Found this article behind paywall:
https://citywireusa.com/professional-buyer/news/star-manager-to-step-off-70bn-vanguard-fund/a1483608

The population increased in the 1980's. My hunch is the 1980's drop was at least somewhat related to the continuing decline in coal consumption and the related 84/85 coal strike and its aftermath (Iron Lady time).

I read about this when it was announced. Morningstar did an article about this a while back and after reading that, it made sense to me.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1026626/what-t-rowe-prices-split-means-for-fund-investors
I have about 25% of my investments with TRP PRWCX, RPMGX and TRSGX .
The change makes sense to me. I don't see any downside. There could be some portfolio improvements. The analysts will change which could make some differences, but the managers will stay the same.

More from Andy Rothman in today's WSJ. Unsprisingly, Andy's pro-China stance is evident once again!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-economy-likely-to-outgrow-chinas-due-to-contrast-in-pandemic-responses-11629036000
Andy Rothman, a China specialist at Matthews Asia, views the growth reversal as a blip along a road leading to China eventually becoming the world’s largest economy. The recent U.S. results are “like getting so excited about the Washington Nationals winning five in a row but they’re still five games below .500,” he said.

@msf
You're a wealth of knowledge, as usual. Thanks so much for that link. $110bn managed by two portfolio managers. I assume the overlap on the various vehicles is pretty high. If so, that's a lot to manage without running into capacity constraints, no? If I recall correctly, Anderson typically has 35-40 stock portfolios? Has BG ever closed their "Foreign Large Growth" strategy to new flows across vehicles?
Im impressed with BG's recent turbo-charged growth and have read about their long history of private investing. But again, given their concentrated approach, i don't get how they don't have to close their growth strategies.

I can't say how much BG is getting per dollar under management. But I can address the capacity question.
As of August 31, 2020, the two BG fund managers at the time (Anderson and Coutts) were managing a bit less than $110B, including four mutual funds, around a half dozen pooled investments, and nearly two score other accounts. Of that, over half, $57B, came from the Vanguard fund. And the Vanguard fund accounted for nearly all the money that carried performance-based fees.
Data is from SAI, p. B-70 (pdf p. 80)
https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/sai023.pdf?2210175721
Vanguard is not adding to the management burden, it is the management burden for this strategy.
I suppose BG could subadvise for a different family instead and charge more. With Vanguard they can be reasonably confident that the fund will not push more money at them than they feel they can handle. Vanguard would either add another investment management firm or close the fund, immediately. (None of this "we're closing the fund in two months" at Vanguard.)
As an example of what could happen with other families is what happened at IVINX two decades ago. The fund wanted to reopen. The subadvisor and original manager, Hakan Castegren, felt capacity limited. The fund reopened over his objections and he walked away. Sometimes, money isn't everything. Shocking. :-)
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/7158/ivy-international-replaces-castegren-with-former-scudder-kemper-manager

I remember hearing about the "splitting" of T. Rowe Price Associates and T. Rowe Price Investment Managemnt last year, but didn't really know what to think of it. Over the weekend, I ran upon this barrons article which highlighed the rationale in more detail than I anticipated. So long story short, it seems T. Rowe got so big, that it needs two entities to manage investment capacity? While I think I understand this...when i start talking it out, it doesn't make much sense to me. So This helps them so at an entity level, they aren't invested too much in a single company? Or does this help them with reporting, meaning, they don't have to report owning >X% of a company? Or is this from a trading perspective, having separate entities will make it easier to trade without moving markets? When i take a step back, I don't fully understand how its that different from just having one entity?
And of course, the most important question: I don't fully understand if this is a good or bad thing for investors?
And I assume Blackrock and every other big manager >$1tn AUM has done this?
https://www.barrons.com/articles/t-rowe-price-is-splitting-in-two-what-that-means-for-investors-51606333566

There is some explaining I would like to see, e.g. the drop in the 1980s, when they reached levels from a century earlier --- was that all population ... decline ?

I taken that you don't invest with Matthews Asia funds or have high opinon of their outlook? Though I agree that Matthews Asia funds have not excel with the exiting of several experienced managers.

