Arvind's Newsletter

So what if its is a Monday morning, lets start with entertainment news Cannes (well its also about use of technology in a way).

1.Harrison Ford Bids a Teary Goodbye to Indiana Jones
The star was happy with the new film’s de-aging effect but “I don’t look back and say I wish I was that guy again, because I don’t. I’m real happy with age.”as reported in New York Times.
The occasion was Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” part of the five-film adventure franchise that Ford kicked off when he was 37 years old and now, at 80, is bringing to a conclusion.

And you can enjoy the movie’s trailer here

2. This the technology which promises to make the smartphone obsolete (really).

   Humane aims to displace cell phone screens with a voice-activated assistant that projects everything from calls to texts onto the user's hands. The projector promises to solve several issues with modern technology, including the need to constantly check cellphones, the physical limitations of touchscreens, and limited accessibility.

Watch the Ted Talk here

3.Dutch colonisers controlled Fort Kochi in southern India for more than 100 years, but their culinary legacy is hard to find — except in the sweet, buttery bread, breudher. With a texture more like bread, but a flavour more like cake, breudher and its variations are found across the former Dutch colonies of south India and Sri Lanka, typically eaten on festive occasions. Breudher has “a distinct flavour and tantalising aroma,” Ananya Rajoo writes in Scroll, describing it as a result of the “confluence of culinary traditions from various parts of the world.” In modern-day Fort Kochi — now a neighbourhood of the Keralan city of Kochi — only a few bakeries still make it, and it is no longer widely consumed. Bakers themselves are skeptical of its future: “They have seen many things fade away with time and feel that the same can happen with breudher too.”

4.Why investors are going gaga for gold, opines Gillian Tett in Financial Times.

The precious metal is proving a safe bet amid growing fears of a US sovereign default. Long Read.

“How can an investor protect themselves against a US government default? Once, that was a crazy question to ask. But today the bizarre has become almost normal in American politics.

So Wall Street analysts are now furtively weighing the protection options as they grapple with this new tail risk. Some, like those at JPMorgan, argue that “diversification is the best defence,” and urge investors to “consider currencies and precious metals like the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, and gold [and] high quality international equities.” That sounds sensible.

However, others are more focused: RBC Capital markets last week suggested that “gold looks like one of the few likely candidates that would bear the burden of resulting market flows” from default anxiety.

And a survey from Bloomberg this week echoes this. Gold is the top safety choice for professional and retail investors, by a long margin, with 52 and 46 per cent, respectively, citing this.

That is followed by Treasuries, selected by 14 and 15 per cent of professional and retail investors (which sounds counter-intuitive until you realise that a default would spark a US recession). Bitcoin lags well behind in third place, followed by the dollar, yen and Swiss franc.

One hopes that this is all simply theoretical. But even if a default is averted, it is worth noting the answers. For one thing, it shows the degree to which eurozone leaders have failed to convince investors that their currency is a viable alternative to the dollar.

Second, this pattern is a nasty snub to crypto evangelists. After all, bitcoin was created as an alternative to the established dollar-denominated financial order. If most mainstream investors shun it when that established system is threatened with crisis, that does not bode well for bitcoin’s future.

But the third, and most interesting, point revolves around gold. A couple of decades ago, investing in this asset seemed bizarrely retro, given that it does not pay a return

But this month the gold price has been trading close to an all-time high (unadjusted for inflation) of $2,069.40 a troy ounce, after rallying 20 per cent since November, and doubling since 2016.

Analysts at Bridgewater, the US hedge fund, say one big reason is that many central banks have recently been gobbling up gold because they want to diversify their reserves away from the dollar, following western sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

However, Bridgewater thinks that another factor driving the rally is that the past 15 years of quantitative easing and recent high inflation have left central banks and retail investors alike reaching for gold as a store of value.

Maybe this pattern will change with a debt deal. Indeed, the gold price has recently dipped slightly on McCarthy’s comments. And when America last faced a similar debt ceiling crisis in 2011, the gold price also rose — but then sunk after a deal was made

However, I suspect that history will not repeat itself so neatly this time, given the concerns about inflation, the weaponisation of the greenback and the fact that America’s political dysfunction will not end with any debt ceiling deal.