“Better ingredients, better pizza.”

— Papa John

Dear Reader,

“I make and keep my own eggs,” Kyle H says, responding to an oddly sustainable theme we stumbled on this week.

Kyle is preserving his wealth, literally:

“Water glassing eggs #homebrewing”

Onward.

Today, we begin with two examples of the “replacement” or “substitution” effect we were discussing yesterday.

In Japan, Pizza Hut is offering a rice based pizza crust, in part, because of the Russian-Ukraine war and surging inflation of wheat prices.

“We’re always thinking of ways to make our products appealing to Japanese customers, and rice is obviously a perfect fit,” says a charismatic Emi Mikado, spokeswoman for Pizza Hut Japan Ltd. “On top of that we’re seeing this surge in wheat prices.”

Rice pizza. Hmn.

Moving up the food chain to prices even harder to swallow…

The Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD reported yet another month of blowout sales of 162,350 vehicles, more than tripling in July vs. a year earlier.

People are starting to compare the largest EV maker in the Eastern Hemisphere to tech giant Tesla as the BYD Seal hits the streets throughout Asia and Europe… and makes a run for Musk’s Model 3 throne.

At one point Musk was promising the Model 3 as the car of the people, lauding a $30,000 price point. Today it costs $46,000 and up. The BYD Seal meets Musk’s target: just $32,958.

BYD also claims to have mastered vertical integration. The car maker controls multiple levels of the EV production process. Tesla, for example, is reportedly going to build the Model Y with BYD blade batteries at Gigafactory Berlin in an East-West supply partnership of the ages.

It’s “win-win or lose,” as Bill Bonner would say.

As the demise of the dollar reveals itself by the day, and interest rates rise, there is evermore a premium on affordability.

So it goes,

Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions

P.S. Meanwhile, back in America, you may be aware the newly minted Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes roughly $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS plans to hire 87,000 new employees, including 1,000 new agents to snoop around your backyard looking for buried treasure.

Read more detailed acerbity with Bonner Privates Research’s Joel Bowman, here.

P.P.S. Next week we’ll be giving you inside access to a private briefing BPR conducted in July… including a look into what economic minds like Doug Casey, Rick Rule, & Porter Stansberry think of the “new normal.”