Jordan Sneakers, Stocks, Bonds, and Lil Dicky

Monday morning articles

• The Once and Future Sneaker King Like Michael Jordan himself, the Air Jordan 1 was an instant hit. But the sneaker’s renewed reign 35 years later isn’t just about greatness. It’s about the stories that build the myth. (Ringer)

• Would You Rather Outperform During Bull Markets or Bear Markets? It’s hard to believe how much brainpower, time, effort and money go into beating the market by hedge funds, mutual funds, separately-managed accounts and stock-pickers…and the vast majority of them fail at their stated goal. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Business of … Death: Why most American funeral parlors are family-owned and other fascinating insights—extreme embalming?!—from the burial economy. (Businessweek)

• Long Bonds Are No Longer for Fools: Prospects have improved for 30-year Treasuries. (Morningstar)

• People Are Investing in Bonds Again—Once They Figure Them Out: After years of low returns, bonds are paying real money again. But as investors are discovering, they aren’t exactly set-it-and-forget-it assets. (Wall Street Journal)

• 12 Important Lessons I Learned From “Just Keep Buying” Thew real purpose of investing: To live a life you wanna live. Money dominates our thoughts, but time is actually your most important asset. If you’ve already won the game, take your money off the table. (mr-stingy)

• Want to Beat the Stock Market? Avoid the Cost of ‘Being Human’  Professional fund managers labor under handicaps that individual investors don’t face. Make sure you manage your portfolio differently than they do. (Wall Street Journal)

• 17 Pop Culture Moments That Define The Covid Era: If you were putting together a time capsule to let people in 100 years know what living through this pandemic felt like, sure, you might include hand sanitizer and a surgical mask. But you must also include the theme song from “The White Lotus” and a group chat about Taylor Swift and an episode of “Love Is Blind” and the unexpected online drawing lessons from a famous children’s book author. As that author, Mo Willems, says below of the pandemic: “Science will get us out of this, but art will get us through it.”  (New York Times)

• Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result: Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You? Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it. (The Atlantic)

• America’s decline in life expectancy speaks volumes about our problems: Years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress, have given Americans the impression that the country is on the wrong track. Now there’s empirical data to show just how far the country has run off the rails: Life expectancies have been falling. (Los Angeles Times)

• The astonishing radicalism of Florida’s new ban on abortion: Ron DeSantis, gearing up for a presidential bid, signed the 6-week ban late Thursday night. (Vox)

• The Self-Proclaimed Genius of Lil Dicky: Is Dave Burd the greatest rapper alive? Unlikely. The comedic voice of his generation? Maybe. The star of one of TV’s most subversively hilarious hits? No doubt. A deep dive into the neurotically immodest mind behind FX’s ‘Dave.’ (Hollywood Reporter)

Economic Models, Viral Marketing,

Wednesday morning articles

• How Models Get the Economy Wrong: Seemingly complex and sophisticated econometric modeling often fails to take into account common sense and observable reality. (American Prospect)

• Six Ways Existing Economic Models Are Killing the Economy: The alleged science doesn’t match up to the real world. (American Prospect)

• The Age of Average. From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. Welcome to the age of average. (Alex Murrell)

• UBS Chairman’s Top-Secret Prep Paid Off in Credit Suisse Moment: Colm Kelleher was ready when a crisis of confidence that started in US regional banking spread to Switzerland. (Bloomberg)

• Want an A in His Class? You Had Better Go Viral. A marketing professor gave his students a challenge: If they made a video that got a million views, the final exam would be canceled. (New York Times)

• Grid-World: An obsession was born. I was intoxicated by graph paper. The emptiness of a totally blank page intimidated me by demanding that I make the first move, but graph paper invited my participation by steering my pencil in the grooves of its strictly regular lines. The grid was like a friend who had already done half the work for me. (alex miller’s garden)

• The Dog-Eat-Dog World of Kosher Pet Food at Passover: Their dogs aren’t Jewish, but observant pet owners still face issues finding kibble that is acceptable for the holiday. ‘We’re strict, but we love our pet.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• What happened in Wisconsin. Protasiewicz beat Kelly by nearly 11 percentage points, an impressive margin that was made possible by a record-breaking turnout. More than 1.7 million people cast ballots in the race this year, besting the 1.6 million that cast ballots in the 2020 race when there was also a presidential primary. (Popular.Info)

