Monday morning articles
Canadian households now owe $1.83 for every dollar of disposable income they have Canadians have $2 trillion in mortgage debt and $722 billion worth of other types of debt (CBC)
Mutual Funds That Consistently Beat the Market? Not One of 2,132. No actively managed stock or bond funds outperformed the market convincingly and regularly over the last five years. Index funds have generally been better. (New York Times)
BlackRock Has Been Targeted by a Political Attack-Style Campaign for Being ‘Woke.’ The Asset Manager is Undeterred. Simply stated, WOKE = Marketing (Institutional Investor)
Why the GOP Will Lose Its War on ‘Woke Wall Street’ Republicans can’t accept that they dislike modern capitalism, so they’re blaming “ESG” instead. (New York Magazine)
Looney Tunes is not macroeconomics: Wile E. Coyote is not a serious forecast. It is not how we should think about 2023. (Stay-At-Home Macro)
Goldman’s guide to the rest of your life:What Goldman Sachs has attempted in a new report imaginatively titled ‘The Path to 2075’. This updates long-term growth predictions made in 2003 and 2011, primarily about the prospects for the BRICs economies (a name famously coined by Jim O’Neill, Goldman’s head of economic research when the first report came out). (Financial Times Alphaville)
The Button That Could Have Changed the Internet: The “Oh, Yeah?” button, it should be noted, was not truly about verifying information or locating “truth.” Berners-Lee wasn’t suggesting that ontological certitude would arise from the web mob’s ranking of websites that distributed the most accurate information. Rather, the “Oh, Yeah?” button would suggest a more paradigmatic truth—that is, a reasonable approximation of whether something you read on the web was considered generally in the realm of credible by most people. (Slate)
Dispatch from Kherson: Inside Ukraine’s battle to win the infrastructure war: Russia is waging a war on infrastructure. Ukrainian civilians are working 24/7 to repair the damage. (Grid)
Why The Sanctions Against Russia Aren’t Working. Yet. But Russia has not been brought to its knees. Far from it: forecasters say Russian GDP for 2022 will likely fall, but only about 3.3−3.4 percent. Inflation, meanwhile, will likely end the year at roughly 12 percent: bad, but not close to as painful as predicted. And foreign direct investment? Estimates say it will fall by a mere 1 percent. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine grinds on. (NPR)
How the Kanye West Subreddit Finally Turned on Kanye West: Having witnessing Ye’s yearslong escalation from “dragon energy” mantras to open Hitler worship, many of these former stans are finally ready to leave their onetime idol behind—though not “the friends we made along the way,” as r/Kanye moderator Clement Leveau put it to me. “Kanye brought all of us together, but we don’t identify with him anymore.” (Slate)