Interest Rates, Commodities, and Crypto

Monday morning articles

• Are Declining Interest Rates Responsible for Stock Growth? While declining interest rates have been responsible for stock growth (at least at the extremes), interest rate changes don’t always determine our investment destiny. What does though? Fundamentals:. (Of Dollars And Data)

• The Long-Term Wins: These periods do seem arbitrary but the changing of the calendar from one year to the next offers a good chance for market nerds like myself to update some long-term market data. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Tight Money Will Pressure Startups to Sell in 2023: Startups holding out for an IPO or Figma-scale acquisition are likely to be disappointed (Businessweek)

• Commodities have largely erased last year’s spike: Commodity prices got heaps of attention on the way up, but their drop hasn’t generated anywhere near as many headlines. That suggests to us that there is a lot of room for sentiment to catch up to reality on this front, boosting stocks along the way. (Fisher Investments)

• Mapping the Death of NYC’s Cheap Slice: Inflation is ratcheting up the price of pizza in New York City. One man tracked more than 450 purchases over eight years to quantify the troubling trend. (CityLab)

• The Crypto Collapse and the End of the Magical Thinking That Infected Capitalism: Dogecoin. WeWork. The Metaverse. It was an era of illusory and ridiculous promises. (New York Times)

• EVs Made Up 10% of All New Cars Sold Last Year: Worldwide, sales of electric vehicles in 2022 passed 10% market share for the first time; 11% of total car sales in Europe (Plug-in hybrid vehicles were another >9%), EVs were 19% in China, and 5.8% in U.S. (up from 3.2% in 2021). (Wall Street Journal)

• 5 unintended consequences of the EV revolution: EVs are going to change our cars — and how we drive. (Vox) 

• The joy of sets: Why won’t our artistic-literary establishment recognise that there’s mystery, beauty and humanity in maths? (Prospect)

• Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I. As a new chatbot wows the world with its conversational talents, a resurgent tech giant is poised to reap the benefits while doubling down on a relationship with the start-up OpenAI. (New York Times)

• What Meta employees really think about their company’s brutal year: Recode obtained a recording of a Mark Zuckerberg Q&A and internal survey results that show how Meta’s struggles are impacting staff. (Vox)

• Two research teams reverse signs of aging in mice: But doubts remain about whether cell reprogramming technique could one day help humans. (Science)

• ‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’ There is risk in the wilderness — even in mild adventures — and yet we still seek to reason with it, to assign order to it, to control it, and to tempt it. (Longreads) see also An Analysis of Deaths in U.S. National Parks  (Panish Shea Boyle Ravipudi)

• Marcel Duchamp painted this explosive nude masterpiece. Then he quit. Modern art’s most influential trickster was hatched from the controversy surrounding “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). (Washington Post)

Living without plastic, Concrete, and Robert Plant

Friday morning articles

• Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic: It’s all around us, despite its adverse effects on the planet. In a 24-hour experiment, one journalist tried to go plastic free. (New York Times)

• How microplastics are infiltrating the food you eat: Plastic pollution is one of the defining legacies of our modern way of life, but it is now so widespread it is even finding its way into fruit and vegetables as they grow. (BBC)

• UPS and the Package Wars: The company offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs and is enjoying record profits. So why is a strike looming? (New Yorker)

• Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. A growing chorus of architects argue we have to build differently with concrete — which contributes to global warming and environmental destruction on a scale that’s hard to fathom — or perhaps abandon it altogether. (Noema)

• Inside The Secretive World Of Shark Tank Deals: Who The Real Winners Are. An analysis of 112 businesses offered deals on seasons 8 through 13 of the show reveals that roughly half those deals never close and another 15% end up with different terms once the cameras are turned off. (Forbes reached out to roughly 300 or so companies that got deals but only 112 responded). A similar 2016 survey that Forbes conducted found that about 73% of the deals in the first seven seasons either changed or fell through. (Forbes)

• Not so faux: How the ‘fake’ fur industry is secretly selling you real fur: Faux fur is a staple of the fashion industry. But what’s marketed as fake might actually be all too real. (Grid)

• Facebook’s Bridge to Nowhere: The tech giant had already remade the virtual world. For a brief period, it also tried to make it easier for people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up. (New York Times)

• Slide in measles vaccination rate among kindergartners raises alarm: New data underscores concern that parental resistance to childhood immunizations may fuel a resurgence of the disease in the U.S. (Washington Post)

• The Four Horsemen of the TV Apocalypse: What Happens When Barriers to Entry Fall in Content Creation Too? (Medium)

