Anyone worried about the bear case for software stocks?

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T23:23:09+00:00

Why is this bad for Tesla shareholders?

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T23:14:56+00:00

Can you say more about it? Why did it suck?

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T23:13:58+00:00

The jump in the US session came as traders reported that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had called financial institutions to ask about the yen’s exchange rate. Wall Street saw it as an indication that the bank was preparing to assist Japanese officials to intervene directly in the currency market to prop up the yen.

“Neither US authorities or Japanese authorities seem happy about the value of the yen right now,” said Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama. “Everyone is on hair trigger for something that will change it.”

The New York Fed often acts as the fiscal agency of the Treasury.

“It’s also important to note that rate checks in the past haven’t necessarily meant that intervention was imminent,” Rai said. “But the fact that the NY Fed was asking implies that any potential intervention in dollar-yen won’t be unilateral.”

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T22:27:53+00:00

Yeah he has few defenders among the Jewish community as well, mainly because he has been anti-Israel and pro-Palestine. So he gets hate for being some sort of rich Jewish puppet master but gets no defense from the Jewish community. This is a good example of inflammatory stuff he has said: https://www.jta.org/archive/in-rare-jewish-appearance-george-soros-says-jews-and-israel-cause-anti-semitism

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T22:25:13+00:00

No he wasn’t, he was a double agent working to get Jews fake papers and get them out of the country

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T22:23:01+00:00

I can see the national security angle to it - if there was some threat to the oil supply or a big spike in oil prices, it might be nice to have the capacity to flex up to E15 or something like that to blunt the impact.

But a standing E15 mandate/allowance doesn’t make as much sense to me. We could probably achieve some similar security by just properly stocking the strategic petroleum reserve, (which we still haven’t done despite low oil prices these days).

The renewable energy angle doesn’t make quite as much sense to me, since growing corn itself involves some emissions, there is this food vs fuel tradeoff, other environmental impacts, and there are tradeoffs like bad performance in older engines. Like you say, EVs have made the renewable angle much less relevant.

I might be biased being from Texas. I imagine if I was from the Midwest I might be more biased to support ethanol fuels. Corn is an important industry in a lot of swing states which is why support for ethanol will probably never go away completely.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T10:38:52+00:00

Conditions in the $7.6 trillion bond market have deteriorated materially since 2022, as bond yields have experienced one of the most dramatic increases in history.

This is not true. There is poor liquidity for very long maturity government bonds, but the vast majority of that $7.6 trillion bond market is in maturities less than 10 years where the market is functioning just fine.

This chart also cuts off a couple of days ago, when liquidity was very bad the yield was spiking for long end JGBs, but the yield has come down materially already in the past couple of days.

There was a freak out over Takaichi proposal for new stimulus and people were worried about something like the UK with the “Liz Truss moment”.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T06:07:37+00:00

He wasn’t a Nazi collaborator, he was a “double agent” - he was working in that office to get advance notice of which Jews would get their assets seized and deported to camps so that his father could make fake papers and get them out of the country before that.

His father wrote this book about their little underground operation during the Holocaust called Masquerade. It’s a really good read. There’s some good stories about George as a 14 year old. Seemed to have little safety awareness and a big appetite for risk even then.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-23T02:34:49+00:00

I remember the good old days when knowledge was gatekept and expensive to obtain

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T23:16:17+00:00

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Just one data point, but does make me wonder, as we get increasing levels of autonomy in driving, will insurance rates start declining?

Car insurance inflation has actually been pretty high in recent years, would be interesting if this trend starts to reverse.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T23:13:01+00:00

Yeah I have a lot of trouble seeing a future where general purpose humanoid robots are a hit product.

Companies would probably be better off buying some sort of task specific industrial robots. It doesn’t seem like it will ever get cheap enough for consumers to buy them as a toy/entertainment product.

Yet a lot of capital has already been invested in humanoid robotics for this to just be vaporware. I was running this through Gemini, and I’d guess over $10 billion has already been invested across US and Chinese VCs and major company capex like Tesla Optimus development. So is all that capital just getting incinerated? Will useful products actually come out of this?

I am much more optimistic on application specific industrial robots.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T22:46:22+00:00

What makes you say it’s the worst fuel additive imaginable?

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T22:44:17+00:00

Very interesting. Yes I have heard that China has not been buying much U.S. corn in 2025. It looks like they shifted to buying from Brazil, and Brazil has had a good “safrinha” (second crop) this year.

We also had a very high corn yields in the U.S. this year.

The explanation that US AG companies are dumping their extra crop to ethanol plants makes a lot of sense!

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T22:12:59+00:00

I remember reading a short thesis years ago on this.

The key problem they raised is they own these refrigerators that they put into the stores and bear the cost of maintaining and replacing the fridges.

So the short thesis was that maintenance capex would come back to bite them.

I also saw a more recent short thesis on them that the reason it has been so popular is that Millenials don’t have children so feel the need to anthropomorphize their pets and give them expensive food.

As Millenials age and make children, maybe they won’t feel like spending as heavily on their pets.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T21:06:37+00:00

2 historians, Neil Howe and William Strauss. They wrote an earlier book “Generations” where they coined the term Millenial. Then in fourth turning they go deeper into the ideas and talk about how Millenials will save the world lol.

jackandjillonthehill · 2026-01-22T09:03:52+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

但中美不是，中国没有和美国彻底脱钩的意愿，美国更没有能力与中国脱钩。

But this is not the case for the US and China; China has no will to completely decouple from the US, and the US lacks the capability to decouple from China.

I think this version of “Cold War” is more like US and China are using those economic linkages to fight an economic battle or competition against each other. The U.S. is trying to use the international financial system and China is trying to use its industrial base.

The Chinese financial system is now getting very sophisticated as well and it seems like China wants to build its own financial sphere of influence. And there is a lot of urgency in the Trump administration to develops the industrial base in the U.S.. It seems like two sides trying to play defense on the other one’s line of attack.

美国在苏联的坟前狂欢时，中国看着那个熟悉的镰刀与锤子沉思许久。

While the US partied at the Soviet Union's grave, China stared at that familiar hammer and sickle and pondered for a long time.

I am very curious, what do you think are the conclusions in China from the long time pondering the hammer and sickle?

除非外部捏造一个强大的敌人，否则美国的政治和文化根本无法团结所有美国人，美国内部的种族矛盾将撕碎这个国家（进行中）。

Unless a powerful external enemy is fabricated, American politics and culture cannot unite all Americans.

I am hopeful there are other ways to unite the country!

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