MBW - 3/22/2022
Good morning friends. This March Tuesday is upon us. Without further ado, let’s get to your daily digest.
News Briefing
•US President Joe Biden has given his strongest warning yet that Russia may be preparing to use chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine. Biden says Russian leader Vladimir Putin has "his back to the wall" as a result of Ukrainian resistance, and there was a danger he could resort to more severe tactics
•The UK's Ministry of Defense says Russian forces appear to be "stalled in place", with Ukraine "continuing to repulse" attempts to occupy the besieged southern city of Mariupol.
•Ukrainian troops are now deploying Panzerfaust-3IT anti-tank weapons received from Germany. These systems can reputedly kill any Russian tank in service. The name means literally ‘tank fist’ in German.
•Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Monday vowed tough action on inflation, which he said jeopardizes an otherwise strong economic recovery.
"The labor market is very strong, and inflation is much too high," the central bank leader said in prepared remarks for the National Association for Business Economics. More on this here.
•There seems to be pattern that the media follows when something bad is about to happen. The end result is a 180 degrees twist of the bad thing. See if you can notice it:
Another one:
And here’s the NYT trying to spin the ‘a small nuclear bomb never hurt anyone’ narrative.
•Here’s a video from two years ago of a Russian prankster hanging a picture of Putin in the elevator. The reactions are priceless:
•Here’s another video of the last Soviet president Gorbachev in a Pizza Hut commercial:
Is a food crisis looming?
Russia and Ukraine account for 30% of the world’s wheat exports, 17% of corn, 32% of barley and 75% of sunflower seed oil. Russia also exports about 15% of the world’s fertilizer. Now all that food and fertilizer are stuck.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, wheat prices have increased by 21%, barley by 33% and some fertilizers by 40%. Consider this, Armenia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have imported all of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Now they need new sources but they are competing against bigger buyers like Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh and Iran, which got more than 60% of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. And all of them will be bidding for an even smaller supply because China is buying much more than usual. China just revealed that flooding delayed a third of its wheat crop, and now the upcoming harvest can be said to be worst in history according the Chinese agriculture minister.
But it’s not just the food. Russia is the world’s largest fertilizer exporter and it has told its producers to halt exports. Guess who is another big fertilizer exporter. Belarus. And its exports were also blocked because of sanctions before the war even started. Brazil, the world’s largest producer of soybeans, purchases nearly half of its potash fertilizer from Russia and Belarus. It has just three months of stockpiles left. Brazil sells most of its soybeans to China which mostly uses them to feed livestock. Fewer soybeans could force ranchers to cut back on animal feed, meaning smaller cows, pigs and chickens and higher prices for meat.
So is a food crisis looming? Yes, unless something changes right now as the planting season in the Northern hemisphere has just started, things will get quite bad by the end of the year, especially in developing countries. (Source: NYT)
Let’s Talk Space
•SpaceX made history in May 2020 when it launched its two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on a private rocket and spacecraft. That feat, which restored American access to space from U.S. soil, is now the focus of a new Netflix documentary (coming on April 7)and you can see the first trailer here:
•The James Webb Space Telescope has been designed to answer many of the core questions that have animated astronomers over the past half-century. With a $10 billion price tag, it is one of the most ambitious engineering initiatives ever attempted. Its goal? To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and witness the first stars flicker on. The infographic below does an excellent job in explaining this goal. You can read the full article here.
•Here’s some footage captured by the Curiosity rover from the surface of Mars. How insane is this? We launched an object to another planet to show us how it looks there. And the landscape looks so terrestrial and familiar that it seems hard to imagine that one would die instantly without a spacesuit.
•We spoke about SpaceX and Mars. Let’s now talk about Starship which is the rocket that SpaceX is building to take people to Mars. Elon Musk has mentioned 2029 as the year when this will become a reality. This is the biggest rocket ever made. Look how it compares to previous rockets from all over the world:
And the way it gets stacked on the booster looks like a render:
The Three Sides of Risk
We have mentioned before on MBW Morgan Housel and how good he writes on financial topics. Morgan emphasizes how our life experiences can have a strong effect on the amount of risks we take in our lives but in this great article he shares a personal example of his own when he was part of a ski team.
The story was very well written and suspenseful the whole time. In the end, we learn the three sides of risk which are:
a. The odds you will get hit.
b. The average consequences of getting hit.
c. The tail-end consequences of getting hit.
And after reading this we can’t help but reflect on our own personal experiences and how those have affected our own risk tolerance. You can read the full article here.
Pics, vids & memes
Hopefully everyone knows that the commonly-used world map is not entirely accurate, but I always get taken aback by these kind of comparisons.
Population distribution in Russia. All three colors have the same number of people.
The Spaniards are on a league of their own.
I always knew that the US was a major oil producer, but I had no clue that it was the largest one. Crazy.
Nafpaktos, Greece.
Accurate.
One more for the GOAT.
That was it folks. Enjoy the rest of your day. See you tomorrow.