Great line. The “I've been to many countries but never left Lviv” of resource rent extraction. It is theoretically possible Sonangol could add an IPO to this list in 2026 (or 2027, or 2028...)

Terrific reporting by Miles Johnson on a morality-free arms dealer (tautologous, I suppose) and how America now fights wars as.ft.com/r/457327c1-3...

Ukraine will have the €90bn loan from Europe (by joint debt crook if not frozen asset cash hook), which should also unlock a new $8bn IMF bailout. And not least, Kyiv has exorcised its GDP warrants, one of its biggest obstacles in its private debt. www.ft.com/content/4157...

For anyone remembering UK political scandals of a million years or approximately two months ago, I've just been told my Southwark landlord is in the process of obtaining a property licence.

Already starting with the historical inaccuracies. In ancient Greece, the spine was inside the body.

If you’re shocked the president’s family would acquire a conglomerate spanning regime-adjacent media and a speculative energy project that needs a lot of state intervention to become viable (if it ever does), you don’t follow EM enough

Isn't this a chart of beauty? India's RRP Semiconductor Ltd, the world's best-performing billion dollar-plus stock, which as Bloomberg notes, has a promoter-dominated float, exchange trading restrictions, tenuous links to semiconductors, and regulatory interest. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Great reporting on China’s efforts to replicate the machines that make the most advanced chips. Fake ID cards, oblique networks of suppliers, and a prototype in a Shenzhen lab that almost fills a factory floor. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

And I still don’t feel like buying one www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Bretton Woods is one of the six historical events that are allowed to exist in public discourse. The others are: Munich, Weimar hyperinflation, Pearl Harbor, the Blitz and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Vanke’s denouement has been under the radar a bit, I guess because China property pain is an old and known story by now. But it’s quite interesting because it isn’t getting a bailout this time from a big SOE owner (Shenzhen’s metro group). Just an old fashioned fight for the assets now.

This is the website of the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). It went down around a month ago, not long after the highly expensive Eurobond private placement which included a condition on improved debt reporting. www.finances.gouv.cg

On the eve of a blockade and who knows what else, bondholders think Venezuela's defaulted bonds may finally work out if Maduro goes. And if he doesn't, well, that would be par for the course for the great woulda coulda shoulda distressed sovereign debt trade of the decade. www.ft.com/content/a8be...

One has to admit that whatever is going on here, there is something truly astonishing about it

The US using undocumented workers to process the only refugees it lets in now (over a fake ‘genocide’) while issuing African visa bans left, right and centre?? How ironic.

Looks like they weren’t training the delusions of grandeur on data past 1971 in this instance www.ft.com/content/a6a8...

Very sad to hear that Peter Doyle has died. May he rest in peace. He was an all-too-rare iconoclastic voice in international macro. Do read @gabrielsterne.bsky.social and @generaltheorist.bsky.social's tribute to him: open.substack.com/pub/moneyins...

Still, nice of them to put it on the record that stay-at-home parenting without the minimum income will now cast you into the outer darkness of trying to settle in the UK.

Slides from a Home Office presentation for employers on “earned settlement” — note the case studies: they explicitly play the “good migrant” versus “bad migrant” narrative. Guess which category Sarah, the American, is placed in?

A couple of months ago, DC committed not to use generative AI in their comics. Obviously a lot has happened since with DC's owner, but, meanwhile, at Marvel's owner: thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-opena...

Private credit had an annus horribilis in the US this year, looking bloated, badly underwritten, and the presumptive source of the next financial crisis. Not so much in emerging markets though. www.ft.com/content/0e1f...

A last-minute deal with holders on terms of a restructuring into bonds this month means Ukraine's GDP warrants are going out much as they lived: with insane levels of complexity mof.gov.ua/en/news/ukra...

An increasing chorus outside China: this trillion-dollar trade surplus just looks unassailable. Meanwhile, in Qiushi (the Party's policy journal)... China is at risk of deindustrialisation. We don't do enough R&D. We don't file enough patents (etc). www.eastisread.com/p/china-fear...

Last month Orbán started talking up the possibility of an Argentina-style US swap line for Hungary, without providing details. You'll never guess what happened next www.politico.eu/article/dona...

I’m reading Dashiell Hammett and the grittiest, hardest-boiled, most cynical parts for me are the old-school paper bonds that appear as plot devices. Upper Austria 6 ½s! (From ‘The Thin Man’, set in late 1932, which would explain the prices)

Senegal's hidden debt scandal appears specifically to have been a debt reconciliation scandal, reporting commitments to lend but not disbursements: findevlab.org/what-we-lear...

