The surge in big tech capex. The shipbuilding boom. Litigating butter chicken. Are we entering post-literate society?
Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email.
La partida, Gare d'Austerlitz, París, 1883 (The Departure, Gare DAusterlitz, Paris, 1883 )Paul Louis Delance
The surge in big tech capex is one of the most dramatic trends in the US economy in the last 15 years.
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”
Whatever the speculation about r* and the neutral rate of interest, there can be no argument that real rates in the US are higher than they have been for fifteen years.
For contributing subscribers only.
Shipbuilding: It is not even a contest
There are currently 80 US-flagged vessels in international commerce compared with China’s 5,500. The recently introduced SHIPS for America Act would revitalize the US shipbuilding and commercial maritime industries after decades of neglect, according to its sponsors, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, Republican Senator Todd Young, Democratic Representative John Garamendi and Republican Representative Trent Kelly. And while his name might not be on it, Mike Waltz’s fingerprints are all over it. Waltz, a China hawk, was deeply involved in putting the bill together before he was tapped to be Trump’s national security adviser. “It’s one thing for the United States to have declined but to have the void filled by our greatest adversary and, I think, the greatest adversary the United States has ever faced is incredibly serious and concerning,” Waltz said at a CSIS event in September.
“Last year, 2023, China received over 1,500 new orders for new ships. The United States received five. The largest shipyard in China could fit every shipyard in the United States inside it and is producing more ships and then, you know, by – comparably the largest shipyard in South Korea, Hyundai, is producing 40 to 50 ships a year. Again, the United States produced five.”
Source1: Bloomberg
Source 2: CSIS
Betting on trade: 2024 saw a huge boom in ship-building orders
The biggest vessel-ordering program since the eve of the global financial crisis is putting a squeeze on the shipbuilding industry’s capacity to construct new vessels. Owners plowed more than $188 billion into newbuilds in the first 11 months of 2024, on course for the strongest pace in terms of both value and capacity since 2007, according to Clarkson Research Services Ltd, a unit of the world’s largest shipbroker. Two of the world’s three largest shipbuilders say customers would need to wait until 2028 to receive new ships ordered today. … The trouble is that some vessels, particularly ships that move coal, ore and crops, aren’t lucrative enough for yards to make. Instead, they’re are increasingly full with container ships, where diversions around Africa have helped create meteoric profits for the world’s major lines, and gas carriers, whose demand is set to surge over the coming years as seaborne flows rise. … HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co., the second-biggest, has taken $20.5 billion of orders for 181 vessels so far this year, exceeding its own annual target by 52%, a spokesperson said. It will take about three-and-a-half years to clear its backlog, the firm said. More than a quarter of those are for LPG and ammonia carriers, and the company is seeking value-added products like gas ships or green-energy vessels rather than bulk carriers or oil tankers that generate lower margins.
Source: Bloomberg
Mismatch
About one-third of workers in OECD countries are mismatched for their jobs, whether in terms of their qualifications, skills or fields of study.
For contributing subscribers only.
When asked about the miniature models of its TWINSCAN EXE:5000 high-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, ASML spokesperson Monique Mols responded: “Sorry, but it’s only for ASML employees.” Engineers on social media are calling on the company to make the sets more widely available, but Mols said the model is only intended to be “a fun item for employees” in celebration of the manufacturer’s 40th anniversary. The Lego-like replica was going for €208 ($216) on ASML’s employee store. Meanwhile, the chip-making machine costs €350 million apiece and weighs as much as two Airbus A320s. Installation of the first 150,000-kilogram (331,000-pound) system required 250 crates, 250 engineers and six months to complete …
Source 1: Bloomberg
Source 2: OECD
Paul Louis Delance - Esquisse pour le cabinet du préfet de l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris , La Famine, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris.
China’s State Council debates Olympic gold v. Football respectability
For contributing subscribers only.
Litigating butter chicken
In the dog-eared cookbook of India’s culinary delights, the section for Delhi is uniquely beloved. From crisp, gooey sweets like jalebi to the tangy flavor of lamb pulao, the city is built around enjoying, sharing, defending and bickering over food. Lately, those passions have fixed on a single question: Can you trademark the world’s most famous recipes? For weeks, two popular establishments serving butter chicken, perhaps the most Delhi of Delhi’s dishes, have been in court seeking clarity on the matter. The plaintiff, an old-school restaurant chain called Moti Mahal Delux, has argued in 2,752 pages that its founder was the original inventor of butter chicken and therefore anybody who says otherwise is guilty of infringement. The defendant, a newer restaurant named Daryaganj, has countered by pointing out that it, too, has ancestral ties to another cook who claimed ownership of the dish. This month, proceedings in the Delhi High Court will resume, with a major hearing scheduled for May. Managers at both restaurants have submitted newspaper clippings, archival photographs and food awards to back up their claims. Publicity from the case has been a financial and marketing boon for the chains, evoking nostalgia for the creamy chicken dish….
Kundan Lal Gujral was among those to make Delhi home after the bloody period of Partition. A migrant from Peshawar, now part of Pakistan, Gujral and his business partners opened the original Moti Mahal in the middle of the capital. As the story goes, Gujral created butter chicken to make use of leftover poultry. With his lambswool fez and signature mustache, he served some of the world’s most famous people, including the Shah of Iran and Jacqueline Kennedy. A question mark appeared over that narrative in 2019 with the opening of Daryaganj. The restaurant chain was cofounded by the grandson of Kundan Lal Jaggi, a chef and business partner in the original Moti Mahal. Daryaganj’s menus detail that chronology with an illustrated timeline, noting that butter chicken was invented after a large group of hungry customers showed up one evening. Jaggi, who was preparing to close the kitchen, improvised the recipe so his guests would have enough food.
Source: Bloomberg by Kai Schultz and Shruti Mahajan
Are we entering a post-literate age?
The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.” What might have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 reads more like prophecy from the perspective of 2024. This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies.
Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland. Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education. Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy. “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
Source 1: Financial Times by Sarah O'Connor
Source 2: OECD
A Strike at Saint-Ouen - Paul Louis Delance
