Friedman on the “Two Chinas” and How Putin Saves Face

2024-09-13

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The prevailing narrative around oil is that a global supply glut and weakening demand from China will continue to keep oil prices down.

The reality is that oil isn’t going away anytime soon.

Josh Young, the founder and CIO at energy investment firm Bison Interests takes us on a world tour of oil-producing nations, explaining why there is “a lot less spare capacity than people think.” That includes capacity from Guyana, which some have called “the next Saudi Arabia.” He also believes the China demand story is overstated.

You will also hear about which OPEC nations might be cheating on their quotas, the nuances in the Exxon v. Chevron dispute, the future of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve… and what

2024-08-09

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the US and its allies froze over $58 billion in assets from Russian oligarchs and blocked major Russian banks from using the international payment system, known as SWIFT. Did the US cross a line in terms of weaponizing the dollar and denying access to the global financial system—opening the door to other nations losing confidence in the US dollar?

Saleha Mohsin, a senior Washington correspondent for Bloomberg News and my guest today on Global Macro Update, pegs the watershed moment for dollar weaponization back decades earlier, to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. She covers this in detail in her book, Paper Soldiers, which has been one of my favorite geopolitical reads of the year.

We delve further into dollar weaponization in our interview, along

2024-08-02

As the US and its Western allies realign supply chains to strengthen economic resiliency, the cost of certain goods and commodities will go up. I call this “resiliency-driven inflation.”

I received a note from renowned economist Bill White about this, which prompted our interview. Bill is a former chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD. He has served at the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, and he is a long-time favorite speaker at the Mauldin Economics Strategic Investment Conference.

Bill and I share concerns about an extended era of both higher inflation and higher interest rates. He sees us moving from an age of plenty, which he pegs as roughly 1990 to 2020, to an age of scarcity. In our interview, he discusses the five key macroeconomic factors

2024-07-26

Something phenomenal happened in 2001. Humanity generated more information in a single year than it had in all of human history, combined, up to that point. Since then, the amount of information available to us has gone parabolic, as documented by former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri in his fascinating book, The Revolt of the Public.

Gurri explains the effects of this information “tsunami,” which underpinned events from the Arab Spring to Javier Milei’s ascendency in Argentina to the abrupt turnaround of China’s Zero-COVID policies.

The information tsunami has led to a breakdown in the public’s trust in institutions and the elites in charge. Many of us have sensed this happening for years now, but I believe Gurri has done the best job of articulating the nuances of this phenomenon.

2024-06-28

We are entering a golden age of macro investing says Harris Kupperman, or “Kuppy” as he’s colloquially known.

Kuppy is the founder and CIO of Praetorian Capital, where he publishes an excellent, free investor letter (link below) that I read regularly. In it, he’s written about the “great macro dreamscape,” where the world unravels largely in response to runaway government debt.

While many of Kuppy’s readers took his forecasts in a negative light (and there will be negative fallout, particularly inflation), he is more focused on the opportunities it will create for macro investors.

We dig into those opportunities in detail in this interview, with Kuppy sharing specific areas—including offshore energy—that he likes. We also discuss his success with uranium, and how our tense