Prepare for a worldwide market crash

by philg

I had some cash sitting in a checking account due to selling our house in Maskachusetts and becoming a renter here in the Florida Free State (a relocation analysis). If this had happened a few years ago, I might have let the money sit in checking until the day when it is time to get super extra stupid again and buy a house here in Florida (trade “call the landlord and open the door to the maintenance guys one hour later” for “spend a week begging contractors to come over”). But with inflation for the stuff that we might actually buy, e.g., houses, aircraft, etc., running at 20 percent annually, “park it in checking” didn’t seem viable.

I didn’t have enough confidence in the U.S. dollar or the Democrats’ muscular central management of the economy to buy more U.S. stocks. Buying bonds seems literally crazy given that the interest rate is lower than the official inflation rate. Buying TIPS doesn’t seem wise given that they’re pegged to the official inflation rate, which is way lower than the inflation rate for our family. So… that leaves non-U.S. stocks. The euro seems to have some of the same inflation risks as the USD, with governments using the same logic that Americans used from 1961 through 1975 with respect to the Vietnam War (“if we just throw some more cash at fighting this enemy, we cannot be defeated”; the enemy today, of course, is SARS-CoV-2).

But my beloved Sweden has its own currency! And that currency is up quite a bit against the euro (i.e., of course I am late to the party!):

(The dollar has lost roughly 10 percent of its value against Swedish krona as well.)

From Best way to invest in Sweden? (September):

I do think the Swedes will prosper in the long run due to superior mental health, a focus on something other than COVID-19, their kids having an extra year of in-person school compared to kids in U.S. cities, etc. I want to invest in Sweden with a 10-20-year horizon.

I have now put my money where my mouth is. The house sale proceeds are, as of today, in EWD, a high-fee index fund of Swedish stocks that I never could figure out how to buy directly as an American.

However, since I am the world’s dumbest investor, if I have moved money from cash to stock that can only mean one thing going forward: a worldwide stock market crash (or at least a crash in the Swedish market and/or currency!). You have been warned!

In the best tradition of Wall Street, if this investment outperforms, I will claim credit as a farsighted genius, second only to Mileva Marić, who explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and formulated the special and general theories of relativity. If this investment underperforms, I will say that it is my version of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Investing, in which I support a society that had the courage to carry on educating children, working, socializing, breathing without masks, etc. despite recognizing that COVID-19 would kill some people (albeit at a much lower rate than in a lot of countries that were celebrated for their mask and shutdown orders). The Swedes even managed to get through 2020 and 2021 without the marijuana that California and Massachusetts governors/covidcrats deemed “essential” (“Cannabis in Sweden is illegal for all purposes.”).

Readers: What are doing right now for protecting savings from Bidenflation?

Related:

  • “Annual inflation hits 30-year high” (The Hill, today): The consumer price index (CPI), which tracks inflation for a range of staple goods and services, rose 0.9 percent last month and 6.2 percent in the 12-month period ending in October, the highest rate in the U.S. in 30 years. Analysts broadly expected the CPI to rise by 0.5 percent last month, up from a gain of 0.4 percent in August, and 5.8 percent over the past year.
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What’s going on at the Kyle Rittenhouse trial?

by philg

I have skimmed headlines regarding the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. This is not the kind of news that I follow closely, so I hope that readers will catch me up on everything important. Is it correct to say that there was a gunfight in Kenosha among a bunch of white people who had different points of view regarding Black Lives Matter? And there is photographic and/or video evidence of who was pointing guns at whom? How did this evidence come to exist? Were people holding up mobile phone cameras while guns were drawn? Or is the electronic evidence coming from surveillance cameras that happened to be on nearby buildings?

Is there so much electronic evidence that it is possible to reconstruct what happened? (Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially if there is a lot of drama, such as gunshots.)

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Bidenflation will make it easier for rich people to avoid estate tax?

by philg

President Biden promised chicken soup for our envious souls in the form of taking money away from rich people. But the inflation associated with Big Government and Bigger Government is already making rich corporate executives richer (easier to meet targets expressed in nominal dollars; see Is Elon Musk one of the bigger winners from inflation?). A recent Bloomberg article makes it look as though inflation also makes it much easier to work around the estate tax. From “The Hidden Ways the Ultrarich Pass Wealth to Their Heirs Tax-Free”:

First, Knight cycled millions of Nike shares through a series of trusts that effectively moved billions of dollars’ worth of stock price gains from his estate to his heirs, tax-free. Then he put most of his remaining shares into a vehicle called Swoosh LLC and let a trust controlled by his son, Travis, purchase a stake at a big discount. The chain of trusts let hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends flow to Knight’s heirs with him covering the income taxes. All this planning also ensured his family would retain control of his sneaker empire.

The foundation of Knight’s strategy is the grantor-retained annuity trust, or GRAT. His first step was to set up nine GRATs, which successfully transferred Nike shares now worth $6.1 billion to heirs tax-free from 2009 to 2016. Two other GRATs that show up in public filings received about $970 million of unspecified assets from Knight. The filings don’t disclose the ultimate beneficiaries, but Lord says that, based on how family wealth transfers usually work, they might include the family of Knight’s late son, Matthew, who died in 2004.

