Among the Last Skeptics Standing

The future hinges on forces not easily seen among all the news clutter. Like the 1930s, the “experimenters” in Washington are unquestionably bright but so inexperienced as to often be inept. Their mental models have proved time and again to be too small for the huge task at hand. The factors that make headlines—growth vs. stagnation, inflation vs. deflation, the cost/benefit trade-offs of multiple monetary and fiscal stimulus packages, fiscal budget and trade deficits, dollar devaluation—fall substantially into the realm of the unknowable. Those factors that get little public attention (Will the growing segment of the population that feels disenfranchised be made to once again feel empowered? Will business shake off the burden of leftist government intervention and higher taxes and become spontaneously optimistic?) are the ones that will determine whether employment and the economy generally rise or whether they stagnate. Will the “great moderation” be followed by the “great malaise”? I wish it weren’t so, but I wouldn’t bet against it.

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Warren Buffett on His Railroad Bet, Economy and Health Care

Buffett praises Trands' 30 great years

"I have to tell you that I now have nine suits made in China. I threw away the rest of my suits. Our director, my partner Charlie Munger, Walter Scott, and even Bill Gates now is wearing suits made by Dayang Trands. They know and love Madam Li for what she has accomplished.

"The suits we received that's made in china; we never had it altered a quarter of inch and they fit perfectly. Since I wear Madam Li's suits, I get compliments on it all the time. Maybe, Bill Gates and I should start a clothing store and sell the suit made by Dayang Trands. We will be great sales man, because we love them so much. Someday we might be even richer. Who knows?

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Note: Thanks to Sanjeev from Corner of BRK and FFH for the original reference

A conversation with theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson

CHARLIE ROSE:  So the world is getting warmer.

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, I went to Greenland myself, where
the warming is most extreme. And it’s quite spectacular,
of course, what you see in Greenland.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, but do you believe that if in fact
there continues to be global warming in those regions,
that we will eliminate the ice and, therefore there will
be a rising of the water level, and, therefore, at some
point it will threaten us all?

FREEMAN DYSON:  No.  I don’t believe that.  I mean, the
point is that the sea level has been rising for 12,000
years.  And it has nothing to do with global warming.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Nothing?

FREEMAN DYSON:  It’s a separate problem.  I mean.

CHARLIE ROSE:  But does global warming contribute to it?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Probably.  But we don’t know how much.
And it’s certainly not -- the main problem when you’re
dealing with a rising ocean -- I mean, we know it’s been
going on for 12,000 years.  We know it has very little
to do with human activities.  So it will be a great --
it will be a terrible mistake to think you solved the
problem of the rising ocean when you’re only dealing with
climate.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, so is global warming bad?

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, I would say warming is certainly real,
but it’s mostly happening in cold places at high latitudes,
and it’s also happening more in winter than in summer, and
it’s also happening more at night than in daytime.

CHARLIE ROSE:  But is the emission of so much CO2 into the
atmosphere a good thing?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Even though it breaks -- whatever it does
up there?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes, I would say it’s a very good thing.
It makes plants grow better.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So all the CO2 doesn’t bother you, even
though.

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, that’s a big plus.  And then against
that, you have possible harmful effects of warming.  But
I think it is most important that warming is happening in
places that are cold.  It’s happening in places where’s
it’s winter rather than in summer, and at night rather
than in daytime.  So it means that it’s essentially
evening out the climate rather than just making everything
hotter.

CHARLIE ROSE:  What’s interesting is that you are not
arguing with the facts.  You are arguing with the
conclusions.

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  What concerns you today?  What do you worry
about?

FREEMAN DYSON:  I worry about nuclear weapons.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah.  There is this idea that physics has
had its century, that was the 20th century, and the 21st
century belongs to molecular biology and brain science.

FREEMAN DYSON:  I think that’s quite likely to be true.
I mean, that -- it’s certain that physics has slowed down
during my lifetime, largely just because the experiments
have become so slow.  But biology, at the same time, has
been speeding up.  So, I think it’s probably true that
this century is the century of biology.

