Monday morning news drop
Ukraine Warcasting Predictions, market accountability, pundit accountability. The first part of this post looks at various markets’ predictions of how the war will go from here (Zvi published something like this a few hours before I could, so this will mostly duplicate his work). The second part very briefly tries to evaluate which markets have been most accurate so far – though this is a topic which deserves at least paper-length treatment. The third part looks at which pundits deserve eternal glory for publicly making strong true predictions, and which pundits deserve . . . something else, for doing . . . other things. (Astral Codex Ten)
I marched in solidarity with Ukraine. Across from us, there was another 'Freedom Rally' There is privilege in thinking life-saving mandates infringe on our freedoms (CBC)
Five reasons the sanctions are working In lieu of a military response, Biden and his allies are waging economic war on Putin’s Russia. It’s not a close fight. (Full Stack Economics)
Weaponizing Finance: To Punish Putin, the World Turned Finance Into a Weapon of War Russia’s central bank became the main target on a front that could crater the country’s economy. (Businessweek)
Russian cyber attacks against US banks increasing The big US banks — JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs — are under constant attacks by cyber criminals looking to disrupt operations and steal client information. The usual suspects are most often located in Iran, China and, of course, Russia. (New York Post)
Russia’s Economic Stagnation in Five Charts Former vassal countries of the Soviet Union that joined the EU have left their neighbor in the economic dust. (Bloomberg)
War in the time of crypto In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which side is crypto helping? Both. (Recode)
Putin No Longer Seems Like a Master of Disinformation In the Ukraine invasion, we are seeing that Russian influence has significant limits — and perhaps the unraveling of the myth of Putin’s mastery over global discourse. Whatever the military and geopolitical outcome in Ukraine, it’s already clear that Russia has suffered a public-relations catastrophe. Repudiation of the invasion has been swift, forceful and widespread. (New York Times)
Why does Putin have superfans among the US right wing? The Russian leader is an autocrat with a homophobic and misogynistic worldview. No wonder he is so admired… (The Guardian)
The Bond King’s Genius Was No Match for His Ego In an excerpt from her new book, Mary Childs, the co-host of NPR’s Planet Money, takes a close look at the rise and fall of billionaire investor Bill Gross. (Businessweek)
The Wolf of Main Street: The fastest-growing landlord in the U.S. Midwest, Monarch Investment and Management Group, used evictions to drive up rents during the pandemic (Bloomberg)
ESG and Alpha: Sales or Substance? Managers of ESG investments create false hope, oversell outperformance, and contribute to the delay of long-past-due regulatory action. (Institutional Investor)
Why we need to expand our crop menu Climate variability and extremes like floods, storms and droughts were a key driver of global hunger and malnutrition in 2021. The proportion of low- and middle-income countries exposed to climate extremes has increased from 76% to 98% between 2000 and 2020, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. (BBC)
A Tale of Two Buds: The Centuries-Old Feud Between American Budweiser and Czech Budweiser There are actually a couple of different Budweisers — the American version and the Czech version that inspired it. But the world is clearly not big enough for the both of them as they’ve been fighting over the name for more than 100 years (Mel)
The Bands Are Never Coming Back The era of group collectives dominating the charts has ended, probably forever—and it’s an issue much larger than just music. (The Honest Broker)
