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Nick, I also like VICI here. Still might be early for any of these but the bull argument is the pressure on consumers slowly building and when they slow spending to pay down debt the economy will weaken. It's unlikely the Fed will play with a recession in an election year. Although they're likely all conservative I doubt one of them wants to be blamed for putting Trump back in the White House and, of course, Biden will be bending their ear through ex-Fed chair and current Treasury Secretary Yellen.
Poor airline investors, literally...:)
It certainly appears that O has found a bottom for now.
VZ vs. TLT, (long term bond ETF). This chart from a Seeking Alpha article shows how VZ, which now throws off almost a 9% dividend has acted like a long term bond as rates have moved up. Both are investible if you can answer the limbo question: How low can you go?...:).
I actually like VZ around this price as we were planning to change cell carriers when we moved but VZ has not only excellent cell service, but apparently, excellent fiber-optic internet service. Some may remember that we had Comcast Business in Santa Fe with 200mb download and excellent response time to outages. I was set to sign up for Comcast Business in Annapolis with 400mb service until I found that both our downtown house and our more remote home both had access to Verizon 1GB fiber service for $65 a month - flat rate for four years. This is less than half the cost for business level internet from Comcast. I've interviewed several users who all think the VZ fiber service is great. We'll see.
The question of course will be when will VZ begin getting a strong return on this CapEx? I'll have to listen to the last few quarterly presentations to see what they've been saying, then see if this is reflected in their quarterly reports. This is when I need a truly functional AI.
I noticed sellers came right back in to take profits. Classic risk-off retreat this morning lead by growth sectors, tech, discretionary and communications.
Below is a 20-year chart of MMM. The current 6.7% yield may prove to be a value trap as there is no technical price support at this level now that the $100 psychological area has been broken. Also both earnings and profits are down in 2023. The dividend is still well covered at 67% of earnings and the 67-year history of raising the dividend appears safe as long as there are no huge liability surprises. Also, MMM has bought back 6% of outstanding shares since the 2021 peak while raising the dividend only 1.4%, (one penny a year). Long term value investors may want to have MMM on their watch list.
It appears the UAW and the Big 3 could be getting closer to a four year agreement. GM is offering a 20% raise with 10% in the first year and up to 5 weeks of vacation. The union is still in fantasy land, asking for a 4-day work week, the return of a pension plan and a raise in the mid 30% range.
The real problem for the UAW is that their membership is down 45% since the early 2000s and new US manufacturing is moving to the Southern US. Also, this will only encourage automakers to automate more quickly. From the WSJ:
SPX closed the day yesterday at 4,349 just slightly above short term support and we're up slightly in the pre-market. There's a reasonable chance the market will pull back at the end of the day as the war in Gaza / Israel heats up.
Given everything else going on there hasn't been a lot of front page details regrading the FTX trial. Word is, SBF lawyers are going to claim that his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, was the mastermind behind FTX. She made her own case as reported by my favorite super-geek, Molly White. Here's a excerpt below. For the full geek-a-thon go to Molly's blog.
I saw that. Let's see where we end today.
Stock markets are down on persistent 4% CPI inflation. Investors are pricing in another rate hike in December. My only question is: When will it be obvious to the American consumer that it's time to stop taking on additional debt? Q1 still looks good for consumers to tighten budgets after the holiday hangover.
I own the bonds the banks wish they had; short term treasuries @ 5.4 - 5.5%..:).
Double post.
Oops, time for another 1:15 reverse split or a quick sale. If anyone is wondering, this would be a 6 cent stock without the previous reverse split.
ASTR is a dead man walking. They lost $2.55 per share last quarter. That is, a 93 cent stock lost more than double their share price in one quarter and much more than that in the previous two quarters.
Net profit margin: -8,677%.
Cash flow per share: -$16.36.
As ASTR circles the drain Kemp is looking for a suitor.