Coup attempt in Benin, which has been a bond-market darling with big ambitions for industrialisation via textile manufacturing. A long way from the usual ‘coup belt’ story. www.france24.com/en/live-news...

"Al-Maktoum & his 2 associates were released in late October for the equivalent of at least $23 mn in cash taken from Emirati vaults and flown to Mali, the officials said. A Gulfstream private jet then arrived in the Malian capital & delivered him to Dubai, they said." www.wsj.com/world/africa...

Christmas present idea just dropped: freshly made local-law, US dollar Argentine bonds, on sale next week. www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/lla...

Streaming service to become publisher of DC Comics, and acquire some other businesses, but they're not important. www.prnewswire.com/news-release...

The new US national security ‘strategy’ seems incoherent more than scary - it abhors interventionism and imposing internal change in other nations, then advocates them with an expansion of the Monroe doctrine and ‘cultivating resistance’ in European democracies. www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

BofA has a note today saying if Senegal has to restructure its debt over its hidden loan scandal, bondholder recoveries will probably be in the 40s(!) but it probably won't do it until well into next year. Which just goes to show sovereign debt restructuring is really all about procrastination.

Cruelty is anhedonic. It rarely delivers the euphoria promised because, in the abstract, what feels righteous and joyful inevitably reveals itself to be sordid and small. Then it's "No not like that". "No not enough". "No the real battle, the forever war to make this feel good starts now". Forever.

Venezuela: "Unlike during past crises here, there are no long lines at gasoline stations, and supermarket shelves are full, though economists warn that people simply don’t have the money to make big purchases." www.wsj.com/world/americ...

Speaking of war financing, Ukrainian dollar bonds fell a bit today while its GDP warrants are more or less trading at par. Markets are waking up to a warrant restructuring that might result in debt senior to those bonds. www.ft.com/content/2a4f...

Russia did what will probably be the year's biggest sovereign renminbi bond issue this week, at a higher interest rate than other countries who have recently issued either offshore or onshore in China (where base rates are low, low, low). www.ft.com/content/92b1...

Yeah but does he want tea or coffee from the producer at the end

Lebanon's gold reserves are now valued larger than its GDP, BofA notes. Up from below $14bn or 25% of GDP in 2019 before Lebanon's default and banking collapse, to $38bn, or 113% of GDP, which went down as gold prices went up. (BofA chart)

It does not matter if the château is white or black, if it can catch up to Margaux.

“The real battle between Chinese carmakers and the legacy carmakers is not happening in Europe. It’s not happening in the United States. It’s happening in emerging markets.” www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Structurally it's also interesting that, as the leak report also notes, the OBR has all these responsibilities but is about the scale of a small to medium-sized business, with a budget of £6.4mn and a team of 52 people, only six in what you'd call 'operations'. Not extending to a full IT department.

Just noticed it was confirmed that Wang Chuanfu and Stella Li of BYD have been in a romantic relationship (for, clearly, quite some time) in probably the glitziest way possible... a Tatler report on their daughter's debut at Le Bal des Débutantes. www.tatler.com/article/le-b...

“Two of China’s private data agencies withheld monthly home sales figures at the government’s behest, people familiar with the matter said… Financial institutions that paid for the figures will still have access to them, provided they keep the data confidential“ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:

The photographer and reporter - so polite to the old! - are gone less than a minute before I throw off wig, purple pullover and cravat through six cavernous rooms to a secret, seventh vestibule. “Yes, comrade,” I tell the figure on a wall-sized screen. “We continue to accelerate the contradictions.”

‘“Ukrainians have fought heroically for their independence,” said Witkoff, who has tried to inspire Ukrainian officials with the idea of soldiers disarming to earn Silicon Valley-scale salaries operating American built AI data centers’ www.wsj.com/world/russia...

This piece was written by Monica Mark, our Southern Africa bureau chief for two years now who is always based in Johannesburg. Just as I was based there in that position for seven years. Tourism journalism, not likely.

Zuma-Sambudla “is nothing but a pampered princess who has been a wrecking ball in the MK since its formation... treating the party as the family fiefdom in which she can do as she pleases because she has the ears of her father.” www.ft.com/content/70e6...

“Brutal competition among models as the cost to compete goes down leading to an outcome like solar in the 2010s: the consumer wins, the producers do not.” (By @alexbhturnbull.bsky.social) syncretica.substack.com/p/ai-bubble-...

The (in)famous 2061 gilt trades at a fat 26p on the pound in comparison (and still at a decent premium in spread terms to the 2060...)