Investing, Managing Money, and Artificial Intelligence

Articles of the week

• 15 Ideas from Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety (Part 1): Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor. Klarman wrote that he “endeavoured to make the book timeless – more about how to think about investing than about what one should buy or sell at any given moment.” (Investment Talk) see also 15 More Ideas from Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety (Part 2): Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor.  “Investors should understand not only what value investing is but also why it is a successful investment philosophy. At the very core of its success is the recurrent mispricing of securities in the marketplace. (Investment Talk)

• 20 Lessons From 20 Years of Managing Money: The longer I’m in the money management business the more there is to learn but these are some of the things I’ve learned thus far. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• How to Die in Good Health: The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Peter Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. (New Yorker)

• What the Upper-Middle-Class Left Doesn’t Get About Inflation: Liberal politicians and economists don’t seem to recognize the everyday harms of rising costs. (The Atlantic)

• BMW Is a Surprise Winner in Electric Vehicles: Once considered a laggard, the German luxury carmaker is one of only a few established automakers that has been able to compete effectively against Tesla. (New York Times)

• Among the A.I. Doomsayers: Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate? (New Yorker)

• AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them. Artificial intelligence is spurring a new type of identity theft — with ordinary people finding their faces and words twisted to push often offensive products and ideas. (Washington Post)

• AI ‘dream girls’ are coming for porn stars’ jobs AI will change adult entertainment forever. AI will change adult entertainment forever. The risks — for sex workers and the rest of us — are profound. (Washington Post)

• People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One: Removing cars from urban areas means lower carbon emissions, less air pollution, and fewer road traffic accidents. So why are residents so resistant? (Wired)

• Why Zillow is worried about America’s housing market shakeup. The company’s stock has dropped nearly 13% since Friday’s $418 million settlement between the National Association of Realtors and groups of home sellers which ended the standard 6% commission for Realtors. (CNN)

• Reddit is going public. Will its unruly user base revolt? Reddit could become the next meme stock — or flop. (Vox)

• How Does Paris Stay Paris? By Pouring Billions Into Public Housing: One quarter of residents in the French capital live in government-owned housing, part of an aggressive plan to keep lower-income Parisians — and their businesses — in the city. (New York Times)

• The People Rooting for the End of IVF: An Alabama court ruling that recognized an embryo as a child has put the popular fertility treatment into the center of a national ethics debate. (The Atlantic)

• How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results (2024 Edition) The 16 companies in this report are behind at least 588 individual brands. Combined, estimates are they pick up around 3.5 billion clicks from Google each month. An average of 5.9 million monthly clicks per site.  (Detailed)

• The Oceans We Knew Are Already Gone: As far as humanity is concerned, the transformation of our seas is “effectively permanent.” (The Atlantic)

• Can the Masters of Hipster Cringe Conquer Hollywood With Wall Street Cash? A24, the studio behind everything from Uncut Gems to Beef, has private equity backing, a $2.5 billion valuation and a newfound desire to go mainstream. (Businessweek)

The Stock Market, Elon Musk, Housing, AI, and New Music

Articles of the week

• The End of Retirement: Want to keep your house? Support your kids? Stay alive? Never stop working. (The Walrus)

• In the Stock Market, Don’t Buy and Sell. Just Hold. There’s new evidence that market timing doesn’t work. Your odds of success are better if you just hang on and aim for average returns, our columnist says. (New York Times)

• 4 Charts That Explain the Stock Market: I view the stock market as a way to invest in innovation, profits, progress and people waking up in the morning looking to better their current situation. While I love the fact that this chart illustrates my long-term philosophy it’s a bit misleading. Yes, the stock market goes up over the long run but it can also get crushed in the short run. That can be difficult to see on a log chart with 200 years of data. The Great Depression, 1987 crash and Great Financial Crisis look like minor blips on this chart. And while every crash eventually turns into a blip on a long-term chart, they don’t feel like it in the moment. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• How to avoid losing money: My favourite insight from a new investing classic. (Behind the Balance Sheet)

• Inside the Chaos at OpenAI Sam Altman’s weekend of shock and drama began a year ago, with the release of ChatGPT. (Atlantic)

• The Unexpected Winner in the Craziest Week in AI: Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella made a huge bet on the world’s hottest AI company. After it nearly blew up on him, he now emerges with closer ties to its leader, Sam Altman. (WSJ)

• Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder: Silicon Valley’s ideology is this: Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee. (Crooked Timber)

• Elon Musk Can’t Help Himself: He wants to own a social network where he can spout antisemitism—even if that means owning a bad business. (Slate)

• How Elon Musk Spent Three Years Falling Down a Red-Pilled Rabbit Hole: His tweet endorsing an antisemitic theory that sent advertisers fleeing comes after years of increasing interaction with extremist content. (Businessweek)

• Congrats, Your House Made You Rich. Now Sell It. Lots of baby boomers are going to sell their homes in the years ahead. The trick is to beat the crowd. (Wall Street Journal)

• Why does it cost so much to sell a house? From staging to commission expenses, here’s what to expect. (The Week)

• Manhattan’s Trophy Apartments Are Gathering Dust: There just aren’t enough billionaires, and no one wants to live in Hudson Yards. (Curbed)

• No, Really. Building More Housing Can Combat Rising Rents: To many people, new home construction is synonymous with gentrification. But a new analysis reinforces how more supply drives down housing costs. (CityLab)