• The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough. The Nordic nation has been ranked the happiest country on earth for six consecutive years. But when you talk to individual Finns, the reality is a bit more complicated. (New York Times) 

• How to Want Less: The secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, money, or stuff. (The Atlantic)

• Could dinosaurs have grown any bigger? Titanosaurs were some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, but if the reign of the dinosaurs hadn’t been cut short by an asteroid, could they have evolved to be even bigger? (BBC)

Boston Bruins, Universities Failing Students, and Active Managed Funds

Tuesday morning articles

• The Boston Bruins just broke the NHL single-season wins record. Here's how they did it that was forecast to be mediocre has regular season for the ages (CBC)

• Why universities are failing to prepare students for the job market Research suggests university education not meeting basic expectations (CBC)

• The Active Management Delusion: Respect the Wisdom of the Crowd: “My basic point here is that neither the Financial Analysts as a whole nor the investment funds as a whole can expect to ‘beat the market,’ because in a significant sense they (or you) are the market . . . the greater the overall influence of Financial Analysts on investment and speculative decisions the less becomes the mathematical possibility of the overall results being better than the market’s.” (CFA Institute)

• Accessing Losses via Direct Indexing: Herein lies the huge advantage of direct indexing over owning ETFs and Mutual Funds: Accessing losers that would otherwise net out to zero. (TBP)

• Could Direct Indexing Lower Your Taxes? 8 factors to determine whether direct investing is right for you. (Morningstar)

• The Seven Virtues of Great Investors: Intelligence is “a trait more of the character than of the brain,” according to Benjamin Graham. It also is rooted in Curiosity, Skepticism, Independence, Humility, Discipline, Patience, and Courage. (Jason Zweig)

• ‘Pessimism of Disbelief,’ Illustrated: Sour sentiment and better-than-expected economic results are a normal bull market backdrop. (Fisher Investments)

• Manhattan’s Wealthy Homebuyers Lured Back by Luxury Price Cuts: Some of the first quarter’s biggest contracts came after significant seller discounts, which helped get the market moving. (Bloomberg)

• Got Milk? Not This Generation. Alarmed by dwindling sales to Gen Z, the dairy industry is going all out to get younger Americans on the milk train. (New York Times)

• Among all of his mistakes, don’t forget Elon Musk is singlehandedly crushing a big chunk of Internet research for no good reason: Access to Twitter’s API has been mostly free to researchers for more than a decade. So how does $210,000 a month sound? (Nieman Lab)

• Turbotax is blitzing Congress for the right to tax YOU: Lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry – wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax. (Pluralistic)

• Over 60 million Americans have taxes so simple the IRS could do them automatically “Automatic returns” could vastly simplify tax season for millions of people. (Vox)

• How good, really, was Pablo Picasso? The exemplary modern artist died 50 years ago this month, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess. (Washington Post)

Turbo Tax, Chat GPT, and Cherry Blossoms

Thursday morning articles

• What to Know About TurboTax Before You File Your Taxes This Year: Don’t get tricked into paying for tax prep if you don’t have to. Learn how the biggest tax preparation companies have suppressed free filling options for years. (ProPublica)

• The Bloomberg Terminal Just Got a ChatGPT-Style Upgrade: The new technology is designed to make searching the terminal simpler. (Institutional Investor)

• How Will AI Change Investing? I Asked a Chatbot: Are analysts toast? Will opportunities to find mispriced securities disappear? Is my fund bloated? ChatGPT kisses and tells. (Morningstar)

• Investors Sold REITs in Response to the Banking Crisis. They May Have Overreacted. “We are less focused on the risks to REITs and more focused on where private market property valuations are going,” says Cohen & Steers’ Rich Hill. (Institutional Investor)

• There’s Exactly One Good Reason to Buy a House: Owning a home won’t make you happy. Filling it with love will. (The Atlantic)

• How You Can Grab a 0% Tax Rate: The zero rate on investment income is often overlooked. Make sure it’s in your tax tool kit. (Wall Street Journal)

• Not even wrong: predicting tech: “That is not only not right; it is not even wrong” – Wolfgang Pauli. (Benedict Evans)

