CPI 3.4% and Bank of Canada Holds Rates, Microsoft Console Wars, Meme Stocks, Pensions, and FinTech

Thursday morning news drop

• Bank of Canada will hold current level of policy rate at 0.25% until inflation objective is sustainably achieved, continues quantitative easing - CPI 3.4% The Bank of Canada today held its target for the overnight rate at the effective lower bound of ¼ percent, with the Bank Rate at ½ percent and the deposit rate at ¼ percent. The Bank is maintaining its extraordinary forward guidance on the path for the overnight rate. This is reinforced and supplemented by the Bank’s quantitative easing (QE) program, which continues at a target pace of $3 billion per week. (Bank of Canada)

• Inflation spike shows U.S. consumer appetite bumping up against shortages Some price increases making up for higher wages to keep or attract workers (CBC)

• How Microsoft Is Ditching the Video Game Console Wars Known for the Xbox, Microsoft has been diversifying away from boxy hardware in favor of reaching millions more new gamers. (New York Times)

• Apple’s Walled Garden Is Becoming Harder to Escape The company just unveiled a ton of new features designed to trap you in its confines. (Slate)

• Global Investable Assets Reach Record $250 Trillion Financial wealth rose significantly even amid the pandemic. That means asset managers have new opportunities among the high-net-worth and to bring alternatives like private equity to individuals. (Institutional Investor)

• Is There A Better Way to Invest in Meme Stocks? Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to report that we have officially entered Act II of the joke as investment meme cycle. The intermission has ended and now it’s AMC (and not Gamestop) that is at center stage. (Of Dollars And Data)

• Is Day Trading a Good Idea? “Why do you want to day trade?” The answer often is, “To make money, obviously.” I ask, “Why do you think you can make money day trading?” There is generally a pause, and then this reply, “I see so many people making money day trading.” (Safal Niveshak)

• Special Report: Will Pension Risk Transfers Someday Control All DB Plans? The trend is mounting for corporate sponsors to shunt liabilities to insurers. But some don’t want to do that, and others can’t. (CIO)

• The Fintech 50 2021 The most innovative fintech companies (Forbes)

Retail Investing, Cheering for Sports Teams, and Fossil Fuels

Wednesday morning news drop

• Make Money Day-Trading from Home! Change is happening in the financial markets. Can you feel it? It’s like the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Something new is happening, and maybe, just maybe, this time really is different. (Belle Curve)

• The Shoeshine Indicator is Dead One of the questions that came up a year ago when the Robinhood traders, and my plumber, emerged on the scene was, “What’s gonna happen when their stocks crash?” My answer was always that they’d move on to something different, a la the aliens in Independence Day. (Irrelevant Investor)

• The Fed Is Paying 0.00%. Such a Deal! Depositors Are Flocking Starting in April, “No Interest” started looking interesting to certain investors with too much cash on their hands. The amount of money they placed at the Fed overnight at 0.00% grew from nothing to single-digit millions to billions and, as of June 8, $497.4 billion. That’s the most ever. (Bloomberg)

• The Worst Business Ever Food delivery just isn’t a very good business. It’s hard to make a profit when you don’t make any money. This describes the state of the food delivery business, which according to the founder and CEO of GrubHub, “is and always will be a crummy business.” (Irrelevant Investor)

• Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy The price for Ubers, scooters and Airbnb rentals is going up as tech companies aim for profitability. (New York Times)

• A company you’ve probably never heard of caused half the internet to go dark Countless websites, including major news outlets, were offline after an outage at Fastly, a cloud computing provider. (Vox)

• How A New Team Of Feds Hacked The Hackers And Got Colonial Pipeline’s Ransom Back That said, the attackers made an unusual error in this case by failing to keep money moving. The $2.3 million that ultimately was recovered was still sitting in the same Bitcoin account it had been delivered to. (NPR)

• The Retreat of Exxon and the Oil Majors Won’t Stop Fossil Fuel National oil champions are likely to fill the gap left by private-sector players—meaning emissions won’t shrink as fast the supermajors (Bloomberg Green)

• Exxon’s Board Defeat Signals the Rise of Social-Good Activists The energy giant’s stunning loss was the work of a tiny hedge fund that believes investing for social good is also good for the bottom line. (New York Times)

• The Paradox of Being a Leafs Fan Generations of Indigenous fans have followed the Toronto Maple Leafs through close calls and decades of despair. Ultimately, it's the hope that connects us (Walrus)

