What caught my eye this week.
I was delighted to hear from Monevator reader Elizabeth Wong a few months ago, when she sent me a copy of her new short story and said it might be of interest to people around here.
It was! The Landless is a thought provoking tale that takes many of the themes we discuss in these Weekend Readings and the comments to their dark conclusion.
I didn’t have a way to share the full story then, but I do now.
Here’s a slice of the extract published by Wasafiri:
She told Poppy, ‘If you say “refugee”, I think of someone who fled their country because of war, and it’s not their fault. And if you say “migrant”, I think of someone who has moved for better opportunities. But these people are neither refugees nor migrants. They are just … landless.’
Poppy tried to argue. ‘Surely these words are two sides of the same coin. Surely these people are refugees as well, escaping places that are now too hot to live in. People like her aunt and cousins who used to live in Malaysia, but left when the country got too hot, and the Chinese and Indian minorities persecuted for not being Muslim — are they not refugees? Surely the price of land is too expensive, hoarded by a few landowners —.’
Louise cut her off. ‘My family took out a multi-generational sixty-year mortgage to buy our chalet. The debt was finally paid off last year. That is why I got to come to Monte Carlo this season. I am here not because of privilege. This is several lifetimes of hard work — my father, my mother, my grandfather, working into their eighties with two jobs. Why should the price of land be lower? Our family has sacrificed so much.’ Louise took a breath. Poppy made a small sound, a signal to add to the conversation but Louise ignored it. ‘And it’s not like the landless are homeless. The government has built the new villages for them to live in.’
‘But the new villages … ’ Poppy read a report, she had seen the documentaries, it was like living in hell. The heat, the dust —
‘The new villages have water, food, jobs, shelter. And it was their choice to come. If they don’t like it, then they can go back to their own country.’
For the rest of May you can read Wong’s The Landless in its entirety.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend.
From Monevator
Safe withdrawal rates: how to spot if your portfolio is headed for trouble – Monevator [Members]
How do home ownership and mortgages affect your portfolio? – Monevator
From the archive-ator: Why you shouldn’t track your investment returns – Monevator
News
The FT no longer allows access to articles reached via search. Paywalled articles noted.
BoE cuts rates, surprise split vote sends pound, yields higher – Reuters
FCA consults on steps to simplify mortgage rules – FCA
Average water bills likely to hit £2,000 by 2050, says Ofwat – Guardian
Trade war creating ‘unprecedented uncertainty’, warns shipping boss – T.I.M.
Women wins £30,000 compensation for being compared to Darth Vader – Guardian
Elon Musk’s SpaceX gets its own company town in Texas – The Verge
Another UK firm taken out: DoorDash buys Deliveroo for $3.9bn – Semafor
WeightWatchers files for bankruptcy as people turn to weight loss drugs – T.I.M.
Real interest rates by country in 2025 [Infographic] – Visual Capitalist
Old art is strangling new art… – Infinite Scroll
…in the age of Surefire Mediocrity – The Garden of Forking Paths
Products and services
Have annuity rates reached their peak? – Which
Virgin Money Regular Saver 6.5% review – Be Clever With Your Cash
One-of-a-kind ‘Delayed Start’ mortgage launched in the UK – Guardian
Get up to £1,500 cashback when you transfer your cash and/or investments through this link. Terms apply – Charles Stanley
Nationwide lowers mortgage rates again, others follow suit – This Is Money
Six of the biggest Lifetime ISA myths debunked – Which
Get up to £4,000 when you transfer your ISA to InvestEngine our link. (Minimum deposit of £100, other T&Cs apply. Capital at risk) – InvestEngine
Secure a cash ISA bonus before it’s too late – This Is Money
How your age affects the cost of car insurance – Which
Homes for sale with stunning views, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
The value of a second opinion – Oblivious Investor
How much exposure to US stocks is too much? [Paywall] – FT
Borrowing from your future can cost you everything – Of Dollars and Data
Wealth, wellness, and well-being – The Conversation
How to save when buying a home – Which
Wear a seatbelt – Safal Niveshak