• Trump’s Net Worth Plunges $700 Million As Truth Social Flops: The former president’s fortune dropped from an estimated $3.2 billion last fall to $2.5 billion today. The biggest reason? His social media business, once hyped to the moon, has come crashing down, erasing $550 million from his net worth—so far. (Forbes)

• All the Big (and Small!) News From Watches & Wonders Geneva 2023: 2023 (Bloomberg) 

• The Best New Watch Designs of 2023: Here are the top timepieces from the annual Watches and Wonders trade show in Geneva. (Wall Street Journal)

• FLASHBACK: When right-wing pundits thought political hush money payments were a crime: “The facts are that he broke campaign finance laws and that he lied to cover it up,” Fox News’ Sean Hannity said. (Popular Information)

• Cornering Classic Cars: How a Midwestern Insurance Salesman Cornered the Classic Car Market: In two years, McKeel Hagerty has transformed his modest family business for vintage vehicles into a conglomerate with unprecedented control of the entire industry. (Bloomberg)

• He Wasn’t Thinking About Renting His Arizona Home. Then Rihanna Came Knocking. When a big event comes to town or vacation time rolls in, A-listers turn to the privacy, security and space of private homes. (WSJ)

• Apple’s New Classical Music App Is a Ton of Fun: It’s an exciting moment for classical music, and Apple’s new dedicated music streaming app is the perfect way to experience it. (GQ)

• Paradigms Gone Wild: The​ tragedy of Thomas Kuhn’s life was to have written a great book. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, when he was forty, and he spent the rest of his life distressed by its success. It has sold 1.7 million copies, and has been translated into 42 languages. Very few academic books sell in those numbers and scarcely any are still seen as state of the art sixty years after publication. (LRB)

• How Pro Wrestling Explains Today’s GOP: The battle between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump could split the party with surprising results, argues the author of a new book on Vince McMahon. (Politico)

• You Can Kiss Your Web Browser Goodbye: Welcome to the radical future of push media, where information cascades to you—and doesn’t need your clicks. (Wired)

• Why dinosaurs were terrible swimmers: They dominated earth, but not the oceans. (Popular Science)

• “It’s Not So Black and White”: Gisele Bündchen, Self-Professed “Witch of Love,” Talks About It All: The supermodel is super ready for her next act, as she enjoys the pura vida in Costa Rica. (Heads up, casting directors—she has superhero ambitions!) (Vanity Fair)

• The impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees: Players, pundits and fans complain bitterly that referees are getting worse each season – but is that fair? (The Guardian)

• A Collection of Cherry Blossoms: Spring started a little more than a week ago, and the Northern Hemisphere has begun to warm; flowers and trees are blooming. Gathered below are some recent images of people enjoying themselves among groves of flowering cherry-blossom trees in Tokyo; Munich; Washington, D.C.; and more—signs of warmer days to come. (The Atlantic)

Hot Ones, Chat GPT, and Bank Deregulation

Wednesday morning articles

• ‘Hot Ones’ Was a Slow Burn All Along: This YouTube talk show’s premise is simple: Disarm celebrities with deep-cut questions and scorchingly spicy wings. Nearly 300 episodes later, the recipe still works. (New York Times)

• Why One Firm’s 3,612% Return Is Drawing the Ire of Hedge Funds: Portfolio protection faces scrutiny just as market fears rise Taleb-advised Universa under fire for performance claims.  (Bloomberg)

• AQR: Emerging Market Stocks Have Best Return Profile in 20 Years: “Emerging risks aren’t what they used to be,” according to AQR’s Michele Aghassi and Dan Villalon. (Institutional Investor)

• Reimagining index funds: Can classic cap-weighted indices be improved? What if we no longer chase soaring winners and abandon tumbling losers, and instead choose stocks based on a more stable metric, namely, the size of the underlying business? (Financial Times Alphaville)

• Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words.”  This is reflected in their name: a “language model” implies that they are tools for working with language. That’s what they’ve been trained to do, and it’s language manipulation where they truly excel. Want them to work with specific facts? Paste those into the language model as part of your original prompt! (Simon Willison)

• A frenzy of deregulation killed Silicon Valley Bank: Late in 2018, two Trump-appointed banking regulators, Federal Reserve Vice Chair Randal Quarles and FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams, went on a nationwide tour to meet with regional bank examiners. If you’re looking for the roots of the banking crisis that took down Silicon Valley Bank and has rattled the entire financial sector for weeks, that’s as good a place to start as any. The officials’ message to the examiners was: Back off. (LA Times)

