Stocks and Bonds, Recessions, EVs, and Messi

Articles of the week

• Stocks Crush ‘Year of Bond’ in Biggest Sentiment Shift Since ‘99: Fixed income underwhelms as Teflon economy strands bears More than half of JPMorgan clients now see no recession. (Bloomberg)

• A Generational Change: People view bonds as competition for stocks as a bad thing. But it’s not.(Irrelevant Investor)

• China’s war chest: how Beijing is using its currency to insulate against future sanctions. In the wake of sanctions on Russia, China has pushed to conduct more trade using the yuan in an effort to reduce its reliance on the dollar (The Guardian)

• The great Rolex recession is here: The WatchCharts Overall Market Index – which tracks the prices of 60 timepieces from top brands including Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet – has plunged 32% from a March 2022 peak. A separate index for just Rolex models fell 27% over a similar period. (Business Insider)

• A Fed Official Wonders: ‘Do We Need to Do Another Rate Increase?’ The head of the powerful New York Fed said that it was an “open question,” and that rates could fall next year. (New York Times)

• Sending it forward: Successfully transitioning out of the CEO role: Great CEOs know that the transition to their successor will define their legacy and cement the strength of what they’ve built. Here’s how they do it right. (McKinsey)

• 22 years after the $63 billion Enron collapse, a key audit review board finds the industry in a ‘completely unacceptable’ state.  Accounting firms have a critical role in verifying the finances of the companies they audit so that those clients can rely on and publish accurate snapshots of their businesses. Lately, a startlingly high number of those audits are filled with errors and other flaws, according to a report released by a congressional watchdog on Monday. (Fortune)

• The AI-Powered, Totally Autonomous Future of War Is Here: Ships without crews. Self-directed drone swarms. How a US Navy task force is using off-the-shelf robotics and artificial intelligence to prepare for the next age of conflict. (Wired)

• One man and his drone: ‘My hope is to shut down the coal industry’ How a citizen vigilante in West Virginia uses his drone to uncover polluters who would rather stay hidden. (The Guardian)

• One of Europe’s Hottest Cities Rediscovers an Old Cooling Technique: The structure is a part of CartujaQanat, an architectural experiment in cooling solutions that doesn’t rely on burning more planet-warming fossil fuels. The site, about the size of two soccer fields, includes two auditoriums, green spaces, a promenade and a shaded area with benches. But its star performer remains hidden — the qanat, a network of underground pipes and tubes inspired by Persian-era canals. (Bloomberg)

• Is it cheaper to refuel your EV battery or gas tank? We did the math: In all 50 states, it’s cheaper for the everyday American to fill up with electrons — and much cheaper in some regions such as the Pacific Northwest, with low electricity rates and high gas prices. (Washington Post)

• As EVs surge, so does nickel mining’s death toll: In the mineral-rich fringes of Indonesia, whose nickel will feed EV giants like Tesla, the deaths of miners continue to mount. (Rest Of World)

• A funeral for fish and chips: why are Britain’s chippies disappearing? Plenty of people will tell you the East Neuk of Fife in Scotland is the best place in the world to eat fish and chips. So what happens when its chippies – and chippies across the UK – start to close? (The Guardian)

• What Landscapers Can Teach Landscape Architects: At Ohio State University’s Diggers Studio, a landscape architecture professor offers a hands-on lesson in bridging the divide between laborer and designer. (CityLab)

• Two more goals, stunning free kick and a late comeback – Messi is everything MLS hoped for: Since arriving in the U.S., Lionel Messi has done nothing but deliver for Inter Miami. So, as he lined up a free kick from the right side of the box in the waning minutes of the game, his team trailing by a goal, everyone knew what was coming. And yet, even so. (The Athletic)

• Pink Floyd, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Me: The inside story of a Times reporter’s strange role in a foundational moment in early internet culture: “The Dark Side of the Rainbow.”  (New York Times)

• Einstein and Oppenheimer’s Real Relationship Was Cordial and Complicated: Though Einstein didn’t help build the nuclear bomb and has just a few scenes in Oppenheimer, they pack a punch—and reflect the two physicists’ real-life dynamic. (Vanity Fair)

Bear Markets, Interest Rates, AI, Electric Vehicles, and Solar Roofs

Articles of the week

• The Bear Market Has Nearly Been Erased, Fewer Than 20 Months After It Began: S&P 500 closer to erasing 2022’s loss after nine-month rally Gains in risky assets reflect growing optimism in soft landing (Bloomberg)

• How to Invest Like the 1%: In 1989, the top 1% of households in the United States controlled a little less than 23% of the wealth in this country. That number has now reached nearly 32%. By contrast, the bottom 90% have seen their share of wealth drop from 40% in 1989 to 31% today. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Birth, Death, and Wealth Creation: Investors seeking to generate excess returns can benefit from understanding the demographics of public companies and their patterns of wealth creation: 60% percent of the stocks of U.S. public companies failed to earn returns in excess of Treasury bills; only 2% created more than 90% of the aggregate wealth. The skewness in wealth creation suggests two approaches for investors: seek broad diversification or build a portfolio that tries to avoid the

• Inflation undershoot? Narrative shifts again. But as impressive U.S. disinflation sweeps through 2023, without a cratering of employment or the wider economy so far, the narrative is shifting again – and encouraging hopes that bruising central bank tightening may be short-lived too. With a ‘soft landing’ now majority thinking again, phrases like ‘immaculate disinflation’ abound and raise questions about whether underlying price dynamics have changed very much after all – even if geopolitical and supply chain maps are redrawn. (Reuters)

