Show Notes
This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on fertilizers, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the first of two audio programs that accompany the written primer on the fertilizer industry, and it is the story of the industry, told for a general audience. The account is built from documented scenes, with the people named, the dates given, and the participants quoted in their own words. It assumes no background in chemistry, farming or finance and explains its terms, from fixed nitrogen and superphosphate to a floor price and an export agency, as they arrive. This episode is public. The program runs from the guano islands of Peru in the 1850s to the Strait of Hormuz in September 2026, and from Chile’s nitrate desert, Norway’s waterfalls and the Rhine to the Saskatchewan prairie, the Urals and a farmyard in Texas. Its people are chemists, among them Justus von Liebig, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch; the Chinese laborers who dug guano on the Chincha Islands; a Chilean captain who boarded an ironclad; the governors and premiers who set and defended the price of potash; and the farmers who asked in 2026 who sets the price of fertilizer. It follows how states and export agencies, from Saskatchewan’s floor price and quotas of 1970 to the Belarusian Potash Company, set the price of nutrients that the air and the rock hold in abundance. Part One stands on its own. It tells how the industry took its present shape, from the natural deposits that states owned and fought over to the synthetic ammonia of 1913 and the potash mines of the prairie. The economics of the business, and the companies as investments, are the subject of Part Two and of the written primer. Where the program reaches the investigations and the farmers’ suits of 2026, it reports them as investigations and allegations, which the companies deny. The program runs in fourteen sections: 1. The Air Takes Fire. On September 7, 1898 Sir William Crookes tells the British Association at Bristol that the world’s wheat depends on guano and Chilean saltpeter that may run out within decades, and prices nitrate made from the air on Niagara’s power at not more than £5 a ton, against £7 and 10 shillings for Chile’s. 2. Before the Plough. In 1840 Justus von Liebig prints a recipe for dissolving ground bones in sulfuric acid, John Bennet Lawes patents the process in 1842 and opens the world’s first commercial fertilizer factory at Deptford Creek in 1843, and that autumn wheat is sown on Broadbalk, where a control strip has received no fertilizer since. 3. Five Tons a Day. In 1853 George Washington Peck watches Chinese indentured laborers on the Chincha Islands dig and wheel 5 tons of guano each a day, and by Alexander Duffield’s count Peru sells 20 million tons at £12 to £13 a ton before it defaults on its foreign debt in 1876. 4. Without Firing a Gun. On February 14, 1879 Chilean troops occupy Antofagasta in a quarrel over a Bolivian tax of 10 cents a quintal on nitrate, the War of the Pacific gives Chile the nitrate province of Tarapacá in 1883, and John Thomas North, who bought Peru’s nitrate certificates at a reported 80 to 90 percent below face value, becomes the Nitrate King. 5. A Dinner on Friday the Thirteenth. Seated beside Kristian Birkeland at a dinner in Christiania on February 13, 1903, Sam Eyde finds the electric arc he wants, and Norsk Hydro is founded on December 2, 1905 with 7.5 million kroner of share capital, only 8 percent of it held by Norwegians. 6. Eighty Hours, Then They Burst. In 1909 Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol make liquid ammonia on a bench apparatus at about 175 atmospheres, Carl Bosch’s first steel tubes burst after 80 hours, and BASF’s plant at Oppau, built for about 30,000 tons of ammonia a year, starts on September 9, 1913. 7. The Saltpeter Promise. Cut off from Chile by the British blockade, Germany takes Bosch’s pledge of September 1914 to make nitric acid from Oppau’s ammonia, and Leuna ships its first ammonia on April 27, 1917
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This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on homebuilding, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the first of two audio programs that accompany the written primer on the homebuilders, and it is the story of the industry, told for a general audience. The account is built from documented scenes, with the people named, the dates given, and the participants quoted in their own words. It assumes no background in housing or finance and explains its terms, from a balloon payment to a rate buydown and an option on a lot, as they arrive. This episode is public. The program runs from the balloon loans of the 1920s to the Federal Reserve's