File this under; if it was easy, everyone would do it. Great article on CVX and CEO Mike Wirth. From Barron's;
How Chevron CEO Mike Wirth Is Riding Oil’s Big Comeback
Earlier this year, with Iranian navy helicopters closing in, the Advantage Sweet, a 274-meter-long crude-oil tanker cruising in international waters through the Gulf of Oman en route from Kuwait to Houston, sent out a distress signal...To no avail.
The next day, April 28, Iranian state TV released a chilling video showing armed, masked commandos rappelling down from their chopper to seize the ship, one of them raising his fist in apparent triumph.
Three months later, the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS McFaul received another distress call, this time from the Richmond Voyager, a very large crude carrier also in the Gulf of Oman. An Iranian naval vessel was stalking the ship and subsequently “fired multiple, long bursts from both small arms and crew-served weapons,” the Navy said, strafing the ship, with several rounds hitting the ship’s hull near crew living spaces. Fortunately, the ship sustained no casualties or significant damage, and the McFaul drove off the Iranian navy vessel.
Yes, this high-stakes geopolitical drama sits squarely in the remit of the Pentagon and the State Department. But as both tankers were managed or chartered by oil giant Chevron (ticker: CVX), it falls directly in the lap of Mike Wirth, Chevron’s CEO, for whom this is almost just another day at the office.
We’ve all heard how manifold the supply chain is for a company like Apple (AAPL) or Ford Motor (F), but when it comes to sheer global complexity, nothing comes close to running an international integrated oil-and-gas company like Chevron and other oil majors like archrival Exxon Mobil (XOM), BP (BP), and Shell (SHEL).
Chevron’s capital ($14 billion in capital expenditure), manpower (43,846 employees), scale (more than 100 countries), technology, chemistry, and processes (6,900 patents or patents pending)—and, yes, the accompanying political risk, including in the company’s home state of California—is ginormous. But when all of this works—as it is now, with the price of crude oil spiking from $67 a barrel in late June to $93 this past week—there are tens of billions of dollars to be made for shareholders. And Chevron has stood out from the pack in recent years.
“Chevron has done a better job over the last decade on capital allocation,” says Roger Read, an analyst at Wells Fargo, who has an Overweight rating on Chevron stock. “They’ve invested in their organic businesses. They’ve walked away from acquisitions when they didn’t make sense but also made the right deals.”
Read points to Chevron’s estimated free cash flow per share of $11.57 this year and $16.11 in 2024. Return on average capital employed, which indicates how profitable a company’s investments are, hit 22.7% last year. It has dipped to 15.3% this year because oil prices have been down, but, as Read says, a “midteens performance is a very good result.”
And Chevron stock has done well since Wirth took the reins on Feb. 1, 2018, outperforming the Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund (XLE), of which Chevron is a 18% component, and the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP). Chevron is lagging behind the S&P 500 index during Wirth’s tenure, but it handily outperformed the index last year—which is when Warren Buffett loaded up the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) truck with Chevron stock.
Buffett first bought some 48 million shares of Chevron in 2020s fourth quarter, then massively boosted his stake to 159 million in the first quarter of 2022 and topped off the holding to 165 million shares in the third quarter of last year. Since then, Buffett has pared back to 123 million shares, still a 6.3% stake worth over $20 billion. I recently wrote about a bet between Buffett and Wirth, with Buffett emailing me, “I entered into this speculation knowing Mike was far smarter than I am in finding oil and gas and who knows what other mental endeavors.”
Chevron and Occidental Petroleum (OXY) were Buffett’s two big oil plays as of late, with Exxon being conspicuously absent—although Exxon outperformed Chevron over the past year. “It’s not so much that Chevron did anything wrong; it’s more like Exxon corrected course,” Read explains.
To compete with Exxon and myriad other players, Chevron operates in a number of challenging environments, including Venezuela.
You may not realize it, but that country has the world’s largest oil reserves (bigger than Saudi Arabia), with some 17.5% of the world’s supply (303.8 billion barrels). Venezuela is also a barely functioning basket case and under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury and State Department.
