Tuesday Night Links

• You shouldn’t own any fixed interest securities. None. Inflating away debt means destroying the purchasing power of fixed income securities. There may be rallies, but fixed income is in a long bear market. Bond bull and bear markets move in about 40 year periods, and now we are into year 3 of the current bear market. You can lose a fortune in real terms over the long term. Therefore: No bonds. Period. [Russell Napier]
• I'm now going to offer you a megalomaniac explanation of the course of events. I wrote my book in '67, published in '68. My book was a response to a great number of coups in Africa, which followed inevitably from the fact that African states became independent in the early 1960s. By 1965, they were ready for military coups, and in the Middle East there were lots of coups. I was tracking events there because at that time I was employed by Walter J. Levy of London, the chief political advisor of big oil companies like Shell [In World War II, Levy led the petroleum section of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.] I was reading about coups. What I did is I tried to distill the mechanics of the coup. All coups are different, but they're all the same, because all of them depend on taking hold, not of the nation, but simply of the repressive machinery of the state. So I wrote a description of how to do that. [Edward Luttwak]
• The bag dump: if you follow the companies on the BTC standard, they all push as aggressively as possible for any and all companies to follow them into the BTC standard. In particular, you’ll see them pushing for deep pocketed corporates (like Microsoft) or sovereign governments (particularly the U.S. / Trump administration) to buy Bitcoin / create a Bitcoin strategic reserve. While the BTC standard companies say they’re going to HODL their BTC forever and want these companies / sovereigns to do it for national security purposes, the skeptic in me can’t help put wonder if this is simply an attempt to get a big buyer to give the HODLers exit liquidity (and their strategy may be working; the Trump admin certainly seems open to anything the crypto bros want them to do!). [Yet Another Value Blog]
• Nearly four years ago I put my iPhone in a drawer. It never leaves unless I am traveling, when, as a small concession to the tedium of modern life, I use it to board planes, order a cab when I cannot find one (a situation that has become depressingly common in Washington), and so on. While I would never suggest that reading one hundred pages a day is impossible for regular smartphone users, I do think that eliminating the temptation to waste time—a heading under which I would include responding instantaneously to a non-urgent email that could be answered in a few hours or even the next day—makes it far less difficult. Many readers will reply that for both professional and social reasons they are unable to get on without a smartphone: their colleagues do not usually take phone calls (even though nine times out of ten what ends up being a protracted series of emails or text messages spread out over the course of several hours could be addressed in five minutes on the phone), their children’s sports league requires the use of a scheduling app, and so on. All of this is real and vexing. I suspect that until more members of the professional classes agree to the digital equivalent of a S.T.A.R.T. treaty for their attention spans, we will not see anything like a large-scale revival of reading in this country. [The Lamp]
• Paul Mellon always said one of the best forms of therapy for him was, he always had a hammer and some nails in his desk drawer, and he would move pictures around. When you move pictures around, hang them, light them, put them opposite other works of art or alongside, hang them next to something that you hadn’t thought about, it can be very stimulating. You can do it at home or in a museum. It’s a worthwhile experiment. [The New Criterion]
• Roosevelt pitted Saint-Gaudens against Charles E. Barber, the U.S.Mint’s chief engraver, who had designed much of the “atrocious hideousness” then in circulation. Dying of cancer at his studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, Saint-Gaudens completed his Indian Head gold eagle (pulled together from other designs) and his double eagle in 1907, in the last year of his life. With a walking Liberty based on both the Nike of Samothrace and his own William Tecumseh Sherman monument in New York’s Grand Army Plaza on the obverse, and an eagle flying above a radiating sun on the reverse, Saint-Gaudens’s luminous double eagle in particular reflected the luster of its material and became one of the country’s most revered coins. Roosevelt’s beautification of America’s gold coinage not only set a new standard for numismatics. It also reinvigorated the gold standard. The novel design, striding forward, stood in direct opposition to the bimetallism advocated by William Jennings Bryan bearing his populist “cross of gold.” [The New Criterion]
• What we have come to think is that shale is a cornucopian bounty, and the producers do not make money because they are in a classic bad business (resource extraction), not because there is something unsustainable about producing oil from the source formations. Being the highest cost producer of a commodity is just a constant tale of woe punctuated by occasional profitable times. The good times keep people - both managements and investors - chasing the dream. [CBS] 
• Cenovus seems to have problems with the Lima (Ohio) refinery that came with its acquisition of Husky Energy in 2020. Sometimes these things can't really be fixed. If you are running an airline with old, inefficient planes, you would never have results as good as a competitor with newer, more efficient planes. The more expensive jet fuel gets the worse you'll do in comparison. Amazingly, the Lima Refinery was opened in 1886 and is the oldest refinery in the United States. Cenovus got it in the acquisition of Husky Energy, and Husky bought it from Valero in 2007. Valero got it when they acquired a company called Premcor in 2005. Interesting that they sold it so soon afterwards. [CBS]