• It’s Not That Hard to Stop Birds From Crashing Into Windows: Chicago’s glass skyscrapers are a menace for birds. They don’t have to be. (The Atlantic)

• The asbestos times: Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire. But as we fixed city fires in other ways, we came to learn about its horrific downsides. (Works in Progress)

• Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says: ‘Polluter elite’ are plundering the planet to point of destruction, says Oxfam after comprehensive study of climate inequality. (The Guardian)

• The world’s 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars: for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you – and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport – collectively known as electric micromobility – are cheaper to buy and run. But it’s more than that – they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport. (The Conversation)

• For the love of quirk: One man’s journey into the weird and wonderful side of car collecting: Tucked away in an immaculately kept converted launderette in the South of Brussels sits a wonderland of quirk, where Jean Werner’s collecting habits aren’t confined to your typical classic Ferraris or Lamborghinis… (Classic Driver)

• The Ultra-Efficient Farm of the Future Is in the Sky: Take a tour of a rooftop laboratory where scientists show how growing crops under solar panels can produce both food and clean energy. (Wired)

• Americans are confused, frustrated by new tipping culture, study finds: Americans are divided and confused over when to leave gratuities and how much to tip for all kinds of services, according to the Pew Research Center — and many don’t like recent trends such as added service fees and suggested tipping amounts. (Washington Post)

• Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis. (The Atlantic)

• The long goodbye: Working through the queue. My relationship with Netflix, like any long-term relationship, has had its ups and downs. I dipped my toe in with a one-DVD-at-a-time plan, but I soon upgraded that to two. (The Smart Set)

• How To Discover New Music: How to discover new music In a musical rut? Whatever your age or existing tastes, you can find surprise and enjoyment beyond the streaming algorithms. (Psyche)

• How To Kill a Superhero: Hollywood embraces a desperate strategy—canceling franchise films before they’re released. (The Honest Broker)

• Danny DeVito Has Never Heard the Term “Short King” A long conversation with the legend about returning to the stage, being in a grandpa chat with Bruce Springsteen, and working with Arnold Schwarzenegger again. (GQ)

Economy, Bond Markets, and Taylor Swift

Articles of the week

• Americans Like Sharing Bad Economic News Way Too Much: The misery index was twice as high in the 1970s than it is now, yet consumers report hearing negative things about the economy at a much greater rate. Social media is partly to blame. (Bloomberg)

• The pandemic has broken a closely followed survey of sentiment: Americans’ opinions about the state of the economy have diverged from reality: Americans are gloomy about the state of the economy. Since the covid-19 pandemic began, consumer sentiment has been in the doldrums, hitting its lowest level ever in June 2022. Such negativity has prompted claims that the country is suffering a “vibecession”—although the market appears healthy, good vibes are lacking (Economist)

• The Myth of the Great Boomer Wealth Transfer: So when is this Great Wealth Transfer going to happen? Are our parents sitting on millions that they haven’t told us about? Will we soon see a life-changing jump in younger generations’ net worth? If the past is any indication, younger generations shouldn’t get their hopes up. (Business Insider)

• The Bond Market, a Sleeping Giant, Awakes: Soaring interest rates have the power to alter the direction of the economy and command the attention of Washington, our columnist says. (New York Times)

• Bond Market Outlook: Valuations Suggest Potential for Equity-Like Returns With Less Risk (PIMCO)

• Higher Bond Yields Could End the Fed’s Historic Rate Rises: Some economists say the rise in yields’ term premium is worth two or three Fed rate hikes (Wall Street Journal)

• This is a Wonderful Market for Dollar Cost Averaging: This has not been a fun time to hold small cap stocks. There have been in four bear markets and two outright crashes of 30% or worse. There is a silver lining here though. This has been an outstanding market for dollar cost averaging into small cap stocks. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but I’ve been buying small caps during every correction along the way. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• World’s Safest Market Becomes a Magnet for Big Investors: US government debt was once among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer. (Businessweek)

• It’s official: The era of China’s global dominance is over: Getting rich isn’t China’s big project anymore; the project is power. As a result, both the government’s priorities and its behavior have changed. In the past, whenever it seemed that a recession was on the horizon, the CCP came to the rescue. There’s no hefty stimulus coming this time. Nor will the explosive growth that experts once expected from China return. Beijing’s relationship with the outside world is no longer guided by the principles of economic rationality, but rather by its yearning for political power. (Business Insider)

• America’s shoplifting problem, explained by retail workers and thieves: Retailers would rather complain about shoplifting than invest in fighting it. (Vox)

• They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird: lost the password to an encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 bitcoins. One team of hackers believes they can unlock it—if they can get Thomas to let them. (Wired)

• Is Crypto Financing Terrorism? A report that terror groups raised more than $130 million in crypto during recent years has set off a debate in Washington and finance circles. (New York Times)

• How Telegram Became a Terrifying Weapon in the Israel-Hamas War: Hamas posted gruesome images and videos that were designed to go viral. Sources argue that Telegram’s lax moderation ensured they were seen around the world. (Wired)

• In the Cities of Killing: The Hamas massacre, the assaults on Gaza, and what comes after. (New Yorker)