• Robert Plant on the Finest and Most Questionable Music of His Career: He was, of course, the platonic ideal of a rock front man with Led Zeppelin until their disbandment in 1980 — his voice a golden hammer, and his lyrics an oft-inscrutable scripture of raw power, for his soul partners Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. In the ensuing decades, Plant’s momentum was infinite, even when his music digressed and changed with purpose when he embarked on his journey as a solo artist in 1982. As he likes to put it, “I’ve sort of woven my way through it all.” (Vulture)

Inflation, Crypto Tax Shelters, and Elon Musk

Thursday morning articles

• Fed Officials Ask How to Better Understand Inflation After Surprises: Federal Reserve officials, including Lisa Cook, a board member, are wrestling with how to think about price increases after 18 months of rapid change. (New York Times)

• Used-Car Prices Are Finally Dropping:  Covid-era production snags and supply constraints for new rides sent prices for older ones skyrocketing. No longer. (Businessweek) see also The Secret That Explains the Price of the Cheapest Tesla: Elon Musk’s always-changing prices are unique in the auto world, and will be under the microscope like never before. (Bloomberg)

• Crypto’s Tax Shelter Problem: Playing hide-and-seek from tax havens is hardly a new game, but for blowup-prone crypto companies and investors, it’s an increasingly problematic one. (Institutional Investor)

• Fed’s No-Rate-Cut Mantra Rejected by Markets Seeing Recession: Policymakers insist rates will be held high into 2024; Markets see rate cuts later in 2023 as economy deteriorates (Bloomberg)

• Vancouver Skyscraper Twists Around Zoning Restrictions: Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group used limitations to its advantage with the gravity-defying Vancouver House apartment tower. (CityLab)

• 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023: Every year, we pick the 10 technologies that matter the most right now. You’ll recognize some; others might surprise you. We look for advances that will have a big impact on our lives and then break down why they matter. (MIT Technology Review)

• Buffett Profile from 1979: “The investor’s investor” “I cannot promise results, but I do promise this: a. Our investments will be chosen on the basis of value, not popularity. b. We will attempt to reduce permanent capital loss to a minimum.” (Neckar’s Minds and Markets)

• RIP meme stocks. You were terrible investments: Unlike other bubbles, meme-stock mania didn’t really help anyone, including companies like Bed Bath & Beyond and GameStop. (Fast Company)

• Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It? With billions of dollars available to improve transportation infrastructure, states have a chance to try new strategies for addressing congestion. But some habits are hard to break. (New York Times)

• The Markets Are Locked in a Game of Chicken With the Fed: Investors are betting the Fed will cut interest rates as early as the second half of the year. The central bank says otherwise. (Wall Street Journal)

• Elon Musk Might Never Be the World’s Richest Person Again: It’s not just that he became the first person in history to have $200 billion erased from their personal fortune. At this point, the bedrock of Musk’s fortune is his 42% ownership of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the rocket launch company he founded in 2002, before he got involved at Tesla. (Bloomberg)

• What If Tesla Is…Just a Car Company? Tesla’s aura as an elite tech disrupter dims as EV competitors multiply and improve their offerings. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Dividends Juice Your Returns in the Stock Market: The price index has gone from a little less than 18 in 1928 to more than 3,800 by the end of 2022. That is good enough for a total return of more than 21,500% or an annualized 5.8% per year. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• How San Francisco Lost High Earners and Got Richer: The pandemic tech boom and a “donut effect” drove up average incomes in both expensive cities and less-pricey exurbs. (Bloomberg)

Wall Street Expectations, Federal Reserve , and F1

Wednesday morning articles

• Wall Street Sets Low Bar for Corporate Earnings Season: Analysts expect S&P 500 companies to report first year-over-year decline in quarterly earnings since height of pandemic. (Wall Street Journal)

• Value Stocks to Lure Investors During Grim Earnings Season: Majority of investors expect ugly earnings reports to drive S&P 500 lower. (Bloomberg)

• The Most Important New Inflation Indicator: Introducing the New Tenant Repeat Rent Index—A New Way of Measuring Housing Inflation. (Apricitas Economics)

• 50 Companies to Watch in 2023: From EBay to Porsche, keep an eye on these global stocks this year. (Businessweek)

• CES 2023’s Wildest Highlights: Flying Cars, Flying Boats and Folding Screens The world’s biggest consumer electronics show has brought plenty of TV, laptops and gaming gadgets to gawk at — plus some big surprises. (CNET)

• Why Does Private Equity Get to Play Make-Believe With Prices? Investors and managers are playing a dangerous game of “volatility laundering,” Cliff Asness writes. (Institutional Investor)