I used to, but not anymore. I was pretty enthusiastic about them 10 years ago after I met with one of the founders. I found their approach to investing and vibrant team pretty compelling and unique. However, performance started becoming mediocre around 2015 and their fees are high, then portfolio managers started leaving, and not to retire, but to other competitor firms. I can't list all the names, but i recall at least 10 relatively young portfolio managers leaving the firm in the past two years, which is meaningful given the size of Matthews. Something seems off with the team and overall company. Not something we haven't seen happen at other boutiques. Its tough to stay hungry and not slip into complacency and mediocrity. The recent departures, who again are all relatively young, tell me people are jumping ship and there are bigger issues at play than just poor performance.
Its been interesting to see where Matthews PMs have left to. I've been trying to find a way to get into Tiffany Hsio's China private/public fund at Artisan (I loved her China Small fund at Matthews). Others left for Genesis (UK) and Rondure in SLC IIRC.

@msf Thank you so much for all the information on BG and their relationship with Vanguard. So I understand that BG is one of the actual advisors of VWILX and VWIGX. However, what I don't understand is - how is this relationship worth it for BG, who are fully in the active-management camp? Meaning, the advisory fee on VWILX and VWIGX is ~18 bps and the total TER is 33bps and 44 bps, respectively. BG's other Foreign Growth equity funds' management fees average around 40 bps and TERs around 50+ bps. This subadvisory relationship with Vanguard is sizeable (~$70bn between VWILX and VWIGX) but must be at incredibly low fee rates, guessing 50% of 18 bps? Given BG's already capacity constrained across a number of their strategies (high overlap?), I don't understand how this arrangement makes sense for them.

The two Schroeder managers on VWILX comprise the management for SCIEX. The three B-G managers on VWILX are the three longest tenure (of five) managing BGESX. One of those, Anderson, also co-managed BSGLX from inception until a year ago.
So if I were to try to gauge VWILX based on its management, I'd compare it to a 70/30 mix of BGESX (not BSGLX) and SCIEX. That's important because BSGLX is a global fund (slightly over half is domestic), while the other funds are foreign: BGESX 94% foreign, SCIEX 96%, and VWILX 86%.
I ran a quick instant X-ray with 50% VWILX, 35% BGESX, and 15% SCIEX and looked at stock intersections. It pretty well verified that VWILX is close to a 70/30 mix of the other two funds. A couple of notable stocks that VWILX has that the others don't are Moderna (MRNA) and Tesla (TSLA).
Independent of which funds VWILX is approximating, its high allocation to Chinese stocks doesn't seem to be the root of its relative underperformance. BSGLX has a 25% stake in China (virtually all its Asian holdings) and has done far better YTD than VWILX, which has "only" 17.6% in China.
Since these funds are in different categories, it helps additionally to note that VWILX's China holdings are about 10% above its peers (i.e. its peers hold 7.7%), while BGSLX's China holdings are a whopping 20% above its peers. Each fund ranks around 80th percentile in its respective category YTD.

Morningstar writes that "The (P/E) ratio of a fund is the weighted average of the price/earnings ratios of the stocks in a fund's portfolio."
https://www.morningstar.com/invglossary/price_earnings_ratio.aspx
Well, not exactly. Or at least I hope not. According to its 2005 methodology paper, "Morningstar now exclusively uses a harmonic weighted average method for calculating the average price ratio for an investment portfolio."
https://studylib.net/doc/7944379/average-price-ratios
That's just a fancy way of saying that it takes the weighted average of E/P ratios and then inverts the average E/P to get the P/E for a fund. Which is really what one wants if one thinks about what P/E (or E/P) represents.
A P/E ratio tells you how many dollars you have to pay for one dollar of annual earnings. Suppose you have invested $2, half in a stock earning 10¢ per dollar invested (P/E of 10), and half in a stock earning 2¢ per dollar invested (P/E of 50). Then for your $2, you're getting 12¢ of earnings, for a P/E ratio of $2/$0.12 = 16154;. Not 30 (the average of 10 and 50).
Of course there are still all sorts of variants: current P/Es, projected P/Es, excluding negative earnings, etc. This is just looking at the formula for fund average P/E, not what P/E values you plug into that formula.
Some pages explaining this::
Mean well - Why the average of 10 and 50 is not necessarily 30 (Schroeders)
- where it writes 162/3x it means 16154;x
P/E for a fund or an index (Bogleheads Wiki)
- the index calculation it gives is equivalent to the fund calculation (left as an exercise for the reader)
Your Mutual Fund's P/E is Likely Very Wrong (Seeking Alpha)
- focuses more on the variants (whether negative earnings should be excluded) than the basic calculation

this is cool --- the UK's 1850 levels

Yes. That is encouraging. The image doesn't show up on my computer....just the word "image". But going to the link I sleuthed when previewing this reply provides the image. Weird....
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8052euWYAIRShO?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
A brief explanation of their recent progress:

The electricity sector is where the large majority of UK emissions cuts have occurred over the past decade, during which the country’s power supplies have been transformed.