• How AI is crafting a world where our worst stereotypes are realized: AI image generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E amplify our worst stereotypes — bias in gender, race and beyond — despite efforts to detoxify the data fueling these results. (Washington Post)

• The Story of a Gun: After 60,000 deaths from firearms use over the past two years, America is in a gun crisis. Yet gun laws remain weak, gunmakers continue to promote killing power, and gun dealers accept no responsibility for the criminal use of what they sell. (The Atlantic)

• Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren’t working: At earnings this week, several auto execs pulled back on EV targets. Dealers have been warning of slowing EV demand for months. “This is a pretty brutal space,” Mercedes-Benz’s CFO said this week. (Business Insider)

• A Tangle of Rules to Protect America’s Water Is Falling Short: The Times asked all 50 states how they manage groundwater. The answers show why the country’s aquifers are in trouble. (New York Times)

• The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Change: Lessons from how we tackled acid rain can be applied to our world today. (Scientific American)

• Daylight Saving Time as Americans know it was instituted by corporate lobbies, not farmers: At some point in elementary school, many American children learn that Daylight Saving Time was originally intended to give farmers an extra hour of light to work the fields. That is, in fact, a lie. (Quartz)

• 'No one fears a defensive team': What's driving hockey's offensive boom Steve Yzerman, the Hall of Fame center turned mastermind general manager, rarely partakes in media interviews. When he does, the Detroit Red Wings executive tends to play his cards close to his chest. (Sportsnet)

• The surprising science that explains why we love thrillers: Entertainment isn’t frivolous. Walter Hickey’s new book You Are What You Watch explains why. (Vox)

• What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate: In an exclusive excerpt from my forthcoming biography of the senator, Romney: A Reckoning, he reveals what drove him to retire. (The Atlantic)

• Kanye and Adidas: Money, Misconduct and the Price of Appeasement: A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade. (New York Times)

• The Streisand Effect: At home with the legend, talking music, movies, and her revealing new memoir, My Name Is Barbra. (Vanity Fair)

• Why is it so hard to work out how much money Taylor Swift is making? Turns out everyone likes a gold rush, gold rush. (Financial Times)

• Taylor Swift Hits Billionaire Status as Net Worth Surges With Eras Tour Success: The most definitive account yet of the pop star’s wealth shows she’s one of the few recording artists to build a 10-figure fortune almost entirely from her music. (Bloomberg)

• Taylor Swift’s 1989: Her biggest album returns with new tracks from the vault: On Friday, Taylor Swift released a new version of 1989 – the biggest-selling album of her career, and the one that definitively turned her into a pop star. Featuring hits like Shake It Off, Blank Space and Style, it was originally written during the 2013-14 Red Tour, with demos stored on her phone in a folder named “Sailor Twips”. Awarded a Grammy for album of the year, it has spent 325 weeks in the UK charts. But now she has re-recorded it as the latest part of an ongoing campaign to regain control of her work, after an investment company bought her master tapes in 2019. (BBC)

• The last new Beatles song, ‘Now And Then,’ will be released this week: Sixty years after the onset of Beatlemania and with two of the quartet now dead, artificial intelligence has enabled the release next week of what is promised to be the last “new” Beatles song. (AP News)

Stocks, Interest Rates, Bonds, and Tupac

Weekly articles

• Why don’t you just sell all your stocks and buy ETFs, you’ll probably have better performance? Every good investor understands that what they are aiming for is hard to achieve, yet they do it anyway. For some, the monetary reward and alpha is all they care about. Others appreciate that the benefits of investing span far beyond an arbitrary total return quota. Everyone invests for their own reasons, so what drives people to buy stocks instead of just buying ETFs and going to the beach? (Investment Talk)

• Americans, especially wealthy ones, are still spending big: Continued consumer spending — on travel, concerts, restaurants and more — is propelling economic growth beyond what many had expected. (Washington Post)

• How High Interest Rates Sting Bakers, Farmers and Consumers: Everyone who relies on credit in America is confronting a new reality: Money will cost more for a good long while. (New York Times)

• The Trusted 60-40 Investing Strategy Just Had Its Worst Year in Generations: Higher interest rates and inflation are upending millions of Americans’ retirement planning. Wall Street’s boilerplate mix of stocks and bonds isn’t cutting it anymore. (Wall Street Journal)

• Asset Managers Are Updating Bond Models to Capture a New Risk: Extreme weather has direct impact on real estate credit market Climate risks are resulting in mispricing of sovereign bonds. (Bloomberg Green)

• Investment Mistakes to Avoid Right Now: These popular investment areas today that may be treacherous. (Bloomberg)

• Springsteen Shows Private Equity Who’s Boss: If you’re going to sell out, do it at the top of the market. (Bloomberg)

• AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop. Books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts. (Washington Post)

• This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative: AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. (MIT Technology Review)

• Voters under 30 are trending left of the general electorate: They could make a difference for Democrats in 2024 — if they bother to vote. (ABC News)

• Chinese fighter jets buzz U.S. planes in dramatic new videos: The Pentagon released previously nonpublic videos and photos of more than a dozen maneuvers by Chinese fighter jets harassing unarmed U.S. reconnaissance planes patrolling lawfully in international airspace. (Washington Post)

• The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle: Offsetting has been hailed as a fix for runaway emissions and climate change—but the market’s largest firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that weren’t real. (New Yorker)

