| India gets some help, Tesla to report, and China widens tech crackdown. Surge The U.S. joined European countries in offering help to India where the surge in the virus is causing record infection and deaths are overwhelming graveyards and crematoriums. Local lockdowns have put in doubt optimistic forecasts for the country's growth, while oil is down today on reduced Indian demand. The total number of vaccine shots given across the world passed 1 billion, as Europe said it would allow vaccinated U.S. tourists to travel to the continent this summer, the New York Times reported. Tesla While the electric-vehicle maker has already reported surprisingly strong delivery numbers in the first quarter, today's results from Tesla Inc. will be an important update for investors. Doubts are starting to emerge as to whether Tesla can maintain its dominant position in the electric-car space amid increasing competition from traditional carmakers. Investors will also be keen to get more details on progress on the company's plants in Germany and Texas, plus any target for 2021 deliveries, when earnings are announced after the bell. Tech investigation China's government has expanded its antitrust crackdown on tech companies, launching an investigation into food-delivery behemoth Meituan. Beijing has become increasingly concerned over the growing influence of tech titans over every aspect of Chinese life and has shown through its moves against Jack Ma's empire that it is willing to crack down hard. Meanwhile, early indicators tracker by Bloomberg suggest the country's economy continued to expand strongly in April. Markets mixedGlobal equities are off to a slow start to a week that will see a slew of earnings and a Federal Reserve decision. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.6% while Japan's Topix index closed 0.2% higher. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index was unchanged at 5:50 a.m. Eastern Time with travel and mining stocks among the best performers. S&P 500 futures pointed to a small move lower at the open, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.581% and gold rose. Coming up... Durable goods orders for March are at 8:30 a.m., with the April Dallas Fed Manufacturing Activity Index at 10:30 a.m. The U.S. sells $60 billion of 2-year and $61 billion of 5-year notes today. As well as Tesla we get earnings from Vale SA, SBA Communications Corp., Brown & Brown Inc. and Ameriprise Financial Inc., among others. The Bloomberg Green Summit begins. What we've been readingHere's what caught our eye over the weekend. And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morningMost people know by now that a government's budget is not like a household's, and that the dynamics of the national debt or deficit aren't like a credit card bill. However intuitions formed by everyday life still haunt our conceptions of the broader economy. In particular, people have this idea that while growth may be robust right now, eventually we're going to have to "pay for it" some way or another. Eventually a bill must come due, as if a strong economy is like a weekend in Vegas. However, not only is this intuition wrong, the truth is the exact opposite. We pay for the bad times and the boom times are free. You see it all over the place these days. As Conor Sen explained recently at Bloomberg Opinion, part of the reason that rental car prices are through the roof right now is because the industry collapsed last year, causing the big players to liquidate substantial chunks of their fleet. Now they don't have enough cars, and have to jack up the prices. Consumers are literally paying more now because of the last year. Lumber is another example. As lumber trader Stinson Dean explains on the latest episode of Odd Lots (starting around the 14 minute mark), the scars of the housing crash and the Great Financial Crisis still run deep in the industry. Saw mills got burned by the collapse of the homebuilders, and have been in a bunker mentality for over a decade, constantly worried when the other shoe might drop. So capacity has slowly diminished over the last decade, and the lumber yards don't carry much inventory, because they're worried about price drops. So when we got the renovation and housing boom this year, everyone was caught short, with diminished inventory and diminished capacity to replace the inventory. Today's sky higher lumber prices can be directly traced (at least in part) to the downturn in housing that started almost 15 years ago.  And you see it in chips. There are lots of factors behind the U.S. semiconductor shortage that's making headlines these days. But one contributing factor (as discussed on a future episode of the podcast with Alex Williams and Hassan Khan) is the long tech slump after the dotcom crash, which led to a lower pace of capital investment in the industry. Buyers of technology (which is everyone and everything) are paying the price now for that past slump. Instead of obsessing about some imaginary "bill that's going to come due" in the future. Let's stop and acknowledge that right now we're paying a higher bill not because of some past boom, but because of past busts. Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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