Welcome to March! My back to work morning train WFH reads:
• Anyone Who’s Anyone Has a SPAC Right Now A once obscure financial maneuver becomes a celebrity flex. “I can’t believe we haven’t seen a Kim Kardashian SPAC yet.” (New York Times)
• Bond-Market Tumult Puts ‘Lower for Longer’ in the Crosshairs A recent wave of selling drove up the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which helps set borrowing costs from corporate debt to mortgages, to its highest level since the pandemic began (Wall Street Journal)
• Once Trump’s ‘enemy,’ Fed emerges as White House ally in rejecting concerns about overdoing stimulus Meanwhile, prominent economists, Republican lawmakers and some market analysts raise alarm bells about the risks of overstimulating the economy and triggering unwanted inflation (Washington Post)
• The Stock Market Is Smarter Than All of Us The idea of the wisdom of crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual could provide. The same is true of the stock market. The stock market isn’t always right but it is amazing how much it’s right more often than it’s wrong. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Will Political Divisions Mess Up Economic Growth? For investors, all the discord could swell uncertainty about long-term investments. Cause for hope: Even now, Republicans and Democrats can find common ground on some things. (Chief Investment Officer)
• What Those Shocking Texas Power Bills Have in Common With Uber Surges, Broadway Tickets, and Airfare It’s called marginal-cost pricing, and it isn’t just a red-state problem. (Slate)
• The Pandemic Proves the Value of Raising the Minimum Wage States that have balked at requiring a higher wage lag in growth, personal income and, most important, retail business (Bloomberg)
• Inside the ambitious venture Bill Gates built to beat climate change Bill Gates says he created Breakthrough Energy—a multiarmed organization that the philanthropist and investor hopes can do all of the above. “It’s a network of programs, funds, and advocacy efforts, all designed to get clean-energy technologies into the market faster,” he says. “And then deployed at scale.” (Fortune)
• The Man Who Refused to Bow: Adam Kinzinger says he’ll fight to take his party back from Donald Trump (The Atlantic)
• Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity. The central thing about Mars is that it is not Earth, not even close. In fact, the only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many). (The Atlantic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview with Jean Hynes, incoming CEO of Wellington Management. The firm has over $1 trillion client assets under management. Hynes also runs the $51B Vanguard Healthcare Fund – the country’s largest health care fund.
The inventory of homes for sale is startlingly low. The pandemic is part of the reason, but it’s not the whole story.
Source: The Upshot
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