• he Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Insurance Industry: Sometimes, a town doesn’t have to be underwater to become uninhabitable. All it has to do is be uninsurable. (The Atlantic)

• The propane industry’s weird obsession with school buses, explained: Electric school buses are better for kids’ health. The propane industry has other ideas. (Vox)

• Trees Are Stressed. Now They Can Tell Us Why: TreeTag sensors, developed by startup ePlant, can give homeowners, farmers and forestry managers early

• A24: The Rise of a Cultural Conglomerate: The indie studio is behind some of Hollywood’s biggest hits and critical darlings. It has designs on becoming media’s answer to LVMH. (The Generalist)

• The Internet Could Be So Good. Really. Today’s social platforms are designed for spectacle and entertainment—but it’s not too late to build a platform that improves society. (The Atlantic)

• What Happened to San Francisco, Really? It depends on which tech bro, city official, billionaire investor, grassroots activist, or Michelin-starred restaurateur you ask. (New Yorker)

• They Wanted to Dance in Peace. And They Got Slaughtered’ Israel's Supernova festival celebrated music and unity. It turned into the deadliest concert attack in history (Rolling Stone)

• How Martin Scorsese Made His Most Challenging Movie Yet: The Oscar-winning filmmaker scrapped a completed screenplay to turn the plot of his new movie, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ inside out. (Wall Street Journal)

• How a Chain-Snatching and a Vegas Beatdown Led to Tupac’s Murder: Grand jury witness testimony describes how hyperlocal clashes between warring gang factions spilled into a fatal dispute that would alter the course of hip-hop history. (New York Times)

Bond Markets, Iran, Israel, and War in the Middle East

Been a little busy lately, back on the weekly news drops. Here is a big one!

• Bloomberg Says It Is Using Machine Learning to Deliver Near Real-Time Bond Prices: “You can trust this price as a reference price for that bond at that point in time,” says Tony McManus, global head of enterprise data at Bloomberg. (Institutional Investor)

• The Worst Bond Bear Market in History: The bond bear market of the 1950s through the early-1980s was more of a death-by-a-thousand cuts. And the source of those cuts was inflation. Sure, annual nominal returns were positive at a little more than 2% per year but inflation was in the 4-5% range over that period. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The 5% Bond Market Means Pain Is Heading Everyone’s Way: The impact will be felt in everything from shoppers’ pockets to company balance sheets. (Bloomberg)

• Why Are Interest Rates Spiking? The bond market continues to be even crazier than the stock market. We’ve witnessed a massive move in long-term bond yields these past couple of weeks and months. Yields on the 10, 20 and 30 year Treasury were all up in the neighborhood of 60 basis points over the past 16 trading sessions. Yields are up 1% or more on each of these bond maturities since the end of June. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Americans Are Still Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow: Concerts, trips and designer handbags are taking priority over saving for a home or rainy day. (Wall Street Journal)

• American Work-From-Home Rates Drop to Lowest Since the Pandemic: Fewer than 26% of households now have someone working remotely Just seven states have maintained rate above 33% post-pandemic (Bloomberg)

• 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)

• Vaccine Scientist Warns Antiscience Conspiracies Have Become a Deadly, Organized Movement: Vaccinologist Peter Hotez explains how the movement to oppose science and scientists has gained power. (Scientific American)

• Millennials and boomers are competing for homes. Guess who’s winning? Rising prices, high rates and demographics are reversing millennial gains. (Financial Times)

• Home Insurance Is So High in This Florida Town, Residents Are Leaving: In West Palm Beach’s Flamingo Park neighborhood, some homeowners are dropping insurance, and others who can’t are selling. (Wall Street Journal)

• These houses are at risk of falling into the sea. The U.S. government bought them. ‘It will be a safer beach,’ says the National Park Service official who pushed for the buyouts and has seen other homes collapse and scatter debris for miles. (Washington Post)

• The insider: how Michael Lewis got a backstage pass for the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried: As author of The Big Short and Moneyball, Michael Lewis is perhaps the most celebrated journalist of his generation. Now he delivers an astonishing portrait of the fallen crypto billionaire. But did he get too close? (The Guardian)

• Something Is Golden in the State of Denmark: Can Novo Nordisk’s success really be a problem for the Danish economy? (The Atlantic)

• America’s High EV Costs Are Driving Buyers to Hybrids: Concerns about high sticker prices and limited charging infrastructure for electric cars are driving renewed interest in the gasoline-electric vehicles. (Businessweek)

• Elon Musk now faces an investigation into disinformation about the Israel-Hamas war: Europe’s probe into harmful content on X about the Israel-Hamas war tests a new law that could reshape the internet. (Vox)

• What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter? A year after the world’s richest man acquired the social media platform, a game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue. (NBC News)

• Rupert Murdoch is sliding into retirement. His malign influence isn’t going anywhere: “For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change.” He promised to be “reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice.” As for his designated successor, his elder son Lachlan, Rupert assured the employees that Lachlan is “absolutely committed to the cause” of fighting “most of the media,” which is “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” (Los Angeles Times)

• Iran, Israel, and War in the Middle East: Iran’s threat to Israel is clear: It has encircled Israel with heavily armed militants. Those groups — e.g., Hamas, Hizballah, and Palestine Islamic Jihad — share Iran’s commitment to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and are dependent on Tehran’s largess to maintain their domestic power and military strength. Israel has countered such provocations by conducting assassinations and sabotage attacks inside Iran aimed at retarding its nuclear, drone, and missile programs. (War on the Rocks)