How the heck does Chevron operate there?
“We’ve been in Venezuela for the better part of the last 100 years,” Wirth told me in an interview as part of our At Barron’s series. “Most other Western companies have actually left. We’ve got a number of Venezuelan employees, and we’re believers in the country. The rules that had been put in place by the U.S. government have recently been modified to encourage the flow of some of the wealth from Venezuela to the U.S. Funds from those oil exports can only be used for prescribed purposes. We’ve had to put in place a financial architecture to ensure that the cash [goes] to pay taxes, royalties, [and] legitimate expenses. We’re seeing Venezuelan oil come here, which has helped improve U.S. energy security.”
Then there’s Kazakhstan, where Chevron has a significant presence but had to reduce production for a time last year after a spate of violence. Also last year, the company pulled out of Myanmar because of “violence and human rights abuses.” Chevron has a 39.66% stake in Israel’s mega-Leviathan gas field, located some 80 miles offshore from Haifa. (Fun fact: Chevron’s predecessor discovered the massive Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, with its subsidiary becoming the predecessor of Saudi Aramco.)
That laundry list of locales reminds me of what an oil analyst once told me about yet-to-be discovered oil. “Oh, there’s plenty out there still,” he said. “Lots in Libya, Iran, and Iraq.” All the garden spots, I thought.
Chevron does operate in some friendlier environs, Australia being one of them, except that the company recently had to face down labor strife at its massive Gorgon liquid-natural-gas facility off the coast of northwest Australia, which provides much of Japan’s natural gas and some 5% of the world’s supply. In late September, Chevron and striking union workers agreed in principle to a deal that will raise wages and improve job security.
A major portion of Chevron’s production, though—39.4%—is right here in the good ol’ USA, including in the Permian Basin, which has created its own set of worries. Though Tom Loughrey, president of oil-and-gas research firm FLOW Partners, calls Chevron’s acreage in the Permian “one of the best oil and gas assets in the world,” he says that “Chevron has a relatively small acreage position for the size of their company.” And he says that “their performance is going down as their wells are getting closer together. Their capital efficiency has been dropping.”
Read disagrees. “We don’t worry about Chevron’s performance in the Permian,” he says. “Yes, some of the results may be underwhelming. The market had reasons for doubt. But we recognize there’s good and bad quarters, relative to expectations, relative to the most recent performance.”
Chevron pioneered the oil business in California through its early incarnations Star Oil and Pacific Coast Oil, the latter of which John D. Rockefeller bought in 1900 for a bargain $761,000, or $27.8 million in today’s dollars. Rockefeller then formed Standard Oil of California, which went on to become Chevron, later merging with Gulf Oil (1984) and buying Texaco (2001) and Unocal (2005). Chevron has kept its headquarters in California, that bluest of blue states, for 144 years, which made it particularly galling when earlier this month, its home state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, sued five oil companies; Exxon, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips (COP), and Chevron—accusing them of knowingly downplaying the damaging effects of fossil fuels.
Wirth was raised in purple state Colorado. His father worked at Coors, then owned by the conservative Coors family. Wirth attended the University of Colorado (majoring in chemical engineering) in crunchy granola Boulder, so he knows all about the game of red state/blue state.
“Climate change is real, there’s no doubt about it,” Wirth says. “Our company accepts the findings of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations] and is taking steps to decarbonize our business [to] help address the challenge. We’ve committed to spend $10 billion over just the next few years on hydrogen, renewable fuels, carbon capture and storage. For those who say, ‘You’re not doing enough,’ throwing more money at technologies that have not yet been proven at scale, that are not cost competitive, doesn’t necessarily make them better, it just throws more money at something.”
“There [are] millions of people who need access to energy in a cost-effective, clean, as well as a reliable way,” Chevron board member Baroness Dambisa Moyo told me in an At Barron’s interview earlier this year.
