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birb_cromble  21d ago (text post)   883 thread views

Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-09-19

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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Why I don't invest in energy, Europe, and especially European energy. They embrace poverty on an almost spiritual level.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/18/eu-europe-fuel-prices-calls-windfall-tax-energy-firms

European governments have discussed imposing a bloc-wide windfall tax on energy companies, as near-record fuel and gas prices pile pressure on leaders desperate to contain mounting public discontent and the challenge of the far right.

With elections due next year in eight EU countries including France, Italy, Spain and Poland, leaders are scrambling to head off the potential fallout from what analysts have warned could be one of the continent’s biggest energy shocks in decades.

Germany’s finance minister, Lars Klingbeil, called on ‌the European Commission at a meeting of EU finance ministers in Dublin on Friday to propose possible ways to tax what he described as the excessive profits of oil companies.

"Several member states have been calling for models for a long time,” Klingbeil said, demanding proposals by next month. “People can see how oil companies are exploiting the situation, overcharging and significantly increasing their profits.”

Okay, actually I do invest in Norwegian oil tankers, but don't tell anyone.

Crazy policies like this sometimes make it very good to invest in the exact industry affected. Oil has long been like this where GOP lets them drill more and Dems less but the restriction on the supply side of a commodity makes the price go up and unlimited drilling often leads to bankruptcy.

Some would call this rent seeking. Real estate often has the same characteristic where you want supply limited.

Windfall taxes change the game though.

It means that in a bust cycle you lose money. But in a boom cycle they cap how much you can make. The gains go to the welfare state, the losses are paid by you personally. And no one will shed a tear because you are just an "evil, rich, oil company".

Here's a company with high exposure to European natural gas. Notice how their stock price is down by 70% over the last 10 years despite extraordinary prices in the underlying commodity. That's what windfall taxes do. They create a shortage while making sure that no one profits from that shortage. Because, in Europe, they want to make sure that no one gets rich, even when they provide a valuable service. Crab bucket mentality at its worst.

Sometimes I really dislike this place. Not enough to try and emigrate (just yet), after all, all my family is here, but I do dislike this place. Well, I don't dislike the place, I dislike what the government is doing to it.

Everyone's blaming Trump, which isn't wrong per se, but which is also no reason for our own government to make the situation even worse. But they can get away with it because everyone's blaming Trump.

My wish is that the United States will provide an immigration pathway for all the "Nicolas, 30 ans" people to seek a better life in the U.S. If we elect Vance in 2028 there is a chance.

Europe hates and punishes the people who keep their society afloat. Let's bring them to America.

It's a shame because Europe has a lot of advantages and is truly beautiful in many ways.

Europe is beautiful, but their population voted in the policies they are suffering from now. If they move to the US, they'd probably vote for the same, and in 10 years, the US will be the same, and there would be nowhere to move to.

I think demographics are destiny, but Europeans migrants will likely have American values. For one, it's already happened. The most right-leaning groups in America are all northern European origin. Secondly, if we select for net payers over net takers, we are going to get a more right-leaning sample.

And the US being more conservative than Europe didn't stop us from allowing our own mass migration that is now destroying the country.

The big worry is a 2028 Democratic sweep which will result in amnesty, mass migration, and permanent victory for the left.

And the US being more conservative than Europe didn't stop us from allowing our own mass migration that is now destroying the country.

True, but right now the balance is teetering around 50/50 - sometimes the left wins, sometimes the right. If we import millions of people who lean even slightly left off center, the right will have no hope at all. They don't need to be DSA voters - they just need to vote for DSA enablers because what they hear sounds good and close to what they had at home. To get over this, one needs massive trauma like one that Eastern Europeans have - convincing those to have communism would be harder, whatever variety it is. But the rest of Europe I don't think realized what they've done yet.

I suspect there's a lot of potential value in the US capturing economic value of would-be migrants in an offshore free-enterprise sphere that doesn't grant them citizenship.

It's been a lively week in finance news, so I'm going to do a little bit of a round up here.

Anthropic Delays its IPO to November, per the Wall Street Journal.

Does anyone know the cutoff date where Anthropic can no longer use Q2 financial data? I vaguely remember mid November for that date.

On a lighter note, Hunter Biden established a meme coin. Some early investors are calling it a rug pull.

How do meme coins even work? Every time I see them, I think it's just a casino. Am I right, or is there some intrinsic value I'm missing?

Saudi Aramco halts crude oil supply to European Customers

This seems... bad. I don't want to catastrophize or wax political, but various commenters here have noted that oil is a mostly-fungible global commodity. If the European market isn't able to get their crude from the Saudis, they're going to try to get it from somewhere, and that's going to take that oil off the market. How is that going to impact consumer markets? My heating oil bill has already quadrupled.

Every time I see them, I think it's just a casino. Am I right, or is there some intrinsic value I'm missing?

It's not a casino. Casinos are heavily regulated industry where most games are truly games of chance, which are skewed toward the house profits, but only to a specific (regulated, and not excessive) extent. If you go into a casino and play the roulette, you know you have the expected value of -0.053 and that's what you'd always get.

Memecoins work differently. They are a game of musical chairs, where everybody wants to sell it to the next bigger fool. Everybody knows it's going to zero eventually, and everybody hopes they could sell it at the profit before it happens. There is no intrinsic value at all, only fools fooling bigger fools. It's also not random with some well-known rules - it's just when the scammer decides to pull the rug. Everything between the ICO and that moment is just everybody trying to cheat everybody else, and that's the only thing that is happening.

This seems... bad.

The Mad Max series actually has a pretty well developed internal story bible detailing exactly what caused the fall of humanity. And we are following along with it pretty closely.

Anthropic Delays its IPO to November, per the Wall Street Journal.

In other IPO news of far less interest and significance to anyone except myself (and anyone else who loves nuclear power), Holtec has postponed their IPO. TL:DR, the turn against data centers made them (or their investors) a bit worried. In contrast, leaks say that Westinghouse is targeting $50 billion as their IPO's valuation, up significantly from previous target estimates of below or approaching $30b. (Ignore the finance.yahoo link; it's basically a non-paywalled version of the Bloomberg article that broke the story.) There's also some drama about Korea wanting stock and/or voting rights over Westinghouse (which is currently owned by two Canadian companies), but oddly, basically every article on that seems to be only coming from Korean sources & papers, and hasn't been picked up by any of the other major press articles except a mention or two by Reuters, so I'm inclined to be skeptical of that as actually a legitimate news story until it gets more traction.

How are you getting that Korean news? Is it English translations or do you speak the language?

English translations, generally on the sites themselves. It's just been strangely popping up recently when I do my usual google news search for nuclear topics; guess it's been a slow week otherwise.

If I wanted to invest in nuclear, what topics would you suggest I start learning? I don't like to invest in single stocks when I don't have sufficient domain knowledge to make realistic assessments of the industry. Right now I'm only exposed second hand through XLU.

Short answer: don't. Hopefully I'll be able to write up a longer answer shortly, tho.

Agree about nuclear investments but what about Sprott Uranium fund? The thesis is that we’re short on uranium, Chinese plants are coming online, and uranium cost is a tiny fraction of a percent of operating costs so the price could 10x without demand destruction.

I own some but I have to admit I’m getting bored and it doesn’t feel very prosocial to hoard uranium so I’ll probably sell and pay cap gains next year.

I would love to read this.

AIUI the situation with nuclear is basically "the technology exists to do it cheaply and safely, but there's too much regulatory red tape"; hence, most of the uncertainty is political.

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