Eggs slump. More terrible news about Britain. Borrower leadership & the Greek colonels.
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Thank you for your support of Chartbook. Your generosity keeps this show on the road.
Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), Worker and Machine, 1928.
Well, here is some good news: Eggs are headed towards a two-year low.
And here is some more good news. China’s fertilizer use peaked ten years ago
And here are some alarming labels.
And here are some silly German arguments being taken down … hard!
NO just because German yields have risen does NOT mean that German debt has lost its standing a safe haven asset. 30 year German debt yields have risen exactly in line with risk-free real rates across the Eurozone.
And here is more terrible news about Britain.
Numbers tell the story. According to the Living Standards Review 2025 from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, real disposable income per head rose by just 14 per cent between the third quarters of 2007 and 2024: it had risen 48 per cent between the third quarters of 1990 and 2007.
According to the IMF, the trend growth of GDP per head in the UK had been 2.5 per cent a year from 1990 to 2007: then, between 2008 and 2025, it was just 0.7 per cent. This reduction of 1.8 percentage points in the growth rate was the largest in the group of seven high-income countries (plus Spain). In the second period, only Italy has grown considerably more slowly than the UK. As a result, UK GDP per head in 2025 is forecast to be 33 per cent lower than it would have been if the 1990-2007 trend growth had continued. This is the biggest shortfall among all these countries.
Source: Financial Times
“Solutions for an Indebted World: Borrower Leadership and Systemic Reform” Chaired a panel with this enticing title in UNGA week in NYC. No one on the panel really knew what to make of it. But it seems like a good idea!
You have to see it, to believe it
A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with startup investors, and interviewed founders of companies. They knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and “everything around energy,” but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc who’s now a partner at Kompas VC. As financial professionals prepare to gather in New York for the city’s annual climate week, they’ll need to address the reality that China — the world’s largest source of carbon emissions — is now the strongest motor guiding the planet to a low-carbon future. While US President Donald Trump axes the green policies of his predecessor and Europe gets caught up in a regulatory stalemate, China is quietly making a number of transition sectors impenetrable to Western startups.
The VCs Bloomberg interviewed don’t have mandates to invest in China directly. Instead, their goal is to avoid allocating funds to Western startups that can’t compete with Chinese peers. They plan to use climate week in New York to talk about little else. Planet A Ventures, a Berlin-based VC, has decided that investments in Western startups spanning battery manufacturing and recycling, electrolysers, solar and hardware for wind are no longer viable, says Nick de la Forge, general partner and co-founder of the firm. He says before the trip he’d suspected China was way ahead; but after going there, those sectors are now “strictly off the list.”
Source: Bloomberg
Hugo Gellert, The Masses, November 1916.
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 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”
Coming in at the end
For contributing subscribers only.
Chatgpt riffing on a prompt from Grey Anderson
Hugo Gellert, Machinery and Large Scale Industry 1933.
If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: