Inflation, Electric Cars, Lithium, and NIMBYism in Silicon Valley

Wednesday morning news drop

• Inflation in Canada falls to 7.6% in first decrease in a year Rates down from June's 39-year high of 8.1 per cent (CBC)

• How Inflation Can Be Both 0% and 8.5% at the Same Time Consumer prices didn’t rise in July. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not rising. Is inflation now 0%? (Bloomberg)

• The Market’s Peak Inflation Story Fights the Fed There’s no sign the Fed will change its mind and agree that rates should come down again next year. (Wall Street Journal)

• Hidden inside the Inflation Reduction Act: $20 billion to help fix our farms Farming destroys the environment. Biden’s inflation bill could help blunt the impact. (Vox)

• How the Inflation Reduction Act might affect you — and change the U.S. The package, while smaller than Democrats’ initial ambitions, would transform huge sectors of the U.S. economy and affect millions of Americans (Washington Post)

• You can make any piece of data look bad if you try: Let’s review 9 unsettling market observations that miss the point. (TKer)

• Chinese Shun Debt and Pile Up Savings, Threatening Global Growth Engine Households downbeat about their prospects are retrenching, with consequences for local giants as well as multinationals. (Businessweek)

• The Place With the Most Lithium Is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution: A California-sized piece of South America is stifling production of the metal at a time when battery makers desperately need it (Wall Street Journal)

• For Electric Vehicle Makers, Winners and Losers in Climate Bill: Carmakers may need several years to revamp their supply chains to meet new rules, but the legislation is still seen as a win for electric vehicles. (New York Times)

• Why renewable subsidies are better than carbon taxes: Democrats got this one right, and economists were left in the dust (Noahpinion)

• The Secret Life of Leftovers. Cheese, curry, beer: We can thank our ancestors who put food scraps to creative use. What we’re leaving our children is garbage. (New Atlantis)

• The Summer of NIMBY in Silicon Valley’s Poshest Town: Moguls and investors from the tech industry, which endorses housing relief, banded together to object to a plan for multifamily homes near their estates in Atherton, Calif. (New York Times)

• VC Billionaire Marc Andreessen and Ultra-Wealthy Neighbors Thwart Housing in California Town: Andreessen has been a critic of anti-housing zoning in the past. (Bloomberg)

• The Yankees’ Dream Is a World Series. Their Nightmare Is Aaron Judge on the Mets. A star outfielder bets on himself and delivers the season of a lifetime. Someone’s going to pay. (Wall Street Journal)

• Wall Street, Like the Climate Bill, Bets on Both Green Energy and Fossil Fuels Many investors continue to back oil-and-gas companies, predicting they will make money for years to come and will control emerging energy technologies (Wall Street Journal)

Bear Markets, Home Prices, Air Conditioning, and Electric Cars

Tuesday morning news drop

• When is a Bear Market Over? Like many things in the market, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for this kind of thing, especially in real-time. Let’s look at the 2008 scenario as an example. The S&P 500 topped out in early October 2007 and bottomed in March 2009. On a price-only basis, the index didn’t reach those 2007 highs again until March 2013: (Wealth of Common Sense)

• Home-Price Skid Hits Four Months Amid Steep Bank of Canada Rate Hikes Benchmark prices drop 1.7% in July, with sales down 5.3% Weakness begins to spread beyond Toronto and surrounding area (Blomberg)

• The rise of the side startup: Remote workers are starting new businesses behind their bosses’ backs (Vox)

• The search for an AC that doesn’t destroy the planet: The AC is about a century old. What comes next? (Recode)

• Why Charging a Car Needs to Be as Easy as Filling Up With Gas: Long queues and buggy apps add to range anxiety for electric-car owners. (Bloomberg)

• Great American Road Trips Are Impossible for Most Electric Cars. Of the 11 most popular road trips as determined by AAA, four have stretches of at least 200 miles between public fast-charging stations. (Bloomberg)

• How American Spaceflight Entered Its Era of Compromise: Looking back at the shuttle program at 50. (Slate)

• Looking for Clarence Thomas He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism of the past century. What happened? (Esquire)

• 11 Reasons to Love a Station Wagon Ah, the station wagon: one of the building blocks of American family life. You might be familiar with modern varieties like the 2022 Subaru Outback or Volvo Cross Country, but this beloved vehicle has a long and rich history. Most adults born in the mid-to-late-1900s probably have plenty of great memories in one of these vehicles—whether in their family car or a friend’s parents’ car. The first ones came out in 1910 and were actually used around train depots because of their excellent storage capacity. (Auto Influence)

Spyware, Economy, the Job Market, Trump, and Alex Jones

Monday morning news drop

• Spyware is huge threat to global human rights and democracy, expert warns: Cybersecurity expert Ron Deibert to testify to Canadian MPs about troubling spread of invasive surveillance tools. (The Guardian).

• This 20% Nasdaq gain doesn’t mean we’re in a new bull market: Explosive rallies are actually more common in bear markets (Marketwatch)

• Is America’s Job Market “Too Good”? Federal Reserve officials want to reduce businesses’ demand for workers to put downward pressure on wage growth and contain inflation. Yet the pace of hiring remained strong as of mid-July. (The Overshoot)

• Does Crypto Have Any Good Use Cases? Besides making VCs richer, of course. (Nat’s Crypto Newsletter)

• YouTube Still Reigns as TikTok Surges Among Teen Social-Media Users, Survey Says More than a third of teens are on social media almost constantly, a Pew Research poll finds. (Wall Street Journal)

• 30 Things Donald Trump Did as President You Might Have Missed Trump’s presidency may be best remembered for its cataclysmic end. But his four years as president also changed real American policy in lasting ways, just more quietly. We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters to recap some of the ways Trump changed the country while in office, for better or worse. (Politico)

• Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals How Mark Milley and others in the Pentagon handled the national-security threat posed by their own Commander-in-Chief. (New Yorker)

• Alex Jones’ origin story: 4 moments that shaped the ‘multiplatform prophet of paranoia’ His misinformation brought him fame. Now, it is at the center of the Sandy Hook defamation trial. (Grid)

Videos of the Week, Private Equity, Lithium Batteries, and Serena Williams

Friday morning news drop

• Private Equity Doesn’t Want You to Read This: Not only do private equity partners make money even if their companies blow up; they also get a pretty good deal from the government on what they earn. Private equity funds generally charge their investors two different fees: a management fee of 2 percent of invested assets per year (funds are held for an average of about six years), and a “carried interest” fee that is 20 percent of any investment gains realized in the fund.(New York Times)

• Ready or not, the supply chain transformation is underway. The dream of untrammeled global growth and trade has been cut short by supply chain snags that are now familiar to CEOs and everyday consumers alike. These disruptions are a problem not only structurally, but also strategically. Decades spent building global supply chains tuned for just-in-time performance have left companies vulnerable to shortages, geopolitical uncertainty and faster shifts in consumer demand. (The Hill)

• Sam Taggart’s Hard Sell: A door-to-door salesman’s quest to rebrand his profession. (New Yorker)

• The Place With the Most Lithium Is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution: A California-sized piece of South America is stifling production of the metal at a time when battery-makers desperately need it. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Russia Took Over Ukraine’s Internet in Occupied Territories: Occupied Territories (New York Times)

• Serena Williams Leaves Tennis Just as She Played: On Her Own Terms Williams brought her own distinctive flair to tennis, challenging norms that governed fashion, power, decorum, race and gender. By being herself, Williams’s reach far exceeded the game. (New York Times)

Videos of the Week

Private Equity, NIMBYs, Cars, and the Manual Transmission

Thursday morning news drop

• What Private Equity Firms Are and How They Operate Private equity firms have grown substantially since the 1980s and now manage more than $6 trillion in assets in the United States. Their presence has affected industries from hospitals to fisheries. (Propublica)

• The Tech That Tries to Tackle NIMBYs: City officials are using digital simulations and other online tools to ease contentious public debates over new development and street changes (Bloomberg)

• When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders: To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom. (MIT Press)

• That Dinner Tab Has Soared. Here Are All the Reasons. At restaurants around the country, staff shortages, supply-chain logjams, the Ukraine war and other forces have driven up the price of nearly everything. (New York Times)

• Economic Misconceptions of the Crypto World: It’s helpful to take a hard-nosed look at some of the economic stories that are floating around there in the crypto world. These stories are hard to pin down precisely, because — crypto being the decentralized enterprise that it is — there is no one authority that tells you what to think about Bitcoin or the Metaverse etc. Still, Cash isn’t savings, Scarcity doesn’t create value. (Noahpinion)

• Blame Election Deniers for Faltering Consumer Sentiment Measures that track confidence in the economy are being skewed downward by politically disgruntled Americans. (Bloomberg)

• The End of Manual Transmission: Stick shifts are dying. When they go, something bigger than driving will be lost. (The Atlantic)

