Weekend Reading #307

This is the three-hundredth-and-seventh weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 22nd March 2025

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What we're thinking.

From our small vantage point, this week was very much about Turkey. We should have known last week when we opined about Turkey’s growing position of strength in global geopolitics that Mr Erdogan would use this to his political advantage domestically. He has chosen a perfect time to do the unthinkable and arrest the one man capable of deposing him from power in the next election, Istanbul mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu. In years gone by, Erdogan has used rather more subtle ways to command power but this time he didn’t bother. The opening salvo was a play to ban İmamoğlu from running for president on the basis that he didn’t have a diploma from a Turkish university (he did and then he magically didn’t). And then the next morning he was simply arrested. We should have seen it coming given the position of strength he had expertly manoeuvred himself into as he always does. The lira has been relatively ok, weakening slightly and clearly being defended with record amounts. But there has been panic in the markets with banking stocks down 30% from the highs of just last week. What comes next? Only Erdogan knows. It seems that protests this time round will remain subdued due to fear of prosecution unlike the Gezi protests all those years ago but the illusion of docility has been broken. In stocks, the central bank hiked rates by 200bps in an emergency intervention to support the currency, meaning that banking stocks, which had been the flavour of the year, went from good to bad literally overnight. This could create a shift to lira hedge names, which had been under-owned. But the truth is no one knows and it’s going to be an interesting weekend and week thereafter.

Elsewhere the chart of the week was from BofA ML showing the incredible speed at which flows shifted from the US to Europe over the past few weeks.

This chart itself became a bit of a meme and we think catalysed a snap back resulting in weakness for European stocks. China has sold off too. The GREAT ROTATION is very much on but as we know, these things never move in a straight line. Be careful out there!

What we're meme-ing.

We enjoyed our new meme-ing so much we made another one for this week in honour of none other than Recep Tayyip Erdogan. DC

What we're watching.

It was quite difficult to escape all the hype around Adolescence on Netflix this week so I submitted and watched it. My conclusion, and sorry to disagree with all the fancy reviewers, was that it was mostly utter garbage. Everyone knows the issues around social media, bullying and social dysfunction of kids today. I suppose it’s an important show to bring this to the attention of the ignorant I guess but it really was just a show about a boy who killed someone. Do yourself a favour and don’t waste your time. The PR agencies did an excellent job on this one.  DC

What we're reading.

After a family trip to Athens a few weeks back, I was inspired to read a bit more about the Greeks and what better place to start than with the great Conn Iggulden’s Athens series. The first book, The Gates of Athens, is brilliant. It features two of the most battles in human history. The war between the Greeks and the Persians is the stuff of legend and the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae are still studied today. Although the pace is not as rapid as his earlier series on the Romans and the Mongols, Iggulden as ever brings it all viscerally life. Super fun and good learning.

On the topic of THE GREAT ROTATION, Kuppy is a very popular twitter account who runs a fund and is well followed in markets so when he wrote on the same topic, it also adds to the memification of this theme.

And finally, an excellent and heartfelt battle cry from Gabby Dizon, one of the fathers of Web 3 gaming. Web 3 games after much promise, have not resulted in the breakout that many were hoping over the past few years. This piece in Coindesk from Gabby tells us all exactly why we mustn’t give up and why we are all following the wrong metrics – token prices, instead of adoption trends. The future is here if you look in the right place. The problem with all crypto projects and crypto in general is that token prices have become the barometers of success rather than actual user metrics and adoption as those became the incentives for founders. There are countless examples of this being the case. Gabby is one of the few founders who when launching his project, Yield Guild Games, gave himself and his team a long vesting and lockup period for their tokens. This has incentivised them to work hard to build a project, rather than like many others, sell and bank the cash quickly before a business was even built. Hats off to him for this and maximum respect. And he is building a proper business too. DC

Just this morning it turned out that huge swathes of West London were out of electricity, thanks to a substation fire, taking out supply to c. 67k households. But more importantly, the outage took out Heathrow airport. The numbers of affected flights and passengers are enormous, to the tune of c. 229k passengers a day going through Heathrow, almost 84m passengers a year. The impact on the 1,300+ flights affected today, assuming that this gets resolved within a day (unlikely) has also flowed through into other airports, including Manchester and Birmingham, including flights that were en route and forced to divert. Airlines are currently on the hook for compensation, but the truth is it isn’t really their fault – the obvious question was how such a piece of critical infrastructure, a globally renowned airport hub, could have its electrical supply coming through on only one channel. Whether this was foul play, negligence or just misfortune remains to be seen, but the lack of redundancy is unsettling – literally there existed a single point of failure (one substation) that once taken out shut down not just the airport but the entire surrounding area. Efficiency is great until something goes wrong, and undoubtedly a symptom of a multi-year thinning out of redundancy and infrastructure in the country thanks to dwindling “hard” investments.

Speaking of energy, for some reason this discovery from ground penetrating radar scans done on the pyramids of Giza in Egypt didn’t really make the news here – I managed to find a couple of articles in slightly less mainstream corners of the internet, but this one in Pakistan’s Express Tribune at least looks the best written. In short, radar scans beneath the pyramids of Giza reveal an entire compound of hollow columns and other very-unlikely-to-be-natural structures underneath the pyramids. The pyramids that we see are literally the tip of the iceberg. Of course, these are but radar readings, but the methodology seems to be well validated. It’s unlikely that an excavation might ever be conducted, but the obvious question here is “what were these structures used for?”. And that’s where the theories abound, including one that suggests that ancient Egypt invented an unlimited-electricity structure to harness energy from the movement of the earth itself. This certainly sounds like an edge case, but then again, after decades of belief that pyramids were merely burial chambers for ancient pharaohs with big egos and slave-driving tendencies, maybe the edge cases aren’t that ludicrous after all. We’ll find out soon if interest persists for long enough for further investigation to occur. Meanwhile, Twitter has done its usual twitter thing, offering a relative-scaled rendition of what seems to be beneath the pyramids. Next should be Hollywood’s turn to deliver some remakes of these tomb-raiding films. EL