• This Statistic Could Be Distorting How We Think About Inflation: The apparent causal link between unit labor costs and inflation is far weaker once you understand how the statistical sausage is made. It’s honest but crude. One of the two inputs into the calculation is inflation itself. So if inflation rises and nothing else changes, the unit labor cost will go up. By definition (New York Times)

• Commercial Real Estate Is in Trouble, but Not for the Reason You Think: As far as weak spots go, there are reasons for concern. Offices comprise 80% of new delinquencies in commercial real estate loans, and occupancy rates in major cities consistently hover around 50% of capacity. But the towers we once commuted to comprise just a tiny fraction of the overall commercial real estate market. Commercial real estate market is big, diverse, and highly regional, valued at about $20 trillion (Q2 2021). This $20 trillion is fairly evenly spread across its component sectors. (Morningstar)

• 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture. These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture: A sense of sameness pervades the creative world The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful Imitation of the conventional is rewarded Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence. (The Honest Broker)

• She Was the Oppenheimer of Barbie. Her Invention Blew Up. Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler engineered a new way of selling toys. Then she created the most popular doll in history. (Wall Street Journal)

• Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating? The OpenAI CEO’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence. (The Atlantic)

• AI and the automation of work: ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption? (Benedict Evans)

• Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books: Every new technology from the internet to virtual reality has tried to upend book culture. There’s a reason they’ve all failed—and always will. (Wired)

• How AI is bringing film stars back from the dead: Celebrities such as James Dean can be brought back to life as digital clones thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, but it is raising troubling questions about what rights any of us have after we die. (BBC)

• Autoenshittification: Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on. (Pluralistic)

• 5 Ways That Buying a Car Has Drastically Changed: Car sellers and car buyers confronted a whole host of challenges in the pandemic, and now it’s clear that some of the challenges are here to stay. ‘Normal is not our benchmark anymore.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• The Best Way to Save American Lives on the Road: France, unlike America, but like almost every other rich country on earth, has worked out how to make its roads safer. They have reduced the speed limits on minor roads, and installed thousands of speed cameras to ensure people stick to them. But they have also literally rebuilt the roads to make it harder to crash. And one of the ways they have done so is by installing roundabouts. (Time)

• The Safety Dance: Autonomous vehicle companies claim that “humans are terrible drivers” and their tech is needed to save lives. Don’t buy it. (Slate)

• The Five Things Keeping Us From Going All-Electric: The ‘electrification of everything’ gets talked about a lot these days. But it isn’t going to happen soon. Nor should we want it to. (Wall Street Journal)

• Extreme Heat Is Deadlier Than Hurricanes, Floods and Tornadoes Combined: When dangerous heat waves hit cities, better risk communication could save lives. (Scientific American)

• Property Owners Ignore Climate Risk Amid Insurance Meltdown :As major underwriters abandon vulnerable states, people keep moving into danger zones. (Businessweek)

• Americans Are Moving Toward Climate Danger in Search of Cheaper Homes: Migration to places at high risk from heat, floods and fires rose over the last two years, a new analysis by Redfin finds.. (Bloomberg)

• Why did it take psychedelics so long to become popular? Some lessons from history and archaeology (Res Obscura)

• Jim Gaffigan’s Quintessentially American Comedy Gets Darker and Better: He’ll still joke about fast food. But on “Dark Pale,” his 10th stand-up special, his evolution as a comedian is apparent. (New York Times)

• Masters of Their Own Realities: Taylor Swift isn’t the only one rerecording classics. A wide range of musicians are heading back to the studio to retrace the past and reclaim ownership of their work. (The Ringer)

• Women are superstars on stage, but still rarely get to write songs: In 2022, hit songs had 6 songwriters on average: 5 men and 1 woman. But the average conceals a remarkable fact about the 42 songs that cracked the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100. While half of the songs had a songwriting team of all men… Only one had a songwriting team of all women. (The Pudding)

• The one baseball’s been waiting for: So far, the two-way sensation is living up to Ruthian expectations. But how will he possibly keep this up? We trace his journey back to Japan in search of the surprising answer. (ESPN)

• What it’s like to play with and against Lionel Messi: A privilege and a nightmare: “You knew the team were going to create chances, and that the opposition were going to be on top of him, sometimes two, three players. And that meant that the other players on our team were free. They couldn’t stop us.” (The Athletic)

Bike Lanes, the Economy, AI, Pickleball, Mission Impossible, and Taylor Swift

Articles of the week

• As Downtowns Struggle, Businesses Learn to Love Bike Lanes: From Manhattan to San Francisco, the need to rethink the urban core is encouraging business improvement districts to change their tune on prioritizing cars. (CityLab)

• Homeowners Don’t Want to Sell, So Home Builders Are Booming: High mortgage rates are dissuading sellers, leaving new construction the only game in town; ‘there was no inventory.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• Goodbye to the Prophets of Doom: The conventional wisdom about the global economy is that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. What if that isn’t true? (The Atlantic)

• When Will Interest Rates Really Start to Matter? For the longest time pundits predicted interest rates would go higher yet they did nothing but go lower year after year. Then when rates hit 0% it seemed like everyone assumed we would experience lower rates forever…just in time for rates to rise higher than anyone thought was possible in such a short period of time. So it goes when it comes to the markets. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Case for Declining Core Inflation: We see four reasons to expect renewed declines in inflation this summer and beyond: 1) 9% pullback in used car auction prices we believe is only halfway done, 2) negative residual seasonality in the summer for CPI and PCE prices, 3) sharp deceleration in apartment rent list prices, and 4) significant progress on labor market rebalancing. (Goldman Sachs)