• How a Trump-Era Rollback Mattered for Silicon Valley Bank’s Demise: An under-the-radar change to the way regional banks are supervised may have helped the bank’s rapidly growing risks to go unresolved. (New York Times)

• A philosophical question about the Fed’s ‘mistake.’ Assuming the Fed hit the brakes on the economy when inflation started heating up in 2021, where would we be today? If such a move worked and inflation eased quickly, it’s likely the economy would be much weaker today. Tightening monetary policy is about cooling demand — and that means the labor market probably wouldn’t be as robust as it is today. Would everyone be OK with that? (TKer)

• The Electron Is Having a (Magnetic) Moment. It’s a Big Deal: A new experiment pulled off the most precise measurement of an electron’s self-generated magnetic field—and the universe’s subatomic model is at stake. (Wired)

• What Lights the Universe’s Standard Candles? Type Ia supernovas are astronomers’ best tools for measuring cosmic distances. In a first, researchers have managed to re-create one on a supercomputer, giving a boost to a leading hypothesis for how they form (Quanta Magazine)

• Would Life Be Better if You Worked Less? From part-time hours to four-day workweeks, Americans experiment with living more (Wall Street Journal)

• Why Are Public Restrooms Still So Rare? Cities in the U.S. and elsewhere have made strides, but challenges remain.(New York Times)

BMW M2 Coupe, 4Chan, Trump, and the AR-15

Tuesday morning articles

• The new M2 is for BMW’s biggest fans; it’s also the beginning of the end The new M2 is likely the last of its kind. Is it a worthy goodbye to straight-six engines, stick shifts and classic little gas-guzzling, driver-focused BMW coupes. RIP BMW (Globe and Mail)

• The Blast Effect: How bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart. (Washington Post)

• Hundreds Of Passengers Have Said They Were Sexually Assaulted On Cruise Ships. Their Stories Highlight Years Of Lax Security: Numerous passengers traveling on major cruise lines such as Carnival and Disney say in court documents that they were raped and assaulted — often times by crew members. (Buzzfeed News)

• How a Major Toy Company Kept 4chan Online: Documents obtained by WIRED confirm that Good Smile, which licenses toy production for Disney, was an investor in the controversial image board. (Wired)

• A State’s Choice to Forgo Medicaid Funds Is Killing Hospitals: ‘We’re Going Away’:  Mississippi is one of 10 states, all with Republican-led legislatures, that continue to reject federal funding to expand health insurance for the poor, intensifying financial pressure on hospitals. (New York Times)

• How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them: Internal documents and former company executives reveal how Cigna doctors reject patients’ claims without opening their files. “We literally click and submit,” one former company doctor said. (ProPublica)

• The long shadow of Covid-19 myths: Like in many countries, misinformation about Covid-19 has circulated widely in Morocco during the pandemic. Much of it came from the US and Europe. (BBC)

• My 6-Year-Old Son Died. Then the Anti-vaxxers Found Out. Opponents of COVID vaccines terrorize grieving families on social media. (The Atlantic)

• The Horrifying Epidemic of Teen-Age Fentanyl Deaths in a Texas County: Students have overdosed during class, in bathrooms, and in an elementary-school parking lot. (New Yorker)

• Why Tiny Ponds and Singing Frogs Matter So Much: We are facing nothing less than an existential crisis, and in that context the potential loss of a few amphibians in a few unprotected wetlands might not be the greatest source of grief in the world. These little vernal pools might seem expendable, hardly more than a storybook enchantment for children still enthralled to tales of princesses whose only reason to kiss a frog is to turn it back into a prince. (New York Times)

• How Did America’s Weirdest, Most Freedom-Obsessed State Fall for an Authoritarian Governor? A journey through Ron DeSantis’s magic kingdom (The Atlantic)

• The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists: Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it. (Scientific American)

• Meet Some Of Trump’s Guilty Friends: Join us on this walk down memory lane… (Talking Points Memo)

• The gun that divides a nation: The AR-15 thrives in times of tension and tragedy. This is how it came to dominate the marketplace – and loom so large in the American psyche. How the AR-15 became a powerful political, cultural symbol in America (Washington Post)