Officially, gifts are taxable: If you send someone more than $15,000 per year, you’re supposed to file a separate gift tax return, with the total counting toward your $11.7 million lifetime estate-and-gift-tax exemption. (Double that for married couples.) Once you reach that threshold, you must pay a 40% levy. But giving heirs the right to profit, risk-free, from your investments? Not a taxable gift if you route it through a GRAT. “It looks like the heirs didn’t receive anything of value, but in fact they have been given all of the upside growth potential,” says Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College.

[section on the grantor-retained annuity trust machinery]

Put in assets, such as stocks, that have a good chance of making money over time. Technically this isn’t a taxable gift, as long as the GRAT is set to repay you the initial value of the assets in the form of an annuity, usually over two or three years.

If the assets go up in value during this period, the gains can stay in the GRAT, minus a (usually low) minimum rate tied to interest rates. Whatever’s left goes to the heirs tax-free.

If the assets drop in value during that time, your heirs are unaffected. You can pretend the GRAT never existed and try again. The more GRATs you set up—and some of the ultrarich open one monthly—the higher the chance some will succeed.

In our current inflationary environment, it is a lot more likely that assets in the trust will go up in value (expressed in nominal dollars rather than real (inflation-adjusted)). Thus, the more money President Biden and the Democrats promise to spend, the richer the children and grandchildren of today’s super rich should become. American tax law in general and estate-/trust-related law in particular are so complex that it takes a $600/hour lawyer to figure it all out and a layperson’s head will be left spinning, but I think the Bloomberg article is worth reading.

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Scientists on the gridiron

by philg

I love the imagery in this New York Times headline: “Scientists Fight a New Source of Vaccine Misinformation: Aaron Rodgers”. Here’s how it renders, for those who are not loyal subscribers:

From the article:

So when news broke that he tested positive for the coronavirus last week and was unvaccinated, Rodgers justified his decision to not get vaccinated by speaking out against the highly effective vaccines and spewing a stream of misinformation and junk science. Medical professionals were disheartened not just because it will make it harder for them to persuade adults to get vaccinated, but because they are also starting to vaccinate 5- to 11-year-olds.

“When you’re a celebrity, you are given a platform,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “When you choose to do what Aaron Rodgers is doing, which is to use the platform to put out misinformation that could cause people to make bad decisions for themselves or their children, then you have done harm.”

Scientists in their lab coats are rushing from the 20-yard line trying to get to the touchdown zone in which 5-year-olds are meekly waiting for their injections with the emergency use authorization (i.e., not FDA-approved) vaccine that will protect them from a killer of 82-year-olds. The scientists are bravely knocking over linebackers, cornerbacks, and safeties.

Separately, it is tough to find a reference for this, but I think that Richard Nixon said “You don’t want to be a candy-ass on the gridiron.”

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Does the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill give us some insight into the cost of immigration?

by philg

With the U.S. already having spent more, as a percentage of GDP, on infrastructure than Germany (previous post), how did we get to the point that we needed to spend another $1.2 trillion? (sounds like a lot, but maybe $1.2 trillion will be the price of a Diet Coke by the time some of these projects are completed)

In How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure? I did a rough calculation that every new migrant would cost the U.S. $250,000 in infrastructure expense. At that rate, the $1.2 trillion will build (or repair) enough infrastructure for 4.8 million migrants (as many people as live in Los Angeles+San Jose (the cities themselves) or about four years of legal immigration under the pre-2021 rules).

So, maybe we could look at this as catching up to the costs of the immigrants who arrived since 2017. On the other hand, is the money going to be spent in states where immigrants have settled and/or where population is growing? And on the third hand, why is infrastructure spending federalized? Don’t individual states have a better idea of what infrastructure is required? Wouldn’t it make more sense for states to tax, borrow, and spend on infrastructure as necessary than to send money up to central planners and have them, sitting in Washington, D.C., try to figure out whether a bridge that is 2,500 miles away should be rebuilt?

Here in Florida, infrastructure spending includes some awesome signage:

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico, by a Harvard professor): if we ignore costs such as traffic and school congestion, there are some financial benefits to natives from low-skill immigration, but they all go to the rich at the expense of the poor and working class (i.e., low-skill immigration transfers wealth from American workers to American landlords and corporation owners)
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Harvard Art Museums shows us the alternate universe of non-profits

by philg

Here’s a request for money from the Harvard Art Museums, recently received in the mail:

They lead with the fact that they were closed for 1.5 years. Surrounded by fully open (“essential” according to the governor) marijuana and liquor stores, adults meeting in restaurant-bars after Tinder matches, etc., the Harvard Art Museums decided that they would all sit at home and they want potential donors to know that. If we assume that the primary mission of an art museum is to have people come in and look at art, the non-profit did nothing to further their primary mission during this 1.5-year period, despite the fact that they were ordered closed by the governor for only about 3 months of the 18-month closure that they proudly highlight.

