The Newsletter You Didn't Subscribe To - the mongoose
Your daily dose of nonsense - 23 July 2020
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What’s the plural of mongoose?
Source: Shannon Wild via Cosmos
Source: African Wildlife Foundation
Source: Dwarf Mongoose via Twitter
Interesting reframing of perception
Who doesn’t like gold. It’s shiny and it’s extremely tangible. We used to use gold as day-to-day currency at some point (more or less, probably as often as you see a £50 note, but I’m just speculating).
Then we got tired of carrying heavy stuff and decided to write pieces of paper that said “yeah, if you have this paper you can go redeem gold with it”. And we lived our lives saying that simply knowing that there’s gold behind this piece of paper was good enough, and we traded with this paper. Then at some point, Richard Nixon decided that the US dollar shouldn’t be so readily convertible back to gold, and here we are today - our currencies have nothing to do with gold anymore.
So then came the 2008 crisis, and the current crisis that we are living in today, and governments around the world are borrowing more money than ever, as shown in this chart from Bloomberg and Institute of International Finance data:
So the question is, what if we:
Pretended that we ultimately use gold as a currency; and
Re-expressed the value of this non-gold denominated debt numbers in terms of gold?
Here’s CrossBorder Capital’s chart in the US debt, re-expressed in gold:
Pretty neat, huh? The implications are yours to determine. I’d imagine that these might be some of the views that you might have:
“We should all go back to the gold standard!”
“No, if we used gold, governments can’t control inflation as effectively! No controlled inflation equals no controlled growth or no growth at all!”
“We should fuggedaboutit because they are all inferior and move to <insert some cryptocurrency here> instead!”
And the occasional:
Stuff that people do at home in a lockdown
In a previous issue, I discussed briefly whether the indoor plants market did well during the lockdown. Well, on a slightly different tangent, B&Q, the very popular DIY chain who has the cool address of diy.com, have just released their Q2 trading results. It's very impressive. Here are their year-on-year sales performance for the months of May and June:
If the lockdown does persist / get reimposed, I believe that most of us would want to get our hands dirty on some DIY project as well, if you haven’t already. A random google search has given me this list of DIY-related Instagram accounts to follow. Otherwise, if you already have a cool DIY project, I’d be happy to see some.
The permafrost is melting
So when things heat up enough, some things start melting. In this case, it’s our planet that is heating up. And one consequence that some people have always feared is that the permafrost melts. The permafrost is a layer of soil in the cold regions of the planet that are permanently frozen because, well, it’s cold enough all year round.
At one point in history (like, 500mil years ago), these regions were once green with vegetation (we find plant fossils in Antarctica today). And when things die, they somehow get buried and the microbes eat them up and turn them into things like methane. Ever wondered where natural gas comes from? It’s this same process too.
So, the permafrost is filled with gasses like methane. And do you know what’s potentially harmful about released methane? It’s up to 56 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (here’s the UN climate change page on it).
So problems beget problems - global warming may cause the permafrost to melt which in turn leaks methane, which in turn may exaggerate the problem. So, has methane leaked yet? Yes, yes it has, as the Guardian reports. Here’s the original scientific paper on this leak.