No. of Recommendations: 17
NO ONE ELSE has silicon valley. NO ONE ELSE has the magnificent 7 or whatever euphemism we use for the technical leadership of the world these days. And despite the Chinese doing perhaps better than expected, NO ONE ELSE has AI leadership.
Fair points, though some might quibble about the last one.
The US has a half dozen gigantically successful firms, without a doubt, but the overall performance of the rest of the US equity market *businesses* is no better than the performance of the *businesses* in (say) Europe. Outside the giants, the financial return advantage of recent years has been about rising valuation multiples, not better economics, despite the low tax rates and business-friendly labour laws.
The real sugar high that is sometimes missed is debt. If aggregate borrowing in an economy is rising rapidly, that brings aggregate profits and consumption forward from the future, depressing them later by a somewhat greater amount. Unless the debt is defaulted.
it seemed insane to me that any US leader should ever even want to play chicken with the bullet train that carries all that foreign money into the US every month.
Indeed : )
The sugar rush is underappreciated.
Imagine a poor country with hard working people. Imagine lending those folks trillions of dollars at low rates, year after year, decade after decade, with the interest paid by more borrowing. Money keeps falling from the sky, so their companies do outstandingly well and living standards soar--lots of true local total factor productivity, but hugely accelerated and flattered by the continuous flow of extra capital from outside. Taxes can be low since the inflows plug the spending gap. The populace gets pretty rich, the economy soars, the companies are gushers of profits, and their equity markets rise to the moon. The money keeps pouring in, though it's now smaller than the economy.
And how will they do when the tap gets turned off? How will the companies do? The consumers? The stock market? All the human and physical capital is still there, but the tail wind of extra capital is now a head wind. Just for starters, either taxes go from unusually low to unusually high, or you get a massive debt default, or a currency crisis, or some combination of the above. Right now I think you can get some Argentine bonds maturing in 2117 for about 40 cents on the dollar.
Jim
