sanctuary city.

05/10/2023

Data Item of the Day: The federal government is 43% larger than it was four years ago.

Jennifer Aniston.

04/10/2023

Amazing chart from today's News Items.

Attosecond pulses of light.

03/10/2023

This time next year, there will be an avalanche of reports like this one:

9. Tom Hanks and Gayle King, a co-host of “CBS Mornings,” have separately warned their followers on social media that videos using artificial intelligence likenesses of them were being used for fraudulent advertisements. “People keep sending me this video and asking about this product and I have NOTHING to do with this company,” Ms. King wrote on Instagram on Monday, attaching a video that she said had been manipulated from a legitimate post promoting her radio show on Aug. 31. The doctored footage, which she shared with the words “Fake Video” stamped across it, showed Ms. King saying that her direct messages were “overflowing” and that people should “follow the link” to learn more about her weight loss “secret.” It was not immediately clear what weight-loss product the ad was promoting or what company was behind it. Mr. Hanks issued a similar warning on Saturday, saying that an advertisement for a dental plan using his likeness without his consent was fraudulent and based on an artificial intelligence version of him. (Source: nytimes.com)

Taylor Swift.

02/10/2023

Itenm of teh Day:

As (Vogue editor) Anna Wintour began to speak, he (Sam Bankman-Fried) clicked a button and she vanished from his screen. In her place popped his favorite video game, “Storybook Brawl.” He had only a few seconds to choose his character.

He picked the Hoard Dragon. The Hoard Dragon was maybe Sam’s favorite hero to play.

“Yup,” said Sam, to whatever Anna Wintour was saying. He could still hear her through headphones. Unless she watched his eyes, she had no reason to think that he wasn’t paying attention. Sam didn’t want to seem rude. It was just that he needed to be playing this other game at the same time as whatever game he had going in real life. His new social role as the world’s most interesting new child billionaire required him to do all kinds of dumb stuff. He needed something, other than what he was expected to be thinking about, to occupy his mind. And so, oddly, the more important he became in the eyes of the world, the more important these games became to him. (Source: washingtonpost.com, amazon.com)

Talking with Anna Wintour.

30/09/2023

Item of the Weekend!

1. Researchers have reversed 'irreversible paralysis' in mice with complete spinal cord injuries using gene therapy. The team found that regrowing neurons is not enough to fully restore walking and that regenerative therapies must target specific neurons and guide them back to where they belong, which was previously unknown. There's a lot more work to do, but the Swiss and US team says it's the first step toward establishing the technology required to achieve the same in humans. "We expect that our gene therapy will act synergistically with our other procedures involving electrical stimulation of the spinal cord," says neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). Research paper is here. (Sources: sciencealert.com, science.org)

Weekend Items. One great video.

29/09/2023

Item of the Day:

2. Wheat, corn and soy surpluses were once a powerful tool of American statecraft. Today the source of America’s “agripower” is rapidly dwindling. The world’s top exporter of corn, soy and wheat for much of the past seven decades, the US is now facing a future of persistent agricultural trade deficits. The shortfall for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is estimated at $19 billion and is expected to balloon to almost $28 billion in fiscal 2024, according to Agriculture Department forecasts. This is an historic reversal. What does a country lose when it stops being the world’s leading food supplier? Global influence. Foreign governments and enterprises reliant on US commodity crops were motivated to play nice to keep the foodstuffs flowing. Yet gradually, as America’s grip on vital agricultural supply chains has slipped, nations with different agendas and alliances have emerged to take its place. (Source: bloomberg.com)

Vertiginous flight

28/09/2023

Item of the day is the first one in. today's News Items.

Eurointelligence:

We have been railing against faulty forecasting models and central bank complacency for quite some time, possibly to the annoyance of some readers. When hedge fund managers do the same, they do not merely express a policy disagreement. They exploit an arbitrage opportunity. By building up massive short positions in US treasuries, they are essentially placing a bet that the Fed and other central banks won't deliver on their inflation targets. The counterparty to these trades are traditional asset managers, like pension funds and insurance companies, who are long sovereign debt. If the hedge funds are right, you better watch this unfolding spectacle from a safe distance. That would be a financial crisis like no other. And there is not going to be a bailout at the end of it. The bailouts got us into this. They came at the beginning.

