Inflation, Stocks, Bluesky, and the LA Lakers

Thursday morning articles

• The US central bank has raised interest rates to the highest level in 16 years as it battles to stabilise prices. The Federal Reserve increased its key interest rate by 0.25 percentage points - its 10th hike in 14 months. (BBC)

• Why Is Inflation So Sticky? It Could Be Corporate Profits: Economists think some companies may have been raising prices faster than their costs have increased, making it harder for inflation to fall (Wall Street Journal)

• The FAAMGs are more than just five stocks: The thought of a few companies accounting for so much of the market is jarring, and it’s the kind of thing that you might consider a market vulnerability. Two quick things: First, there isn’t much evidence that shows a relationship between market concentration and forward market returns; Second, market concentration isn’t unusual. (TKer)

• Bets Offering 2,400% Payout on US Default Lure Growing Crowd: Volumes, spreads on US CDS are rising amid debt-cap showdown; Deeply discounted long bonds could supercharge swap payouts (Bloomberg)

• Why Banks Keep Failing: Three previously solid, medium-size banks suddenly faced annihilation. The blame lies with the system itself. (The Atlantic)

• The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens. Buttons are back! (Slate)

• A Tax Loophole Makes EV Leasing a No-Brainer in the US: An exemption in the Inflation Reduction Act is worth $7,500 to drivers who lease. (Businessweek)

• IKEA Redesigns Its Bestsellers, Starting With the Billy Bookcase: With inflation squeezing consumers and material and shipping prices up, the company took products back to the drawing board (Wall Street Journal)

• The New Social Network That Is Finally Threatening Elon Musk’s Twitter: Bluesky has instant buzz and great vibes. Is that enough? (Slate)

• What is Bluesky, and why is everyone on Twitter talking about it? The invite-only, decentralized new social network, explained. (Vox)

• A massive cavern beneath a West Antarctic glacier is teeming with life: Glaciologists bored 500 meters through the Kamb Ice Stream to access the cavern. (Science News)

• Independents Saw Urgency in Ousting Trump. Will They Feel the Same About Re-electing Biden? In Arizona, where independents are a crucial voting bloc, there might not be the same sense of urgency for a Biden-Trump rematch. And some voters might look elsewhere. (New York Times)

• Frum: The Coming Biden Blowout: Republicans thought about running without Trump in 2024—but lost their nerve. They’re heading for electoral disaster again. (The Atlantic)

• Flipping Air Jordans Is No Longer a Slam Dunk The resale value of limited-edition sneakers defied gravity in 2021. Now they’re crashing back to Earth. (Wall Street Journal)

• It’s Time to Take the Lakers Seriously (Again) Few believed Los Angeles could be a legit contender this season, even after its trade deadline makeover. But after upsetting the Grizzlies in the first round? It’s hard to deny that LeBron James and Co. have a real shot at another title. (The Ringer)

Artificial Intelligence, Building Boom, and Television

Wednesday morning articles

• This company adopted AI. Here’s what happened to its human workers: Economists found AI caused a group of workers to become much more productive. Backed by AI, these workers were able to accomplish much more in less time, with greater customer satisfaction to boot. At the same time, however, the study also shines a spotlight on just how powerful AI is, how disruptive it might be, and suggests that this new, astonishing technology could have economic effects that change the shape of income inequality going forward. (NPR)

• Dark Clouds Over Commercial Real Estate Don’t Frighten Allocators: Prices are down and dire forecasts abound, but asset owners plan to modestly boost their CRE exposure (Chief Investment Officer)

• The Building Boom Is Prolonging Market Pain: Construction employment is higher than ever—undermining bets the Fed will soon pivot. (Wall Street Journal)

• Large, creative AI models will transform lives and labour markets: They bring enormous promise and peril. In the first of three special articles we explain how they work. (Economist)

• Billionaire Steve Cohen Has a Plan to Become the King of Queens: To win a coveted New York casino license, he’s ‘hired the best team that money can buy.’ (Bloomberg)

• Exxon Has 40 Billion Reasons to Go Shopping: A gusher of cash and a richly priced stock could steer the supermajor toward a deal (Wall Street Journal)

• Why I deactivated my Facebook page: “I always reported the fake account, reported the comment and blocked the user who placed it – and the fake page they’d created – but my submission of these reports would go absolutely nowhere. Into thin air. No response from Facebook. No attempt to stop more of them from sprouting up. No effort whatsoever and no action. So the very next post I’d put up, one hour later or one week later, an identical comment from an identical impersonator would appear. Also scamming people with some sort of fake offer for crypto currency (of course it’s crypto. Not everyone who is involved in crypto is a thief, but every thief is involved in crypto).” (Reformed Broker)

• The Fight for the American Public Library: Library boards, school boards and legislatures are becoming battlegrounds in a push to censor books. Communities are fighting back. (CityLab)

• Why Are TV Writers So Miserable? On the cusp of a potential strike, writers explain why no one is having much fun making television anymore. (New Yorker)

• TV’s Streaming Bubble Has Burst, a Writers Strike is Here, and “Everybody Is Freaking Out” Billions in losses. Sweeping layoffs. The party’s over, and Hollywood is waking up with a splitting headache. (Vanity Fair)

• The Case for the Total Liberation of Ukraine: Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea. (The Atlantic)

Crypto's Anti Establishment, Investments, and Climate Change

Thursday morning articles

• Crypto’s Anti-Establishment Zeal Runs Headfirst Into Bankruptcy Bureaucracy: Angry retail investors are speaking up in complex legal brawls over the remains of Voyager, Celsius and BlockFi. (Businessweek)

• SPACs Delivered Easy Money, but Now Companies Are Running Out: Businesses are burning through cash raised in SPAC deals with few ways to fill the gap. (Wall Street Journal) 

• The Biggest No-Brainer Investment Right Now? It makes sense investors are considering making a swap from a total bond market index fund to some sort of cash equivalent — T-bills, CDs, money market funds, online savings accounts, etc. You can get yields in the 4-5% range in cash-like vehicles and you don’t have to worry about duration or volatility from changes to interest rates. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• How Much Can We Take? I don’t know where the tipping point is, but the apparent answer to this question is a lot more than anyone thought. Things aren’t perfect, but we recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, the unemployment rate is still near record lows, and inflation is going in the right direction. (Irrelevant Investor)

• When Will I Retire? How About Never: For many people, the idea of stopping work is a nonstarter—an inevitable path to boredom, ill health and a life devoid of meaning. (Wall Street Journal)

• Musk Bets the House of Tesla on Low Prices and Razor-Thin Margins: The man who upended the auto industry is now offering steep discounts for his electric vehicles. Is this more disruption, or desperation? (Businessweek)

• Someone has to run the fabs: Egalitarianism is important but we neglect STEM education at our peril. (Noahpinion)

• Disney lawsuit shows Ron DeSantis at his bullying, bumbling worst: The 77-page legal complaint, filed in federal court in Gainesville, Fla., aims to stop what it terms “a targeted campaign of government retaliation — orchestrated at every step by Gov. DeSantis as punishment for Disney’s protected speech.” (Los Angeles Times)

• Disney’s had enough — it’s taking Ron DeSantis to court: In a new lawsuit, Disney accuses DeSantis of “a targeted campaign of government retaliation.” (Vox)

• Red States Are Trying To Fight The World On Climate: “You can look at the EPA website and see all of what they’re opposed to … carbon, methane. All these things directly affect … our major industries in our state, our oil industry, our ag[ricultural] industry.” (FiveThirtyEight)

• Molly Ringwald bites back: ‘I was projected as the sweet American girl next door. It wasn’t me’:  Hollywood success in the 80s was so unpleasant that Ringwald moved to France. Since then she has made a jazz album, written a novel and translated a memoir about Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider. (The Guardian)

