Skeptical optimist. Like to laugh.

Fire & Motion 24

2023 年 2 月 17 日

Stin's reading note.

Fleeting Quote

I think I've been able to run for more than twenty years for a simple reason: It suits me.

Reading

📕A Promised Land

None of this turnover was unusual for an administration, and I saw the potential benefits to shaking things up.

Changing perspective! Perhaps I'm biased, but I do think that the ability to view in a different way is what makes Obama such a great president.

Everything I did or had done involved working the odds, quietly and often late at night in the room where I now sat. I knew that I could not have come up with a better process to evaluate those odds or surrounded myself with a better mix of people to help me weigh them. I realize that through all the mistakes I'd made and the jams I'd had to extract us from, I had in many ways been training for exactly this moment. And while I couldn't guarantee the outcome of my decision, I was fully prepared and fully confident in making it.

📄A Brief Review of What Actually Happened Relative to My Template: 1945 until Now

Regarding the internal conflicts between the extremists, while their increasing intensity showed up in elections and in other ways—especially in the US, Italy, Brazil, and throughout Latin America—and while they began to surface in strikes in Europe, by and large there was a stepping back from the brinks rather than a moving toward them. In the US midterm elections, for example, extremists of both the right and the left lost to moderates so there was a small stepping back from the brink.

Still a reason to be optimistic.

there has been a very big decline in the relative wealth levels of Americans, Europeans, and Japanese relative to Chinese and many other nationalities such as Norwegians, Indians, Saudis, and Indonesians because the debts that have funded the three major reserve currency areas have increased faster than the assets. While borrowing allowed these countries to spend more than they earned, paying back will require them to spend less than they earn. That day of reckoning will certainly come.

One of the key insights I learn from the book Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises, is that the time to pay back the debt will definitely come. I also bear the same belief that all the goods and bads in life we do will eventually come back toward us.

it’s time that we start focusing on rising countries with strong fundamentals (as reflected in my 18 measures) such as India, ASEAN countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, which have benefited by being neutral vis-à-vis the power conflicts. A number of them are at take-off points in their developmental cycles because their people, governance systems, and capital markets are approaching being capable of competing in ways that didn’t previously exist.

Not an INVESTMENT ADVICE.