August 28 2024

1 ExxonMobil Forecasts Oil Demand to Remain at Current Levels Until 2050
2 Subsea Fiber-Optic Cables: The New Battleground in Global Power Competition
3 Global Chip Supply at Risk: Disruption in Taiwan Could Cripple Manufacturing Worldwide
4 NFL Allows Private Equity Investment
5 Election Roundup: Trump Indicted Again, First Harris-Walz Interview, Mega Donors
8/28/1968 Protests at Democratic National Convention in Chicago

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1 ExxonMobil Forecasts Oil Demand to Remain at Current Levels Until 2050

ExxonMobil has said global oil demand will remain virtually unchanged by 2050 and warned that any move to curtail investment in fossil fuels would trigger a new energy price shock. In a forecast released on Monday, the US supermajor said oil demand would stay above 100mn barrels a day over the next 25 years — a forecast that assumes an energy transition will fail to curb the world’s thirst for fossil fuels. Exxon warned of a new global oil shock if companies failed to keep investing to match that demand, saying crude prices could quadruple as supply fell. Exxon’s prediction contrasts sharply with UK oil major BP, which expects oil consumption to decline to 75mn b/d in 2050. The International Energy Agency projects oil demand would fall to 54.8mn b/d if governments met their climate pledges on time.

Article Source: FT

2 Subsea Fiber-Optic Cables: The New Battleground in Global Power Competition

Subsea fiber-optic cables, a critical information and telecommunications technology (ICT) infrastructure carrying more than 95 percent of international data, are becoming a highly consequential theater of great power competition between the United States, China, and other state actors such as Russia. The roughly 600 cables planned or currently operational worldwide, spanning approximately 1.2 million kilometers, are the world’s information superhighways and provide the high-bandwidth connections necessary to support the rise of cloud computing and integrated 5G networks, transmitting everything from streaming videos and financial transactions to diplomatic communications and essential intelligence. The demand for data center computing and storage resources is also expected to increase in the wake of the artificial intelligence revolution. Training large language models takes enormous, distributed storage to compute, and if those networks are globally oriented, they will require additional subsea capacity to connect them. These geopolitical and technological stakes necessitate a consideration of the vulnerabilities of subsea systems and the steps the United States can take to fortify the digital rails of the future and safeguard this critical infrastructure.

Article Source: CSIS

3 Global Chip Supply at Risk: Disruption in Taiwan Could Cripple Manufacturing Worldwide

Today, every Apple smartphone has chips that can only be made in Taiwan. And so, production of Apple devices would plummet. And it would take many years to bring that back to anything approaching normal, but I think actually the thing that most people don’t realise is that Taiwan produces most of the high-end chips, but actually the disruption to losing access to Taiwan would be primarily felt because we’d have a deficit of lower-end chips. And what we learned during the pandemic was that it’s not just smartphones or PCs that have chips inside of them. It’s everything. It’s electric toothbrushes, it’s cars, it’s hearing aids. And although Taiwan doesn’t have unique skill in producing these lower-end chips, because they’re more commoditised, just the volume that comes out of Taiwan means that there would be immense disruption to general manufacturing across the world.  

Chris Miller

Article Source: FT

4 NFL Allows Private Equity Investment

The National Football League has approved sweeping changes to its ownership policies that will allow the private equity industry to invest in teams, opening the most lucrative sports league in the US to the buyout industry for the first time. NFL owners on Tuesday gave the green light to the changes, which would allow team owners to sell minority stakes to private equity firms.  The NFL will allow firms to buy a stake of up to 10 per cent stake of the common equity of individual teams, barring so-called preferred equity investments that have been typical in other leagues.   The deal will pave the way for team owners looking to cash out, with franchise values soaring into the billions of dollars, and finally bring Wall Street to the richest US sports league.

Article Source: FT

5 Election Roundup: Trump Indicted Again, First Harris-Walz Interview, Mega Donors

Special counsel Jack Smith filed an updated indictment Tuesday against Donald Trump in a bid to salvage and strengthen the historic election obstruction case, following a Supreme Court ruling that granted broad immunity to presidents for official acts and sharply criticized the prosecutor’s approach. The superseding indictment comes as a critical window was closing for Smith. In about 10 days, a Justice Department policy known as “the 60-day rule” will take effect forestalling any new filing of charges against the former president, who is again the Republican nominee for the White House. 

WaPo   

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will participate in a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday, the network announced on Tuesday. The broadcast will mark the first joint interview with Harris and Walz since he joined the campaign and the first time Harris will sit for an in-depth, on-the-record conversation since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed her to be the Democratic presidential nominee. 

WaPo   

The 50 biggest donors this cycle have collectively pumped $1.5 billion into political committees and other groups competing in the election, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission data. The vast majority of money from top donors has gone to super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums from individuals and often work closely with campaigns despite rules against coordinating their advertising 

WaPo

Article Source: WaPo

8/28/1968 Protests at Democratic National Convention in Chicago

On August 28, 1968, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, thousands of Vietnam War protesters battle police in the streets, while the Democratic Party falls apart over an internal disagreement concerning its stance on Vietnam. Over the course of 24 hours, the predominant American line of thought on the Cold War with the Soviet Union was shattered. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. perspective on the Soviet Union and Soviet-style communism was marked by truculent disapproval. Intent on stopping the spread of communism, the United States developed a policy by which it would intervene in the affairs of countries it deemed susceptible to communist influence. In the early 1960s, this policy led to U.S. involvement in the controversial Vietnam War, during which the United States attempted to keep South Vietnam from falling under the control of communist North Vietnam, at a cost of more than 2 million Vietnamese and nearly 58,000 American lives. The “Cold War consensus,” in U.S. government, however, fractured during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Democratic delegates from across the country were split on the question of Vietnam. A faction led by Eugene McCarthy, a committed anti-war candidate, began to challenge the long-held assumption that the United States should remain in the war. As the debate intensified, fights broke out on the convention floor, and delegates and reporters were beaten and knocked to the ground. Eventually, the delegates on the side of the status quo, championed by then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, won out, but the events of the convention had seriously weakened the party, which went on to lose the following election. Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago, several thousand anti-war protesters gathered to show their support for McCarthy and the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deployed 12,000 police officers and called in another 15,000 state and federal officers to contain the protesters. The situation then rapidly spiraled out of control, with the policemen severely beating and gassing the demonstrators, as well as newsmen and doctors who had come to help. The ensuing riot, known as the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” was caught on television, and sparked a large-scale change in American society. For the first time, many Americans came out in virulent opposition to the Vietnam War, which they had begun to feel was pointless and wrongheaded. No longer would people give the national government unrestrained power to pursue its Cold War policies at the expense of the safety of U.S. citizens.

Sources

1. https://www.ft.com/content/56708ad0-79a2-461b-b9bc-46b179784808

2. https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2024-08/240816_Runde_Subsea_Cables.pdf?VersionId=hn4OBAvGOF.c3WSZD9uJo6mGJviXZJWh

3. https://www.ft.com/content/42bde830-ad35-4b3a-b13b-03390aceee25

4. https://on.ft.com/4cCXUOU

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/08/27/trump-dc-indictment-new-charges-jan-6/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/27/harris-walz-cnn-dana-bash-interview/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/biggest-campaign-donors-election-2024