Stock Market, Global Economy, Wine, and Steve Ballmer

Wednesday morning articles

• What Happens After a Bad Year in the Stock Market? The year is still young of course but there is an obvious divergence in the price action between 2022 and 2023. This is a good reminder about what generally tends to happen in different market environments. Volatility clusters in a downtrend so you get both big down days and big up days even as the market’s general direction is lower. In up-trending markets you don’t see as many big moves in either direction. You take the stairs up at a measured pace and the elevators down in a hurry. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Here’s a Better Way to Identify Quality Stocks: According to new research, the annual return on a portfolio of quality stocks can be enhanced by an average of .60 percent when investors include intangible assets in their definition of quality. (Institutional Investor)

• The Future of AI Relies on a High School Teacher’s Free Database: With over five billion images, LAION has become central to the future of artificial intelligence — and a growing debate over how to regulate it. (Bloomberg)

• The iPhone Setting Thieves Use to Lock You Out of Your Apple Account: The recovery key was designed to make Apple IDs safer. Instead, these victims permanently lost family photos and other precious digital possessions. (Wall Street Journal) 

• Apple’s New Savings Account Makes iPhones More Valuable—for Thieves: Apple is now paying you to have an iPhone! That’s right. Sign up for the savings account now available through Apple Wallet, administered by Goldman Sachs, and you will get an interest rate of 4.15%, Apple. (The Information)

• The global economy’s slow-motion reset: We are now in the early stages of a slow-moving process of markets, companies and governments adapting and readjusting to that reality. (Axios)

• Why Tucker Carlson’s Exit From Fox News Looks Like an Execution: The biggest star in cable news didn’t get to give a proper goodbye from his prime-time perch. But will Carlson go quietly into the night? (Vanity Fair) but see also Tucker’s Successor Will Be Worse: The history of Fox News shows that the network and its issues are larger than any one anchor. (The Atlantic)

• Schizophrenia at the IMF: At long last, the International Monetary Fund has begun to recognize that the best way to reduce sovereign debt is by boosting economic growth, rather than insisting on fiscal retrenchment. But this new understanding is being undermined by a lingering adherence to growth-inhibiting austerity policies. (Project Syndicate)

• What Was Twitter, Anyway? Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains. (New York Times Magazine) see also How Elon Musk Turned the Blue Checkmark Into a Scarlet Letter: A weekend-long masterclass in business failure. (Slate)

• 5 Big Wine Books to Buy Now and Use Forever: The reference guides our wine columnist relies on are ambitious, comprehensive, deeply researched and enduringly relevant. These are the books, old and new, she gives her highest recommendation. (Wall Street Journal)

• Judicial record undermines Clarence Thomas defence in luxury gifts scandal: Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow was linked to a conservative group that had court business while Thomas was on the bench. (The Guardian)

• The controversial article Matthew Kacsmaryk did not disclose to the Senate: The judge who delivered a high-stakes abortion pills ruling last week removed his name from a law review article during his judicial nomination process, emails show (Washington Post)  

• The Wildest Seat in the NBA Is the One Next to Steve Ballmer: The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers goes viral for his courtside reactions—and no one’s more aware of it than his game day neighbors. (Wall Street Journal)

The Pandemic, Hedge Funds, and the Economy

Tuesday morning articles

• The Pandemic Didn’t Upend US Geography: Three years after Covid began, big cities are still standing. But work and housing shifts are translating to some enduring changes. (CityLab)

• So You Want to Launch a Hedge Fund? The first thing you need to do as a new fund is raise some seed capital. Having a wealthy benefactor helps; failing that, it can be hard work. Dan Loeb of Third Point, a New York-based hedge fund focused on event-driven, value-oriented investing with $16 billion in assets under management, describes how he spent six months in the early 1990s driving around the country opening savings accounts at mutually held savings and loans companies which later demutualized, providing the seed capital for his fund. (Net Interest)

• The Super Rich Are Are Nervous About the Economy. Should You Be? Don’t let the abundance of high-end designer wear adorning the Wall Street spouses fool you. Despite a rebound in stocks in the first quarter, it isn’t like the environment is now any easier to navigate. Sharply higher interest rates and the recent banking sector meltdown are making life difficult not only for common folk but for masters of the universe. (Barron’s)

