Thursday morning articles
A year of pain: investors struggle in a new era of higher rates: Twelve months after Jay Powell called an end to super-cheap money, fund managers are still adjusting to a very different environment. (Financial Times Alphaville)
A Missing Piece of the SBF Puzzle: In a range of interviews and Twitter threads (see links and excerpts below), SBF explained that he approached financial decisions with little or no aversion to risk. That’s a valid personal choice, but it’s highly unusual. In our own experience, we’ve never met anyone who made important financial decisions consistent with being anywhere in the ballpark of zero risk aversion. (Elm)
Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich? The question of why some countries join the developed world while others remain in poverty has vexed economists for decades. What makes it so hard to answer? (Asterisk)
Here’s what employers are cutting instead of your job: You may get to keep your job, but you might lose your Zoom and your desk. (Vox)
Anti-Woke Republicans Aren’t Making Business Sense on Climate: The GOP’s opposition to meaningful climate policy is increasingly at odds with corporate pragmatism. (Bloomberg)
Is China heading toward another Tiananmen Square moment? How a deadly fire in Xinjiang ignited a nationwide protest against zero-covid in China. (Grid)
When Visiting Michelangelo’s David, She Brings a Duster: The revered statue in Italy is not going to dust itself. That’s where Eleonora Pucci comes in. (New York Times)
What if everything is going to be OK? The severity of the global financial crisis left deep emotional and intellectual scars on everyone who went through it. Since then a lot of people have been desperate to identify the next big economic faultline, the next CDO, the next financial cataclysm to befall us. Some permabears have managed to turn their apocalyptic visions into lucrative careers. (Financial Times)
FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident Sam Bankman-Fried is a con man and fraudster of historic proportions. But you might not learn that from the New York Times, CoinDesk’s Chief Insights Columnist David Z. Morris writes. (CoinDesk)
A Cloud Startup Wants to Be a Crystal Ball for Farmers Everywhere: India’s Cropin aims to boost agricultural efficiency by helping growers know what to plant and when to sow, water and fertilize. (Businessweek)
Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century: By the end of the century, Africa will be home to 40% of the world’s population – and nowhere is this breakneck-pace development happening faster than this 600-mile stretch between Abidjan and Lagos. (The Guardian)
‘He was fast … he ran you right over’: what it’s like to get hit by an SUV: One Thursday afternoon, I stepped out to cross a city street – and woke up in hospital with broken bones and a brain injury. After I recovered, I started looking into why so many drivers just don’t stop (The Guardian)
What Kind of Man Was Anthony Bourdain? He was so damaged, and yet he showed us so much of the world. (The Atlantic)