• Parents told to delete social media apps to prevent kids from seeing Hamas atrocities: Facebook, X, TikTok and other social media services have been filled with graphic imagery out of Israel and Gaza since the weekend’s terror attack. (NBC News)

• Teens Are Developing ‘Severe Gambling Problems’ as Online Betting Surges. An increasing amount of evidence suggests that young adults and even minors are easily able to bet online despite a variety of industry safeguards. (Vice)

• Disney Goes All In On Sports Betting: After years of internal debate, the entertainment giant did a deal with a gambling company and will launch an ESPN betting app next month. Can it draw a bigger sports crowd without alienating Mickey’s fans? (Wall Street Journal)

• Dave Portnoy Bought Barstool Back. Can Erika Ayers Badan Keep His Pirate Ship on Course? As Penn pivots from Portnoy’s brand of bro-ish excess to family-friendly ESPN, Barstool is free to be itself. (Vanity Fair)

• Inside the delicate art of maintaining America’s aging nuclear weapons: The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country’s most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project. (AP News)

• ‘People are happier in a walkable neighborhood’: the US town that banned cars: For the first piece in our new series the alternatives we visit a community without cars in the desert of Tempe, Arizona. (The Guardian)

• Scotiabank Arena reimagining the fan experience MLSE reveals first part of $350 million renovation to home of the Toronto Raptors and Maple Leafs ahead of venue’s 25th anniversary. Now if someone can only fix the Leafs corporate fans who don’t know how to cheer and are killing the arena… (On-Site)

• Taylor Swift Re-Recorded Albums Into Hits. Can It Be Done Again? Swift began to execute a plan to regain control and in the process created a radical new blueprint for artists and music ownership. The same month she published her initial letter, she announced she would re-record the albums included in that deal. (Bloomberg)

• What Madonna Knows: The artist is always one step ahead—and has a unique power to scandalize each generation anew. (The Atlantic)

• The Drake Lyrics Taxonomy: From Emo Drake to Horny Drake and everything in between, come with us on a journey as we sort through the rapper’s most famous lines and personalities. (The Ringer)

• One Great Rock Movie Can Change the World: An Oral History of ‘School of Rock’ Twenty years later, the filmmakers and cast remember making the hilarious music movie with a heart of gold. (Rolling Stone)

• Vintage Nirvana: Thirty years after the release of ‘In Utero,’ T-shirts commemorating the album can go for four figures. The most iconic band of the 1990s—one that openly rejected the commodification of rock—is now one of the biggest brands in the vintage industry. (The Ringer)

Hip-hop Investors, Artificial Intelligence, Autoworkers, and Cable TV

Articles of the week

• Hip-hop stars and financial luminaries: Ritholtz Wealth Management redesigns the investment conference: Roughly 3,000 attendees are gathered to hear hip-hop legends Method Man and Redman, and financial headliners like Jeremy Siegel, Jeff Kleintop, Emily Roland, Cliff Asness, Jeff Gundlach and Jan van Eck. Plus there’s dancing, swimming, surfing, yoga, pizza and sushi and beer and wine sessions. Over four days, the emphasis is on personal interaction, with numerous “networking dinners” — giant parties for young RIAs and investors to get together and socialize. (CNBC)

• How Blackstone Sprinted Ahead of Its Peers in AI: Eight years ago, Stephen Schwarzman decided to go all in on artificial intelligence — and never looked back. (Institutional Investor)

• Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged. It’s no accident — the intertwining of religion and technology is centuries old. (Vox)

• Autoworkers Have Good Reason to Demand a Big Raise: Their real wages have fallen 30% over the past two decades. But can the Detroit Three really afford to bring back the old days?  (Bloomberg)

• A $700 Million Bonanza for the Winners of Crypto’s Collapse: Lawyers. Bankruptcy lawyers and other corporate turnaround specialists have reaped major fees from the bankruptcies of five cryptocurrency companies, including FTX. (New York Times)

• Everyone’s Worrying About China, But the Real Pain Is Coming From the Fed: For many countries, the side effects of higher US interest rates are taking a bigger toll than China’s slowdown. (Businessweek)

• The China Model Is Dead: The nation’s problems run so deep, and the necessary repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may already have passed. (The Atlantic)

• A Crafty Way to Earn Returns From the Inverted Yield Curve: Some allocators and managers are doing this, expecting a price pop ahead and collecting nice interest payouts along the way. (Chief Investment Officer)

• Cable TV Is on Life Support, but a New Bundle Is Coming Alive: Cable companies have started to figure out a way to stay in the TV game: Reselling streaming services. (New York Times)

• 10 New Vehicles Join the American Electric Car Race: Tesla dominates the US market, but newcomers include the first electric models from Lexus and Fisker, two sedans from BMW and one mass-market Hyundai. (Bloomberg Green)

• Kim Jong Un: The US wants to engage North Korea but doesn’t know how. For decades, the West – and Washington particularly – has asked itself the question: how do you solve a problem like North Korea? (BBC)

• Mattel’s Windfall From ‘Barbie’ The company’s approach has paid off to a degree that even the C.E.O. could hardly have believed possible. (New York Times)