UK inflation: they are not cooking the books – Simple Living in Somerset
Following the crowd into popular funds is a bad idea – Morningstar
The gold dilemma isn’t going anywhere – Abnormal Returns
Bye bye Buffett mini-special
Warren Buffett, 94, stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway – BBC
Buffett caps a career built on humility – Bloomberg via Advisor Perspectives
Warren Buffett’s bet of the century – FT
Lessons from Buffett – Market Sentiment
There will never be another Warren Buffett – The Washington Post
Jamie Dimon says Warren Buffett represents the good in American capitalism – Fortune
Warren Buffett’s final brushstrokes – The Rational Walk
Just a day’s worth of Buffett’s quips and insights – Ted Merz [h/t Abnormal Returns]
Naughty corner: Active antics
The top 40 UK dividend stocks – UK Dividend Investor
Google is toast in the AI search era – Polymath Investor
The US is not an emerging market… yet – Semafor
Bitcoin crosses $100,000 for the first time since February – The Block
Kindle book bargains
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis – £0.99 on Kindle
The Price of Money by Rob Dix – £0.99 on Kindle
The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns by Linda Yueh – £0.99 on Kindle
Failed State: Why Britain Doesn’t Work by Sam Freedman – £0.99 on Kindle
Or pick up one of the all-time great investing classics – Monevator shop
Environmental factors
Huge North Sea wind farm scrapped due to rising costs – Independent
Sadiq Khan to announce plans to build on greenfield land – Guardian
Wind theft: the mysterious effect plaguing wind farms – BBC
It’s okay to notice when wind and solar fail – Breakthrough Journal
Robot overlord roundup
The life-or-death case for self-driving cars – Vox
McKinsey report on the $7 trillion bill to scale data centres – McKinsey
The AI arms race in hiring is a huge mess for everyone [Paywall] – FT
Why large language models are so hard to understand – Quanta
The AI jobs crisis is here now – Blood in the Machine
Trump meme-coining it mini-special
Trump set to raise millions from crypto and meme coins this month – CNBC
Trump family’s net worth has increased by $2.9bn through crypto in six months – CBS
58 wallets made over $10m each from Trump’s meme coin. 764,000 have lost money – CNBC
Not at the dinner table
Ken Rogoff: Our Dollar, Your Problem – Semafor
Globalisation did not hollow out the American middle-class – Noahpinion
The ‘100% tarriff’ on foreign films proposal doesn’t make much sense – Time
MAGA’s war on science – Paul Krugman
Trump’s mob-like shakedown of Paramount via the FCC – Mother Jones
The great deliverable of Trump’s first 100 days? Revenge – Semafor
Off our beat
Harrison Ford and the origin of Western civilisation – The Honest Broker
On the death of daydreaming – After Babel
Everything not forbidden is compulsory – Dror Poleg
Why men shouldn’t fear middle-age [Podcast] – Khe Hy via YouTube
When you take care of today, tomorrow takes care of itself – Ian Cassel
And finally…
“So smile when you read a headline that says ‘Investors lose as market falls.’ Edit it in your mind to ‘Disinvestors lose as market falls — but investors gain.’ Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other.”
– Warren Buffett, The Essays of Warren Buffett
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Thanks so much for the Friday evening post, always appreciated!
On the subject of “strangling new art” my husband and I discussed the article below at the kitchen table over coffee this morning. I find the older I get, the more I question whether or not I am just old or if things are really as depressing in the art & culture space as it seems (“Why not both?” as the meme states).
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/american-pop-culture-decline/682578/?gift=TGgP34XZPBAppowZPOH7pz1aBTX6zLohcRX481HGAtY
@Tucker
Sure Taylor Swift might not be Kate Bush but I assume you dont watch TV. For All Mankind sure beats Dallas.
TV is going through a golden age. Music & cinema have probably never been worse. Mainstream sport is anodyne but one should generally be playing more than watching.
My hot take is that self publishing, be it music, literature, pod cast or tiktok, suffers through lack of editing, resourcing, mentoring and finally championing.
The ground swell of going viral might produce likes and may even generate revenue, but great art, not so much.
“If they don’t like it, then they can go back to their own country.’”