• The Fed May Finally Be Winning the War on Inflation. But at What Cost? There’s a good chance that the Fed could push the economy into recession. The pain will not be shared equally. (New York Times)

• Something big is happening in the U.S. housing market—here’s where 27 leading research firms think it’ll take home prices in 2023. For the first time in over a decade, residential real estate across the world has entered into a period of falling home prices. (Fortune)

• Rents Are Still Higher Than Before The Pandemic — And Assistance Programs Are Drying Up: While rents for new leases measured by Zillow and other apartment listing sites finally began dropping nationwide at the end of 2022, the dip came only after a year of historic, nationwide rent increases throughout 2021. (FiveThirtyEight)

• The Pandemic Was Good for Retailers. What Happens Next? Some bankruptcies are on the way, but maybe not a return to the bad old days of the 2010s. (Bloomberg)

• The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera: Young people are opting for point-and-shoots and blurry photos (New York Times)

• How Tall Is Too Tall? The rise and rise and rise of the supertall skyscraper. Hence the new category: The supertall superslim. (The Atlantic)

• F1 Want Women in the Cockpit For First Time Since 1976: With its new academy, the racing league is inviting women to train for the grand prix. (Bloomberg)

Recessions, Investing, Bull Markets, and Roman Concrete

Tuesday morning articles

• Economist Says His Indicator That Predicted Eight US Recessions Is Wrong This Year: Cambell Harvey’s work showed link between curve inversion and growth Strong labor demand, risk avoidance support US economy now. (Bloomberg)

• Wall Street’s sleuth of bears is growing: Stocks kicked off the new year on a positive note, with the S&P 500 climbing 1.4% last week. The index is now up 8.9% from its October 12 closing low of 3,577.03 and down 18.8% from its January 3, 2022 closing high of 4,796.56. Meanwhile, the market’s many bears got more company. (Sam Ro)

• Everything Is Up In This Bull Market: If you’re not making money in this environment, it’s not because it’s a “bear market”. Don’t be one of those investors left holding the bag in the few remaining stocks that are not working, while almost everything else is. (All Star Charts)

• Your Investing Strategy Just Failed. It’s Time to Double Down. The standard portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds just delivered one of its worst years in history. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad approach. (Wall Street Journal)

• Your stuff is actually worse now: How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products. (Vox)

• ‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word. The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot. But it comes with a slurry of difficult questions. (New York Times)

• Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia. (MIT)

• Is Chelsea target Enzo Fernandez worth £105million after only 80 senior matches? Within the space of six months, the 21-year-old went his first 22 matches unbeaten with his new club, announcing himself on the European stage by shining in midfield as Benfica topped a Champions League group featuring Paris Saint-Germain and Juventus, then broke into Argentina’s starting XI during the World Cup and immediately established himself as an indispensable contributor to a historic triumph in Qatar. (The Athletic)

Wall Street Expectations, Investing, and Joel Embiid

Monday morning articles

• Here’s (Almost) Everything Wall Street Expects in 2023: To kickstart the new year, Bloomberg News has gathered more than 500 calls from Wall Street’s army of strategists to paint the investing landscape ahead. And upbeat forecasts are hard to find, threatening fresh pain for investors who’ve just endured the great crash of 2022. (Bloomberg)

• Venture capital’s reckoning looms closer: Valuations on holdings will have to converge sooner rather than later with listed tech sector. (Financial Times)

• Institutional Failure: A Future of Finance Worldview: The human species has gotten good at solving big problems. Whether it’s taking down a woolly mammoth by working as a group or giving commands to a robot exploring a foreign world, scientists refer to this capability as “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition.” (ETF Trends)

• The Real Santos Shocker: Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat who lost to Santos, was a veritable oppo expert in a past life. So how come he failed to deliver the Santos bombshell himself? (Puck)

• Will Remote Work Continue in 2023? With recession worries growing, power may shift back to employers and threaten perks gained during the pandemic. (Bloomberg)

• The billionaire vibe shift: It was the year the billionaires showed who they really are. (Vox) 

• The ultrarich are getting cozy in America’s tax havens at everyone else’s expense: More states are slashing or eliminating taxes, lessening the burden mostly for the wealthy. What does that cost the rest of us? (Vox)

• The World’s Love Affair With Japanese Cars Is Souring: Brands like Toyota have been global favorites for decades. How did they get the shift to electric so wrong? (Businessweek)

• 5 ETF Predictions for 2023: 2023 marks the 30th anniversary for the US ETF industry (more on that in a moment) and I plan on going five for five this year. I can feel it. Following a highly impressive 2022, what will happen in the ETF world this year? First, a quick note: several of my predictions are more contingent than usual on financial market conditions. Obviously, forecasting markets is extremely difficult, if not impossible. (ETF Educator)

