What we’re reading (1/7)
“The Billionaire Mining Magnate Who Bet Coal Had A Future—And Won Big” (Wall Street Journal). “Coal, the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, is booming, and few are profiting more than Low Tuck Kwong, the 76-year-old businessman behind one of Asia’s largest coal-mining complexes. Coal’s resurgence as a cheap and reliable energy source propelled him to a spot on Forbes’s 100 richest people. Low’s wealth is estimated to have swelled to $28 billion from $1 billion in the years since coal was assumed to be headed for the slag heap.”
“Have We Reached Peak Population?” (The Week). “According to the UN's latest projections, the global population is expected to peak at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, earlier than previously predicted. It is then expected to plateau at about 10.2 million by 2100. Experts say lower birth rates and falling fertility levels – especially in "ultra-low" fertility countries like China, Italy and Spain – are to blame for the more imminent peak.”
“If Bitcoin Is The Future, What Explains MicroStrategy’s Need For Speed?” (Financial Times). “Something peculiar is afoot at MicroStrategy. The company has amassed over two per cent of all bitcoin in existence, funded through a combination of shares and convertible bonds. This strategy has turned a humdrum business software firm into something akin to a bitcoin ETF, albeit one trading at a frothy premium to its net asset value. The stock is up over 20 times since the pivot to bitcoin in August 2020. Yet recent months have revealed some curious contradictions in this narrative. While bitcoin has maintained its stratospheric altitude at around $100,000 per coin, MicroStrategy’s stock has drifted lower, shedding 40 per cent since peaking intraday on November 21 at $550, which implied at the time a market cap of $124bn. Even its inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 index failed to boost the share price. Its premium to net asset value has meanwhile decreased from a high of 3.8 times to 1.9 times. This decline in the share price is happening even as the company continues to acquire more bitcoin.”
“Myron Scholes (Stanford Professor and Nobel Prize Winner) on Academic Finance, Black-Scholes Options Pricing, and Regulation” (Jon Hartley). “So Fisher [Black] and I rewrote the paper and try to show that basically everything in our lives was options and option related. And if you really thought about uncertainty, that options were primary and think about the right to do something, but not the obligation and what the value of that right would be.”
“The Fact Checks Have Just Become Too Political” (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta). Statement from Mark Zuckerberg.