This was the one trotted out by many a bigot back in the day. One of my friends was talking about the Rwanda scheme and jokingly said “well there are probably better opportunities there than in the UK right now! “! Obviously it was a joke but still…
Not so funny is the idea of immigrants returning to their own country. The time seems to be approaching where, for many immigrants, returning to their “own” country or not even leaving it in the first place, is actually becoming a very viable option. If the bigots aren’t careful, they might actually get what they want – to the massive detriment of many institutions and economies in the Western World and to the massive benefit of those “own ” countries that they speak of.
That Guardian headline about water bills has made me properly cross. They’ve literally doubled the true (useful) figure, which is £1000 in today’s money. That’s still newsworthy, so why are they resorting to cheap tricks to get attention?
Another equally useful way to write the same headline would be “Average water bills might be cheaper in 2050 than they are today” (if there’s a deflationary period).
#Freemantle …self publishing, be it music, literature, pod cast or tiktok, suffers through lack of editing…
So true. In books, certainly.
Also, we old-fashioned professionals have to contend with AI-generated ‘books’ from ‘authors’ whose only existence is a fake biog.
On ‘old art strangling new art’ and ‘surefire mediocrity’ – both articles were interesting, but lacked historical perspective.
Any piece of creativity that succeeds, even if only in tickling a fickle audience, has been relentlessly copied throughout history. From castle and cathedral designs to computer games. That’s why we can recognise the period of ancient metalwork and schools of art. Giving the punters what they want has been a reliable route to success for the average artist/artisan. And what they want is frequently what the Joneses down the road have got.
Every now and then, an outlier will produce something original that grabs the public imagination and starts a new trend. Then the copycats pile in. But it doesn’t happen that often.
The other point that gets lost is survivorship bias. Most creative acts disappear without a trace because it was only ever average (or mediocre in the article’s terms). I have people from the generation below me enthusing how lucky I was to live through the 60s, 70s and 80s when there was so much great music compared to today. My response is, have you ever listened to “Shaddup You Face” by Joe Dolce, or “Tiptoe through the Tulips” by Tiny Tim?
The best stuff survives through the brutal filter of changing fashion, or is rediscovered. I particularly like Early Music, especially medieval. I like the sparseness and simplicity of musical resources. But that music lay dormant for centuries as more complex and dramatic forms took over. In the mid to late 20th century, it found a new and enthusiastic audience and was everywhere.
Even for the bands of my youth and young adulthood that are still admired – Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Queen etc, it is a selection of their music which is widely played and known today, not everything.
The market for creativity has always been brutal, and the judgement of history is the only way to value art of any kind. Van Gogh was not a successful artist in his lifetime compared to many others. We now take a different view.
The same thing happens in business and commerce. Most bright new ideas die a death, whilst variants on the old tired models bring in steady returns. To mangle the old quote, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the sophistication of the public”.
And people have forever lamented the decline of civilisation and the quality of creative expression. There are Sumerian texts from 3000 BC complaining about ‘kids today’.
@Fremantle
‘……self publishing, be it music, literature, pod cast or tiktok, suffers through lack of editing, resourcing, mentoring and finally championing.’
And, you can discover stuff you’d never previously come across due to top down control and censorship.
Love the Trump corner. Shows even the middle aged bores have moved on from Brexit. I see having better Trade deal than the EU does with India doesn’t feature. Same way Japan didn’t. Best you stick to raging against Maga and quietly step away from what I was saying about trade with the fastest growing parts of the planet for years. No courage, just sulky rants about new topics.
@BBlimp lol, we’ll never move on from Brexit until that particular idiocy is corrected, and the direction of travel is now moving to rectify some of the damage at least. With this new arm’s length trading arrangement with the US space has been left to move closer to the EU.
@TI I enjoyed, if that’s the right word, the short story. I’m currently staying on the Mediterranean coast, in a village which maybe 50 or 60 years ago lived from subsistence farming and fishing, you can still see the terraces hacked out of the hills. Now it’s incredibly overbuilt and the average property price seems to be at least €0.5m. A small segment, I guess, of the locals have done well out of it. The rest live off the seasonal tourist work or presumably move away because there is no affordable housing.
