Netflix: the next Blockbuster?
“Netdog” the Bloomberg analyst called it on the morning after Netflix announced it had lost 200,000 subscribers; first subscriber loss in a decade.
Netflix stock off around 40% on the week. How would you like to own Netdog this year? This chart is YTD: Year to date.
Netflix subscription prices keep rising. And competitors keep pouring in: Disney, Amazon, even CNN, though it canned its streaming service after just a month. The Bloomberg analyst said there will be a consolidation of streaming services, just as decades ago there were many cell phone services not just a few.
FAANGs Tank…except for one.
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Together they made up 22% of the S&P 500 at their peak last fall. All down so far this year except for… Apple. Apple not only makes computers, phones, tablets and other gadgets, but it runs a successful streaming service, Apple TV.
Air Pollution vs Climate Change at the New York Times
Enough About Climate Change. Air Pollution is Killing Us Now.
A headline in Tuesday’s New York Times for an opinion piece by Binyamin Appelbaum of the paper’s editorial board. He points out that fewer people died from heart attacks in the early days of the pandemic lockdown. The reason: so few people were driving and air pollution was much lower.
Appelbaum says people are so worried about climate change— he is too— that they have been ignoring the immediate problem of air pollution that kills people now.
Here is the Appelbaum story. Sorry if there is a pay wall.
Money in, Inflation Up.
This chart show money supply in the United States and inflation. They usually match but there have been two exceptions: In the 1880s there were huge technological developments, such as electricity and the telephone, which boosted productivity. Ditto with the 1990s when the Internet boom pushed wages lower.
This chart only goes to the start of the COVID Pandemic. Money supply was soaring, as governments poured in cash; as we know now, inflation is soaring in the rich world.
Strong US (and Canadian) dollar
Finance guru Hubert Marleau pointing out that the strong dollar is deflationary, since it makes imports that much cheaper. The Canadian dollar dragged along for the ride.
The US dollar is super strong against the Japanese Yen, the Pound and the Euro. The dollar is closing in on parity with the Euro.
The Japanese Yen is at a 20 year low against the US dollar.
How rich are Europeans.
This is from a 2015 report by the bank Credit Suisse. The ratios are still the same.
Amazing that the average German has less wealth that the average Italian, even though the German economy is almost twice the size of Italy’s. This measure what the average person’s net worth.
That could be because rich Germans are not sharing the wealth. A friend says it’s because of the rich social safety net. Not surprising that the Swiss have the most money, but that is because so many rich people move there and hide their loot. Ditto Luxembourg.
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Wealth in Canada and the United States
The takeaway: if you’re poor move to Canada, if you want to be rich pick the United States.
This is from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2021. There is a ton of stuff in it so there is a link at the bottom.
The chart below deals with how rich people are in each country. A millionaire is someone with a million US dollars in liquid income. It doesn’t count the house you haven’t sold yet.
On a per capita basis, Canada has fewer millionaires. But in the median wealth column— half the people above, half below the number —you can see that the average person in Canada has more money that the average person in the United States.
Click here for the full Credit Suisse report
It’s not just Tesla Anymore
BMW sales honcho Pieter Nota says BMW will focus “on a very strong and fast ramp-up of electric vehicles”. He should be worried. Tesla knocked the BMW 3 Series from its perch in the United States.
Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 says it can charge from 10% to 80% in 18 minutes.
A shocking sight on Tuesday morning in Knowlton, Quebec.
Essay of the Week
This is an obit that started as straight business story, but there was a Second World War angle: this very Canadian man was born in London (England, not Ontario) and his parents were from Vienna. Another family displaced by the Nazis, but saved by leaving Austria.
“We live in a great age for death,” is a line from the late David Twiston-Davis, the chief obit writer for the Daily Telegraph, when I interviewed him for a CBC program on obituaries in the early 1990s. Pilots, soldiers, sailors even a spy, all people entangled with the war, some more directly than others.
He was top dog in a dog-eat-dog business. Ron Oberlander, who has died at the age of 62, was the chairman and chief executive officer of Abitibi-Consolidated Inc., the largest newsprint maker in the world. He guided the company through some tricky times and survived major changes in ownership -- including the period when the Reichmann family lost control of the firm when their real-estate empire collapsed.
If only they could have waited. Mr. Oberlander later made the company profitable.