• Inside Canada’s first Ace Hotel Featuring local art, custom-made furnishings and rooms designed to feel like urban cabins (Toronto Life)

• What I Learned as a Teenage Hip Hop Critic for Pitchfork At seventeen, I spread the gospel of underground rap to a wider audience. But BIPOC music journalists are no longer afforded opportunities like mine (Walrus)

• The Most Surveilled Place in America In the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, Border Patrol spent billions on high-tech surveillance. All the drones, cameras, and manpower do little to deter migrants from trying to cross the border — it only makes the journey deadlier. (Verge)

The Economy, Supply Chains, Newcastle United, Rolling Stones, and JCrew

Wednesday morning news drop

• The Reason Gas Prices Are Finally Plummeting: The most significant driver of the price drops? Demand, demand, demand. Multiple consumer surveys have found that the year’s cost surge motivated many American drivers to reconsider their primary means of transport—and to drive much less overall. (Slate)

• Think 9% Inflation Is Bad? Try 90%. With the world grappling with rising prices, a tour through Argentina reveals that years of inflation can give rise to a truly bizarre economy (New York Times)

• Why the market is bouncing: The money has to go somewhere. The stock and bond markets, in combination, form an equilibrium, absent severe changes in the money supply or the overarching needs of the investing public. There is stasis. (The Reformed Broker)

• These Factors Outperform When the Dollar Appreciates: The last three times this has happened, large-cap and quality stocks have beaten the broader market. (Institutional Investor)

• How This Economic Moment Rewrites the Rules: Jobs aplenty. Sizzling demand. If the United States is headed into a recession, it is taking an unusual route, with many markers of a boom. (New York Times)

• The Michael Scott Economy: Why don’t I tell you my biggest weaknesses as an economy? Too many people have jobs and wages are rising too fast. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• A bunch of charts showing how supply chains have improved: But is supply improving or demand deteriorating? Supply chains have improved considerably in recent months. The New York Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index1 — a composite of various supply chain indicators — fell in July to its lowest level since February 2021, meaning supply chains are easing. (TKer)

• What’s Really Going on With Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump: The network does what its viewers want, not vice versa. (Slate)

• A Different Kind of Moneyball: Newcastle United Is Finding Out What Winning in the Premier League Really Costs Last year, Newcastle United, the deeply beloved and perpetually mismanaged team from North East England, was taken over by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Now fans are finding themselves in the middle of a debate around money in the game, and what a foreign country wants with a football club. (Ringer)

• ‘My Life as a Rolling Stone’ shines a stadium-worthy spotlight on the Rolling Stones. “The Beatles: Get Back” set a very high bar for musical nostalgia, but “My Life As a Rolling Stone” is no slouch, breaking the four band members into their own dedicated hours, with extensive access to the three surviving members and a who’s who of rock voices serving as the chorus. Yes, you can’t always get what you want, but for Rolling Stones fans, this should come close. (CNN)

• The New J.Crew: At its peak, J.Crew might have been the most important menswear retailer in America. Then it went bankrupt and tasked downtown New York designer Brendon Babenzien with bringing it back. In a world that’s gone crazy for streetwear and high fashion, can he make oxford shirts and khaki pants cool again? (GQ)

Eventually the cash has to go somewhere…

Ransomware, the Housing Crisis, Crypto, and the Anti-Vax Movement

Tuesday morning news drop

• A ransomware attack cost this entrepreneur a year of his life and almost wrecked his business: When ransomware bandits struck his business last June, encrypting all his data and operational software and sending him a skull-and-crossbones image and an email address to learn the price he would have to pay to restore it all, Fran Finnegan thought it would take him weeks to restore everything to its pre-hack condition. (Los Angeles Times)

• New Zealand shows how a housing crisis can become a catastrophe New Zealand and Canada’s housing markets have much in common. They both have some of the least affordable homes in the world and both saw prices explode during the pandemic. (Globe and Mail)

• Corporate Stagflation Means Rising Sales With Flat Volumes It’s growth, but not healthy growth, and it doesn’t really help the economy. (Businessweek)

• US Inflation Peak in Sight But Debate Rages Over What Comes Next: Fed hopes to tame inflation without too much economic pain; Skeptics say it will take a recession to bring prices down (Bloomberg)

• You, Too, Can Strike It Rich on YouTube! A cottage industry is persuading people to spend thousands to create video businesses on YouTube. Disclaimer: It is harder than it looks. (New York Times)

• The Disastrous Record of Celebrity Crypto Endorsements: From Matt Damon’s infamous ad to Reese Witherspoon’s NFT partnership, celebrity crypto touts haven’t gone well for fans (Bloomberg)