• Chartflation: Five Charts Showing Inflation Isn’t as ‘Sticky’ as Feared: Leading inflation indicators point toward price pressures easing further. While we don’t think this is a direct market driver, with inflation continuing to weigh on sentiment, the clearing fog likely reveals a better-than-expected reality. (Fisher Investments)

• The economy’s doomsday clock has been reset: Wall Street’s fearmongers were totally wrong about a recession. (Business Insider)

• How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality: The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped. (New York Times)

• Google’s AI Blunders Rival Xerox’s PC Mistakes: The “T” technology behind ChatGPT was devised at Google but languished there. Sound familiar? (Bloomberg)

• How to spot an AI cheater: Students, lawyers and others are passing off writing drafted by artificial intelligence as their own. Alex O’Brien investigates the technological tools and critical thinking skills needed to identify if AI is the real author. (BBC)

• The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn’t destroy humanity: The founders of Anthropic quit OpenAI to make a safe AI company. It’s easier said than done. (Vox)

• Inside the AI Factory: As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging — and not going anywhere. (The Verge)

• Is Rolex a Non-Profit? Answers to Your Burning Questions About the Rolex Watch Company. (Teddy)

• Best Electric Vehicles of 2023 and 2024: We’ve selected the best electric cars you can buy today that include a wide range of SUVs, hatchbacks, sedans, and even pickup trucks. (Car and Driver)

• Electric Vehicle Prices Fall as Automakers Raise Production: Ford, Tesla and other automakers are having to lower prices to lure buyers as the supply of battery-powered models begins to exceed demand. (New York Times)

• A New Job for Electric Vehicles: Powering Homes During Blackouts: Some energy experts say battery-powered vehicles will increasingly help keep the lights on and support electric grids, rather than straining them. (New York Times)

• The Last Place on Earth Any Tourist Should Go: Take Antarctica off your travel bucket list. All of these attractions are getting harder to find in the rest of the world. They’re disappearing in Antarctica too. The continent is melting; whole chunks are prematurely tumbling into the ocean. And more people than ever are in Antarctica because tourism is on a tear. (The Atlantic)

• Yes, it’s hot. But this could be one of the coolest summers of the rest of your life. Heat waves like those in Texas and Europe are likely to get worse on the whole, not better. (Vox)

• Ocean temperatures “much higher than anything the models predicted,” climate experts warn: “We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,” World Meteorological Organization director of climate services Christopher Hewitt said Monday. “This is worrying news for the planet.” (CBS News)

• Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink: The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing. The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding. (Washington Post)

• This is the hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers: This is the Siria Valley, a cluster of villages about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, in the Francisco Morazan department of central Honduras. The valley is also the hometown of a high concentration of people who, fleeing poverty and a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates, migrate to San Francisco, where they ultimately sell drugs, according to an 18-month investigation by The Chronicle. (San Francisco Chronicle)

• Stephen Curry is too good to pretend his success is merely down to hard work: A new documentary on the four-time NBA champion shows a man driven by a grudge against those who doubted him. But there is more to his success. (The Guardian)

• Money Isn’t Winning in MLB This Season. Is That Good or Bad for Baseball? The high-payroll Mets and Padres are flailing. The low-budget Rays, Diamondbacks, Orioles, and Reds are thriving. What’s behind MLB’s topsy-turvy standings? And what could it portend about the future of the sport? (The Ringer)

• Shattered Nerves, Sleepless Nights: Pickleball Noise Is Driving Everyone Nuts: The incessant pop-pop-pop of the fast-growing sport has brought on a nationwide scourge of unneighborly clashes, petitions, calls to the police and lawsuits, with no solution in sight. (New York Times)

• The Means of Gaming Production: Fed up with a toxic industry, video game workers are turning to a radical alternative. (Slate)

• Peak TV Has Peaked: From Exhausted Talent to Massive Losses, the Writers Strike Magnifies an Industry in Freefall (Variety)

• Turner Classic Movies Is a National Treasure: The channel has an astounding degree of control over a crucial part of American cinema. It should become a public resource available to all. (New Yorker)

• How Hollywood appeases China, explained by the Barbie movie: Vietnam banned Barbie over a map featuring the nine-dash line. Here’s why that matters. (Vox)

• The Impossible Story of the Bomb: Ever since its detonation in 1945, people have been grappling with the enormity of the atomic bomb’s power. This is the complex tale Christopher Nolan is trying to tell with ‘Oppenheimer.’ (The Ringer)

• How Mission: Impossible Became the Last Great Stunt Franchise: Over the past 27 years, the Mission: Impossible franchise became the final stronghold for “real action.” (Inverse)

• Ranking the Top 25 Set Pieces From the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise: A countdown of the best stunts, capers, and heists from the ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies, including ‘Dead Reckoning Part One.’ (The Ringer)

• Where Johnny Cash Came From: The Man in Black grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, in a community of poor farmers working government land. (National Endowment for the Humantiies)

• From Beatlemania to Taylor-mania: How the meteoric rise of The Beatles helps to explain Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, on pace to be the first tour ever to gross $1B. (SatPost by Trung Phan)

