Critical four days ahead for geopolitical headlines

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Today’s Links

George Magnus weighs in with a well-timed piece on China policy mix as the CCP’s Fourth Plenum winds up today and will likely conclude that the only way forward is the continued Chinese policy of predatory mercantilism that is not only finally prompting a profound response from the US, but is not particularly pleasant for middle- to lower income countries either. A direct link to the full PDF.

An incendiary take from “The Islander” on X on Germany’s political leaders and the Eurozone hobbling the country’s economy with bureaucracy, climate politics and Ukraine support.

Regarding the impact of forecasts on the US natural gas market in recent days, for those of you interested in longer range weather forecasts, there is a great site called Tropical Tidbits that offers model forecasts for precipitation and temperature, and region by region. If you navigate to the “Forecast Models” page (top menu), and then on the left select Thermodynamics → 2M Temperature Anomaly, you can see two weeks or so out into the future. Perhaps it is the forecast of colder than normal temps for the heavily populated areas of the eastern US in early November that helped pump up natural gas markets yesterday?

FTAlphaville with a link reviewing OpenAI’s new Atlas browser, including its creepy level of invasive data gathering. Talk about “being the product”, or in this case the “agent”. I’ll give it a hard pass….

Chart of the Day - Beyond Meat (BYND)

Speaking of speculative frenzies of late after the big blowups and retreats of late, we have an upside down case with another crazy one in the form of Beyond Meat, a company that has looked doomed to disappear from existence if you follow their financial trajectory - a trajectory that was similarly dire in the stock price chart until a short squeeze developed in recent days that saw the shares jumping more than 1,400% (!!) as of yesterday’s highs off last week’s lows before short sellers came in with renewed force yesterday, cutting the move in half. The proximate excuse for the squeeze on short sellers was Beyond Meat’s announcement two days ago that more of its products would be available in Walmart stores.