@larsen – really ? Suggest you go back and look at earlier weekend readings. Used to be a ‘Brexit corner’ every time some minor politician mentioned we hadn’t made major trade deals. Funnily enough, better deal than Eu with Japan just glossed over. And now, the economy predicted to be the largest in the world by the end of the century doesn’t get a look in.
Be honest Larsen – even if India isn’t the biggest economy in the world by 2100, is there ANY chance whatsoever it grows slower than the EU over ANY time period – 1 year, 5 years, 10 years etc
Ofcourse not. Germany used to be the only bit that grew – how’s that looking now ?
Interesting snippet of story. How does Louise sit with you TI? Is that opinion acceptable? Can she share in the collective endeavour of her family and therefore not claim the privilege? Is it viable to view the family unit like that, subsuming the individuals into a single entity of effort?
Probably not right?
And what about that Knoydart property? Spectacular! No roads in or out, 100 mile hike to get out on foot! But you do have a great local in ‘the old forge’..
The Which article on car insurance wasn’t very good. I spent a good few years doing the risk modelling and managing large motor portfolios.
These figures are very old (circa 2000) and are the “pure” effects of these factors in a multi-factor GLM.
-Young females much lower risk than young males
-Old females much worse than old men
-Drivers deteriorate from low 50’s – around 3% pa to begin with
-Drivers over 75 start being seriously risky and many insurers Decline new business
– some interesting weird stuff also appeared in the models – diesels being much higher risk…
– where you live and what car you drive are obviously hugely important
– NCD less predictive than you think
– have any claim event predicts having future claim events – that’s why you premiums goes up
– widows and divorcees came out as ~15% higher risk!
– a lot of serious accidents between 12-2am on Sunday morning with cars full of young drivers!
Roughly 75-80% of all premiums went on claims costs – and most companies i worked for ultimately stopped writing car insurance as it wasn’t profitable – nothing to do with me…
@Rhino #13 > Is it viable to view the family unit like that, subsuming the individuals into a single entity of effort?
The aristocracy is testament to the viability as is that they owned a third of Britain’s land in the 2010s
@BBlimp. India could have signed an FTA with the EU in 2013. At present, the only legal basis for bilateral trade and services between India and the EU is the MFN principle ordained under the WTO’s GATT.
Countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka now get tariff preferences that India does not (so called Generalised Scheme of Preferences). Countries like Vietnam signed an FTA with the EU in 2019. These countries can all export to the EU under more favorable terms than India.
As a result, India has realized that they put themselves at a severe disadvantage by not signing a FTA with the EU in 2013. So in a volte face, India now wants to sign an FTA with the EU.
Because the UK still has very similar regulatory systems to the EU, the EU has held back on an FTA with India to see what concessions India will make to the UK. The UK-India deal is now effectively a floor for the EU-India FTA which is aimed to be completed by end 2025.
So I don’t really see how any of this advantages the UK. The EU will almost certaintly get a better deal than the UK given it’s larger size. The EU is effectively using the UK as a trial balloon. The fact we might get the deal 6-12 months ahead of the EU is a negligible benefit.
@ZXSpectrum48k #16
Thank you for injecting a bit of reality into the overblown claims about the India-UK FTA.
In some quarters, we are seeing the same wildly enthusiastic claims about both this deal and the US-UK Non-FTA (or framework, or ambition, or starting point, or whatever else it turns out to be). Neither of these deals, or potential deals, will replace what we have lost in the single market.
@BBlimp — I was away a couple of days and unfortunately wasn’t able to auto-delete you, so unfortunately useful readers have had a chance to engage with you. So I’ll be leaving these comments up and resuming deletion.
@all — If you’re not familiar with @BBlimp, I agree these comments are sort of fine as far as they go (he mischaracterises our Brexit coverage of course, I would have been delighted to include any good news — there was none net to make up for even a small part of the bad) but he has a long history of trolling so eventually I threw the towel in on him.
I cannot be bothered to judge where each conversation he makes is going — trolls lure you in being reasonable-ish before revealing their true colours/lack of constructive discussion — so he alas became the third auto-deleted poster in Monevator history. Hope this explains things.
