Weekend News Items.

Democracy sausages. Goodbye (and thank you) Roger Angell.

1. The War:

Ukraine’s military intelligence chief said the country would keep fighting until it evicts Russian forces from all of its territory—including Crimea and other areas effectively seized by Moscow in 2014—and called for deliveries of longer-range heavy weapons and warplanes from the West to help.

“I don’t know any borders except the borders of 1991,” Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov said, referring to the year of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. “Who can force Ukraine to freeze the conflict? This is a war of all Ukrainians, and if someone in the world thinks that they can dictate to Ukraine the conditions under which it can or cannot defend itself, then they are seriously mistaken.”

In an interview in his Kyiv office, Gen. Budanov, one of the architects of the country’s war effort, said that to speed its counteroffensive Ukraine urgently needs medium- and long-range missile systems, large-caliber artillery and strike aircraft to offset Russian advantages in manpower and equipment.

“We have already begun an offensive in certain points, but a large-scale offensive without these weapons will be very difficult,” the general said. (Source: wsj.com)

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2. Jeremy Grantham:

All 2-sigma equity bubbles in developed countries have broken back to trend. But before they did, a handful went on to become superbubbles of 3-sigma or greater: in the U.S. in 1929 and 2000 and in Japan in 1989. There were also superbubbles in housing in the U.S. in 2006 and Japan in 1989. All five of these superbubbles corrected all the way back to trend with much greater and longer pain than average.

Today in the U.S. we are in the fourth superbubble of the last hundred years.

Previous equity superbubbles had a series of distinct features that individually are rare and collectively are unique to these events. In each case, these shared characteristics have already occurred in this cycle. The checklist for a superbubble running through its phases is now complete and the wild rumpus can begin at any time. (Source: gmo.com, 1/20/22)

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Superficially, this bubble looks very much like 2000, focused on US tech. What I fear is that there are a couple of differences with 2000 that are more serious. What you never want to do in a bubble is mess with housing, and we're selling at a higher multiple of family income than we did at the top of the so-called housing bubble in 2006. The bond market recently had the lowest lows in the history of man, in 6,000 years of history. Energy has put up metal prices, and food prices are actually higher than they have ever been before in real terms."

……..We are really messing with all of the assets, and this has turned out, historically, to be very dangerous." (Source: cnbc.com, businessinsider.com)

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3. Web3.

This Andreessen Horowitz presentation on “the state-of-crypto” is smart, reasonably detailed and worth reading. Quote: “We are now beginning the third era of the internet — what many call web3 — which combines the decentralized, community-governed ethos of the first era with the advanced, modern functionality of the second era. This will unlock a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship.” (Source: a16zcrypto.com, interestingengineering.com)