Investing, Cannabis Economy, Carbon Dioxide CO2 Levels, and NBA Fans

Tuesday morning news drop

• A Guide to Moving from Cash to Investments “Valuations are high.” “Stocks have had an incredible run, how much higher can they go?” “Interest rates are near historic lows. What happens when they rise?” These are all reasonable things to think about when allocating a lump sum of money that has been sitting on the sidelines. But what does the data suggest? (Compound Advisors)

• Dollar Cost Averaging vs. Lump Sum: The Definitive Guide One of the biggest problems in personal finance is deciding when to invest a sum of money. Whether you have $10, $10,000, or $10 million that you could put to work, the question is: Should you invest all that money over time (dollar cost averaging) or now (lump sum)? (Dollars & Data)

• The Bottom 90% of Americans Are Borrowing From the Top 1% The savings of the rich are recycled into household and government debt (Businessweek)

• U.S. Trophy-Home Market Poised for a Banner Year The market for $50 million-plus home sales got off to an incredibly strong start to 2021, with the number of listings and sales on pace to outdo previous years (Mansion Global)

• A Commodities Crunch Caused by Stingy Capital Spending Has No Quick Fix Limited inventory of resources is converging with a buying spree to supercharge prices, spurring inflation concerns (WSJ)

• The Hazy Economy of Cannabis When Canada legalized recreational marijuana, a team of statisticians set out to decode how much exactly the weed business is worth (Walrus)

• Affected Development: Will Kids Ever Recover from Isolation? For many children, our panicked pandemic lives are the only lives they’ve ever known (Walrus)

• Why Confederate Lies Live On For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe. (Atlantic)

• Earth’s carbon dioxide levels hit 4.5 million-year high The amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has reached its annual peak, climbing to 419 parts per million (ppm) in May, according to scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Axios)

• CO2 levels are at an all-time high The historic CO2 record was pretty unfazed by the pandemic (The Verge)

• The argument for a carbon price We are paying a price for fossil fuels, but that price is not paid by those that burn the fossil fuels – we need to change that (Our World in Data)

• N.B.A. Fans Wanted a Show. They’re Also Getting a Reckoning. The entertainment of the playoffs has been coupled with a pressing message from players that fans have disrespected them for too long. (NYT)

House Hunt Victoria, Pitch Doctoring, Leafs, and Climate Change

Monday morning news drop

• Yellen Won a Global Tax Deal. Now Comes the Hard Part. The Treasury secretary worked with finance ministers from the G7 to win support for a global minimum tax. But selling the idea to Republican lawmakers will not be easy. (New York Times)

• Employees Are Gaining Leverage Over Employers Right Before Our Eyes “Employers are becoming much more cognizant that yes, it’s about money, but also about quality of life.” (Upshot)

• Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal. (Bloomberg)

• How cybercriminals hold data hostage... and why the best solution is often paying a ransom Targets have included hospitals and municipalities, but the FBI says anyone on the internet should expect to be attacked by cybercriminals. (60 Minutes)

• How SoundScan Changed Everything We Knew About Popular Music Thirty years ago, Billboard changed the way it tabulated its charts, turning the industry on its head and making room for genres once considered afterthoughts to explode in the national consciousness. (The Ringer)

• The World’s Best Hope to End the Pandemic Still Needs More Doses The nonprofit Covax, which distributes Covid vaccines to mostly poor countries, has been saying for a year no one is safe until everyone is. Rich countries may finally be getting the message. (Businessweek)

• ‘This Should Be the Biggest Scandal in Sports’ The inside story of how rampant pitch-doctoring in MLB is pumping pitchers up and deflating offenses. (SI)

• Fixing the Leafs: Why trading Morgan Rielly should be on the table. And what if Mitch Marner is their DeMar DeRozan? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Yet Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan and general manager Kyle Dubas plan to bring back essentially the same team — certainly the same core — that has disappointed fans in the playoffs for five years now. They’re expecting different results (Toronto Star)

• The World’s Northernmost Town Is Changing Dramatically Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (Scientific American)

• Sir David Attenborough explains what he thinks needs to happen to save the planet The legendary wildlife filmmaker tells Anderson Cooper why urgent action on climate change is crucial and why we need to save nature in order to save ourselves. (60 Minutes)

• Are the rungs in the property ladder growing further apart? You’ll often hear said that you want to get on the “property ladder” as quickly as possible. Buy a starter property, then ride any price gains upward and upgrade the house when you can. Is that really true? And do price gains help you upgrade to the next house? Let’s take a look. (House Hunt Victoria)

Videos of the Week, Home Costs, Harley Davidson, and Kyrie Irving on a Skateboard