• Short-Term & Long-Term Inflation Trends: It’s not coming down as fast as some people would like but at least the trend is lower. And once those 8-9% readings start dropping off it wouldn’t surprise me to see 2-3% inflation by the end of the summer. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• We’ve Been Measuring the Economy All Wrong: Questionable theoretical assumptions drive economic models to rubber-stamp disastrous policy changes. (The Atlantic)

• Fox News won. Dominion won. The rest of us lost. Rupert Murdoch’s company doesn’t like paying the $787 million settlement. But now it’s back to business as usual. (Vox)

• What Your Favorite Personality Test Says About You: Are you a Myers-Briggs person, an Enneagram person, or something else? The Atlantic made a quiz to help you find out. (The Atlantic)

• Ticks Are Bringing Disease to a Backyard Near You: Bites, infections are increasing as temperatures warm and deer populations grow. (Wall Street Journal)

• Colorado River snaking through Grand Canyon most endangered US waterway: Unique ecosystem on the brink of collapse due to climate crisis and mismanagement, says conservation group American Rivers (The Guardian)

• Why It Matters That Trump Is Leading The 2024 Primary Field In Endorsements: Leaders in FiveThirtyEight endorsement points and national primary polls on the day before the Iowa caucuses, and the eventual nominees, in every Democratic and Republican presidential primary without an incumbent since 1972. Endorsements are about as predictive of primaries as polls. (fivethirtyeight)

• The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City: NYT critic, Pete Wells, ranks his favorites in all five boroughs. (New York Times)

Savings Accounts, Stock Market, and Nikola Jokic

Monday morning articles

• With 4% Savings Accounts, Is It Finally Time to Break Up With Your Bank? Returns on cash investments—no pain, just guaranteed gains!—is tempting savers to get rich gradually again. (Businessweek)

• When your neighbors become your overlords: How HOAs became an unnecessary necessary evil. (Vox)

• How to Price Your Home For Today’s Market (And Any Market, Really) From researching comps to understanding current market conditions, the steps you can take to determine the best asking price for your home. (Wall Street Journal)

• Meet 2023’s Hedge Fund Rising Stars: These ten up-and-comers will be honored at Institutional Investor’s Hedge Fund Industry Awards on May 11. (Institutional Investor)

• Picking a Stock for the Year 2048: Investment funds run by some college students are taking on an extraordinary challenge: Picking stocks for the next 25 years and then never trading them. (Wall Street Journal)

• When did mass layoffs become so normal? A brief history of engineered job insecurity in America. (Vox)

• When Apple Comes Calling, ‘It’s the Kiss of Death’ Aspiring partners accuse tech giant of copying their ideas; Apple says it plays by the rules. (Wall Street Journal)

• Republicans Fight a Solar Boom That’s Made Texas King of Clean Energy: The political backlash against ESG is behind a push to penalize renewables. (Businessweek)

• The Subtle Moments That Separate Nikola Jokic: The Denver Nuggets’ two-time MVP isn’t at his most dangerous with the ball, but rather right before receiving it. That moment is when the point guard trapped in the 7-footer’s body is most unstoppable. (The Ringer)

Fox Succession Drama, Groundwater, and the Housing Market

Friday morning articles

• Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words (Steve Jobs Archive)

• Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama: With the $1.6 billion Dominion lawsuit threatening to hobble Fox News, the ink on his divorce to Jerry Hall still wet, and his broken engagement to Ann Lesley Smith even fresher, it’s been a chaotic 12 months for the 92-year-old conservative media baron. As Fox and family insiders tell it, this could just be the beginning. (Vanity Fair)

• Groundwater Gold Rush: Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California’s scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink. (Bloomberg)

• The False Promise of Opportunity Zones: Tax breaks for investors don’t help poor communities. Rather than court venture capital, cities must build new institutions to grow neighborhood wealth. (Boston Review)

