Not much moves cryptocurrency markets like Elon Musk tweets -- except, perhaps, the idea of another crackdown in China, the world’s second-largest economy. From a trading ban on domestic exchanges to squeezes on power-consuming digital currency miners, Chinese regulators have tried to tamp down risks related to the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin and its peers for years. Yet a recent flurry of official reminders has traders nervous about more possibly to come as President Xi Jinping seeks to reduce financial risk in the economy and meet the country’s ambitious goals for combating climate change.

Many have wondered aloud whether GMO is not giving enough credit to some of these high growth new-business-model “disruptors.” First, we have all sorts of models that take current optimistic growth forecasts into account. Many are deserving of their current high multiples --- we absolutely concede that somewhere in the Global Growth basket sits “the next Amazon.” Unfortunately, they’re ALL being priced that way, and that is a bridge too far.
We also remind ourselves that during the month of May, the S&P 500’s real earnings yield (the inverse of P/E minus inflation) dipped into negative territory, the lowest in 40 years. Even at the height of tech bubble mania this scary event did not occur.
Combine that sober statistic with the negative real yields being offered by sovereign bonds, and you may come to see why we are loathe to recommend a traditional 60/40 mix. There will come a day when global equities and government bonds are fairly valued and should deliver a “normal” real rate of return. Today, however, is not that day.

On an every-day experience level we just came back from Safeway having purchased a favorite flavor of Hagen-Daz ice cream. I thought that the cartons looked a bit smaller than before. Sure enough, down from 1 pint (16 oz) to 14 oz. We have no idea what the price was before, but even if it hasn't increased at all, we just saw a 10% price increase.
I've been occasionally commenting on this sort of thing here on MFO for at least a year now, only to be reassured that the government statistics haven't picked up any major price increases in food, other than the usual variations due to supply issues.
You can say whatever you want to, but I loudly call BS on the government figures.

Old_Joe : I think you had a price increase of 12.5 % , without paying more !
Enjoy the treat, Derf

All the daily humdrum is simply noise. Rather then helping to make a wise investment decision it simply adds to the confusion by providing a plethora of information, some wrong, some right, that makes the investment decision more likely wrong. The solution is simple enough. Avoid that info.

Women earn more in the marketplace over men. Why that unexpected outcome? They are not slaves to the daily news! They are not motivated by all the unnecessary activity to act unwisely. Surely doing nothing can not be the proper action. But it is. Winning in the investment world is to ignore the excitement. Just do nothing. That simple strategy will win in the long haul in most all instances. Of course, exceptions exist. That’s what makes the marketplace work, it seems as if luck is a more dominant factor than skill.

Zeroes
• Conceptually, the most basic debt instrument is a zero-coupon bond--a security with a single cash flow equal to face value at maturity.
• Cash flow of $1 par of t-year zero: [no cash over time until maturity t-years, then $1]
• It is easy to see that any security with fixed cash flows can be constructed, and thus priced, as a portfolio of these zeroes.
A Coupon Bond as a Portfolio of Zeroes
Consider: $10,000 par of a one and a half year, 8.5% Treasury bond makes the following payments:
[$425 coupon at 0.5 years; $425 coupon at 1.0 year, $10,425 coupon & principal at 1.5 years]
Note that this is the same as a portfolio of three different zeroes:
– $425 par of a 6-month zero
– $425 par of a 1-year zero
– $10425 par of a 1 1/2-year zero

