Today's Must-Reads - 3 January 2024

A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering together new information and interesting articles. I then pick one or two of the most interesting topics and write about them. However, that leaves a lot of missed out information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the latest articles and information that I’ve found. This is a slimmed down version for all readers but is usually for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• Hannah Ritchie: ‘Doomsday predictions are a dream for climate deniers’. The scientist, whose book Not the End of the World offers a data-based analysis of environmental problems and their solutions, on how being informed and engaged can prevent defeatism. ‘I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was completely wrong’. ‘There are definitely flaws with capitalism. But we do not have time to dismantle it and build something else.’

• Net zero is about to get even more painful. Green levies now make up a significant proportion of energy bills. Restrictions on new North Sea developments and a windfall tax are likely to have combined to drive up energy bills further. Our current, highly dirigiste approach will be economically ruinous. There will be huge waste, with the taxpayer footing the bill: when the Government asked the economist Dieter Helm to look into what it was doing to meet the net zero target, he concluded that up to £100bn had been squandered, largely from investment in technologies which hadn’t matured to the point where they were cheaper than the alternative.

Covid

• At least £550 million of Covid drugs wasted in the UK. Paxlovid – an antiviral developed by Pfizer and designed to be used shortly after people test positive for Covid-19 – was approved across Britain in 2021. Yet more than one million courses of the antiviral have now expired in the UK, according to a report from the health analytics firm Airfinty. That figure could surge to 2.2 million by the end of June – equivalent to £1.1 billion worth of wasted drugs. Britain’s unused stock is higher than anywhere else in Europe. About 200,000 doses expired before they were prescribed in Spain, and 100,000 in France and Italy, respectively.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Number of UK first-time buyers in 2023 was lowest in a decade. The figures, from Yorkshire Building Society, are the latest evidence that housing affordability has been stretched to the limit by rising mortgage interest rates and high house prices. The lender calculated that across the UK there were an estimated 290,000 first-time buyers in 2023. That would be down by a fifth compared with 2022, when the number reached 370,000, and the lowest since 2013, when the total was 260,000.

• The number of zombie firms as a percentage of Russell 3000 is nearing 2000 Dot Com levels. Zombie firms are companies where profits are less than the interest paid on their debts for at least three years.

  

• "The Bulls**t Revolution": What If ChatGPT Is An Epic Dud. It has become apocryphal to even suggest that the biggest driving force behind stocks in 2023 (besides Powell's 11th hour capitulatory pivot of course), namely the mania behind AI/ChatGPT, which propelled the Magnificent 7 stocks by more than 100% in 2023...is nothing more than the latest chatbot mania, no different at the end of the day than the doomed metaverse infatuation of 2020/2021 (which was nothing more novel than Second Life from two decades earlier) which prompted even the "geniuses" behind Facebook to switch their name to what has literally become a capex sucking joke.

• Central banks rethink forecasting after failures on inflation. The European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and other official forecasters failed to see how the end of Covid-19 lockdowns and an energy shock triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine could pave the way for the worst inflationary spiral in a generation. Christine Lagarde, the ECB’s president, told the Financial Times in a recent interview that the central bank needs to learn from its mistakes. “What we should have learned is that we cannot just rely only on textbook cases and pure models. We have to think with a broader horizon,” she said.

• Multiple Financial Executives Commit Suicide Amid China’s Financial Crisis. In 2023, at least 96 Chinese financial executive have fallen from grace, and 38 people have been investigated in the five major state-owned banks. “In the past, enterprises were encouraged to operate in debt. Some enterprises did not meet the conditions for loans, but through interpersonal connections, they got the loans anyway. No one asked about it for so many years. Now for the year-end check, someone must be held accountable, can the bank presidents not be anxious? Which sum of money was loaned out without the presidents’ sign? Choosing to commit suicide may be able to save their families or assets.”

Health

• Record number of excess deaths amid NHS strikes. Nearly 53,000 more people died in 2023 than normal – the highest figure recorded in a non-pandemic year since the Second World War. Prof Heneghan said: “We’re at a tipping point in the NHS. People are dying on the waiting list, those who require emergency care are not being sought and seen quickly enough, and social care is almost non-existent.” He said many GPs had not worked for seven of the last 10 days, with a quarter of their number being made up of junior doctors.

• Glyphosate, commonly found in many weed killers, has been under scrutiny for potentially acting like estrogen, a hormone in the body. This study explores how glyphosate might cause these effects using breast cancer cells that respond to estrogen. The results suggest that at high levels, glyphosate can mimic estrogen, affecting estrogen receptors and leading to increased cell growth and other changes in the cells. The exact way glyphosate does this involves complex interactions at the molecular level, particularly with the part of the estrogen receptor that binds to hormones. This finding indicates that glyphosate could potentially disrupt normal hormonal functions at high concentrations.

Politics

• ‘Tony Blair should be behind bars’: New calls to axe knighthood over payments from despots. The former prime minister’s Institute for Global Change (TBI) is being paid to advise nations with questionable human rights records, such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, in an apparent bid to expand its global influence, it has emerged. An agreement was forged between the non-profit and Sunni Muslim-ruled Bahrain despite the Gulf state’s abysmal track record of political oppression against its Shia Muslim majority population.

• The Eurocrats’ secret weapon. It is important to understand that the euro was always as much a political project as an economic one. And, from that standpoint, it has been an extraordinary success. In short, the euro saw the light of day because national elites came to embrace the idea for different but convergent reasons: in some cases (such as Germany), it was a matter of gaining an economic advantage at the expense of other countries; in others (Italy, for example), it was a matter of gaining an advantage at the expense of domestic actors, even if that cost economic growth.

Science

• Nature - Brain organoid reservoir computing for artificial intelligence. This article talks about a new technology that mimics the human brain for computing purposes. Scientists have created a mini-brain in the lab, known as a brain organoid, and use it to process information. This technology, called "Brainoware," works by connecting the organoid to a device with many small electrodes. By sending specific electrical signals to the organoid, it can perform advanced tasks like remembering information for a short period, and learning by itself through adjustments in its internal network. The technology has been successfully used for recognizing speech and solving complex mathematical equations, similar to how our brain works.

Technology

• No passports needed under Border Force e-gate plan. Facial recognition technology will allow arrivals into Britain in new proposal. Phil Douglas, the director-general of Border Force, told The Times that the aim was to create an “intelligent border” that used “much more frictionless facial recognition than we currently do”.