• Taylor Swift Is Halfway Through Her Rerecording Project. It’s Paid Off Big Time: The remaking of Swift’s early discography, which includes her first six albums, has so far found success, with fans eager to listen to her new vocals, unpack its various easter eggs, and purchase new merchandise. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is expected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, which would give Swift the third-most No. 1 albums of any artist of all time, surpassing Barbra Streisand And Bruce Springsteen. (Time)

• The point of Shania Twain is to let her be Shania Twain: Even if her current concert tour isn’t exactly what anyone might expect, the country-pop legend has defied odds for decades by doing exactly what she wants.  (Washington Post)

• How Drake won: The Canadian, biracial, Jewish, middle-class, former child actor has reshaped rap, pop, and the masculinity wars. (Vox)

• Father and son drive for 2 days from Virginia to Niagara Falls to load up on ketchup chips Next year, they say they'll try a new flavour they just learned about — all dressed (CBC)

BCCA’s Statement on the “Emoji” Ruling: South West Terminal Ltd. v Achter Land & Cattle Ltd.,

The King’s Bench of Saskatchewan recently issued a ruling in South West Terminal Ltd. v Achter Land & Cattle Ltd. holding that a contract was formed by the use of a thumbs up emoji “👍” in a text message. The court determined the thumbs up emoji “👍” was “an action in electronic form that can be used to express acceptance”.

The King’s Bench of Saskatchewan recently issued a ruling in South West Terminal Ltd. v Achter Land & Cattle Ltd. holding that a contract was formed by the use of a thumbs up emoji “👍” in a text message. The court determined the thumbs up emoji “👍” was “an action in electronic form that can be used to express acceptance”.

While this case is fact specific, in the view of the BC Construction Association, this decision could have implications for the construction industry. The industry relies on communication, often in a time sensitive environment. Increasingly, text messages are used to convey and seek approval on important and material project matters. This includes changes and site instructions that can have financial and contractual implications.

As stated by the judge, this case is novel but “this appears to be the new reality in Canadian society and courts will have to be ready to meet the new challenges that may arise from the use of emojis and the like.”

“This ruling serves as a cautionary tale for those of us in the construction industry. Your actions and words, written or spoken and now even an emoji, may have unintended legal consequences. Proceed with caution”. —Chris Atchison, BCCA President

BCCA recommends that professional, clear and direct communication is maintained by every party and every team member.

Global stocks, Home Sales, AI, Plastics, and Wildfires

Weekly news and article drop

• The global stock market rally isn’t as narrow as you think: “If you assign equal weights to the MSCI Europe, Japan and the US indices, this is the best start to a year since 1998, Lapthorne notes. In dollar terms the Nikkei 225 is off to its best start since 1999.” (Financial Times)

• ‘Hot Money’ Is Piling Up at Banks and It’s Starting to Take a Toll: Investors scrutinize cost of surging brokered deposits and FHLB loans as midsize banks bear brunt of higher interest rates. (Bloomberg)

• Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True: While the world’s eyes were on the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and China, the paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier. (New York Times)

• The multibillion-dollar lawsuits that could radically reshape how we buy and sell homes forever: As the money makes its way to all the players in the transaction, you may wonder: Why does it work this way? According to the plaintiffs of two massive class-action lawsuits, this circuitous method of paying real-estate agents is all part of a far-reaching scheme that is bilking home sellers out of billions of dollars every year. (Business Insider)

• The Air Jordan Drop So Hot It Blew Up an Alleged $85 Million Ponzi Scheme: Michael Malekzadeh’s Zadeh Kicks made millions of dollars taking big presale orders for coveted sneakers at low prices and scrambling to fill them. Then came the Air Jordan 11 Cool Grey. (Businessweek)

• The ad industry is going all-in on AI: At Cannes Lions, the year’s biggest ad event, you couldn’t escape talk of ChatGPT or Midjourney, even at the yacht parties. (Vox)

• The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Children to Join: Pentagon scrambles to retain the main pipeline for new service members as disillusioned families steer young people away. (Wall Street Journal)

• So where are we all supposed to go now? It’s the end of a social era on the web. That’s probably a good thing. But I already miss the places that felt like everyone was there. (The Verge)

• Lithium Scarcity Pushes Carmakers Into the Mining Business: Ford, General Motors and others are striking deals with mining companies to avoid raw material shortages that could thwart their electric vehicle ambitions. (New York Times)

• How Plastics Are Poisoning Us: They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. Will we ever be rid of them? (New Yorker)

• Why Canada’s wildfires will affect air quality for weeks to come: Canada’s fire season is especially bad, and it could lead to smoke drifting southward for the rest of the summer. (Vox)

• Nearly half of US honeybee colonies died last year. America’s honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, an annual bee survey found. (AP)

• How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction. (ProPublica)

• The Stradivarius Murders: Police said four very valuable violins went missing after a collector and his daughter were killed. Then a lot of stories began to unravel. (Businessweek)

• The Violin Doctor: He’s trusted to repair some of the world’s most fabled — and expensive — instruments. How does John Becker manage to unlock the sound of a Stradivarius? (Chicago Magazine)

• Dave Grohl’s Monument to Mortality: With trademark ferocity, the Foo Fighters front man is tackling the capriciousness of sudden loss. (The Atlantic)

• ‘People are like, Wow!’: the man trying to make condoms sexy: It has been said that condoms share marketing characteristics with napalm and funerals. But it is Ben Wilson’s mission to make us believe they are key to human happiness. (The Guardian)