• How does a magician trick other magicians? We went to find out. At the “magic Olympics,” magicians from around the world compete to be deemed the world’s best. To win, they must fool each other. (National Geographic)

• The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin: Bitcoin mines cash in on electricity — by devouring it, selling it, even turning it off — and they cause immense pollution. In many cases, the public pays a price. (New York Times)

• The False Promise of Opportunity Zones: Tax breaks for investors don’t help poor communities. Rather than court venture capital, cities must build new institutions to grow neighborhood wealth. (Boston Review)

• A small town became the center of a QAnon storm. Now it’s fighting back: The Netherlands’ most notorious conspiracy theorist is now in prison. (Ars Technica)

• At FTX, Multimillion-Dollar Expenses Were Approved by Emoji: Report outlines control failures at the failed crypto firm. (Wall Street Journal)

• Rise of the Climate Rating Agencies: Government and the private sector rely increasingly on risk-modeling firms that claim they can zero in on exposure to climate change. The independent modelers look a lot like rating agencies. (American Prospect)

• $388 in Sushi. Just a $20 Tip: The Brutal Math of Uber Eats and DoorDash Delivery drivers were hailed as pandemic heroes. But they say the rise of contactless delivery has made customers less inclined to tip generously and gig work is becoming an even harder way to make a living. (New York Times)

• Florida health officials removed key data from COVID vaccine report: The surgeon general’s guidance against the vaccine for young men ignored results showing infection was a greater risk for cardiac-related deaths. (Tampa Bay Times)

• The Super Rich Are Worried. Should You Be? We human beings act irrationally, which makes for bursts of creativity in the arts and, yes, even on Wall Street, but inevitably precipitates overexuberance in capital markets and bank runs. It also means that there is probably some limit on the marginal utility of incremental units of regulation, I suppose. But does that mean we can never tame these spirits? (Barron’s)

• There is No Index Fund For the Housing Market: While stock market ownership during the Great Depression was a rounding error of the total population, plenty of people owned houses. Real estate got obliterated just like everything else in the economy back then but the homeownership rate still only got as low as 44% following the Great Depression. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• No Sellers, No Buyers: Like every other market in the world, real estate has a large psychological component. But unlike liquid markets where Animal Spirits can dominate, primary residences are more governed by arithmetic than almost anything else. The prices are what they are, and you can either pay for the mortgage or you cannot. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Here’s Where Market Timing Works: Factor timing has its champions and skeptics — so academics set out to find an answer to the controversial practice. (Institutional Investor)

• The inside story of Credit Suisse’s collapse, by Credit Suisse: Dispatches from the room where nothing was happening. (Financial Times)

• Elon Musk: Owning Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster”: The multi-billionaire entrepreneur said he would sell the company if the right person came along. Musk, who also runs car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44bn in October. The interview at the firm’s HQ in San Francisco also covered the mass lay-offs, misinformation and his work habits. (BBC)

• Twitter Isn’t a Company Anymore: It’s been merged into a new entity called X Corp. Here’s what that could mean. (Slate)

• Abortion was a 50/50 issue. Now, it’s Republican quicksand. Six in 10 voters support legal abortion in most cases. Just over a third want it to be entirely or mostly illegal. (Politico)

• China May Not Need Western Technology Much Longer: The latest ranking of global spending on research and development has US tech companies on top and Chinese rivals on the rise. (Bloomberg)

• ‘Secret Invasion’ Revealed: Inside Samuel L. Jackson’s Eye-Opening New Marvel Series. Why he has no eyepatch, where you’ve seen Emilia Clarke’s mystery character before, and 10 new images from the shape-shifting alien saga. (Vanity Fair)

Broke Millennials, Tax Season, and Housing Prices

Thursday morning articles

• The Myth of the Broke Millennial: After a rough start, the generation is thriving. Why doesn’t it feel that way? (The Atlantic)

• How 2022 Became a Record Year for US Income Taxes: An asset-price boom, a progressive tax code and inflation interacted to drive effective rates higher than ever. Now the process is working in reverse. (Bloomberg)