increase of September 16, 2026, and from Long Island's potato fields to Bucks County, Fort Worth, Phoenix, Port St. Lucie, and Omaha. Its people are builders, among them William Levitt, Donald Horton, Robert Toll, Tony Pidgley, and Dwight Schar; a Black family who moved onto Deepgreen Lane in 1957 and the governor who sent the State Police; judges who ruled on racial covenants, fair housing and a builder's pledged subsidiaries; and buyers who kept their contracts with a bankrupt builder in 1992. It follows the land and the mortgage, which set what a family could pay for a house and, for a generation, which families could buy one at all. Part One stands on its own. It tells how the industry took its present shape, from the federal mortgage of 1934 to the builders that now hold their lots by deposit. The economics of the business, and the companies as investments, are the subject of Part Two and of the written primer. The program runs in fourteen sections: 1. As Long as the Suppliers Keep Supplying. On Monday, April 6, 1992 NVR, the Virginia parent of Ryan Homes, files for Chapter 11 after its 8 banks decline to keep funding it, and of 410 buyers holding deposits on Ryan houses in the Baltimore region, only 3 ask for their money back. 2. The Balloon Payment. In the 1920s a lender put up about half the price of a house on a loan that fell due in one payment within 3 to 5 years, and on June 27, 1934 Franklin Roosevelt signs the National Housing Act, whose insured loan covers up to 80 percent of the appraised value and is repaid every month until nothing is owed. 3. The Dice Were Loaded. With the GI Bill backing veterans' loans and, by Time's count, 5 million houses needed at the war's end, the Levitts pay $3,600 an acre for Long Island farmland, twelve times its prewar price, for a town Harper's counted in 1948 at 6,000 houses. 4. A House Every Fifteen Minutes. By 1950 the Levitts have broken the building of a house into 26 operations, every house in Levittown sells at one price, $7,990, and a veteran can own one for no down payment and $56 a month. 5. Deepgreen Lane. On August 13, 1957 William and Daisy Myers become the first Black residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, and after the crowds, the stones and three burned crosses Governor George Leader sends the State Police; on February 9, 1960 the New Jersey Supreme Court rules unanimously against Levitt that houses sold on FHA-insured or VA-guaranteed loans count as publicly assisted. 6. Eighteen Point Six Three. In the week of October 9, 1981 Freddie Mac's thirty-year rate reaches 18.63 percent, the highest in its history, when each $1,000 of a loan costs $15.59 a month against $6.88 in April 1971, and builders begin paying lenders to lower their buyers' rates. 7. Long and Wrong on Land. Donald Horton opens for business in Phoenix in late 1987, in the middle of the Texas housing collapse, takes D.R. Horton public in June 1992, two months after NVR files, and from that listing to his death on May 16, 2024 the shares return 134.5 times the money invested, 16.6 percent a year against 10.45 percent for the S&P 500 with dividends. 8. The Speculative Buyers. New-home sales reach a rate of 1,389,000 a year in July 2005, the highest since the series began in 1963, and on August 22, 2006 Toll Brothers reports net contracts down 45 percent an
This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on aerospace, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the first of two audio programs that accompany the written primer on the airframers and their suppliers, and it tells the story of the industry for a business and investing audience. The account is built from documented scenes, with the people named, the dates given, and the participants quoted in their own words. No background in aviation or finance is assumed, and the terms it uses, from a derivative airplane to an approved replacement part and a Dutch auction, are explained as they arrive. This episode is public. The program runs from four flights on the North Carolina coast in 1903 to the 737 line at Renton, near Seattle, by way of Lake Union, Hartford, Toulouse, Miami, Cleveland, Portland and Omaha. It is told through the people who built the industry and the people who created the most value for its shareholders. William Boeing, a timber heir who flew his first seaplane in 1916, and Bill Allen, the lawyer who put the company's own money into the first jet transport built in the United States, carry the first half. The second turns to the value creators: Bill Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who shrank General Dynamics on purpose; Larry Mendelson and his sons Eric and Victor, who took over a loss-making HEICO in 1990; Nick Howley, who founded TransDigm with