America's mounting insurance crisis. US record homelessness. Beijing's Himalayan mega dam & who killed Jazz?
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email.
Georges Rouault, “Hindenburg”, 1930.
Numbers spinning out of control.
As private insurance pulls out of insuring homes in the most disaster-prone American states, public last resort backstops are absorbing the risks, so far to the tune of $ 1 trillion.
Federal lawmakers have begun to take notice of the conjoined problems of rising risks and higher costs. US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, is investigating the possibility that a big-enough disaster on Florida’s coast might trigger a national real estate crisis, or push the state’s residual insurer to seek a federal bailout. Meanwhile, Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, has proposed a national catastrophic reinsurance program, similar to the longstanding—and chronically indebted—National Flood Insurance Program …. According to a 2018 study by the University of Cambridge and Munich Re, if a Category 5 hurricane hit Miami and the Florida coast, it could cause a staggering $1.35 trillion in damages, more than $60,000 for every person in the state. … Fire damage from 2017 and 2018 wiped out more than twice the previous 25 years’s worth of underwriting profits for the California insurance market … “The problem is that the numbers spin out of control once you look at them …. We’re afraid that’s a sign, that they know perfectly well that their numbers don’t add up and that they’re in deep, deep trouble. They just don’t want to admit it.”
Source: Bloomberg
HEY READERS,
THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your weekend.
I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button.
If you are a regular reader of long-form Chartbook and Chartbook Top Links, or just enthusiastic about the project, why not think about joining that group? Chip in the equivalent of one cup of coffee per month and help to keep this flow of excellent content coming.
If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $50. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to!
And when you sign up, there are no more irritating “paywalls”
An out-of-the box idea for China and Trump Mark Sobel on joint intervention
For contributing subscribers only.
Deflation is eating into Chinese corporate profits
Joe Leahy and Tina Hu in Beijing 14 HOURS AGO 38 Print this page Chinese corporate profits are set to show a third consecutive year of declines in 2024, with the trend expected to continue into this year as deflationary pressures weigh on the world’s second-largest economy. Corporate profits in China for companies with more than Rmb20mn ($2.7mn) in revenue fell by an average of 4.7 per cent year on year between January and November, according to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics. This is greater than the 4 per cent drop seen during the whole of 2022 when the country was under pandemic lockdowns. Revenue grew just 1.8 per cent year on year between January and November 2024 on the same period in 2023. This compares with 5.9 per cent growth in 2022 on the previous year. In addition, 25 per cent of companies in China with revenue of more than Rmb20mn made outright losses between January and November 2024, compared with 16 per cent in the full year of 2019 before the pandemic, NBS data showed. The agency’s data covers 500,000 companies. “The biggest reason behind that slowdown, I would say, is deflation,” said Laura Wang, chief China equity strategist at Morgan Stanley. China is grappling with a two-speed economy, with strong exports offsetting weak domestic demand as households cope with a deep property slump.
Source: Financial Times
Federal Reserve employees overwhelmingly donate to Democratic causes Liz Hoffman and Rachyl Jones Semafor
For contributing subscribers only.
Georges Rouault, “Fille au miroir” (Girl in the Mirror), 1906. Source: Georges Rouault
Beijing’s mega dam
Beijing’s approval of a controversial mega dam on a river flowing from Tibet autonomous region into India, has raised concerns about the project’s environmental impact and its effect on China-India ties, which had been on the mend. The dam on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River is expected to be the world’s largest hydroelectric project and could generate three times the power of the Three Gorges Dam. Its construction will mark a major step in China’s plan to tap the hydropower potential of the Tibetan Plateau. But it could also intensify a dam-building competition between the Asian neighbours near their disputed Himalayan border, according to diplomatic and environmental experts. State news agency Xinhua said on Wednesday that the Chinese government had recently approved the massive project, which was included in Beijing’s 14th five-year plan from 2021 to 2025. The report did not specify the exact location of the project on Tibet’s longest river, which becomes the Brahmaputra River when it flows into the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, an area viewed by China as part of southern Tibet. The river also flows into Bangladesh, where it is called the Jamuna. But what is known is that the project will be built on a section referred to as the Grand Canyon, or the “Great Bend”, on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo. According to a 2020 estimate by state-owned Power Construction Corporation of China, the dam, located in one of the most hydropower-rich areas of the world, is expected to produce nearly 300 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually.
Source: myNEWS
The Yarlung Tsangpo River, often called the "Everest of Rivers," is not just the highest major river in the world; it also boasts the steepest descent, with a gradient that drops over 2,000 meters in just 100 kilometers. This unique topography creates an extraordinary opportunity for hydroelectric power generation but also poses significant engineering challenges. The river's gorge is three times deeper than the Grand Canyon, carved from ancient granitic bedrock, making it a geological wonder and a risky site for construction.
Source: LinkedIn
The excellent Justin Fox of Bloomberg explaining why NYC is such a safe place compared to most of the rest of the USA makes for great Instagram.
And Stephen Mihm on the real kings of NYC - the rats - is also excellent.
$100 gigs …. Dont know what the cover photo has to do with anything, but this is a fascinating insight into the contemporary Jazz life.
Porn is to real sex as James Bond films are to the routine of a civil servant
Oral sex, which was once so taboo that prostitutes charged more for it than penetrative sex, has become a staple, especially among the better-off and the young. When it comes to anal sex, by contrast, around 50% of British men and 40% of women aged 25 to 34 in 2010 had tried it, but fewer than half as many had done it in the previous year. Dr Spiegelhalter suggests that for many it is “tried for the experience but [does] not necessarily become a habit. Like swimming at Blackpool.”
Source: Economist
Georges Rouault Nocturne Chrétien, 1952
If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: