This is probably because the economist who first looked into relationship between the yield curve and recessions used 10y-3m [0]. His reasoning is that the 3m gives a better outlook of the conditions happening at the moment than the 2y.
I don't know if $45B is a line item to them, but to give you a sense of scale of how much money the Saudis have, Aramco had a net income of about $34B in the first half of 2017 [0].
$34B is a lot in company scales but not a lot when it is the vast majority of a government budget used to sustain a very plush lifestyle for millions of people.
Saudi has been running huge deficits and have had to dig into their reserves to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain their spending.
In the first five months of '15 they had to draw $65B from reserves just to meet costs[0]
They've introduced a new VAT, excise on fuel, cut health and education spending etc. to prevent the house of cards from collapsing[1].
Further to that point, Saudi Arabia's population is expanding very rapidly, putting immense strain on those limited resources (which have to be used to continually pacify the population).
Unlike (almost) every other business on earth where you have to do work and compete with peers to make a profit on your efforts, all the value of oil is sitting in the ground underneath them. Oil wealth is just luck of being born on top of the right geology.
And being part of an extremist tribe who were useful to the Brits/Americans versus the Ottomans in World War 1, who then continued to provide a “stable source” of oil. Stable because they stamped out any sort of democracy or society with freedoms that would allow anyone to object to their arrangements with the West, in exchange for one family of the tribe to become extremely wealthy.
In Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Ericsson had chess grandmasters look chess boards of real games, and they could recreate the board in a pretty short fashion.
But when they took chess boards of randomly placed pieces, they could not remember the placement of pieces any better than a random group of people.
The idea is that through practice, you develop the ability pattern match and chunk together the data into more cohesive blocks, and memory fewer of these blocks.
The rough analogy in software is to take a quick look at some code and recognize the design patterns, and remember the design patterns used rather each individual character.
In fact, words are a form of chunking -- we don't remember hundreds of character sequences, but we remember the words instead.
If you want to see what pterhx was referring to in action, National Geographic did a documentary featuring Susan Polgar a few years back. The relevant clip and timestamp are here: https://youtu.be/LdKHrxcpxrY?t=238.
The difficulty in recalling nonsensical positions is not that it's like "boxing a beginner", it's that the pieces are literally placed in a way that the positions could not have been reached with legal moves.
Analogously, remembering famous quotes or memorable phrases in a certain language is quite easy. If instead, you had to memorize a string of randomly placed words that did not follow established rules of grammar or sentence structure, it'd be a much harder task.
Matt Levine wrote an article (with charts!) on VIX[0] back in 2014 that basically says the same thing: VIX is more of a measure of past volatility than an indicator of future volatility.
> 1. Crime pays less than it used to. Back in the good old days, people carried more cash on them. Pickpocketing and mugging was reasonably profitable when everyone had money. These days, everyone has credit cards. I frequently carry less than forty dollars; I've gone weeks where I have zero cash in my wallet.
On the other hand, now everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. My friends and I entered Southeast Asia with four phones and left with one. None of our wallets were pickpocketed, but that may just be chance.
iOS 7 devices are bricks when stolen if Find My iPhone is enabled. Android could get there eventually. That might well be a technological problem with a technological solution.
[0] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1092678307