• Joel Embiid’s Process: How The 76ers Star Wants To Go ‘From Rich To Wealthy’ “From the early days, Jo was always incredibly inquisitive, asking you lots of questions, wanting to learn, trying to be a sponge to how he can grow,” says Rubin, who recalls Embiid coming to his office to observe meetings. “Different than a lot of NBA players, Jo is very financially disciplined. He may save more and invest more, and spend less, than maybe any player.” (Forbes)

Quantum Computers, Crypto, and David Beckham

Friday morning articles

• The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer: Such a device could help address climate change and food scarcity, or break the Internet. Will the U.S. or China get there first? (New Yorker)

• The Story of Japan’s Lost Decade: Japan’s Bubble-Burst: The Party That Wasn’t Supposed to End Uncovering Japan’s lost decade (1991-2001); The tragic tale of the economic bubble burst and its consequences. (Konichi Value)

• All The Ways That Crypto Broke in 2022: Fast forward a year, and the primary topics of conversation among even the most devout of the crypto faithful were more likely to be about Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto co-founder of the fallen FTX empire, or whether they’d ever retrieve the coins trapped on bankrupt exchanges and lending platforms after a series of big digital-asset collapses. (Bloomberg)

• How Not to Play the Game: Magic beans, Bahamian penthouses, old-fashioned fraud and other important SBF-inspired insights. A postscript to Bloomberg Businessweek’s The Crypto Story. (Businessweek)

• The most honest man in real estate thinks the housing market isn’t going to crash: Jonathan Miller is a real-estate appraiser who’s published monthly housing reports for 27 years. Everyone from The Wall Street Journal to The East Hampton Star quotes his data and analyses. Here’s how Miller, who doesn’t think the housing market is going to crash, became a beacon of trust. (Business Insider)

• Finding the First Americans: Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science and here’s why. (Aeon)

• He’s the Bad Boy of Chess. But Did He Cheat? An American teenager, Hans Niemann, defeated Magnus Carlsen, the world’s best chess player. Then Mr. Carlsen accused his opponent of cheating. It’s either overdue justice or paranoia. (New York Times)

• The Hidden Details Behind David Beckham’s MLS Contract That Earned Him $500 Million: David Beckham shocked the world when he left Real Madrid to join the LA Galaxy of Major League Soccer. He was just 31 years old and agreed to take a 70 percent pay cut. But here’s the part you probably didn’t know: Beckham’s MLS contract included two unique stipulations that eventually turned his $6.5 million annual salary into more than $500 million. It’s one of the most lucrative contracts in sports history. (Huddle Up)

Fall of FTX, Inflation, and Mbappé

Thursday morning articles

• The fall of FTX shocked everyone. Except this guy. The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby. (The Atlantic)

• Some Bosses Embrace Work From Home to Keep Wages Down: With potential hires in short supply, companies increase their recruiting in areas where pay is lower. (Businessweek)

• Stiglitz: The Causes of and Responses to Today’s Inflation: Today’s inflation is largely driven by supply shocks and sectoral demand shifts, not by excess aggregate demand. Monetary policy, then, is too blunt an instrument because it will greatly reduce inflation only at the cost of unnecessarily high unemployment, with severe adverse distributive consequences. (Roosevelt Institute)

• Inflation Forecasts Were Wrong Last Year. Should We Believe Them Now? Economists misjudged how much staying power inflation would have. Next year could be better — but there’s ample room for humility. (New York Times)

• How does the Consumer Price Index account for the cost of housing? Housing represents about a third of the value of the market basket of goods and services that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to track inflation in the Consumer Price Index. A rise in the price of shelter, the BLS label for housing, contributed to the increase in inflation in early 2022. Measuring changes in shelter costs is more difficult than measuring changes in the prices of, say, apples or tires. How the BLS currently measures changes in the cost of housing for both renters and homeowners. (Brookings)

• The Gamification of Everything Is No Fun: Adrian Hon’s book “You’ve Been Played” warns against the abuses of game logic in work and politics. (TNR)

• Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster Messed With the Wrong People: Data Analysts: I Knew You Were Trouble When I Logged In Taylor Swift fans are convinced a ticket sale screwed them over. Our data analysis suggests they’re right. (Slate)

• Karma Is a Second Chance at Taylor Swift Tickets Ticketmaster admits (sort of) that it screwed over loyal fans. (Slate)

• Why Musk’s meltdown matters. Musk’s tweet was dangerous, ignorant, and insulting to Dr. Fauci and LGBTQ people. Should we care? Why should we pay attention to a man-child who seems to delight in provoking people who care about democracy, truth, and decency? (Robert B. Hubbell Today’s Edition Newsletter)