• If you love film, you should be worried about what’s going on at Turner Classic Movies: TCM has been a joy since its launch in 1994, and has never faltered. In my home, it’s earned its place as my default channel of choice: Of all the channels and streaming services on TV, it’s the one that, more than any other, wasn’t broke, and didn’t need fixing. (NPR)

• The America’s Cup Takes All the Fun Out of Spying on the Rival Yachts: Secret surveillance teams and frogmen are banned from premier sailing race as snooping goes legit. (Wall Street Journal)

Investment Portfolios, Gold, Crypto, and the VX1000

Articles of the week

• Are You Making These 5 Common Portfolio Mistakes? Problem spots in real-world portfolios—and how to fix them. (Morningstar)

• The Evolution of Financial Advice. To be a successful investor you need to possess a number of different traits. You need to understand how math, statistics and probabilities work. You need to understand how corporations and the global economy generally function over the long haul. You need an understanding of how the different asset classes behave from a risk and reward perspective. You also need a deep understanding of financial market history from booms to busts. And you need the emotional discipline to stick with a reasonable investment strategy from manias to panics and everything in between. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Gold Is No Longer a Good Hedge Against Bad Times: The precious metal has become just another cyclical asset, no longer a useful harbinger of social and economic collapse. (Bloomberg)

• He Went After Crypto Companies. Then Someone Came After Him. Kyle Roche was a rising star in the field of cryptocurrency law — until his career imploded. Who orchestrated his downfall? (New York Times)

• Arizona Is Running Out of Cheap Water. Investors Saw It Coming: The state just moved to restrict housing construction around Phoenix as groundwater demand outstrips supply. But fast-growing towns are already buying water from elsewhere — and investors’ bets are paying off. (Bloomberg)

• The Ugly Shoes Now Worth Billions of Dollars: Hokas are the chunky sneakers of choice for runners. And nurses. And waiters. And teens. And grandpas. How did shoes that were huge, weird and French conquer America’s hearts, wallets and feet? (Wall Street Journal)

• AI Risk-Reward: AI risks, the future of oil, and some recent talks. There are, to be clear, immense opportunities for human flourishing here, but they won’t come from arm-waving about how technology “always” creates more jobs than it destroys. Or by name-calling critics, or suggesting malign motives to nuanced opinions about the complex role of technology in modern societies. As recent research by David Autor, Daron Acemoglu, and others has made clear, technology’s jobs-related impacts are better thought of as a series of path-dependent choices than as some universal economic constant. (Paul Kedrosky)

• How queer went corporate: The 50-year evolution of LGBTQ+ marketing: Inclusive ads from Miller Lite to Subaru to Bud Light have gone from trailblazing to commonplace to controversial again. (Washington Post)

• Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights: Advocacy groups condemn Alliance Defending Freedom as ‘a danger to every American who values their freedoms’. (The Guardian)

• Inside North Korea: “We are stuck, waiting to die”. For months, the BBC has been communicating in secret with three North Koreans living in the country. They expose, for the first time, the disaster unfolding there since the government sealed the borders more than three years ago. (BBC)

• Trump’s Fox News interview was a defense attorney’s nightmare: The former president offered a confusing, and likely damaging, defense of his latest indictment. (Vox)

• Everyone Says Social Media Is Bad for Teens. Proving It Is Another Thing. Parents, scientists and the surgeon general are worried. But there isn’t even a shared definition of what social media is. (New York Times)

• Reddit’s Chief Says He Wants It to ‘Grow Up.’ Will Its Community Let It? As the social media site matures, its users and moderators have made their displeasure about corporate changes known, putting the company into a bind. (New York Times)

• Is Taylor Swift Underpaid? Aside from her music, Taylor Swift is giving us food for thought — a reminder both that the effects of technological progress can be more complex than you think, and that the technologies that matter most may also not be the ones you think. (New York Times)

• The Immortal Mel Brooks: The 2,000-year-old man turns 97 this summer. I talked with him about fighting in World War II, his life in comedy, and the secret to happiness. (The Atlantic)

• The definitive ranking of modern movie Batmen, from Michael Keaton to Robert Pattinson: ‘The Flash’ has helped cement the legacies of Keaton and Ben Affleck. Here’s how they stack up against the others. (Washington Post)

• The Man Who Broke Bowling Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the (GQ)

• Dolby Atmos Wants You to Listen Up. (And Down. And Sideways.) True believers in the immersive audio format say it could restore a musical appreciation lost to a generation that has come up during the streaming era. (New York Times)

Selling Stocks, Crypto, Baseball, and the Beatles

Articles of the week

• The Art of Short Selling: Among all the activities in finance, short-selling remains one of the most misunderstood. To many, the practice of selling something you don’t own with the intention of buying it back later at a cheaper price appears…abstract. Few baulk at the idea of buying low and selling high, but reverse the chronology and it sows confusion. (Net Interest)

• A Bull or a Bear Market? It Doesn’t Matter. Stocks still haven’t returned to their last peak, and our columnist is in the camp that says this isn’t a bull market yet. But he’s buying stock anyway. (New York Times)

• Is Crypto Dead? Or can the industry recover? Even before the SEC announcements, crypto was in trouble. Dozens of firms had failed, millions of individual investors had plunged into the red or cashed out, and billions of dollars of institutional investment had moved on. Beset by long-standing problems of its own invention, the industry now faces not just a regulatory crisis but an existential one too: Is crypto down, or is it dead? (The Atlantic)

• Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI: “Current AI feels like something out of a Philip K Dick story because it answers a question very few people were asking: What if a computer was stupid?.” (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain)

