Starting this month, I am including a new form of blog post that lists interesting things I learned over the course of the prior month: both factoids and charts. This is in addition to, not instead of, my regular long-form blog posts.
Things I learned
Annual spend on Delta cobranded cards is approximately 1% of US GDP ($200B) (cite)
As of the beginning of 2023 Wimbledon, Djokovic had won more lifetime Wimbledon matches than the top 20 players in the world combined, and the last time someone outside the big 4 won Wimbledon, the world number 2 (Alcaraz) and 6 (Rune) were not yet alive. (cite and cite)
if you invested $1,000 in the Japanese stock market in 1950, by 1989 it would have been worth $389,000. If you invested $1,000 in the Japanese stock market in 1989, today it would be worth $840 (cite).
The last time a US troop was killed from an enemy aircraft attack was 1953. (cite)
By 1897 there were roughly a quarter of a million saloons, or 23 for every Starbucks franchise today (cite)
Diamonds account for 90% of Botswana’s exports (cite)
The Federales (Mexico’s federal police force) had an annual budget nearly four times as large as the FBI ($35B vs. $9.5B), despite having approximately the same number of employees (cite and cite).
At the 80th percentile of the wealth distribution — where a typical household has about $200,000 in financial assets — a full 20% of these households own no public equity (directly or indirectly). (cite)
The mean height of an 18 Year old in the English Army between 1763 and 1767 was 5’ 3”. (cite)
The only three years that cash yielded a positive return while both stocks and bonds were negative was in 1931, 1969 and 2022 (cite)
17% of ESG ETFs have held Exxon Mobil as part of their portfolio at some point. 25% of ESG ETFs have held Tesla at some point. (cite: my own calculations).
18% of turtle owners have left money for their turtle in their will (cite)
A knot can only exist in three dimensions. There is no such thing as a four dimensional (or two dimensional) knot. (cite)
There are now more NBA players with $30 million annual salaries than CEOs of fortune 500 companies (cite)
About 20% of US small businesses fail by just their second year of operation. About half of small businesses have failed by their fifth year. (cite)
60% of The Gambia’s electricity is provided from a single offshore ship (cite)
The rate of twin birth is more than twice as high in the US (33 per 1000) as in Europe (16 per 1000). (cite)
There are 6 absolute monarchies remaining in the world (Brunei, Eswatini, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Vatican City, UAE).
All purple heart medals awarded in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, War on Terror—all 370,000 since 1945—were manufactured for an anticipated Allied invasion of Japan during World War II. Due to oversupply, there are 120,000 of these medals remaining. (cite and cite).
Transgender people are significantly more likely to serve in the US military than the general population. (cite)
On the Concorde, a typical London to New York crossing would take a little less than 3.5 hours as opposed to about 8 hours for a normal flight. (cite)
If you went 2-5 with a homer and single every day, you would finish your season with 162 HR, 810 TB, 324 hits, and still end up with a lower OPS than Barry Bonds had in 2004. (cite)
Charts I Liked
Description: it turns out the US Treasury accepts voluntary gift contributions to reduce the public debt (currently at ~$32 Trillion). Perhaps more surprisingly, the US treasury actually receives such gifts each year, on the order of several million dollars. This shows the quarterly contributions to reduce public debt, which have slowed since 2020.
Description: There are many complaints about the evolution of commercial aviation — both quality adjustments and the apparent rising costs. However, it appears that the “real value” of airline costs — measured relative to income — have actually decreased fairly significantly (36%) over the past decade.
Description: Speaking of things getting better…the share of income spent on food has decreased from about 17% in 1960 to about 10% in 2022.
Description: Very cool paper by Devin Pope using cellphone geolocation data to study religious attendance. Church attendance is something I really don’t trust surveys to get right, so this is an interesting “unbiased” measure of the geographic distribution of religious attendance. The contrast of Nevada vs. Utah is amusing.
Description: Interest rates have risen significantly in the past year, and the implications for consumer finance are extremely interesting. The left graph shows that — at least on the liability side — much of (90%) of consumer debt is “immune” to rising interest rates, since it was locked in at a fixed rate (think: fixed-rate mortgages, student debt). On consumers’ asset side, however, they aren’t always seeing the benefit of higher interest rates: past 2020, the fed funds rate is above 5%, whereas bank deposits pay less than half a percent. I do not understand why there isn’t more deposit market competition.
Description: American Time Use Survey is a very interesting dataset collected by the BLS. Americans eat dinner far earlier than I expected, especially given the 9-5 work day.
Description: Self-explanatory, but a nice illustration of the travel rebound from Covid.
Description: One more Covid-”recovery” graph: work-from-home(WFH) is here to stay. Nick Bloom, who has pioneered the WFH research, has a lot of interesting graphs.
3. Japan's stock market 1989 onwards:
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Japan lost its main supplier of oil and petrochemicals, being forced to undertake new supply contracts at higher prices.
To support its people living in hotels worldwide and the war effort, Kuwait had to unload billions it had invested in Japan.
Japan paid for most of Desert Storm's costs. PLS see General Norman Schwarzkopf's book.
In one year Japan's economy was shaken by three financial shocks all of severe, long-term consequences. It has yet to recover.
lot of airline stuff, have you seen video about airline rewards programs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
pretty interesting, although they make it sound like flying planes is a side business, but really it's more like pushing sales of seats into points has a bunch of benefits since it's basically money but not treated the same as money by law or consumers