Actual Real Estate Stuff

Yeah, believe it or not.

First, ag land auctions.  Currently these are mostly retirement and estate sales with some foreclosures and bankruptcies mixed in.  Iowa is currently loaded with $15,000+/acre auction prices.  Even though commodity prices are flat and expenses are up.  Even though the American Bankers Association thinks only half of ag borrowers will be in the black in 2025.  So what's going on?  I have a strong suspicion the bigs are getting bigger.  They have cash and can get their hands on more, and they're turning it into dirt.  So yet more family farms are landing in the hands of agribusiness.  Which bodes ill for surviving small farmers, consumers, soil, water quality, name it.

Now on to office space.  Most law firms I know are reducing their footprint.  No reason not to given how much we can do remotely.  But the bigs are entering into big, new leases.  Why?  Because they can.  Because they know the legal industry is changing dramatically, and size means survival.  Because their corporate clients want image and are willing to pay for it.  Because they have hammerlocks on their employees and can force on-site work.

What we're seeing is yet more asset concentration to the detriment of all the rest of us.  I won't call this neo-feudalism, though, because it isn't.  There is no interlocking system of rights and responsibilities.  The rights have all floated up the hill, and the responsibilities have all rolled down it.  There are no holidays.  We're on call all the time.  There are no commons we have access to.  Any possible Third Space either has an admission fee or is locked down entirely.  We aren't peasants.  We're serfs.

OF Redux

This is an update of this post.

OF continues down the multilateral currency road.  In spite of many electrons being spilled, just how the BRICs are supposed to accomplish this remains unexplained.  One member (Russia) is failing in its war against a measurably inferior opponent and and is dancing with a demographic death spiral (although Putin's takeover the the US may buy some time).  One member (China) is so desperate to distract everyone, foreign and domestic, from its being history's largest Potemkin Village, it's preparing to invade Taiwan in 2027 or early 2028.  One member (India) is so insecure about its currency it's trying to eliminate cash.  One member (Brazil) is simply mired in a multi-pronged inability to function (although Trump's tariffs may give it a boost).  And as OF has reported, China has just issued a new round of bonds denominated in US$.  Not the surest way to break the US$ as the reserve currency.  I don't see anything, BRIC or otherwise, remotely capable of replacing US$, even as part of a basket of currencies.

Do I think US$ is undefeatable?  Absolutely not.  Bad Vlad has done a very good job of putting a mob of ticking bombs in the US government.  By the time Trump is done this time, I think everything that made the US function will have been plundered and pillaged, and the US$ will be irretrievably broken.  So the US will lose; that doesn't mean anyone will win.  By 2034 the whole world could look like Central Europe in 1634.  Only worse, because all attempts to stop climate change will have fallen by the wayside.

So while I expect US$ to fall, I do not expect it to be replaced.  If there's no global economy, who needs a global reserve currency?

He's Baaaack

Awhile back I posted about Mikkel Thorup and his "advice".  Shortly after that, his incessant emails dried up.  No loss.  Then a couple of months ago I got a promo email.  Shortly after that, I received another "newsletter" type thing.  And it looks like he and his tools have only gotten worse.

First, he's completely come out as a COVID denier who believes "woke" is destroying civilization.  Second, he's using that fear-mongering to sell his latest grift, Veritas Villages scattered throughout developing nations, where you can live independent of "government" grids because you have your own water and power and apparently (though Thorup of course doesn't mention point of course) your own staff of locals to maintain all this because you sure as Hells aren't going to.  In other words, rank neocolonialism.  Not that the types who buy into this rubbish see anything wrong with that.

The other big drum he's beating is for Pavel Durov, the Russian tech bro who arrested in France in August.  According to Thorup, Durov was arrested because he protected free speech.  According to France and its case filings, it was because Durov refused to cooperate with investigations into criminal activities on his Telegram platform.  I would note that crime is not free speech, at least not when it's fraud, drug dealing, trafficking, and political hits, so it doesn't really look like Durov was protecting free speech.  But the truth wouldn't help Thorup's sales pitch.