(Even now, they won’t be executing all that aggressively on their primary mission; visitors have to make online reservations before showing up, a significant discouragement to those strolling around (fully masked, of course!) Harvard Square.)

Readers: Does this seem like a good illustration of the alternate universe inhabited by non-profit organizations? A for-profit enterprise wouldn’t expect to win points with customers by highlighting more than a year of voluntary closure, would it?

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Wisdom from Greta Thunberg at COP26

by philg

The wisest comment regarding the most recent mass in-person gathering by the elite? “Greta Thunberg tells protest that COP26 has been a ‘failure'” (BBC):

Ms Thunberg said: “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.”

She described the UN climate change summit as a “two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah” to “maintain business as usual” and “create loopholes to benefit themselves”.

The logical inconsistency of the gathering was impressive, even by coronapolicy standards. We’re in a climate crisis, so we’ll agree to stop cutting down forests nine years from now (in 2030; BBC: “Experts welcomed the move, but warned a previous deal in 2014 had ‘failed to slow deforestation at all’ and commitments needed to be delivered on.”).

[As with Ayn Rand, I can agree with Greta Thunberg on the description but not the prescription.

She said: “We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.

“The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.

If this is a 100-year problem, as we’ve been previously told that it is by the climate modelers, why does it make sense to try to deal with it via 2021 technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_aviation was not very impressive compared to what is doable today. If we need to cool off the planet in 2081, won’t we be able to ask a Chinese space company (“Red Origin”?) to pull down the shades for a few days? Greta T. says this is a “technological solution that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere”, but even a 60-year horizon is nearly impossible to predict. The integrated circuit (“chips”) revolution was transforming lives in the 1980s (PCs and dial-up networks). The first inkling of the modern semiconductor transistor was in 1925 (Julius Edgar Lilienfeld), but it wasn’t until after William Shockley and colleagues at Bell Labs made a prototype in late 1947 that anyone could reasonably have begun to foresee the 1980s tech landscape. (so maybe 30 years is about the limit for the smartest person with the best crystal ball?) From the point of view of someone in 1947, the world of 2007 was, in fact, packed with technological solutions that had suddenly appeared seemingly out of nowhere and the world of 2047 will be yet more advanced (maybe you’ll be able to find an Xbox Series X in stock at Walmart by then!). Furthermore, we don’t have to go it alone. If we go back 60 years from today, China was suffering from famine and poverty in the Great Leap Forward. India was deeply impoverished. Taiwan was not a place to get advanced electronic components. Korea was recovering from a war, not making OLED panels, etc.]

No really related… carbon sequestration Palm Beach style:

Related:

  • How’s the Climate Change summit in Glasgow going? (“For nearly two years, the global elite have been telling the peasantry not to gather across households for fear of spreading deadly SARS-CoV-2. The global elite have closed borders as well (except for the U.S. southern border, which must remain open), because one certainly wouldn’t want to give a variant virus a chance to infect a new area. It is doubly bad when people from different countries mix. Since at least 2015, when elites gathered in Paris via Gulfstream, elites have been telling the peasants not to emit CO2.”)
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What is the practical highway speed limit in Florida? (and in other states)

by philg

I caught an Uber from Jupiter to PBI the other morning. My Colombiana driver (I did not actually ask for this driver’s gender ID; should it be Colombianx?) blasted down the left lane of I-95 at 90 mph.

(Was this unsafe in a subcompact Honda C-HR? Certainly not! We were both wearing masks.)

I assume that an Uber driver knows the real-world speed limit and therefore that 90 mph is slower than speeding ticket territory. That raises the question: how fast would one have to drive on the straight perfectly smooth highways of Florida to be pulled over?

Based on what I have seen, traveling at 80-85 is a 75th percentile speed on I-95 in South Florida or on Florida’s Turnpike towards Orlando. Back in Massachusetts, I would say that the real-world limit is 80 mph (i.e., that one is likely to get a ticket driving above 80; note that Maskachusetts highway standards are lower than in Florida, where everything is newer and can be done to the latest highway engineering textbook standards).

Readers; What’s the real speed limit in your state?

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Locked-down, pregnant, and stoned is actually a great way to go through life…

by philg

…. in the opinion of American pregnant people.

“Rates of Prenatal Cannabis Use Among Pregnant [People] Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (JAMA):

Considered an essential business in California, cannabis retailers remained open during the pandemic with record sales in 2020. We used data from Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), a large integrated health care delivery system with universal screening for prenatal cannabis use to test the hypothesis that rates of prenatal cannabis use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of 100 005 pregnancies (95 412 [people]), 26% were Asian or Pacific Islander; 7%, Black; 28%, Hispanic; 34%, non-Hispanic White; and 5%, other, unknown, or multiracial. The patients were a mean age of 31 years (median, 31 years).

… In the ITS analysis, we found that prenatal cannabis use increased by 25% (95% CI, 12%-40%; Table) during the pandemic over prenatal cannabis use during the 15 months before the pandemic.

Note that I have edited the title and a portion of the text to remove offensive language that is inconsistent with #Science and CDC Guidelines.

Related:

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