A European central banker told us in a private conversation some time ago that the worst possible case is for exactly this to happen, that markets lose confidence in the inflation targets. We are two years into an inflation shock that shows no sign of disappearing, and this is now starting to happen. The hedge funds are not the market. But the short positions against bonds, and also equities, are remarkable. We are not amongst those who consistently warn about financial crises and market meltdowns. We happily leave that game to others. But we can see clearly that a financial crisis in US treasuries would rock the foundation of the global economy. This is not just about inter-linkages between financial institutions. The global economy is dependent on dollars and treasuries. (Source: eurointelligence.com)

The iPhone of AI.

27/09/2023

Item of the Day:

12. The synthetic opioid fentanyl is well known for the many lives it has claimed – mainly in the US, but elsewhere too. Now, a less well-known class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes is starting to crop up in overdose cases, on both sides of the Atlantic. Nitazenes have recently been the subject of a national patient safety alert in the UK as a result of a spike in opioid-related deaths over the last two months, with several cases involving nitazenes. Some drugs in the nitazene class are 100 times more potent than morphine – so about as potent as fentanyl. However, nitazenes may be more deadly. (Source: sciencealert.com)

A new edition of 'Key Precincts'.

27/09/2023

My latest podcast with Taegan Goddard. We discuss Rupert's retirement, Fox and Trump, and the GOP Prexy campaign more generally. Here's the link:

‎Show Key Precincts, Ep Trump Beat Rupert Murdoch - Sep 26, 2023

26/09/2023

Everything is not fine.....
“What’s the matter with you?” isn’t exactly a winning message, so they might want to work on that. But “messaging” isn’t the problem. The reason so many voters aren’t on board with what might be called “the Biden narrative” is simple: They’ve run out of money.

So why is everyone so grumpy?

26/09/2023

Item of the Day: 2. Consumers in the market for loans to buy homes and cars are discovering that, because of the Federal Reserve’s rate increases, their money gets them a lot less than it would have a few years ago. Meanwhile, those with credit cards and other loans that carry rates pegged to broader benchmarks are finding they have gotten much more expensive. Fed officials signaled last week that they plan to keep interest rates high for quite a while. For families who don’t need to borrow, higher rates might not affect daily life too much. But for those who do, the Fed’s aggressive rate increases are really beginning to sting. “The bite is starting now,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. (Source: wsj.com)

Even more Evergrande.

25/09/2023

Items of the Day:

4. Chinese property stocks tumbled the most in nine months as concern over a possible China Evergrande Group liquidation added to fresh signs of stress across the industry. A Bloomberg Intelligence gauge of developer shares fell 7.1% Monday, taking its loss in valuation this year to almost $56 billion. Evergrande, which scrapped key creditor meetings at the last minute and said it must revisit its restructuring plan, dived 22%. China Aoyuan Group Ltd. was the biggest drag on the index, slumping by a record 72% after shares resumed trading following an 18-month halt. Market sentiment has taken a turn for the worse following a recent stream of negative news. Last week, China’s securities regulator said it launched an inquiry into Ping An Real Estate Co. over an undisclosed overdue loan payment. China Oceanwide Holdings Ltd. on Monday disclosed it is facing liquidation after a Bermuda court issued a winding-up order. Worries are also growing that Country Garden Holdings Co. may suffer an imminent default. (Sources: bloomberg.com)

If it's about Evergrande, it's in News Items.

24/09/2023

Weekend News Items leads off with that scary rock.

Trump up, Biden down.

24/09/2023

Murdoch retires, Trump on top.

Trump won.

20/09/2023

Bad news for Biden:

13. Either Donald Trump’s standing in early 2024 polls is inflated, or we are headed for a sizable realignment in how non-White voters cast their ballots. Multiple polls in recent weeks have shown Trump performing historically well among Black and Hispanic voters in head-to-head matchups with President Biden, helping put him neck-and-neck with Biden in a way he rarely was during their 2020 matchup. Across five high-quality polls that have broken out non-White voters in the past month, Trump is averaging 20 percent of Black voters and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. Both numbers — and especially that for Black voters — could set modern-day records for a Republican in a presidential election. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

Missense variants.

19/09/2023

Item of the day:

1. A Scottish research team believe they may have produced the "holy grail" alternative to palm oil. It is estimated that almost half of all food and cosmetic products on supermarket shelves contain palm oil. The huge demand has led to significant deforestation in areas where oil palm trees can grow near the equator. Food experts at Queen Margaret University (QMU) in Edinburgh say their new 100% plant-based ingredient is 70% better for the environment. And with 80% less saturated fat and 30% fewer calories, they are also hailing PALM-ALT as a significantly healthier option. Palm oil remains the world's most-produced vegetable oil, accounting for 40% of the total, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). It is hugely popular with food and cosmetics firms because it is so useful. (Sources: bbc.com, wwf.org.uk)

Forgotten orders are part of the service.

16/09/2023

Bad news for Biden:

9. Here are five takeaways from the latest Fox News survey.

--Inflation worries aren’t fading, as 91% are concerned about higher prices. It was 90% in May and March

--8 in 10 are concerned about housing costs, and almost as many about paying their bills.

--Views on the economy remain negative by more than three-to-one.

--A growing share think the administration’s actions to get inflation under control are hurting the economy, up 13 points compared to earlier this year.

--President Biden’s political base appears wobbly with record disapproval among loyal constituencies. (Source: foxnews.com)

Weekend News Items.

15/09/2023

What's the UAW strike about? Read this and you'll know.

The issue is "tiers."

15/09/2023

Poll ofthe Day:

6. As President Biden tries to sell Americans on an economic rebound, most Americans aren't buying it, according to an exclusive poll from the Suffolk University Sawyer Business School and USA TODAY that reveals major concerns about the state of the economy and little hope of people's outlook improving. What's worse for the incumbent president, Americans say they trust Donald Trump − not Biden − to fix it. Nearly 70% of Americans said the economy is getting worse, according to the poll, while only 22% said the economy is improving. Eighty-four percent of Americans said their cost of living is rising, and nearly half of Americans, 49%, blamed food and grocery prices as the main driver. (Source: usatuoday.com, italics mine)

Calculations per second.

13/09/2023

Item of the Day: Google does a great thing:

19. Google is launching new anti-censorship technology created in response to actions by Iran's government during the 2022 protests there, hoping that it will increase access for internet users living under authoritarian regimes all over the world. Jigsaw, a unit of Google that operates sort of like an internet freedom think tank and that creates related products, already offers a suite of anti-censorship tools including Outline, which provides free, open, and encrypted access to the internet through a VPN. Outline uses a protocol that makes it hard to detect, so users can surf the web largely out of sight from authorities who might want to block internet access. (Source: technologyreview.com)

Google does a great thing.

12/09/2023

Item of the Day:

2. China is set to become the world’s biggest car exporter this year, overtaking Japan. The watershed moment will mark the end of decades of dominance by European, American, Japanese and South Korean groups. Yet driving China’s global ascendancy are deep structural problems in the domestic auto industry, which threaten to upend car markets across the world. A stark mismatch between production at Chinese factories and local demand has been caused, in part, by industry executives mis-forecasting three key trends: the rapid decline of internal combustion engine car sales, the explosion in popularity of electric vehicles and the declining need for privately owned vehicles as shared mobility booms among an increasingly urbanised Chinese population. The result has been “massive overcapacity” in the number of vehicles produced in factories across the country, said Bill Russo, former head of Chrysler in China and founder of advisory firm Automobility. “We have an overhang of 25 million units not being used,” he said. (Source: ft.com)

An overhang of 25 million units.

25/10/2023

24/10/2023

24/10/2023

23/10/2023

22/10/2023

21/10/2023

20/10/2023

18/10/2023

17/10/2023

17/10/2023

16/10/2023

13/10/2023

12/10/2023

11/10/2023

10/10/2023

09/10/2023

07/10/2023

06/10/2023

06/10/2023

05/10/2023

04/10/2023

03/10/2023

02/10/2023

30/09/2023

29/09/2023

28/09/2023

27/09/2023

27/09/2023

26/09/2023

26/09/2023

25/09/2023

24/09/2023

24/09/2023

20/09/2023

19/09/2023

16/09/2023

15/09/2023

15/09/2023

13/09/2023

12/09/2023

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share