Doug Peacock in 1993; and Mark Donegan, who ran Precision Castparts when Berkshire Hathaway acquired it for more than $32 billion. Test pilots and engineers, among them Tex Johnston, Joe Sutter and Roger Béteille, fill out the cast, with passengers such as the Boeing mechanic who saved for four years to fly on Pan Am's first 707 flight. Part One stands on its own. The value creators speak in their own words, on debt, pricing, acquisitions and the people who work for them, and each one's record is given with its dates and its basis. The failures that changed the business, from the Comet's metal fatigue to the 737 MAX and the door plug of January 2024, are told for what they changed. The economics of the business, and the companies as investments, are the subject of Part Two and of the written primer. The program runs in twenty sections: 1. It Sold a Lot of Airplanes. On Sunday, August 7, 1955, Boeing's chief of flight test, Tex Johnston, rolls the Dash 80 prototype twice over the hydroplane races on Lake Washington, with Bill Allen watching from a yacht among the heads of the world's airlines, and not one airline has yet ordered the airplane. 2. Home Christmas. Orville and Wilbur Wright fly four times at Kill Devil Hills on December 17, 1903, and on June 15, 1916 William Boeing, a timber heir, takes his first seaplane 900 feet over Lake Union in Seattle, a little farther than Wilbur's longest flight at Kitty Hawk. 3. Less Than a Million Dollars. The Air Mail Act of June 12, 1934 breaks up United Aircraft and Transport, William Boeing retires that year with the Daniel Guggenheim Medal for achievement in aeronautics, and the company that keeps his name is left, in Bill Allen's words to Time, with "less than $1,000,000 in liquid assets." 4. Thorny, but Well Rooted. Bill Allen, a lawyer who listed five reasons against taking the job, becomes Boeing's president on September 1, 1945, and in 1952 the board he leads commits about $16 million of the company's own money to a jet transport prototype that no airline and no air force had ordered. 5. Five Hundred and Twenty Fathoms. The de Havilland Comet flies the first scheduled jet passenger service on May 2, 1952, loses its certificates of airworthiness after two airplanes are lost off Italy in 1954, and on October 13, 1955 Pan American orders 45 American jets for $269 million, the first order any airline placed for American jet airliners. 6. A Dozen Bathrooms and No Engines. Pan American orders 25 Boeing 747s for $525 million on April 13, 1966, the largest order for commercial aircraft ever placed, and when the prog
This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on United States regional banks, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the first of two audio programs that accompany the written primer, and it is the story of the industry, told for a general audience. The account is built from documented scenes, with the people named, the dates given, and the participants quoted in their own words. No background in banking is assumed, and the terms it uses are explained as they arrive. This episode is public. The subject is money that belongs to somebody else. A bank buys money from depositors and sells it to borrowers, and the money can leave at any time, by law, by a competing product, or by a wire transfer sent in the space of a morning. Every scene in the program is a case of that money arriving, staying, or going. The program runs in fourteen sections: 1. Are We a Dinosaur? In the fall of 2004 the man who owned a bank in Plano, Texas stops buying loans, and over three years takes it from $7.7 billion of assets down to $2.9 billion, until one of his own directors reduces the matter to four words. 2. A Country of Small Banks. The first commercial bank in the United States opens in Philadelphia on January 7, 1782, and the Pennsylvania Assembly votes its charter away less than four years later because its credit reached the city and not the farmers. 3. Three Hours and Eight Million Dollars. The Knickerbocker Trust Company of New York, with $62 million of deposits, pays out $8 million in three hours on the morning of Tuesday, October 22, 1907 and is finished by lunchtime. 4. The Little Fellow. A produce merchant named A. P. Giannini opens the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904 with $150,000 of capital, and twenty-six years later tells a House committee who a bank is really for. 5. The Week Without Banks. Franklin Roosevelt signs Proclamation 2039 at one in the morning on Monday, March 6, 1933, and a country of 125 million people goes a week with no banking at all. 6. We Hit the Jackpot. Two signing ceremonies two and a half years apart, Jimmy Carter on March 31, 1980 and Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden on October 15, 1982, free the price of deposits and then widen what the institutions paying that price were allowed to lend against. 