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🇨🇳 Limited Upside Seen for #China Home Prices Under New Rules - Securities Times ➡ China’s housing market remains well supplied and lacks the conditions for a sharp increase in home prices, the Securities Times reports, citing industry experts. ➡ Responding to concerns that #ChinaHousing #RealEstate #MarketTrends #CN

🇺🇸 US retail diesel prices hit the highest since mid-2022, topping a peak seen during the early stages of the Iran war to approach a record - Bloomberg *The national average pump price climbed to $5.783 a gallon on Wednesday, surpassing the wartime peak set in April, and is #DieselPrices #Inflation #FuelCosts #US #IR

Rents & house prices are too high. Council waiting lists are too long. Too many people are being forced to put their lives on hold because of Govts failed housing policies. But there are alternatives. Affordable homes can be delivered. Read more here: https://t.co/4U2QZtJG5p https://t.co/y6XFIAOokk #AffordableHousing #HousingCrisis #GovtPolicy #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

+ shortage of quality grades in the world today. In fact, Venezuela oil requires breakeven Brent price of > $80 per barrel. Which makes it utterly uneconomic to develop under any prices, including current. The 'math' is not mathing on the 'Trump Mega MAGA deal'. #OilPrices #Venezuela #EnergyEconomics #VE

⚡️ The market is still heavily focused on models, Nvidia and token prices but who is going to power, finance, insure and ultimately monetize the gigantic physical infrastructure being built behind AI? - FT 🇺🇸 In the US, the number of data centers above 100MW could almost triple https://t.co/fJl6HFsewa #AI #DataCenters #Nvidia #US

Babiš's ANO movement did not gain a majority in the towns affected by the tornado, despite winning in the parliamentary elections in 2021, which was reflected in the criticism of its representatives after the disaster and in the paradoxical positive effects of the tornado on the modernization of the towns. (translated)

⛽ Η Ελλάδα πληρώνει τη 12η ακριβότερη βενζίνη ανάμεσα σε 150 χώρες του κόσμου, σύμφωνα με τα στοιχεία του Global Petrol Prices που ανέδειξε σε ρεπορτάζ του ο Θανάσης Κουκάκης. 💸 Επτά χρόνια ακούμε συνεχώς για μέτρα κατά της ακρίβειας. Επτά χρόνια μετά, όμως, πληρώνουμε τη βενζίνη-χρυσάφι ❓ Ρωτήσαμε λοιπόν τον κυβερνητικό εκπρόσωπο: Είστε ικανοποιημένοι από τα αποτελέσματα της πολιτικής σας; 🗣️ Ο Παύλος Μαρινάκης απάντησε μιλώντας για τη διεθνή πληθωριστική κρίση, για τις τιμές του ρεύματος και των τροφίμων, ενώ παραδέχθηκε ότι στα καύσιμα η Ελλάδα έχει υψηλότερες τιμές λόγω της μεγάλης φορολογίας. 👉 Πρόσθεσε μάλιστα ότι «τον κόσμο τον ενδιαφέρουν όλα, όχι μόνο ένα που επιλέγει ένας ρεπόρτερ ή εσείς για να δημιουργήσετε εντυπώσεις». ⛽ Μόνο που δεν επιλέξαμε το ροκφόρ. Τη βενζίνη επιλέξαμε. Ένα προϊόν που εκατομμύρια άνθρωποι είναι αναγκασμένοι να αγοράζουν για να πάνε στη δουλειά τους, να μετακινηθούν, να ζήσουν. Και ένα εμπόρευμα που όταν ανεβαίνει η τιμή του προκαλεί αυξήσεις σοκ σε ολοκληρη την οικονομία. 🌍 Και αφού η απάντηση ήταν ότι υπάρχει διεθνής πληθωριστική κρίση, το επόμενο ερώτημα ήταν απλό: ❓ Οι άλλες 138 χώρες που πληρώνουν φθηνότερα τη βενζίνη δεν πέρασαν διεθνή πληθωριστική κρίση; ❓ Τι καλύτερο έκαναν οι κυβερνήσεις τους; ❓ Ή, για την ακρίβεια, τι χειρότερο έκανε η ελληνική κυβέρνηση από 138 κυβερνήσεις; 🔄 Η απάντηση ήταν να επιστρέψει ξανά η συζήτηση στο ρεύμα και στον πληθωρισμό των τροφίμων. ⛽ Το ερώτημα όμως παραμένει: γιατί μία χώρα με μισθούς πολύ χαμηλότερους από πολλές ευρωπαϊκές οικονομίες πρέπει να πληρώνει μία από τις ακριβότερες βενζίνες ολόκληρου του πλανήτη; Και σε αυτή τη συζήτηση υπάρχει ένας τεράστιος ελέφαντας που για ακόμα μια φορά δεν έδειξε κανείς την ύπαρξή του: Οι πετρελαιάδες και τα κέρδη τους. #Βενζίνη #Ακρίβεια #Ελλάδα

The ESB charge the second highest electricity prices in the world. Uisce Éireann have been fined €31m for not fixing leaks. This government are the opposite to accountability. People get rewarded for not doing their job right. https://t.co/S2sJhyUbOq #ElectricityPrices #Accountability #IrishGovernment #IE #ES

🇨🇳 🌎 China may be winning the global industrial battle while destroying part of the profitability of its own companies - Nikkei 📉 Chinese companies are trapped in such intense competition that they have to invest more, expand capacity, accelerate technologically and cut prices https://t.co/BsmH7HdG5i #China #GlobalEconomy #IndustrialCompetition #CN

🌾 The agricultural market is starting to wake up quite violently and the timing is particularly interesting given that Warsh just stressed at Jackson Hole that the Fed should also monitor commodity prices to detect potential inflationary pressures upstream. ➡️ I would frame https://t.co/CZrZoabyiG #Agriculture #CommodityPrices #Inflation #Nospecificcountriesarementionedinthetweet.