Morning Brew Daily
Neal’s Numbers of 2024: Warren Buffet T-Bills, Digital Cameras, and More
Fri, 27 Dec 2024
Episode 484: Neal and Toby reflect on the numbers that stood out throughout the year, including Warren Buffet’s Treasury Bills, Digital Cameras, and Toby shares his favorite tallies from the year! Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What numbers stood out in 2024?
Oh my gosh, it's a special Neil's Numbers episode. It's Friday, December 27th. Let's ride. Let's ride.
Good morning and happy Friday, even though the days of the week feel a little made up during this stretch from Christmas to New Year's. We're back with another special episode, one that is near and dear to my heart because it's the best of Neil's numbers.
Each Thursday, I bring you three of the most fascinating stats from the week's news, hopefully making you the most interesting person at your dinner party in the process. For this episode, our team poured over every number I discussed from 2024 and picked a bunch that stood out either for representing a bigger theme from the year or just because they were so wacky. Toby, are you ready?
By the way, your commentary is a big reason why Neil's numbers is so popular.
Oh, you flatter me too much. Neil, this is my favorite segment every week. Not only because I learn a lot, but also you do most of the talking. So let's dive right in.
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Chapter 2: How did voter sentiment change in 2024?
All right, I guess I will start talking then. One of my numbers from back in January was that we were entering the biggest election year in history. In 2024, 76 countries with more than half the world's population, over 4 billion people voted in elections, including eight of the 10 most populous countries in the world. What did we learn now that all those votes have been counted?
One pattern that was clearly evident is that voters were fed up with inflation. The incumbents in every single one of 10 major countries with elections this year were handed losses by voters, including the Democrats in the U.S., Britain's Tories, Emmanuel Macron's coalition in France, and Japan's liberal Democrats. It was the first time this has happened in 120 years of record keeping.
Yeah, I mean, among democracies that held elections this year, 80% saw their incumbent party lose. Some places it was longtime incumbents, too. In Senegal, its now president became the first opposition candidate to win a presidential election since the country became independent in 1960. So it really was a year of people saying, we want change, we want something different.
And you saw that in just the sheer amount of elections that were held and the sheer amount of incumbents that did end up losing.
And maybe a 1B number that I want to add over the U.S. presidential election was the sheer amount of outside spending from corporations, individuals. That was a major theme in the election that happened in November. With two weeks to go before Election Day, outside groups poured in $1.1 billion into the presidential race, which surpassed the record set in 2020.
And I remember you would talk about some Senate races just in specific states outspent even the entire election spending of countries like France or Canada or something like that. So it truly is a unique phenomenon to the U.S., just how much we spend on elections.
OK, moving on to a number from the summer, Berkshire Hathaway owns more Treasury bills than the Federal Reserve, which is a sign of how Warren Buffett has been stockpiling cash and sparking debate over why he seems wary of the stock market. At the end of June, Berkshire owned $234 billion in Treasury bills compared to the Fed's $195 billion Treasury war chest.
Buffett's TiVo pile is more than several countries, including Brazil, Mexico, and Germany. And his overall cash pile of $325 billion would allow him to easily buy all but 25 of the most valuable public U.S. companies, including Goldman Sachs, Disney, Pfizer, and AT&T. At the same time, Buffett spent the year selling off holdings of his two most treasured investments, Apple and Bank of America.
Toby, what does Buffett see that we don't?
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Chapter 3: What does Warren Buffet's cash position indicate?
But I was just thinking, like, wait a second. He could. This is one company that he maybe would see value in. Yeah.
This is one company that could afford TikTok, and there aren't that many. I like that idea, Toby. It would sit nicely in the portfolio next to the railroads insurance companies and fruit of the loom. I could see that happening. I'm sure Buffett would have a lot of expertise to give to the TikTok CEO. OK, sports gambling was in the headlines a ton this year.
It's only grown since it was basically legalized by the Supreme Court in 2018. But the findings of two studies over the summer revealed some of its negative consequences for Americans' personal finances. One study showed how Americans were taking money out of their stock accounts to fund their online betting. It found that.
for every dollar spent on sports gambling, net investments in stocks and other financial assets dropped by a little over two dollars. And then in another study, the average credit score in a state was found to have fallen point three percent after the state legalized sports gambling. And that triples to one percent if the state allowed online sports betting.
Toby, sports gambling has become a massive industry here. Should we expect more of a reckoning now that we've got more data on its harmful effects?