• The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes: The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip. (Vulture)

• The million-dollar hustle changing US sport – how college football athletes are cashing in: College football in the US is big business. The sport, which kicked off its new season last weekend, is awash with money. (BBC)

Sports Team Valuations, Interest Rates, and AI

Weekly news drop

• Valuations of Sports Teams and Franchises CBV Institute leads the Chartered Business Valuator (CBV) profession – Canada’s only designation dedicated to business valuation since 1971. Over the past couple of decades, the growth in the value of sports franchises has noticeably outperformed the S&P 5001 , driven by increasingly lucrative media rights deals, the globalization of content, and an overall resilience to macroeconomic downturns. As such, sports assets are attracting increasing attention from institutional investors. (CBV Institute)

• The Generational Paradigm Shift Taking Over Markets: For most of the 20th century, stocks and bond yields moved in opposite directions. They’re doing it again after a two-decade break. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Great and Awful Thing About These Interest Rates: If you’re depending on income to fund your retirement, 5% rates are a blessing. But if you’re in need of credit, current rates are a curse. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Mortgage Rates at 7% Are Making Everything Worse for US Homebuyers: With supply tight and prices rising, deals are frozen with little relief in sight, (Bloomberg) 

• Why Are Mortgage Rates So High? With the 10 year at 4.2% and inflation at 3.2%, mortgage rates should be lower…right? Mortgage rates typically trade a spread to the 10 year Treasury yield. If we were at 1990s spread levels we would be looking at mortgage rates of 5.7%. Even if we were at the average for the 2020s so far they would be at a more reasonable 6.4%. So why are spreads so high right now? (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Larry Summers’ Comparison of 2013–23 Inflation with 1966–76 Is Uninformed Madness: How incredibly wrong was Larry Summers about inflation? In June 2022, he said “we need 5 years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation, 2 years of 7.5% unemployment, or 5 years of 6% unemployment, or 1 year of 10% unemployment” just to contain inflation, not reduce it. But the annual rate of CPI inflation was 9.7% then and 2.7% percent now. (Cato Institute)

• In a Hot Job Market, the Minimum Wage Becomes an Afterthought: The federal wage floor of $7.25 is increasingly irrelevant when even most teenagers are earning twice that. But what happens when the economy cools? (New York Times)

• Generative AI applications: an investing framework: The generative AI venture landscape has blossomed rapidly, from applications to infrastructure and tools. In this post, we focus on the application layer – where we have historically been most active. It seems inevitable that generative AI will be embedded in most applications we touch, enabling entirely new experiences as well as large-scale automation. Less certain is the pace of this change, and its second-order effects. It’s one thing to tinker with ChatGPT; it’s quite another to adopt a product that structurally reinvents a long-held human task. (Mosaic)

• The A.I. Revolution Is Coming. But Not as Fast as Some People Think. From steam power to the internet, there has always been a lag between technology invention and adoption across industries and the economy. (New York Times)

• Huawei Is Building a Secret Network for Chips, Trade Group Warns: Tech giant is reportedly getting $30 billion in state support Biden administration monitoring and ready to take action. (Bloomberg)

• What Stone-Carving Robots Tell Us About the Architecture of the Future: Architects are exploring new creations with old materials, using robots to carve stone? (Slate)

• Meditation is more than either stress relief or enlightenment: Exploring the wider range of meditation is no longer reserved for the monasteries. The new science of meditation is just getting started. (Vox)

• As winters warm, the citrus industry squeezes into Georgia: Half a million citrus trees have taken root in the Peach State over the past decade. (Grist)

• What Your Insurer Is Trying to Tell You About Climate Change: Insurers are trying to send a message. The government is trying to suppress it. (The Atlantic)

• Rising Insurance Costs Start to Hit Home Sales: Vulnerable areas on coasts are first to feel impact of higher premiums (Wall Street Journal)

• Heat, Floods, Fire: Was Summer 2023 the New Normal? Climate scientists say a warming planet is contributing to, and worsening, extreme weather events (Wall Street Journal) 

• 47 Days in Extreme Heat, and You Begin to Notice Things: You notice things in sustained heat. Paying attention is a strategy for survival. The red rock landscape I love and have lived in for a quarter of a century is a blistering terrain. The heat bears down on our shoulders with the weight of a burning world. (New York Times)

• ‘Off-the-charts records’: Has humanity finally broken the climate? Extreme weather is ‘smacking us in the face’ with worse to come, but a ‘tiny window’ of hope remains, say leading climate scientists. (The Guardian)

• America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow: Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide, a New York Times investigation found. (New York Times)

• One Man’s Quest to Heal the Oceans—And Maybe Save the World: “Suddenly, we’re seeing that the impacts of climate change are not something that is going to be suffered by somebody else. It’s here.” And so it is, in the wildfires, heat waves, and floods that have made the weather of summer 2023 some of the most extreme on record. (Time)

• Tape Heads: The Mellotron, an electronic keyboard of recorded samples, heralded the digital age, and its use in “Strawberry Fields Forever” changed pop music history. (JSTOR Daily)

• The diaries of Amy Winehouse: ‘I’m the nutter of the class – loud and mouthing off!’ Using family photographs, journals, letters and handwritten lyrics, a new book sheds fresh light on the great singer’s life – while hinting at the tragedy to come. We publish exclusive images from the often heartbreaking work (The Guardian)