‘net-zero emissions’ target is one source for more details.

this is cool --- the UK's 1850 levels

We have had the discussion on Baillie Gifford awhile back. @msf provided a detailed analysis on Baillie Gifford investment approaches. For retail investors, there are two vehicles available:
Vanguard International Growth, VWILX. Baillie Gifford managed by BG 2/3 of the fund and Schroeder manages the other 1/3. BG side uses a concentrated approach sizable exposure to emerging market, particularly China. Plus side is low expense ratio. This fund is available as a transaction fee fund with Fidelity.
Harbor International Growth, HAIGX, more diversified approach with a different set of BG fund managers. Institutional share, $50K min and transaction fee required.

Can carbon capture become part of the solution? (Can the saying "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" be usefully applied to adoption of this technology by people with a variety of perspectives about the extent of the underlying problem?)

Skyrocketing carbon prices and a “code red” warning about the threat posed by climate change are giving fresh momentum to a technology that captures and removes greenhouse gas emissions so they can be buried.

Bury Carbon
The potential for obtaining broad based support in the United States is a point in its favor:

Amid Extreme Weather, a Shift Among Republicans on Climate Change

For 1964, unfortunately, the calm before the storm-Vietnam War and stagflation.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nixon-reshaped-the-world-economy-50-years-ago-is-crypto-on-the-brink-of-doing-the-same-now-11628893012?siteid=yhoof2
Crypto is reshaping the world economy, 50 years after Nixon ended the dollar’s peg to gold. Here’s how some are playing itLast Updated: Aug. 14, 2021 at 10:52 a.m. ETFirst Published: Aug. 14, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. ET
Mark DeCambre
 
A Bretton Woods for the digital-currency era? Will we see more global coordination on digital assets?
Cryptos to the moon?

A year that has rewarded those who have simply enjoyed the ride.....

The gains are smaller, befitting a less hysterical year. When the S&P 500 Index has risen in 2021, the daily increase has been half what it was in 2020. But in terms of persistent, day-after-day gains, these seven months in the U.S. stock market have few historical precedents.
Over the last century, there has been just one other year when the benchmark set more high-water marks by this point in the summer -- in 1964.

Slow Slog
Plus, an optimistic view going forward:

What’s keeping stocks aloft? As usual, the answer is corporate America’s earnings machine.
...the equity market is not the economy. If you compare the two, the equity market has massive technology in it, a lot less small-caps. Those earnings are super defensive to a no-GDP-growth scenario.”
In the eyes of analysts who follow individual companies, profit growth is set to slow, but at roughly 10% in each of the next two years, that would still top the historic rate of 6% annually.
Profit margins, which just reached a record high, are expected to increase over the next years, analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence show.
To Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Leuthold, this boom cycle is just starting.

S&P 500 Snubbing Dire View

Nice piece by GMO. It's basic enough that at most all one needs is Econ 101, not macro, to follow. But by the same token, it may be glossing over some things.
For example:

The impact of fiscal deficits on the economy is complicated and requires careful analysis. For this reason, we see no simple correlation between fiscal deficits and inflation

It then shows a scatter plot with an R² of essentially zero.
But it declines to graphically illustrate the textbook Keynesian view of deficits that it presented earlier:

whether this [fiscal deficit] activity is inflationary depends on how much potential output is available in the economy. If the economy is experiencing sluggish growth or a recession, then an increase in fiscal spending by the government will simply get the economy growing again.

It could plot fiscal balance vs. inflation restricted to periods when economic growth is above a given threshold. That would illustrate what the paper acknowledged: at times deficits are inflationary. Rather than being constructive, it chooses to shoot down a simple strawman.
In presenting the aggregate supply/aggregate demand curves, it presupposes that government stimulus would increase demand from AD_2 to AD_3. But earlier it acknowledged that rather than increasing spending (demand), this time the government stimulus didn't have that effect::

when it comes to fiscal policy, this time was different. Typically, when money is distributed to people it results in an increase in spending. But during the pandemic, we saw a massive increase in the personal savings rate when the government sent out checks (see Exhibit 9).

It would have been nice had GMO had connected current data to theory a bit more tightly. It would have gotten to the same place, but then we'd have been reading a 30 page paper instead of an 11 page one.