• Tax season is getting longer. Blame climate change. Tax Day is April 18, but the IRS has postponed tax deadlines for filers in parts of seven states because of natural disasters. (Washington Post)

• Will We Ever See Affordable Housing Prices Again? You can see those trends were already in place before the pandemic since millennials are now the biggest demographic in the United States. The demographic wave of millennials in their Household Formation years more than made up for the remote work phenomenon. This same demographic wave of household formation is making it more difficult for housing prices to fall substantially. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Unexpected Reason Apple Is Dominating the U.S. Smartphone Market: It’s not just lavish marketing and the threat of green bubbles—Apple’s commitment to supporting old phones has allowed it to capture a part of the market once cornered by inexpensive Android devices. (Wall Street Journal)

• Twitter Is Broken. Thanks, Elon. About six months ago, Elon Musk bought your favorite neighborhood bar. Then he fired veteran bouncers and bartenders, tried to stiff the landlord and at least one vendor, and demanded that regulars pay a cover charge. He’s frequently struggled to serve his customers, yet he’s penalized them for mentioning the competition. He’s tamped down the revelry in general, really — a lot of conversation at his watering hole has been drowned out by Musk’s own never-ending stage act, which consists mainly of him yelling dad jokes at customers through a bullhorn. (New York Times)

• Fox News Lost the Lawsuit but Won the War: Dominion’s choice to settle comes as a great disappointment to many critics of Fox, and is also probably a smart financial decision. For the critics, this case was about democracy and disinformation and provided an opportunity to hold Fox accountable for years of broadcasting hogwash. For Dominion, it was primarily about business. No matter how lofty the language its spokespeople used, the company didn’t sue to fix the American media landscape. (The Atlantic)

• Why aren’t we taking every Chinese refugee we can? Let’s be the City on a Hill again. (Noahpinion)

• The Exhausting History of Fatigue: Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse. (New Yorker)

• Can the Knicks’ Youth Movement Push Them Over the Hump? Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle deserve much of the credit for the Knicks’ success this season. But New York wouldn’t be in this position if not for its young core, and that group just might be the X factor in the team’s first-round series against the Cavs. (The Ringer)

Accounting Fraud, Short Selling, and the Music Business

Wednesday morning articles

• A beginner’s guide to accounting fraud (and how to get away with it): A history in the faking: The mechanics of making up sales are pretty simple. If we’re running a business and want to boost our top line, all we have to do is phone a friend. A good friend to be sure, who doesn’t ask questions. It’ll only take them a few hours to do the paperwork for setting up a shell company and then we have our customer, one we can invoice whatever we want. We have our fake sales (and I’m pretty sure our mate has done nothing wrong, in the eyes of the law). (Financial Times Alphaville)

• Why a Secretive Short Seller Is Challenging Reports Made by Peers: Is Fiat Lux Partners trying to clean up the industry or just eliminate its competition? (Institutional Investor)

• Meet the Return-to-Office Whisperers: A niche group of consultants is trying to get you back to the office. It’s not going too well. (New York Times)

• The End of the Music Business: A century of recorded music has culminated in the infinite archive of streaming platforms. But is it really better for listeners? (The Nation)

• Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? A few months ago, I wrote about returning to vinyl after giving up on it 34 years ago. But I was shocked at what I encountered. Few of the albums I wanted were available in vinyl. Prices were outrageously high. The whole market seemed designed to discourage buyers. (The Honest Broker)

• How Bookshop.org Survives—and Thrives—in Amazon’s World: Andy Hunter’s ecommerce platform was a pandemic hit. Now he’s on a mission to prove that small businesses can scale up without selling out. (Wired)

• Europe is not ready to be a “third superpower.” For that, it would need to act as a unified entity, defend itself against Russia, and embrace new technology. (Noahpinion)

• The Military Mental Health Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight: Blast overpressure, it’s called: the “near-instantaneous pressure rise” in the area around an explosion. During a nine-month deployment, the unit would launch shells toward their enemies around 6,000 times. As a result, some incurred noticeable concussions, and each blast had the potential to cause what the Centers for Disease Control now call “primary blast injury of the brain,” with symptoms similar to other types of mild traumatic brain injuries, or mTBIs: headaches, irritability, cognitive deficits, and even death. (Slate)

