Wednesday morning news drop
Out of Office: The Case for More Paid Vacation Days The pandemic has forced us to reevaluate our relationship with work and time off (Walrus)
The Worst Run For Bonds Since 1980 The S&P 500 and the Bloomberg US Aggregate bond index have both declined for consecutive months ten times since 1976. They’ve never both had negative returns for three straight months, which is where it looked like things were headed. That is, until last week, when the S&P 500 had its strongest four-day run since the start of the pandemic. Right now, the S&P 500 is up 1.8% for the month. (Irrelevant Investor)
How Sensitive Are Your Stocks to Interest Rates? It’s Time to Find Out As central banks start lifting borrowing costs from near zero, profitless startups are certain to suffer more than telecom companies. For everything in between, investors should learn to look at stocks as if they were bonds. (Wall Street Journal)
The Real Winner of the Used Car Bubble Is Revealed Windfall profits from car financing are padding automakers’ bottom lines. A big source is their financing units, thanks to soaring used-car prices and exceptionally low loan-default rates. (Bloomberg)
This is why youth say they're leaving Alberta Report finds many young people think Alberta lacks vibrancy and diversity (CBC)
Bitcoin Miners Want to Recast Themselves as Eco-Friendly Facing intense criticism, the crypto mining industry is trying to change the view that its energy-guzzling computers are harmful to the climate. (New York Times)
Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War The Kremlin has used a barrage of increasingly outlandish falsehoods to prop up its overarching claim that the invasion of Ukraine is justified. (New York Times)
How Kremlin accounts manipulate Twitter The Russian government has a huge network of more than 100 official Twitter accounts. They range from foreign embassies, with a few thousand followers, to those with more than a million followers. President Putin has his own account. Many of the accounts are labelled as Russian government organisations by Twitter. (BBC)
Robot Truckers Could Replace 500K U.S. Jobs: Amid a severe driver shortage, a new study says 90% of long-haul trucking could be replaced by self-driving technology. The short trip from a factory or distribution center to an interstate is usually far more complicated than the next several hundred miles. The same is true once the machine exits the interstate. Trucking companies may set up transfer stations at either end, where human drivers handle the tricky first leg of the trip and then hitch their cargo up to robot rigs for the tiresome middle portion. (Bloomberg)
Exploring scenarios for future home affordability We know that rising prices have led to severely deteriorated affordability, with especially detached properties breaking out of the historical ranges for that measure, while condo affordability is at the level where prices usually turned around. Given that, let’s look at a few scenarios of what might happen to affordability going forward. In the past two cycles, affordability dropped roughly 15 percentage points over a period of about 7 to 8 years from the peak. (House Hunt Victoria)