• Andy Roddick’s Open Era: Twenty years after winning the U.S. Open, Andy Roddick has thrown away his trophies and moved on with his life. But in a rare interview, the last American man to win a grand slam reflects on that historic triumph—and all the pressure, fame, failure, love, and loss that came after. (GQ)

• Michael Jordan Is the Richest Basketball Player Ever With $3.5 Billion Fortune: The NBA legend’s wildly successful deal with Nike forms the cornerstone of his wealth, which has grown through endorsements and the sale of his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets. (Bloomberg)

Stock Market, Household Wealth, Recession, and Donald Trump

Weekly article drop

• The Stock Market Has a Real Problem—a Real Yield Problem: Real yields—adjusted for inflation—have been steadily climbing as rates rise and inflation decelerates. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury inflation-protected securities was negative until May of last year. It touched 2% on Friday, its highest level since 2009. That’s an attractive-enough after-inflation yield for many investors, and it presents more competition for stocks, especially those with high valuations. (Barron’s)

• The Great and Awful Thing About These Interest Rates: If you’re depending on income to fund your retirement, 5% rates are a blessing. But if you’re in need of credit, current rates are a curse. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Global Household Wealth Drops for First Time Since 2008: Financial Crisis Assets shrunk by $11.3 trillion amid inflation, strong dollar North America, Europe hit hardest as Russia added millionaires. (Bloomberg)

• Credit card debt collection: One core waste stream of the finance industry is charged-off consumer debt. Debt collection is a fascinating (and frequently depressing) underbelly of finance. It shines a bit of light on credit card issuance itself, and richly earns the wading-through-a-river-of-effluvia metaphor. (Bits About Money)

• How Nvidia Built a Competitive Moat Around A.I. Chips: The most visible winner of the artificial intelligence boom achieved its dominance by becoming a one-stop shop for A.I. development, from chips to software to other services. (New York Times)

• The Booming Business of American Anxiety: A flurry of companies and entrepreneurs aim to fill the demand for mental-health help. (Wall Street Journal)

• US Housing Market Recoups $3 Trillion Lost in Recent Slowdown: Total value of US homes hit a record $47 trillion in June Redfin’s Zhao says shortage of homes is propping up values (Bloomberg)

• Too Many Vacant Lots, Not Enough Housing: The U.S. Real-Estate Puzzle: In Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit neighborhoods where houses are surrounded by empty lots, authorities are starting to bulldoze obstacles to development. (WSJ)

• How does Elon Musk get away with it all? The billionaire’s heroic image is built on media praise, breathless fans, and … romance novel tropes. (Vox)

• Heat, Floods, Fire: Was Summer 2023 the New Normal? Climate scientists say a warming planet is contributing to, and worsening, extreme weather events (Wall Street Journal) 

• 47 Days in Extreme Heat, and You Begin to Notice Things: You notice things in sustained heat. Paying attention is a strategy for survival. The red rock landscape I love and have lived in for a quarter of a century is a blistering terrain. The heat bears down on our shoulders with the weight of a burning world. (New York Times)

• Does The Ocean Floor Hold The Key To The Green Energy Transition? Abundant minerals at the bottom of the ocean could be vital for renewable energy infrastructure. But what harm will be caused by mining them? (NOEMA)

• ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Us? PFAS lurk in so much of what we eat, drink and use. Scientists are only beginning to understand how they’re impacting our health — and what to do about them. (New York Times)

• The Man Who Made the Suburbs White: J.C. Nichols pioneered racial covenants in Kansas City’s surrounding enclaves. The country is still grappling with them. (Slate)

• The Supreme Court is taking a wrecking ball to the wall between church and state: The Court’s Republican majority has ground the Constitution’s establishment clause down to a nub. (Vox)

• Two Months in Georgia: How Trump Tried to Overturn the Vote: The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election. (New York Times)

• How Donald Trump tried to undo his loss in Georgia in 2020: Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, where all of their strategies came together in a complex and multilayered effort that unfolded against the hyperpartisan backdrop of two ongoing U.S. Senate races. (Washington Post)

• There’s a way to get healthier without even going to a gym. It’s called NEAT. All the calories that a person burns through their daily activity excluding purposeful physical exercise: Think of the low-effort movements that you string together over the course of your day – things like household chores, strolling through the grocery aisle, climbing the stairs, bobbing your leg up and down at your desk, or cooking dinner. (NPR)

• Wish you weren’t here! How tourists are ruining the world’s greatest destinations: Overtourism has long been a problem – and besieged cities are fighting back. But can angry locals stop the tide of stag parties, ‘anus burners’, noise and graffiti? (The Guardian)

• The Vicious, Multibillion-Dollar War Over Sports Trading Cards: The two firms atop the industry are exchanging accusations of anti-competitive practices as the wholesome hobby gets sucked into the antitrust wars. (New Republic)

• Dave Portnoy Bought Barstool Back. Can Erika Ayers Badan Keep His Pirate Ship on Course? As Penn pivots from Portnoy’s brand of bro-ish excess to family-friendly ESPN, Barstool is free to be itself. (Vanity Fair)

• Andy Roddick’s Open Era: Twenty years after winning the U.S. Open, Andy Roddick has thrown away his trophies and moved on with his life. But in a rare interview, the last American man to win a grand slam reflects on that historic triumph—and all the pressure, fame, failure, love, and loss that came after. (GQ)