7. It Is Called Too Big to Fail. Continental Illinois loses its funding by wire in May 1984, and on September 19 a congressman in room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building gives the new kind of bank its name. 8. Where Were These Professionals? Judge Stanley Sporkin dismisses the suit brought by the owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan on August 22, 1990, and closes the opinion by turning to the lawyers and accountants who were in the room and said nothing. 9. The Builders. NCNB of Charlotte wins the failed First RepublicBank Corporation of Dallas in 1988 because its people had read the tax rulings nobody else put into a bid, and the Texas operation earns $308 million in 1989, half the buyer’s earnings for the year. 10. A Message to One’s Partners. Robert Wilmers takes control of a $2 billion Buffalo bank in 1983 and writes its owners a letter every year for thirty-four years, and Warren Buffett puts in writing in 1991 that what he has bought is a person. 11. The Wisdom of No. The chief credit officer of Washington Mutual stands in front of thousands of the company’s managers at a 2004 retreat and answers the advertising line the speaker ahead of him had been selling. 12. Not Even a Penny From the FDIC. Wachovia is handed to Citigroup on Monday, September 29, 2008 with the public absorbing the losses past $42 billion, and four days later Wells Fargo signs for the whole company with no assistance at all. 13. One Million Dollars a Second. Silicon Valley Bank loses $42 billion of deposits in ten hours on Thursday, March 9, 2023, expects to lose $100 billion more the next day, and is closed before lunch instead. 14. The Committee Will Deliver Price Stability. The Federal Open Market Committee vot
This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the first of two audio programs that accompany the written primer, and it is the story of the industry, told for a general audience. The account is built from documented scenes, with the people named, the dates given, and the participants quoted in their own words. No background in insurance is assumed, and the terms it uses are explained as they arrive. This episode is public. The program runs in fourteen sections: 1. Four Hours on a Saturday. A twenty-year-old in Benjamin Graham’s class at Columbia takes the train to Washington in January 1951, pounds on a closed door, and gets four hours from Lorimer Davidson on why selling direct cost less than selling through agents. 2. The House That Sold Information. Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in London, first mentioned in 1688, where the product was shipping news, and Lloyd’s List, in print from 1734. 3. Sixty-Eight Companies. The fire that took New York’s financial district on the night of December 16, 1835, and Eliphalet Terry of Hartford, who guaranteed his company’s checks with his directors’ private fortunes. 4. The Word Nobody Would Say. San Francisco on the morning of April 18, 1906, and the argument after the fires about which cause of loss the policies had covered. 5. The Farmer Who Noticed. The New York Court of Appeals strikes down the state’s workers’ compensation law on March 24, 1911, and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burns the next day. 6. Fifteen Minutes, No Lawyer, No Audit. Berkshire Hathaway pays $8.6 million in 1967 for National Indemnity and National Fire and Marine, on a page and a half of contract and no audit. 7. Capacity Is an Attitudinal Concept. The Manville Corporation files for bankruptcy on August 26, 1982 with 16,500 asbestos suits pending, and the industry learns what one word in an old policy was worth. 8. Down to the Last Cufflink. The Lloyd’s Act of 1982, and the Names whose liability for what their agents wrote had no limit at all. 9. Karen Clark at the Fax Machine. Hurricane Andrew comes ashore in south Dade County on August 24, 1992, and a model built in Boston puts the industry loss above $13 billion while the market is still working from a much smaller number. 10. I Violated the Noah Rule. The September 11 attacks produce about $32.5 billion of insured loss across property, aviation, workers’ compensation and liability at once, and Warren Buffett writes down the three rules his reinsurers were supposed to follow, and which two had been kept weakly. 11. Fair, Friendly Acquisitions. Prem Watsa takes over a failing Canadian trucking insurer in 1985 and renames it for the three words he intends to operate by. 12. A Bigger Slice of the Paella. Progressive, founded in Cleveland on March 10, 1937, and the underwriting profit objective it printed in 1971 and has not moved since. 