@TI:
Interesting set of links- and thanks for the shout out for the SLIS post.
To echo @ZX, et al: watch out for spin – there is huge amounts of spin, BS, etc around these days and it is becoming increasingly hard to discern any signal from the cacophony of noise. So thanks again to @TI.
Best!
The article about peak annuity rates opens up a load of related questions on whether now is the right time to lock in on longer dated gilts, and maybe even REITs and other rate sensitive income investment trusts, as part of an income portfolio.
If we can get past the tariff inflation scare then gilts with 5% YTM could look a good thing to have in a drawdown portfolio.
I have my eye on a couple of gilts with a 4.75% coupon (TR38 and TR43) so they can automatically spin off decent income at regular intervals.
The story about Weight Watchers missed the opportunity to explain how it acquired a debt pile in excess of $2 billion.
Clearly there has been a significant amount of financial engineering going on in what is, superficially, an easy to understand business. What was its purpose and who benefited?
I tried to reply to Boltt about car insurance premiums and my comment didn’t make it through. Is this because there was a link in my comment? I can see others posting links in comments here, am I on the naughty step somehow?
@Rob — 99.9% of times comments vanish because the overzealous AI filter puts them into Spam, and then I overlook them when I do my 2-3 times a day trawl through spam comments (one of the most tedious things imaginable, imagine wading through several hundred comments about underage sex, Japanese love dolls, and crypto currency scams. An effort to reduce this burden is why commenting has been disabled on posts older than three years).
If I do miss a legit comment that’s been spammed then it’ll get deleted.
Links do tend to trigger the spam filter, yes, for obvious reasons.
If you don’t mind reposting I’ll keep an eye out for it!
On the “Google is toast” Polymath Investor link: great analysis as far as it goes, but ..
– Doesn’t give due weight to possibility of intergrating and embedding Gemini into search.
– Yes, Gemini (2.5 Pro) uses 2.9 watt hours per query, as against 0.3 for conventional search, and using it with the current search algo might push AI search to 8.9 watt hours, but…at 20 cents or less per kilowatt hour, and with 9 billion Google searches per day, that’s still only an extra $5.8 billion per year in costs. Probably less at the cost Alphabet can access electricity. A drop in Google’s bucket.
– Google’s about way more than search, and a 90% global monopoly doesn’t disappear overnight. There’s huge network effects and consumer inertia.
– Alphabet owns Waymo which is giving Tesla a run for its money in FSD L5 Robotaxis. LiDAR is better tech, even if the vehicles are more expensive, and Waymo is actually doing hundreds of thousands of rides per week right now, is scaling fast, and is partnering up with Uber; whilst Tesla is just talking about it. Delivery not words (Musk first promised FSD ‘within a year to fifteen months’ way back in 2015).
– Google is looking to compete with Crowdstike, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet and Cisco on AI driven cyber security.
So, the Polymath piece is quite one sided.
P.S. @Rob/TI #22/23: what now appears as my comment #14 on the “short one house” MV piece disappeared upon submitting, so I redid it in short hand as what’s now showing as #16. Then subsequently #14 appeared. Apologies for the duplication. Should you want to @TI, you can delete my #16 on that thread as a duplicate.
@Howard — Great response, thanks for sharing. I’m inclined to agree that Waymo is the potential key to another grand chapter for Alphabet, albeit disruption on this scale in the world of atoms and traffic wardens must always be a bigger and more uncertain lift I think.
RE: search, you may be right about energy costs of AI vs standard search not being hugely consequential in the grand picture. But it does all go towards Google’s legendarily high margins, and all these upward pressures on the cost side can only ding that and even Google’s multiple.
I’d agree though that figuring out how to monetize (if it’s possible) AI chat is probably more existential for the company than higher costs per response, especially as some of the latter might be passed through to advertisers in such a world if Google maintains a de facto moat.
The other snag is you can assign big values to the likes of YouTube and Gmail and the Cloud business (and I would) but you *need* these big values to justify Alphabet’s old market cap really, it’s not all absent from the price, even at these lower levels.
