Thursday morning news drop
How the pandemic turned humble shipping containers into the hottest items on the planet 18 months into the Covid-19 pandemic, global shipping is still in crisis, with backlogs looming over the peak holiday shopping period. One look at the market for steel shipping containers, and it’s clear that a return to normal won’t happen any time soon. Demand for goods, meanwhile, has soared — giving the network of ships, containers and trucks that deliver merchandise around the world little time to catch up. (CNN)
The One Thing Successful Private Equity Firms Have in Common Eight industry leaders reveal how they’ve built their private investment empires. (Institutional Investor)
Most stocks are duds (yes, you read that right) Highlighting the riskiness of individual stock selection, recent research has demonstrated that around the globe the majority of individual common stocks have generated long-run shareholder losses relative to a Treasury-bill benchmark. The implication is that the large, long-term equity risk premium delivered by the broad stock market was attributable to outsize gains generated by a relatively few high-performing stocks. (Evidence-Based Investor)
Crypto’s Rapid Move Into Banking Elicits Alarm in Washington The boom in companies offering cryptocurrency loans and high-yield deposit accounts is disrupting the banking industry and leaving regulators scrambling to catch up. (New York Times)
The Other Afghan Women In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them. (New Yorker)
Why Does Playing Tennis Make So Many Pros Miserable? Naomi Osaka is taking an indefinite break from tennis as she struggles to find meaning and joy from playing. It’s a sadly familiar script for the sport. (New York Times)
The Gentrification of Blue America Economists trying to understand the rise and fall of regions within a country often rely on some form of economic base analysis. The idea is that a region’s overall growth is determined by the performance of its export industries — that is, industries that sell mainly to customers outside the region, such as the technology firms of Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles entertainment complex (or, here in New York, the financial industry). Growth in these industries, however, generates a lot of growth in other sectors, from health care to retail trade, driven by the local spending of the base industries’ companies and employees. (New York Times)
Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters? The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything. (New Yorker)
Why U.S. Housing Prices Aren’t as Crazy as You Think I remain firmly entrenched in the camp that this isn’t another housing bubble. There are structural and market forces that are causing these price gains, even if it all feels out of hand. But there’s another reason the housing market isn’t as crazy as you think — housing prices in the rest of the developed world have outpaced prices in the U.S. for some time now. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Value of building permits skyrockets in Greater Victoria Greater Victoria building permit values rise 27% while Canada as a whole sees a 4% decline (Goldstream News)