In the military, clothing, food, shelter, and medical care are guaranteed. And although it offers less choice about what to wear or where to live than the private sector, there’s a baseline of care for service members that doesn’t exist in the civilian world. The military invests time and money in service members while making the maximum effort to keep their morale high. The millions of service members who live on military bases around the world experience a kind of economic and social security that isn’t comparable with any other working-class community in America. There are schools, golf courses, public parks, movie theaters, and campsites maintained for their use. While some have called the military a “socialist paradise,” as The Daily Beast’s Jacob Siegel has suggested, there’s a practical reason for the full-service benefits: Military members are simply more effective at defending the country when they’re healthy, happy, and untroubled by issues at home. Napoleon’s dictum that an army marches on its stomach is absolutely true. Likewise, marching requires vaccinations and boots. (In fact, five years after separating from the Army as an infantryman, I still occasionally wear the boots I deployed in.)
One of the empty promises of the so-called “gig economy” is that workers have the freedom to work whenever they want. As Arun Sundararajan wrote in The Guardian, “You can pick up your kid from school (and then switch to being an Uber driver). In the gig economy, the lines between personal and professional become increasingly blurred.” But work hours weren’t meant to limit employees’ productivity; they were meant to protect workers from being exploited. When work life and home life blur, the effect becomes totalizing. Work life always “wins,” and the time that could be spent with family or pursuing an identity outside of your role in the corporate structure is stolen. As Leah Libresco writes in First Things, asking workers to devote so much to a corporate cause forces them to approach a career as oblates—secular monks—without a counterbalancing depth of meaning.
The military obviously asks much of those who serve and their families. Deployments are long, and death or injury is a very real possibility. However, the profundity derived from military service, unlike abandoning a family life in order to take on more Uber routes, is commensurate with the sacrifice. Military service provides a sense of meaning beyond what any corporate culture is capable of creating. This seems like a fairly obvious notion, and it’s one that has been expressed by thinkers from Plato to Hegel to Francis Fukuyama: Human beings derive a higher sense of self from risky, physically dangerous sacrifice in the service of a higher ideal. Plato knew it as thumos or thymos, Attic Greek translating roughly to “spiritedness.” People don’t just want to satisfy their own physical needs—they want to contribute to something larger than themselves. This is what veterans most miss after leaving the military: the sense that the people to your right and left are looking out for you while you in turn are willing to lay down your life for them, all towards a goal that transcends group and individual self-interest. As one vet writes, “Most recent veterans aren’t suffering because they remember what was bad. They’re suffering because they miss what was good.”
The military is tasked with something almost pre-modern in scope and seriousness: destroying the enemy. Not maximization of value for shareholders. Not the opening of new markets. The goal is simply to defend the lives and property of the United States. In other words, the focus is on people instead of profits.
Civilian employers are fundamentally different from the military because their animating goals are different. And their goals often do not prioritize their workers’ well-being. The result, for many, is economic insecurity, which is about more than stagnant wages or wealth distribution. Precarity is an all-inclusive term that describes a lack of predictability, stability, and sense of security in the workplace. It’s a word that can be used to describe the tenuous legal status of migrant laborers, the Weltschmerz of Millennials clinging to unpaid internships, or the desperation of the underemployed holding down multiple part-time jobs that offer few benefits or none at all. Precarity is at work in things like forced telecommunication, being paid per minute, and the trend towards turning employment into a quickly revolving door. As Barry Asin, chief analyst at labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts told Bloomberg Business, “When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh. The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true.”
At the frontline of precarity is the gig economy. In theory, the gig economy gives workers the freedom to remain untethered to a single employer, pursuing work piecemeal as a series of individual short-term tasks. No need to be limited by a set salary when there’s a potential to work and earn as much as you want. These are the promises of companies like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. Of course, played out in the real world, the reality of the gig economy is different. Jobs and workers are traded back and forth in a bid to simultaneously minimize the responsibility of the employer and maximize value for shareholders. Uber drivers have to purchase and maintain cars themselves. AirBnB hosts purchase and maintain their own property. Neither company treats those providing their services as employees. The gig economy has served, as Melissa Gregg writes in The Atlantic, to “liberate workers from a single employer,” a liberation that in actuality serves to liberate employers from “the traditional responsibilities of being an employer,” resulting in greater precarity for workers.
The charge that modern capitalism fails to create meaning isn’t a new one. Since the 19th century, social thinkers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim have critiqued consumption as fundamentally nihilistic. The experiences of those who have served, who have had the opportunity to cultivate experiences outside the logic of the market, complement these critiques. Bryan Wood echoes the chorus of dissatisfied vets when he writes in his memoir Unspoken Abandonment, “I couldn’t believe the kind of silly bullshit these people thought mattered in life … I couldn’t believe I once thought these same things were important.” Most civilians I’ve talked to about military service dismiss it as a brutal and alien experience. But in many ways, the gig economy, and the contemporary economy more generally, provide the more brutal environment: People are isolated, uncared for, fungible or disposable, and without the opportunity to cultivate the higher human need to sacrifice for a noble purpose. In this sense, it’s the military—and similar occupations—that provide the more humane option.

[T]he first colonial pension schemes ... reproduced the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Payments were means-tested and subject to a character test. People had to prove they had led ‘a sober and respectable life’. ...
[W]hen the Commonwealth scheme came into effect in July 1909, all non-white residents, even those already naturalised before the racist Naturalisation Act 1903, were formally made ineligible for benefits reserved for white settlers. ...
From 1907, following the Harvester Judgement, employers were bound to pay a male worker a ‘fair and reasonable wage’, sufficient to sustain himself, his wife and their children in ‘a condition of frugal comfort’. The basic male wage became the centrepiece of what has been described as the ‘wage earners’ welfare state’..., but thereafter—in spite of challenging times like the 1930s Great Depression—attempts to extend social protection to those outside the labour market failed.
[Through two world wars and beyond] [t]he basic male wage remained the foundation of social security policy and the Unemployment Benefits resembled a dole more than an earned social entitlement.
The Whitlam government (1972–1975) sought to reform the system along social democratic principles. Social security would no longer be merely a safety net, but a precondition for economic justice. Economic justice demanded that social security should be provided according to need, in recognition of the innate value of every citizen, not an assessment of character. ...
The Poverty Inquiry chaired by Professor Ronald Henderson [in this period] highlighted many systemic problems in the design of social security and put forward a concrete proposal for a basic income scheme , but poor timing meant its recommendations were never realised.
The last forty years of social security reform mark a steady retreat from the principle of universalism and a return to older notions of ’deservingness’.
This has coincided with the dismantling of the regulatory frameworks and institutions put in place to curtail both economic volatility and deep inequality. At the same time as deregulation has markedly increased household exposure to risk ..., the social safety net has become less effective.

Australia and the U.S. are both liberal welfare states. During the past quarter century, they have begun the transition from a welfare to a workfare state, albeit at different rates and through different paths. Social work developed in each country in ways congruent with the local liberal welfare state, and as such, has been destabilized by the transition to the workfare regime

This three-year run [2017-2020] warrants further inspection—just how uncommon was this value premium magnitude? Literally unprecedented, as illustrated by the rolling three-year value premiums in Exhibit 2. Of the 1,093 rolling observations in US history, the three years ending in June 2020 ranked dead last. This is the very definition of an outlier.

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ᴇxʜɪʙɪᴛ 2

Back of the Pack
Rolling 3-year annualized return differences for value versus growth,
US market, June 1929–June 2020

Thanks all. Very informative.
FWIW - the password (to a news site) that was “flagged” by Apple consisted of 8 lower case letters which comprised a first name and an initial. Think “denniso”. I’d imagine there’s hundreds of people using that one. :)
However, this has spurred me to rethink and beef-up password security across the wide spectrum of applications.