Recession, Bond Yields, AI, Taylor Swift, and Baseball

Articles of the week

• What recession? This summer’s economy is defying the odds. Americans still have jobs and are continuing to spend — on plastic surgery, motorcycles and cruises — leading many to revise their doom-and-gloom forecasts. (Washington Post)

• Bond Yield Hits Highest Since 2008, Adding Pressure to Borrowing Costs: Bets that interest rates will fall have suppressed 10-year yields for most of 2023, but analysts warn that may be changing. (Wall Street Journal)

• How bonds ate the entire financial system: A very short, very wild history of the market that will shape the next financial crisis. (Financial Times)

• Do Valuations Even Matter For the Stock Market? If we look at valuations going back to 1990, out of slightly more than 400 monthly observations, the CAPE ratio has been below the long-term average for just 22 months. That’s around 5% of the time. Mind you, this is not valuations at screaming buy levels, just below average. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• Are You Rich? Billionaires know they are. Low-wage workers are very well aware that they aren’t. But vast swaths of America’s “regular rich” don’t feel that way, and it’s keeping everybody down. You know them. They’re lawyers in New York, doctors in Phoenix, dentists in Memphis. They own construction companies in your hometown, burger franchises off the highway, homes in the resort villages your parents want to retire in. They’re young, old, Democrats and Republicans. They have two things in common: They’re rich. But they don’t feel that way. (Bloomberg)

• Why Are NYC Rents So High? It’s Complicated: COVID spurred many tenants to vacate city apartments, but changing rent laws and rising interest rates are among factors now encouraging people to stay put — with few new apartments available. (The City)

• A.I. Can’t Build a High-Rise, but It Can Speed Up the Job: Developers are embracing artificial intelligence tools like drones, cameras, apps and robots, which can reduce the timelines and waste that have made construction increasingly costly. (New York Times)

• How a Small Group of Firms Changed the Math for Insuring Against Natural Disasters: Climate change, inflation and global instability have thrust companies that sell insurance to insurers into the spotlight. (New York Times)

• How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox: Declining rainfall, rising temperatures and invasive species have left the islands more susceptible to wildfires. (New York Times)

• Hawaii Is a Warning: The world doesn’t need more reminders that climate change is accelerating. But we’re going to keep getting them. (The Atlantic)

• The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet: Laced across the cold depths of the world’s oceans is a network of multimillion-dollar cables, which have become the vital connections of our online lives. (CNET)

• The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year: As organizations rapidly deploy generative AI tools, survey respondents expect significant effects on their industries and workforces. (McKinsey)

• See Inside a Ghost Town of Abandoned Mansions in China: Now, farmers are reportedly putting the land of the deserted development to use. (Architectural Digest)

• Google’s Search Box Changed the Meaning of Information: Web search promised to resolve questions. Instead, it brought on a soft apocalypse of truth. (Wired)

• Bring On the E-Boats! The most exciting electric vehicles in the world are for sailors only. (Slate).

• The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think: The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries. (New York Times)

• Behind All the Talk, This Is What Big Oil Is Actually Doing: The industry can point to efforts to reduce emissions and pursue green energy technologies. But those efforts pale in comparison with what they are doing to maintain and enhance oil and gas production. As the International Energy Agency put it, investment by the industry in clean fuels “is picking up” but “remains well short of where it needs to be.” (New York Times)

• How Fake Science Sells Wellness: Dubious claims in product marketing are everywhere. Don’t fall for them. (New York Times)

• Influencers Built Up This Wellness Startup—Until They Started Getting Sick: Inside the fiasco that turned Daily Harvest, a vegan food company backed by celebs including Gwyneth Paltrow, into a cautionary tale. (Businessweek)

• Comedian Jim Gaffigan Starred in 200 Commercials Before Landing on ‘Letterman’ The ‘Linoleum’ star on cereal battles, overcoming anxiety and how copywriting led to stand-up and acting. (Wall Street Journal)

• 50 Years Later, Everything Is Hip-Hop: Rappers didn’t just change the sound of music—they changed the business of it too. ‘The only rule was to be successful.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• For Dua Lipa, Just Being a Pop Star Isn’t Enough: Though the singer has maintained a strict line between her music and her private life, she’s leveraging her personal passions in a bid to become a media mogul. (New York Times)

• Taylor Swift’s Viral Era: a Timeline: Fan demand broke Ticketmaster, and that was just the prologue. These are the moments that turned the Eras Tour into a phenomenon. (New York Times)

• How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World: The pop star’s record-breaking, career-spanning show has dominated the summer, commanding attention and whipping up demand at a level thought unachievable in a fragmented age. (New York Times)

• The Most Emotional Video Game Music in the Unlikeliest of Places The Eleanor Rigby of video game music. (IGN)

• The A’s Don’t Just Want to Leave Oakland. They Want to Leave Moneyball Behind, Too. In an interview, team president Dave Kaval says the team hopes revenue from a new stadium will help it pay more for players than its famous cost-conscious strategy. (Wall Street Journal)

• Why Did Scouts Whiff on Luis Arraez, MLB’s Base-Hit King? And will the unexpected success of baseball’s batting average leader pave the way for other unconventional prospects? (The Ringer)

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)