ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

 1974 EPIPHONE CASINO vs GIBSON ES335 Many guitar enthusiasts regard the Gibson ES335 as the king of hollow body guitars that are in between Strats, Les Pauls and Teles and the full-size jazz archtops. But there is one guitar that in my opinion is better than the ES-335- the iconic Epiphone Casino. First popularized by the Beatles, it is still being used by many well-know musicians from Oasis' Noel Gallagher to Rolling Stone's Keith Richard and Gary Clark Junior. Unlike the ES335 which has a center block in its body to damp the feedback, the Casino is fully hollow. Together with its P90 pickups, this gives the Casino a unique edgy yet woody tone that is eminently suited for modern music. My 1974 MIJ Casino is a beautiful guitar, with fine wood grain, pickups with a slight covering of patina, and wonderful electronics. It is a blue sticker pre-Elitist Casino -much rarer than the beige and orange sticker MIJs. The 1992 Gibson is also a very playable guitar with the ability to get...

 It is only with the USA-Iran War and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that we realise how crucial crude oil and natural gas are to the modern day economy. I didn't know that fertilisers need the  methane from natural gas. And that semiconductor manufacturing requires Helium the supercoolant. Take a good look at the infographic from the Straits Times Singapore. 

 The above image shows two heatmaps (one with a 104 week rolling window  to capture the correlation and the other with a 26-week rolling window) of economic and financial  market variables that are known to be correlated with the price of Silver. By looking at the change in the degree of correlation of each variable in the 26-week heatmap from the 104-week heatmap, we can get a sense of the probable directon of each variable in the next few weeks. Data & Method Frequency: Weekly (W-FRI). Transforms used before correlation: • Silver, S&P 500, Gold, Brent, USD proxy: weekly log returns • M2: weekly log change • 10Y Treasury yield: weekly first difference (percentage-point change) Heatmap coloring: Fisher z-transform z = atanh(r) applied to the correlation matrix for improved visual scaling near high |r|. Cell annotations show the raw Pearson correlation r for interpretability. Tickers / Series:  Yahoo Finance: SI=F (Silver), ^GSPC (S&P 500), GC=F (Gol...

  A LESSON FOR THE USD. My Spade and Knife money and Zimbabwe 100 trillion-dollar note are examples of what happens to money when it is not based on a physical asset with inherent value and no counter-party risk such as gold and silver (or bronze in the case of the spade and knife money).  When in 221 BC the Qin Emperor Shih Huang Ti united all of China, he decreed that all the seven States (Qin, Qi, Zhao, Chu, Wei, Han, Yan) shall use a new standardized bronze coin (see image below: the round coins with sqaure holes in the middle)  The old knife and spade money in its various forms could be exchanged for it based on the weight of their metal content. On the other hand, the Zimbabwe 100 trillion-dollar note was printed into existence (just as the Fed prints into existence new USD) with no physical backing whatsoever in January 2009 but was abandoned just three months later because people did not trust it and refused to accept it for trade and daily use.  Under the 19...