• The Absurd Talent of Kylian Mbappé: The French star player has already proved that he’s one of the best in the history of the game. (The Atlantic)

Twitter, NFTs, Great Movies, and the Supreme Court Conservatives

Friday morning articles

• Why the Age of American Progress Ended: Invention alone can’t change the world; what matters is what happens next. (The Atlantic)

• Bored Ape Yacht Club Conquered NFTs. Can It Master the Metaverse Next? Two founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club talk to CNET about how BAYC became the poster child for NFTs — and what comes next. (CNET)

• Blue Bird vs. Cash Cow: Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase has become a big problem for Tesla. (Slate)

• What bodybuilders do to their bodies — and brains: Creating a physique that can win at the highest level of professional bodybuilding requires superhuman self-discipline, intense training and genetic good fortune. Increasingly, say the people familiar with the culture and its consequences, it cannot be done without illicit drugs and a willingness to push a body to — or past — its limits. (Washington Post)

• What Makes a Movie the Greatest of All Time? The much-respected Sight and Sound poll of the best films ever shows that what is valued onscreen has changed over time, sometimes radically. (New York Times)

• What Sam Bankman-Fried Got for His Baffling Media Blitz: The disgraced FTX founder didn’t help his case, and he probably made it worse. (Slate)

• The High Price of Bad Business: Corporate America’s Biggest Settlements: BP’s Deepwater Horizon to Bernie Madoff, these are some of the biggest payouts for everything from tax violations to insider trading.. (Businessweek)

• The Untold Story of the Insular Texas Family That Invaded the U.S. Capitol: The Munns became a national curiosity after five of them were indicted for participating in the insurrection. But the full scope of their malignant behavior is little known—including to the federal prosecutors tasked with investigating their crimes. (Texas Monthly)

• The 80-year-old book that explains Elon Musk and tech’s new right-wing tilt: The long shadow of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. (Vox)

• Elon Musk Is Turning Twitter Into a Haven for Nazis: Musk has welcomed neo-Nazis back onto the platform, engaged with them on his timeline, and posted multiple tweets that appeal directly to them. (Vice)

• The Corruption of Supreme Court Conservatives: The Court’s falling approval is worsened by conservative Justices’ blatant partisanship. Many of its decisions are untethered from any form of recognizable jurisprudence, and the contempt of conservative Justices for precedent is incomprehensible. The collapse of public approval for the Court – dismissed in arrogance by people like Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito – has nothing to do with disagreeing with “objective” decisions. Rather, it is a wide recognition that justices like Alito and Clarence Thomas consider themselves no different than lifetime senators, and don’t even bother to hide it. (The Threats Within)

Housing Crisis, Hot Wheels, Soccer, Messi, and Pele

Thursday morning articles

• What Would It Take to Turn More Offices Into Housing? Vast amounts of empty real estate are a crisis for building owners. But some politicians and business leaders hope they can be converted into something new — and transform downtown neighborhoods. (New York Times)

• Why Hot Wheels are one of the most inflation-proof toys in American history: Hot Wheels are a retail oddity. They remain one of the most affordable toys in the country at a time when inflation is chipping away at savings accounts and compounding credit card debt for many Americans. (NPR)

• Why does good news about the economy sound bad to the Fed? The complicated reason why could push us into a recession. Wages and employment are high — but so is inflation. (Grid)

• What if TikTok really just wants to sell you stuff? Understanding the appeal of adverts for adverts. (Financial Times Alphaville)

• Young people feel like they have no future due to climate change; we need to change the narrative: More than half of young people think “humanity is doomed” due to climate change. We need to reframe the narrative from doom and sacrifice, to one of opportunity. (Sustainability by numbers)

• How the Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions: The neural representations of a perceived image and the memory of it are almost the same. New work shows how and why they are different. (Quanta)

• Wiped out’: War in Ukraine has decimated a once feared Russian brigade: The bloody fate of the 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade is emblematic of Vladimir Putin’s derailed invasion plans. (Washington Post)

• The night Messi won the World Cup – told with some help from the man himself: An epic final showdown between Argentina and France delivers beyond expectations. (The Athleteic)

• Celebrating Pele, the greatest player in World Cup history: It is a matter of opinion whether Edson Arantes do Nascimento was the greatest footballer in the history of the world, but there’s little doubt he was the greatest footballer in the history of the World Cup. One simple fact concisely demonstrates that: Pele won it three times. No one else in history, man or woman, can match that. (The Athletic)