Some people have moral qualms about investing in oil stocks, which is understandable. Truth is, though, if we shut down Chevron et al., our economy would shut down, too. Looking just at the costs of what Chevron does—producing and selling hydrocarbons—without looking at the benefits reminds me of what Buffett’s partner Charlie Munger told me about Berkshire’s investment in Coca-Cola (KO):
“People have to take in this immense amount of water every day or they will die. One of the things you can do to add to daily pleasure is flavor the water and get a tiny touch of stimulation from it. That basically does more good than harm, in my opinion....If the average life on the planet is one week shorter because everybody is drinking soft drinks, I think that’s a choice people ought to be allowed to make.”
Munger continued, “What could be more asinine than making a judgment about something without taking into account both the advantages and disadvantages? What kind of a nut would just look at one side and not the other?”
Wirth and his investors have discovered that some folks may be doing that, bringing big risk right to Chevron’s front door.
Not sure I mentioned this, my latest fixed income rollover was to 6 month Treasuries, 5.5%.
Little Georgie is the gift that keeps on giving. The list of charges are as follows: Conspiracy, Wire Fraud, False Statements, Falsification of Records, Aggravated Identity Theft...oh, and Credit Card Fraud.
Given recent events in Israel this may fly under the radar this week. China's housing crisis is getting worse. From the WSJ:
China’s Country Garden Succumbs to Debt Crisis After Sales Plunge
Property giant fails to repay a loan and warns that it is unlikely to pay off all its international debt obligations
HONG KONG—Chinese property giant Country Garden failed to make an international debt payment after its apartment sales plunged in September, succumbing to a liquidity crisis that worsened over the past few months.
The 31-year-old developer said it wasn’t able to repay a $60 million loan denominated in Hong Kong dollars that was due. Country Garden said it also doesn’t expect to meet all its U.S. dollar bond and other offshore debt obligations when they come due, or within grace periods—effectively saying that it expects to default. The company has hired financial advisers and plans to hold talks with its offshore creditors.
More here:
https://www.wsj.com/finance/chinas-country-garden-succumbs-to-debt-crisis-after-sales-drop-84c85a79?mod=hp_lead_pos1
The more things change the more they stay the same in the Middle East. Apparently both sides need new leadership. Of course this isn't the direction of the world today. We continue on a path toward authoritarian leadership. Billionaires are the new kings and queens and money is speech.
Crypto is a digital financial transaction masquerading as an investment.
Reminds me of the rollercoaster ride with silicon 20 years ago. That has proved to be largely a horrible investment at almost every level of production and delivery. At least silicon is still relevant. Will that be the case with lithium? I don't give that case more than a 50/50 chance. And then there's the existential threat to this move to an electric future. What happens when people finally understand that this isn't a solution to global warming?
Thanks for the correction Elroy, much appreciated. It still may not be as benign as 2%. This from Marketplace:
For the first time in the current interest rate rise, some treasuries are outpacing CDs. Six month treasuries moved up to 5.6% this afternoon surpassing the best CDs I can find at 5.5%. Keeping in mind that treasuries are immune to local and state taxes, this is a nice return. I'll begin extending my timeline for fixed investments to 6 months from 3 months, laddering the closing dates and using treasuries exclusively until such time that CDs make sense again. When the highest bond rates move from 1 month to 3 months to 6 months over one quarter, it doesn't bode well for the market.
There is currently a lot of hopeful talk about how the surprisingly resilient consumer and economy are not giving in to rising rates. See my post from earlier today to understand where the median consumer is compared to 2019. The consumer will be giving in little by little as past inflation bites harder when the last of COVID relief funds are spent. Very few consumers have kept up over the last four years.
Unfortunately, we'll all get the same one.
That was big news when Buffett made the remark about how unfair the tax system is. I hadn't heard the entire quote before. Post Trump, it appears they have won and many of them don't just want lower taxes, they want to shuttle democracy as well. Maybe Americans will actually take the time to vote in 2024.
