No, I will not comment on Prince Charles’s comparing Putin to Hitler. There are arguments pro and con but since I am not a subject of the Royal Family, I don’t have to pick a side. A US shares I owned was subjected to Chinese internet espionage, Alcoa.
Gazprom got lucky. First the EU wrote a letter to Putin asking him not to cut gas supplies running through Ukraine after Kiev turned down OGZPY demand to be paid $3.5 bn for gas in advance. That was good for Russian morale.
Then Beijing and Moscow—by leaving out the key matter of price per cu m, which CEO Alexei Miller called “a commercial secretâ€â€”finally managed to hammer out a 30-yr $400 bn supply contract over new Siberian gas for China. Experts think Russia is settling for a lower price than it charges western Europe and moreover, to get the deal, it agreed to let China National Petroleum Corp join Gazprom in developing fields nearer to China than the ones supplying Europe.
The new accord almost certainly does not link the gas price charged China to the price of oil. That link which hits European importers of Siberian gas, is subject of a potential European anti-trust case against Gazprom, which predates the Ukraine events.
Today I gloat that yesterday’s note about how to play India (for paid subscribers) forecast that Narendra Modi might pull a Nixon-in-China or an Ariel Sharon on the PLO. Today Indian invited Pakistan’s leader Nawaz Sharif to Modi’sMay 26Â inauguration, a first such invitation since Partition. It is easier for those known to be firmly against another country to make peaceful gestures.
I wrote, for paid subscribers only:Â
“A quirky alternative is to buy Pakistan. As the leader of the Hindu sectarian BJP party, Modi could pull a Nixon in China or an Airel Sharon out of his sola topee… There is no longer a Pakistan Fund which I used to own in honor of my fellow Radcliffe graduate, the late Benazir (Pinky) Bhutto. Pakistan has been boosted because of its good performance to 8.9% of the MSCI Frontier index, double where it was a year ago. We own this through an open-end fund (converted from closed and therefore dropped from the model portfolio), Morgan Stanley Institutional Frontier Markets Fund, MPMIX, which weights Pakistan at 9.3% (no. 4 after 3 Gulf countries.) Whose who didn’t buy it with me now have to put up $5 mn to buy in.”
Investing in stocks for the long-term is the best tactic for boosting your wealth, according to academic studies. The 2nd best investment turns out to be—not bonds, not stamps, not paintings, not antiques, not real estate, not gold—but “Premier Cru†Bordeaux red wines. A team of researches from Britain’s Cambridge, France’s HEC, and Vanderbilt U of Nashville found that fine wine appreciated 4.1% in the period 1900 to 2012, beaten only by UK equities. They studied data about over 36,000 sales transactions for 5 wines: Haut-Brion, Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, and Mouton-Rothschild. The transactions were sales by London wine-merchants Berry Bros & Rudd and auction prices at Christie’s.