Yeah, because it's not just data about the amount of money you lose by putting them into your account and losing. It is the opportunity cost of what that money could have been doing in the stock market. So it's even bigger than you probably imagined. We also read some of these horror stories this year where professional gamblers, people who do this for a living...
figured out that if they tried to reverse engineer the behavior of gambling addicts, they would get fed better boosts, better deals from the gambling sites. So they would do stuff like check their phones in the middle of the night, log onto the app at 2 a.m. And those behaviors signified to the sports gambling websites that, hey, this is someone who probably has an addiction to this.
Let's feed them a deal. And they were doing that just so they would get a better edge on things. So there really was a little bit of this was the year where sports gambling really was widespread, rolled out to a lot of different states, and now we are seeing just the second-order and third-order effects of it.
Yeah, it'll be curious to see whether in the next administration or Congress there will be some regulatory crackdown on sports gambling because it really is the Wild West. But you're going to see more studies like this come out, and lawmakers might be—
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Chapter 4: How is sports gambling affecting personal finances?
That's up from just $7 billion in 2018 when the Supreme Court legalized or paved the way for legal sports gambling. And earlier this year, Flutter, which is the company that owns FanDuel, overtook the biggest physical casino, Las Vegas Sands, in market cap. So you're starting to see a changing of the guard there. Let's turn to the always fascinating automobile industry for this next number.
In September, Norway became the first country in the world with more electric vehicles on its roads than gas-powered cars. The country is the world leader in EV adoption thanks to government incentives such as allowing EV drivers to use bus lanes and exempting EVs from certain taxes. For other countries, though, the EV transition has been rocky this year. In the U.S., J.D.
Power lowered its projections for EV sales from 12% of new cars to 9%. President-elect Trump is expected to blunt growth even more by pulling a $7,500 EV tax credit when he comes into office. Over in Europe, growth is slowing for countries not named Norway. European EV sales rose just 0.8% in October from the year earlier. outlier.
If any country was going to do this, it was going to be Norway because you're right. There are these generous government incentives, but also it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world. So the residents there can offset some of that upfront cost of buying an electric vehicle. It is funny too, though, because a lot of the incentives that the government does offer for electric vehicle buyers.
They are funded in large part by the money the country makes by selling its oil and gas reserves to other countries. So they hope to end all diesel and gas vehicle sales by next year. Again, if one country is going to do it, it is Norway.
But I would say that they are a bit of an outlier and not indicative of, or maybe not not indicative, but definitely one of the people higher up or the countries higher up the adoption curve on.
Oh, yeah, they're by far in a way the highest adoption for EVs. The question is, how long will it take the rest of the world to catch them? Two years ago, it seemed like EV adoption would be super fast. I mean, rates were going at 40% here in the United States, even faster in Europe.
China, but due to a variety of factors like the high costs of cars and the lack of stations here in the United States, growth has almost slowed to a trickle. They're just going to grow less than 10% in the single digits here in the United States. Adoption is much faster in China. They're growing at 50%.
And the question, I think this will be something that we talk about a lot on the podcast next year. is what are we going to do about the Chinese EVs that are quote-unquote invading Europe and the United States? The United States has put a tariff of 100% on them. Europe has also placed some tariffs. But, you know, Western carmakers just can't compete with these Chinese EV companies.
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Chapter 5: What trends are shaping electric vehicle adoption?
From what I understand, there's been a lot of fits and starts to try to abolish the penny, but there's just always something more important going on that you can't get lawmakers to say like, OK, let's actually vote on abolishing the penny. And then you then you mentioned all of the logistics that require, you know, going into that.
Canada abolished the penny a few years ago, but they kept the concept of the cent. So you have, you know, competing states. things going on here. And I don't know if Americans will be amenable to that change. Maybe we should just take all the pennies, melt them down into a, you know, copper liquid and then create a statue in front of the Fed as a testament to capitalism.
There you go. Track them down and you get on that. Up next, more numbers coming your way. Neil, as always, thank you for those numbers. Sometimes throughout the year, though, when there are a few extra numbers to go around, you can't choose just three. I get to jump in with some Toby's tally, and I'm going to do that on today's episode as well.
The first tally I picked up this year was $2,047, which is the price per person. per square foot on the most expensive street in the world, Milan's Via Monte Napoleone. Now, this was a fun story. Milan's luxury fashion scene propelled Via Monte Napoleone into the top spot, surpassing New York's Fifth Avenue. But that is not why I picked it.
