Cashing in on the egg crisis. How American business hemorrhages cash & Zoonotic spillover.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email.
Equipo Crónica (Valencia, 1964 – 1981). “The Banker” (1972). Source: Invaluable
Because why not take advantage of a crisis?
The family that controls the largest US egg seller is seeking to cash out amid a bird flu crisis that has driven prices to all-time highs. The four daughters and son-in-law of Cal-Maine Foods founder Fred R Adams Jr reached an agreement with the company to convert their super-voting shares to common shares, relinquishing control ahead of a “potential diversification of their individual financial portfolios”, according to a securities filing by the company. The family’s stake in Cal-Maine is held through a shell company called Daughters LLC. At Friday’s close, the stake is valued at nearly $532mn, including $434mn in super-voting shares and another $98mn in common shares. At the same time, Cal-Maine, based in Ridgeland, Mississippi, said it would undertake a $500mn share buyback programme, its first in two decades, and disclosed it could use the initiative to “repurchase some of the family members’ common shares” as they sold their holdings. … US egg prices reached $8.58 per dozen in wholesale markets this week amid a severe bird flu outbreak, a 70 per cent increase from year-ago levels, according to a commodity price information service Expana. The outbreak has led farmers to cull 100 million chickens, turkeys and egg-laying hens in the US since 2022, according to the US agriculture department, creating an egg shortage that experts forecast to keep prices near all-time highs for months to come. … “Dominant egg producers — particularly Cal-Maine Foods — have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power,” advocacy group Farm Action wrote in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. “The slow recovery in flock size, despite historically high prices, further suggests co-ordinated efforts to restrict supply and sustain inflated prices.”
Source: FT
Say you were actually serious about trying to rebuild US manufacturing, rather than raising tariffs, what might you do?
The challenge for Trump’s policies is to reverse the long rising trend of firms using internal cash to fund dividends and buybacks rather than capital spending (Chart 3). On a four-quarter moving average basis, some 70% of internal funds are being used to return capital to shareholders. The financing gap (capex minus internal funds) is, on the other hand, negative. The two series have been on a diverging trend since the 2001 recession – not surprising given the shift to use productive capacity outside the US and, in turn, earn the wide margin. This structure creates little reason to hold onto the capital. Trump’s proposals are being designed to shift the incentives back towards using internal cash to underwrite domestic capex.
Source: Steven Blitz TSLombard
HEY READERS,
THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day.
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”
President Trump will speak at the first-ever White House Crypto Summit next Friday.
For contributing subscribers only.
Will BHP acquire Freeport to create a copper giant?
The biggest mine that BHP would be after is Grasberg, situated in Indonesia’s half of New Guinea, a region that has long been synonymous with clashes between separatist groups and Jakarta’s security forces, many of the latter funded by Grasberg’s owners as site protection.
Source: Bloomberg
Equipo Crónica (Valencia, 1964 – 1981). “Point and Line on the green (Billiards)” (1978). Source: Invaluable
Equipo Crónica
Equipo Crónica was a group of Spanish painters active between 1964 and 1981. It was founded by Manolo Valdés, Juan Antonio Toledo, who soon left the group, and Rafael Solbes, whose death in 1981 put an end to the project. The historian and critic Tomás Llorens was also a member of the group, and he explains the theoretical basis of Equipo in a text entitled "La distanciación de la Distanciación" ("The Distancing of Distanciation"). The three painters also signed a manifesto in 1965, in which they defined themselves as a working group with collective methods and supra-individual aims. Equipo Crónica moved away from the prevailing informalism to cultivate figurative painting, closely linked to pop art. Fed up with introspection, these artists took to the streets and observed the world around them, a society of incipient industrialisation and tourists. Their style was a unique blend of realism, criticism, pop, pictorial quotations, anachronisms and bittersweet pastiches. The group produced paintings, sculptures and prints, and tended to work in series, which allowed the same subject to be analysed in different variations. Equipo Crónica started from a very simple language, with monochrome and repeated images, very close to contemporary media, especially newspaper photographs. There are works by Equipo Crónica in the IVAM in Valencia, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Fundación Juan March and the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, among others. In 2007 an exhibition dedicated to Equipo Crónica was organised at the Museo de Arte Abstracto in Cuenca.
Source: Setdart
Zoonotic viral spillover events since the 1960s. Quite surprised that HIV/AIDS is not on here. It is surely the most significant instance of zoonosis in modern age.
Source: World Health Organization
And the risk of further zoonotic spillovers is rising.
For contributing subscribers only.
Excreting microplastics
For contributing subscribers only.
El Capitain
The world's most powerful supercomputer was officially dedicated in California on Jan 9 2025, with the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and AMD on hand to celebrate their handiwork. El Capitan — as the $600 million supercomputer is known — will handle an array of classified tasks aimed at securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons and conducting a variety of other unspecified simulations. El Capitan and a smaller sibling designed for nonclassified work sit inside a large data center inside Lawrence Livermore National Labs, roughly 30 miles northeast of Silicon Valley…. El Capitan is capable of peak performance of 2.79 exaflops, or 2.79 quintillion calculations per second. That's equivalent to the processing power of about 1 million of today's high-end smartphones working simultaneously. Its 87 computer racks and accompanying infrastructure weigh 1.3 million pounds. That's about the same as four blue whales or 100 African elephants. El Capitan uses 30 megawatts of power, drawn from the local grid, though the lab did have to arrange for more power to be concentrated in the data center that houses it. For HPE, El Capitan is yet another notch in its belt. The company, which acquired supercomputer maker Cray in 2019, is also responsible for supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Argonne labs, the next-largest such computers. For AMD, it's another sign of just how far the chipmaker's fortunes have risen. Long Intel's distant rival, AMD has not only grabbed a significant share of PCs and servers, but emerged as a key player in supercomputing. AMD also aspires to grab a larger share of the AI training market from Nvidia.
Source: Axios
Equipo Crónica (Valencia, 1964 – 1981). “El telegrama, Homenaje a Viñes” (1976). Source: Invaluable
If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: