The World’s Most Radical Experiment in Monetary Policy Isn’t Working – A generation of Japanese accustomed to falling prices have diminished the impact of negative interest rates and other stimulus that were supposed to spur wage and price increases; ‘people love to save’ – Link here
Lines that caught my attention
A Bank of Japan survey in October found only 5% of respondents planned to spend more next year, while 48% intended to cut.
“The role of parents and children is getting reversed, where the parents from the bubble generation still act like children and want to buy the fancy car, while their children in the post-bubble generation worry about their parents’ spending,”
Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai blames negative rates and other central bank policies, such as quantitative easing, for worrying consumers. “It’s anxiety about the future,” he said in an interview. “They have to stop negative rates. That’s idiotic.”
The Man who studies the spread of ignorance – How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon – Link here
How to upgrade yourself – Link here
Greatest stock picker of all time: Buffett or Lynch? – Link here
With Pastures Shrinking, India May Have To Import Milk By 2021 – Link here– I think after reading this lot of FMCG/Dairy analyst would start getting queries on fodder strategy used by various listed dairy companies.
Lines that caught my attention
To boost milk yield, India would need to generate 1,764 million tonnes of fodder by 2020. But existing sources can only manage about 900 million tonnes of fodder–a shortage of 49%.
This demand and supply gap has pushed up milk prices by an average of 16% per annum, according to the according to the 2015 SOIL report.
The contribution of livestock to the incomes of landless and small farmers ranges between 20-50%.
Some time back I received a WhatsApp forward saying how farmers should be taxed to increase our tax to GDP ratio, how it’s unfair to not tax them….etc etc. here is different thought to tax system by Ajit Ranade (chief economist at Aditya Birla Group) – Quest to widen direct tax net – Link here
Indirect taxes in the form of excise taxes have risen by almost 50% for two consecutive years. Tax on petrol itself is up by 150% since July 2014. It is time we confront the curse of the silently escalating indirect taxes in India.
The recent data released on direct taxes pertaining to three years ago, shows taxes foregone on capital gains to be of the order of Rs54,000 crore.
The minimum threshold below which no income tax is paid is Rs2.5 lakh. This is 250% of India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP).
The Ultimate Way to Use Other People’s Money – Link here
The next time a resource sector is down big from its high and industry sentiment is terrible, start looking around for projects that have enormous amounts of capital sunk into them. Look for deposits firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying, drilling, and permitting. You’ll often find you can buy all their work and knowledge for pennies on the dollar. It’s the ultimate way to use other people’s money (OPM).
Charlie Munger’s Most Important Concept (Takeaways from the DJCO Meeting) – Link here
You won’t get that many great ideas and, You don’t need that many great ideas
I’ve heard a lot of larger, well-known successful investors repeat the general idea that “investing is harder than it used to be”.
I think there are three general potential advantages that can be gained in the markets: Informational edge, Analytical edge and Time-horizon edge.
I think that when great investors made fortunes using a particular technique and that technique is no longer working, they feel the game is much harder to win.
In the late 90’s, famed stock picker Julian Robertson closed the doors of his enormously successful hedge funds, citing that the market had “changed”, and that the strategies he used for decades were no longer working. At this same time, a new class of small stock pickers like Dan Loeb and David Einhorn were busy stacking up 30% annual returns in their early years when their funds were still small. Today Loeb and Einhorn are big, and both have hinted that things are different now.
Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, on how meditation made him a better historian – Link here – if you have not read Sapiens, I dare you to give it a miss, I believe it’s must read for all of us.
My main ambition as a historian is to be able to tell the difference between what’s really happening in the world and what are the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or in order to control what’s happening in the world
We seldom realise it, but all large-scale human cooperation is based on fiction.
Money is probably the most successful story ever told. It has no objective value. It’s not like a banana or a coconut. If you take a dollar bill and look at it, you can’t eat it. You can’t drink it. You can’t wear it. It’s absolutely worthless. We think it’s worth something because we believe a story.
Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley’s wealth bubble – Link here
“It was $1,100 for a fucking bunk bed and five people in the same room. One guy was living in a closet, paying $1,400 for a ‘private room’.”