CHARLIE ROSE:  What did you determine about the origins
of life?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Well, I’m simply speculating that it
actually had two origins.

FREEMAN DYSON:  That we had -- our living creatures are
made of two components, which is sort of hardware and
software, like computers.  And the hardware being.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Wait, living creatures are made of two
components, hardware and software?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.  The hardware being sort of the
chemistry of things, what they call metabolism, the
eating and drinking and processing chemicals.  All the
real processing, all the active things like nerves and
muscles and so on are made of hardware, proteins.  And
then there is the software, which is the genes, the
genomes, and which is just the instructions for how to
build it.

And so we have these two components, which are very
separate in life, as we know it. So I’m making the
hypothesis that really, it was unlikely that they both
were there from the beginning.  It’s much more likely
that they originated separately. So that…

CHARLIE ROSE:  Simultaneously or…

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, on the contrary.  You had the
hardware first, and then you had life evolving without
genes for a long time.  And then genes were then an
independent creature, which originally were parasites,
and then took over the direction, so they became then
-- became then a symbiosis, a collaborative system,
which both of them worked together.  That seems to me
a reasonable point of view, but I don’t claim it’s true.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Are you optimistic about all of us?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  In the end?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Oh, very optimistic.  It’s quite
amazing how much we’ve been able to do in the short
time we came down from the trees.  We have talents,
which to me are quite extraordinary, because they
don’t have any obvious survival value. Like for
example, calculating numbers. I mean, who needs to
calculate numbers in order to survive? It’s not at
all clear.  Why should we be able to compose string
quartets?  Why should we be able to paint paintings?
Everything we do is so much more than you require
just to survive.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Have we been kind to the planet?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.  I would say on the whole, yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Whom you look a bit like (ph).

FREEMAN DYSON:  No, the fact is of course, we’ve done
a lot of damage to the planet, but we also repair the
damage. I grew up in England, and England was far more
filthy then  than it is now.  Because we had the
industrial revolution first. So England was much more
polluted than the United States ever has been, and
England now is quite comparatively clean.  You can go
to London and your collar doesn’t get blacked in one
day.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Have you been to Beijing?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And you’re not bothered by that? And you
want them to build every coal-burning plant they want to
build?

FREEMAN DYSON:  Yes.  They should clean up the coal, but
of course that you can do. The global warming people
don’t make a distinction between carbon dioxide, which is
essentially, in my view, harmless, and the other things
in coal which are horrible -- soot and smog and nitrogen
oxide and all that stuff.  There’s a lot of very ugly
stuff in coal, which you can get rid of by scrubbing the
coal and scrubbing the gases that come out of the fire
station.  And so, the Chinese certainly can do a lot more
of that, and they are doing a lot more of that.

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The Greenback Effect

IN nature, every action has consequences, a phenomenon called the butterfly effect. These consequences, moreover, are not necessarily proportional. For example, doubling the carbon dioxide we belch into the atmosphere may far more than double the subsequent problems for society. Realizing this, the world properly worries about greenhouse emissions.

The butterfly effect reaches into the financial world as well. Here, the United States is spewing a potentially damaging substance into our economy — greenback emissions.

To be sure, we’ve been doing this for a reason I resoundingly applaud. Last fall, our financial system stood on the brink of a collapse that threatened a depression. The crisis required our government to display wisdom, courage and decisiveness. Fortunately, the Federal Reserve and key economic officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations responded more than ably to the need.

They made mistakes, of course. How could it have been otherwise when supposedly indestructible pillars of our economic structure were tumbling all around them? A meltdown, though, was avoided, with a gusher of federal money playing an essential role in the rescue.

The United States economy is now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery. But enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects. For now, most of those effects are invisible and could indeed remain latent for a long time. Still, their threat may be as ominous as that posed by the financial crisis itself.