13. Twenty-Two Days. The fire that took Paradise, California, on November 8, 2018, and the small Central Valley insurer the state moved to take over twenty-two days later. 14. Weather That Did Not Arrive. Greg Abel’s first annual letter, February 28, 2026, Berkshire’s insurance businesses at an 87.1 percent combined ratio for 2025 on the company’s own basis, and the single sentence that says why. The program runs 1 hour 31 minutes (1:30:59). The written primer and its companion slide deck are on the Latticework Substack under the title Industry Primer: Property and Casualty Insurance & Reinsurance. Part Two, the deep dive for professional investors, is a separate episode, available to members of Latticework. This audio program is published by MOI Global for educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation, and no security mentioned herein is recommended for purchase or sale. The publisher and contributors may hold positions in securities discussed. Figures are believed accurate as of the da
This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on exchanges and financial market infrastructure, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the story of the industry, told for a general audience of lifelong learners. (Part Two digs deeper into the industry fundamentals from an investor’s standpoint. An in-depth industry research report is also available.) This program runs from Amsterdam in 1602 to the prediction markets of 2026, in thirteen sections. It opens on a December afternoon in 2012, when an Atlanta company most people had never heard of agreed to buy the New York Stock Exchange and said on television that it wanted a London futures business rather than the building or the brand. It then goes back to the night the subscription for the Dutch East India Company closed at Dirck van Os’s house in Amsterdam, with the clause in the capital book that made a share transferable; to the London brokers who paid sixpence each in 1773 to rename their coffee house the Stock Exchange; and to the twenty-four brokers who signed seventy-three words under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street in 1792 and fixed a commission that lasted 183 years. From there the story follows the club as it becomes property and then a public company. It covers the price of a seat on the New York exchange across a century and a half, and Richard Whitney, who bid for United States Steel on the floor during the crash of 1929 and was sentenced nine years later for looting a members’ fund. It covers Leo Melamed, who crossed Siberia as a child on a Japanese transit visa, answered a classified advertisement he took to be from a law firm, and thirty years later put currencies into a futures market. It covers the paperwork crisis that closed the New York exchange every Wednesday for half of 1968 and produced the depository that holds the certificates still; the end of fixed commissions on May Day in 1975 and London’s Big Bang in 1986; the German government bond contract that moved from a London trading floor to a Frankfurt screen in the 1990s; the two professors who noticed that dealers almost never quoted in odd eighths; the eleven days in 2006 in which a seat on a New York commodity exchange turned into about $12 million of stock; the $9 trillion of Lehman Brothers interest rate swaps that a London clearinghouse worked through in 2008; the flash crash of 2010, and the software release that cost Knight Capital more than $400 million in about forty-five minutes in 2012; the night in March 2022 when the London Metal Exchange suspended nickel trading and canceled a day of trades; and the prediction market that was fined for operating without a license, then bought a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, and then took a $1.6 billion investment from the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The program runs about an hour and a half. The written primer, a 223-page report, and its companion 53-slide deck are on the Latticework Substack under the title, Industry Primer: Exchanges & Financial Market Infrastructure. Part Two of the podcast on the industry, the deep dive for professional investors, is available to members. This audio program is published by MOI Global for educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation, and no security mentioned herein is recommended for purchase or sale. The publisher and contributors may hold positions in securities discussed. Figures are believed accurate as of the dates stated but are not warranted; listeners should verify all data against primary sources before relying on it. Nothing herein constitutes legal, tax, or accounting advice. The transcript is available for download to members only.