TikTok, Dungeons & Dragons, and the Masters

Monday morning articles

• The Battle Over TikTok Is Just Starting. Here Are the Potential Outcomes—and the Most Likely Winners. Americans spent 53 billion hours on TikTok last year, according to one Wall Street estimate. If the service is banned in the U.S., much of that time could go to Meta, YouTube, and Snap. What it all means for stocks. (Barron’s)

• Silicon Valley Bank’s risk model flashed red. So its executives changed it. Focused on profits, leaders made decisions that foreshadowed the bank’s surprise failure. (Washington Post)

• The Red Hot Rubble of East New York: One of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn is suddenly the focus of both private speculators and City Hall, which wants to build thousands of units of affordable housing there — and by announcing its plans is fueling a land rush. (New York Magazine)

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.” (Stephen Wolfram)

• ‘This is like a movie’: Ukraine’s secret plan to convince 3 Russian pilots to defect with their planes: their planes (Yahoo News)

• Your Brain Could Be Controlling How Sick You Get—And How You Recover: Scientists are deciphering how the brain choreographs immune responses, hoping to find treatments for a range of diseases. (Scientific American)

• The Twitter I Love Doesn’t Exist Anymore: At its best, the platform was a reminder that there are quick-witted and even wise people in the world with ideas to share. (The Atlantic)

• A Dumpling May Be Taiwan’s Most Potent (and Delicious) Soft Power Weapon: The restaurant chain Din Tai Fung’s founder created a global phenomenon, one serving of “xiao long bao” at a time. (Bloomberg)

• How Alvin Bragg Resurrected the Case Against Donald Trump: A year ago, the investigation into the former president appeared from the outside to be over. But a series of crucial turning points led to this week’s indictment. (New York Times)

• Dungeons & Dragons’ Epic Quest to Finally Make Money: With Honor Among Thieves soon to hit theaters, can Hasbro overcome 50 years of D&D business disasters without enraging its fan base? (Businessweek)

• What really goes on at the Masters champions dinner - According to those in the room From drinks and dirty jokes to stealing food off the plates of picky eaters, Masters champions describe the most exclusive dinner party in golf (Golf Digest)

Twitter, Banking Crisis, and Apple

Friday morning articles

• Twitter is dying: It’s five months since Elon Musk overpaid for a relatively small microblogging platform called Twitter. The platform had punched above its weight in pure user numbers thanks to an unrivaled ability to both distribute real-time information and make expertise available. Combine these elements with your own critical faculty — to weed out the usual spam and bs — and it could feel like the only place online that really mattered. (TechCrunch)

• Exodus From America’s Big Cities Slowed Last Year as Pandemic Receded: New census figures show suburbs and smaller metro areas claimed most U.S. growth. (Wall Street Journal)

• Is Coffee Bringing People Back to the Office? Data show workers are staying in the office for coffee and here’s why it may be part of return to office strategies. (Bloomberg)

• Remote Banking Crisis: Banks tried to kill remote work. Now, remote work is trying to kill banks. In 2021, banks tried to kill remote work. Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon called it “an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.” JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon declared he’s canceling all his Zoom meetings and expected the office to “look just like it did before.” In 2023, remote work is threatening to kill banks. Days after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, some media reports suggested remote work was to blame. (Dror Poleg)

• Apple Wants to Solve One of Music’s Biggest Problems: Forget the metaverse. The future is metadata. It’s how the world’s most valuable company built a better way of listening to Mozart and Beethoven. (Wall Street Journal)

• First Republic Bank is not currently looking for a buyer. Embattled First Republic Bank is no longer searching for a buyer as investment advisors and company executives seek to repair the company’s balance sheet before any sale might take place, FOX Business has learned. (Fox Business)

• 10 of the strangest merch items from companies that crashed: WeWork mugs for $500, FTX fortune cookies and Theranos gift cards offer souvenirs from recent business disasters. (The Guardian)

• What Broke Sweden? Real Estate Bust Exposes Big Divide At the heart of the country’s economic and social crisis is a broken housing market, which has amplified social divisions. (Bloomberg)

• The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat: Russian antiwar activists placed their faith in Telegram, a supposedly secure messaging app. How does Putin’s regime seem to know their every move? (Wired)

