Thursday morning news drop
Election housing policy: The bad, the ineffective, and the missing The housing market has been on fire not just in Victoria but all around Canada. All the attention has been on the sharp uptick after the pandemic, but the housing market actually started heating up in mid 2019 and the latest performance was simply an acceleration of a previously existing trend. (House Hunt Victoria)
Wall Street During the Pandemic: The Impossible Is Now Commonplace One lesson from the market’s relentless climb is that sometimes the rules don’t matter. (Businessweek)
Are We in a Melt-Up? “Of all the things that you should do during a melt-up, the most important is to get invested. Do not sit in cash. Why? Because even if the market does eventually return to its prior levels, sitting in cash will destroy you psychologically.” (Of Dollars And Data)
Companies Are Hoarding Record Cash Amid Delta Fears Cash and short-term investments on corporate balance sheets rose in the second quarter (Wall Street Journal)
The new threat to China’s luxury boom: What to know Luxury stocks tumbled last week as the Chinese government announced a crackdown on wealth inequality. Here’s what that means for the industry. (Vogue)
In This Housing Boom, Mortgages Are for Losers To boost entry-level homeownership for lower-income buyers, the government needs to make the market less appealing to the cash-rich Wall Street investors who have taken over. (Bloomberg)
Some Wall Streeters are fed up with their unvaccinated coworkers As Wall Street scrambles to find safe ways to return its bankers to the office as the Delta variant surges, some financiers have found a scapegoat for the mess: the unvaccinated. Across America, roughly 57 percent of people are vaccinated, but at top Wall Street firms, that number is north of 90 percent. (NY Post)
How Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are handling the Taliban The world might accept the Taliban as a legitimate government. Will social media companies? (Vox)
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess. (Ars Technica)
The High Priest of Cryptopia Regrets Nothing Ian Freeman could have been a bitcoin billionaire. Instead he could go to prison for the rest of his life. (New York Magazine)
Charlie Watts, the Unlikely Soul of the Rolling Stones In a band that defined debauched rock ’n’ roll, he was a quiet, dapper jazz fan. But their unusual chemistry defined the rhythm of the Stones, and of rock. (New York Times)