Good afternoon,
Never-Ending Stories: If we’re having a hard time wrapping a mask around our faces for the latest threat from Covid, the weather outside might give us another reason to do so. Here’s a few tidbits to inhale, on a smoky weekend, as we anticipate an imminent election of another Trudeau government, and all the implications of strange movies, whose theme song just won’t go away.
Dig-Uppery:
The chart below shows the stuff we need to take out of the ground so we can take less oil out than we do now. In an RBC whitepaper entitled “Green Infrastructure”, we note that moving away from hydrocarbons implies a host of other raw materials being harvested, with aluminum and copper at the top of the list. Over the next decade, this demand could drive metals prices up, possibly offset by higher scrap supply and other substitutions
Made-Uppery:
How “I think I read that somewhere” is being supplanted by “I saw a Tiktok about that somewhere.” Thanks to social media, the news has the blues.
Spendthriftery: The $1 trillion U.S. infrastructure bill is so big its scope gets lost in a haze of zeroes. This’ll help:
- At 6.14 inches long each, if we lined up US $1000 bills end-to-end until we had a trillion dollars, we’d need to walk the earth’s circumference at the equator 3.89 times to finish. Still fuzzy?
- For each mile of the journey, we would tally $10.32 million smackers.
- Proof: (There’s 63360 inches in a mile, and 6.14 inches per $1000 bill. Therefore: 63360/6.14=10,319 Bills… $1000 x 10,319 ~= $10.32 Million per mile). There are 24,901 miles in the earth’s circumference. Thus: 24,901 miles x $10.319 Million x 3.892 laps ~= $1 Trillion, ignoring rounding errors).
It’s like the Newfy who was playing ice hockey on frozen Lake Superior. He got a break-away, and… well, they haven’t seen him since.
U.S. investors cheered strong economic data, with the rotation into value stocks rekindled – The July employment report was enough to distract from the latest COVID-19 surge, even as inflation concerns drove interest rates higher.
Regional developments: The Canadian labour market builds momentum; Robust UK economic growth could be challenged; China’s regulatory tightening still underway.
Lions and tigers and debt!
More here: Global Insight Weekly
Enjoy your weekend!
Mark