Even so, it was never certain he would get the top job. In the late 1980s it looked as if there was a three-way horse race for the leadership of Abitibi Price, as the company was then called. Mr. Oberlander was the odd man out. Though he'd worked in the paper business all his life, he wasn't an engineer. He seemed too much of an entrepreneur or maverick for such a conservative industry.
But the board at Abitibi Price knew it needed change, and Mr. Oberlander became chief operating officer in 1990, and was soon appointed chief executive officer. It was not an easy time to be the boss. From 1990 to 1994 Abitibi Price lost more than $500-million. But in 1995 the company made a profit of $273-million.
The turnaround was probably Mr. Oberlander's greatest corporate achievement. His colleagues say he did it by changing the culture at the newsprint giant. In a business dominated by engineers, the solutions in the past had involved a combination of engineering fixes and cash bailouts from governments anxious to save jobs in towns dominated by the pulp-and-newsprint business.
Mr. Oberlander was also at home in politics. When Abitibi Price merged with Stone Consolidated in May of 1997, the company had to decide whether to move to Montreal -- where Stone had it headquarters -- or stay in Toronto, Abitibi's home base. The decision to move to Montreal pleased the Quebec government. Even before the move, Mr. Oberlander was already close to then premier Lucien Bouchard. Since he spoke French, Mr. Oberlander was one of the few English-speaking business executives involved in a business summit organized by the Quebec government. Mr. Bouchard saw it as a way of tapping into the thinking of the Toronto business community.
Ronald Yehuda Oberlander was born in London on Aug. 23, 1941, the son of Fred Oberlander, a Viennese businessman who had fled Nazi-dominated Austria in the late 1930s. They joined a relative in England who had already started a small manufacturing business. As well as being a businessman, his father had been an Olympic wrestler who, like many Jewish athletes, boycotted Hitler's Olympics at Berlin in 1936. Although his chance came at the 1948 London Olympics, he was then beyond his prime and the gold medal went instead to a younger man he had defeated in prewar contests.
Later in life, Ron Oberlander used to say his favourite pastime as a boy was playing with his Meccano set. Running a huge company, he claimed, was like playing with a giant Meccano set.
"The only limit on what you could build was the number of pieces you had. That's why it was great when my best friend came over. There was no limits to what we could build."
The Oberlander family moved to Montreal in the early 1950s and Ron grew up with his two brothers, Dan and Philip, in the suburb of Rosemere. After high school he spent two years at Cornell University, the American Ivy League school, studying commerce. He returned to Sir George Williams in Montreal to finish his degree, graduating in 1963.
Ron Oberlander started at the bottom in the pulp-and-paper business, working as a clerk on the order desk of Inter City Papers, a medium-sized firm. He worked in every aspect of the business, even the warehouse, but his talents as an executive were quickly recognized. By the age of 29 he was the president of Inter City.
Then everything changed. Abitibi took over Inter City in the early 1970s, determined to wean itself from a boom-and-bust industry whose product prices rise and fall in tandem with the seasonal advertising patterns of newspapers. In contrast, Mr. Oberlander came from the more stable, fine-paper side of the business that specialized in products for computers and copiers. His new masters saw him as someone whose success was not dependent on cyclical trends and made certain he got involved in the paper distribution and conversion end of the business.
Although his father lived to an old age (he died in 1996), Ron Oberlander became the patriarch of his extended family. Though not over religious, every Passover he would play host to his entire extended family. When his brother Philip got into trouble with substance abuse, he moved him into his house for six months and encouraged him to go back to school. His brother eventually received a master's in social work and now works with the homeless in Manhattan.
He took his sons, close friends and other members of his family on out-of-the- way fishing trips. Like many forestry companies, Abitibi Price owned several fishing camps and it had inherited a particularly beautiful salmon run on the Hunt River in Labrador. Mr. Oberlander set himself a challenge and picked a patch of rough water so difficult to fish that it was re-named Oberlander Gorge and marked on maps. The family also spent a lot of time at their cottage on Georgian Bay. Interestingly, for a man from the newsprint business, he made a point of marching in Earth Day parades with his children.
When Ron Oberlander took his first treatment for cancer in 1996, he kept working. Sometimes he would meet with people in a room at the hospital while he took chemotherapy. He kept working in the top job, then became chairman and gave up CEO duties. He stayed on until the cancer returned, and retired as operating chairman in 1999. He remained non-executive chairman of the board until 2001.
He leaves his wife Cathy, and two sons and a daughter from an earlier marriage.