As we stumble forward to the 2024 election and parts of our government seem to be in disarray, I think it's important to listen to ideas from many sources to try and understand why we see a small minority of the Republican party sinking into MAGA fascism. Who might be behind it? Who are the thought leaders and where might it go? What's the purpose? Our mainstream media is paralyzed by both side-ism. Below is an opinion piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer. If you read it, you will at least understand what Jim Jordan, Taylor Green or Gaetz mean if they decide to talk openly about a Red Caesar.
America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship
“Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship. People need to be alarmed.
The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy. And most of the folks who get paid big bucks to understand politics could not make any sense of it.
TV pundits compared a near-shutdown of the federal government and Kevin McCarthy’s subsequent ouster as speaker to the iconic sitcom Seinfeld — a show about nothing. In capitals around the globe, world leaders and baffled analysts struggled to make sense of the utter dysfunction paralyzing the nation that just a generation ago held itself out as the lone superpower.
Yet to a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.
The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through the what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.
If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.
The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack. (Yes, the same Hillsdale that GOP-led school boards, including Pennridge in Philadelphia’s northern exurbs, are hiring to whitewash their curriculums.)
In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, the centrist liberal Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.
“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue.”
Things are getting more terrible by the day, whether it’s the mob on Staten Island tormenting residents of a temporary shelter for refugees by bombarding them with noise or flashlights, or the shockingly ugly social-media swarms of right-wingers mocking the murders of liberals like Philadelphia journalist Josh Kruger or New York’s Ryan Carson, or the MAGA gunman in New Mexico who smirked after shooting a Native American during a vigil. But the chaos at the bottom of the political food chain is coming from the same instincts tearing apart the top of the government: A desire to blow it all up.
When these raw instincts are translated by the extreme right’s “intellectuals” into an explicit plea for a dictatorship, you can see that America is poised to cross the Rubicon — a metaphor rooted in the river in northern Italy that Julius Caesar had to cross with his army in 49 B.C. in order to drive out Rome’s democratically elected government and seize power.
America should be having a robust, life-or-death conversation — when TV’s cable talkfest signs on at 6 a.m. until the last words at midnight, on the floors of the House and Senate, in newspaper editorial boards and down at the barber shop and in Starbucks — about whether we really want to end this country’s 247-year uneven experiment in democracy, and whether one man should have the power to override elections, jail his enemies, free his friends, and eviscerate federal agencies.
And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.
But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like Trump — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — Bannon, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster who was pardoned by Trump but faces new charges, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as Trump did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it.”
In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate, Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, wrote that the Trump ally frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”
So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny.”
Dictatorship can happen here, but why, and why now? That would probably take another book to explain, but it feels partly the ultimate outcome of America’s college/non-college divide that I wrote about in 2022's After The Ivory Tower Falls, which looked at the root causes of mostly white-working-class resentment of educated elites — not just in academia but in the media, the bureaucracy, and elsewhere. But it also reflects the desperation of a conservative movement struggling to win free and fair democratic elections yet determined to impose its cherished hierarchies — including white supremacy and the patriarchy — by any means necessary.
The Guardian’s Wilson noted that Anton, in an essay decrying the power of elite, liberal-minded “experts,” wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965.” What was that year’s landmark event? The passage of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered Black voters and led to the election of thousands of African American office holders.
After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Republicans could win elections through the backlash politics of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or the demagoguery of 1988's “Willie Horton ad.” They then turned to tactics like voter suppression or extreme gerrymandering as their electorate shrunk. In 2024, the right sees dictatorship as its final “Hail Mary” pass. And it just might work.
But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” But in the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.
Thanks Nick, I'll check those out.
So American consumers are not as screwed as Brit consumers. I'm sure they'll feel much better about their situation knowing this..:).
May the volatility be with you Nick.