• Terra $45 Billion Face Plant Creates Crowd of Crypto Losers VC firms, investors and startups are among the casualties The market downturn could chill white-hot valuations in crypto. (Bloomberg)

• The Metaverse Real Estate Boom Turns Into a Bust: The metaverse is in the midst of a real estate meltdown. Sales volumes and average prices for virtual land have plunged this year, part of a broader slide in crypto and non-fungible token prices. Soaring interest in virtual property spawned an industry that mirrors traditional commercial real estate—buyers develop land by adding virtual storefronts, and then sell or rent it to companies looking to set up shop as a marketing strategy or to sell things like clothing for online avatars. (The Information)

• The Anti-Vaccine Movement’s New Frontier: A wave of parents has been radicalized by Covid-era misinformation to reject ordinary childhood immunizations — with potentially lethal consequences. (New York Times)

• ‘Debt bomb’ risks: More than 40 nations are at risk of default — and that’s a problem for us all The world faces the possibility of a series of economic collapses that could destabilize the lives of millions of people. (Grid)

• It’s Getting Harder to Be a Woman in America The US welcomes the employment and economic advancement of women—yet doesn’t actually support them. We’ve finally hit a breaking point.(Businessweek)

• A Very Dangerous Place to Be Pregnant Is Getting Even Scarier: Texas leads the US in maternity ward closures, and nowhere is this more of an issue than in the western part of the state (Bloomberg)

• Trump Supporters Think They’re in a Fight to the Death: Fear, hate, and grievances animate the new Republican Party. (The Atlantic)

• Sneakerhead Accused of Running Huge Air Jordan Ponzi Scheme: Zadeh Kicks promised the hottest sneakers at discount prices. Buyers say they never got their shoes and are out millions of dollars (Bloomberg)

• The Perils of Audience Capture: How influencers become brainwashed by their audiences: We often talk of “captive audiences,” regarding the performer as hypnotizing their viewers. But just as often, it’s the viewers hypnotizing the performer. This disease, of which Perry is but one victim of many, is known as audience capture, and it’s essential to understanding influencers in particular and the online ecosystem in general. (The Prism)

The Stock Market, the Recession, and Central Banking

Monday morning news drop

• The stock market can be an emotional roller coaster. It shouldn’t be. There’s how you think about investment risk — and then how you feel about it. (Vox)

• Gen Z Knows What It Wants From Employers. And Employers Want Them. To tap into the creativity of younger workers, and to offset a labor shortage, companies are offering four-day weeks, club memberships and work-from-anywhere flexibility. (New York Times)

• Bank of England Gives a Lesson in Honest Central Banking: Analytical directness and intellectual honesty from monetary policy makers are inspiring. (Bloomberg)

• Blame History for Making Recession Calls So Hard: The National Bureau of Economic Research has been putting dates on downturns since 1929 — well before there was such a thing as gross domestic product (Bloomberg)

• Does This Look Like a Recession To You? Things are very weird right now. Contradictions abound. All of the confusion results from turning the economy off and back on again. 2020 threw a wrench in everything. Everything. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Londongrad is Falling Down: Inside London’s Struggle to Wean Itself From Russian Billions; Some say the uproar over sanctions unfairly targets elite U.K. citizens. Others are skeptical an oligarch diet can last. (Vanity Fair)

• U.S. Likely Didn’t Slip into Recession in Early 2022 Despite Negative GDP Growth A recession is often defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction—declining real GDP. The nation’s GDP fell 1.6 percent on an annualized basis in first quarter 2022 and was followed by a 0.9 percent drop in the second quarter. (Dallas Federal Reserve)

• Tales from the Thrifts: From savings-and-loan crooks to crypto hucksters (The Baffler)

• Inside Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis: But no matter where they ply their trade, and despite the technology they have on hand, these artists can’t always fix everything they touch. And what they cannot fix becomes a problem for the consumer, who ends up getting lower-quality visual effects for their dollar. Audiences have been exposed to enough shoddy digital effects this century that the term “CGI” itself now implies poor craftsmanship. This problem is so widespread in Hollywood, not to mention accepted, that producers have their own acronym for effects work that passes muster for them but might not for audiences: a final approval note of CBB, for Could Be Better.