• The Next Crisis Will Start With Empty Office Buildings: Commercial real estate is losing value fast. (The Atlantic)

• The Horse Isn’t Real. People Are Betting on It Anyway. In virtual sports betting, the house edge is insane, there’s even more stigma and the racing never stops. (Vice)

• Plagiarism Engine: Google’s Content-Swiping AI Could Break the Internet:  The Search Generative Experience seems more like a text-copying experience. (Tom’s Hardware)

• The Great Grift: How billions in COVID-19 relief aid was stolen or wasted: All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall. (AP)

• When a Huawei Bid Turned Into a Hunt for a Corporate Mole: At TDC in Copenhagen, senior managers were potential suspects. The company’s offices were compromised, people were getting tailed. And then there were the drones… (Businessweek)

• Power companies quietly pushed $215m into US politics via dark money groups: Donations have helped utilities increase electricity prices, hinder solar schemes and helped elect sympathetic legislators. (The Guardian)

• Taiwan sees MeToo wave of allegations after Netflix show: Taiwan is being rocked by a wave of sexual harassment and assault allegations – sparked by a Netflix show which many say has ignited a local MeToo movement. (BBC)

• Counting Russia’s dead in Ukraine – and what it says about the changing face of the war: Russia has a history of extraordinary secrecy over its wartime losses. So when it invaded Ukraine, the BBC and its partners began painstakingly verifying and counting as many deaths as possible, identifying more than 25,000 named individuals, setting a bare minimum for Russia’s total losses. The count provides hard evidence of the war’s impact on Russian forces. But it has also given answers to grieving families and relatives who did not know what had happened to their loved ones until the BBC traced them. (BBC)

• Trump’s post-indictment speech was a master class in alternative facts and false victim narratives: Though it seemed like his camp was initially reticent to address the specifics of the indictment, Trump went into a detailed defense before a crowd at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He presented alternate histories, legal disinformation, and false claims of political victimization to craft a narrative that he seemed to believe his followers will accept as fact. Overall, the speech previewed a strategy to neutralize the impact of a case that could stretch well into the 2024 election and beyond. (Vox)

• U.S. Allocators Grapple With the Risks of Investing in China: “While a tail event is remote, it’s more likely than it was five years ago,” says Scott Taylor, CIO of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (Institutional Investor)

• Don’t Forget Who Loses in Fed’s Quest to Soften Labor Market: Lower-income workers are the ones who have come off the sidelines to fill many recent openings, and will likely be the first to suffer when jobs disappear. (Bloomberg)

  Beyond Meat Wannabes Are Failing as Hype and Money Fade: A shakeout in once-hot sector is widening as funding dries up; Consolidation could help winners emerge if growth rebounds (Bloomberg)

• When Doctors Use a Chatbot to Improve Their Bedside Manner: Despite the drawbacks of turning to artificial intelligence in medicine, some physicians find that ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate empathetically with patients. (New York Times)

• American Companies Are Hostage to the Whims of TikTok: The social-media giant has become ‘a billion-person focus group,’ disrupting business cycles and upending corporate R&D. (Wall Street Journal)

• How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist: Brendan was once a leader in the US white nationalist movement. But when he took the drug MDMA in a scientific study, it would radically change his extremist beliefs – to the surprise of everyone involved. Rachel Nuwer investigates what happened. (BBC)

• Jack Johnson’s Oahu: The Hawaii-born singer-songwriter and activist recommends some places he loves on the island he still calls home. And yes, surfing and music are involved. (New York Times)

• In an Age of Power, Luis Arraez Is Hitting Singles—and Batting .400: Baseball’s analytics movement has often downplayed the simple act of hitting a single to get on base. The Marlins’ Arraez is challenging the new thinking in an old-fashioned way. (Wall Street Journal)

• Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Secret to Lasting Influence: He’s outmuscled and outsmarted his way to the tippity-top of bodybuilding, Hollywood, and politics. But can he master the art of online influence? (Men’s Health)

• The Real Lesson of The Truman Show: Twenty-five years later, the film’s most powerful insight isn’t about reality TV so much as the complicities of modern life. (The Atlantic)

• The Beatles Come Together Using AI for ‘Last Record,’ Paul McCartney Says: The record features AI-assisted vocals from the late Beatle John Lennon. (Wall Street Journal)

Inflation, MAID, Vegas Knights, Jokic and the Nuggets

Articles of the week

• Larry Summers Was Wrong About Inflation: His call for austerity was premised on the notion that only a sharp increase in unemployment could prevent a ruinous wage-price spiral. In reality, both wage and price growth have been slowing for months, even as unemployment has remained near historic lows. Summers’s failure to anticipate this outcome should lead us to reconsider just how prescient his analysis of the post-COVID economy ever was. (New York Magazine)

• Due Diligence: Using ESG as a Risk Mitigator: Although seldom apparent in financial statements, environmental, social and governance deficiencies can come out of nowhere and slam investors. (Chief Investment Officer)

• America’s Long, Tortured Journey to Build EV Batteries: The fall of startup A123 still haunts the US decades later—and reveals everything that’s wrong with this country’s approach to innovation. (Businessweek)

• Inflation Is Overhyped, Says This Pro. “I hear a lot of people say that we’re never going to fix it, that 7% is the new normal. That’s overhyped. There were multiple things that drove inflation up, but almost all of them are being corrected. The massive Covid-related stimulus was, in hindsight, possibly too much. But that money has been spent. So we’re mostly past it. The supply-chain issues have been largely corrected. Freight costs have come back down. And the Fed kept rates at zero for way, way too long. That has obviously been corrected. We will be back in the 2% to 3% range for inflation.” (Barron’s)