• The Ringer’s Streaming Guide: Who’s winning the Streaming Wars? For a few years, it was all Netflix, Hulu had sneaky value, and Prime Video had Fleabag. But when the calendar changed from October to November in 2019, so too did the entire streaming industry. Apple TV+ launched on the first of the month, flanked by stars like Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Jason Momoa; 11 days later, Disney+ put its stake in the ground with an instant phenomenon. Two words: Baby Yoda. (The Ringer)

Stock Picking, Economists, and Economic Recovery

Tuesday morning articles

• With the Odds on Their Side, They Still Couldn’t Beat the Market: In 2022, conditions were heavily in stock pickers’ favor, but most trailed the market. This year looks worse. (New York Times)

• Scary economists and bad news: The news cycle has swung back to recession talk, even as inflation is coming down and unemployment is at a 50-year low. Ask people what they’ve heard about the economy, and they’ll tell you it’s bad. (Stay-At-Home Macro)

• Stop the gloom and doom. The economic recovery is strong. Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the economy: A large percentage mistakenly think we’re in a recession or will be hit by one this year. As the recovery progresses, there’s less and less justification for the drumbeat of negative hot takes and gloomy economic speculation from the media. The economic evidence paints a very different picture. (Washington Post)

• Rumours of China’s economic demise may be greatly exaggerated: From ‘miracle to malady’ — but how bad is it really? (Financial Times)

• 35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now.  “It’s like collaborating with an alien.” “Everything is becoming much easier.” “It feels like I’ve hired an intern.” “What used to take me around a half-hour to write now takes one minute.” “It’s enormous fun.” (New York Times)

• ChatGPT Can Decode Fed Speak, Predict Stock Moves From Headlines: First wave of research using AI chatbot in finance is arriving Fed staff find the tech can decipher dovish, hawkish language. (Bloomberg)

• How did solar power get cheap? Solar photovoltaics (PV) have become one of the cheapest sources of electricity. Lazard’s estimate of unsubsidized levelized cost of energy (LCOE), the average cost of electricity generated over a plant’s lifetime, has utility scale solar PV cheaper than anything except completely depreciated natural gas plants and wind in the very windiest locations. (Construction Physics)

• 2024 Ford Mustang chief engineer learned to drive on a Mustang GT stick, reveals future: While muscle cars fade into the sunset, America’s favorite pony is undergoing a technology transformation. At age 59 on Monday, the iconic Ford Mustang is making a play for younger buyers while keeping the current Mustang fans in the stable. (We’ll explain how shortly.) And all eyes are trained on Laurie Transou, chief engineer of the Mustang program. (Detroit Free Press)

• Only 10 Electric Vehicles Qualify for Full $7,500: US Tax Credit Eight EVs, two plug-in hybrids are in line for $7,500 perk; Tax credit will shrink or disappear for purchasers of most EVs (Bloomberg)

• Is Twitter finally dying? Say goodbye to the old Twitter and hello to the new normal: It’s been a year since Elon Musk initiated his takeover of Twitter. The six months since he actually took charge can only be characterized as chaotic, and quietly, in early April, Musk merged Twitter with a new shell company called X Corp. In other words, Twitter Inc. no longer exists. (Vox)

• Return of the Kings: Playoff basketball is back in Sacramento for the first time since 2006. This season’s run has delighted a long-suffering and devoted fan base, but the Kings aren’t satisfied. Says All-Star guard De’Aaron Fox: “We want to be championship contenders year in and year out.” (Ringer)

• If Tennessee’s Legislature Looks Broken, It’s Not Alone: State legislatures around the country — plagued by partisan division, uncompetitive races and gerrymandering — reflect the current pressures on democracy. (New York Times)

• Red states are trying to make their own rules. The Tennessee Expulsions Are Just the Beginning: Red states are trying to make their own rules. (The Atlantic)