I go back and forth. Picked up a small holding in the tariff tumult but fortunately sold it for only a small loss.
I’m not actually sure I know what “Google is winning” looks like at this point, given it has to cannabilise it’s own business (search to AI) and as the blog post says it can probably juice returns for a bit with various underutilised levers to keep revenues up / profitability up for a while, too.
Landful comment 5 makes an interesting point
Using India as an example. I know someone who went to one of the IITs in India and moved to the UK about 20 years ago. He says that in his graduating class, 80% of the people graduating moved to the UK, Europe, America to seek opportunity as there was perceived to be more opportunity there. Now he says that 80% of the class are staying in India because the opportunity is perceived to be more there! (Or they couldn’t get visas!).
Apparently, also from this same friend who works in a hedge fund, you are starting to find a lot of Western MBAs (of non-Indian origin importantly) moving to India or looking for opportunity there, particularly in the venture capital/ PE area.
Finally here is an interesting story
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/02/i-left-the-us-for-india-and-opened-a-california-style-burrito-chain.html?msockid=08ba4cb033336ea424e3595b320b6f51
All very anecdotal I know – not statistically valid of course. But the Asian economies are growing very fast and some have better demographics than others, but being a part of that growth is probably a very smart move for the UK. By the way this does not mean that Europe should be shunned as that is also a very big important market to be a part of. As well as the US. The traditional relationships should be maintained of course.
But the real “juice” is likely to be in Asia for some time to come, economically at least, and being part of that, while not losing the old traditional relationships, would be helpful for the UK in lots of ways.
Thanks @TI. Maybe worth my adding on the whole ‘Alphabet is doomed’ debate that:
– We’ve seen this movie before with Meta in 2022. Turned out to be a cracking time to buy (obviously that was a more severe valuation disnunct).
– On Google owned Waymo (now partnered with $12 bn profits p.a. run rate Uber) v Tesla, just today announced that NHTSA potentially calling into question June Robotaxi launch in Austin. I’d never short Musk, but at the BEV core business valuation (100+ TTM PE) it has to deliver perfection, whilst likes of Alphabet (and Meta) need do no more than OK on future fundamentals and still be decent investments. And arguably they’ve got as much optionality (Optimus hopes aside) as Tesla.
@TI You can access FT (and many other) paywalled links via archive.ph
@Rhino #13 I’m not sure what argument Louise has been created to make. Privilege is about an individual being an undeserving recipient of fruits from the past. No one claims those in the past were also undeserving. The better argument against privilege would seem to be that anyone can be ‘accused’ of it depending on which group you are comparing against which isn’t useful.
@old_eyes #8 Agreed. It’s suprising the article doesn’t mention the Lindy effect once.
@platformer — Thanks, though I’m already aware of archive.ph. 🙂
As I have said to others who suggested it over email, while I’ve no problem with occasionally using that service for personal use, I don’t think it’s right broadcasting articles via something that’s effectively copying the content from the paywalled site.
Adding to that moral issue, we now have premium content ourselves on Monevator and the revenue from that is the only thing that keeps us publishing these days, from a financial perspective. So it’d be pretty hypocritical too.
I was happy to use the ‘search result’ hack for the FT as it was clearly a loophole they were aware of and presumably a compromise they were happy with hitherto. 🙂
@Old_eyes @platformer — Well agreed Hollywood was built on fashion, perhaps even Shakespeare too from memory. But while I’d also agree that big punctuations in the same old, same old schedule are very rare (The Beatles, 1980s dance music, say) that doesn’t explain the charts that show sequels share of market have been increasing?
If it was a constant appreciation of the past then you’d expect a constant share, no?
Perhaps something else is going on though, like the underlying tailwind of ever-more consumers (via globalisation etc) being able to enter the market and express their view, or the waning influence of a demographic bulge / youth-quake in the West in the 20th Century that queered the early figures.
Quick question for the MV intelligentsia.. today vgov is up 0.4%, but iglt is down 2%.
Now I know they have slightly different duration, but that sort of disparity in behaviour seems unexpected. Anyone have an explanation?