Mauldin on Trade Deficits

Mauldin has yet another excellent article regarding trade and trade deficits, as he says: "I have to confess something: I run a huge trade deficit. It’s not with China or Mexico, but with Amazon. I buy all sorts of goods from them and Jeff Bezos has yet to spend a penny with me. It’s just not fair."

The U.S trade deficit is just as useful.  It does two very good things, 1) it gives us lots of cheap stuff, and 2) sends lot of U.S. dollars around the world to help maintain our currency as the world's reserve currency.

A great many people do not realize what advantages you get by issuing the world's reserve currency (like being able to run 130% debt-to-GDP without completely destroying your economy... yet).

If we pursue aggressive protectionism, it will deeply incentivize other countries to not hold as many U.S. dollars in their reserve pools and thus erode the dominance of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.

This trade war nonsense is the only reason I refused to vote for Trump, because I understand the nature of trade and the advantages of our country issuing the world reserve currency.

Hopefully, Trump does not destroy this advantage with his tomfoolery.

Mauldin's article is posted below, but without images, since my email does not load images.
If you want the chart and image version, go to Mauldin's site, here:
http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/the-trade-deficit-isnt-the-boogeyman

Not Petya: Russia's Cyberattack on Ukraine

A fascinating article about how cyber attacks can cause collateral damage:
https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

U.S. Public Pension Crisis

I apologize to any regular reader.  I have not written as much lately.  I have been busy, which is both good and bad.

Anyway, Mauldin has an article, titled "The Pension Train Has No Seatbelts" regarding the public pension crisis in the U.S. that is packed with a lot of useful and scary data.

Most of the states in the U.S. are underwater financially, and some of them are going to go belly up very soon (like Illinois, for example).  Even the state with the highest average income (Connecticut) is short by around 50% of their stated pension obligations.

This is not going to end well.

It is why I am completely convinced that biotechnology and life and health extension must happen.  If it doesn't, our civilization collapses.

So, people of my generation need to begin to get used to the idea of living and working for the next 300 years to try to fix this insane situation.  Fortunately, biotechnology will allow us to do that.  Companies like BioTime, Asterias, and AgeX are at the forefront of this, and have been for years now.

The biotechnology age of humanity is dawning, and I --for one-- look forward to being an elf.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

I know we live in a globalized world, but it always amazes me that legislation passed in the EU causes me to received dozens of email regarding privacy policies. 

Not that I dislike the regard for privacy, but it is a lot of work.

Syria, Russia, and Chemical Weapons, Oh my!

So, the Syrians gassed more of their people again...

The last strike we did on them was little more than a hand slap.  They got their airfield up and running again in 2 days (or so).

In order to actually punish them for this attack, we would have to spend a lot more resources.  I honestly do not think that Syria is worth it.

We need to pursue a soft power diplomatic approach here.  I would recommend going after Russia via the EU.  I am quite certain the the Europeans don't want a chemical weapons arms race, so they would likely be willing to pay a higher gasoline/LNG/propane bills to sanction the Russian energy sector.  That would hit Russia and actually leave a mark.

Any further military strikes in Syria are too costly to be worth it.

Trail of Bits: An Easy Guide to Meltdown and Spectre

I found an excellent blog post by Trail of Bits that helps to explain some of the details of Meltdown and Spectre.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2018/01/30/an-accessible-overview-of-meltdown-and-spectre-part-1/
It is especially useful when combined with a good explanation of branch prediction from Stack Overflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/2555197

I will link the other parts as they are published.