Tuesday assorted links

1. China fact of the day — what if China stops buying Treasuries?

2. “A few fire ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them close together, and they act more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. They can form rafts to survive flash floods, arrange themselves into towers, and you can even pour them from a teapot like a fluid.”  Link here.

3. Donald Kohn on Sumner and ngdp targeting.  And Sumner’s response.

4. Is 20 quadrillion the correct number of ants?  The optimal number of ants?

5. Supply curves slope upward.

6. Niger projection of the day (FT): “On current trends, Niger’s population is on course to nearly triple from about 24mn in 2020 to a projected 68mn in 2050, according to the UN Development Programme’s latest forecast. If that projection proves correct, Niger’s population will have grown 25 times in the century to 2050, a period over which the global population will have risen a relatively modest fourfold.”