Friday morning news drop and videos of the week

• Building a Home in the U.S. Has Never Been More Expensive From lumber to paint to concrete, the cost of almost every single item that goes into building a house in the U.S. is soaring. In some cases, the price increases have topped 100% since the pandemic began. Fom rock-bottom mortgage rates to city dwellers’ rush to the suburbs to shortages of materials—but the simplest explanation is that there is just too much demand for builders and their suppliers to handle. (Bloomberg)

• No More Bear Markets Remember when it took an hour to download a song? Remember when it took 6 months for a movie to go to DVD? Remember when bear markets used to last more than a few months? (Irrelevant Investor)

• A New Era Dawns for Harley-Davidson The feature-stuffed Pan America is a stark diversion for a company long associated with bulky, expensive cruisers. Early impressions suggest a potential blockbuster. (New York Times)

• How Covid Inspired a New Generation of Entrepreneurs The pandemic forced everyone to adopt new technology and rethink their jobs, spurring our economy to lean in to independent work. (Bloomberg)

• Commuting is psychological torture: Not doing that commute gave me 15 hours per week of my life back “I am never going back to that commute five days a week every single week again,” a friend told me recently. Before Covid he was spending about three hours a day in his car driving back and forth. When things started to shut down last year his employer was staunchly against people working from home at first, but before long it became unavoidable. (Welcome to Hell World)

• The Tyranny Of Time The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us. (Noema)

• Dunning-Kruger meets fake news: People who overrate their media saviness share more misleading material Inspired by the widespread sharing of blatantly false news articles, a team of US-based researchers looked into whether Dunning-Kruger might be operating in the field of media literacy. Not surprisingly, people overestimate their ability to identify misleading news. But the details are complicated, and there’s no obvious route to overcoming this bias. (Ars Technica)

Videos of the week

GoPro: DarkFEST MTB Course Preview 2021 - Gnarly train

Team Shredits Vol. I - Nic Court Nic rips some of his local favourites in the Cowichan Valley for Vol. I of the new Cowichan Cycles team "shredit" series.

BRANDON BEGIN - BMX PRO PART

Christian Rigal - 'STILL UNITED' Full Part

Primitive Skate | What the P-Rod? We are very proud to present Paul Rodriguez's newest video offering: "What the P-Rod?"

Ryan Decenzo's "Sender Bender" Part Ryan's been a heavyweight for over a decade, but his rampage is far from over. This part is loaded with enders, but his closing shot is in a league of its own. No wonder Phelper said, “This dude rules!"

NBA All Star Kyrie Irving Skateboarding - 2014 footage

Brooklyn Nets and Durant, Stock Market, Infrastructure, and German Renewable Energy

Thursday morning news drop

• Kevin Durant and (Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team of All Time The Brooklyn Nets were built to be an unbeatable superteam of eccentric basketball superstars. Will they dominate the N.B.A. playoffs? (New York Times)

• Your father’s stock market is never coming back With a Robinhood account, your first exposure to cryptocurrencies does not frame them as an unproven alternative to stocks. The two stand on equal footing. Coke and Pepsi. Feel like trading one or the other? Have at it, no difference. This is radically different from the experience of the Gen X and boomer investors logging in through Schwab, Fidelity, or Vanguard to check their balances or download a statement. (Fortune)

• How to fix America: Take a road trip from New York to California to see infrastructure projects with the potential to make cities more livable and equitable. (Bloomberg)

• Billionaires are racing to sidestep President Biden’s plan to raise their taxes How Silicon Valley might beat the Tax Man. (Vox)

• What Germany Can Teach America About Renewable Energy Bringing energiewende across the Pacific—this time with nuclear in the mix. (Slate)

• ‘We’re Not Going to See Tankers in Active Pass Ever Again’ Advocates celebrate after officials publicly ban tankers carrying dangerous cargo in the narrow passage. (Tyee)

• Soft skills and hard times: Female leadership during COVID he shift from head to heart is not novel to human resources, but construction, a big and bold industry in many respects, has been slow to recognize the value of soft skills. In many cases, it has been even slower to shed the antiquated approach of authoritarian leadership. This changed last year when COVID-19 forced leaders to take extraordinary efforts to keep job sites not just physically safe, but psychologically safe. (On-Site)

Mortgage Stress Test, Big Tobacco and Fake News, Fairy Creek, and Supply Chain Attacks

Wednesday morning news drop

• Tougher mortgage stress test shaves up to 5% off some homebuyers' purchasing power

  New rule could reduce the mortgage you qualify for by between $14,000 and $47,000 (Financial Post)