It may be that while there were a lot of jobs created, 70% of those jobs were in hospitality, leisure and other services. So, lots of Mc-jobs which keep people off of unemployment but don't pay enough to allow much, if any, discretionary spending.
There has been a lot of talk about how employees and unions are causing inflation to stay high because of wage demands. The numbers don't bear that out. According to the St. Louis Fed, median US household income was $78,250 in 2019. It has fallen 4.7% through 2022 while CPI has moved up over 15% from January 2020 through December 2022. . That is, consumers are roughly 20% under water from 2019 in real household earnings and will likely fall another 4% this year without adjustments. It appears household income will rise again this year, maybe even get back to 2019 levels. If so, American households will be making much less in real terms than they were in 2019 but talking heads will likely blame them for inflation.
Median income does not include capital gains or lump sum payments so it's unlikely COVID relief payments are included. As consumers have run through those payments the reality of this issue will hit home. American households are considerably less well off than they were at the end of 2019.
For now the market appears to have gotten over its goofy-verse reaction where all good news is bad news while the Fed is fighting inflation.
The Florida convertible or drophead coupé model.
His Jesus drawing has a rather unsettling resemblance to Charles Manson.
According to one of the commentators on CNBC Rivian loses $30,000 just in the manufacturing process for each vehicle. They may have extrapolated their number from the Bloomberg report. RIVN down 25% in the last two days but still well above the $12 low in April. I'm not sure how they grow their way out of this issue considering the lack of sales. Tesla only became profitable when they came out with a car priced for a middle class owner and Tesla did that in a world with very little competition. Even Tesla is estimated to have their earnings cut by 17% this year while revenue is estimated to grow 22% and production to 1.8MM, (up 31%). Even if AMZN throws a Hail Mary pass I don't see how they ramp up production quickly. Ford has given up as an investor and currently owns only ~1% of RIVN.
So far I've not found AAA munis that make sense for us. The best trade above par and net ~3.5% after tax. Our situation may be different than others because we're still maintaining exposure to rental properties but that's too low a return.
The Donald is hawking his services as Speaker. That should be a hilarious carney side show.
You're welcome and thanks for all of your suggestions as well. CVX and ABBV were both excellent. Over the next year we'll be building our new home in Annapolis so I'll most likely stay predominantly with treasuries and similar investments unless there is a significant change in the economic landscape.
Building a home on the water in Annapolis has proven to be at least as arduous as building in the historic district of Santa Fe. We've been working through the process for about a year and the goal is to have a permit and break ground in six months. The significant red tape is the downside. The upside is that the city has made building on the waterfront so difficult that water front, move-in ready homes, are up about 50% over the last few years. So while it was unintended when we first bought here, our best investments are still in our real estate business. And I owe you another hat-tip, we bought the house using a tax free 1031 exchange. You might remember your advice there.
So as we always say on the board, you have to look at your own unique situation to decide what's correct for you. Our two approaches may be quite different but the goal is the same. We want to make as much net profit as we can while managing the level of risk that's correct for us and our family.
Good to see that McHenry is as petty as his party would expect him to be. He got to the really important work right away. Of course this reporting is from that liberal bastion the WSJ so who knows what really happened..:).
Nancy Pelosi Ejected From Capitol Office
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said she was evicted from her hideaway office in the Capitol by Republican leadership, a day after her party declined to come to the rescue of now former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.). She missed the vote that ousted McCarthy, as she was in California attending tributes to late Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
“Office space doesn’t matter to me, but it seems to be important to them. Now that the new Republican Leadership has settled this important matter, let’s hope they get to work on what’s truly important for the American people.” She said she hasn't been able to retrieve her things. The office of former Democratic leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said that he has been kicked out of his hideaway as well.
CNN reported that an email from the office of interim Speaker Patrick McHenry (R., N.C.) stated, “Going to reassign h-132 for speaker office use. Please vacate the space tomorrow.”
McHenry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.