I picked it because we got a few emails and texts from people who said that this number in particular helped them win some of their trivia competitions. Now, I don't know if one of the writers of bar trivia around the country heard this Neal's Numbers and got inspired or if it was just a coincidence.
But still, this one will hold a special place in the Neal's Number pantheon for being helpful enough to win trivia for a few people, Neal. That is all I'm going for.
That really is all you're going for. Help you win trivia with Neil's numbers. I also think you chose this, Toby, so you could say via Monte Napoleone. It does roll off the tongue pretty well. And remember, do you remember some of the reasons why? Well, yes.
The reason why this street is the most expensive, yes, there are luxury goods companies going in there, but it's also just tiny, so it's a matter of supply and demand. Fifth Avenue is much longer, and Bond Street in London, all these other ones are just... bigger, so they can't charge as many rents to be on the actual street itself.
If you extended the street in Milan or took in another street to normalize the length with Fifth Avenue, then I'm not sure Milan would still win. But I've been there. It's super fancy.
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Chapter 6: Why should we consider abolishing the penny?
Yeah, I know. Okay, my final tally is just a banger, and that is everyone in Japan will be called Sato by 2531, unless some changes are made to marriage laws in the country. So in Japan, married couples are not permitted to use separate surnames.
So that means Sato, which already tops the list of most popular last names in the country, will see its share exponentially increase throughout the years until in 500 years' time, Everyone in Japan will be named Sato. This study was also published on April 1st of this year. So people at first thought it was a joke, but it was real.
And the author said it was to drive awareness of this outdated marriage rule.
My first thought is this is going to be a nightmare for sports announcers. I mean, we're doing the game. Sato passes the Sato, passes the Sato, Sato shoots, and I'm not, if I'm listening on the radio, I don't know what's going on. So I go out, my thoughts are with all the sports announcers that have to deal with all the Satos.
When I think of Neal's numbers, this is the one that comes to mind, though, just because it's so out there. You would never think about it. You would never come across it unless you unearthed it. So that is just in my top three of Neal's numbers of all time. Okay, Neil, to close out the show, I have a quiz for you to see just how well you know your own numbers.
This quiz picks out some themes that emerged over your year of numerology. Let's see if you can recognize your own tendencies. All right, so question one is, you did 11 numbers related to America this year. Stuff like, why does America suddenly have a record number of Bs? Why Americans stopped moving and Americans saying they needed a $1.5 million to comfortably retire?
But what do you think was the second most popular country you talked about this year in your Niels numbers?
Well, we just did one on Japan, so that's top of mind. You know, we talked a lot about Germany this year. We talked a lot about Argentina. I'm going to go with Argentina. No, I'm not. You're shaking your head. That's not my final answer. Oh, God. I don't know. I will say Japan.
Japan was in a two-way tie with Russia, actually. There was the number that we just discussed about everyone being called Sato, but also there's a number about how Japanese diaper makers are shifting their production from babies to adults, given the increasing amount of elderly people in the country.
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Chapter 7: What are Toby's favorite tallies from the year?
Yeah.
But just the headline of cocaine sharks.
Yeah. So you do love a nice marine theme.
Well, I think the ocean is so vast and mysterious to us that it certainly lends itself to eye popping stats like a humpback whale, you know, sojourning 8000 miles for sex or the largest predation event ever, ever recorded. You know, that thing, you know, those things just don't really happen on land unless it's the insect kingdom. You just don't get that sheer quantity.
So the ocean is is a remarkable thing.
It lends itself to Neal's numbers. Do you know who the most talked about person in Neal's numbers were this year?
I'll say, well, Warren Buffett was definitely one. I don't know if I talked about Jerome Powell or Warren Buffett, one of those.
You're thinking in the wrong realm. It's not a business-related realm. It is entertainment, and it was Taylor Swift. Oh, no. I'm so predictable. She edged out Caitlin Clark, actually. Caitlin Clark appeared multiple times as well. Some of the Taylor Swift numbers were she drove more luxury travelers to Paris than even the Olympics. Five times as many US travelers, to be exact.
Also, the tortured poets department broke the record for weekly vinyl sales, which is another thing we've talked about. She sold 700,000 in just a weekend. And then there was also, this one I had totally forgot about, there was this Monmouth poll that found nearly one in five U.S. residents believed Taylor Swift was conspiring with Joe Biden to steal the election.
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