• How Big Tobacco Set the Stage for Fake News A coordinated program of public deception that spanned four decades has become a template for modern disinformation (Walrus)

• Worsening opioid crisis taking outsized toll on Ontario’s construction workforce An “increasingly volatile” unregulated drug supply is among the reasons cited for the significant increase in opioid-related deaths in Ontario during the pandemic. (On-Site)

• The Covid Trauma Has Changed Economics—Maybe Forever Policymakers learned the lessons of 2008 and deployed a wider set of tools to help repair the damage from Covid. They know how to create a recovery, but can they manage the boom? (Bloomberg)

• Americans Don’t Want to Return to Lousy Low Wage Jobs The majority of the jobs that aren’t back to prepandemic work force levels are very low-income jobs; they are what the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, which I cocreated, calls low-quality jobs. (New York Times)

• Hacking: What Is a Supply Chain Attack? From NotPetya to SolarWinds, it’s a problem that’s not going away any time soon. (Wired)

• How Electric Car Designers Are Reimagining Iconic Grilles With their electric vehicles, BMW, GM and Ford are re-inventing the grille in ways both familiar and strange. (Bloomberg)

• Three Days in the Theatre of Fairy Creek The drama playing out today was set in motion 150 years ago. One person can change the ending. (Tyee)

• The World’s Northernmost Town Is Changing Dramatically Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (Scientific American)

House Hunt Victoria, Investing, Crypto Craze, and the Democratic Collapse

Tuesday morning news drop

• How to Navigate the 'Great Reset’ The closest parallel is the post-World War II era, which led to massive economic and societal changes. (Bloomberg)

• Unloved 60/40 Strategy Needs a Modern Makeover to Win Over Skeptics After half a century, the venerable investment allocation formula is showing some signs of age. But that doesn’t mean retail investors need to start from scratch. (Bloomberg)

• 200+ Years of Asset Class Returns There is a very good case to be made that returns over the next 50-100 years will be lower than they’ve been over the past 50-100 years. There’s simply more knowledge about the markets now, an implicit backstop from the Fed, lower interest rates and ever-increasing valuations. On the other hand, costs have never been cheaper, the barriers to entry to get invested have never been lower. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• $ASS Coin Billionaire: Tales From the Fringe of the Crypto Craze Meet the thrill-seeking traders who are prowling for profits in the wildest corners of the market — all in search of the next big coin. (Bloomberg)

• iTrapped: All the things Apple won’t let you do with your iPhone Have you ever tried to swap Siri for a better voice assistant on your iPhone? Don’t bother, you can’t. Tried to buy e-books from the Kindle app? Can’t do that, either. Send iMessages to someone with an Android phone? Nope. Backup your iPhone to Google Drive? Nope. Get your own iPhone repair parts from Apple? Nope. Transfer your digital life to a different kind of smartphone? When you buy an iPhone, it isn’t really yours. (Washington Post)

• If Democracy Is Dying, Why Are Democrats So Complacent? Democrats are unwilling to match their language of urgency with a strategy even remotely proportional to it. (The Atlantic)

• Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? “I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we’re in.” (Vox)

• Why Are So Many Albertans Vaccine Hesitant? Jason Kenney modelled a mistrust of science and journalism — and COVID is just the latest way it’s backfiring. (Tyee)

• Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market Pick a housing statistic at random, and it’s probably setting an all-time record. Home prices: record high. Inventory: record low. Percentage of homes selling above asking price: record high. Average time on market: record low. (The Atlantic)

• May – Mixed signals in the market May ended with 1049 sales, 1333 new listings, and 1450 properties on the market. That’s the lowest level of inventory for any May on record (second lowest was 1896 in May 2017) combined with the second highest sales rate. (House Hunt Victoria)

Residential Schools, Parking Destroys Cities, Johnny Knoxville, and Crypto Memes

Monday morning news drop

• Why so many children died at Indian Residential Schools At some schools, annual death rates were as high as one in 20 (National Post)

• Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy Operation Warp Speed was a triumph of public health policy. But it was also a triumph and validation of industrial policy. OWS shows what the U.S. government can still accomplish when it comes to tackling a seemingly unsolvable technological challenge. It demonstrates the strength of the U.S. developmental state, despite forty years of ideological assault. (American Affairs Journal)

• How Parking Destroys Cities Parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, subordinating density to the needs of the car. (The Atlantic)