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Recent Updates: BYD

SAIC to Adopt Li Battery Stacks of BYD

Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. (SAIC), one of China's leading automakers, reached accord with BYD Corp., a well-known battery supplier, to purchase the latter's lithium battery stacks, said sources. These battery stacks will be installed on hybrid models under Roewe, a proprietary brand of the automaker, they added. A sales executive with BYD confirmed that his company really signed an agreement with a domestic giant, but declined to tell its name.

Subsidy will help plug-in hybrid sales, BYD says

Chinese battery and vehicle maker BYD Co said it was bullish about sales of its F3DM plug-in hybrid car, after regulators recommended the energy-efficient model as eligible for government subsidies.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently unveiled the list of a first batch of new-energy vehicle models that have got regulatory approval for production and sale.

According to a statement on the MIIT website, there were five new-energy vehicle models in the list - Nanjing Iveco's electric commercial vehicle, Jianghuai Auto's electric engineering vehicle, JMC's electric service vehicle, Zotye Auto's electric light minibus, and BYD's plug-in hybrid sedan.

"Being the only sedan on the list, we qualify for the highest subsidy level of as much as 50,000 yuan ($7316) per unit. Hence, we are optimistic about the F3DM model's sales to individual customers, which will start next month," said a BYD spokesperson.

BYD added to H-shares

The compiler of Hong Kong's stock indexes said Friday it will make no changes to the constituents of the blue-chip Hang Seng Index but added Chinese battery and electric car maker BYD Co. [s:hk:1211] to the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, or H-share index, lifting the number of constituents in the share tracker to 44.

Related Article

Another company Buffett recently invested in is BYD, the Chinese battery giant that has released an electric vehicle with a range of 250 miles. Reiten met with BYD executives while in China with Gov. Ted Kulongoski on a trade mission, and those discussions have led to a compelling new collaboration Reiten calls "potentially a game- changer," with super-efficient batteries storing the extra electricity while the wind is humming or the sun is beating down, to transmit it through the system at a later time when it is needed.

"BYD is the No. 1 cell phone battery manufacturing company in the world," says Reiten. "They have staked their company on being the best in terms of batteries and we think there are utility applications."

The partnership could develop into something exciting. Then again, it could flop. Either way, there will be no quick fix to the challenges Reiten and PacifiCorp face. As he lays out his strategy Reiten has a lot to say about a lot of things, but he doesn't say much about coal, which is PacifiCorp's greatest asset and its greatest liability.

Law of easy money

A 300-year-old example of quantitative easing

“IF FIVE hundred millions of paper had been of such advantage, five hundred millions additional would be of still greater advantage.” So Charles Mackay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, described the “quantitative easing” tactics of the French regent and his economic adviser, John Law, at the time of the Mississippi bubble in the early 18th century. The Mississippi scheme was a precursor of modern attempts to reflate the economy with unorthodox monetary policies. It is hard not to be struck by parallels with recent events.

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When the scheme faltered Law resorted to a number of rescue packages, many of which have their echoes 300 years later. One was for the bank to guarantee to buy shares in the Mississippi company at a set price (think of the various government asset-purchase schemes today). Then the company took over the bank (a rescue along the lines of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Finally there were restrictions on the amount of gold and silver that could be owned (something America tried in the 1930s).

All these rules failed and the scheme collapsed. Law was exiled and died in poverty. The French state’s finances stayed weak, helping trigger the 1789 revolution. The idea of a “fiat” currency was perceived to be the essence of recklessness for another two centuries and the link between money and gold was not fully abandoned until the 1970s, when the Bretton Woods system expired.

Of course, the parallels with today are not exact. Law’s system took just four years to collapse; today’s fiat money regime has been running for nearly 40 years. The growth in money supply has been less excessive this time. Technological change and the entry of China into the world economy have generated growth rates beyond the dreams of 18th-century man. But one lesson from Law’s sorry tale endures: attempts to maintain asset prices above their fundamental value are eventually doomed to failure.

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