• Who do we spend time with across our lifetime? In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone. (Our World In Data)

Videos of the Week, Investing, Baseball Stadiums, and Electric Vehicles

Friday morning news drop

• Pay Raises Really Are Tied To Switching Jobs The typical worker who changed jobs between April 2021 and March 2022 saw earnings jump by 9.7% from a year earlier, after accounting for inflation, according to the Pew Research Center. (CNBC)

• Is the US Economy in Recession? Here Are Eight Offbeat Indicators to Watch: From popping the bubbly to shopping for underwear, pundits look at alternative ways to measure sentiment. (Bloomberg)

• The Price of Admission: Down 5% months don’t happen very often but they’re not completely out of the ordinary. Over the past 96 years, on average, the stock market is down 5% or worse in a month about once a year. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• We Built This City High above street level, thousands of hard-hatted men and women are busy constructing the city’s new condos and office towers. Inside the gravity-defying lives of Toronto’s high-rise workers. (Toronto Life)

• The Baseball Stadium That “Forever Changed” Professional Sports Camden Yards, which opened 30 years ago this summer, is revered for its design and downtown location. But its influence—along with its lessons—extends beyond architecture. (Ringer)

• The Origins of Covid-19 Are More Complicated Than Once Thought Scientists used painstaking research, genomics, and clever statistics to definitively track two distinct strains of the virus back to a wet market in Wuhan. (Wired)

• What’s the Deal With Water Bottles? Once you start looking for drinks in standup specials, they’re everywhere … (New York Times)

• What Should a Nine-Thousand-Pound Electric Vehicle Sound Like? E.V.s are virtually silent, so acoustic designers are creating alerts for them. A symphony—or a cacophony—of car noise could be coming to city streets. (New Yorker)

• The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery The former UniEnergy Technologies office in Mukilteo, Wash. Taxpayers spent $15 million on research to build a breakthrough battery. Then the U.S. government gave it to China. (NPR)

Videos of the Week

Job Switchers, Stock Fundamentals, and Retail Inventory

Thursday morning news drop

• If This Is a Recession, We Might Not Know for Months As the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates in its fight against the highest inflation in more than four decades, economic indicators flash signs of a slowdown and questions abound over what is a recession and whether the U.S. has entered one. (Wall Street Journal)

• Things Are Clear as Mud This is the weirdest market and economic environment of my career. Michelangelo wouldn’t be able to paint a clear picture of it all. You should always be wary of people with strong opinions about the future, but maybe never more so than right now.

• Job Switchers Are Earning a Lot More Than Those Who Stay Even if you’re happy at your job, getting a new job for more pay is a good strategy as inflation eats into paychecks. (Wall Street Journal)

• Why Stocks Took a July Vacay From Fundamentals: A discouraging economy took a backseat to technical and relative valuations. Inflation will have a lot to say about how long that lasts. (Bloomberg)

• Retail’s ‘Dark Side’: As Inventory Piles Up, Liquidation Warehouses Are Busy: Consumers are buying fewer discretionary goods and returning more. To clear their shelves, retailers are selling to liquidators at steep discounts. (New York Times)

• Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy: Despite what Meta has to say. (The Atlantic)

• States With Abortion Bans Are Among Least Supportive for Mothers and Children They tend to have the weakest social services and the worst results in several categories of health and well-being. (New York Times)

• The Supreme Court Is Making America Ungovernable: The West Virginia v. EPA ruling signals a future in which no one in power has the ability to tackle the biggest issues society faces (The Atlantic)

• ‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracy Trump’s efforts to subvert the elections laid bare the system’s weaknesses, exposing it to greater exploitation (The Guardian)

• Made-in-Vietnam Electric Vehicles Are Heading to the U.S. Market VinFast is the latest startup to test American EV demand—and with a novel pricing strategy (Wall Street Journal)

• Inside Ferrari’s Plan to Enter the Electric-Car Market The luxury sports-car company aims to start selling a fully electric vehicle in 2025. Can it do that and still be Ferrari? (Wall Street Journal)

• Welcome to Chicago, Hot Dog Town, U.S.A. Just don’t even think about asking for ketchup. The Chicago dog has a special place in the city’s heart: a humble, affordable food that anyone can enjoy, across cultures, creeds and proclivities. With French fries, it’s lunch; on its own, a snack. A source of civic pride, the Chicago-style hot dog is a nexus for many people’s. (New York Times)

• Beavers are heat wave heroes Animals don’t have AC. But they have beavers. (Vox)

• The myth of Marilyn Monroe: how her ‘sex bomb’ image buries the truth Six decades on, the spectacle of Marilyn Monroe’s tumultuous life and death still holds us in its grip. With a major new biopic on the way, her biographer sorts fact from fiction. (The Guardian)