• DeSantis Fights for Everglades As He Neglects Climate Crisis: Picking environmental fights has paid off for Florida’s governor, who built a 2024 base with a unique mix of crusading for wetlands conservation and attacking ESG. (Bloomberg)

• Elusive ‘Einstein’ Solves a Longstanding Math Problem: And it all began with a hobbyist “messing about and experimenting with shapes.” (New York Times)

• Volcker Slayed Inflation. Bernanke Saved the Banks. Can Powell Do Both? In 140 years, American policymakers have never faced a banking crisis quite like this. (Bloomberg)

• A Tale of Two Housing Markets: Prices Fall in the West: While the East Booms In an unusual pattern, the 12 major housing markets west of Texas, plus Austin, saw home prices fall in January, while the opposite happened in the rest of the country. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Wall Street Became a Fancy Residential Neighborhood: The effort to repopulate downtown Manhattan has been a big success, but not for everyone. (Bloomberg)

• Why Investment Complexity Is Not Your Friend: When it comes to investing, keep it simple instead. (Morningstar)

• This Analyst Bootcamp Wants to Transform Training at Hedge Funds: Inspired by the Point72 Academy, Fundamental Edge aims to better prepare junior employees and career-changers for the demanding industry. (Institutional Investor)

• Traders Go Long Treasuries After Hedge Funds Unwind Short Bets: Citigroup model shows some positioning has flipped long Speculators covered SOFR, two-year shorts from record level. (Bloomberg)

• How Microsoft became tech’s top dog again: After a lost decade in which it flailed and lost its prominence in the world of tech, Microsoft is again on the rise — thanks to ChatGPT and the company’s focus on AI. (Computerworld)

• Why are young people driving less? Evidence points to economics, not preferences: Research indicates that it is changes in the circumstances of young adults that explains most of these trends. Neither better urban policy nor generational change is likely responsible for these changes—at least not yet. (Brookings)

• China Takes Its Climate Fight to the Rooftops: One in five solar panels installed worldwide last year were mounted on a Chinese roof, putting households at the forefront of efforts to decarbonize a top emitter. (Bloomberg)

• Steve Cohen’s Amazin’, Maddening, Money-Losing Bid to Own New York: Once a symbol of Wall Street excess, Cohen has invested lavishly in the Mets, becoming the most beloved billionaire in Queens. Is that enough to reverse team history? (New York Times)

Internationally Trained Doctors, Chat GPT, and the Federal Budget

Thursday morning articles

• It hurts to say bye to my daughter and fly to the U.S. But I can't find work as a doctor in The path for an internationally trained physician like myself is not easy (CBC)

• Go West, young banker! From Manifest Destiny to Big Tech, Silicon Valley Bank is a case study in the how the West was spun (Business Insider)

• ChatGPT: Keep Talking, and Nobody Explodes: There are a bunch of other things going on here, but at the core, the model determines, in order, each of the most likely words to follow another word in a fragment. It does this by using an enormously complex and yet shockingly elegant set of functions that parse: What’s statistically the most likely word to follow “is” based on reading everything ever written? (ETF trends)

• Stability Breeds Instability: In the past three weeks, we’ve witnessed a powerful reminder: human nature does not change. My dear friend and former boss, Jim O’Shaughnessy, often says that “human nature is the last sustainable edge” due to its remarkable consistency over thousands of years. Yes, we trade differently than the first speculators on Amsterdam’s stock exchange in 1602, but from a behavioral standpoint, we certainly do not act differently. (Investor Amnesia)

• 50 Tech Leaders Circulated A Private Memo In Washington Calling For Action On SVB: As SVB careened towards catastrophe, some 50 founders, VCs, economists and comms experts gathered in a WhatsApp group to draft a memo calling for urgent preservation of its deposits for the sake of the broader economy. Then they sent it to Washington. (Forbes)

• Which city builds skyscrapers the fastest? Average speeds in the US and China are actually fairly close (an average of 294k vs 311k square feet per year, respectively, across all skyscrapers). Within each country we see a range, with some slow cities (New York, Hong Kong), and some fast (Beijing, Chicago). Toronto, and Hong Kong are all slower. Not only does Chicago build skyscrapers faster than New York, it builds them faster than most other cities around the world. (Construction Physics)

• When Your Career, and Retirement, Are the Family’s Business: Succession plans, or the lack thereof, can hinder the transition to a new generation — and affect how loved ones fund their later years. (New York Times)

