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)