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)