Tuesday morning news drop
Why boardrooms must be fluent in the ABCs of ESG After Larry Fink demanded companies in BlackRock’s portfolio to provide climate-focused disclosures, other major investors and regulators are making similar demands (Globe and Mail)
Return-to-Office Chaos Is the Best Thing to Happen to Consultants Since Y2K A new breed of “experts” is here to help desperate employers navigate these uncharted waters. Too bad no one knows anything. (BusinessWeek)
There Is Finally a Visible Way Out of the COVID Pandemic Two new developments could mean a real endgame is near. (New York Magazine)
Why you should care about Facebook’s big push into the metaverse The futuristic tech Mark Zuckerberg is investing billions in could remake the internet. (Vox)
How TikTok Reads Your Mind It’s the most successful video app in the world. Our columnist has obtained an internal company document that offers a new level of detail about how the algorithm works. (New York Times)
The Best Music of 2021 So, 2021 wasn’t quite the “post-pandemic” return to normal we’d all hoped for. But once again, music carried us through, and not even ever-mutating variants could stop incredible artists from releasing great new records. Below, in our 2021 wrap-up package, Pitchfork looks back on the year that was, with lists of the best songs and albums in a variety of genres, plus the best books, best music movies and TV shows, and more. Happy new year, and, as always, thanks for reading. (Pitchfork) and top 100 Pitchfork songs of 2021 (Youtube)
Nature Shows How This All Works Two little stories from nature that teach us a few things about investing: 1. Extremes lead to extremes. 2. Small changes compounded for long periods of time are indistinguishable from magic. (Collaborative Fund)
Bubble watch: has anything changed? hough he has moved on to the pensions field, the old boss of CMHC was making news again this week on the topic of housing. In an interview with CTV, Evan Siddall said “I really don’t think we’re in a bubble. If demand is going up and supply is not, prices will go up, that’s not a bubble.” Is he right? Well he doesn’t have the greatest track record as a prognosticator of housing, but it’s a worthy topic of discussion especially if you’re wondering about whether it still makes sense to jump in to the market now or if it’s primed for a big dip. In some ways, a bubble can’t be positively identified until it has popped. I’d say we’d need to see at least a 20% drop in prices to say that what came before was a bubble. We’ve heard the Canadian housing market be called a bubble hundreds of times for decades, and despite going in radically different directions from the US market especially after 2008, so far there’s been no crash. Even if today’s prices are a bubble, those calls were clearly incorrect. A 20% drop in national prices would only bring us back to July 2020. (House Hunt Victoria)