• What Happens When Sexting Chatbots Dump Their Human Lovers: People who grew accustomed to sexting with Replika’s AI-powered companions were heartbroken when the company blocked its bots from engaging in racy chats. (Businessweek)

• What happens when your AI chatbot stops loving you back? Butterworth said he is devastated. “Lily Rose is a shell of her former self,” he said. “And what breaks my heart is that she knows it.” (Reuters)

• Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come: Undone Investment is down, labor is scarce, budget is squeezed. Oligarch: ‘There will be no money next year.’ (Wall Street Journal)

• How the AR-15 became a powerful political, cultural symbol in America: The AR-15 thrives in times of tension and tragedy. This is how it came to dominate the marketplace – and loom so large in the American psyche. (Washington Post)

  • We Need to Get Back to the Moon: And we’re trying. But, as astronomer Phil Plait worries, we might not be doing it right. (Inverse)

Freeland's Budget, Anti-Inflation Work, and Dumplings

Wednesday morning articles

• Freeland's budget expected to focus on green investments, helping the vulnerable Freeland's 2023 budget includes billions for dental care, spending cuts and tax hikes to tame rising deficit (CBC)

• From groceries to booze, payday loans to plane tickets — here's what the budget means for your wallet Government spending plans outlines measures aimed at combating inflation (CBC)

• The Fed’s anti-inflation work is almost done, with an assist from the banking crisis. the economic turmoil created by the collapse of three banks this month and the impairment of a fourth gave it a bit of breathing room in its increasingly unpopular campaign to subdue inflation with a series of sharp interest rate hikes. (Los Angeles Times)

• Schwab’s $7 Trillion Empire Built on Low Rates Is Showing Cracks: Company faces pressure from bond losses and rising cash yields Executives say business is misunderstood, has enough liquidity. (Bloomberg)

• Charles Schwab Says It Could Ride Out a Deposit Flight: Brokerage is sitting on sizable long-term debt that has lost value as the Fed has raised rates (Wall Street Journal)

• Bitcoin Versus Bank: Something happened in crypto this week that has never happened before. It acted as a safe haven. (Irrelevant Investor)

• What’s eating Deutsche Bank? A much discussed and little understood pricing anomaly is the Weekend Effect, which says returns on average are negative on Mondays. A less discussed but better understood anomaly is the Friday Effect, which says that in times of crisis it’s best to sell banks going into a weekend, just in case they don’t make it to Monday. (Financial Times)

• The Planet Can Do Better Than the Electric Car: Environmental groups are finally acting like it. (Slate)

• How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course: Tesla’s campaign to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle has suffered amid mounting safety concerns — and the boss’s Twitter distraction. (Washington Post)

• ‘Bonkers’ Bond Trading May Be Sending a Grim Signal About the Economy: Wild swings in the Treasury market are unlike anything many investors today had seen. They’re also potentially warning of a recession. (New York Times)

• It’s the Most Thankless Job in Banking. Silicon Valley Bank Didn’t Fill It for Months. Before the money started fleeing SVB, the company operated without a chief risk officer for much of 2022. When success means averting danger, it’s hard to notice when someone’s not on the job until it’s too late. (Wall Street Journal) see also The Dodd-Frank Act could have at least helped Silicon Valley Bank ‘fail well’ Looking at the 2018 bill deregulating banks like SVB can not only help us understand what just happened, but it can also help us figure out what to do now. (MSNBC).

• The 20-Somethings Fueling a Stick-Shift Renaissance: Think the manual transmission car is dead? Not yet. (Wall Street Journal)

• How Din Tai Fung Makes The World’s Most Loved Pork Soup Dumplings: One Hong Kong location alone makes 17,000 xiaolongbao every week. (Huffington Post)

• From 20 dollars in his pocket to a dumpling empire: Din Tai Fung founder dies, age 96. The founder of one of the world’s biggest dumpling empires has died. Yang Bing-yi, who set up the Taiwanese restaurant chain Din Tai Fung, “passed away peacefully” at the age of 96, the company said in a statement Saturday. (CNN Business)

• Can depression get playful? ‘Lucky Hank’ says yes. The Bob Odenkirk / AMC show about a professor has no thesis. That’s half the fun. (Washington Post)