• Jerome Powell’s Big Problem Just Got Even More Complicated: The Fed aims to avert financial instability while also fighting inflation—predicaments that frequently call for opposite policies. (Wall Street Journal)

• These millionaires want to tax the rich, and they’re lobbying working-class voters: The nonprofit Patriotic Millionaires has lobbied Congress to make changes for more than a decade. Its members see inequality as a danger — they worry big money is corrupting politics and driving civil unrest. But they haven’t had much success. President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts largely benefited the wealthy, and even when Democrats controlled the Senate in 2021, they failed to pass a bill to raise the minimum wage. (NPR)

• The tech industry was deflating. Then came ChatGPT. Last year, Silicon Valley was drowning in layoffs and dour predictions. Artificial intelligence made the gloom go away (Washington Post)

• Rich nations say they’re spending billions to fight climate change. Some money is going to strange places. Wealthy countries have pledged $100 billion a year to help reduce the effects of global warming. But Reuters found large sums going to projects including a coal plant, a hotel and chocolate shops. (Reuters)

• Suncor helped write ‘first draft’ of Canadian plan for tackling carbon emissions Newly obtained documents reveal a Shell executive is also part of the federal advisory group for carbon capture, utilization and storage, which has been kept under wraps for two years (Narwhal)

• ‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’ While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach (Guardian)

• NASA’s newest X-plane wants to save the planet: The space agency has a plan to “skip a generation” of passenger aircraft design to fight climate change. (Vox)

• Does Journalling Actually Improve Mental Health? Writing down your thoughts can be helpful. But getting the perfect notebook isn’t a substitute for professional care (Walrus)

• Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far? As Canada expands access to MAID, many people with disabilities are sounding the alarm. Some say the law was flawed from the outset (Walrus)

• 'A good death' Saskatoon artist Jeanette Lodoen wanted Canadians to understand the realities of medically-assisted dying. She and her family granted CBC News unrestricted access to the weeks before, during and after her death. (CBC)

• Golden Knights ‘misfits,’ Matthew Tkachuk and the Stanley Cup playoffs’ winners and losers It took eight weeks and 88 games, but the Stanley Cup has been awarded and the 2022-23 NHL season is over. (Athletic)

• The Psychedelic Scientist Who Sends Brains Back to Childhood Kids soak up new skills, adults not so much. But neuroscientist Gül Dölen might have found a way—with drugs—to help grownups learn like littles. (Wired)

• I placed my first wager when I was 10. I’ve gambled more than $1 million since.

  A memoir of addiction, desperation and the dangers of sports betting (Macleans)

• The Vegas Golden Knights Make Their Own Luck—and Have a Stanley Cup to Prove It Less than six years after joining the NHL as an expansion team, Las Vegas has its first championship. To get there, the Knights beat the odds—and created their own good fortune. (The Ringer)

• The Denver Nuggets Were Built to Last: Not every franchise can be so lucky as to draft the best player in the game, but any can afford to be patient—and the Nuggets’ long, steady march carried them all the way to the NBA title. (The Ringer)

• Where Does a Title Put Nikola Jokic in NBA History? The Denver Nuggets star has reached rarefied air after bringing a championship to the Mile High City. Is he already one of the game’s 20 best players ever? “He’s one of the all-time greats and still 28 years old. There’s so much more to go,” says Nuggets GM Calvin Booth. (The Ringer)

• How the Lionel Messi Deal Stymied Saudi Arabia: A complex arrangement, involving Apple, to bring the soccer star to Miami shows how to trump the free-spending kingdom — and how hard that may be to duplicate. (Dealbook)

Investing, Stocks, Grocers, and Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic

Articles of the week - We have moved to doing a weekly post instead of daily.

• The Crypto Winter Cost People More Than Their Money: Some acolytes lost faith, others blamed devils—and some went even harder. An essay exploring what happens when the prophecy of blockchain fails. (Bloomberg)

• The Stock Market Will Pick the Winners For You: Index funds ride the winners. And while they don’t completely discard the losers right away, the stocks that are coming up pick up the slack for the eventual underperformers. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Why Should I Hold Stocks? And yet here we are, halfway through the year with the S&P 500 up 10%. The Nasdaq-100 is up 31%, one of the best first half of a year ever. (Irrelevant Investor)

• The Real Reason Your Groceries Are Getting So Expensive: Big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. (New York Times)

• How Saudi money returned to Silicon Valley: All the ways Saudi Arabia’s cash powers tech startups and venture capital. (Vox)

• 5 winners and 5 losers from the debt ceiling deal: Biden and McCarthy win. The Freedom Caucus loses. (Vox)

• Adidas After Yeezy: The partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was the stuff of sneakerhead legend—and its demise has the shoe company scrambling to replace nearly half of its profits. (Businessweek)

• A.I.-Generated Content Discovered on News Sites, Content Farms and Product Reviews: The findings in two new reports raise fresh concerns over how artificial intelligence may transform the misinformation landscape online. (New York Times)

• The One Thing Holding Back Electric Vehicles in America: The biggest hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars is not the cars themselves. (The Atlantic)

• The Unexpected Problem With EVs: They ‘Tire’ Quickly: Electric vehicles go through tires 30% faster than gas-powered vehicles, Bridgestone says, so it developed its first EV-specific replacement tire that protects range and improves durability. (PC Magazine)

