What a week right?

The week is just starting…

Not in Europe: https://c.tadst.com/gfx/1200x675/map--first-day-of-the-week....

It is just the beginning. It can affect even some ‘Systemically important banks’. Perhaps CS was the unsafest SIB of them all.

They are ‘Too big to fail’ until they fail.

CS has been lurching from crisis to crisis for as long as I can remember. The tide doesn't have to go out very far when they've been swimming naked for years now.

…what industries are being killed by “insane inflation”?

ironically long duration tech stocks and crypto have been surging all year and outperforming basically every other sector

I heard shipping containers have been piling up at China’s ports and China exports are way down - with quite a few factory suspending operations. Supposedly the US stopped buying because inflation means people focus on the necessities like food.

The thought experiment then is to ask "What mechanisms connect Chinese exports with inflation?"

To get a better understanding of that, one might "rewind" time to look back at what those containers were carrying when there was a container shortage.

Since containers are a mechanism for moving goods, one might look at supply and demand of goods to try to understand what that relationship is.

Historically, when supplies are tight, retailers order the same order from multiple suppliers in the hope that one of them will come through. This typically results in adding production capacity to meet this "shadow" demand (there are orders for 300 widgets but the retailer on the other end really only wants 100 widgets, they have just ordered 100 from three different distributors who each passed on that order to the factory).

When the factories ramp up to cover that shadow demand, they put a lot of product into the distribution channel but retailer cancels their other two orders after one is filled. As a result there is now 2x the "demand" level sitting in distribution. The next time the retailer orders, their orders are satisfied out of existing stock.

Until the distributors have worked through this "excess" they don't order anything from the factories and the factories have nothing to do and don't need to ship anything so the containers sit there empty.

This "boom" and "bust" cycle is an oscillation that occurs in systems that are not critically damped (a term from systems analysis). During the 2020/2021 years a lot of demand was unmet and we had the "supply chain crisis." Once things ramped up, it is expected to have an "over supply" crisis.

If people stopped buying then inflation would go down dramatically.

Prices may stay the same if supply goes down in concert with demand.

Container movement has been erratic since 2020. I would look deeper before inferring causes for piles of them. (Once you actually get evidence of piles of them, because it seems you don't have that yet.)

There are many people that track actual goods. It's better than looking for a proxy.

Likely because multinational firms have been steadily shifting their supply chain and manufacturing out of China

Just take note that mergers of CS and UBS have been discussed a few times over the past 20 years. Don’t be fooled into thinking that there wasn’t a lot of planning/analysis already done for this. In fact it might even have happened the other way around in 2008 and again there was no doubt planning for that too!

Didn’t all the plans lead to the conclusion that it was a bad deal for UBS?

Yeah, but they’ll have at least thought out how this could work.

This is hyperbole at its finest. Can you name a few industries that have been killed?

Which artists and writers aside from pretentious copy cats are getting replaced by AI?

China’s exports I heard are down and shipping containers are actually piling up at their ports.

I feel artists selling “generic art” for pictures in lobbies and homes are probably going to be out of a job.

The vast majority of artists don’t make a living selling the “generic art” that enthusiasts are so sure AI will disrupt (and if they do, certainly not individual pieces to hotels/coffee shops/etc, but bulk licensing through agencies)

At most it would be replacing one licensing middleman for another.

> bulk licensing through agencies

And the agencies pay the artists, yes? Now you can just get art from MidJourney and skip the artists.

“Piling up” should be visible. Is there photo or satellite evidence of that?

You lost me when you say AI threatening to take jobs as one of the comparables

In the space of 12 weeks, AI seems to have come from nowhere to now having the skills to replace lots of knowledge workers and creatives. Though there is some way to go, I think it’s pretty bleak and scary for employment prospects.