• Johnny Knoxville’s Last Rodeo He’s been offering up his pain in this fashion for 20 years, ever since he first flung himself, human-cannonball-style, into the center ring of the great American pop-cultural circus. Jackass, the stunts-and-pranks television show that he cocreated and starred on, ran for only three seasons on MTV, but with time it came to occupy an unusually influential position in our collective consciousness—an improbable achievement given what the show consisted of. As he prepares to release his final Jackass film, the stuntman takes stock of a surprisingly long, hilariously painful, and unusually influential career. (GQ)

• Home Truths: How HGTV, Magnolia, and Netflix Are Building a Massive Space in the Stream America’s obsession with home renovation is a cash cow for streamers—though the neighbors might complain. (Vanity Fair)

• Can memes save crypto from reality? Can memes save crypto from reality? If you think you’re in on the crypto joke, the joke might be on you. (Vox)

Maple Leafs-Canadiens Game 7: Talk about it like a hockey expert (even if you're not) Despite the storied history of both clubs, the Toronto Maple Leafs host the Montreal Canadiens to face off in Game 7 for just the second time in 16 playoff series (CBC, CBCSports.ca, 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern). The winner advances to battle the Winnipeg Jets in the next round of the postseason. (CBC)

Videos of the Week, Office Space, Bitcoin, Inflation, Fast and the Furious, and Fairy Creek

Friday morning news drop and videos of the week

• Ready to Return: Fashion Rental Is Back The pandemic hit the world of clothing rental hard. Now, companies like Rent the Runway say the market is booming like never before. (New York Times)

• What’s the Point of the Office Again? The office is primarily a social space, not a productive one. Most humans aren’t solitary, like snow leopards, but more like birds. The office provides a place to ruffle plumage and establish a pecking order. (Bloomberg)

• Bitcoin’s Reliance on Stablecoins Harks Back to the Wild West of Finance To understand the weakness of stablecoins such as Tether, it is worth a quick history lesson from pre-Civil War American finance (Wall Street Journal)

• Why do people hate inflation? In theory, inflation could reduce normal people’s debt burdens while leaving their purchasing power unchanged. This is why economists used to think that inflation wasn’t a big deal. But in the 1970s, wages failed to keep up with inflation, reducing purchasing power. (Noahpinion)

• I Watched All the Fast and the Furious Movies in A Week. The problem with the Furious series: I very much want to write it off as blindingly stupid, but every now and then it will do something delightful or brilliant or downright heartwarming. Take its treatment of women – a universally problematic issue for the entire genre, the films aren’t entirely terrible with their portrayal of female characters. (The Everywhereist)

• The Fairy Creek blockaders: inside the complicated fight for B.C.’s last ancient forests For eight months a small group of protesters have successfully prevented logging company Teal-Jones from accessing forest on Pacheedaht territory, exposing tensions that can exist at the intersection of Indigenous land rights, economic opportunity and the urgent battle to protect what remains of the province's old growth. That group’s decision became a lightning rod for criticism, on the ground and online. Without the consent of the Pacheedaht, blockaders appeared to be reproducing an age-old mistake that had cut deep rifts in B.C.’s environmental movement: settlers claiming authority over land that doesn’t belong to them. (Narwhal)

Videos of the Week

29" POV on Hand Built Jump Trail! Top to bottom lap on my hand built trail 'Mayday'.

EMPTY SPACES - EMIL JOHANSSON Empty Spaces - In partnership with SRAM and RockShox. During winter, this park is a regular ride spot for me. I've been riding there since 2015 and it was where I filmed my previous skatepark edit "XXII.XI".

Island Vibes Feat. Elliot Jamieson and Lucas Cruz Deep in the untamed stands of Black Cottonwood and Western Hemlock, Norco Factory DH Team riders Elliot Jamieson and Lucas Cruz forge a bond on the trails of Mt Prevost, high above the Georgia Strait on Vancouver Island.

S&M BMX - Aryei Levenson 2021 Our first round draft pick Aryei Levenson came to California and went crazy for 3 days filming a whole video part. Kid's gonna be spooky good - shiiiit, he already is.

Ryan Decenzo's "Sender Bender" Part Ryan's been a heavyweight for over a decade, but his rampage is far from over. This part is loaded with enders, but his closing shot is in a league of its own. No wonder Phelper said, “This dude rules!"

Dalton Dern's "Florida Man" Tactics Part Dalton’s stunts defy reasoning, whether hucking a McTwist in a ditch or charging handrails like a madman. Only in Florida...

Rafa Cort's "Dear Gate" Element Part Rafa rips through Spain and a plethora of European dream spots with quick feet and the pedal to the floor. Enjoy the ride.