• The Repo Man Returns as More Americans Fall Behind on Car Payments: Pandemic relief measures shielded many people from repossession, but that’s changing as interest rates and auto prices soar. (Businessweek)

• Why Your Steak Is Getting Pricier: Ranchers are shrinking cattle herds because of drought and high costs, cutting down the nation’s supply of beef. That threatens to push prices for steaks and burgers to records. (Wall Street Journal)

• Students are increasingly refusing to go to school. It’s becoming a mental health crisis. Since the pandemic, more students are school-avoidant, leaving parents feeling hopeless and schools unequipped to find a solution. (USA Today)

• A Model of Influencer Economy: With the rise of social media and streaming platforms, firms and brand-owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both common product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. As outreach and distribution technologies improve, influencer payoffs and income inequality change non-monotonically. More powerful influencers sell better-quality products, but pluralism in style mitigates market concentration by effectively differentiating consumer experience. (National Bureau of Economic Research)

• The Girl of the Endless Summer How ‘Gidget’ helped to put surfing on the map. (Quillette)

• Football bonded them. Its violence tore them apart. They were roommates and teammates at Harvard, bound by their love of football and each other. Then the game — and the debate over its safety — took its toll. (Washington Post)

• How New Rules Turned Back the Clock on Baseball: Nearly two months into the season, a series of rule changes — including the new pitch clock, enlarged bases and a ban on the infield shift — has translated into a game that evokes the 1980s more than the 2020s. (New York Times)

• The Game NBA Defenders Hate to Play: See Steph Run: Stephen Curry’s long-range 3-pointers make the highlight reels. The distances he travels before he shoots them are what really destroy NBA defenses. (Wall Street Journal)

• He’s the Best Player in the NBA. He’s Also the Bloodiest. The Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic has long been near the top of the leaderboard in points, assists and rebounds. He leads the league in flesh wounds, too. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Legend of Nikola Jokic Is Growing: The Nuggets big man beat every scheme, won every matchup, and sank seemingly every improbable moonball in a series sweep of the Lakers. (The Ringer)

• Lionel Messi, Soccer’s Most Coveted Free Agent, Picks Miami Days after he announced he would not return to Paris St.-Germain, Messi, Argentina’s World Cup hero, said he planned his next stop to be Inter Miami of M.L.S. (NY Times)

US Economy, US Debt and Defaulting on the Economy

Wednesday morning articles

• Why Water Access Should Be Part of Your Risk Metrics In the current tally of key risks and mitigants it’s easy to feel that the risk side of the equation is having a banner era; with business leaders being forced to manage through challenges that previous generations could have never anticipated or experienced. Climate change, populism, pandemics, high inflation, interest rate risk, economic migration, and the list goes on. Yet there is another risk that many businesses have not incorporated into their five- and 10-year strategies, and that is water risk. (BMO)

• Will The U.S. Economy Pull Off a ‘Soft Landing’? In the ’70s and ’80s, we thought that you needed to raise unemployment to fight inflation. Next, we thought that cooling down inflation would require higher unemployment. In the early ’70s, economists thought that price controls could slow inflation. …and were surprised when unemployment stayed low. In the late ’80s, we thought that a good inflation target was 4 percent. Then we decided that a better target would be 2 percent.. (New York Times)

• JPMorgan’s US debt default Q&A: JPMorgan late on Friday published a fantastic Q&A that explores most of the technical issues surrounding a possible US default. While the bank’s analysts stress that they “fully expect a timely resolution of the debt ceiling constraints”, it noted that clients naturally had a lot of questions. (Financial Times)

• Even Flirting With U.S. Default Takes Economic: Toll Financial markets are still betting that Congress and the White House will strike a deal. But the uncertainty alone is having consequences. (New York Times)

• How Did Hyundai Get So Cool? Korean carmaker known for budget brands becomes EV innovator; sets sights on Tesla. (Wall Street Journal)

• Decoupling is just going to happen: Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here. (Noahpinion)

• Why Are Economists Still Uncertain About the Effects of Monetary Policy?  Despite decades of research, there remains substantial uncertainty about the quantitative effects of monetary policy. Different models produce conflicting predictions, and these predictions lack precision. This article discusses some reasons for these issues. In addition to the relative lack of data, the structure of the economy has continued to evolve, posing challenges for empirical macroeconomic analysis more generally. Economists have been confronting these challenges by developing tools to jointly consider a range of models and continuing to seek new sources of data. (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond)

• Foresight: The mental talent that shaped the world: When humanity acquired the ability to imagine the future, it changed the trajectory of our species. But in the age of the Anthropocene, we need to harness this mental skill now more than ever, say the scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jon Redshaw and Adam Bulley. (BBC)

• How Will We Know When Self-Driving Cars Are Safe? When They Can Handle the World’s Worst Drivers: Call it the Mad Max driving test, a gantlet only a Hollywood director—or a mild-mannered engineer—could dream up. (Wall Street Journal)

• ‘The exact opposite of Donald Trump’: Republican senator Tim Scott’s vision for America: Can the politician’s Reaganesque optimism and rightwing principles convince the GOP to pick its first Black presidential candidate? (The Guardian)

• What Do a Falling Apple and an Orbiting Moon Have in Common? Isaac Newton connected the two motions in a way that revolutionized physics and made space travel possible. (Wired)

• Killers of the Flower Moon review – Scorsese’s magnificent period epic is an instant American classic: Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star in a sinuous, pitch-black tragedy about how the west was really won. (The Guardian)