Tuesday morning news drop
KPMG disputes leaked emails linking firm to offshore companies suspected in massive Ponzi scheme Isle of Man shell companies protecting identity of wealthy Canadians and KPMG is disputing emails from an offshore leak of financial data that say the accounting firm helped set up four companies in the Isle of Man that experts believe were later involved with a massive fraud operating out of Montreal (CBC)
Now That Everyone Is Bullish, Be Cautious The economy and the stock market have churned out spectacular numbers, and investor optimism is high. But don’t forget to hedge your bets. (New York Times)
The Woman Who Shattered the Myth of the Free Market Joan Robinson upended the misogynistic good-old-boys’ network of economists and devised theories around competition and labor vital to the antitrust debates of today. (New York Times)
The Next Chapter of Money: The Greatest Story Ever Told In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari describes humans (aka homo sapiens) as being different from other animals in one very distinct way: We have the ability to create, tell, and remember stories. Money is also a story. Humans created currency. Gold was an abundant and malleable metal that could easily be forged into coins, which were easy to carry around and trade. But the glue that bound these monetary systems together was belief in a common story; that the coins had a specific value.(The Belle Curve)
‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen – and no one saw it coming (The Guardian)
Rich Americans Face Biden Tax Hike With Anger, Denial and Grief Pressure has been building to raise levies on the wealthy after decades of tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the top 1%. Politicians at the national and state levels have recently proposed or passed higher rates, but the measures were largely focused on income taxes. (Bloomberg)
Jack Ma Shows Why China’s Tycoons Keep Quiet High-profile business leaders have been detained, sidelined or silenced as the Communist Party moves forcefully to keep companies in line. Today, the best strategy is to lie low. (New York Times)
Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model Apple is selling a single CPU across a wider range of products than any competing Intel or AMD CPU is ever sold. This speaks volumes as to what Apple believes it has its hands on, namely: 4+4 CPU architecture, with four high-performance CPU cores and four high-efficiency CPU cores; fast enough at the quad-core level while drawing so little power, it can also be sold in a laptop. (ExtremeTech)
The secretary who turned Liquid Paper into a multimillion-dollar business Bette Nesmith Graham invented one of the most popular office supplies of the 20th century. Today, she’s largely been forgotten (The Hustle)
Anthony Fauci Isn’t Perfect. He’s Closer Than Most of Us. Shocker of shockers: Fauci isn’t perfect. But he has been perfectly sincere, perfectly patient, a professional standing resolutely outside so many of the worst currents of American life. More than that, he has been essential. We owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude, not the mind-boggling magnitude of grief that he gets. (New York Times Magazine)
Posh French Winemakers Pounce on Big American Vineyard Selloff European vintners are finding toeholds in the U.S. just as some of America’s oldest wineries are ready to cash in. (Bloomberg)
The death of family-affordable housing Single family houses aren’t affordable to the average family, that it hasn’t been that way for years or decades, and that there’s no reason to believe they will get anything but less affordable in the long term. That doesn’t mean that prices can’t come down or they can’t get more affordable in the short term – they can and have in the past – but on the order of decades they will get less and less affordable as they become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total housing stock. (House Hunt Victoria)
