Recommended Weekend Reads

August 16 - 18, 2024

Please find below our recommended reads from reports and articles we read in the last week.  We hope you find these useful and that you have a relaxing weekend.   And let us know if you or someone you know wants to be added to our distribution list.

Hacking, Deep Fakes, and the 2024 U.S. Elections

• 100 Days Until Election 2024   U.S. Director of National Intelligence

  Already seeing the foreign governments attempting to meddle in the upcoming U.S. elections, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) issued this unclassified memo explaining how the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring foreign actors trying to influence and disrupt the upcoming elections.  Well worth the read to understand the threat at hand.

• How Foreign Governments Sway Voters with Online Manipulation   Scientific American

  2024 is the year of elections, with more than half the world’s population heading to the polls to vote. More than 100 countries including India, Taiwan, the UK, France, Russia, Venezuela, and soon, the United States, have held are holding national elections.  Most of the elections were free and fair, while others – such as Russia and Venezuela – were rigged, and opposition candidates either arrested or “disappeared.”  But one constant in most of these elections has emerged: Foreign government efforts to interfere and either discourage voters or mislead them with disinformation.  Scientific American Magazine did a deep dive into how malign foreign governments use social media and other mediums to achieve their goals.
  

• Iran Steps into U.S. Election 2024 with Cyber-Enabled Influence Operations Campaign  Microsoft On the Issues

  Two weeks ago, news broke that the Trump campaign had been hacked, and the most likely culprit is Iran.  How is this happening?  In a new report from Microsoft details how foreign countries are seeking to negatively influence the 2024 US election.  As the report details, these malign forces started off slowly in 2024 but have steadily picked up the pace over the last six months. Russia was primarily the initial operator, but more recently, Iran has picked up the pace.  China is not far behind.

Source: Microsoft On the Issues

• Iran using covert influence campaigns to undermine Trump's candidacy, U.S. intelligence says     CNN

  CNN reports how Iran is using covert social media activity and related influence operations in an effort to undercut the candidacy of former President Donald Trump, a US intelligence official said Monday in an updated assessment of threats to the November election.

China

• China’s Imaginary Trade Data   Brad Setser/Council on Foreign Relations “Follow the Money” Blog

  Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Brad Setser took a deep dive into the IMF’s latest assessment of China.  In the appendix, he found something interesting: China has a new way of calculating its good trade balance - and that calculation is deeply misleading and helps to explain the apparent fall in the current account surplus.  For example, Setser believes the new method understates the current account surplus by $300 billion as of the second quarter of 2024 and that the actual surplus is closer to $700 billion.
  

• China’s Great Wall of Villages   The New York Times

  President Xi calls them “border guardians.”  In this superb interactive report using satellite imagery, the New York Times reports on how the government built twelve new villages in frontier areas claimed by other countries in recent years, the New York Times reported based on satellite images. They are among more than fifty new villages in frontier areas, and while civilian in nature, they provide access points for China’s military. A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said regarding border issues, Beijing seeks “fair and reasonable solutions” through peaceful consultation.

Source: New York Times

• Marijuana and Mexican cartels: Inside the stunning rise of Chinese money launderers  NBC News

  Over the past decade, Chinese organized crime groups in the U.S. quietly became the dominant money launderers for Mexican cartels. Then they used the profits to take over the illicit marijuana trade.  Experts worry that the organizations that now dominate money laundering worldwide pose a potential national security threat to the U.S.

Geoeconomics

• Don’t Believe the AI Hype   Daron Acemoglu/Project Syndicate

  Acemoglu, an MIT Economics Professor, writes that if you listen to tech industry leaders, business-sector forecasters, and much of the media, you may believe that recent advances in generative AI will soon bring extraordinary productivity benefits, revolutionizing life as we know it. Yet neither economic theory nor the data support such exuberant forecasts.
  

• Has the Recession Started?    Pascal Michaillat (UC Santa Cruz) and Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley)

  Abstract: To answer this question, we develop a new Sahm-type recession indicator that combines vacancy and unemployment data. The indicator is the minimum of the Sahm indicator -  the difference between the 3-month trailing average of the unemployment rate and its minimum over the past 12 months—and a similar indicator constructed with the vacancy rate—the difference between the 3-month trailing average of the vacancy rate and its maximum over the past 12 months. We then propose a two-sided recession rule: When our indicator reaches 0.3pp, a recession may have started; when the indicator reaches 0.8pp, a recession has started for sure. This new rule is triggered earlier than the Sahm rule: on average, it detects recessions 1.4 months after they have started, while the Sahm rule detects them 2.6 months after their start. The new rule also has a better historical track record: it perfectly identifies all recessions since 1930, while the Sahm rule breaks down before 1960. With July 2024 data, our indicator is at 0.5pp, so the probability that the US economy is now in recession is 40%. In fact, the recession may have started as early as March 2024.

UBS’s ElectionWatch 2024

The Race, the World, and Investments April 4, 2024

I was delighted to be interviewed last week by UBS’s Chief Investment Officer Americas, Solita Marcelli, about the upcoming US elections. It was a fantastic conversation, and it was a true honor to be joined by former National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and David Rubenstein, the Co-Founder of the Carlyle Group.

Markets are struggling to price in the impact of the November US elections for a number of reasons. First, the elections are still seven and a half months away. Polls are unfocused and suffering from a population that feels over-polled and weary of the constant campaign cycle in the US.

Additionally, while our house view is it is between a toss-up and leaning Democratic win for control of the House and a likely win for Republicans to control the Senate, we still have primaries to be held and need a clearer sense of candidates and campaign funding. All this will increasingly become clearer in the next two months.

Geopolitical issues often have little impact on presidential elections, but this year may be an anomaly. Progressive Democrats are deeply unhappy with President Biden’s policy toward Israel and the Gaza War. Increasingly, young Democrats seem to be drifting toward the Robert Kennedy, Jr. presidential campaign, which may upend all current thinking about who wins in November.

Add to this a general unhappiness among the electorate over the state of the economy, especially over sticky inflation (note the uptick in inflation numbers today - April 10 - unexpectedly rising 3.5 percent), which may drive voters to think of other candidates and even other political parties.

You can watch the whole interview HERE. I hope you find it informative and useful.

Fulcrum Macro’s Global & U.S. Summer Overview

We are happy to share our latest macro overview of key geopolitical issues along with an update on the Washington agenda and upcoming U.S. Elections. Please let us know if you have any questions - always happy to help!

Election 2024: Opening Salvos

Neuberger Berman’s Private Bank’s Aspire Magazine

It was a great pleasure to be interviewed for the latest edition of Aspire, published by Neuberger Berman’s Private Bank, talking about the early outlook for the 2024 elections. You can read the full interview here or download it here.

There are certainly going to be lots of twists and turns ahead in this presidential election cycle, which is likely to be unlike just about any other presidential election we have seen in a hundred years or more.