KochBank Weekend Reading

The "Big Beautyful Bill": unsustainable budget deficits are driving up US Debt-to-GDP (see article below)...

....driving up wealth inequality. According to Yale´s Budgetlab, it will cost the bottom 20% of taxpayers $560 a year on average, while the top 20% will get an average annual boost of $6,055 (source)

...but also driving up the heat between Donnie and Elon. Could a new party save America ? The extreme left and extreme right agree on a lot these days. They both love price controls and are obsessed with power. They just disagree on whose power they want to destroy. For the right it’s old institutions. For the left it’s "the rich" and corporations). Both have a "zero-sum" view of the world. More polarization will ultimately end democracy. Musk is right that there´s a lot of potential for a "central, moderate" party. But, Musk isn´t the right person to build it. Remember his "I-pay-you-for-your-vote-lottery" in the run-up to the election ?

...and is not very popular overall

Random Walk: Can the US grow its way out of debt?
Eagle Point Capital: Reading Roundup: April & May 2025
Best Anchor Stocks: About Selling - when, why, how ?

Eagle Point Capital with summaries of these books (see article above). The grain merchant one looks interesting

Tweedy Brown find better opportunities outside Europe. They talk Roche, Nestlé, Rheinmetall, Fresenius, Prudential, and Berkshire Hathaway with NZZ The Market (see article below)

Quipus is distilling a DCF model to its components. Stock return equals multiple delta + earnings growth + buyback + dividend

Kyla Scanlon: "We're now living in a system where attention dynamics are the operating system for resource allocation, political decisions, and identity formation" (see article below)

NZZ The Market: Tweedy Brown - We find better opportunities outside the US
Quipus Capital: Where do stock returns come from? A napkin framework.
Must Read: Kyla´s Newsletter: Attention and Speculation as primary economic drivers

You need an income of over $100k to afford a starter home in the US, more than double the income needed just five years ago.

MIT study: Using AI writing assistants like ChatGPT leads to "cognitive debt"—a state where outsourcing mental effort to AI weakens critical thinking, learning, and idea ownership over time (source)

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev plans to "tokenize everything" (i.e. European stocks from summer 2025)

Podcasts & Videos

Odd Lots: Robinhood's CEO on the plan to tokenize everything
In good company: Interview with Anthony Bolton
Preferred Shares: Beretta: 500 years of Italian exceptionalism

Anthony Bolten has been a world-class "contrarian investor". Contrarian investing works not because of superior information or analytical skills, but because of "having a tougher stomach" (the behavioural edge of not needing the "approval of the crowd"). Now think about this: real contrarian investors are in very short supply, given the momentum and ETF boom of the last 1.5 decades. There are simply no young or middle-aged "contrarians" left. The art is lost. Young analysts are trained to find and trade the next alternative data point, the next input to tilt a pre-close call or whatever Multi-Strat funds use to drive ultra-short-term performance. When very few people do it, competition in contrarian investing will be low and prospective returns will be high.

500 years of firearms. The Beretta family and its craft through the centuries (see podcast above)

Mr. Moritz, 70, said he had decided to start The Standard because he “couldn’t find out what was happening in San Francisco” anymore because of “the erosion of all the local news outlets. “I think news and information in any city is as vital as water, electricity and gas.“
Couldn´t agree more. Local news is a massive, non-commodity, opportunity offering real pricing power. Gossip, preferrably about people and things you know, is a key human need. Social Media cannot fill this void. It´s too congested, un-checked and polarized.

Enjoy the Weekend!