“We make over $1m between us, but we can’t afford a house,”
“For all the feminist movement of ‘you can do it all’, the concept of home ownership is really truly out of reach,” she said
The cost of rent and childcare, which cost “more than I paid for my university education in Canada”
End of a golden age – Unprecedented growth marked the era from 1948 to 1973. Economists might study it forever, but it can never be repeated. Why? – Link here
At the time, an oil crisis took the blame for what seemed to be a sharp but temporary downturn. Only gradually did it become clear that the underlying cause was not costly oil but rather lagging productivity growth – a problem that would defeat a wide variety of government policies put forth to correct it.
As late as 1948, incomes per person in much of Europe and Asia were lower than they had been 10 or even 20 years earlier. But 1948 brought a change for the better. In January, the US military government in Japan announced it would seek to rebuild the economy rather than exacting reparations from a country on the verge of starvation.
The US Congress approved the economic aid programme that would be known as the Marshall Plan, providing Western Europe with desperately needed dollars to import machinery, transport equipment, fertiliser and food.
As societies embarked on reconstruction, no one could deny that citizens who had been asked to sacrifice in war were entitled to share in the benefits of peace. In many cases, labour unions became the representatives of working people’s claims to peacetime dividends.
In addition to the growing welfare state, strong productivity growth contributed to rising living standards. Rising productivity – increasing the efficiency with which an economy uses labour, capital and other resources – is the main force that makes an economy grow.
Six rounds of trade negotiations between 1947 and 1967, ultimately involving nearly 50 countries that signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, forcing manufacturers to modernise or give up.
Jobs were just for the asking; in 1966, West Germany’s unemployment rate touched an unprecedented 0.5 per cent.
The good times rolled on so long that people took them for granted. Between 1948 and 1973, Australia, Japan, Sweden and Italy had not a single year of recession.
Many of the basic technologies behind mobile telephones were developed in the 1960s and ’70s, but mobile phones came into widespread use only in the 1990s. Often, a new technology is phased in only over time as old buildings and equipment are phased out.
Moreover, for reasons no one fully understands, productivity growth and innovation seem to move in long cycles. In the US, for example, between the 1920s and 1973, innovation brought strong productivity growth. Between 1973 and 1995, it brought much less. The years between 1995 and 2003 saw high productivity gains, and then again considerably less thereafter.
Today, nearly 40 years on, voters are again turning to the Right, hoping that populist leaders will know how to make slow-growing economies great again.
More than a generation ago, the free-market policies of Thatcher and Reagan proved no more successful at improving productivity and raising economic growth than the policies they supplanted. There is no reason to think that the populists of our day will do much better. The Golden Age was wonderful while it lasted, but it cannot be repeated. If there were a surefire method for coaxing extraordinary performance from mature economies, it likely would have been discovered a long time ago.
I think Zomato is doing something every interesting, which probably has never been tried before in restaurant/food industry anywhere in the world- Zomato Infrastructure Services – 101 – Link here
There won’t be any fixed cost for restaurant brands to use Zomato Infrastructure Services. In fact, we will only charge them a nominal percentage of their revenue – we win only if these brands win. Our ZIS team will act as a key partner for them to make their business successful, and in the process, our business successful. Talk of win-wins – business doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be a win-lose situation.
Arvind Dixit – he was the COO of Wendy’s India in his previous role. He has been working with large scale QSRs for all the 18 years of his work life.
Our initial estimates tell us that with some hard work, we can have a 100 locations by the end of 2018.
Buffett’s Honor versus 3G – Link here
Take away the rubbish in data”—read discrepancies— and “our actual growth rate is around 4%, about half of what is being claimed.” – Link here
“The bulk of growth has apparently materialised from Rs 140,000 crore Take away the rubbish in data”—read discrepancies— and “our actual growth rate is around 4%, about half of what is being claimed.”
The race for autonomous cars is over. Silicon Valley lost – But there’s still money to be made by tech companies in the automotive world – Link here
Why Swedes overpay their taxes – Link here
Manifestos And Monopolies – Link here
(Video) Somehow This Amazing Electromagnetic Car Suspension System Never Got Popular – Link here