Juggling Dynamite

A new Netflix documentary, A Life on Our Planet, features naturalist Sir David Attenborough encouraging people to cut down on meat to help the planet:  “We must change our diet. The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters. If we had a mostly plant-based diet we could increase the yield of the land.”

For those who cannot imagine a life without eating meat, science is engineering new sustainable sources as discussed in a recent BBC podcast at the link below.

Would you feel better tucking into a juicy steak knowing that the cow it comes from is still happily living out its life in a field somewhere? Biotechnology could make that possible.

Manuela Saragosa hears from Shannon Falconer at pet food maker Because Animals, who grows real meat in a lab. Jon McIntyre at Motif FoodWorks explains how new technology has made his plant-based products tastier. We also hear from Tony Seba at the think tank, Rethink X. He believes we’ll be designing food like software in the future.

Here is a direct audio link.

We’re on the cusp of the most profound disruption of the energy sectors in over a century. We’re not facing a slow energy transition, we’re facing a rapid and total energy transformation and it’s already begun.

The disruption is inevitable (for economic reasons), existing coal, gas, nuclear and other assets are stranded. No new investments in those technologies are rational from this point forward.  Here is a direct video link.

Thinking people know that present financial conditions are a train wreck in motion and controlling our own behaviour is the most valuable risk management available.

An excellent essay from former Fed-insider, now independent analyst, Danielle DiMartino Booth, is a helpful fact check in a mad time, see Monetary Policy Gone Wild.  A Lost Generation of US Growth?  Financial engineering, zombie companies, bankruptcies, retail speculators, urban-exodus real estate and implications, it’s all here…a few highlights:

The duct tape holding the façade together today is 2021 earnings estimates off of which markets are theoretically trading. Investors are looking past a full year of a bloodletting at the bottom line and that’s a best-case scenario.

For context, in 2008, there was no shutdown of the US economy and earnings fell 69%. In the 2015–2016 industrial recession, S&P 500 earnings slumped by 15%. All things considered, it’s fantastical to accept that full year 2020 earnings will only be down 21.5%. The absence of share buybacks, which accounted for about 40% of earnings per share in the past cycle, will introduce a separate source of pressure. For the moment, according to Citadel Securities, corporate volumes have been somewhat offset by retail traders who are estimated to account for a fifth of trading as speculation and valuations hit historic highs.

…An acceleration in bankruptcies cannot be ruled out against such a backdrop. Forecasts call for 25,000 retail stores to close in 2020 on the heels of the record 9,800 in 2019. By 2025, estimates call for the tally to hit 100,000. One-third of office space in North America is in metro areas that rely heavily on public transportation. CoreLogic has warned residential real estate prices to fall by 6.6% in the 12 months through May 2021. Once the pent-up demand for housing is exhausted and the minor exodus to the suburbs by those with the financial latitude to make that move concludes, the reality of a six-year low in mortgage availability and sellers who need to monetize the equity in their homes will settle in.